To put Rafael Valls’s picture in perspective, Van Haeften showed in the same fair a very large and very grand church interior also signed by de Lorme. The asking price for the picture, dated 1645, was €630,000 ($812,000). This is the quintessential museum piece, both in size and complexity, by a master whose stature has yet to be fully acknowledged.

Surprisingly, painters closer to our time have similarly escaped the tribute of admiration that they deserve. This is often true of English school artists. Take the Irish-born Francis Danby. Agnew’s of London displayed a stunning landscape signed by the artist in 1833. "View in Norway," as an inscription on the stretcher calls it, was painted in London, where Danby settled in 1824. Memories of Scandinavian scenery continued to haunt the master and inspired him with intensely poetic compositions. The asking price, €85,000 ($110,000), was a joke compared with those of scores of better-known artists. Yet it was available as I left the fair.

Katrin Bellinger, who runs a drawings department under the Colnaghi umbrella, had better luck with a wonderful study of a young woman portrayed three-quarters back by Adam Töpffer. The French-style hairdo dates it to the early 1830s. The name is familiar to collectors in his hometown of Geneva but means little to the international public. The red panel on which touches of reddish paint are briskly applied with the tip of the brush is as good as anything done in later years by the masters of early Impressionism. At €8,000, just a little over $10,000, the asking price was about one-fortieth of what a study in oils of that size by Édouard Manet might cost.

The effort to strike a balance between highly important works of art and low-priced, quality discoveries could be verified in every area.

The London dealer Ben Janssens, who is best known for early Chinese art, displayed as usual some Buddhist stone sculpture and lay terra-cotta figures. A €100,000 ($130,000) Northern Qi torso of the third quarter of the 6th century a.d. went to a collector of Chinese art who had never yet bought a sculpture, and a standing character, possibly an entertainer, of the early Tang period (618-907) also went quickly, even though the asking price was a comparatively substantial €38,000 ($49,000).

In his search for novelty, Janssens had found some rare yet easily affordable Japanese bronze vessels from largely neglected periods ranging from the early 19th century to the 1930s. A beautiful bronze jar with a purplish red and dark green patination imitating certain stoneware glazes, which was signed by Murata Seimin in the early 1800s, had a €7,500 ($9,700) price tag. A French collector picked up that one at the private viewing.

When asked about business at the fair, the usually smoothly self-controlled Janssens could not refrain from a broad smile. A regular participant in the Maastricht show for the past 12 years and the head of its executive committee, he had done better than ever. His turnover was up by one-third, at a conservative estimate. The experienced dealer had rarely observed such eagerness from collectors, old and new.

Some of the dealers selling antiquities from the ancient Middle East, Greece and Rome recounted similar experiences. At the private viewing, Rupert Wace of London parted with a splendid Hellenistic marble statue of Aphrodite dating from the 2nd century B.C., which was worth (continued on page 98) around €500,000 ($646,000). On the same day, a German couple enthusiastically bought a Sardinian bronze figure of a man wearing a rigid felt cape of a kind still known in the highlands of Turkey and Iran. Exceptionally large in its category, the bronze, for which Wace was asking about €120,000 ($155,000), had once adorned the collection of a close friend of Oscar Wilde. It takes connoisseurs to engage with this kind of object at that price level. But Wace also sold some remarkable stone and bronze vessels worth a few thousand dollars.

The ultimate symbol of art lovers buying for pleasure was a bronze finial displayed by Michael Petropoulos, owner of Rhéa, the renowned antiquities gallery in Zurich. The asking price, €1,500 ($1,900), would have induced an investor to dismiss it as a negligible quantity — assuming that he or she would have taken any notice of the small piece, only about two inches wide. Petropoulos saw it as a Greek bronze of the 7th century b.c. The foreparts of two stylized mythical quadrupeds seen back to back actually point in the direction of the steppic immensity over which the nomadic Scythians and later the Sarmatians roamed from the 6th century b.c. to the 2nd century b.c. But until archaeological excavations yield more precise leads, the object will retain its mystery.