Maybe so, but collectors are scrambling for them anyway. “Scarcity is feeding the market frenzy,” says the Los Angeles–based art adviser Michael Quick. “Auction houses and dealers are always warning collectors that something is their last chance and that they will never be offered anything of comparable quality again.” It’s not just a marketing ploy. “People are constantly asking me, ‘How many more Homers, or Sargents, or whatever are still out there?’ ” says Krulik, “and then counting them down as they disappear. Anything great is now seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Not everybody waits for the “for sale” sign to go up. “People knock on doors and offer collectors the moon for their paintings,” says Guggenheim. “Not a day goes by without a call to one of our clients offering to buy one of his great American landscapes. But he is not selling, because he knows he cannot replace them.” It’s enough to force even dedicated American-art aficionados to look at different fields. “I have started collecting some contemporary art as well,” says James Dicke. “At least in that market, there is the chance to find things.” And Cheryl Chase is considering Old Masters and 19th-century European works.

Dealers, too, have been casting around for ways out of the scarcity bind. “Some of us have tried to open a modern wing of our business,” says Maroney. Indeed, New York galleries such as Spanierman, Hirschl & Adler and Hollis Taggart, generally associated with older American works, all show some contemporary art. “But it doesn’t always work,” continues Maroney. “We are downright clumsy about it, because contemporary art is not what we know best.”

Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your point of view—extreme scarcity and the consequent surge in prices have created a new source of supply. Non-art institutions like libraries, universities and clubs have been selling their American pictures in record numbers. “Many of these places are now holding their art very tenuously,” says Maroney. “They say to themselves, ‘We have $100 million worth of art, and we cannot take care of our students, or our patients, or whatever.’ ” Many pictures are leaving the walls where they have hung since before the turn of the 20th century, from Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, 1849, sold by the cash-strapped New York Public Library to Alice Walton for a reported $35 million, to Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic, 1875, bought from Jefferson Medical School in 2006 for $68 million, raised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after the heiress threatened to take that famous painting to Arkansas, too.

Canny collectors are making offers institutions can’t refuse and waiting patiently through the outraged backlash such sales invariably create. A Nashville judge recently rejected Alice Walton’s 2007 bid for a half interest in Fisk University’s Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which contains modernist gems by O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley. Walton reportedly also approached Randolph College, in Lynchburg, Virginia, which is on the verge of losing its accreditation because of lack of funds but is blessed with a collection of American art worth more than $100 million. The college chose instead to consign top examples to Christie’s in December 2007. Those lots, including Bellows’s Men of the Docks, 1912 est. $25–35 million), and Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom, circa 1840–45 (est. $4–6 million), were withdrawn from the sale at the last minute because of legal challenges, and at this writing the collection’s future is still up in the air. Despite such dramas, observers expect institutional collections to be the deus ex machina of the American market for some time to come. “The art on their walls is now more valuable than their buildings,” says the New York dealer Warren Adelson, “so a lot of selling is bound to happen.”

But there will never be enough goodies to go around. For most buyers “the market is evolving toward what is available,” observes Adelson. Jim Dicke agrees. “A few decades ago we would have walked right by artists like the Japanese-influenced Arts & Crafts–era painter Arthur Wesley Dow and snowscape specialist Walter Launt Palmer. But now people are taking another look,” Dicke says. “There is also new interest in regional artists.”