NEW YORK—With scarcity afflicting the Old Masters market, an auction lineup that includes pictures by top-tier painters and exceptional works by lesser masters is bound to make waves. Such was the case here on January 25 and 26, when Sotheby’s achieved the highest-ever total for an Old Masters sale, $110,993,240.

The top lot by a long way was Rembrandt’s “Saint James the Greater,” 1661 (right, est. $18 million–$25 million), which sold to an anonymous bidder for $25,800,000, not quite reaching the record of $28.7 million set in 2000. A somber, naturalistic portrait dominated by brooding browns, it is the last of Rembrandt’s late New Testament–themed religious pictures in private hands. Last March at TEFAF Maastricht it was in the booth of New York dealer Salander-O’Reilly with a $50 million price tag, intended for a museum, but did not sell. Interestingly, as “Saint James” was being hammered down, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was close to concluding negotiations with England’s National Trust to buy Rembrandt’s “Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet,” 1657, for approximately $80 million. And at Sotheby’s earlier in the morning, another Rembrandt, “Portrait of a Young Woman in a Black Cap,” went for $9 million against an estimate of $3 million to $4 million.

A surprise in the sale was the impressive performance of a military portrait from 1771 to 1772 by Joseph Wright of Derby. Captain Robert Shore Milnes is shown posing in a dashing uniform against a sylvan background as a groom holds his horse in the lower right of the canvas. Estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million, the painting went for a record $7,208,000 to London dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, bidding for an American client.

A Botticelli portrait of a woman in profile (est. $2.5 million–$3.5 million) sold for $4,744,000. It was dated to the 1480s, the same period in which the artist painted “The Birth of Venus.” An El Greco Annunciation, painted in the artist’s typical elongated Mannerist style, was pegged at a puzzlingly modest $600,000 to $800,000, but took off once the bidding got underway. It ended up selling for $4,184,000 to a private buyer. Among other significant Spanish works, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Christ and the Virgin in the House of Nazareth (est. $1.5 million–$2 million) went for $3,512,000, and Goya’s portrait of the actress Rita Luna, with the same estimate, brought $2,616,000.