In 1987, Barbara and Thomas F. Eagleton returned to their home town of St Louis, Missouri, leaving Washington, D.C. behind. They had lived in the federal capital of the United States for almost two decades, while Thomas served three terms in the Senate.
Newly back in St Louis upon his retirement, the couple converted a long-standing interest in the arts into the assembly of an important art collection, particularly rich in work by a generation of Germans breaking new aesthetic ground. Though well known today, these figures — the likes of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz — were not widely appreciated in the US at the time.
Highlights from their collection are about to be offered across a number of auctions at Christie’s in London. These include Richter’s painting Abstraktes Bild (1988), which used to hang prominently in the couple’s living room. It features in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026.
The Eagletons thought that draughtsmanship offered the truest expression of an artist’s visual intellect, and they duly acquired numerous works on paper. Below, we highlight a selection of such works to be offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 15 October. They were all made between the early 1960s and the early 1990s, against the backdrop of major socio-political change in the artists’ homeland, the period in question beginning with the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961) and ending just after Germany’s reunification (1990).
Gerhard Richter, 14. Jan. 91 and 15. Jan. 91
The Eagletons acquired these two vibrant watercolours shortly after their creation in 1991. They each comprise quasi-fluorescent ripples of red, yellow and blue.
Richter began engaging in earnest with watercolour in the late 1970s, coming to see its value in parallel to his oil paintings. It tackles ‘the same sort of problem, but with different means,’ he said. ‘Like a poem and a novel by the same author.’