Art dealer

“ VI.—TRICKS AND TRICKS I have heard it debated with great seriousness whether a fine art dealer in a commercial town, where the finer arts are neglected, is not entitled to resort to a method of disposing of his goods which some people might be disposed to term trickery. ”

“ It is always possible that someone else was the master's match as artist and craftsman, and of that someone's work there may be an overwhelming supply. The critic may sell the collector a common pup instead of the one uncatalogued specimen of Pseudo-kuniskos; and therefore the wary collector sends for someone who can furnish him with the sort of evidence of the authenticity of his picture that would satisfy a special juryman and confound a purchasing dealer. ”

“ And this indifference to the value at the hammer of their acquisitions, marks the distinction between the genuine collector or connoisseur and the ruck of the people who buy pictures; the bulk of whom are after all but amateur dealers. When the successful stock-jobber leaves off dealing in shares and takes to art, he merely deals in another more or less intangible security of very fluctuating value. With childlike confidence he follows the advice of some more or less honest dealer. He buys from the easel with a hope of a "rapid rise." ”

“ My dear Mary, that pretty, pretty stuff of yours is all very well to bring you in flattery from bazaar managers, but the milk-stool school of art is no good when you get into the market. Painters, real painters, mind, not daubers like us, find colour work dreadfully hard to sell. There isn't a dealer who would give you five shillings for what you have there. ”

“ They have an art-class in which the first thing insisted on is that the pupils should know the price of all the leading modern pictures that have been sold during the last twenty years at Christie’s, and the fluctuations in their values. Give an examination paper on this subject. The artist being a picture-dealer, the first thing he must do is to know how to sell his pictures, and therefore how to adapt them to the market. What is the use of being able to paint a picture unless one can sell it when one has painted it? ”

“ The antiquary is generally a dealer who has no shop, but keeps objects of art in his tastefully furnished house, allowing his private show to be visited only by whom he chooses. He is as it were the aristocrat of the trade, the one who is presumed to ask and get the highest prices. This select dealer’s success is according to his ability, integrity or the reputation for trustworthiness he enjoys among collectors. ”

“ It is true that the dealer cannot be got rid of—he is a vice inherent in our civilisation; but if the Press withdrew its subvention, his monopoly would be curtailed, and art would be recruited by new talent, at present submerged. Art would gradually withdraw from the bluster and boom of an arrogant commercialism, and would attain her olden dignity—that of a quiet handicraft. ”

“ To end with a brief classification, it may be noted that there are dealers whose shops have private rooms in the rear where trade can be carried on in the same way as with a dealer who has no shop. From this double-faced form we pass to the real shopkeeper, the vaster class ranging from the vendor who can afford to fill his window with the choicest samples down to the modest curio shop, the benevolent harbour of the humbler modes of expressing art. ”

“ If an object cannot be secured in a direct manner, the dealer will indulge in side-play, called in the Italian argot of the trade, di mattonella. When dealers are not admitted and it is important that the object should be inspected before the conclusion of a business transaction, the antiquary or shopkeeper, namely the buyer, is generally careful to hide his professional quality. He is often introduced as a foreign casual visitor interested in art. ”

“ They are easier to get than books, and cheaper, too. The art dealers have excellent lists of penny, nickel, and dime prints, and if we wish something more expensive, we may get fine photographs from original paintings both at home and abroad. ”

“ In this country they cry down and undervalue all pictures that are not expressly committed to them, and the ignorance of the rich shopkeepers who purchase works of Art, is so excessive that they do not feel safe in making any acquisition without the advice and permission of some charlatan of a dealer, to whom these wiseacres come saying (verbatim, so Mr. Ordway informed me) , "I want some pictures ”

“ The modern buyer, on the other hand, is for the most part the mere puppet of the dealer. He buys at the top price of the market because he believes the market will maintain its price, and with a prudence that the dealer is careful to foster he makes his choice from among those{132} older pictures whereof the market value has been appraised by time. ”

“ But in our time the artist is visited by a showily-dressed man, who comes into the studio whistling, his hat on the back of his head. This is the West-End dealer: he throws himself into an arm-chair, and if there is nothing on the easels that appeals to the uneducated eye, the dealer lectures the artist on his folly in not considering the exigencies of public taste. On public taste—that is to say, on the uneducated eye—the dealer is a very fine authority. ”

“ Three years ago a certain gallery accepted from a certain artist a picture which he and his wife knew to be monstrous fine. But no one spoke of the picture, no one wrote of it, and no one made an offer for it. Crushed was the artist, sorry for the denseness of connoisseurs was his wife, till the work was bought by a dealer for an anonymous client, and then elated were they both, and relieved also to discover that I was not the buyer. ”

“ But each successive sale here shows that most buyers now know what is worth getting and what is not, though naturally some painters are the rage who will be forgotten fifty years hence. Still, the cynics are wrong in decrying the eagerness to buy painters who are in fashion. What harm in a millionaire's ordering a picture d'ameublement, to suit a particular room or panel, or in his ordering from the bookseller a hundred volumes of current novels? If the picture be good, whether bought by the foot for furnishing or whether painted under the microscope, its sale may aid the profession of art. ”

“ You keep the Artist's receipt, a proof of the genuineness of the picture. The copies, name and all, are so well done that even the painter himself would be puzzled to know his own. You then proceed to place your pictures at good distances from each other, representing each as genuine. It is a simple, beautiful, and lucrative method. Not so profitable, perhaps, as cleaning oil-paintings, which takes half an hour apiece and is charged from ten shillings to ten pounds, according to the dealer's belief in your power to pay. ”

“ He began to understand that, first of all, they were self-respecting artisans, practising their trade of making pictures and painting each picture as well as they knew how; that, like other artisans, their pride was in knowing their trade, in a mastery of their tools, and in executing commissions as honestly as they knew how and leaving the "art" to take care of itself. ”

“ To sell a picture is becoming rarer and rarer, and the dealer is no more respectful to the canvas that has achieved the honor of the catalogue than to that which has preserved the sequestration of the studio. ”

“ Duly subordinated, the commercial side of art has a value which it were affectation to ignore; but to paint merely for the present, heedless of the future, is to sink art to the level of a trade, not the most honest. For it is the purchaser who suffers from the want of thought bestowed on the materials, the sloppy manipulation, the careless compounding; sins of omission and commission that cause him, on finding his picture becoming chaos, to join the detractors of modern pigments. ”

“ After all, they were all craftsmen—Michael Angelo, Titian, Donatello, Canova—wall-decorators, door-painters, ceiling-colourers, tomb-builders, stone-masons, working to contract and to measure. When our artists are content with the pay of manual labourers and the joy of art, taste may be stimulated in the masses, and original work be going at the price of lithographs. Why shouldn't artists even paint public-house signs? ”

“ He paid a fair price for everything of value offered him and soon he was known as the dealer in quaint and curious books and pamphlets.
Good fortune knocked on his door. One rich find came after another. He was able to supply collectors and other book dealers with long-sought-after items.
Recently he acquired the most complete collection of American drawings by magazine illustrators that was ever gathered under one roof. Sixty thousand{116} specimens of American and foreign artists whose works have appeared in American illustrated magazines he bought from the files of leading publishers. ”

“ His father was a dealer before him, and the son was brought up on prices, he lisped in prices, and was taught to reverence prices. He cannot see the pictures for prices, and he lies back, looking round distractedly, not listening to the timid, struggling artist who is foolishly venturing an explanation. Perhaps the public might come to his style of painting if he were to persevere. The dealer stares at the ceiling, and his lips recall his last evening at the music-hall. If the public don't like it—why, they don't like it, and the sooner the artist comes round the better. ”

“ To which the young painter answers, “Art must find expression first. Let the stomach wait.” And so the shop-keeper and painter pursue their separate ways, and it often happens, in the course of time, that they come together again. The painter gains recognition, and his pictures make him famous. The shop-keeper rises to be a millionaire merchant—and becomes a patron of Art. ”

“ One reason why this modern type of collector is so commonly deceived is because he generally lives in a sort of fool’s paradise of art trumpery separated from the real art market by a little understood feeling of aristocratic pride.143 The art collector of olden times used to mingle with dealers, learn from them where and what to buy, tramping from place to place, the former El Dorado of the “find.” The modern species would consider it beneath him to have anything to do with common dealers or to attend a public sale even for the sake of interest in art. How can they gain experience? ”

“ The dealers’ idea, it must be remembered, is to sell again, and they buy accordingly. Many a good picture does not appeal to the commercial eye. At this sale, for instance, five examples of the, to me, impressive art of Georges Michel, the rich and sombre painter of windmills, a French Crome, brought together only a little more than 100 guineas, while on the second or water-colour day, there were many lots that went far too cheaply. In a sale where competition is concentrated upon the great works, the humble collector has often a chance. ”

“ But it is, nevertheless, a degradation,—for wherein does the shop-like atelier of the professional “portrait-painter” differ from the emporium and the bazaar of commerce? And wherein do the methods of the shrewd and successful painter differ from those of the successful merchant? Are not the doors of the studio open to every comer with a purse? Are not the prices fixed at so much per square yard of canvas? Is not the patronage of celebrities sought, regardless of artistic possibilities, for the prestige it gives? ”

“ The manufacturer is quite as much a teacher as the writer or the artist, and he is frequently a much more effectual one. In pottery especially, where the wares of one kind or other are hourly in the hands of every person in the kingdom, it behoves the manufacturers to produce such perfect forms, and to introduce such ornamentation, even in the commonest and coarsest ware, as shall teach the eye, and induce a taste for whatever is beautiful and perfect and lovely in art. The mission of the manufacturer is to create a pure taste, not to perpetuate and pander to a vicious and barbarous one ”

“ It is a common belief that high art and commercial success cannot go hand in hand,—that to make things sell you must sink art—or that, if you produce high art examples, you must give up all expectations of a remunerative trade. This theory I do not [251] believe in. I hold it to be the mission of the manufacturer, in whatever branch he may be engaged, to produce such goods as shall tend to educate the public taste, and to lead it gradually upwards to a full appreciation of the beautiful. ”

“ An artist sells a picture, and then, the merchandise delivered, assumes to prevent the purchaser from selling engravings, under the pretext that he, the painter, in selling the original, has not sold his design. ”

“ All are not ancient masters that are called so. Some years ago there was an aged man in a German capital, who, throughout a long life, had made a decent [Pg 30] income by painting pictures by any great artist of any time or place. If a rich amateur, travelling that way, wanted a work by some renowned painter of the early times he went to a dealer, and the dealer, undertaking to find him one, went to the old painter of other men’s pictures, who in a week produced a Da Vinci, a Raffaelle, or a Del Sarto, a Rubens, a Claude, or a Wouvermans—it mattered not what ”

“ There are a certain number of artists in this town, men of my own trade, but they [Pg 290] all seem to be doing their work from the dealer’s point of view, to produce a saleable article, and not for the sheer delight of exercising a talent, without which the result cannot give delight. ”