The market for classic British painting of the late 18th-century has been in the doldrums for decades. Not any longer, says Ivan Lindsay

When in 1921 the second Duke of Westminster needed to raise funds to pay taxes, he turned to Joseph Duveen (1869–1938), the pre-eminent art dealer of his day, who bought three paintings from him for the then-enormous sum of US$800,000. These were Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727–1788) Cottage Door and The Blue Boy, and Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (1723–1792) Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse.

The prize was Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (c.1770), for which the Duke had refused countless offers over the previous twenty years. This painting depicts a young man, thought to be Jonathan Buttall, the son of a prosperous East End hardware merchant, who is depicted wearing a bluesilk outfit dating from the age of Van Dyke. It is generally believed that Gainsborough painted this picture as a homage to Van Dyke, but there is another story, perhaps apocryphal, that his rival Reynolds had challenged him to try and construct a successful painting with blue as the predominant colour. Either way, at that time the painting was the second-most famous painting in the world after Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

In the late 19th century European agricultural rents collapsed as a result of cheap grain imports from the United States. As a result, members of both the British and European aristocracy lost their primary source of income and were forced to sell off artworks collected by their ancestors on the Grand Tour. At the same time the success of American capitalism created a new breed of rich industrialists and entrepreneurs in North America, who rapidly developed a taste for great European art.

Duveen, a jovial but steely character, was at the head of a group of dealers who facilitated the movement of art from Europe to America. He was an excellent salesman and Andrew Mellon, a good client of Duveen’s, observed, ‘Duveen, my pictures never look so marvellous as when you are here’, and Kenneth Clark, the Director of the National Gallery in London, remarked that, ‘when he was present everyone behaved as if they had had a couple of drinks’.

Examples of the 18th-century British school can be found for modest prices and often at

a fraction of their 1920’s valuation

So when Duveen found himself in possession of The Blue Boy, there was a wide range of American collectors he couldapproach, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, Isabella Gardner,Joseph Widener, Henry Walters, Henry Havermayer, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Clay Frick, Samuel H. Kress and Andrew Mellon. In fact, he sold it to Henry E. Huntingdon, a railway tycoon from San Marino, California – the painting still hangs in the town today, in the Huntingdon Library. Duveen sold The Blue Boy for $728,800, a new world record for a painting at the time.

The scale and range of the era’s collections was enormous. When J.P. Morgan and Ben Altman died in 1913, their holdings were valued at $60 million and $20 million respectively. William Randolph Hearst budgeted $5 million a year for his art buying, and Samuel H. Kress amassed a collection of 3,216 artworks. Gerald Reitlinger in his work The Economics of Taste (published in 1961) points out that nearly every sort of art work rose sharply in value after 1880, including Limoges enamels, Italian Faience, Ch’ing-dynasty porcelain and late-Gothic, Renaissance, English and, above all, French furniture. Collectors merely decided whether they preferred Versailles or Chatsworth and then off they went.

The most sought-after paintings were the traditional Old Masters and 18th-century British paintings, including work by artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Ramsay, Wilson, Hogarth, Stubbs, Turner and Constable. This great burst of collecting activity collapsed after the stock market crash of 1929. However, whereas demand for the leading Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters, such as Titian, Correggio, Leonardo, Rembrandt and Rubens, stayed constant with rising prices, the market for British painting ran out of steam and the work has stayed out of fashion until now, when the first flickerings of a renewed interest can be detected. Until recently, early pioneer collectors of this school, such as the late Bill Berger and Paul Mellon, all but had the field to themselves.

The 18th century is considered the golden period of British painting. Earlier British patrons had to rely on imported foreign painters such as Holbein, Van Dyck, Lely and Kneller, but in the 18th century Britain developed, for the first time, an outstanding and very individual school of painting that produced portraiture and landscapes. In landscape, the painters initially struggled to break free from the 17thcentury Dutch template developed by artists such as Ruysdael and Hobbema, before moving towards a more relaxed and whimsical approach, as can be seen in Gainsborough’s landscapes, and that culminated in Turner’s watercolours and Constable’s cloud studies. But by the mid-19th century, following the deaths of Lawrence, Turner and Constable, this new British school lost its energy.

Clearly, a great masterpiece by a leading name will always attract a healthy price. For example, a Gainsborough landscape recently sold for $5,753,000, and a major full-length Gainsborough portrait of Colonel John Bullock went for £2,646,650 in 2002. Reynolds’s full-length portrait of the Tahitian Omai sold for $20 million in 2001, and Reynolds’s three-quarter-length portraits of attractive women sell for around $6 million, as long as they are still in good condition.

These prices are still modest when compared to those for Rubens, who has sold for $98 million, and for Raphael ($100 million), Picasso ($90 million) and Klimt ($120 million).Lesser examples of the 18th-century British school can be found for modest prices and often at a fraction of their 1920’s valuation. Philip Mould, London’s leading dealer in this period, gives the example of a Hoppner Mother and Child that he sold for $96,000 in 2006. In 1912 it had sold for the equivalent of $3,400,000 in today’s money, so its 2006 sale price of $96,000 represents a decline of around 95 per cent in real terms.

Smaller portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds can still be found for under $100,000 in the twice-yearly sales of British pictures held at Christies and Sotheby’s in New York and London and from the specialist dealers. When buying, look for attractiveness of sitter or subject, provenance, condition, frame and size, but also seek out independent advice. Prices are starting to recover after languishing for nearly 100 years and, when the current fashion for the shock art of dissected cows, elephant dung and inflatable dolls fades, as it surely will, and the requirement that art should be both beautiful and finely returns, British painting of the 18th century will be one of the beneficiaries.

Ivan Lindsay is a dealer in Old Masters and Russian paintings. For more information, visit www.oldmasters.net

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