More than thirty years after its publication, Reine de Bertier de Sauvigny’s catalogue raisonné of Jacob and Abel Grimmer continues to appear with striking regularity in auction catalogues. Sometimes it supports an attribution, sometimes it corrects an earlier one, and sometimes an auction house declines to follow its conclusion altogether. That is precisely where its influence lies: not as an infallible verdict, but as a point of reference the market can scarcely ignore.
On 28 April 2026, Dorotheum in Vienna sold a small landscape by Jacob Grimmer for €109,000 ($127,000). The estimate for The Flight into Egypt, a Fortress Beyond had been just €15,000–20,000 ($17,000–23,000).[1] That gap immediately attracts attention, but more interesting than the price itself is the attribution history presented in the catalogue.
In 1923, the panel was with Jacques Goudstikker in Amsterdam as a work by Jacob Grimmer. In 1994, it appeared with Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts in New York as “Attributed to Abel Grimmer”. A year later, Reine de Bertier de Sauvigny wrote about the painting; a copy of her January 1995 letter accompanied it at Dorotheum. By 2026, the lot was once again catalogued without qualification as Jacob Grimmer.
A few lines of provenance can thus encapsulate almost a century of art-historical uncertainty. Jacob, then possibly Abel, then Jacob again. And somewhere in the middle of that movement the same name keeps appearing: Bertier de Sauvigny.
This is no exception. Anyone who regularly follows Old Master sales will have noticed how frequently her Jacob et Abel Grimmer: Catalogue raisonné of 1991 appears in the literature. More than three decades after publication, the nearly four-hundred-page volume remains the central reference work for both painters.[2]
It is tempting to regard such a book as almost sacred. For some Old Masters, a catalogue raisonné can indeed appear to draw a line between inclusion and exclusion: listed or unlisted, autograph or not, secure or problematic. Yet the Grimmers demonstrate that the reality is considerably more interesting.
Bringing Order to a Particularly Complicated Oeuvre
The need for such a book is easy to understand in the case of Jacob Grimmer (1525/26–1590) and his son Abel Grimmer (c. 1570–1618/19). Both specialised in landscapes; subjects and compositional types recur; paintings formed part of series devoted to the seasons and the months; and figures could be added by specialist collaborators. Looming over all of this are Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Hans Bol and other Antwerp landscape painters.
Their landscapes are characterised by elevated viewpoints, successive planes receding into space, atmospheric depth and scenes of everyday life in the Flemish countryside. But precisely because this visual language belonged to a broader tradition, names can shift remarkably easily.[3]
This is where a catalogue raisonné acquires its practical authority. Such a publication does more than record which works a scholar considers autograph at a particular moment. It brings together dimensions, supports, earlier sales, owners, literature, related versions and series. In practice, it therefore also assumes an authentication function.[4]
For the art market, this is extraordinarily useful. A small panel measuring thirty or forty centimetres is no longer an isolated object, but becomes one numbered work within a documented group. A painting sold under the wrong first name in 1972 can be connected with related compositions. A work without a firm date can be situated within a wider corpus.
When Christie’s sold one such work in London in December 1972, it was catalogued as Abel Grimmer. At another Christie’s sale in July 1974, the attribution remained the same. Bertier de Sauvigny later published it under Jacob Grimmer as number 18 in her corpus. When the panel returned to Christie’s in New York on 30 January 2013, it too was catalogued as Jacob Grimmer.[5]
That is roughly what “bringing order to chaos” really means. Not that a single book suddenly produces absolute truth, but that dispersed objects, earlier auction attributions and related compositions are reorganised into an oeuvre that can subsequently be discussed with far greater precision.
The Catalogue’s Curious Second Life
Something still more interesting happened with the Grimmers. In effect, the catalogue raisonné did not end in 1991. Bertier de Sauvigny continued to examine paintings and issue written opinions after publication. Alongside the printed volume, an informal second layer therefore emerged: certificates, letters and statements indicating that particular works were intended for inclusion in a future supplement.
A strong example appeared at Dorotheum on 21 April 2015. Abel Grimmer’s circular Winter Landscape with Woodcutters, measuring 35 centimetres in diameter, sold for €113,000 ($130,000) against an estimate of €80,000–120,000 ($93,000–139,000).[6] The painting was accompanied by a certificate issued by Bertier de Sauvigny in January 2004, in which she stated that she intended to include the work in the “forthcoming addendum” to her catalogue raisonné.
For that reason, the work is more interesting for its documentation than for its price, which fell within the estimate. Eleven years after Bertier’s statement, and almost a quarter of a century after the book itself appeared, her letter was still considered important enough to be highlighted in the auction catalogue.
The same phenomenon can be seen at Christie’s Paris in 2023 with Abel Grimmer’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap. The small panel, measuring 16.6 by 25 centimetres, draws on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s celebrated winter composition of 1565. Christie’s noted that, before her death, Bertier de Sauvigny had intended to include the painting in the addendum to her catalogue.[7]
Included in the Book, Yet Still Only ‘Attributed to’
Anyone concluding from this that inclusion by Bertier automatically results in an unqualified Grimmer attribution soon encounters difficulties. In December 2024, Christie’s London offered a landscape with herdsmen, cattle and what is probably the zodiac sign Capricorn as “Attributed to Jacob Grimmer”. This is a significant qualification. The auction house was not saying “by Jacob Grimmer”, but rather that the work was believed or considered likely to be by him.
The situation becomes more interesting once the literature is examined. Bertier de Sauvigny had published the very same painting in her catalogue raisonné as a work by Jacob Grimmer, with the figures possibly by Martin van Cleve. It had also previously been offered as Jacob Grimmer at Sotheby’s in 1986 and Koller in 2016.[8] Christie’s therefore cited the catalogue raisonné in 2024, but did not fully adopt its conclusion.
The lot also sold below estimate. The realised price was £3,780, approximately €4,000 ($5,000), against an estimate of £6,000–8,000, or roughly €7,000–9,000 ($8,000–11,000). It would be too easy to attribute the weak result directly to the more cautious attribution. But one point is clear: inclusion in Bertier was not sufficient for Christie’s to catalogue the work unequivocally as Jacob Grimmer.
When Technical Evidence Challenges the Book
The issue becomes even sharper with a winter landscape that passed through almost the entire spectrum of possible attributions over the course of several decades. The panel bears the painted signature “PBREVGHEL”. In 1971, Sotheby’s sold it as Pieter Brueghel the Younger. In 1987, it appeared at Christie’s as Jacob Grimmer. By 1997, it was once again Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Meanwhile, Bertier de Sauvigny had published it in her catalogue raisonné as Jacob Grimmer, with the figures probably by Gillis Mostaert.
At a later sale, however, Christie’s became markedly more cautious. Technical analysis dated the panel to the seventeenth century and concluded that the signature was probably applied at the same time as the painting itself. Willem van de Watering subsequently rejected both the Brueghel and Grimmer attributions. The work was eventually offered as “School of Antwerp, circa 1600 (?)”.[9]
Ironically, the painting is now in the Carmen Thyssen Collection as Jacob Grimmer. The museum itself discusses this long attribution history and again refers to its inclusion by Bertier de Sauvigny.[3] This case demonstrates particularly clearly why a catalogue raisonné should not be confused with an unassailable certificate. Technical analysis, new comparisons, panel research and evolving connoisseurship can all challenge existing conclusions.
What Klaus Ertz Reveals About Money and Certainty
Here the Grimmer story intersects with another name that has acquired almost institutional status in the Old Master market: Klaus Ertz. In the case of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, the market impact of such an expert has, unusually, been subjected to economic analysis. Researchers examined auction sales between 1972 and 2017 in relation to Ertz’s 2000 catalogue raisonné. Their conclusion was striking: paintings accepted as autograph following his intervention realised prices estimated to be around 60 per cent higher than those of the relevant control group.[10]
That figure cannot simply be transferred to Jacob and Abel Grimmer. No comparable econometric study exists for Bertier de Sauvigny, and the Grimmer market is far too thin and heterogeneous to derive the same causal relationship from a handful of conspicuous results. But the underlying mechanism is recognisable.
The Old Master market does not trade only in paint on panel. It also trades in information: certainty about authorship, relationships between works, a verifiable provenance and the question of whether a painting falls inside or outside an accepted oeuvre. The greater the uncertainty surrounding a name, the greater the potential economic significance of someone capable of reducing that uncertainty credibly. That probably explains Bertier de Sauvigny’s persistent presence in auction catalogues better than the idea that the market simply regards her as infallible.
A Book the Market Keeps Returning To
A catalogue raisonné is not a constitution. It is an attempt to define the boundaries of an oeuvre at a particular moment, using the best evidence then available. For Jacob and Abel Grimmer, that ordering process was especially valuable because the preceding situation had been so fluid: father and son were confused with one another, works migrated to Brueghel and back again, series became dispersed, and collaborations made the question of authorship considerably less straightforward than a name on an auction label might suggest.
Bertier de Sauvigny did not resolve these questions permanently. Her own later certificates show that the corpus continued to expand after 1991. Christie’s demonstrates that a contemporary specialist may qualify one of her attributions. Technical analysis can remove a painting from the oeuvre again. A museum may subsequently arrive at yet another conclusion. None of this, however, means that the catalogue raisonné has lost its authority.
Even when specialists disagree with Bertier de Sauvigny, they still have to position themselves in relation to her. That is what a genuinely influential catalogue raisonné does. It does not necessarily provide the final word, but it determines the terms in which the next discussion takes place.
In the market for Jacob and Abel Grimmer, Reine de Bertier de Sauvigny is therefore not the infallible arbiter that a catalogue raisonné is sometimes imagined to be. Her position is more interesting than that: more than thirty years after publication, her book remains the point from which almost every serious discussion of these paintings begins.
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Notes and Sources
[1] Dorotheum, Old Master Paintings, Vienna, 28 April 2026, lot 32, Jacob Grimmer, The Flight into Egypt, a Fortress Beyond, oil on panel, 31.5 × 42.5 cm. Estimate €15,000–20,000; realised price €109,200, including buyer’s premium.
[2] Reine de Bertier de Sauvigny, Jacob et Abel Grimmer: Catalogue raisonné, Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 1991, 398 pp.
[3] Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, “A Winter Landscape with a Village and Skaters on a Frozen River, Hunters in the Foreground”.
[4] International Catalogue Raisonné Association, “What is a catalogue raisonné?”.
[5] Christie’s, Old Master Paintings Part I, New York, 30 January 2013, sale 2672, lot 4, Jacob Grimmer, Summer, oil on panel, 44.2 × 61.6 cm.
[6] Dorotheum, Old Master Paintings, Vienna, 21 April 2015, lot 69, Abel Grimmer, Winter Landscape with Woodcutters, oil on panel, diameter 35 cm. Estimate €80,000–120,000; realised price €112,500 including buyer’s premium.
[7] Christie’s, Maîtres Anciens: Peintures – Sculptures, Paris, 15 June 2023, sale 20692, lot 14, Abel Grimmer, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap, oil on panel, 16.6 × 25 cm.
[8] Christie’s, Old Masters Part II: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings and Watercolours, London, closed 4 December 2024, sale 22692, lot 157, Attributed to Jacob Grimmer, A Landscape with Herdsmen and Their Cattle Returning to a Village, with a Sign of the Zodiac, Probably Capricorn. Estimate £6,000–8,000; realised price £3,780.
[9] Christie’s, Old Master Pictures, London, 1999, sale 6097, lot 11, School of Antwerp, circa 1600 (?), A Landscape with Skaters on a Frozen River by a Village, Hunters in the Foreground. Bertier de Sauvigny had published the work as Jacob Grimmer.
[10] Victor Ginsburgh, Anne-Sophie Radermecker and Denni Tommasi, “The effect of experts’ opinion on prices of art works: The case of Peter Brueghel the Younger”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 159, March 2019, pp. 36–50.
