The party is over in the market for American paintings. In December, the 184 lots offered by Sotheby’s in the category brought in roughly $25 million, while the 186 at Christie’s grossed a mere $20 million. Those totals, a fraction of the sums the houses achieved in May, are the lowest they have generated in at least five years.

According to Dara Mitchell, the executive vice president and director of the American-paintings department at Sotheby’s, the market is recalibrating. "It is perceptibly different from a year ago. In this sale there was resistance to current prices at every level, even though the estimates were down by 20 percent. Clients expected to buy things under the low estimate, like at luxury department stores where everything is on sale."

But some bidders were still brave enough to put up significant sums. At Sotheby’s, 5 of the top 10 lots sold for more than $1 million. The highest price was for Sunrise at Tappan Zee, 1874 (est. $1.5-2 million), a luminous painting of the Hudson River by Francis A. Silva, which an American collector bought for a record $2,658,500. Two other lots that were estimated to be worthy of multimillion-dollar prices, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue Wave Maine, 1926 (est. $1.5-2.5 million), and Marsden Hartley’s The Silence of High Noon, circa 1908 (est. $1.5-2.5 million), wound up selling just above their low estimates.

Museums were also going after top-tier works. An unidentified U.S. institution purchased Stuart Davis’s Still Life with Map, New Mexico, 1923 (est. $1.5-2.5 million), for $1,538,500. And the Princeton University Art Museum stretched to win Robert Walter Weir’s 1833 painting Greenwich Boat Club (est. $400-600,000), which depicts a group of artists seeking respite outside New York during the city’s cholera epidemic of 1832, for an artist’s record of $1.2 million.

For the most part, however, "the air thinned out at prices over $1 million and even more over $2 million. There wasn’t a lot of froth or loft," says Mitchell. She also points out that there was very little dealer participation for paintings over $200,000.

"People are very selective now. Things that would have sold last year didn’t," says the Connecticut dealer Thomas Colville, who found several of the estimates too high.

Of the top 10 lots at the Christie’s sale the following day, two were by Henry Farny and two were by Childe Hassam. The highest price went to Farny’s In Pastures New (est. $1-1.5 million), a precisely rendered gouache of a group of Plains Indians in an encampment from 1895, which brought $1,426,500, an artist’s record for a work on paper. The New York contemporary-art dealer Maxwell Davidson bought the second-most-expensive lot, Fifth Avenue (est. $1.2-1.8 million), paying $1,314,500 for a circa 1890 Hassam watercolor depicting a fashionable crowd; the work had changed hands several times since 1986.

Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services of New York snagged Grant Wood’s February, 1940 (est. $400-600,000), an unusual, highly stylized charcoal drawing of horses in a snowstorm, for $1,058,500, a record for a work on paper by the artist. But the New York private dealer Ann Richards Nitze walked away with one of the few must-haves in the sale, laying out $902,500 for Cider Barrel, 1969 (est. $500-700,000), a watercolor by Andrew Wyeth of one of his favorite subjects: a farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

"The liveliest section of the sale was the modern material," says the department head Eric Widing, noting that there may be a trend away from classic, academic 19th-century genre painting. Such a shift would help explain why Winslow Homer’s 1887 watercolor After the Rain, Prouts Neck (est. $2.5-3.5 million) — the most heavily publicized and steeply estimated lot of the sale — passed at $1.7 million. "But," he adds, "there is still broad interest in the other categories: modern, Ashcan School, the New Hope Circle, Western works, Hudson River and Impressionism."