Some artists are quieter about their art-buying activities, as if the term collector were unsavory. “Very few painters want to be perceived as collectors,” says the art historian and Picasso biographer John Richardson, noting that for those who make art, acquiring “is a whole different process. I think, in each case, the artist has a different take on collecting.” Richardson cites Lucian Freud as one who keeps his purchases close to the vest. “Lucian would hate to be described as a collector,” he states. “These things are sort of accumulated.” Thanks to his more-forthcoming friends and acquaintances, it is known that Freud possesses not only one of the finest groups of pictures by fellow School of London painter Frank Auerbach, whose work has shot up in market value over the past few seasons, but also an early Cézanne interior, which inspired his own After Cézanne, 1999–2000, and an early Corot oil study of a woman, based in part on the Mona Lisa. According to Richardson, the British painter also has “perhaps one of the greatest Bacons of all”: the rarely exhibited Two Figures, 1953, which he acquired from the dealer Erica Brausen, of London’s Hanover Gallery, in the 1950s. The elusive Freud would comment only through his London lawyer, Diana Rawstron, of the firm Goodman Derrick, in London, who says: “I regret that your information is inaccurate. And, apart from that, Mr. Freud has nothing further to say on the subject.”

For his part, Jeff Koons has pursued older and historically significant works by a surprising range of artists. At Sotheby’s London in June 2007, he paid £1.6 million ($3.1 million) for Gustave Courbet’s Femme Nue, 1865–66, the last great Courbet nude from this period still in private hands. Part of its appeal is that it depicts Joanna Hiffernan, a famous redheaded Irish beauty who was involved with the artist James McNeill Whistler when she met Courbet, who immediately stole her affections.

At Sotheby’s New York this past January, Koons acquired a rare lime-wood carving of Saint Catherine by the German Renaissance master Tilman Riemenschneider for a record $6.31 million (est. $4–6 million). The sculpture is a sort of touchstone for Koons, who worked with German craftsmen on a number of his most celebrated works from the late 1980s, including Buster Keaton, Winter Bears and Ushering in Banality. “For Koons to buy a Renaissance work is absolutely brilliant—and a brilliant career move,” observes Maurice Tuchman, a New York–based art adviser and a longtime supporter of the artist. “It makes you see his work in that context, and it gives it additional historical significance.”

A picture from an artist’s holdings may have a particular allure for prospective buyers. If they can’t get their hands on a work by a particular talent, something he or she owned and appreciated may be the next best thing. Moreover, experience—and some museum collections— indicate that artists can make prescient choices. The Musée Picasso, in Paris, was founded with the works from Picasso’s near-encyclopedic collection, which his heirs donated to the state in 1973 in lieu of estate taxes. Sometimes, though, artist-connoisseurs can be too far ahead of the curve. The Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte, for instance, amassed a stunning collection of about 60 of his contemporaries’ works, including dazzling examples by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet and Renoir, which he bequeathed to the state when he died, in 1894. Initially, officials were unenthusiastic about the gift, and after years of negotiation, the national museums kept only about 40 works. Many of the remaining paintings were later purchased by the American collector Albert Barnes and now belong to the Barnes Foundation, in Pennsylvania. In 1988, barely a year after Warhol’s death, an auction of the artist’s holdings at Sotheby’s New York realized $25.2 million, with the proceeds benefiting the newly created Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. If that sale were held now, when demand for Warhol’s art is greater than ever and prices for it run up to $71 million, the final tally would be many times higher.