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The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939

This collection of essays makes a significant contribution to scholarship in a field in which the editors and several of the contributors already play a leading role. The distinctive structures and characteristics of the art market, which expanded and evolved remarkably from the mid-nineteenth century throughout Europe, were determined by the specific and unusual nature of the product involved, whose price was not related to labour or material costs, or to a clear use function, but to an estimation of cultural value that was unstable, and which situated ‘art’ apart from material goods. In this market, artists were self-employed producers, who sold their work increasingly through commercial intermediaries as well as officially supported institutions. These dealers, while they were in a sense shopkeepers, developed strategies of display and promotion that highlighted the cultural significance of their stock for discriminating customers for whom the successful exercise of taste was worth the outlay of large amounts of money. In a context of over-abundant supply and shifting aesthetic valuations, information and judgement circulated in the press, particularly in specialized journals, became increasingly important. The case studies presented here engage with most of these various aspects of the market as they manifested themselves in London between 1850 and 1939, with a particular focus on the latter half of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to the First World War. The particular character of the dealing business, and of its evolution in London, is brought out very clearly in the essays by Mark Westgarth, Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich. They trace the concentration of activity in the West End, near the Royal Academy but also, crucially, on the site of high-end consumption in general, and the development of appropriate presentation and selling policies to enhance artists’ reputations and the brand identity of galleries. Helmreich also analyses, in the case of the Goupil Gallery, the complexity of a business organization functioning on an international scale. The importance of London as a centre of the international art trade is also brought out – in different ways – by Anna Gruetzner Robins’ study of the Grafton Gallery Post-Impressionist exhibitions and by Morna O’Neill’s discussion of Sir Hugh Lane as a dealer-connoisseur whose clients were the rich of the English-speaking world. The essays by Malcolm Warner, Brenda Rix and Patricia de Montfort focus on the situation and strategies of artists in the changing conditions of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. While the Royal Academy remained the premier exhibition venue for most artists, at least until the turn of the century, and direct relations with patrons