Arthur Joseph Sulley

Arthur Joseph Sulley (c. 1853-1930) was a London-based art dealer best known for selling Dutch Old Master paintings, including the record-setting Rembrandt van Rijn's The Mill.

He worked with several American collectors and industrialists, including Alexander Byers, Peter Arrell Brown Widener, and Henry Clay Frick.

And two years later, Sulley helped to sell Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at her Music, which Knoedler & Co. and Lawrie & Co. co-owned, to Frick for $26,000.

[16] Sulley made history in the same year, 1911, by selling Rembrandt’s The Mill, which the Berlin art luminary and museum director Wilhelm von Bode, called “the greatest picture in the world,” to Peter Widener for £100,000.

In 1914, with the help of connoisseur Bernard Berenson, he sold Lorenzo di Credi’s Boy in a Scarlet Cap and Bernardo Daddi’s Madonna and Child with a Goldfinch to Isabella Stewart Gardner,[19] for $25,000 and $7,000 respectively.

[1] He kept Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods in his London gallery during World War I air raids and, in 1921, he and Thomas Agnew & Sons sold it under the name The Bacchanal to Joseph Widener.

Widener promised the prince, who had used the paintings as collateral for a debt, that he could repurchase them in three years at 8 percent interest if his financial situation had improved.

The paper also quoted expert witnesses, including Stevenson C. Scott and Colin, saying that $100,000 was a fair price for the two Rembrandt works - particularly during the art market depression of 1921.

[27] And at the very end of his career, in 1930, Sulley sold another famous item to Valentiner: Pieter Brueghel’s Wedding Dance, this time for the Detroit Institute of Arts.

[28][29] Sulley kept a low profile later in life, sometimes buying works at auction under the name “Hopkins.”[30] Nonetheless, by the end of his career, he had won "widely-shared" respect as a man of "incomparable fairness.