Slim Pickings

Big-time collectors expect the best, and they usually get it. Each season, Impressionist fans are offered top works by Renoir and Monet, modern European buffs have their pick of important Picassos, Mirós and Légers, and contemporary collectors savor juicy Warhols and de Koonings. But money can’t buy everything. In the market for 19th- and early 20th-century American art, the “best” is now unavailable at any price. Great paintings by such major names as George Bellows, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, William Sidney Mount and James Abbott McNeill Whistler are so rare to the market that not a single example may surface for years. Scarcity—an annoyance in other fields—has become the ruling principle of this one, causing prices to skyrocket, public institutions to sacrifice important holdings, collectors to move to greener pastures and observers to ponder the future of a category where masterpieces are perpetually out of reach.

Any collector in search of one of William Sidney Mount’s mid-19th-century genre paintings will be looking a long time; only one of these memorable all-American renderings has come to market in the past 25 years: Mount’s Power of Music, 1847, portraying a black man clandestinely enjoying the music of a white country fiddler, was sold by the Century Association, in New York, in 1991 to the Cleveland Museum of Art for a reported $7 million. More paintings by Winslow Homer have changed hands during the same period, but only one—the 1885 Lost on the Grand Banks, a dramatic depiction of the power of the sea, bought by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates in 1998 for a reported $30 million—is considered truly important. Sightings of significant works by other coveted artists have been, and are likely to continue to be infrequent. “There are no major works by Thomas Eakins left in private hands,” says Dara Mitchell, the head of the American painting department at Sotheby’s New York. “There are a few Hoppers out there and maybe a handful of  Bellows works.” The New York dealer Howard Godel adds: “Go to every dealer in the country, and you won’t find one great Sanford Robinson Gifford or Albert Bierstadt. And the right William Merritt Chase? Good luck.”

The true extent of the problem has yet to register with some hopeful collectors. “People call me three times a year and say, ‘Get me a Hopper,’ ” says the Leicester, Vermont, private dealer James Maroney. “They think that if I just put my mind to it, I could get them a painting like Nighthawks,” the famous 1942 scene of a diner, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Others are more resigned. “A Hopper …” muses the Ohio-based collector Jim Dicke, the chairman of the board of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C., as if contemplating something lovely but long extinct. “I haven’t been offered one of those in 20 years.”  

Twenty-five years ago, the American market was a very different place. “When I was working for dealers in the 1980s, we had plenty of stock,” recalls Eric Widing, the head of American paintings at Christie’s New York. “Buyers, we had to go out and find.” The New York art consultant Barbara Guggenheim has also seen a seismic market shift. “Back in the ’80s, we would take out a client every week and see so much that we would go home and have to decide, this one or that one?” she says. “These days you can go for six months without seeing an American picture of real quality.”

What happened? Start with the fact that a limited number of great American paintings were created in the first place. “There were always fewer artists in America than in Europe,” observes Eleanor Harvey, the chief curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C. “And they were catering to a much smaller market. So they made a fraction of what their European counterparts produced.” Factor in the thousands of works that were grabbed by American museums during the 20th century, and it’s easy to see why there’s a shortage.

Until about 1990, aficionados could still count on a steady stream of pictures coming out of attics and off the walls of early collectors who, seeing prices rise so steeply, were happy to sell Grammy’s landscapes at a tidy profit. But during the past two decades, the attics have been cleared out, and market circulation has come to a screeching halt. “Today major works are no longer in the hands of doctors and lawyers and other ‘little people’ who, at some point, will want to trade up or cash out,” says Godel. “There has been a movement to ‘strong hands’: billionaires who will never need to sell their collections.”