TEFAF Returns With Majesty in an Uncertain Market

A medieval manuscript unseen for 60 years, hand-painted by the renowned French illuminator Jean Pichore and his workshop, is one of the most spectacular exhibits at the 38th annual edition of the TEFAF Maastricht fair, which previewed to invited guests on Thursday.

“This is world history,” said Dr. Jörn Günther, an illuminated manuscript dealer in Switzerland, pointing to an illustration in a book of hours. It is of a trim, young King Henry VIII of England kneeling next to an angel and Catherine of Aragon, the first of his six wives.

“With manuscripts you really can get close to the big figures of the Middle Ages,” Günther said, as one of his staff members leafed through the book with this image, dating from about 1509, which had been owned and handled by Queen Catherine. “It’s different from a portrait. It’s more intimate.”

Catherine was one of Tudor England’s more consequential queens. The failure of Henry and Catherine’s marriage to produce a surviving male heir — or an annulment from the pope — resulted in Henry’s split from the Church of Rome. The manuscript was priced at 1.4 million Swiss Francs, about $1.6 million.

The venerable Dutch event from the European Fine Art Foundation, running through March 20, this year features 273 exhibitors from 21 countries, and is the last remaining major international fair primarily devoted to pre-20th-century art and objects. (TEFAF also holds a smaller sister fair focused on modern and contemporary art in New York in May.) This year’s edition faced formidable headwinds. Old masters have fallen out of fashion with private collectors, the international art market is in a slump. President Trump’s trade wars have also rattled markets and upended long-held ties between the United States and Europe.

“This is a challenging time in a wider sense,” said Massimiliano Caretto, a partner in the Rome- and Turin-based old master dealership, Caretto & Occhinegro. “With Trump and the wars, everyone is frightened about everything.”

“But TEFAF is the one event where museums, collectors and dealers gather together and want to buy,” Caretto said.

During the first hour of the crowded preview, the Italian gallery had no difficulty in finding an as-yet-undisclosed museum purchaser for a recently rediscovered panel painting of Christ’s “Entombment” by the 16th-century Flemish painter Maerten van Heemskerck. The dealers’ research indicates this is the original central image of an altarpiece whose side panels are preserved in the Worcester Art Museum, in Massachusetts. Dating from about 1550, this expressive Italian-influenced Netherlandish painting was priced at 500,000 euros, or about $544,000.

In recent years, museums, particularly American ones, have increasingly become the go-to buyers of high-value old masters at TEFAF. The fair has also tried to freshen its appeal by expanding the number of booths showing Modern and contemporary art. This year, some 60 such dealers were exhibiting, including the first-time participant Richard Saltoun from London.

Saltoun’s singular display of Surrealist paintings and drawings by the Palestinian-born Lebanese artist Juliana Seraphim (1934-2005) was in tune with the desire of many museums to rebalance their collections with works by long-overlooked women artists. Seraphim once said she wanted to portray “how important love is to a woman,” and her opulent, enigmatic images are suffused with erotic symbolism. A richly layered oil, “Untitled,” from 1968, marked at €120,000, or about $130,000, was reserved by a museum.

The focus of American museums on expanding their works by underrepresented artists continues, even as the Trump administration cracks down on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

James Steward, the director of the Princeton University Art Museum, which is slated to open an expansive new building in October, was one of several American museum directors and curators at the TEFAF preview. Visiting the fair for his 16th time, Steward said, he is always on the lookout for pieces that fill gaps in the holdings of his privately funded institution, particularly those that straddle different cultures.

“We have to double-down on our core values,” said Steward, responding to concerns about the Trump administration’s cultural revisionism. “Diversity is baked into our collections.”

“We have art and objects from all over the world and from across 5,000 years of human history, and we will continue to rebalance our collections with works and artists we think are historically underrepresented,” he said.

This time, a 16th-century Flemish painting of the Madonna and Child in a similar-period Japanese black lacquer frame caught Steward’s eyes. This rare object, associated with the evangelical activities of Jesuit missionaries in Japan, was priced at €336,000, or about $365,000, at the booth of a London dealer, Jorge Welsh.

Several visitors said that though this year’s TEFAF still kept up its reputation for offering a wealth of museum-quality items, standout masterworks by major names were fewer and farther between.

“Despite the lack of obvious showstoppers such as we have seen in past years, people were still quietly doing good business and there was a very international crowd in attendance, which makes all the difference,” Morgan Long, a London-based art adviser, said after the preview.

Other notable early sales included a mid-17th-century “Virgin at Prayer With Self-Portrait” by the Flemish artist Michael Sweerts who worked for several years in Rome. This sold to a European museum for about €4 million, or about $4.3 million, from the booth of the Geneva-based Salomon Lilian. Recent restoration had revealed that the painting had been made in Rome while the artist was working for Camillo Pamphili, a noted collector who was the nephew of Pope Innocent X. The London gallerist Ben Brown sold a 2006 supersized golden apple sculpture, “Pomme (Moyenne),” by the quirky and ever-popular French designer Claude Lalanne to an American collector for a price in the region of $950,000.

TEFAF’s organizers said that no fewer than 62 groups of museum patrons attended the preview. Among them was a cohort of some 30 patrons of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, including Penny Vinik, a collector of contemporary art based in Boston and Florida.

“I usually go to Art Basel,” Vinik said. “The museum encouraged me to come to Maastricht. I haven’t bought anything for a year and didn’t expect to fall in love with anything.”

But after putting a reserve on a large and joyous 1961 Hans Hofmann abstract painting from the New York gallery Yares Art, which was asking an undisclosed seven-figure sum, she said, “I love the bright colors. It looks optimistic to me.”