Auctions of 19th-century European art take place at Sotheby’s today and Thursday, and at Christie’s on Wednesday. In contrast to other surging art specialties, the sales this week include work that should sell for relatively modest prices.

“Compared to every other painting sale, this area is enormously undervalued,” the head of 19th-century European painting at Sotheby’s, Polly Sartori, said recently. For example, she describes Corot’s feathery landscapes and Courbet’s seascapes — which sell for $100,000 and up — as precursors of Impressionism without the $1 million plus price tags.

The specialty is crammed with Orientalist, Barbizon, Victorian, Realist, religious, genre, and academic pictures. Some connoisseurs brand these paintings as marginal, while others sniff that they are mere kitsch. Still, the field is gaining attention in both the museum world and academia. The Dahesh Museum of Art, the only American museum devoted to 19th- and early 20th-century European, academically trained artists, opened in 1995. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which focuses exclusively on 19th-century arts, purchased a Jean-Léon Gérôme painting of a Versailles reception at Sotheby’s two years ago. Meanwhile, in scholarly circles, the catalogues raisonnés of academician William Bouguereau and others are in the midst of preparation.

This week, Sotheby’s will sell 322 lots tagged to fetch between $31 million and $44 million. Christie’s is offering 274 lots valued between $14 million and $20.4 million. Those are very low numbers compared to the Impressionist and Modern auctions in November, when considerably more than $300,000,000 may change hands in a single evening sale at Christie’s.

In the Gilded Age, however, the contemporary European art scene was booming. Americans swarmed to Paris with buckets of money on art buying sprees. Collectors included John Jacob Astor, William Henry Vanderbilt, and August Belmont. Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, considered the richest woman in the nation, eventually left her collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “In 1878, Vanderbilt paid 100,000 francs for a Bouguereau — or the equivalent of $23,000,” Ms. Sartori said. At the time, the sum could have purchased a vast Oyster Bay estate.

That period of inflated prices was brief, however. By the 1900s, the market had gone bust. “In the 1940s and the 1950s, you could pick up a Bouguereau for $2,000 at Parke Bernet [Sotheby’s predecessor],” Ms. Sartori said. Prices rose until the market crashed in the fall of 2000. “People stopped calling,” Ms. Sartori said. Sales were middling for several years.

The first signs of revival sprouted in fall 2003 when Bouguereau’s “Morning Breakfast” (est. $300,000– $400,000) sold for close to $1 million. Along with James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau’s work is now among the highest-valued in the market.

“What’s new today is increased interest in Orientalist pictures,” Christie’s head of 19th-century European paintings, Deborah Coy, said.

Now citizens of Dubai, Qatar, Egypt, and Morocco are entering the market. Ms. Coy predicts that Hungarian artist Arthur von Ferraris’s “Driving a Bargain” will sell for between $300,000 and $500,000 tomorrow. At Christie’s London in 1961, the 1889 oil painting sold for roughly $476.

Other offerings this week include work by Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Charles-Francois Daubigny, and Ribot. The sleeper this week may be Christie’s sale of Karl Pierre Daubigny’s 1884 seascape “La Plage.” It is expected to bring between $10,000 and $15,000. The painting is not in triple mint condition. “It’s dirty,” Ms. Coy said, “but it will clean up like a dream.”

What are the advantages of collecting 19th-century European paintings? “It’s where we tell people to get started,” an associate director at Spanierman Gallery, Susan Nelly, said. She said novice collectors feel safe in the market, because the pictures are all signed, and they’re representational. “Then they move on.”

But some experienced collectors still crave these pictures. Actor Eugene Iglesias bought his first in 1951. His Hollywood house now contains more than 2,000 paintings, making him the largest such collector on the West Coast. “When I started, no one had heard of these artists and prices were $20,000 and less,” he said recently. “Now good ones go for $250,000 and more.”