The surprising era making an art market comeback for staggering sums of money

Portraits belonging to the late Countess Mountbatten of Burma went through the roof at Sotheby's last month. A group of 13 Tudor and Elizabethan portraits of named sitters from her husband, John Knatchbull, 7th Lord Brabourne's side of the family, were estimated at about ￡80,000 and sold for ￡650,000. Outstanding was a portrait of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, by a follower of Hans Holbein the Younger, estimated at ￡2,000, which sold for ￡189,000.

Dealers said the discrepancy between estimates and price was not because the works had been poorly attributed or undervalued - the sitters were all correctly identified, and estimates were set attractively low to encourage bidding. But whereas a lot of 18th and 19th-century portraits sell very cheaply nowadays, earlier Tudor and Jacobean portraits with their clean-cut modern look are in demand, says Philip Mould, whose gallery specialises in portraits.

Among the factors that drove demand, he thinks, was the provenance and its association with royalty; the resurgence of interest in Tudor portraiture associated with fashion, film and television productions (think The Tudors, Wolf Hall, etc); and a forthcoming exhibition about the Tudors and Renaissance England to be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That's not to mention Mould's own exhibition, "Love's Labour's Found", a survey of discoveries he has made in this field over the years, which opens on April 21. None, though, was made at the Mountbatten sale.

Julian Gascoigne, a specialist in early British paintings at Sotheby's, said that two very knowledgeable private collectors drove the prices at the higher levels and that the paintings were likely to stay in the UK.

In the same sale, three early-20th-century portraits of military officers, all members of the Knatchbull family, by Sir Oswald Birley and Philip de László, were snapped up above estimate for ￡30,000 by the New Place Hotel, a Grade I-listed, Lutyens-designed manor house near Southampton, which is decking its walls with works by the likes of Alfred Munnings, John Frederick Herring and Sir Edwin Landseer. The portraits will add something to the Edwardian grandeur of the building.

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