Picasso painting owned by Sir Sean Connery expected to fetch £15 million at auction

The family of Sir Sean Connery are selling Buste d’homme dans un cadre (1969) after he requested a trust be set up in his name after his death.

The Sean Connery Philanthropic Fund will donate money to good causes in Scotland as well as the Bahamas; the Edinburgh-born actor lived with his wife, Micheline, for more than 30 years on New Providence.

The James Bond actor bought the painting – one of Picasso´s musketeer portraits, inspired by Dumas’ famed novel The Three Musketeers – a few years before his death, aged 90, in October 2020.

It will be sold at Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art Sale in Hong Kong on May 26: the most valuable work by Picasso to ever be offered by Christie’s in Asia.

The painting, an epic representation of Picasso’s iconic musketeer motif: the pan-European, 17th Century swashbuckling archetype of masculinity, is described by experts as “one of the finest and most striking of the artist’s paintings from the last decade of his life”.

Connery’s stepson Stephane Connery, an art adviser, said: “Sean had an extraordinary sense of aesthetics, composition and movement honed by his career in a visual medium as well as his long marriage to Micheline, a fine and internationally exhibited painter.

“He loved and owned numerous works by Picasso, and upon seeing Buste d’homme dans un cadre he was captivated by its expressive power and freedom. It seems fitting that this work would be sold in Asia as Sean had a tremendous affinity for Asia.”

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