FINE ARTS SPECIAL
Sale-rooms
Yesterday's pictures
In 1781 Gavin Hamilton bought Leonar- do da Vinci's 'The Virgin of the Rocks' from the monks of the Conception Brotherhood in Milan for £15. Yes, £15. One day in the 1840s Michele Knoedler, founder of the famous firm of art dealers which still bears his name, wrote to a colleague in France saying that, the even- ing before in New York, a painting had changed hands for $300. Knoedler thought this an enormous sum 'and we shall not see its like again'. In 1900 Van Gogh's 'Le Dejeuner' changed hands for f36.8s. Philistines love stories like this. They appear to prove how fickle taste is and we are invited to compare these ridiculous amounts with the equally ridiculous sums, at the other end of the scale, being paid in the auction rooms today. In fact, a com- parison of art prices over the past 250 years shows that, although there has been a great deal of variation, there has also been a certain consistency in prices — a consisten- cy which leads to some interesting specula- tions for our own times.
First, however, for this consistency to emerge we must attempt something that has hardly ever been done: we must convert prices from the past into present- day values. As any department of econo- mic history in any university will tell you, this is a deceptively complex task. The calculations which follow are based upon the Bank of England's survey of the Retail Prices Index, which has been researched for every year back to 1270 AD. Most scholars believe, however, that this under- plays the values from bygone ages. In earlier centuries there was less money in circulation, fewer people competed for pictures and many of the wealthy had their Going for $20 million? Pontormo's 'Portrait of Duke Cosimo 1 de' Medici' riches tied up in land. I have therefore applied a correction to the Bank's table, using the figures calculated by Gerard Reitlinger in The Economics of Taste: the rise and fall of picture prices 1760-1960, first published in 1961, and which I have updated.
The picture which emerges after these calculations have been made shows that throughout the 18th century until the Napoleonic wars art prices were fairly static and fairly low. In 1717, when the Regent of France, Philippe II, Duke of Orleans, bought Annibale Carracci's 'Vis- ion of St Roche', he paid £840 — less than £80,000 at today's values. Four Canalettos commissioned by the Duke of Lucca in 1724 cost him £45 (f4,000 now).
The Napoleonic Wars did not im- mediately improve matters. For one thing many collections came on to the market because the aristocrats of the old regimes in Europe were forced to flee and to take with them the only valuables they could move — their art. And with Napoleon's troops ransacking so much, people in Europe preferred to sell works cheaply than have them confiscated.
All this had two effects. Since there were so many pictures around, prices were not high. At the famous Orleans sale in 1798, when the Regent's fabulous collection was sold, the most valuable painting, Annibale Carracci's 'Descent from the Cross', was valued at £4,200 (£350,000 now). Howev- er, the influx of so many collections from the Continent did produce in Britain in the early 19th century a taste for Old Masters. Thus appetites developed, there was an increased supply and, as the industrialisa- tion of the 19th century took hold, prices started to take off.
When Michele Knoedler wrote his letter back to France, no painting had sold anywhere for more than £20,000 (approx- imately a million pounds now). That bar- rier was broken for the first time in 1852 when the Louvre astounded everyone by acquiring Murillo's 'The Immaculate Con- ception' for £24,000 — say, £1.4 million in 1989 terms. That seems to have provoked a significant jump in prices and, over the next 100 years, the graph for the most expensive works has steadily risen, as this table shows:
Equivalent Then Now (f) (£ million) 1898 Fragonard's 'Roman d'Amour de la Jeunesse' 64,000 2.7 1906 Velasquez's 'Equest- rian Portrait' 82,700 3.47 1915 Fragonard's 'Roman d'Amour de la Jeunesse' 205,000 8.0 Gainsborough's 'Blue Boy' 146,000 3.7 1921 Reynolds's 'Mrs Sid- dons as Tragic Muse' 73,500 2.3 1929 Raphael's 'Alba Madonna' 240,000 6.2 Botticelli's 'Adoration' 173,000 4.48 1940 Van Eyck's 'Three Maries' 300,000 7.5 This list does place the recent boom into context, with two points particularly stand- ing out. First, ten-million-dollar works of art are not as new as they seem. In 1898, remember, when the Fragonard changed hands, there were five dollars to the pound. So although the current boom has been going on for five or so years now, it is really only in the last 18 months that prices have, in real terms, broken new ground. In historical terms, only paintings selling for $15 million or more may be said to have achieved a new level. But this is especially interesting when compared with the second factor — that in the past the really high prices have all been fetched by classic Old Masters. In marked contrast, the pictures fetching the very highest prices now are the Impressionists, modern and contemporary works.
Contemporary painting has always done well, historically, but never so much as now and it has never opened up the gap with Old Masters that exists in 1989. That situation may be redeemed to some extent on the 31st of this month, when Pontor- mo's portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici is auctioned at Christie's in New York. Con- sidered by many to be the finest privately owned Old Master in America, it is ex- pected to fetch $20 million. But even if it reaches that figure the sale is unlikely to reach the pitch of excitement and wide interest seen at recent contemporary sales. Looked at historically, Old Masters have rarely — perhaps never — been so out of fashion in commercial terms.
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