This Artist Sold a Portrait for $1.6 Million. She Was Discovered on Instagram.

At just 27, Anna Weyant has enjoyed a rocket-fueled rise to the top of the contemporary art world.

By Kelly Crow
June 30, 2022
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Artist Anna Weyant, from Calgary, Canada, was discovered on Instagram three years ago and quickly vouched for by a savvy handful of artists, dealers and advisers.

Her paintings of vulnerable girls and mischievous women in sharply lit, old-master hues are now internationally coveted.

In May, each of New York’s three major auction houses included one of Ms. Weyant’s works in their high-profile evening sales for the first time.

Sotheby's

All three works surpassed their auction estimates by multiples, but Ms. Weyant didn’t get a share, she said, as artists in the U.S. don’t automatically get royalties on auction resales of their work.

Her record sale is a 2020 portrait, “Falling Woman,” that sold at Sotheby’s for $1.6 million, eight times its high estimate.

Anna Weyant

“Summertime,” Ms. Weyant’s portrait of a woman with long, flowing hair that the artist had sold for around $12,000 two years before, resold for $1.5 million at Christie’s auction house. “People kept congratulating me. All I felt was pressure,” she said.

Anna Weyant, Christie’s

Demand for Ms. Weyant's art outstrips supply: The waiting list to buy one of her paintings, dealers say, is at least 200 names long. And in May, Ms. Weyant teamed up with the biggest art gallery of them all, Gagosian.

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As she ascends the art world, Ms. Weyant has powerful help. For the past year, the artist has been dating Larry Gagosian, the 77-year-old founder of arguably the most powerful art gallery network in the world.

Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty

Precedence exists for such art-world romances, but Ms. Weyant and Mr. Gagosian’s May-December relationship is being scrutinized in art circles.

For his part, Mr. Gagosian said he has never dated an artist of any kind before. “I’m just trying to protect her from the big bad wolves,” he said.

Growing up, Ms. Weyant didn’t know anyone who chose a life in art. Her sophomore year, at the Rhode Island School of Design, she started painting women and girls who looked lost in forested fairy tales.

2020’s “Wit of the Staircase.”

Anna Weyant, Rob McKeever

“Being new, confused and homesick in a new country, I was just scared,” she said. “I remember thinking that if I could transfer my fears to the woman I was painting, at least I had another person in the conversation with me.”

Ms. Weyant’s big break came when she began assisting Cynthia Talmadge, a pointillist painter, in 2018. Ms. Talmadge promoted her assistant by posting some of Ms. Weyant’s work on her own Instagram.

2019’s “Some Dolls are Bigger Than Others.”

Anna Weyant, 56 Henry

By September 2019, buzz was mounting for Ms. Weyant’s first New York solo show, “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” Her paintings of somber young girls summed up the agonies of early adolescence.

Every piece in the show sold out for between $2,000 to $12,000 apiece. After that, collectors had to get creative to get access to her work.

Around this time, Bill Powers of Half Gallery also introduced the artist’s work to Mr. Gagosian, who later said Ms. Weyant’s work stood out as “refined and imaginative,” adding, “I loved the clarity and moodiness of it.”

"Chest" had a low estimate of $64,100 ahead of an auction at Phillips Hong Kong this month. It sold for $530,000.

Anna Weyant, Phillips

Looking ahead, Ms. Weyant’s task will be to focus on painting amid the market frenzy. Art critic Jerry Saltz said: “It can be difficult to paint with another voice in your head whispering numbers and prices, but maybe she can.”

Ms. Weyant's Manhattan home-turned-studio.

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Photos by Tess Ayano for The Wall Street Journal
Produced by Brian Patrick Byrne

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