With art-market veterans still reeling from the $450.3 million sale of a Leonardo at Christie’s last night, the usual gang of collectors, dealers, advisers, and auction fans convened tonight at the 57th Street headquarters of Phillips in New York for its November 20th-century and contemporary art evening sale. One Phillips exec joked before the auction that they had added a Michelangelo at the last minute—a Pietà, as it happened. There was, of course, no way that this evening’s theater could compare to the previous night’s spectacle, but the perennially third-place house nevertheless delivered a solid outing, selling 39 pieces of art for about $113.9 million.

Only four works failed to find buyers over the course of the 70-minute sale, which had a strong sell-through rate of about 90 percent. And while $113.9 million may seem modest compared to some other hauls—it would buy only a quarter stake in the Leonardo at last night’s price—it topped the totals reached at the same sale last year, and at the house’s sale in May, which brought in $111.2 million and $110.3 million, respectively.

Peter Doig delivered the top lot of the sale, his Red House (1995–96)—a large, wintry landscape populated by a scrum of ghostly figures—selling quickly for $21.1 million, well within its estimate of $18 million to $22 million. The work had last been on the market at Christie’s London in October 2008, when it sold for £1.83 million, or about $3.17 million at the exchange rate at the time. Even accounting for the fees that go into owning and selling a work like that, it certainly appears to have been a pretty good return on investment for tonight’s seller.

Under the leadership of chairman and CEO Edward Dolman, Phillips, long known as a trading post for ultra-contemporary works, has been offering up pieces from earlier in the 20th century, and that strategy appeared to pay off as two Matisses and two Picassos handily jumped their estimates.