Dealers at TEFAF Maastricht Report Robust Sales

Despite global unrest and a continually worsening conflict in the Middle East, dealers surveyed by ARTnews in their stands at the TEFAF art fair in Maastricht, when willing to discuss sales, were more than pleased. Even if, as one dealer observed, collectors from the Middle East may have been unable to travel. (Another quipped, “There’s email. There’s WhatsApp.”) The show must go on.

“The caliber of collectors is extraordinary,” said first-time exhibitor Alison Jacques, of London, who noted a greater international attendance than she expected. By the end of day one on Thursday, the dealer had placed works by Eileen Agar and Sheila Hicks. Also on offer are pieces by Pacita Abad, Ana Mendieta, and Dorothea Tanning, among others.

Jorn Günther, a rare books dealer from Basel who has exhibited at TEFAF for thirty years, said this year was his best.

The fair is marked by luxurious wide aisles, and expansive stands that are built out at an incredibly ambitious level by the dealers, this year numbering 277 from 24 countries. In hopes of keeping acquistive visitors at the convention center, the fair offers a one-star Michelin seafood restaurant, an Italian bar, a pastry bar, a sushi bar, a raw bar, an oyster bar, and, of course, roving oyster shuckers with an array of dressings.

It’s true that there are enormous items on offer, such as a grand 18th-century Neapolitan crèche at Porcini of Naples with dozens of richly attired miniature figures, and a gigantic 18th-century sleigh at Rudigier Fine Art of London. But dollar for dollar, inch for inch, it’s possible that some of the most valuable and remarkable works at the current edition are the smallest.

Pride of place at the stand of Paris gallery Brimo de Laroussilhe, for example, goes to three unbelievable plaques in enameled gold, made for Anne of France after cartoons by the artist Jean Hey, who was active in Lyons and Moulins ca. 1480–1505. They measure less than two inches high each and provide an incredible visual feast, with the utensils in this case being the magnifying glasses hanging nearby that allow visitors to get up close with the richly detailed pieces, which show traditional scenes such as the Annunciation and the Nativity, each with several figures and fully rendered settings. (The one illustrated here shows the Holy Ghost personified as a twin of Jesus, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.) 

Each is in a two-sided case, with both sides visible, because, dear reader, these tiny items were each initially pages from a book. The gallery declined to share information about sales, but did note that this reporter, visiting from New York, could see things the gallery has sold back home when visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its uptown medieval branch, the Cloisters. 

Another tiny item that packs a big punch and a big price tag—and that would be at home at the Cloisters, had the dealer nog sold it to another buyer—comes from Basel’s Jorn Günther: the Liechtenstein Tacuinum Sanitatis, an illuminated manuscript in Latin from Padua from ca. 1450. This six-inch-high book includes something very rare: scenes of everyday life from everyday people, not the well-to-do. A medical handbook and a guide for healthy living, the book was first written in Arabic and later translated to Latin. Inside are 130 small paintings by four different artists, which makes the $5 million price tag seem pretty reasonable at about $38,500 a pop. 

The gallery had placed several manuscripts, priced from $200,000 up to the $5 million item, by mid-afternoon on day two of the fair. “The oldest item on the stand is a 10th-century manuscript,” said Günther. “It makes you think: how many revolutions, how many plagues, how many wars, over that time? It slows you down. Contemporary art is all about speed. We have slow art that speaks of values—like the devotion and patience it took to create these things.” Nearby, a US museum curator was presenting a work from the stand to her director and her institutions’ conservators for consideration for acquisition.

Yet another piece one could imagine at the Cloisters, alongside its famed Unicorn Tapestries, is at De Wit Fine Tapestries from Mechelen, Belgium: a 14-foot-wide example, with very rich surviving pigments, depicting A Tree of Life (probably mid-sixteenth century) between two imaginary coats of arms. That means that it was likely not created to celebrate a marriage between two actual families, making its purpose ambiguous, director Pierre Maes told me. Still available mid-afternoon Friday, the piece is marked at $300,000. The gallery had placed another large tapestry with vivid colors, The Offering to the God Pan (ca. 1690–1730), with a public institution, said Maes, who wasn’t at liberty to name the museum.

The fair’s offerings span from the ancient to the contemporary, and dealers across that range reported successes.

London gallery David Aaron sold Stele of Medeia, a Greek sculpture from the Attic region (375-350 B.C.E.), to “a major U.S. museum” on the first day, reports the gallery. The asking price was £450,000 (about $600,000). It’s a rare piece that memorializes a young woman of marriageable age who died before being married.

At least three paintings at the fair happen to have been recently restituted to their rightful owners after being seized by the Nazis. At least two had found buyers by the end of day two.

Agnews (founded in London in 1817) sold Willem Drost’s Man with a Plumed Red Beret (1654) to the Leiden Collection, founded by American-French precious metals mogul Thomas S. Kaplan and his wife Daphne Recanati Kaplan and focusing on 17th-century artists, especially Rembrandt and his circle in Leiden and Amsterdam. (The collection recently sold a Rembrandt drawing at Sotheby’s New York for $17.8 million, the highest price ever paid for a Rembrandt drawing, to benefit Panthera, the wild cat conservation charity he co-founded.) 

Drost’s works are rare; he died of pneumonia in Venice at age 25. The canvas passed through the collections of noted Dutch and German collectors in the 18th and 19th centuries and four generations of the Rothschild banking family before being stolen by the Nazis for the Führer Museum in Linz, Austria. A photo shows the Monuments Men retrieving the work along with Vermeer’s The Art of Painting. The Rothschilds later sold it to Jacqui Safra, of yet another banking dynasty. 

Meanwhile, Rosenberg & Co. (New York) also sold a work on day one that had been seized by the Third Reich, an 1881 gouache on paper by Camille Pissarro, Femmes au Tournant de la Route, also known as Rue de village avec trois paysannes causant à gauche (Valhermeil). Dealer Paul Rosenberg bought the piece in 1939; the following year, the Nazis seized the work, which was returned to the Rosenberg family in 2025. Rosenberg Gallery declined to reveal a price, but data from art market analytics company ARTDAI reveals that three 1880s Pissarro gouaches of similar size have sold since 2015, for prices as high as $1.6 million. 

Another recently restituted work, a canvas by 17th-century Flemish artist Jacob Jordaens, is with Pelgrims de Bigard, from near Brussels, but the dealer was reluctant to share information on matters of sales.

At a fair that spans 7,000 years of human creativity, some dealers found success by mixing old and new. New York’s Marianne Boesky, by the end of day one, had sold eleven of twelve paintings by contemporary artist Thalita Hamaoui for prices ranging from $16,000 to $60,000. The gallery displayed the lush, surreal paintings showing overgrown landscapes in an enticing array of layers and colors alongside works by pre-Surrealist artist Odilon Redon. 

So too did Paris dealer Kamel Mennour, who by day two had sold a Félix Vallotton painting of a woman reading, Liseuse (1912), which he displayed next to a Camille Henrot bronze sculpture in a shape that echoes the reader’s curves. Mennour sold the painting for €350,000 (about $400,000) to an institution, as well as a Giacometti for €700,000 (about $800,000) and an Ugo Rondinone for €350,000 (about $400,000), both to private collectors. The king of his booth was a Francis Picabia, Statices (ca. 1929), that is tagged at €4.5 million (about $5.1 million). Its fate was, by mid-afternoon on Friday, as yet uncertain despite some very serious conversations.

“But I’m fighting against myself,” said Mennour, who bought the painting outright and just might keep it.

“But, when you run a gallery,” he said, “you have bills to pay.”