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Collecting is a passion, some would say an addiction, to which the only known remedy is more of the same. The problems begin when the remedy keeps changing, as it does these days. The massive entry of new buyers leads to ever-dwindling supplies, making it difficult to build up collections within closely defined categories—there just aren’t enough desirable works left knocking around. Another consequence is that estimates become unreliable, prices often defying expectations. Thus each work must be bought solely on its own merits. This is evident in Old Master drawings, now a scarce commodity. In New York, Christie’s and Sotheby’s each hold at the most two auctions a year.

This year I would have been tempted to buy just twice in this category, both times at Sotheby’s on January 23, when the Italian drawings amassed by Jeffrey Horvitz were being dispersed. Possibly fearing that he did not have enough experience to assess the validity of attributions, Horvitz appears to have played it safe by often acquiring sketches related to signed or documented paintings that established their authorship beyond doubt. Sometimes, though, it was his flair for recognizing quality that yielded top-tier purchases.

In 1998 he bought an enchanting red chalk sketch of a girl with the shadow of a youthful smile from Flavia Ormond Fine Arts, of London. When offered at Sotheby’s New York earlier that year, on January 28, it had been catalogued as an anonymous 16th-century Italian work. A British Museum curator, Hugo Chapman, was the first to propose an attribution to Parmigianino, as Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola is known, but the clinching evidence was published in 1999 by David Ekserdjian, a distinguished British specialist in Renaissance painting, who associated the sketch with the head of Mary in Parmigianino’s Vision of Saint Jerome, which was commissioned in 1526. At Sotheby’s in January, this important addition to Parmigianino’s drawing corpus was a delightful, if not cheap, acquisition at $73,000.

I would have cracked even more easily at the sight of a sheer masterpiece by Federico Barocci, whose masterly black and red chalk portrait of a young woman with a joyous smile on her closed lips is probably a studio elaboration of an earlier sketch. The same woman also appears as one of the figures in the crowd gazing at Mary in Barocci’s famous La Madonna del Popolo, which hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence. Horvitz’s drawing was exhibited twice at the Royal Academy, in London, and is illustrated in Andrea Emilianis two-volume study of Barocci, published in 1985. You can’t do much better than that. At $193,000, the splendid likeness was not even particularly expensive.

To land great works by Old Masters, you must climb higher on the financial ladder, although not wildly higher. The only problem is that the purchase of a Dutch still life of the 17th century or portraits by the finest German Renaissance artists requires extensive exposure to art of this kind in order for the buyer to take in all the nuances of composition and mood in the picture. Many present-day buyers have their eyes so exclusively attuned to the primary colors and simplified forms of 21st-century urban scenery that they have difficulty looking at Old Masters. As a result, if you are willing to stray off the beaten path, finding masterpieces at moderate prices is feasible.

Walking through a selling show that Johnny Van Haeften put up last December in his Duke Street gallery, in London, I stopped dead in my tracks in front of a forest ground still life signed by Ottmar Elliger the Elder in 1666. By then the German painter, who had spent his career in Holland, was living in Hamburg. The picture has an intensity and a mystery that make it unlike any work from the Dutch school of which he is considered to be part—misleadingly in my view. Grapes and plums, brightly lit, are suspended against a backdrop of darkness. Two butterflies have just alighted on leaves, and a grasshopper has its antennae warily tilted at divergent angles, as if weighing whether to jump. There is an irresistible fairy-tale atmosphere of expectancy about the scene. At £125,000 ($257,850), this remarkable picture by a rare painter was a bargain I would have loved to pounce on.

A month later, in the Sotheby’s New York sale of January 24, another still life by a Dutch painter whose greatness has yet to be fully acknowledged filled me with an even stronger urge to own it. Rachel Ruysch was the daughter of a botanist whose influence probably accounts for her unusual interest in rare plants, which include, in the present case, a devil’s trumpet and fig branches. Sotheby’s placed the picture in the early 1690s, at a time when another long-ignored great artist called Adriaen Coorte was painting minimalist still lifes also poised on a ledge as in Ruysch’s composition. Her masterly use of chiaroscuro and extraordinary sense of color harmonies make this picture worthy of the Mauritshuis, the ultimate treasure house of Dutch 17th-century painting, in the Hague. This picture by Holland’s greatest woman painter was worth every cent of the $690,600 that it cost its buyer.

If any still life competed with the Ruysch this past season, it was a 17th-century panel by the Haarlem artist Jan Jansz van de Velde, in the same Sotheby’s sale. The close-up of quinces and medlars, which are viewed in highly contrasted light, recalls earlier Spanish still-life painting in its spartan intensity. It realized a modest $481,000, possibly because works by the artist are so exceedingly rare that bidders failed to react.

As heavyweights adorned with world-famous signatures go, Lucas Cranach the Elders 1528 portrait of a lady in court attire, which also came on the block on January 24, is the ultimate museum piece. The painter, who arrived at the Saxon court of Wittenberg in 1505 and was at the height of his career, could be called the German Leonardo for the inscrutable smiles that he gives his sitters. Although Cranach’s detailed handling of the woman’s choker, depicted with a jeweler’s love of precious stones and chiseled detail, betrays a misunderstanding of perspective, her mesmerizing, slightly chilly gaze is unforgettable. The price, $5.1 million, compares favorably with what an Impressionist or modern picture of no special merit costs nowadays.

This illustrates a new art market rule: The greatest museum works need not be the most expensive, because so few people now have  the trained eyes required to recognize them for what they are. The most telling evidence of this was provided on May 6 in New York, in the course of Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and modern masters. One of the most important pictures for understanding van Goghs artistic trajectory was up for sale, under a funny title concocted by cataloguers more at home with English than French: Route aux confins de Paris, avec paysan portant la bêche sur l’épaule (in proper French, you would say aux portes de Paris and avec un paysan portant sa bêche). The landscape was painted in the summer of 1887, when the Dutch artist, newly arrived in Paris, was discovering Impressionism. Having probably seen one of Pissarros landscapes done under the influence of the Divisionist theories of  the rendition of light through the juxtaposition of color dots, van Gogh radically transformed the picture’s visual effect. Thickly applied dots of intense hue give it a new texture and brilliance. A road abruptly cuts across the composition at a slant. Gone is Impressionist naturalism, and in comes van Gogh’s Expressionist strain.

Not surprisingly, the magnificent landscape had appeared in major art exhibitions, notably in the 1990 retrospective at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Estimated at $13 million to $16 million, however, it fell unwanted and was later sold by private treaty at an undisclosed  price, likely to have been slightly below the low estimate. I would have rushed to the auctioneer’s desk to make an offer the minute his hammer came down.

As wonderful as these European works were, however, the most gratifying buys this past season could be made in the art of the Far East, where the greatest of the greatest remains available. Despite the recent surge of buyers from mainland China, archaic bronzes from the Shang and Zhou periods, Song porcelain and even rare silver vessels of the Tang age still come up. The new Chinese collectors are rarely tempted by these, preferring to chase the gaudy wares made during the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736–95) as well as any work of art with a reign mark, for the aura of an imperial connection that it imparts. They rarely venture into fields such as the excavated bronzes of ancient China, partly because of the taboo against acquiring objects recovered from the abode of the dead, partly because these pieces have no visible connection with the court, but chiefly because the power of this mysterious art, which is utterly cut off from the culture of historic China as we know it, eludes them. Competition may come from Taiwanese bidders or the occasional Hong Kong collector, but hardly ever from mainland buyers.

On March 18, Sotheby’s New York precisely offered four bronzes from a Taiwan collection, two of which were among the finest Western Zhou creations to have come on the market within living memory. The estimates—$3.8 million to $4.5 million and $2.8 million to $3.5 million—were, however, roughly twice what the pieces could possibly achieve. Trade sources say they were demanded by the consignor, a wealthy, highly sophisticated collector who was amusing himself by playing poker with his treasures. The masterpieces, dating from the 10th century B.C., did not elicit one bid. If I had all the money in the world, I would have chosen these before any other work of the past season. The following day, at Christie’s, I would have chased another bronze of staggering beauty. The elongated vase, with a tapering body flaring into a trumpet-shaped neck, or ku, most likely cast in the 11th century B.C., was once owned by the late Edward T. Chow, the Shanghai-born dealer who made his career in Hong Kong and amassed a personal collection of unrivaled splendor. The vessel is the most beautiful of its kind that I can remember seeing in at least four decades, both for its form and its abstract motifs. At $133,000, it was not even particularly expensive. Museum curators, where were you that morning?

Some of the most admirable Chinese ceramics cost far less than $133,000. In the same Christie’s sale, a late Tang vessel of pure lines went for $20,000. Covered with alternating bands of pale ochre and almond green on an ivory-colored ground, this 10th-century masterpiece is worthy of any museum.

My other choice would have been a bowl with a celadon glaze, probably from the second half of the 13th century. Its shape, borrowed from Iran, has an extraordinary vigor that is subtly softened by the smoothness of the surface. It came with a box that pointed to a Japanese consignor. At $21,250, it struck me as fairly inexpensive, even though this price roughly matched the estimate—in this field, values are determined by category rather than aesthetic merit.

If there is another Far Eastern area that offers opportunities for real coups without requiring considerable expenditure, it is Japanese metalwork. Stunning examples of more recent vintage rarely get the attention they deserve. A vase signed on the underside by the 20th-century master Nakajima Yoshio turned up in the Christie’s New York sale of Japanese and Korean art on March 18. The six-faceted piece is an exercise in solid geometry enhanced by a rich, reddish brown patination that tones down the austerity of the shape. It went for $5,000, double its high estimate but still a steal, given its splendor, superbly suited to contemporary surroundings.

Korean pottery of the 19th and 20th centuries is another category that sits well with contemporary art. The same sale included a monumental vase, 20¾ inches high with a square section, by Choi Sung-jae, a Korean potter born in 1962. The unevenly applied white slip is scratched with curving slashes that allow the darkish body to show through. Just right for a room hung with one of Cy Twomblys gray scribbles on white ground. It sold for $6,000—hardly a large amount measured by the yardstick of contemporary art.

The price variations in the art of Far Eastern lands, Chinese works included, may seem extreme, but these are matched in at least one other broad area of the market: antiquities, a loosely defined category that can include anything ranging from ancient Egyptian statues to Greek vases of the 6th century B.C. to pre-Islamic southern Arabian sculptures.

Southern Arabia—Yemen, to be precise—was the source of one of the most remarkable pieces of animal sculpture seen last season: two stylized, alabaster dromedaries reclining side by side on a low base that turned up at Christie’s New York on June 4. An incised inscription in the ancient alphabet of the Himyarite kingdom names the owner who dedicated the piece to a shrine some time between the 1st century B.C. and the 3rd century A.D. The sculpture is fantastic—and inexpensive at $22,500. Yet I would not have touched it. It has no export license, and there is no proof that it reached the West before 1970, the export cutoff date specified in the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law’s convention on stolen objects that was effectively underwritten in June by the Association of American Museum Directors in a series of recommendations.

On May 7, at Sotheby’s, the most stunning bronze cast in Iran under the Parthian dynasty came up with a label describing it as “a Roman deity.” The standing female figure, lacking its arms, is no more Roman than a French marble Venus carved at Versailles. Although her robe is draped in the Roman manner, details such as the sash and the way the folds fall over it, plus the plaits of the hairdo point to a different origin. The fine print in the catalogue indicated that the bronze had once belonged to the Swissborn art writer Claude Anet, who spent much time collecting art in Iran, and that he acquired it around 1910 in Persepolis, one of the three capitals of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. The statue is a major, major addition to the small group of Hellenizing Parthian bronzes. It was an inspired acquisition at $612,500 and presents small risk of restitution claims, since it reached the West nearly a century ago.

The lesson to be drawn from all this is that to catch splendid artistic prey, you need to cast your net far and wide without always heeding art-historical characterizations printed in catalogues. But check provenance carefully. This may reveal that your find was admired by a great collector such as Edward Chow, or it could spare you the pain of acquiring a piece you might one day have to relinquish because of faulty title. And if you’re very lucky, it may lead you to a discovery like a stupendously rare Hellenizing bronze from Iran.

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