THE ECONOMICS OF TASTE. Volume II: THE RISE AND FALL OF OBJETS D'ART PRICES SINCE1750 by Gerald ReitlingerReview by: F. J. B. WATSONJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 112, No. 5090 (JANUARY 1964), pp. 126-127Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41367525 .

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JANUARY 1 964 He appears to have waded through the Patrologia Graeca, the Bonn Corpus, the Greek Anthology, and even the Greek mathematicians in search of pronouncements having some bearing on aesthetics. This has at any rate served to show that some views assigned to 'the Byzantines' in the past have no literary support whatever; which is a big step forward. But he was still faced with the task of grouping his materials and presenting some positive results. As the written sources are quite insufficient to suggest, let alone show, that any coherent system of aesthetics was generally prevalent in articulate Greek circles at any period in the thousand odd years under review, the material has had to be eked out with straight history, consideration of surviving monuments, and Fr. Mathew's personal response to Byzantine works of art.

This last is least satisfying when it is linked to his concept of Byzantine aesthetics. At least one person (not the reviewer) who has visited Torcello since the appearance of this book to inspect the alleged optical compensations, has returned convinced that Fr. Mathew's micrometer was out of adjustment. And insistence on the continuity of Byzantine history is positively unhelpful when one tries to understand the shift of emphasis from the grandiose to the fussy which is as unmistakable as between the sixth century and the eleventh in the East as in the West.

But in spite of it all, this is an important and stimulating book. It is entirely to the author's credit that he has been able to make anything at all out of his materials, and careful reading will show just what we do or do not know about Byzantine responses to Byzantine art. The illustrations, mostly of very well known monuments, are beautiful.

Mr. Hearsey's is a book of a very different kind. It is a condensed, rather chatty and perfectly adequate history of the Byzantine empire in which are embedded accounts of the topography of Constantinople at various periods, with sketch maps, and of the surviving Byzantine monuments there, with plans. The frontispiece, of the monastery of the Chora, shows a motor coach waiting prominently in the fore- ground, which sufficiently indicates the public the author has in mind. They are warned they will find Ostrogorsky 'specialized* in a bibliography which lists Cecil Stewart and omits Schlumberger. It can do no harm and may indeed prove very useful.

CHRISTOPHER HOHLER THE ECONOMICS OF TASTE. Volume II: THE RISE AND FALL OF OBJETS D'ART PRICES

since 1750. By Gerald Reitlinger. London , Barry & Rockliff , 1963. 90 s net . In deciding to follow up his highly entertaining book on the economics of taste

in paintings with one on the fluctuating prices of objects of art, Mr. Reitlinger embarked on a formidable task. To trace the early sale history of a picture presents a relatively simple problem compared with identifying, say, the '3 old embossed Roman ware dishes' which fetched 125 at the Harrache sale in 1780. Were they really the first identifiable Palissy ware to be auctioned, as the author supposes? Such problems confront the author almost everywhere before the latter part of the nineteenth century, when most such things began to be described for the first time in sale catalogues with any sort of expertise.

Fortunately French eighteenth-century works provide a field in which Mr. Reitlinger can follow the fluctuating prices of many types of art-object with accuracy almost since their creation. Not only were the Paris sale catalogues of the period extremely detailed, but numerous bills for Crown furnishings survive, whilst the Livre-Journal of Lazare Duvaux provides a complete day-to-day record over more than a decade in mid-eighteenth century of the price of every sort of fashionable object of art except paintings. More recently such things have remained almost continuously in fashion, at least since i860, so their prices can be followed closely over an excep- tionally long period.

To-day banner headlines appear when a so-called sale-room 'record* is established 126

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JANUARY 1964 NOTES ON BOOKS

by a Llangattock table (1958; £35,000) or Lord Powys's ebony and marble commode (1962; £33,000). But as Mr. Reitlinger tartly remarks, the newspapers might just as well announce 'Australia reached in 65 days' as the latest news-item. As long ago as 1878 over £24,000 was spent on a commode made for Mme. du Barry at a time when it was not even an antique in the modern legal sense. This sum in gold is the equivalent of at least £90,000 to-day according to the generally accepted conversion rates adopted by Mr. Reitlinger. In fact, even the £3,200 Mme. du Barry originally paid for it in 1782 is far more in terms of modern money than any piece of French furniture has fetched at auction since the last war. Still higher prices were paid in the first fifteen years of this century, when £4,000 was not an uncommon price for a fine commode. This is not far from £25,000 to-day. Less than a handful of things have fetched such a sum since 1945 and even then, it may be supposed, the purchasers obtained an article inferior to what they would have got in the old days.

It is arguable, of course, that the really high prices for objects of art are paid privately and remain unknown. For a moment memories cross the mind of the Duc de Choiseurs astonishment when Louis XV told him that the new carriage they were travelling in cost him 35,000 livres , over five times the exaggerated price that the minister thought a King might have conceivably been charged. But anyone familiar with present conditions in the sale-rooms will know that the highest priced objects almost invariably go direct to the collector and seldom into a dealer's stock. Discussing this very point about private sales, the author wonders what price the Hamilton Palace secretaire and commode made for Marie Antoinette would fetch to-day. Duveen is said to have paid £51,650 for them in 191 5 and to have sold them at a profit. A precisely comparable secretaire made for Louis XVI was purchased privately in London within the last year for no more than £15,000 in to-day's devalued money (well under £4,000 in 1915 money); and the object was not picked up at a bargain price from an unknowledgeable dealer in the King's Road.

Of course, French eighteenth-century objects by no means exhaust the range of Mr. Reitlinger's themes. There are extremely interesting chapters on the rise (and fall) of the taste for medieval objects, for Palissy and Henri II ware, whilst such subjects as the taste for Oriental objects brought in by the looting of the Summer Palace in i860 (at this period a pair of cloisonné perfume burners were more costly than a Piero della Francesca), or the dethronement of Paris by London as the centre of the international art trade, are amongst the topics he illuminates. But nothing of this will bring any comfort to those art-auctioneers who sing the siren-song of 'onwards and upwards with the arts'. In an amusing aside Mr. Reitlinger notes that a Victorian painting Looking for a Safe Investment dropped in price from £65 1 in 1887 to £310 in 1920; later it disappeared from the market altogether. If he has a moral it is contained in this boutade . His record is one of absolute, not relative, decline in art prices. There are no longer millionaires like Pierpont Morgan willing to spend £i2j million (over £40 million to-day) on objects of art in fifteen years; nor sales like that of the Doucet collection in 19 13, which produced £3,600,000 (nearly £14 million in 1963 pounds). Even the law of supply and demand is reversed in the sale-room, and scarcity does not necessarily produce high prices. Renaissance rock-crystal carvings actually fell in value between 1904 and 191 2, when they first became scarce.

Anyone interested in collecting, in the history of taste, with a vulgar human curiosity about what the rich sometimes do with their money, or fond of trenchantly expressed prejudices (two Rhinoceros Vases sold in 1828 are 'possibly the most hideous objects in the universe') will find The Economics of Taste provides a rewarding feast. If there are more inaccuracies than there should be, they do not affect the trend of the author's story, and in so complex a text it would be captious to cavil overmuch at some very careless prooi-reading.

F. J. B. WATSON

127

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