True, one work fell far short of expectations. Monet’s Dans la prairie, an 1876 painting of a woman reading in a field, half-concealed by wildflowers swaying in the light summer breeze, would have been a pure enchantment but for one detail. Her mean, mulish expression spoils it, and at a flat £15 million, the estimate quoted on request (only in sterling) before the sale, it could have failed. The auctioneer let it go on a £10 million bid that still brought the full price to £11.2 million ($16.2 million).

This easily amounts to a 50 percent drop in buying-power terms when compared with the £14.3 million ($20.4 million) that the Monet cost at Sotheby’s London on June 28, 1988, and it is at least 25 percent less than the $15.4 million paid at Sotheby’s New York on November 11, 1999, but it is still a huge amount for a picture slightly marred by an aesthetic imperfection.

This relentless shrinking in value, unrelated to financial troubles, reflects the gradual decline of early Impressionism, in large part because its great masterpieces now all grace museums, and to some extent because its lighthearted mood no longer appeals to a public attuned to the brutal impact of Expressionism, Surrealism, or 20th-century cartoon-style works in the manner of the late Picassos.

Considering the change in taste over the past two decades, and the flaw that the subject’s unappealing face represents, the $16 million paid this year for Dans la prairie remains phenomenal. It proves that big money continues to flow in the art market. What is in short supply is great art, and that is the real problem with which auction houses will have to cope in coming years.

Souren Melikian is the international editor of Art+Auction. "Bullish Bidders" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.