Old Masters are generally insulated from ebullient auction periods. Whereas prices for modern and contemporary works have doubled, tripled, and increased tenfold in a few short years, the Old Masters have ticked upward at a leisurely pace. The supply of available Old Master works decreases year by year, and their prices are driven more by rarity than by faddishness.

The Old Masters are well known, staid men of habit – one likes his light autumnal, another prefers his women excessively humble – who occasionally play little tricks of attribution, as if they had turned puckish with age and wanted to bedevil curators and collectors for a few decades before coming clean. A Rembrandt and Titian are being sold this winter after exactly such confounding circumstances.

When substantive paintings and drawings by acknowledged greats become available, buyers bid tenaciously. At the London auctions in July, two different Canaletto views of Venice set an artist’s record on successive nights, surging from $20.1 million at Christie’s to $32.7 million at Sotheby’s the next evening. But lesser known Old Masters are proving accessible, in price and subject matter, for a younger generation of collectors.

“A lot of people are feeling that with contemporary being as strong as it is, the Old Master field presents real value,” Christie’s international head of Old Master paintings, Nicholas Hall, said. More private collectors are entering the market, educated by hired restorers, by Web sites that do comparative auction price checks, and by time already logged looking at art.

“More younger people are buying Old Master paintings, which I find very encouraging,” Maastricht-based dealer Robert Noortman said. “There are more privates than I can ever remember,” Sotheby’s co-chairman of Old Master paintings, George Wachter, said. “There’s something sort of fashionable about it now.” And the “privates” are widening the pursuit of the new to include the pursuit of the good, whenever it was made.

The major New York Old Master sales are in January, with smaller sales in late May. But Christie’s sale of Old Master paintings tomorrow will test the depth and breadth of curiosity for lesser-known Italian, Dutch, and British artists and their circles and schools. The sale’s estimate of $2 million is more akin to those for the late spring New York Old Master sales, which are like tasting courses before the key London auctions in July. It is the first stand-alone fall Old Master sale at Christie’s New York since 2001.

“In a sale like this I think it is an opportunity for American private collectors because the Europeans won’t be in such full force,” Mr. Hall said.

The Italians, in particular, are likely to be staying home, thanks to the coincidence of the biennial art fair in Florence. Mr. Hall said that the many consignments from estates and private sellers and the relative dearth of dealer consignments in this sale represent a strengthening market. “When it’s weaker, dealers will be trying to improve cash flow. When it’s stronger, they’ll be keeping it for themselves.”

For collectors accustomed to auction prices for contemporary art, such as $210,000 for a psychedelic painting by German artist Daniel Richter or $400,000 for a kitschy John Currin oil, a few comparisons are instructive. An estimated $12,000 to $18,000 would win Dutch still-life painter Matthias Withoos’s “A Forest Floor With Butterflies and Lizards” (ca. 1660s). The picture’s stylized abundance calls to mind latter-day naturalist artists such as Mark Dion or Walton Ford. A 17th-century French picture from the circle of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, of snarling dogs besetting a wolf, is estimated at $10,000 to $15,000. Painted in buttery rococo brushstrokes, the animals look like a Lucian Freud dog, multiplied into a pack and then let loose in the wild.

The sale also features several 18th century British academic portraits, including two by George Romney, one by Thomas Gainsborough, and two by Gilbert Stuart, all being sold by museums and schools. The genre has been gaining favor lately, Mr. Hall said, adding that “it’s really absurd to be able to a buy a fully published Gainsborough or a Stuart for $30,000.”

Overtly religious paintings are a perennial tough sell. But Orazio Samachini’s 16th-century “The Risen Christ,” with its eye-catching yellow loincloth and low estimate of $3,000 to $5,000, may lure someone to toss in a few thousand to own a work once possessed by Charles I. “Religious paintings from all periods are underpriced,” the co-director of London’s Agnew’s Gallery, Christopher Kingzett, said.

Relative bargains still exist among other less well-mined artists and genres. Mr. Noortman mentioned Dutch landscape painters Salomon van Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen as “very cheap,” for just a few hundred thousand dollars. According to Columbia professor James Beck, an Italian paintings expert, the late 18th-century and early 19th-century Italian pre-Impressionists, known as the macchiaoli, are due for a re-evaluation in the market. Yet Sotheby’s Mr. Wachter emphasized the theme of the era: “Quality always wins, as long as the condition is good.”

It can be a long wait for a peak-condition Titian or Rembrandt, but one of each will be on offer this winter. In December Christie’s London will sell for an estimated $8.8 million Titian’s “Portrait of a Lady and Her Daughter,” uncovered after a 20-year restoration effort. In January, Sotheby’s New York is offering a Rembrandt, “Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet,” for an estimated $3 million to $4 million. It was of dubious attribution until a major restoration undertaken by the Rembrandt Research Project removed a suspicious fur collar on an older lady to reveal a working woman in a starched collar. “It’s a study where Rembrandt is working on a concept of how light falls,” Mr. Wachter said. “But it’s a finished painting.”

Both the Titian and Rembrandt will be on view in New York at the end of October, during the public exhibition of Impressionist pictures at each house.

HIGHLIGHTS

Francois de Nome, called Monsu Desiderio, “An Architectural Fantasy With Artists Sketching” (16th century). Estimate: $30,000 to $50,000. This darkly painted invented city looks like every building was designed by Antonio Gaudi or a virtuoso sand-castle constructor. “It has a modern, surreal quality and might well appeal to somebody who is not a traditional Old Masters collector,” said Nicholas Hall of Christie’s.

Klaes Molenaer, “A Winter Landscape With Skaters by a Village” (17th century). Estimate: $50,000 to $70,000. Molenaer’s signed painting shows workers towing goods and blowing off steam on the frozen canal. One young man pushes himself on a homemade sleigh, while a red-jacketed man laces up his skates. Molenaer’s winter landscape is in the tradition of such better-known genre practitioners as Isack van Ostade and Salomon van Ruysdael.

Circle of Claude-Joseph Vernet, “A Mediterranean Port With Fisherman” (18th century). Estimate: $60,000 to $80,000. This arrived at Christie’s from a Texas estate with the attribution of Vernet, but Mr. Hall believes it is by Thomas Patch, an English painter who worked in Vernet’s studio. In June 2001, Christie’s sold a Patch harbor scene for $300,000.

Circle of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, “Dogs Attacking a Wolf in a Landscape” (17th century). Estimate: $10,000 to $15,000. “What’s amusing about this picture,” Mr. Hall said, “is that it’s a reprise of a type of painting invented by Rubens and his circle. But whereas in the prototype half the dogs would have been hanging by their legs in a tree – very violent and R-rated – because this is 18th-century French, there’s not a drop of blood to be seen. The reality of the hunt is downplayed, an indication that we’ve moved from the baroque.”