The Discovery Game

Taddeo di Bartolo J van Dyck Jan van Goyen Frans Hals Carl Jacobz Marrel van der Neer Jos Rubens

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Extreme scarcity makes the auction market more exciting than ever for those who know enough about art to make their own decisions without relying on catalogue estimates. As supply keeps dwindling, the traditional price hierarchy, based on comparisons, becomes meaningless. It requires frequent appearances of works with similar characteristics by the same artist, and that no longer happens. New dangers arise, as do new opportunities. Take Old Masters paintings, where the situation is as complex as this huge category, encompassing many schools and periods, is diverse.  

Pieces by the most famous artists now come up at such distant intervals that their prices are determined solely on the basis of personal opinion, whether about beauty or about art historical importance. Unfortunately, nothing is more subject to variation than personal opinion. Hence the favorite exercise of art historians and auction house specialists alike: revising the judgments of preceding generations of experts. Reconsidering unsigned pictures previously excluded from a famous master's oeuvre is particularly popular. For potential buyers, this new revisionism poses a dilemma: If interested in a newly recognized painting, should they go along with those who say that it is by the master, and decide that the earlier experts did not know what they were talking about? Or should they stick to the previous view, according to which it is merely studio work? Last July, this dilemma was spectacularly illustrated in the Old Masters sales held in London.

On July 8, Christie’s offered the painting of a dun horse as the work of the 17th-century Dutch master Anthony Van Dyck. The muddy tonalities and the dramatic setting of A rearing stallion immediately called to mind the art of the Romantic age, which explains why, by Christie’s own admission, the picture had "apparently been very little discussed in commentaries on Van Dyck." The first specialist to whose attention the portrait was drawn, in 1999, was Sir Oliver Millar, who accepted it as a Van Dyck based on a photograph and later declared himself "impressed" after seeing the picture. His enthusiasm was not shared by the American scholar Susan Barnes, who reproduced it in a 2004 book written in collaboration with other specialists, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of Paintings, with the notation "by a later artist." Intriguingly, Millar, who contributed to the catalogue, does not appear to have objected to the inclusion of a view flatly contradicting his own.

Eventually, Barnes changed her mind about the period and authorship of the picture. According to Christie’s, she now dates it to 1620–22/3 and considers the handling of the sky and the trees to be comparable “with many works [by Van Dyck] from that time.” Who got it right? Barnes I? Or Barnes II? Judging from the £3.1 million ($6 million) paid for the painting on July 8, bidders overwhelmingly sided with Barnes II. Not only did the price exceed the high estimate by more than 80 percent, but it also set an auction record for Van Dyck—assuming the work is by him. The vaguely Delacroix atmosphere plus the awkwardness of the left foreleg, which seems to hang from the horse’s belly, still require some explaining. The acquisition was a gamble.

Long-lost pictures that pop up out of the blue should likewise be closely scrutinized by collectors considering a purchase. Last March, the Christie's marketing team dramatically announced that Watteau’s La surprise, previously known only through an 18th-century engraving and various mentions in writings of the period, had “reemerged from a private collection in England.” The small panel indeed closely resembled in composition the woodcut that Benoit Audran printed in 1731 with the title La surprise and a caption specifying that it was engraved after a picture by Watteau. Although lost, the original had been abundantly discussed by 20th-century art historians on the basis of the engraving because the central motif, a couple locked in a mad embrace, is borrowed from a picture by Rubens, La kermesse, and the Rubens-Watteau connection has long been fascinating to Watteau scholars.