What is still out there? “Important works by Andrew Wyeth are still available,” notes Barbara Guggenheim. So are those by unusually prolific painters like John Singer Sargent. Also still in reasonable supply are late 19th- and 20th-century illustrations by Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, J. C. Leyendecker and others; Neoclassical sculpture by the likes of Hiram Powers and William Wetmore Story; and Surrealist works by Jared French and George Tooker; as well as works on paper by such major names as Charles Demuth and Albert Bierstadt—his butterfly drawings, for instance—and by 20th-century urbanists Reginald Marsh, Everett Shinn and John Marin. Very nice, but slim pickings for those determined to fill their lives with first-class works by the great names that drew them to the American field in the first place.

Can anyone still amass a great collection of American art? With unlimited cash, maybe, say veterans of the category, but not for long. “I have a daughter interested in going into the market, and I’m not sure what to tell her,” says Christie’s Widing. “By the time she is ready to enter the field, there may be so little around that it won’t be as active a place as it is today.” In fact, the age of a booming market for our national art may soon be as quaintly historical as the era when dealer Joseph Duveen raided Europe’s Old Masters for American tycoons in the 1920s. “Today, when someone asks, ‘How is the market for Titian paintings?’ you just laugh at them,” says Adelson, speaking to the rarity and staggering cost of such works. “Decades from now, someone will be asking, ‘How’s the market for Sargent?’ and I’ll be laughing.”

"Slim Pickings" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.