Graziella Patiño de Ortiz Linares Collection at Christie’s Paris

When a collection of this magnitude comes to market, the art world takes notice. The Graziella Patiño de Ortiz Linares Collection, assembled over four decades with extraordinary discernment and passion, is one of the most significant private accumulations of decorative arts and Old Master paintings ever brought together. Christie’s Paris will offer approximately sixty lots from this legendary collection on 23 September 2026, in what promises to be one of the most anticipated auction events of the year. Those wishing to experience the collection in its entirety before the sale may do so at the Paris exhibition, which runs from 17 to 23 September.

The collection, assembled by Graziella Ortiz and her husband, is primarily centred on the Régence period and the reign of Louis XV, two of the most refined chapters in the history of French taste. Its importance is confirmed by the fact that major works previously belonging to this collection now reside in some of the world’s most revered institutions, among them the Getty Museum, the Musée du Louvre and the Château de Versailles. The sale is structured around three principal fields: paintings and drawings, furniture and works of art, and silver, a category in which Graziella Patiño de Ortiz Linares distinguished herself as one of the greatest collectors in history.

A Watteau Of Rare Poetry

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The undisputed centrepiece of the sale is The Enchanted Isle (L’Île enchantée), a painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau completed circa 1717 and offered with an estimate on request, the traditional auction marker of a work whose value is beyond easy calculation. Widely recognised as one of the most important works by the artist remaining in private hands, this oil on canvas measuring 46 by 56.2 centimetres distils everything that made Watteau the defining genius of early eighteenth-century French painting.

The work was shown publicly to considerable acclaim at the landmark Watteau retrospective held at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris in 1984, one of its rare public presentations. On that occasion, the distinguished art historian Pierre Rosenberg described it as a “magnificent spectacle of nature. The Enchanted Isle (…) is at once earthly and beyond reach, rooted in time yet timeless.” The painting was regarded as the most spectacular highlight of the entire exhibition. More recently, it was presented at The Worlds of Watteau exhibition held at the Château de Chantilly in 2025, offering a new generation of viewers the opportunity to encounter this singular work.

Watteau’s artistic formation drew deeply on both Venetian and Milanese Renaissance painting, and he enjoyed privileged access to the royal collections, where he studied the masterpieces of Titian and Leonardo da Vinci with particular intensity. The fantastical, blue-tinged, snow-covered mountain landscapes of the Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne appear to have offered direct visual inspiration for the otherworldly backdrop of The Enchanted Isle, a connection that lends this already extraordinary work an additional layer of art-historical resonance.

Fragonard, Ingres And The Masters Of French Painting

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Joining the Watteau as a centrepiece of the paintings section is Jean-Honoré Fragonard‘s The Longed-for Moment or Happy Lovers (L’Instant désiré ou les Amants heureux), estimated at around €2,500,000. Executed in oil on canvas measuring 49.5 by 60.5 centimetres, the work encapsulates the full brilliance of Fragonard’s mature style. The fluidity of the paint, the transparency of the colours, the soft light that plays across the figures and the sense of time suspended in an embrace all speak to an artist who had achieved what the catalogue describes as “total virtuosity.” The luminous, suggestive quality of the iconography recalls some of Fragonard’s most celebrated works: The Swing, held at the Wallace Collection in London, and The Bolt, in the collection of the Louvre.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres is represented by a work of quite different character but equal historical weight. Julius Caesar (Jules César), estimated at around €1,000,000, was an imperial commission from Napoleon III to Ingres for the frontispiece of his work devoted to the life of Julius Caesar. Offered under a single lot number alongside two preparatory drawings and an autograph letter from the artist relating to the commission, the group offers a rare window into Ingres’s creative process and the political demands placed upon him as the pre-eminent artist of the Second Empire. The drawings and the finished painting together illuminate the fundamental challenges Ingres faced in representing both the cultural policy of his era and the nature of authority itself, caught, as the catalogue puts it, “between grandeur and humanity, myth and reality.”

Antoine Le Nain‘s The Little Dancers (Les Petits danseurs), a very rare oil on copper from the collection of Gabriel Cognacq, carries an estimate of around €2,000,000. The section also features Portrait of a Young Boy by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (estimate: €300,000–500,000), and a superb watercolour by Eugène Delacroix, Sleeping Soldiers (Soldats orientaux endormis dans un poste de garde), estimated at €250,000–350,000. Presented by Delacroix to the Comte de Mornay as an expression of gratitude for being invited to join a diplomatic delegation to Morocco to meet Sultan Moulay-Abd-er-Rahman, this remarkably fresh drawing is reappearing on the market after having remained out of sight for more than half a century.

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The drawings section is further distinguished by two landscapes in pen and brown ink by Fra Bartolommeo (1472–1517), one of the greatest Florentine masters of the Renaissance. Both works derive from the collection of Maria Niccolò Gabburi (1676–1742) and formed part of an album sold at auction in 1957. The finer of the two, a double-sided study depicting a View of an Italian town (Vue d’une ville italienne), carries an estimate of €600,000–800,000 and was considered at the time of the 1957 sale to be the most important in the series.

The Glory Of Royal Silverware

If the paintings section reads as a survey of the highest achievements of French art across two centuries, the silver section tells an equally compelling story, one of royal patronage, extraordinary craftsmanship and the near-miraculous survival of objects that history might so easily have destroyed.

Assembled with passion and expertise at major historic auctions in New York, London and Paris, frequently with the assistance of the antique dealer Jacques Helft, the Ortiz silverware collection is regarded as historically one of the most significant ever formed. It stands alongside the Rothschild, David-Weill and López-Willshaw collections as a benchmark of the field. The fifteen pieces on offer, among them candlesticks, cutlery, plates, salt cellars and pepper shakers, trace the splendour of European tableware from the late seventeenth century to the eve of the French Revolution, each crafted by silversmiths whose names have become synonymous with excellence. For a sense of the records that exceptional European collections can achieve at auction, the Lewis Collection’s £200 million record-breaking Sotheby’s sale offers a compelling benchmark.

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Pride of place within this section belongs to four three-light candelabra from the Portuguese Royal Service, crafted by Thomas Germain (1673–1748) and François-Thomas Germain (1726–1791), and estimated at around €3,000,000. The service for the kings of Portugal is the world’s most significant eighteenth-century French silver service, and the largest commission ever placed by a foreign court with the Germain workshop, silversmiths to the kings of France. When the first service commissioned from Thomas Germain in 1729 was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, an entirely new commission was placed with his son following the elder Germain’s death in 1748. This second commission engaged more than a hundred craftsmen and required deliveries spread over nearly eight years.

The survival of these pieces owes everything to their exceptional quality. Having withstood the Napoleonic invasions and the political upheavals of successive centuries, and having escaped the melting pot that claimed so much royal silver, pieces from this service are today found in the collections of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Louvre, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The four candelabra offered at Christie’s are among the last remaining examples in private hands. They are immortalised in the celebrated 1736 portrait of Thomas Germain and his wife by Nicolas de Largillierre, now held at the Gulbenkian Museum, in which the silversmith proudly draws attention to the very pieces that will come under the hammer in September.

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Another exceptional piece is a rare ewer and basin in silver-gilt from the Louis XIV period, crafted by Nicolas Delaunay (1646–1727), goldsmith to King Louis XIV himself, and estimated at €600,000–800,000. Despite being regarded as the father of the Regency style, Delaunay appears to have produced very few works bearing his hallmark. Of the ewer model in question, which went on to become widely reproduced in bronze through the nineteenth century, only two examples in silver-gilt are known to survive. The older, dating from 1697, has unfortunately lost its basin and is now held in Poitiers Cathedral. The example in the Ortiz collection, dating from 1704, is the only one still complete. It is engraved with the coat of arms of Jérôme Marie Champion de Cicé (1735–1810), a man of the Church, a politician and the father of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Completing the silver section are four gold table services commissioned for Frederick Augustus II (1797–1854), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, son of Augustus the Strong. Each set comprises a spoon, a fork, a knife, a spice box, an egg cup and a marrow spoon, and is presented in its original numbered case. Used for the Petit Couvert of the king and the Polish royal family, these rare surviving examples of royal gold tableware are estimated at €200,000–300,000.

Furniture And Works Of Art: The Pinnacle Of French Craftsmanship

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The furniture and works of art offered in the sale reflect the same insistence on quality and provenance that characterises every other section of the collection. The Royal Savonnerie Manufactory carpet, nearly six metres in length and dating from the Louis XIII period, circa 1660–65, is one of the proudest pieces in the entire collection, estimated at around €1,000,000. Its monumental dimensions and lavish decoration foreshadow the great commissions placed by Louis XIV for the Louvre.

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Attributed to André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732), a remarkable desk and its accompanying cartonnier, dating from circa 1715, embodies all the hallmarks of the famous cabinetmaker’s art. With its projecting frieze drawer and its emblematic masks of Democritus and Heraclitus, the piece bears a striking resemblance to a celebrated series of drawings attributed to Boulle and preserved at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. It is one of the very few known examples that retains its original cartonnier (estimate: €400,000–600,000).

Among the most historically fascinating pieces in the furniture section is an exceptionally rare pair of Louis XV ormolu-mounted corner cabinets in black lacquer by Bernard II van Risamburgh, known as B.V.R.B. (active 1730–1767), estimated at €200,000–300,000. These encoignures have been identified as part of a consignment made for the château at Crécy, belonging to Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764). They are precisely described in Lazare Duvaux‘s journal entry dated 20 September 1753: “Two openwork corner pieces, with crow’s feet, varnished, mounted in gilded bronze with ground gold, the interior veneered in satin-finished wood with floral motifs, the marbles from Brocatelle, 400 livres.” The pair subsequently passed through the collection of Paul Dutasta, a French diplomat and secretary of the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference.

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The collection also features a luxurious Japanese lacquer chest of drawers stamped by Mathieu Criaerd (1689–1776), dated to circa 1740 and richly ornamented with chiselled and gilded bronze with a red marble top (estimate: €150,000–250,000), accompanied by a sumptuous pair of Louis XV ormolu-mounted Karashishi lion candelabra in Kakiemon Japanese porcelain and Chantilly porcelain flowers (estimate: €200,000–300,000).

A Legacy Written In Objects

What unites every piece in this collection, whether a painting of transcendent poetic beauty, a piece of silverware that graced the tables of European kings, or a cabinet that once stood in the private apartments of the most influential woman at the court of Versailles, is the vision and scholarship of the woman who assembled it. The Graziella Patiño de Ortiz Linares Collection does not simply represent an accumulation of exceptional objects. It is a lifetime of connoisseurship, a sustained dialogue with the finest achievements of European civilisation across three centuries.

The Christie’s Paris sale on 23 September 2026 offers collectors a rare, perhaps unrepeatable, opportunity to acquire works from one of the most remarkable private collections of our era. The exhibition of the entire collection in Paris runs from 17 to 23 September, welcoming all those who wish to encounter these extraordinary objects before they find their next custodians. Those with a passion for historically significant auction events may also wish to follow the Sotheby’s May auctions featuring Rothko’s $100 million masterpiece, another landmark moment in the international art market calendar.

*Images: Christie’s