Dorotheum's modern art auction in Vienna got off to a roaring start, with bidders on the telephone lines battling over a rarely seen masquerade painting by the Belgian artist James Ensor. Baptême de masques, a carnivalesque group portrait from around 1925–1930 inspired by a photograph, shows the artist posing among his masked friends wearing a military busby. It sold for €1,022,500 — well above estimate and a top-10 auction result for Ensor, whose paintings come to the market only rarely.

According to the catalogue text, the painting condenses the principles of Ensor's art: a light that intensifies mother-of-pearl colours, a hunger for modernity, masks that blur the line between reality and theatre, and the self-portrait as a marionette in the midst of the masquerade. The riotous telephone bidding underlined how thin the supply of quality Ensors is: top-10 results for the artist tend to emerge only when an unusually well-documented discovery surfaces.

The Ensor was not the only lot to draw heat. Fernando Botero's sculpture Bather went to a determined bidder for €344,600, while a large-scale 1938 abstraction by the German artist Rudolf Bauer — Two purple balls – Das Geistreich, formerly owned by Solomon R. Guggenheim, who had helped Bauer emigrate to the United States in 1939 — sold well above estimate at €295,800. The trio of results gave Dorotheum a strong opening to its autumn season in Vienna, where it continues to lead the Austrian market for modern and contemporary art.

The Vienna sale's strong start contrasts with the week's London focus. Dorotheum, the leading house in Austria and Central Europe, continues to draw international phone bidding for its autumn season: the Bauer abstraction's Guggenheim provenance and the Ensor's top-10 result both brought out buyers from well beyond Vienna, reinforcing the house's pull in the modern art segment.