FOUNDER

Sarah Mansfield, former international director at Christie’s auction house, began her art career at their flagship offices at King Street, London, in 2004. She developed her ‘eye’ as a sale cataloguer: examining, researching and preparing thousands of paintings for the auctioneer’s gavel. Appointed Head of the Russian Art Department in 2008, Sarah managed an international specialist team and was responsible for multimillion-dollar budgeted auction sales in London, Paris and New York.

Until 2021, the Russian Art auction category was one of the most diverse in the auction world, covering almost 300 years of art history and including artists from a vast geopolitical region. Under Sarah’s leadership, the pictures team achieved six of the top ten highest prices ever recorded in the category, including the phenomenal result of £9.2 million for Kuzma Petrov Vodkin’s ‘Still Life with Lilac’, for which Sarah executed the winning bid in 2019. This auction record remains unbroken to this day.

Over almost 18 years, Sarah’s proven skills at sourcing high-value lots led her to travel extensively throughout the US and Europe, in addition to Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Working closely with museum curators, archivists and art historians worldwide, Sarah personally handled some of the most high-profile consignments at the apex of the market, including Valentin Serov’s ‘Portrait of Maria Zetlina’, sold for over £9 million to benefit the Ramat Gan Museums in 2014.

Sarah holds a BA in English Literature and Russian from University College, Oxford.

FOUNDER

During a career spanning 37 years at Christie’s International, Alexis de Tiesenhausen travelled across the globe, discovering, appraising and cataloguing Russian pictures and works of art, including Fabergé, bronzes, Imperial and Soviet porcelain, enamels and silver. He served as International Head of the Russian Department from 1995 to 2022 and was responsible for ‘making the market’ for several artists including Konstantin Somov and Maria Iakunchikova. Over the years, he introduced numerous collectors to the art world in categories as diverse as Arms & Armour, Books, and Impressionist & Modern.

Widely recognised as a leading expert on Fabergé, Alexis handled some of the most significant private collections ever to appear on the market, including the Clore Collection in 1985, the Kazan Collection in 1997, the di Portanova Collection in 2000, and the Woolf Collection in 2021. He had the rare privilege of selling Fabergé’s Imperial Winter Egg from 1913 twice: first in Geneva in 1994 and later in New York in 2002, on both occasions establishing a new world record for a Fabergé item sold at auction. In 2007, Alexis presented the extraordinary Rothschild Fabergé Egg, which later sold for £9 million - the highest price ever achieved in the Fabergé field.

Alexis has contributed to several publications, including The Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs (ed. T. Fabergé, L. Proler and V. Skurlov, London, 1997) and Fabergé: The Twilight Years (U. Tillander-Godenhielm, 2023). He is co-editor of General Andolenko’s Preobrajenski Guard Regiment during WWI and the Civil War, 1914-1920, republished in 2010. His next book will be dedicated to the Imperial Russian Corps des Pages and will include no less than 600 images recording its history from 1796-1917 and documenting 4,400 Pages.

Alexis is the Keeper of the collection at the Imperial Guard Cossack Regiment Museum in Courbevoie, outside Paris. He is also a member of the Chambre Nationale des Experts Spécialisés en Objets d'Art et de Collection (CNES) in France.