What Price Glory?

Between this morning and November 29, Christie’s will mount 16 auctions of 19th-century European art in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Madrid. In 2003, Sotheby’s offered just six such sales, which brought in $41 million; last year, it mounted 10 auctions, which brought in almost $111 million, and this year it will offer 15 sales.Once disparaged as kitsch, 19thcentury European art is finally having its day, as prices climb, specialty sales increase, and buyers cross over from other categories of art long recognized as having high value. At this morning’s sale, Christie’s will offer 241 lots, expected to fetch between $11.2 million and $16.1 million. On Wednesday, Sotheby’s will offer 271 lots with a total estimate between $19 million and $27 million. Both auction houses are betting their sales will maintain the category’s steady growth — and that some paintings will go for seven figures.Just a decade ago, only a few 19th-century European paintings sold for as much as $100,000. And at Sotheby’s 2002 sales, only 57 lots reached six figures, while last year there were 117 such sales. Only two paintings sold for more than $1 million in 2002, compared with six last year. The average price of a work climbed to $87,225 from $37,936 during that period. Christie’s expects a saccharine Bouguereau painting to hit $2 million at this morning’s sale.What’s driving the market is a growing number of international bidders, including those in the oilrich Middle East. “Only onethird of the pictures are bought by Americans,” the head of 19th-century European painting for Christie’s, Deborah Coy, said. “Another third goes to Middle Eastern buyers, and the remaining to Europeans.”Ms. Coy also pointed out that the 19th-century market becomes more attractive as prices for modern and contemporary art reach record levels. “Buyers are now coming from American painting and other areas,” the senior vice president and head of 19th-century European painting for Sotheby’s, Polly Sartori, said.“The 19th-century is where people get their feet wet,” Ms. Coy said. “The art is representational and people feel safe. For $20,000 to $50,000, you can get a nice picture with good names.”Ms. Sartori mentioned one local collector who now owns Old Masters paintings by Titian, Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Poussin, and Rubens, but who got his start with 19th-century work, as well as with American Modernism. “I acquired my first 19th-century picture in 1989, an 1850 Corot landscape with feathery trees, and I was hooked,” the collector, who requested not to be named, said from his suburban home. He also owns oil paintings by Corot, Courbet, Delacroix and Gericault. “The big stars of Impressionism learned from those painters, and for a fraction of the price of a great Impressionist, you can get a great painting by an artist like Courbet,” he said.It’s not just works by Courbet and Corot on the market anymore, however. Orientalist paintings — European and American artists’ depictions of the “exotic” East — are included in both sales. “Three years ago, we had at most 10 Orientalist pictures in our April auction; now we have 90 of them,” Ms. Coy said. Hoping to stoke that market, Christie’s estimates the Brussels-born artist Pierre Tetar van Elven’s “A View of Jerusalem” will sell for between $60,000 and $80,000. Ms. Coy said the identification of the city in the title enhances its price.The growing market also is bringing out work by arcane artists, some of whom have never crossed the salesroom floor. Now Swedish, Swiss, Austrian, Hungarian, and Polish artists can be found in the sales catalogs. As a consequence, Ms. Coy said, there are new bidders from Warsaw and elsewhere, too.If Web traffic is any guide, Bouguereau’s “Chansons de Printemp” (1889) is the most hotly watched painting at today’s sale. According to Ms. Coy, the auction house’s site has received 2,000 hits for the Bougeureau, and 100,000 hits for today’s sale over all. The painting depicts the “song of spring” as a doe-eyed, purple-robed maiden with two putti hovering over her shoulders and delicate flowers at her feet.First exhibited at the Paris World Exposition in 1889, the painting was engraved and widely disseminated in Paris, London, and America. The maiden was an icon of her day, lionized by Louis Comfort Tiffany as the subject of one of his most famous glass windows. According to a scholar working on the history of the Knoedler gallery, DeCourcy McIntosh, the painting probably sold for about $13,500 in 1890. Today it is expected to sell for between $1 million and $1.5 million. With Bouguereau a virtual painting factory — he made more than 700 works — more are bound to come to market.Certain to rival the interest in the Bouguereau is a private collection of works by Rosa Bonheur, to be sold next week at Sotheby’s. Among them is a large-scale watercolor version of Bonheur’s 1853 painting “The Horse Fair,” which is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bonheur completed the watercolor version in 1867, and it was later owned by the reclusive dog-lover Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge.A woman who donned male clothing to gain entrance to Paris slaughterhouses to better study animal anatomy, Bonheur blazed a path of achievements for her sex. She was the first woman to be named an Officier de la Lègion d’Honneur. Sotheby’s will offer 13 Bonheur lots in all. A few bear the kind of modest estimates — three pencil sketches are pegged at between $2,000 and $3,000 together — that are increasingly rare in this booming category.

What Price Glory?

What Price Glory?

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