The 19th century

Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, England, designed by James Wyatt, 1796–1806. Engraving by T. Higham, 1823, from Delineations of Fonthill by John Rutter.

J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

Until the second quarter of the 19th century, there was very little market for what are now considered to be antiques; accordingly, prices were remarkably low. In England the increasing appreciation of such items was connected with the Gothic Revival and with Romantic antiquarianism. The English man of letters Horace Walpole was one of the first collectors to furnish his house with antiques as well as antiquities. His example was followed by the eccentric author William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey and was paralleled on the Continent by collectors such as Alexandre du Sommerard, founder of the Cluny Museum.

This spirit of antiquarianism affected silverwork in London during the Regency period: Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, England’s leading silver manufacturer, built up a huge stock of old silver to use as a design source for their products. The interest in antiques also led to the emergence of dealers whose primary trade was the supply of secondhand goods. One of the most successful in England was Edward Holmes Baldock, who in the 1830s supplied his aristocratic clients with a mixture of masterpieces and fakes.

The last quarter of the 19th century saw a shift from aristocratic to plutocratic collecting, a trend exemplified by families such as the Rothschilds. By about 1900, American collectors had started to play a major role in the antiques and art markets. They were supplied by the likes of Jacques Seligmann, the great Parisian dealer whose clients included industrialist Henry Clay Frick, financier John Pierpont Morgan, and merchant S.H. Kress.

Orientalism

The market for Asian arts enjoyed a significant revival in Paris in the middle of the 19th century. The 1862 opening of Mme Desoye’s shop, La Porte Chinoise, in the rue de Rivoli, encouraged a taste for blue and white porcelain and Japanese prints. Orientalism was eagerly embraced and promoted by the Impressionists, the American painter James McNeill Whistler, and the French Art Nouveau etcher Felix Bracquemond. Whistler’s Japanese-inspired design for the dining room of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland’s London house is an especially fine example of the style. Leyland commissioned the work, now known as the Peacock Room, after acquiring Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863–64), its focal point.

One of the most famous Parisian dealers in Asian art was Siegfried Bing, whose shop was later known as La Maison Art Nouveau. Bing played a vital role in the promotion of the new style, as did his English counterpart, Arthur Liberty, who founded the luxury goods shop Liberty of London. In the United States the taste for Asian art was promoted by scholar-collectors such as Ernest Fenollosa, Edward Morse, and Charles Lang Freer and the dealer Dikran Kelekian.

England

By the time Victoria became queen in 1837, England’s contemporary art scene was booming, and the country’s most successful artists were enjoying unprecedented wealth and social status. This change resulted from several factors. One was the rise of a new breed of collector, typically self-made, who preferred to put his money into new art rather than Old Masters. Others included the growing prestige of the Royal Academy and the increasing importance of public exhibitions.

The Horse Fair, oil on canvas by Rosa Bonheur, 1853–55; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887, (87.25), www.metmuseum.org

Perhaps the most significant factor, however, was the rise of the dealer—to whom, according to The Art Journal (1871), “have been owing the immense increase in the prices of modern pictures.” Key to the dealer’s success were commercial exhibitions that attracted thousands of fee-paying visitors and promoted the highly lucrative market of reproductions. Thanks to the invention of steel-plate engraving in the 1820s, it had become possible to inexpensively produce thousands of images of the more popular paintings.

Victorian contemporary art soon began to eclipse the Old Masters, a situation marked by such events as William Holman Hunt’s sale of his The Shadow of the Cross in the 1870s for more than the London National Gallery had paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. The most prominent dealer in this market was Ernest Gambart, whose showmanship and business acumen brought a fortune to him and the artists with whom he dealt, including Hunt, William Powell Frith, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Rosa Bonheur.

France

1814, oil on canvas by Ernest Meissonier, 1864; in the Louvre, Paris.

Courtesy of the Musee du Louvre, Paris; photograph, Marc Garanger

Paris in the 19th century became the principal European center for artistic innovation, though often in the face of official opposition. One early promoter of the avant-garde was the dealer John Arrowsmith, who bought John Constable’s The Hay-wain. Other more mainstream figures in the Parisian contemporary art world were publisher Théodore Vibert, print dealer and publisher Alfred Cadart, and Adolphe Goupil, who was among the first French dealers to exploit the market in the United States. Until the end of the 19th century the contemporary art business was principally focused on mainstream Salon painters such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paul Delaroche, and Ernest Meissonier, whose highly finished and technically brilliant subject pictures attracted huge sums that rivaled those of their British contemporaries.

Paul Durand-Ruelwas a central figure in the promotion of Impressionism, becoming one of the first dealers to break away from a system of patronage still dominated in France by the academic establishment. By exhibiting and investing heavily in the work of the Impressionists and supporting them during lean times, Durand-Ruel eventually created a market for their work. Although the strategy of bankrolling the currently unfashionable was a risky one that did not start to pay dividends until the late 1880s, his approach created a new, more ideological image of the dealer as tastemaker and entrepreneurial patron. This inspired other dealers, such as Ambroise Vollard.

Oil painting self-portrait by Paul Cezanne showing a balding man with a beard, wearing a dark coat, set against a patterned background.

Self-portrait, oil on canvas by Paul Cézanne, 1880/1881; located in the National Gallery, London.

One of the features of the later 19th-century contemporary art market was its growing internationalism. The spread of Impressionism into Germany was greatly facilitated by the alliance forged between Durand-Ruel and Paul Cassirer. A German dealer based in Berlin, which had become perhaps the most prominent center of cutting-edge art by the 1890s, Cassirer played a vital role in promoting Paul Cézanne and rehabilitating Vincent van Gogh. The most radical of the Berlin dealers was Herwarth Walden, whose gallery and publishing company provided an avant-garde forum for the Blaue Reiter, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Italian Futurists.