This is a long article with few illustrations - but the subject is so important, and comes up so often with clients, journalists, and academics that it should not be misunderstood. Important and complex - if you simplify you falsify.
There once was a man who owned a second hand bookshop who told the story of a customer who saw a book on his shelf marked at £25 (this was in the old days and you have to try and remember those days too). The customer recounted that he had a similar volume at home in just the same condition. "If HE can sell it for £25 mine must be worth as much", he reasoned. Many people who ask prices at fairs or in bookshops or art galleries are only valuing their posessions. This used to be regarded as bad manners but the reasoning is faulty anyway. The fact that the dealer had his book in stock at £25 proved only that he could NOT sell it for that price - otherwise it wouldn't still be there.
In just such a way an old friend of mine who is an antique dealer has been looking at his price list and a pretty sight it makes, he feels: All that money, all those values. BUT THIS IS A LIST OF HIS UNSOLD TREASURES "My successes are in the bank, my failures are on the wall" my wise old daddy used to say.
"A dealer's strength is in his stock" is common knowledge, even to ignorant fools like bankers; wrong (like all common knowledge) because a dealer's strength is in the bank balance like everyone else's. Bottom right is all.
Nearly 30 years ago I was one of the first dealers in London to approach a Merchant bank - through the good offices of a young man I had met when he was at Oxford, Jacob (now Lord) Rothschild, who was a close friend of the elder brother of my friend Michael. Jacob still worked for the eponymous bank in those days, and we formed a joint-venture company with the N M Rothschild & Co (which would be illegal now - you may not lend and hold shares) and we bought pictures. Everything went swimmingly, we bought and sold well: but one of the bank's stipulations had been that they chose the auditors, in those days called Peat Marwick & Mitchell (now KPMG).
At the end of the first year two young men arrived, bright, intelligent, (red-hot as we said) who went through the books and the documentation like a dose of salts, understood everything, devaluations for tax, revaluations, double invoices for Italians (in those days our best clients before EC and VAT). Fine. Sir Francis Sandilands, a nice boring man who later joined my board at Colnaghi, had just written the famous report that bears his name on inflation accounting, historic cost etc. and it was all the rage. I didn't understand a word of it of course (I can't read a balance sheet) so when these two young men approached me at the end saying everything was fine but could they go through the stock with me one more time I thought they were joking.
"To establish the real values" they said. "How should I know" "No, no - we understand about cost and devaluation etc but this is for the share-holders - absolutely privileged information" they insisted. I still thought they were trying to wind me up and I said, in the old phrase "perhaps £30 each, canvas, bit of paint, gold on the frames, less the delapidations". They were very patient with me, like interrogators before the Inquisition and I was patient with them. "This is for the share holders report, not the revenue" they insisted. I was a share holder. Slowly it dawned on me that they really didn't understand. I explained that a painting might have a real cost price and a real sale price. Restoration and framing and travel, salaries and overheads can all be calculated as in any other business. But the real value which takes in fashion and history, authenticity and aesthetics, while it certainly exists, cannot be measured in monetary terms.
This is why the trade has a bad reputation and the values are thought by the ignorant to be arbitrary. "Luft Geschäfte"one might say. But the concept of an existence without a monetary value was beyond them. In the end I refused to do another valuation and, bright as they were, they never did understand.
But I believe to this day that I was right - I have thought about it many times since then and the more often I consider, the more often and the more deeply I think about the subject, the more important it becomes to distinguish between price and value. Only trivially are they related - but clever auditors should have understood because economic theory has a similar sort of problem in a different format: Money itself. When you consider the monetary value and the price of a gold coin (say) compared to metal, political stability, trade and notional values and paper money the same sorts of problems arise, even leaving out the influence of collectors.
I bought a painting of Tobias and the Angel for about £6K at Christies. A young man sitting right beside me (a client and a friend) came back to the gallery after the sale, watched me do a cleaning test, told me I had "stolen" it, and offered me twice my money then and there. But I said I wanted to research it first and find out more. It had been catalogued as attr. to (they didn't believe it either) Jan Moninckx, an obscure artist and it was 'signed and dated 1661' which had all the hall marks of too much research in Wurzbach. I had it cleaned and restored with specific instructions to 'scrub' the signature. Usually we ask restorers to treat signatures with great tact but I insisted that it would either disappear or, whatever might be left, must be genuine.
So it proved. Though a little unclear, try as I could, I could only read it as J B Weenincks with the date now very clear as 1640. The spelling did not bother me, nor at that date for a young man to have followed another composition.The style, very Rembrandtesque bothered me quite a lot however as I had never seen a Weenix like that. Furthermore a moment's reasearch reminded me that he had never been a Remrandt pupil, but was a pupil of Abraham Bloemaert and Moyaert. It was my turn to leaf through Wurzbach and Thieme Becker.
No go for another Weenincks, a brother perhaps or uncle, except that finally I noticed a note that Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam have an early Tobias by Weenix. I wrote a careful fax to them stating I had this painting, that it appeared very Rembrandtesque but that I could read the signature as Weenix. Did they still have their picture (my book was dated 1910)(1), did they believe in the signature, still believe it to be by Weenix and if all this was so could I have photograph.
By return the sad story came out - in the thirties the then director had reattributed the painting to Carel Fabritius and had scrubbed off what he called the obviously spurious Weenix signature. Today it is a Weenix again but now unsigned. There is another of this period in Warsaw and my picture proved the point. I thanked him and pointed out that I had heard wild and unfounded accusations of wicked dealers removing signatures to 'upgrade' a work, but never a museum director. (2)
Just goes to show. The composition turned out to be taken from Pieter Lastman (3) and the painting was later published (4). Now a Weenix might normally be worth in the region of £200/250K so I thought that an early one, untypical but very beautiful must be worth 10% of that and I asked (I think) £20K. It is sad that names count for so much, but count they do - and everyone who saw it thought it was perfectly reasonable. An art history lesson, the Rembrandt School, a congenial subject, the romance of discovery, all these count towards the value.
Eventually the wise young man who sat beside me in the original sale made me another offer, higher than his first and lower than I was asking. Such sympathy had he with the bitter lot of an art dealer that he decently added that he would leave the offer open till Christmas to give me the chance I begged of him, to sell it for a little more. There was recession, I didn't sell it and in the New Year he had it, and he has it still. Prof.Werner Sumowski put it his next volume too (2).
Was I unreasonably expensive? The mark-up was over 300% but I am not ashamed of the story and I told it in full to each person who looked at it. No one was deceived and the purchaser lived through it all personally. Really early Rembrandt can be bad as anything - but is still worth more than the mere quality would have you estimate vide the ex- Eliot (Lord St Germans) painting recently sold, I think, to the Getty for c.£3M (was it?). Unattributed it would have been £30K max. I think my figure for the Weenix was about right and in the end I took a bit less anyway. So what? For my famous Flinck which looks like a Rembrandt landscape and is now in the Louvre (and also in Sumowski) (5) I asked about 10% of what it might have been worth as a Rembrandt, cheap in a way but still more than any Flinck had ever cost - I nearly wrote 'been worth' .
What it really tells you is that you is that the pupils are undervalued compared to the top masters - Rembrandt is not ten or twenty times better than the best Fabritius or Dou, Flinck or Gelder. But that is the market, fashion and Romanticism, the entirely odd modern view of the artist as genius, the single hand of the master. But no, I must stop: the subject of schools and studios merits a whole other article. See in part Topics 2 and Topic 3 in this little series
But I am afraid that people do not tell the truth even to themselves. What galls most of them is not the actual price of course but the profit and, in recognition of this, most deals can be spoiled by rival colleagues simply telling a client where the picture came from. Curiosity then does the rest - he looks it up and is galled by the margin. But art dealers are seldom as rich as their clients, who have presumably made more money and more profit somewhere along the line. Why are chemical profits and property profits and shipping profits, though accumulated in different increments, any different in kind or morality to art dealers profits?
On the contrary - no one needs a painting and a man who charges ½ p more for bread or medicine might be said, if the true poor still exist, to be more immoral that an art dealer adding a few thousand on a painting that no one has to have. Only cosmetics and high fashion and interior design, maybe fireworks and flowers, come into the same sort of category. By charging £18 (say) for 10ml of an oil you could manufacture for 5p per gallon, a perfumery 'creates' a feeling of preciousness; often the bottle costs more than the contents.
I don't feel very strongly about money so I don't feel that morality is deeply involved. If it is not stolen you may spend your earnings as you will but the problem gets worse. I have more often failed to sell a painting because it was too cheap than too expensive. 'Can't be that good' they say, 'why does Agnew have one at ten times the price?' (must be more genuine, more better - but Agnews Gallery is closing) - even curators don't always want bargains - their trustees collected funds, raised a million dollars and did not send him to London to come back with a 55,000 $ painting - now if the same painting were to cost a million . . . . .
So much for price - VALUE cannot be measured in monetary terms. Value speaks to the soul.
References
1. in Wurzbach Niederländisches Künstler-lexikon 1910
2. Guido Jansen 1988 Museum Catalogue Rotterdam A Glowing Palette, Paintings of Rembrandt and his School. No 24
3.. A Tümpel & Peter Schatborn 1991, Pieter Lastman Leermeester van Rembrandt Amsterdam Rembrandthuis Museum, No.3 pp.90/91
4. Werner Sumowski Volume VI (Addenda) of Gemälde der Rembrandschüler as an example of Rembrandt-followers who were not pupils, "Rembrandt-Nachfolge ohne Schülerschaft". p.3583 I am most grateful to Dr Sumowski for pointing out the connection with the Lastman painting (#3 op. cit.), which itself was offered for sale at Christies Amsterdam November 13th 1995.
5. Sumowski op.cit. Vol II, p.1150, Color Ill. 718
If you get bored from here or any other page you can always press the Back button or return to Home Page? or the Alphabetical List to look at art.