Making pictures and dealing in them is an intimate business. In what other marketplace are the principal players - maker, buyer and seller - so close? Van Gogh's brother Théo was a picture dealer. So was Vermeer, and so too was Vigée-Lebrun's unsatisfactory husband. Dealers like Duveen achieved a way of life which challenged that of the millionaires they sold to. Money was so successfully laundered as painted canvas that the names Frick and Mellon now bring old pictures, not unfettered capitalism, to mind. The relation between artist and dealer is familial, and the squabbles and tensions domestic in character, if not in fact. The relation between dealer and buyer - no matter how friendly - is different, and of its nature confrontational. The dealer sets a price: the buyer decides when, and if, to pay it.

LRB 3 April 2003 | PDF Download