N° 25
N° 25
Cultural Clearings: The Object Transformed by the Art Market/Schnittstelle Kunsthandel: Das Objekt im Auge des Marktes
Daniel Dubuisson/Sophie Raux
Art Dealers and the Socio-cultural Construction of Value
in Eighteenth Century France
The significant development of collecting practices in the
eighteenth century and the parallel growth of a more and more
organised and efficient market led to the need to come up with
new tools and new criteria for analysing the value of art works.
The purpose of this paper is to show how the issue was seen by
two categories of players: on the one hand, the theorists and con-
noisseurs connected to the academy milieu and, on the other, the
dealers involved in more commercial dynamics. Connoisseurs seek
to define universal and timeless criteria for appreciating works of
art, taking a purely intellectual approach and giving primacy to
aesthetic judgment. As for the new professional category of art
dealers, their main interest was in gauging the economic value of
an individual work according to more reliable, namely, extrinsic
qualities.
Initially, therefore, we are going to focus on the discrepancies
inherent in such different approaches at the very moment that
artworks began to be regarded as speculative assets on both an
intellectual and a commercial level. We will then demonstrate how
specific statements by connoisseurs and theorists on the one
hand and by dealers on the other eventually came together to
generate the double-sided myth of the singular work of art and the
creator-as-genius, categories which both could use to their own
advantage. Looking at the eighteenth century as a whole, we also
want to reflect on the irreplaceable synthesis provided by the
ambivalent notion of value (be it financial or aesthetic; social or
artistic). It is this synthesis that should be regarded as the vital
foundation on which the modern art world in the West could build
and subsequently develop.
The Connoisseurs
As early as the end of the seventeenth century, Roger de Piles
put forward a number of standards for understanding painting that
provided the basis required for an aesthetic judgment. In his treatise
»De la connaissance des tableaux« he described his »unerring
precepts« for judging paintings which consisted of three points: »to
see what is good and bad in a painting,« to attribute a painting to
the correct artist and to tell the difference between an original and a
copy.1 This concept of the connoisseur would be taken up and expan-
ded during the eighteenth century by such diverse writers as Edme-
François Gersaint, Pierre-Jean Mariette, Antoine-Joseph Dézallier
d’Argenville and the Abbé Laugier. In England, Jonathan Richardson
would take it up and develop it in his »Second Discourse.«2 Richard-
son said that amateurs should train their judgement so as to be able
to recognize the intrinsic quality of an artwork. However, in order to
do so, Richardson placed great emphasis on a method of attributi-
on that would give renewed importance to the value attached to a
name. As we will see, this particular guideline would be welcomed
more by circles of the trade than by connoisseurs.
Indeed, as of the 1750s, it would be a new generation of dealers
(that of Pierre Rémy, François Joullain the Younger and Jean-
Baptiste Pierre Lebrun) who would bring about a shift in priorities
to favour assessment of attribution and expert insight into authen-
ticity. To quote Mariette, as soon as people »started to buy names
instead of works,«3 a major shift had to be acknowledged from
the concept of the painting as a source of aesthetic pleasure to
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that of the painting as a financial asset. The increasing importance
given to attribution in evaluating art triggered enormous disappro-
val among »true connoisseurs.« Claude-Henri Watelet describes
it with great disdain as »material knowledge, the one dealers in
paintings boast about, the one mostly sought after by the lowest
level of connoisseur. It doesn’t consist of judging the painting
but of linking it to the name of an artist. It is this name that de-
termines the quality of the painting and that quality may well
vanish if, in the future, the name is found to have been wrongly
attributed.«4
The Dealers: Originality and Scarcity
The question of originality, a word that retained a very ambiguous
significance in the eighteenth century, tended to become increas-
ingly topical in the second half of the century.5 According to De Piles
and his followers, the methodological principles for authenticating
originality relied on an analysis of the »manière,« which only the
most informed connoisseurs were able to perform. However, when
striving to establish a work’s originality, dealers preferred to rely
on provenance, a criterion which comes to prominence in auction
catalogues from the 1750s onwards.6 Dealers endeavored to es-
tablish the pedigree of a painting by tracing its lineage through a
succession of more or less famous owners. There is no denying
that the public saw this as more reliable in establishing originality
than an evaluation of manner or matters of aesthetic judgment. The
prestige of provenance was eminently suited to a society ruled by a
strict hierarchy of rank and status. Moreover, with the dispersal of a
number of major collections, the steady increase in the circulation
of works of art on the market brought home to the public just how
widely prices varied. This situation led the dealer François-Charles
Joullain to publish, in 1783, the first index on provenance, which
presented not just information about ownership but also informa-
tion about the prices paintings had fetched at auction in a way that
highlighted the relationship between provenance and value as well
as the variability of prices from one sale to another.7
Such insistence on connecting notions of originality and pro-
venance reveals a new kind of aspiration that was to achieve full
prominence in the nineteenth century, namely the claim of a work’s
absolute uniqueness with all its attendant implications on the
aesthetic, conceptual and commercial levels. For dealers, the very
fact of establishing each work’s pedigree stabilized its singulari-
ty, thereby endowing it with a rarity coefficient that would in turn
generate value. In the preface to the catalogue of the Poullain sale
(1780), Le Brun declares this intention outright, prefiguring the myth
of the unique work of art:
»Thus the works are precious not only in terms of their own merit
but also because of their rarity; for the rarity of an object is sufficient
as a rule to give it a price and a monetary value. Once established,
the value of paintings is necessarily better founded than that of all
the other items of commerce and curiosity. A diamond, an object of
porcelain, a book, a shell, an antique sculpture are often purchased
at a high price because of their rarity, but their value tends to vanish
when one or several items of similar, or even greater beauty, appear.
A painting, however, can never encounter another self [›un autre
lui-même‹] that would make it lose its rarity and value.«8

10 Cultural Clearings: The Object Transformed by the Art Market/Schnittstelle Kunsthandel: Das Objekt im Auge des Marktes
From the rules of art to market law: the birth of a modern
paradigm
The reputation of a name, an originality beyond any doubt, a prestig-
ious provenance acting as a pedigree, scarcity… these are some of
the criteria applied by dealers which correspond to the definitions
of the words »price« and »value« in contemporary dictionaries of
commercial terms.9 They also echo the comments of the eighteenth
century’s first thinkers about the economy of art, such as Bernard
Mandeville (1670–1733) in his famous »Fable of the Bees« (1732):
»The Value that is set on Paintings depends not only on the name
of the Master and the Time of his Age he drew them in, but likewise
in a great measure on the Scarcity of his Works, and what is still
more unreasonable, the Quality of the Persons in whose Possessi-
on they are, as well as the length of time they have been in Great
Families.«10 Those ideas predate by about two centuries Thorstein
Veblen’s comments on conspicuous consumption, those of Pierre
Bourdieu on distinction or those of Jean Baudrillard on the system
of objects.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the discourse
on painting was torn between, on the one hand, those aspiring to
grasp an »internal« understanding of a painting, to be acquired only
Notes
1 Roger de Piles: Conversation sur la connoissance de la peinture, et sur le
jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux. Paris 1677 (ed. 1747), pp. 461–476.
2 Jonathan Richardson: Two discourses. London 1719, pp. 130–138.
3 Letter from Mariette to Giovanni Bottari, October 26, 1764. In: Raccolta di Lettere
sulla Pittura, Scultura ed Architettura. Ed. by Giovanni Bottari et al. Milan 1822,
vol. 5, p. 407.
4 Claude-Henri Watelet: Connoissance. In: Dictionnaire des arts de peinture,
sculpture et gravure. Paris 1792, vol. 1, p. 444.
5 On the notions of originality and authenticity, see more particularly
Rosalind E. Krauss: Retaining the Originals? The State of the Question. In:
Retaining the Original. Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions. Ed.
by Kathleen Preciado. Washington 1989, pp. 7–11. – Charlotte Guichard:
Du »nouveau connoisseurship« à l’histoire de l’art. Original et autographie
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through studying the immutable principles of art, and on the other
hand, those who thought a work should be understood through
empirical, external criteria (for example, attribution or authenticity)
based on a knowledge of market laws. In spite of this opposition,
both camps eventually played a part in generating the modern myth
of the work of art. By endowing it with an aura that only knowledgea-
ble connoisseurs would be able to grasp and by elaborating the tools
and techniques that enabled them to speculate on both uniqueness
and rarity, connoisseurs and dealers came together in the social
construction of a new value for art. Thus, the opposition between
dealers and connoisseurs that could be seen at the beginning of
the eighteenth century was tending to vanish by its end. This shift
was made possible by the triumph of the singularized work of art,
sustained as much by the myth of the artist-as-genius as by the
intervention of the informed entrepreneurs who now dominated
the market. In a world of high society that thought highly of both
luxury and conspicuous spending, the »new« dealer controlled both
the provenance and circulation of the works, as well as their valua-
tion, their promotion, the market on which they would be offered
for sale, and the elite networks of collectors and buyers who would
purchase them.
en peinture. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, 2010, n. 6,
pp. 1387–1402.
6 Sophie Raux: From Mariette to Joullain. Provenance and Value in Eighteenth-
Century French Auction Catalogs. In: Provenance: An Alternate History of Art.
Ed. by Gail Feigenbaum/Inge Reist. Los Angeles 2012, pp. 88–105.
7 François-Charles Joullain: Répertoire de tableaux, dessins et estampes, Ouvrage
utile aux Amateurs. Paris 1783.
8 Jean-Baptiste Pierre Lebrun: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, dessins, estampes,
(…) qui composoient le cabinet de feu M. Poullain. Paris 1780, pp. XII-XIII.
9 See for instance Jacques Savary Des Bruslons: Prix. In: Dictionnaire universel de
commerce. Paris 1747, vol. 3, p. 1005.
10 Bernard Mandeville: The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits.
London 1732, vol. 1, p. 375.
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