Art: Market Report

The art market boom that has pushed French impressionist paintings to dizzy heights (TIME, July 11) has begun to inflate Old Master values as well. London's leading auction galleries, which handle a lion's share of the world's Old Master market, totaled their year's earnings last week and found that they had set new sales records. Bestsellers:

¶ 17th Century Eclectics: Pictures by the Carracci brothers, Carlo Dolci, Salvator Rosa and Guido Reni have increased ten fold in value since World. War II, now bring as much as $11,000.

¶ 18th Century Venetians: Canaletto's near-photographic panoramas of Venice could be bought for a few hundred dollars 15 years ago, now cost up to $30,000. A small pair of cityscapes by Francesco Guardi sold for $7,700 in 1946, brought $25,200 at auction in London last March. One reason for the comeback: the present fashion for imitation 18th century interiors. (Because early Renaissance furniture does not appeal to decorators this year, prices for Italian primitives are down.)

¶ English Portraitists: Gainsborough. Reynolds and Romney are returning to favor, though nowhere near the inflated level to which Lord Duveen, the famed Seeing Eye dealer for U.S. millionaires, pushed them during the boom of the 1920s. Then, wealthy Easterners (e.g., Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache) bought them; now, Texas oilmen do. The wide-ranging oilmen, one happy dealer explained last week, "prefer to buy their English pictures in England."

¶ The Barbizon School: 19th century French Landscapists Daubigny, Theodore Rousseau and Millet, long in eclipse because Duveen frowned upon them, are back in favor, have increased as much as ten times in value in the last four years.

While the demand for Old Masters continues, nothing is surer than the shrinking of the supply—especially since the best paintings are continually being frozen into permanent public and private collections. The result, as the London Economist recently cautioned would-be investors: "Too much money has been chasing too few good pictures."