SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.- Christie’s will auction the $30 million mansion and the entire collection of paintings and sculpture of one of Australia’s most prominent art collectors, John Schaeffer. hristie’s claims next month’s Sydney auction of hundreds of art works will be the biggest sale in Australia in decades. Mr. Schaeffer signed the contract with Christie’s after rejecting a bid by Sotheby’s. This was despite Sotheby’s publishing a special catalogue of 12 of his important Australian paintings for the firm’s big art auction last August, which raised almost $1 million.

Mr. Schaeffer has been dealing in high-priced art since his cleaning and security business, Tempo Services, was floated on the stock exchange in 1994. But his purchases of property and art in Australia and Britain relied heavily on Tempo’s turnover, which collapsed last year. The company’s net profit for the six months to December 31 fell by more than 70 per cent to what auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers said was $42,000. To pay off margin loans on his 30 per cent stake in the company, Mr. Schaeffer began selling art works in Australia and Britain. Now his 19th-century neo-Gothic mansion in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill will be sold and is expected to sell for up to $35 million.

It was revealed in November that Mr. Schaeffer had sold more than a quarter of his 400 art works to pay off loans. Bur despite the financial pressures, Mr. Schaeffer last month gave almost $1 million to the Art Gallery of NSW to enable it to buy two significant works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.