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What? How? Who? Where to buy Art?

By Sir Valois

2 Definition: Art MArket

• art market, physical or figurative venue in which art is bought and sold.

• At its most basic, an art market requires a work of art, which might be drawn from a very wide
range of collectible objects; a seller; and a buyer, who may participate directly in negotiations or
be represented by agents.

3 Art Transactions
• Historically, some of the most significant art transactions have taken place outside the framework
of what is now understood as an art market.
• The most common of these transactions involved the artist or craftsman and a patron, who might
be either a private individual or, as was often the case in the European Middle Ages
(approximately 450–1400 CE), an institution such as the Roman Catholic Church.
• In such cases the work of art might be site-specific, as with a fresco or an altarpiece. These works
of art would not, and indeed could not, be traded on the open market, and the artist was not the
“owner” in the modern sense.

4 Art Transaction
• Instead, the patron and the artist would draw up a contract in which the price of materials, the
subject of the piece, and the number of figures were generally determined in advance.
• The price of the artist’s skill and labour was often agreed upon separately, through an external
adjudication.
• In addition to these and other direct commissions, there was an open market of growing
importance in more portable commodities, such as textiles, curiosities, and antiquities.
•

5 Development of Art Market

• The development of the art market per se depended crucially upon three factors:
1. the emergence of collectors,

2. the production of movable works of art, and

3. the development of mechanisms for selling these works of art, either directly by the
artists—through fairs, markets, and exhibitions in their shops and studios—or via intermediaries
such as dealers and auctioneers.

6 PERSONAL AND CLASS REFLECTION

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• Since the 17th century CE, these professional intermediaries have dominated the art market and
have been joined by other intermediaries such as art consultants. Auctions, which were rare before
the 17th century, are now the major determinants of art values. In addition, the market has

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the 17th century, are now the major determinants of art values. In addition, the market has
expanded enormously through cultural globalization, satellite communication, and the
development of the Internet.
•
8 Development of Art Market
• Since the 17th century CE, these professional intermediaries have dominated the art market and
have been joined by other intermediaries such as art consultants.
• Auctions, which were rare before the 17th century, are now the major determinants of art values.
• In addition, the market has expanded enormously through cultural globalization, satellite
communication, and the development of the Internet.
•
•
9 Art Collecting before the Renaissance

• The earliest substantial evidence of an art market in the West is from ancient Greek civilization and
includes a cup by Phintias dating to approximately 500 BCE that shows a young man buying a
vase—possibly the earliest depiction of an art transaction.
• Although the most important Greek art of this period was created for temples and other public
buildings, a lively art market also developed in smaller commodities such as vases and small
bronzes. Such items were often traded in shops in the harbours of Piraeus and Olbia.

10 Phintias
• Athenian early red-figure vase-painter and potter who signed six vases as painter ('egrapsen') and
three as potter ('epoiesen’).
• He also decorated a cup for another potter. He was part of a group of early red-figure artists
working a decade after the invention of red-figure who combined vitality and fine drawing with
imaginative development of the new technique.
• They are referred to as the 'Pioneers'. The group included Euphronios (q.v.) and Euthymides.
Several unsigned vases have been attributed to Phintias' hand on the basis of style.
11 Art Collecting before the Renaissance

• The Hellenistic Age (323–30 BCE) saw a considerable boom in collecting as art moved increasingly
from the public to the private domain.
• During this era, works of art came to be appreciated for aesthetic reasons in addition to religious
ones. The city of Sicyon became the centre of the Hellenistic art market until its collapse in 57 BCE.
12 Art Collecting before the Renaissance

• The expansion of the Roman Empire caused a huge influx of artwork into the Italian peninsula,
much of it spoils of war.
• An area of Rome near the Villa Publica became a centre for dealers in books, paintings, and
antiquities. By the era of Augustus (approximately 43 BCE–18 CE), most sizable villas boasted a
room dedicated to the exhibition of paintings and sculpture, and sculpture gardens became
fashionable.
• The most famous of these was at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli (completed in 134 CE), now a UNESCO
World Heritage site. To watch the reconstructed, please watch here:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGdjf9wzHOI

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13 Hadrian Villa Tivoli

14 Art Auction
• The first evidence of art auctions also dates to Roman times. Sales were generally held either to
resolve cases of insolvency or to dispose of war booty and slaves. The latter were conducted sub
hasta (“under the spear”) by agents who accompanied the Roman armies for this purpose.

15 Roman Art Auction

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• The Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion in the 4th century CE, and this led to
widespread iconoclasm and the destruction or burial of numerous statues.
• However, during the 8th century Charlemagne’s policy of reviving Roman traditions led to the
assimilation rather than destruction of classical art, and monasteries and cathedrals became vitally
important repositories.
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18 Religion
• The principal impetus behind collecting and artistic patronage throughout the later Middle Ages
was religion.
• The veneration of relics and the development of pilgrimages exerted particularly strong influences
on the arts.
• Chartres Cathedral, for instance, was built to house a relic of the Virgin Mary’s tunic, the presence
of which in turn supported a very profitable trade with pilgrims from across northern Europe.
• There was also a high demand for luxury items such as ivory combs and chessboards, which by
the 14th century were being sold throughout Europe.

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East Asia

• China’s tradition of art collecting dates to the Qin (221–207 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE)
dynasties, which were periods of increasing social and political complexity.
• From the Qin onward, the literati who controlled China’s very powerful civil service played an
increasingly important role in artistic patronage and collecting.
• They held calligraphy—the Chinese “art of arts”—in such high esteem that by the 3rd century CE
the most respected historical calligraphers had acquired sufficient cachet to be worthy of forgery.
• By the 8th century CE collectors had become concerned enough about provenance to add seals
to sheets of calligraphy and scroll paintings, anticipating by about 900 years the collector’s marks
found on the works of Western Old Masters.
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East Asia

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• During the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), jade carvings and inkstones began to be valued. This

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period also saw developments in porcelain technology—new glazes such as celadon, as well as
the ability to create forms echoing the shapes of archaic bronzes—that enabled less-wealthy
consumers to purchase pieces that simulated genuine jade and bronze.
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• The collecting of antiquities had become widespread by the 14th century, a trend reflected in the
writing of the first connoisseur’s manual, Cao Zhao’s Geguyaolun (1388; “Essential Criteria of
Antiquities”). It included advice on handling dealers and other collectors.

24 The Renaissance: The 15th century

• Europe’s rediscovery of the classical world during the Renaissance was intimately connected with a
growing interest in antiquities and classical manuscripts.
• Following the example of the Italian poet Petrarch, who in the late 14th century had not only
assembled a famous library and collection of antique coins but also turned his study into a shrine
to the Muses, it became fashionable for rulers to create a room, or suite of rooms, known as a
studiolo.
• The most celebrated example was created by Isabella d’Este, wife of Francesco Gonzaga III, at the
ducal palace in Mantua. Decorated with paintings by Andrea Mantegna and other court artists,
d’Este’s studiolo was designed to show off her remarkable collection of jewelry, antique cameos,
and sculptures.

25 Studiolo: Petrarch

26 Venice and Florence

• was the most important trading centre in northern Italy at this time and thus a magnet for artists,
who went there to sell their work and to buy rare pigments such as lapis lazuli.
• From as early as the late 14th century, there is evidence of a free market operating: paintings were
offered for sale on the Rialto Bridge, and there were sales fairs during the feasts of the Ascension
and San Rocco.
• Auctions also occurred, not only in Venice but in Florence as well.

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• From the 14th century onward, both cities had confraternities of secondhand dealers, known as
rigattieri or strazzaruoli.
• These vendors originally traded in old clothing and leather but also came to deal in objects
pertaining to the bedchamber: cassoni (marriage chests), tables, chairs, tapestries, statuary, and
painted images. By the early 15th century, Florence had become a tough mercantile republic in
which artists competed fiercely for commissions.
• From about 1430 there was a substantial open market for small devotional pictures and items of
domestic furniture such as mirror backs and marriage chests. Although the art trade was
increasing, prices for paintings remained low in the 15th century. It was not until the 16th century
that notions of “artists” being more elevated than “artisans” began to gain currency.

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Marriage Chests

29 Medici Family
• The members of the Medici family were the most famous 15th-century art patrons and collectors
in Florence. Lorenzo de’Medici and his father avidly collected Flemish manuscripts and tapestries,

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whose influence can be felt in Paolo Uccello’s famous battle paintings and Bennozo Gozzoli’s
frescoes of the Journey of the Magi in the Medici-Riccardi Chapel.
• Lorenzo’s greatest enthusiasm was for collecting antiquities, particularly cameos and gems. He
also created a sculpture garden where the young Michelangelo Buonarroti worked early in his
career.

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• In northern Europe the art market started to develop in the late 14th century. It centred on the
great mercantile cities of Flanders, such as Bruges; a court verdict of 1466 refers to shops,
counters, and art dealers in that town.
• While the most prestigious works of art were painted on commission, they represented a small
and dwindling proportion of the overall artistic output in the Low Countries.
• Tapestries remained the favoured form of wall covering in the Netherlands and Flanders and in
the 16th century accounted for a considerable proportion of the total value of exports from those
regions, in large part because of the Medici penchant for collecting.
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• In Spain a booming economy and high demand for luxury goods brought a huge influx of works
of art, artists, and artisans.
• Important art markets sprang up along the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, where a
brisk business developed selling devotional books, small-scale religious paintings, and carvings
from Germany and the Netherlands.

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• Beginning in the late 15th century, improvements in navigation and naval architecture enabled the
Portuguese and the Spanish to begin a period of intensive trade with East Asia.
• Goods that had been quite rare during the heyday of caravan-based trading, such as silks, ivories,
and porcelain, were suddenly available in large quantities; porcelain was especially valued because
the techniques for its creation were not yet known in Europe.
• The opening of trade with the Americas kindled a similar interest in ethnographic and natural
history specimens.

33 The 16th century: The rise of Rome

• Beginning about 1450, Rome started to challenge the supremacy of Florence and Venice.
• Over the next several decades, Rome became an increasingly important centre of artistic and
architectural patronage, primarily as a result of the munificence of a succession of powerful popes.
• This trend reached a high point during the pontificate of Julius II (1503–13). The late 15th and
early 16th centuries were also marked by an astonishing boom in the collecting of antiquities. A
series of remarkable archaeological discoveries culminated in the spectacular rediscovery, in 1506,
of the Laocoön.
• It was displayed with the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican, which effectively became the first
postclassical semipublic museum.

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• Julius II is celebrated for his patronage of Michelangelo, who by age 30 was on his way to
becoming the highest-paid artist of the era; he died leaving real estate valued at 12,240 florins,
more than was paid for the Pitti Palace, while just a generation earlier the most Sandro Botticelli
had received for an altarpiece was 100 florins.
• This astonishing increase was a reflection of the extraordinary economic circumstances of early

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16th-century Rome and the unprecedented rise in the status of artists.

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• During the 16th century, dealers and agents emerged as specialized art professionals.
• This is reflected in the appearance of the first portraits of collectors, beginning with Lorenzo
Lotto’s Andrea Odoni of 1527 and culminating with Titian’s splendid Jacopo Strada of 1568.
• This period also saw the beginnings of formal Western art history, as marked by the 1550
publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and the expansion of art criticism and theoretical
writing.
• Associated phenomena include the establishment of the first academies of art and the collecting
of drawings, an activity pioneered in print by Vasari in his Book of Drawings and followed in the
round by the Medicis with the foundation of the Florentine Gabinetto dei Disegni, the first print
room in Europe.

36 Northern Europe and the Austrian Empire

• There were marked differences between the situation in Italy and that north of the Alps, where
artists were still treated as artisans.
• One solution to this relative stagnation in worth was printmaking, which freed the artists from
wealthy patrons and their demands regarding the subject matter and composition of
commissioned works.
• Artists such as Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer reveled in the resulting freedom of self-
expression and were able to sell their prints to a very wide audience.

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• A movement known as Mannerism also arose in the early 16th century, and both art and
collecting began to favour the unusual, the bizarre, and the ambiguous. Collections (also referred
to as cabinets) were formed that were far more wide ranging than those of the 15th-century
studiolo and whose purposes were more scientific than humanistic.
• North of the Alps these were known as Kunstkammern or Wunderkammern, from Kunst (“man-
made objects”), Wunder (“natural curiosities”), and Kammern (“chambers, rooms”).

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• Greatest of all the Mannerist collectors and patrons was Rudolf II, the Holy Roman emperor from
1576 to 1612. Italian craftsmen flocked to his court, which moved from Vienna to Prague, bringing
with them the secrets of gemstone carving, glass engraving, and pietra dura, a form of mosaic art.
• Rudolf II also sponsored Netherlandish artists such as the sculptor Adriaen de Vries and the
painter Roelandt Savery. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, another court artist, painted a series of bizarre
proto-Surrealist heads, including a portrait of Rudolf II as Vertumnus. Rudolf was an omnivorous
collector of art and curiosities who attracted to Prague wizards and alchemists and who
patronized pioneering scientists such as Johannes Kepler.
• These interests were reflected in Rudolf’s collections, which included astonishingly ornate
instruments and automata by German and Swiss goldsmiths and clock makers and a vast
assemblage of natural history specimens.
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The 17th century

• During the 17th century art collecting became a much more visible activity. It also became more
specialized and less encyclopaedic: the development of the gallery as a specialized viewing or

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display area encouraged collectors to concentrate on paintings and sculptures rather than the
acquisition of an omnium gatherum of works of art and natural curiosities.
•
• This trend is apparent in the large number of Netherlandish paintings that depicted art galleries.
The most famous of these were the views of the collection of Leopold William von Habsburg,
archduke of Austria and regent of the Spanish Netherlands (see House of Habsburg). These were
painted by David Teniers the Younger after his 1651 appointment as keeper of the art collections.
Teniers continued in this position after the regency changed hands in 1656 and was able to
publish an important compendium of engravings based on the collection in 1660.
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Rome as an art centre

• Rivalries between powerful papal families such as the Barberini, the Borghese, and the Farnese
were an important impetus for artistic patronage and collecting in 17th-century Rome. Some of
the most notable commissions came from worldly cardinals such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s patron,
Scipione Borghese, who was also an avid collector of Classical antiquities and Old Master
paintings.
•
• Rome was comparatively slow to develop a free market for contemporary art, though Caravaggio
started his career by creating still-life paintings for the open market in the 1590s. By 1635 picture
dealers were sufficiently numerous to be worth taxing, and by the 1650s the Neapolitan painter
and etcher Salvator Rosa was exhibiting his works for sale in his own studio. By the end of the
17th century, a variety of annual sales exhibitions had been established in Rome.
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The rise of Antwerp and Amsterdam
• Despite the prestige of Rome, the centre of gravity in the 17th-century art world shifted
increasingly toward the northern cities of Antwerp and Amsterdam. During the 16th century,
Antwerp had been a major centre of artistic production, exporting paintings throughout Europe.
• It was similarly renowned for the manufacture of luxury items such as collectors’ cabinets. The city
was also home to a number of important merchants, such as Peter Paul Rubens’s friends Cornelis
van der Geest and Nicholas Rockox, whose collections were recorded in the “gallery pictures” in
which artists such as Frans Francken II (1581–1642) specialized.
• Within this lively collectors’ circle Rubens himself played a prominent part, building a magnificent
Italianate house in Antwerp and filling it with an impressive collection of paintings and antique
sculpture. By about 1640, however, Flanders was in decline artistically and economically. Its
swansong was the aforementioned collection of paintings assembled by Archduke Leopold
William.
•

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• During the 1630s, Amsterdam had begun to rival Antwerp as a centre of the art trade. Because
there was little in the way of court or church patronage in northern Europe, most Dutch artists
painted for the open market and an essentially middle-class clientele.
• Having moved to Amsterdam in 1631, Rembrandt van Rijn was shrewd in the sale of his own
prints, appealing to the era’s collectors’ market and selling copies of “Christ Healing the Sick” for
100 guilders or more, a considerable sum at the time; the work thus acquired the alternative title
“The Hundred Guilder Print.” He was himself an avid collector, spending such large sums at art

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“The Hundred Guilder Print.” He was himself an avid collector, spending such large sums at art
auctions that the habit contributed to his eventual bankruptcy.
•

43 London
• When Rubens visited London in 1629, he was astonished by the quantity and quality of art he saw.
Outstanding pieces were featured in the collection of Charles I, whom Rubens described as a great
connoisseur of paintings. Other important collections included that of Thomas Howard, 2nd earl
of Arundel—the first serious English collector of classical antiquities and Old Master drawings—
and those of the late George Villers, 1st duke of Buckingham; the earl of Pembroke; and James
Hamilton, 3rd marquess and 1st duke of Hamilton.

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• In France, by contrast, there had been very few additions made to the royal collection since the
time of Francis I in the early 16th century. In 1630 the collection comprised barely 200 paintings—
a number hardly comparable to the inventory of more than 5,500 paintings in the Spanish royal
collection at the end of the 17th century. France’s pioneers of change were two enormously
acquisitive cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin. The former acquired many of the paintings that
Charles I failed to secure from Mantua, the two Michelangelo slave sculptures (The Dying Slave
and The Rebellious Slave) now in the Louvre, and an enormous quantity of jewelry and smaller
precious objects. Mazarin’s acquisitiveness was such that even exile by the Fronde did not keep
him from procuring several prize paintings from Charles I’s collection after the monarch’s
execution.
•

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• The collections of both Mazarin and Richelieu passed to the Crown. During the 1660s Jean-
Baptiste Colbert, a favourite of Mazarin’s and by that time a statesman in his own right, was
directed by Louis XIV to take charge of the development and expansion of the arts in France.
Colbert instigated the foundation of the French academies of painting, sculpture, and architecture
and brought the patronage of the arts firmly under state control, appointing painter Charles Le
Brun as artistic dictator.
•
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European trade with East Asia

• The foundation of the English and Dutch East India companies in 1600 and 1602, respectively,
brought a huge increase in trade between Europe and East Asia. This relatively sudden increase in
demand had a particular impact on the market for porcelain and lacquerwork; during China’s
Ming dynasty (1368–1644), large factories were created to supply the market for linglong (pierced
porcelain) and other wares. Although approximately 3.2 million pieces of porcelain were shipped
to Holland between 1604 and 1657, the trade was not a simple pipeline from East to West: the
greater proportion of what the Dutch shipped out of East Asia was in fact destined for their
warehouses in Southeast Asia and thence to India and the Islamic countries of the Middle East.
•

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• The arrival of so much imported porcelain had a seminal impact on European ceramic production
at centres such as Meissen (Germany). It also affected interior decoration: a fashion for massed
displays of porcelain, started by the Dutch in the 1670s, led to a vogue for “rooms of porcelain.”

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Among the most amazing displays of the fashion was the so-called Trianon de porcelaine, built by
Louis XIV for his mistress Mme de Montespan on the site now occupied by the Grand Trianon (see
Palace of Versailles). It was faced with faience tiles of a blue-and-white chinoiserie pattern.
Augustus II, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, was another aficionado of porcelain. Not only
did he trade a regiment of dragoons for a shipment of Chinese porcelain, but he also built a
“Japanese” palace in Dresden to house his collection, which had grown to more than 50,000
•
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The 18th century

• In the 18th century the so-called Grand Tour became a rite of passage for aristocratic young men.
The journey typically involved three or four years of travel around Europe and included an
extensive sojourn in Italy, as Rome was considered the ultimate destination for what might now be
characterized as cultural tourism.
•
• The Scottish painter, archaeologist, and art dealer Gavin Hamilton, one of the era’s cultural power
brokers, championed the idea that “the most valuable acquisition a man of refined taste can make
is a piece of fine Greek sculpture.” Hamilton’s opinion was widely accepted and spurred the
development of a highly lucrative antiquities market. The British end of this market was largely
dominated by Hamilton himself and by two dealers, Englishman Thomas Jenkins and Scot James
Byres. The most notable collector was Charles Townley, though his collection was later
overshadowed by the so-called Elgin Marbles, collected by the British ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, Thomas Bruce, 7th earl of Elgin.

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• There were also important continental participants in the Roman art market, including German
archaeologist Baron Philip von Stosch and Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. To Rome’s south
the presiding figure was Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to the Neapolitan court. His
collection of Greek vases, a catalog of which was published by the Society of the Dilettanti, was of
seminal importance to Neoclassicism.
•
• Venice also continued to be an important art market during the 18th century. Notable dealers
included the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, the principal agent for Canaletto, and Italian
intellectual Francesco Algarotti, who acted on behalf of Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia. There
was also a significant trade in fans and Venetian glass. Florence also had a lively grand tourist
market, particularly for pietra dura and scagliola table tops; all’antica bronzes by Giovanni Zoffoli,
Francesco Righetti, and Giovanni Francesco Susini; and Old Master paintings.
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Central and Eastern Europe

• Apart from the British, the most acquisitive 18th-century collectors were Augustus II (the Strong),
king of Poland and (as Frederick Augustus I) elector of Saxony; the aforementioned Frederick II of
Prussia; and Empress Catherine II (the Great) of Russia.
•
• Augustus was a notable collector of Old Master paintings, including Raphael’s Sistine Madonna—
the most expensive painting in the world in 1754. Frederick acquired some of the greatest
paintings by Antoine Watteau, including the The Signboard of Gersaint. Catherine founded the

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paintings by Antoine Watteau, including the The Signboard of Gersaint. Catherine founded the
Hermitage Museum in 1764 and acquired Sir Robert Walpole’s tremendous collection of Old
Master paintings in 1779 via James Christie (founder of Christie’s auction house). She was also a
notable patron of Josiah Wedgwood and the Sèvres porcelain factory.
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The rise of Paris

• During the reign of Louis XIV, the French crown tightly controlled artistic patronage. This broke
down in the closing years of his reign. Significantly, Watteau—perhaps the greatest French painter
of the era—worked almost exclusively for dealers, such as Edme-François Gersaint, and for private
clients. Gersaint pioneered the dealer’s catalog, and his shop was immortalized in Watteau’s late
masterpiece The Signboard of Gersaint (1721).
•
• At the same time, the connoisseurship of Old Master painting was becoming increasingly
professionalized. This change was reflected in the more scholarly approach used by dealers such
as Pierre-Jean Mariette and, toward the end of the century, by Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, later
an art adviser to Napoleon I. The increasing body of art-historical and critical writing was reflected
in the Salon criticism of Denis Diderot, whose pivotal role as a commentator on the contemporary
art world anticipated that of John Ruskin in Victorian England.

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• Decorative arts dealers, known as marchands merciers, were allowed to surmount the French guild
restrictions that forced craftsmen to specialize and prevented, for example, cabinetmakers from
supplying the brass mounts on commodes. The marchand mercier therefore became a pivotal
entrepreneurial figure in French furniture making, supplying capital, negotiating with customers,
working with teams of specialist craftsmen, controlling the quality of the finished product, and
very often assuming responsibility for the design. This is nowhere better expressed than in clocks
where diverse elements—figures of Meissen porcelain, flowers of Vincennes ware, elaborate
ormolu mounts and casing, and the movement itself—would be integrated in a complex
confection involving many different craftsmen. Probably the best known of the 18th-century
marchands merciers were Lazare Duvaux and the partners Simon-Philippe Poirier and Dominique
Daguerre, all of whom had shops in the fashionable rue Saint-Honoré. Daguerre played a central
role in the Anglo-French art market in the 1780s, acting simultaneously as the agent for
Wedgwood in Paris and the Sèvres factory in London.
•
• By the 18th century auctions were a familiar ingredient in the Paris art trade, many of them
captured in the drawings of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Unlike in England, where auctioneering was
largely deregulated by the 18th century, auctions in France had to be conducted by an official
called a commisseur-priseur. The medieval privileges accorded to this office survived a myriad of
historical events, from the French Revolution to the world wars, before yielding to European Union
legislation in the year 2000.

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• Despite the astonishing richness of the collections assembled at the court of Charles I, London
remained a backwater in terms of art markets until the 18th century. A crucial development was
the rising popularity of art publishing and print selling. This sector was promoted by William
Hogarth (among others), whose narrative paintings translated easily into engravings and appealed
to a wide middle-class audience. The passing of the Engraving Copyright Act in 1735 (often called
the Hogarth Act) extended intellectual-property law from literature to the visual arts and proved

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the Hogarth Act) extended intellectual-property law from literature to the visual arts and proved
to be a vital step in maintaining artistic quality within London’s nascent market.
•
• The next great entrepreneur in print selling was Arthur Pond, whose caricatures were widely
disseminated from about 1740 onward. His example was followed by engraver John Boydell, who
became the greatest print merchant of Georgian London. In 1786 Boydell initiated a project
known as the Shakespeare Gallery, a collection illustrating the works of the Bard of Avon and
involving artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, John Opie, and James Barry. Other
important factors in the development of the London market were the formation of academies and
societies of artists, beginning with portrait artist Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Academy in 1711 and
culminating in the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768.
•

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• By the late 17th century the Office of the Outroper, which held a monopoly on the holding of
sales within the City of London, had begun to lose power. This change combined with the
introduction, from the Netherlands, of new techniques of auctioneering and allowed independent
auction businesses to flourish. Art auctioneering developed as a specialist activity, with the first
picture auction being held in London in 1682. Building on these initiatives, Christopher Cock, the
most pioneering of the early Georgian auctioneers, fully exploited newspaper advertising to
promote his sales. He was also among the first to conduct business from fixed premises, choosing
a fashionable address in Covent Garden to help capture the aristocratic market. Another
important enterprise, if more specialized and modest in terms of its clientele, was the bookselling
business founded in 1744 by Samuel Baker and later run by his nephew, John Sotheby. Sotheby’s
retained its primary emphasis on books until the 20th century, when it diversified its auction
services.
•
• James Christie founded his auction house in 1766, and while he started out in the same part of
London as Samuel Baker, he soon moved his business to the more aristocratic West End. There he
gained a reputation as an auctioneer of fine arts. Christie handled the greatest country house
picture sale of the 18th century, in which the pictures from Sir Robert Walpole’s collection at
Houghton Hall were sold privately to Catherine the Great in 1779 for the then-record price of
£40,000. During the closing years of the 18th century, two other auction houses were founded in
London whose businesses persisted into the 21st century, Bonham’s (1793) and Phillips (1796,
now Phillips de Pury & Company).
•

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• The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
• The extended conflicts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries created an atmosphere of
uncertainty and instability in much of Europe. Elites who had enough foresight or forewarning to
remove themselves from areas of conflict were understandably keen to take their wealth with
them; art was among their more portable assets. Circumstances sometimes required the
liquidation of all or part of these collections—a boon for auction houses. For instance, James
Christie and John Sotheby profited greatly from the French Revolution, which effectively destroyed
Paris’s position as the leader of the European art market and flooded the London market. Perhaps
the most notable of the collections liquidated as a result of the French Revolution occurred in
1792, when the 296 paintings in the collection of Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duke d’Orléans, brought
to the London market pictures of a quality and distinction not seen since the reign of Charles I.

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•
• In England, George IV was among the most important collectors of the period. Between 1783 and
his death in 1830, he assembled the greatest collection of Sèvres porcelain in the world and one
of the finest collections of French 18th-century furniture outside France. He was also responsible
for building the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, a fanciful collection of domes, minarets, and galleries
that renewed interest in the arts of India and China.

56
• The Napoleonic invasions of Italy and Belgium gave the emperor access to the collections therein.
Using a team of art experts led by Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon, the French plundered the
cream of the European collections. The pope was forced to hand over 100 of the most celebrated
treasures from the Vatican galleries, including the Belvedere Torso, Laocoön, and Raphael’s
Transfiguration. Venice lost the Horses from Saint Mark’s Basilica and Paolo Veronese’s Marriage of
Cana.
•
• In the north the booty gathered included Rubens’s Deposition from the Antwerp Altarpiece
Triptych and Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb (also called the Ghent Altarpiece).
For a time the Musée Napoleon (as the Louvre was rechristened) housed the greatest assemblage
of art treasures ever gathered.
•
57
The rise of the “antique”

• Until the second quarter of the 19th century, there was very little market for what are now
considered to be antiques; accordingly, prices were remarkably low. In England the increasing
appreciation of such items was connected with the Gothic Revival and with Romantic
antiquarianism. The English man of letters Horace Walpole was one of the first collectors to
furnish his house with antiques as well as antiquities. His example was followed by the eccentric
author William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey and was paralleled on the Continent by collectors such
as Alexandre du Sommerard, founder of the Cluny Museum.
•
• This spirit of antiquarianism affected silverwork in London during the Regency period: Rundell,
Bridge and Rundell, England’s leading silver manufacturer, built up a huge stock of old silver to
use as a design source for their products. The interest in antiques also led to the emergence of
dealers whose primary trade was the supply of secondhand goods. One of the most successful in
England was Edward Holmes Baldock, who in the 1830s supplied his aristocratic clients with a
mixture of masterpieces and fakes.
•
• The last quarter of the 19th century saw a shift from aristocratic to plutocratic collecting, a trend
exemplified by families such as the Rothschilds. By about 1900, American collectors had started to
play a major role in the antiques and art markets. They were supplied by the likes of Jacques
Seligmann, the great Parisian dealer whose clients included industrialist Henry Clay Frick, financier
John Pierpont Morgan, and merchant S.H. Kress.

58
• The market for Asian arts enjoyed a significant revival in Paris in the middle of the 19th century.
The 1862 opening of Mme Desoye’s shop, La Porte Chinoise, in the rue de Rivoli, encouraged a

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The 1862 opening of Mme Desoye’s shop, La Porte Chinoise, in the rue de Rivoli, encouraged a
taste for blue and white porcelain and Japanese prints. Orientalism was eagerly embraced and
promoted by the Impressionists, the American painter James McNeill Whistler, and the French Art
Nouveau etcher Felix Bracquemond. Whistler’s Japanese-inspired design for the dining room of
shipping magnate Frederick Leyland’s London house is an especially fine example of the style.
Leyland commissioned the work, now known as the Peacock Room, after acquiring Whistler’s The
Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863–64), its focal point.
•
• One of the most famous Parisian dealers in Asian art was Siegfried Bing, whose shop was later
known as La Maison Art Nouveau. Bing played a vital role in the promotion of the new style, as
did his English counterpart, Arthur Liberty, who founded the luxury goods shop Liberty of London.
In the United States the taste for Asian art was promoted by scholar-collectors such as Ernest
Fenollosa, Edward Morse, and Charles Lang Freer and the dealer Dikran Kelekian.

59
• By the time Victoria became queen in 1837, England’s contemporary art scene was booming, and
the country’s most successful artists were enjoying unprecedented wealth and social status. This
change resulted from several factors. One was the rise of a new breed of collector, typically self-
made, who preferred to put his money into new art rather than Old Masters. Others included the
growing prestige of the Royal Academy and the increasing importance of public exhibitions.
•
• Perhaps the most significant factor, however, was the rise of the dealer—to whom, according to
The Art Journal (1871), “have been owing the immense increase in the prices of modern pictures.”
Key to the dealer’s success were commercial exhibitions that attracted thousands of fee-paying
visitors and promoted the highly lucrative market of reproductions. Thanks to the invention of
steel-plate engraving in the 1820s, it had become possible to inexpensively produce thousands of
images of the more popular paintings.
•

60
• Victorian contemporary art soon began to eclipse the Old Masters, a situation marked by such
events as William Holman Hunt’s sale of his The Shadow of the Cross in the 1870s for more than
the London National Gallery had paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. The most
prominent dealer in this market was Ernest Gambart, whose showmanship and business acumen
brought a fortune to him and the artists with whom he dealt, including Hunt, William Powell Frith,
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Rosa Bonheur.
•

61
• Paris in the 19th century became the principal European centre for artistic innovation, though
often in the face of official opposition. One early promoter of the avant-garde was the dealer John
Arrowsmith, who bought John Constable’s The Hay-wain. Other more mainstream figures in the
Parisian contemporary art world were publisher Théodore Vibert, print dealer and publisher Alfred
Cadart, and Adolphe Goupil, who was among the first French dealers to exploit the market in the
United States. Until the end of the 19th century the contemporary art business was principally
focused on mainstream Salon painters such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme,
Paul Delaroche, and Ernest Meissonier, whose highly finished and technically brilliant subject
pictures attracted huge sums that rivaled those of their British contemporaries.
•
• Paul Durand-Ruel was a central figure in the promotion of Impressionism, becoming one of the

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first dealers to break away from a system of patronage still dominated in France by the academic
establishment. By exhibiting and investing heavily in the work of the Impressionists and
supporting them during lean times, Durand-Ruel eventually created a market for their work.
Although the strategy of bankrolling the currently unfashionable was a risky one that did not start
to pay dividends until the late 1880s, his approach created a new, more ideological image of the
dealer as tastemaker and entrepreneurial patron. This inspired other dealers, such as Ambroise
Vollard.

62
• One of the features of the later 19th-century contemporary art market was its growing
internationalism. The spread of Impressionism into Germany was greatly facilitated by the alliance
forged between Durand-Ruel and Paul Cassirer. A German dealer based in Berlin, which had
become perhaps the most prominent centre of cutting-edge art by the 1890s, Cassirer played a
vital role in promoting Paul Cézanne and rehabilitating Vincent van Gogh. The most radical of the
Berlin dealers was Herwarth Walden, whose gallery and publishing company provided an avant-
garde forum for the Blaue Reiter, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Italian Futurists.
•
63
The growth of the auction market

• In the middle of the 19th century, Paris regained some of its original prominence as an auction
centre. The presence of a group of phenomenally rich and competitive collectors such as Baron
James de Rothschild and Richard Seymour-Conway, the 4th marquess of Hertford, acted as a
magnet for art sales, as did the founding of a state-sponsored auction house, the Hôtel Drouot, in
the 1850s.
•
• In Britain the combined effects of the agricultural depression of the 1870s and the passing of the
Settled Land Act of 1882 encouraged a spate of auctions of aristocratic collections, beginning with
the Hamilton Palace sale of thousands of objects in 1882. Similar sales continued in response to
the introduction of death duties in 1894. Because these opportunities co-occurred with the
presence in London of enormously rich art collectors, the period from about 1880 until the stock
market crash of 1929 was a period of great prosperity for the British auction houses. The first art
auction house in the United States, the American Art Association, opened in 1883, but
auctioneering business was slow to develop there.

64 Museums and their impact

• During the 19th century the number and size of museums expanded tremendously. This was
particularly the case in Europe, where great collections, formed of artifacts from around the world,
were created as an expression of cultural imperialism.
65
British museums

• The British Museum was founded in 1753. Its initial collection comprised the library amassed by
Sir Robert Bruce Cotton in the 17th century and a collection of more than 70,000 items given to
the nation by the physician and botanist Sir Hans Sloane upon his death. Although Sloane’s
collection was begun by Sir William Courteen, a merchant and shipping magnate, Sloane had
purchased and further developed this cabinet of curiosities in the first half of the 18th century.

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The British Museum was rebuilt in the 1820s and greatly expanded its collections in the 19th
century, particularly in the fields of ethnography and antiquities, acquiring such illustrious
materials as the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles.
•
• The Victoria and Albert Museum was founded in 1852 on the profits from the Great Exhibition of
1851. It was originally known as the Museum of Manufactures, and its colonialist taxonomy was
reflected in the arrangement of its collections. The museum’s initial staff—especially its director,
Sir Henry Cole, a designer and educator; the head of its department of practical art, John Charles
Robinson, a connoisseur and scholar; and its superintendent for art, Richard Redgrave, a
professional artist—were visionaries who expanded the collection enormously. Their acquisitions
of medieval and Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts were of particularly fine quality.
•

66
• The Museum of Manufactures greatly influenced the development of design and craft museums in
continental Europe and the United States, including the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, the
Austrian Museum for Art and Industry (now the Austrian Museum of Applied Art) in Vienna, the
Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. While the primary emphasis of
these art and design museums was education, they also had a vital impact on the art market by
promoting a more scholarly understanding of the decorative arts.

67
German museums

• In southern Germany the growth of public museums was a natural outgrowth of a tradition of
princely collecting that combined with an Enlightenment belief in the benefit of art museums for
public education. Thus, the Bavarian State Picture Galleries and State Collection of Antiquities in
Munich were based on the collections of Louis I, king of Bavaria. Originally inherited from the
Habsburgs, these collections were further developed by Louis through an enlightened purchasing
policy that emphasized Old Master paintings and antique sculpture. He also employed the
German architect Leo von Klenze to design two new museums, the Glyptothek and the Alte
Pinakothek, to accommodate and exhibit the collections.
•
• During the 19th century, one of the most significant buyers of British ancestral treasures was the
Kaiser-Friedrich Museum of Berlin. The museum’s painting collection was based not on royal
heirlooms but rather on the recently formed and very remarkable collection of early Italian
pictures amassed by Edward Solly. An English timber merchant, grain speculator, and art collector,
Solly sold some 3,000 paintings to the Prussian government in 1821 as part of an effort to recover
from business losses.
•
• The man who became the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum’s first great art director, Gustav Waagen,
believed that museum collections should be organized systematically according to the new
German art-historical ideas, so as to display the evolution of painting within individual schools.
Further, he felt that collections should be reflective of rigorous and wide-ranging standards of
connoisseurship rather than of 18th-century notions of “good taste.”

68
• Waagen’s ideas had a seminal impact on the development of 19th-century museums throughout

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Waagen’s ideas had a seminal impact on the development of 19th-century museums throughout
Europe, particularly in England. There the first director of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Eastlake,
built up remarkable holdings of early Italian and northern European paintings. Waagen also
advised Prince Albert and was a driving force behind the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition
(1857), where the new taxonomy was employed by another German, George Scharf.
•
• Waagen’s traditions of scholarly museum curatorship were continued after Berlin became the
capital of the new German empire. Their principal proponent was Wilhelm Bode. As the director of
the royal Prussian museums from 1906 to 1920, Bode was able to exercise much greater power
than Waagen and worked with considerably enhanced resources. This was the man who,
according to the painter Max Liebermann, “knows where every picture is, where it was before, and
who is going to buy it.” Bode not only made some spectacular purchases but also inspired dealers
and collectors to become donors by encouraging gifts to museums in return for advice. The
Kaiser-Friedrich Museum was renamed the Bode Museum in 1956 in recognition of his role in its
development.

69
Museums as agents of change

• During the 19th century, the simultaneous development of museums and academic art history
also caused a reevaluation of artists and schools of painting that had largely been forgotten. In
the 18th century, for instance, few collectors had taken an interest in the early Italian or Flemish
schools of painting. Renewed interest in and respect for these schools was not just a matter of
scholarly interest but was also connected with contemporary art movements, most notably the
Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rising nationalism in Germany and religious
revivalism, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, also contributed to the “rehabilitation” of some
schools and individuals. Particularly spectacular were the rise in the critical fortunes (and hence
prices) of works by Fra Angelico and Botticelli, the latter of which was to be the major influence on
the English painter Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones.
•

70
• Rediscovered artists from the north included Johannes Vermeer and Frans Hals; Hals’s rediscovery
coincided with the founding of the Haarlem (Netherlands) Municipal Museum. The rediscovery of
El Greco in particular, and Spanish painting more generally, was to have a major impact on artists
such as Édouard Manet.
•
• During the 1840s, 18th-century French artists were also rediscovered, having entirely fallen from
grace during the French Revolution. Their rehabilitation spurred a major surge in prices for 18th-
century French decorative arts, a taste particularly associated with the Rothschilds and later
adopted by the American plutocratic collectors of the early 20th century.
•
71 The 20th century Art Market

72
To World War II: The United States

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• One of the most significant developments in the art market after 1900 was the role played by
American collectors and the dealers who supplied them with works of art. Of the latter, the most
phenomenally successful and flamboyant was Joseph Duveen, Baron Muldeen of Millbank—
perhaps the only art dealer ever to be ennobled. His influence was so great that the period
between about 1900 and about 1940, during which great American private collections were
assembled by Andrew W. Mellon, Henry E. Huntington, Henry Clay Frick, S.H. Kress, John Pierpont
Morgan, and others, has often been called “the age of Duveen.”
•
• Despite Duveen’s success with other clients, one of the first great American collectors, Isabella
Stewart Gardner, bought her pictures mainly through the agency of the eminent London firm
Colnaghi (established 1760). Gardner also relied on the advice of the great American connoisseur
Bernard Berenson, who later worked secretly for Duveen.
•
• Society portraiture had enormous fashionable appeal to American collectors, perhaps because of
its aura of aristocracy. Most highly sought were Sir Anthony Van Dyck and the great 18th- and
early 19th-century British masters such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas
Gainsborough, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Duveen showed extraordinary skill in exploiting this
taste. His most spectacular coup occurred in 1921 with the sale to Henry Huntington of
Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy for £182,200 (approximately $700,000 at the time)—a price that at
the time made it the second most expensive painting in the world, after Leonardo da Vinci’s
Madonna and Child.
•

73
• The great art boom of the 1920s came to an end with the 1929 stock market crash, though one of
the greatest American art deals of the 20th century took place against the background of the
Great Depression. This occurred in 1931, when a consortium of dealers including Colnaghi of
London, Knoedler’s in New York, and Matthieson in Berlin—but not, significantly, Duveen—sold a
group of masterpieces to Andrew Mellon to form the foundation collection of the National Gallery
of Art in Washington, D.C. The 1930s and ’40s also saw an explosion of American museums, and
the first American courses in museum studies were offered by Paul Sachs and Edward Waldo
Forbes of Harvard University. In the period following World War II, American museums (and above
all the Getty Museum) largely surpassed private collectors as patrons of the art market.
•
• At the beginning of the 20th century, most American collectors were interested in old art. This
trend began to change following the 1913 Armory Show in New York City and a decision by the
U.S. Congress to lift the 15 percent duty then payable on works of art less than 20 years old. The
photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who promoted the work of Constantin Brancusi and Juan Gris at
291, his Manhattan gallery, was also influential in broadening American collectors’ tastes to
include contemporary art.

74 Paris
• The continued importance of Paris as an art centre is demonstrated by the careers of Ambroise
Vollard, Félix Fénéon, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler—dealers in contemporary genres, including
Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Cubism.
•
• The 1920s saw the development of the Left Bank of the Seine as a centre for smaller, more

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The 1920s saw the development of the Left Bank of the Seine as a centre for smaller, more
adventurous galleries. One pioneer was the dealer Paul Guillaume. An important promoter of
African sculpture, he organized the Art Nègre exhibition in 1919 at the Galerie Devambez. He also
helped to form the Barnes collection of Impressionist pictures originally located in Merion,
Pennsylvania, outside Philadephia.
•

75 Paris
• Paris remained a crucial market for secondary art throughout the interwar years; the leading
dealers were Nathan Wildenstein, the father-and-son partnership of Ernest and René Gimpel, and
Jacques Seligmann. For Wildenstein and the Gimpels, the core business was initially in 18th-
century French fine art, though both firms (which sustained a partnership, E. Gimpel and
Wildenstein, in New York from 1902 to 1919) later became important purveyors of Impressionist
works. René Gimpel’s Diary of an Art Dealer (1966) provides a first-person account of the heady
art scene of the interwar period. Seligmann was, until his death in 1923, the leading dealer in
French 18th-century decorative arts.

76 London
• In the early 20th century the art market was largely dealer-led. The balance of power began to
shift toward auction houses, most notably Sotheby’s and Christie’s, just before the First World War.
Until that time Sotheby’s had largely confined itself to book auctioneering; there was an unwritten
agreement that if a literary property came on the market it went to Sotheby’s, while pictures and
sculpture went to Christie’s.
•
• Sotheby’s changed hands in 1909, and in 1913 this agreement was broken by Montagu Barlow,
the new lead partner in the firm. Barlow sold a Frans Hals for a record auction price, introduced
the use of new technologies such as telephones and typewriters, and in 1917 moved the firm to
New Bond Street. Christie’s, with its superior contacts among the aristocracy, dominated the Old
Master market through the early 1920s, but Barlow hired Finnish art historian Tancred Borenius to
boost the firm’s expertise, an innovation that greatly increased Sotheby’s turnover in paintings and
drawings.
77
The latter half of the 20th century

• The outbreak of the Second World War greatly slowed the London art market and forced a
number of the leading Jewish dealers in Paris to move their businesses to New York. Like the
French under Napoleon, the Nazis were extremely acquisitive. In 1940 they created an
organization called the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg). Although the ERR was originally
charged with the collection and suppression of “undesirable” political media, Hermann Göring
almost immediately changed its mission to the seizure of private Jewish collections. It confiscated
more than 200 French private collections and inflicted forced sales and confiscations on Jews
throughout the Reich; tens of thousands of items—some estimates reach the hundreds of
thousands—were thus seized. Göring made frequent trips to Paris to select the best works for
quick sale or for transport to his own expansive personal collection. Legal actions have enabled
Holocaust claimants to recover some of this property.
•

78

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• Ironically, the collections in German museums also suffered heavily as a result of Nazi policies.
Adolf Hitler was determined to increase the representation of German art in public collections and
to expunge from these collections all traces of “decadent” art. This caused the deaccessioning of
major Italian Old Masters in favour of second-rate German art. There were also disastrous sales of
Impressionist and Modernist paintings, many of which were auctioned by Galerie Fischer of
Lucerne (Switzerland) for trifling sums.
•
79
New York City

• The New York art market benefited from the Jewish exodus from Europe during the Second World
War, succeeding Paris as the most exciting centre for modern and contemporary art. Two
important refugee dealers were Pierre Rosenberg and Peggy Guggenheim. Art of this Century,
Guggenheim’s short-lived gallery, launched the career of Jackson Pollock. The city also acted as a
magnet for artists such as Piet Mondrian and Fernand Léger and for the Surrealists Salvador Dalí
and Max Ernst.
•
80
• The success of the New York contemporary art market depended upon a substantial number of
collectors interested in new art and a complex triangular relationship between art dealers, critics
such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and museums. The greatest of the postwar
contemporary art dealers in New York was Leo Castelli. The most important museums were the
Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum,
which validated the provenance of works of art and evaluated their significance. Auction houses
played an increasingly important role as sellers of contemporary art after 1973, when the auction
of 50 pieces from the Pop art collection of American taxicab magnate Robert Scull—some of
which sold at prices 50 times greater than Scull had originally paid—garnered more than $2.2
million.
•
81
The internationalization of the European auction houses

• The European art market was slow to recover after the Second World War and remained largely
dominated by dealers for some time. In 1956 Peter Wilson of Sotheby’s challenged the status quo
by offering a guarantee of sale to the vendor of Nicolas Poussin’s Adoration of the Magi. Soon
thereafter he employed advertising firm J. Walter Thompson to promote the 1957 auction of
Wilhelm Weinberg’s collection of van Goghs and other items, which ultimately sold for nearly
£327,000 (more than $900,000 at the time).
•
• In what was perhaps his most masterful coup, Wilson recast auctions as glamorous celebrity-filled
evening events. He initiated this approach in order to attract private buyers to the 1958 sale of
Impressionist and Modernist paintings collected by Jakob Goldschmidt, a financier who had fled
Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime and later settled in New York. Wilson’s strategy
proved successful: the auction broke the sales records for the price of an individual painting and
for a single event.
•

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82
• In 1964 Sotheby’s acquired Parke-Bernet, the largest American fine arts auction house, creating a
bridgehead from which to launch its global expansion. During the rest of the 1960s and the ’70s,
Sotheby’s grew from a London-based firm of auctioneers into an international firm with branches
in the Americas, East Asia, Australia, and continental Europe. Wilson was quick to capitalize on
new technology, introducing ever more innovations, such as telephone bidding and, at a charity
auction in 1966, satellite links. Sales catalogs became more accessible, and the publication of
presale estimates was introduced to encourage private buyers.
•
• Christie’s was slow to incorporate these innovations, although the firm’s superior contacts with the
British aristocracy led to a number of milestone sales. Many of these were of Old Masters, as in the
1970 sale of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja, the first painting to fetch more than £1 million. This was
significantly the result of competition between American museums—most notably the Getty
Museum near Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan
Museum in New York—and reflected the postwar importance of museums in art valuation.
•

83
• Another significant feature of the changing auction market in the 1960s and ’70s was the
diversification of collectibles. Victorian paintings and furniture enjoyed such a significant revival
that Sotheby’s opened a secondary auction house in London, Sotheby’s Belgravia, specializing in
Victoriana. In New York demand rose for Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and photography. Collecting was
popularized by auctioneers’ road shows, television programs, and the Pop art movement, which
made contemporary art seem more accessible.
•
• The art market itself also became more accessible during this period. Beginning in 1968, the Art
Sales Index brought auction prices into the public domain. Books such as Gerald Reitlinger’s
Economics of Taste (1960), and later Robin Duthy’s The Successful Investor (1986), suggested that
art prices were susceptible to financial analysis.
•

84
• Following the Second World War, China, Japan, and Korea came to have a major impact on
traditional art market centres such as London and New York. These countries also developed
increasingly important local art markets.
•
• For many years Hong Kong dominated the art market in East Asia. The city’s importance as an art
centre dates from 1949, when dealers from Guangzhou (Canton), Beijing, and Shanghai fled there
following the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China and established the now-famous
Hollywood Road as an antiques centre. The former British crown colony was the principal conduit
for business with the West for the remainder of the 20th century. Its primacy as a market centre
was subsequently challenged by increasing openness in mainland China and by the development
of auction houses in cities such as Beijing that allowed buyers and their agents to deal more
directly with sellers.
•

85

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• As noted below, Japanese buyers played a decisive role during the late 1980s in fueling the
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist boom. However, within Japan itself a culture of discretion
and protectionism inhibited the development of an international art market on Western lines
except in partnership with existing Japanese organizations such as the department stores
Mitsukoshi and Seibu.
•
• Korea was somewhat slower to develop as an art market centre, but during the 1990s South
Korean collectors played an increasingly significant role in the East Asian art market. By the close
of the 20th century, one of the most important private collectors of contemporary British art was
the South Korean businessman C.I. Kim.

86 Art as investment
• In 1974 the British Rail Pension Fund decided to invest in art, eventually devoting some £40
million ($70 million), or about 3 percent of its holdings at the time, to the venture. British Rail
engaged with Sotheby’s, which offered “free” advice on the condition that any sales from British
Rail’s portfolio would pass through Sotheby’s. The significance of the British Rail experiment, the
success of which remains debatable, was that it was the first very large-scale and systematic
attempt to treat art as an investment vehicle.
•
• During the 1980s and early ’90s, there was an extraordinary boom in the art market, particularly in
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures. A crucial role was played by Japanese buyers, who
were attracted to the market following the revaluation of the yen at the 1985 International Plaza
Agreement. The next year, changes to U.S. tax law removed incentives that had encouraged the
wealthy to donate fine art to museums, instigating a spate of sales. The greatest escalation of
prices occurred between 1987 and 1990, after the 1987 stock market crash. During this period
Vincent van Gogh, who had sold only one painting in his own lifetime, became the most sought-
after artist in the world. Three of his pieces became, in turn, the most expensive paintings ever
sold; the 1987 sale of Sunflowers to the Japanese fire-insurance company Yasuda brought $39.9
million, a price eclipsed later in the same year by the sale of Irises to Australian entrepreneur Alan
Bond for $53.9 million and again in 1990, when Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito purchased
Portrait of Dr. Gachet for $82.5 million.

87
• For a time it seemed as though the art market was immune to the fluctuations of the money
markets. In reality, prices were being forced up artificially by a huge influx of money from
institutions, individual speculators, and, it later emerged, an elaborate Japanese money-laundering
operation. While the sale rooms boomed, many dealers operating in the more traditional fields of
the secondary market were unable to keep up with spiraling prices or compete with the incursions
of the auction houses into the retail market. This led to profound changes for some of London’s
most venerable galleries. In 1992 Arthur Ackermann (established 1783) merged with Oscar and
Peter Johnson. Christie’s purchased Spink and Son (established 1666) in 1993, merged it with
Leger Gallery in 1996, and, after having spun off the assets, closed Spink-Leger Pictures in 2002.
•
• Another major trend of the 1990s was the ascendance of contemporary art, which became the art
market’s biggest growth area. This was particularly the case in England, where artists such as
Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin enjoyed the patronage of British collector Charles Saatchi. These

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Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin enjoyed the patronage of British collector Charles Saatchi. These
so-called Young British Artists also benefited from the popularity of Tate Modern, which opened in
2000.
•
88
The 21st century

• As the century turned, art and antiques fairs became increasingly important. Among the most
important were the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris, the Frieze Art Fair and the Grosvenor House
Art and Antiques Fair in London, the Armory Show in New York, and Europe’s biggest art fair, the
European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht (Netherlands). These venues offered dealers publicity and a
high volume of visitors and offered buyers the reassurance that everything had been rigorously
vetted. Buyers also had the opportunity to compare prices in a much less inhibited way than in a
traditional gallery setting.
•
• The growing popularity of fairs can also be attributed to a scandal that rocked the art market
beginning in January 2000, when Christie’s chief executive officer (CEO), Christopher Davidge,
provided the U.S. Justice Department with damning evidence of past collusion between Sotheby’s
and Christie’s over the fixing of commission rates. Sotheby’s primary shareholder and CEO, A.
Alfred Taubman, was tried and sentenced in the U.S. criminal court system, but Christie’s previous
CEO, Sir Anthony Tennant, refused extradition to the United States. In addition, the two most
powerful auction houses in the world were faced with fines and levies totaling almost $590 million
(£390 million). The following year Sotheby’s profits were approximately halved, and there were
those who predicted that Sotheby’s and Christie’s domination of the world art market would end.
This did not come to pass, though the setbacks did allow rivals to challenge their position.

89
• Also in 2000, France implemented a European Union rule that abolished the French auctioneers’
monopoly on holding sales in France, which had been implemented by Henry II in 1556. This
allowed Sotheby’s and Christie’s to hold their first sales in France and spurred an increasing
volume of business to Paris. Improved access to the international market has been good for the
business of stronger firms such as Tajan and Artcurial: Briest, Poulain & F. Tajan.
•
• The 2003 launch of the £214 million ($350 million) Fine Art Fund was the first investment vehicle
to experiment with the art market on a scale comparable to that undertaken by the British Rail
Trust nearly 30 years before. Its inception was soon followed by the creation of several other funds
with portfolios centred on art. The 2000s also saw significant growth in the number of financial
institutions offering art advisory services, in particular Citibank and the Union Bank of
Switzerland/Warburg (UBS). A linked phenomenon has been the huge growth in corporate
collecting, wherein institutions such as UBS and Deutsche Bank have played a leading role.
•

90 The Art Market: An Econometric Model

91 VARIABLE AND THEIR PREDICTED RELATIONSHIPS

• 1. Age of artist at his death ( - )
• 2. Age of the artist at completion of painting ( - )
• 3. Number of auction records ( - )

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• 4. Number of painting records ( - )

• 5. Page number of reproduction in catalogue ( - )
• 6. Lot number at auction ( - ) Hypothesis
92
• 7. Size ( + )
• 8. Low presale estimate ( + )
• 9. High presale estimate ( + )
• 10. Signed ( + )
• 11. Dated ( + )

93
• 12. Day sold (undetermined)
• 13. Month sold (undetermined)
• 14. Style (undetermined)
• 15. Location of sale (undetermined)
• 16. Country of origin (undetermined) VARIABLE AND THEIR PREDICTED RELATIONSHIPS
•

94 Economic Theory
• 1. The Demand for Art Far fewer buyers than sellers Wealthy individuals, private collectors, or
museums
• 2. The Supply of Art Unlimited number of painting by an unlimited number of artists

95 References:
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "ready-made". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Sep. 2019,
https://www.britannica.com/art/ready-made. Accessed 19 August 2023.
• Pock, Jordan.
•

96 End

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