The Old Masters are European painters working roughly from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century, from Leonardo and Dürer through Rembrandt to Goya. On the art market they form a segment of their own, where price depends above all on attribution, condition and provenance.

Art movements and styles

Old Masters

Who are the Old Masters?

Old Masters is a collective term for European artists who worked roughly from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century, that is, from the Gothic through the Renaissance and Baroque to Neoclassicism. It is not a single style but a period and, at the same time, a market category, which is also how the auction house Christie’s defines it. Art historians tend to avoid the term as too vague. The boundary is flexible: Francisco Goya died in 1828, and yet he is unquestionably an Old Master. The word master originally referred to the guild, meaning a painter with his own workshop and assistants.

Who are the most important Old Masters, and what is the Czech connection?

The icons include Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Diego Velázquez. The Czech connection is surprisingly rich. Around 1600 Emperor Rudolf II made Prague one of the centres of European art, and in 1606 he acquired Dürer’s Feast of the Rosary for his collections, one of the few works from them that remained in Prague. Today it belongs to the National Gallery Prague, whose collection of old art also includes Rubens, El Greco, Goya and the Czech Baroque painters Karel Škréta and Petr Brandl.

How do the Old Masters do on the art market?

The most expensive painting ever sold at auction is the work of an Old Master. Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) sold at Christie’s in November 2017 for 450.3 million dollars, almost six times the previous Old Master record, Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, which fetched 76.7 million dollars in 2002. And a little gem? It was offered in an evening sale of post-war and contemporary art, not among the Old Masters. The commercial heart of the segment is TEFAF in Maastricht, which grew out of the Old Master fair Pictura and has carried its present name since 1988.

What should you watch out for when buying?

With the Old Masters, attribution is decisive: the answer to the question of who actually painted the picture. Auction catalogues distinguish fine degrees: the artist’s name alone, attributed to (probably by the artist), studio of (his workshop), circle of (his immediate circle), follower of (a later follower). Each step away from the master himself usually means a lower price. That is why it pays to insist on an expert opinion and to check provenance and the condition of the paint layer, including earlier restoration. Not every Old Master costs millions; you just need to know exactly what you are buying.

— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club