Highlights From Fall Auctions in Europe

LONDON — From a bottle of the world’s priciest Scotch whisky to a painting by Lucian Freud at age 19, Europe’s leading auction houses are putting a wide variety of items on the block this fall. Following are some highlights.

Collectors with deep pockets and a taste for British art may wish to stop by two London sales in early October (the week of the Frieze Art Fair). On Thursday, Christie’s London is auctioning Francis Bacon’s “Figure in Movement” (1972), a painting of his lover George Dyer, who killed himself in Paris just before the opening of Bacon’s historic retrospective at the Grand Palais. The painting was for four decades in the collection of Magnus Konow, a Monaco-based Norwegian friend of Bacon’s, and carries an estimate of 15 to 20 million pounds ($19.5 to $22.5 million). It shows a naked man with his back to the viewer, holding a newspaper up to his face; the writhing figure is inside a cagelike frame. (Another Dyer painting from the same collection sold for $49.8 million in May.)

Freud’s “Man in a Striped Shirt” (1942), also from the Konow collection and on sale in the auction on Thursday, was painted when Freud was 19. It is estimated at 1 million pounds to 1.5 million pounds.

The next day, Sotheby’s London is auctioning two oils by Peter Doig: “Buffalo Station I” and “Buffalo Station II” (1997-98). They were painted from photographs that Doig took in Buffalo, New York, right after a Rolling Stones concert. Doig, who lives in Trinidad, is one of the world’s most expensive living artists and an art-market favorite. His “Rosedale” (1991) sold for $28.8 million at Phillips in New York in May 2017, a record for a work by the artist.

The last time a bottle of Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 Scotch whisky was auctioned, a world record was set. That was in May, at Bonhams in Hong Kong, and the buyer paid $1.1 million. Now, another bottle from the same series (Macallan 1926 60-year-old) is on offer at the Bonhams whisky sale in Edinburgh on Wednesday.

Why would anyone spend so much on a whisky released in 1986? Because it’s from a limited edition of 24 bottles with labels commissioned from the artists Valerio Adami and Peter Blake, and the bottle comes in a specially designed cabinet. Of the 12 Adami bottles originally produced, this is the only one still up for grabs, hence the excitement.

Collectors with a penchant for postwar German art can head to the evening auction at Phillips in London on Thursday. There, they can bid for works from the estate of Howard Karshan, a television and movie executive industry lawyer who lived between London and New York and died in 2017.

The star lot of the evening will be Gerhard Richter’s “Hände” (“Hands,” 1963), estimated at 2 million to 3 million pounds. It’s a blurry painting in grayish tones of two hands laid flatly on a surface; it was painted from a photograph and coincides with the start of Richter’s photorealism period. The German painter’s greenish “Busch” (“Scrub,” 1985) will also feature in the sale, with an estimate of 800,000 to 1.2 million pounds; it was exhibited in the Richter retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2002.

Born exactly a century ago, the pipe-smoking Jacques Faizant was the longtime political cartoonist of the Paris daily Le Figaro. His sketches of gendarmes, concierges and glamorous Parisian women, not to mention the country’s leading politicians, were recognizable to generations of French newspaper readers. Faizant is believed to have produced 50,000 cartoons in his lifetime, and his last cartoon was published in Le Figaro Magazine in 2005; he died the next year. For his centenary, the Drouot auction house in Paris is auctioning 300 original color panels on Oct. 30. They can be viewed in an exhibition at Drouot that starts the day before.

On Oct. 30, Christie’s Paris is selling choice African sculptures from the collection of the Belgian banker Adolphe Stoclet, who died in 1949, and whose Brussels home, the Palais Stoclet, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Prize antiquities in the sale include a 19th-century Yaka headrest and a 19th-century Luba-Shankadi stool from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, each estimated at 300,000 to 500,000 euros (about $348,000 to $580,000). The sculptures have impeccable provenance: They once took pride of place inside the famous “salon africain” of the home.

Collectors of contemporary African art can head over to Bonhams in London for the “Africa Now” auction Thursday, where the star lot will be the large oil-on-canvas “Ogolo” (1989) by the Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu. It’s an evocation of the masquerade ritual that took place at his elder brother’s funeral. In subsequent years, the masked male figure of Ogolo featured in many other paintings by the artist. This one is estimated at 200,000 to 300,000 pounds.

Fans of African black-and-white studio photography can put in bids for “Les Copines” by the Malian master Malick Sidibé. Estimated at 5,000 to 8,000 pounds, it shows four unsmiling young women in patterned robes and headdresses, standing in front of a photographer’s backdrop and gazing straight at the camera.