Golden age

For four years, one of the most-loved programmes on Danish television has been Auktionshuset. Running for nine seasons – a staggering 97 episodes – it charts the goings on front-of-house and behind-the-scenes in the leading Danish auction house, Bruun Rasmussen in Copenhagen. Viewers can see what happens when a hesitant person brings a painting to the front counter that they’ve inherited from their old aunt. Or when a specialist makes a startling discovery about an obscure coin. There are also the funny moments: when, for example, a cameraman became so excited while filming an Old Masters sale, he fell off the rostrum.

While Danes have become addicted to watching this real-life soap opera, they have also become captivated by the auction process. As Jakob Dupont, the CEO of Bruun Rasmussen explains, “When we first started the series, a lot of the public thought Bruun Rasmussen wasn’t for them. Perhaps they thought we dealt only with top tier works. Now, they understand the auction house is not confined to an elite circle – it’s for everyone – and that we don’t bite! Because we have tried so hard to be accessible and transparent, we have a new generation of clients. Now, every year some 70,000 people upload images to our website to get estimates.”

Dupont is sitting in his office in front of a row of paintings from the Golden Age of Danish art. Two of them feature auctions – rather rowdy outdoor affairs by the look of it, while one, a biblical scene of the flight to Egypt, is by the 19th-century painter, Laurits Tuxen. “It is incredible,” says Dupont, admiringly. “The painting glows when the lights are low”.

It wasn’t a huge surprise to his family that Dupont ended up running an auction house – although he did take the scenic route. His parents are both English teachers – his father translated Shakespeare into Danish – and after teaching, his mother went back to university to study art history. His sister is an art restorer who works in museums. Jakob, however, initially went in another direction. He studied Computer Science at University of Copenhagen and then started a software company with two friends. As he says, “It’s the classic story: we began in a basement, had long hair and played loud rock music. But we also created a database publishing system so that users could press a button and have a fancy catalogue.”

Thirty years ago, it was ahead of its time. “One of our clients was an auction house. It took them between six to eight weeks to produce a catalogue – they pasted bits of paper with glue. We reduced that production process to six hours.” After Dupont sold his part of the company, Brunn Rasmussen asked him to be a consultant – and he stayed, rising to CEO.

It must have been a different world when he started. “Yes,” says Dupont emphatically. “At that point, in the late 90s, invoicing was on paper. No emails. We didn’t have a home page. So I had carte blanche to create a digital system specifically for an auction house.” Bruun Rasmussen was also an early adopter of online auctions by having its first sale purely online in 2004. It was a lifeline. As he says, “In 2009, after the financial crisis, the turnover from online auctions was more than half the company’s revenue. And it has been like that ever since. We sell around 80,000 items a year – and 75,000 of those are sold online. We still love our traditional auctions and find that the 5,000 or so lots sold in the auction room make up half the turnover.”

So there’s life in the traditional auction? “Oh yes. Admittedly the numbers participating in the room are gently declining. Modern design, for example, has a great following among interior designers in Manhattan who bid online. On the other hand, when we sell Danish old master paintings, the room is packed. People come for the show and the atmosphere and we should use the auction room experience to emphasise that we want everyone to come into our beautiful world.”

Lucinda Bredin is Editor of Bonhams Magazine.