Corals, Opals, Marble, and Glass

Materials for all seasons at the world’s grandest art fair, plus Cleopatra and a killer ship model

T he European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht in the Netherlands is the art extravaganza of the year. More than 270 dealers and thousands of collectors and connoisseurs gather to sell and buy, and the goods aren’t chopped liver. The art is all museum-quality, vetted by curator specialists, and fresh to the market. Last week I wrote about some of the highlights. Today, I’ll focus mostly on art that’s not oil on canvas. Creativity comes in all shapes, sizes, and materials. Call these objects idiosyncrasies, but each is nonpareil, even the one with the broken nose.

Every art lover should get to TEFAF in Maastricht at least once, even if, like me, you don’t happen to have a seven-, eight-, or nine-figure checking account balance but a number closer to zero. It’s not only for the quality of the art and elegant European style. No one attends, à la Met Gala, dressed like a tree, a gangster, or a taffeta space shuttle.

Everything is seriously chic. I swapped Vermont flannel for Façonnable, and my Merrell boots — no snow, ice, or hills in Maastricht — for stately, black-leather cap-toes that I needed to dust. Every booth in TEFAF is a little museum gallery, sometimes not so little. And they’re often organized around not only media such as porcelain or jewelry but also by theme.

Agnews Gallery, based in London and Brussels and in business since 1817, has a nautical theme. I planned to write about Willem van de Velde the Younger’s 1684 ship group portrait, at 13 feet wide the largest by Younger or Elder. Father and son were Dutch but painted battleship pictures in London and pioneered the English seascape tradition. It’s been in one aristocratic family for eight generations until it sold at auction in 2023 as an unsigned painting by the Younger and studio. Agnews discovered the artist’s signature under surface grime and also used high-tech means and connoisseurship to find that the Younger had painted it entirely by himself, making a marquee masterpiece as big as a marquee.

Why write about a painting, though, when next to it, in three-dimensional, fully fitted splendor is Isaac Betts’s pearwood model of Coronation, from 1685. Old sea dogs, salivate. Betts made the model while designing and building the 90-gun ship at the Portsmouth naval dockyard. Ship models are indeed art. I consider them sculpture. Charles II, James II, and Peter the Great owned ship-model collections that have gone to museums. Coronation belonged to the third Earl of Carbery, who, as lord of the admiralty, led a massive enhancement of the Royal Navy after much depletion during three wars with the Dutch. Junius Morgan, J.P. Morgan’s grandson, sensationally bought it in 1924 when the U.K. had no art-export controls. Off to Morgan’s Glen Cove mansion it went.

The model is a triumph of the gilder’s and carver’s craft. From waterline to rails, it was packed with ornamentation, just as the large ship was. Every bulbous passage was either gilded or decorated with figureheads, gargoyles, lion’s heads, or wreaths from which cannons point. Masts, tops, yards, guns, and lanterns are original. The pearwood hull is honey-colored, warmed over nearly 350 years. Don’t think “ship in a bottle.” The model is 52 inches wide. It’s €2.4 million ($2.6 million). Agnews is also selling J.P. Morgan’s gold pocket watch, worn daily during his last ten years, and splendid drawings by Willem van de Velde the Elder.

Her nose went missing along the way, and even at her best she looked nothing like Elizabeth Taylor, but Charles Ede’s Hellenistic Head of Cleopatra, from 33 to 29 b.c. has the look of ambition, nerve, and power. Ede is one of the great antiquities dealers, though in the past couple of years it’s returning to its roots as a more general firm. Ede’s Cleopatra is the only one of the dozen or so portraits of Egypt’s last pharaoh that’s in private hands. We know from the materials — Parian marble from Egypt — and carving that it was made in the royal Ptolemaic workshop in Alexandria, probably after Egypt’s defeat in the Battle of Actium.

How do we know it’s Cleopatra? TEFAF’s art is vetted by experts in the days leading up to the fair, and these experts take no prisoners. Tiny details — in this case, tear ducts, her hair style, and marks on top of the head where a wooden crown might have gone — are decisive, but each of the other Cleopatra sculptures has been studied microscopically and comes with its own history. With Ede’s bust, the stories overlap.

Ede didn’t publicize the bust ahead of the fair, wanting to benefit from shock value, but, let’s face it, no one knows what the vetters will do. The art world has its share of scandals, but, once we reach the heights, reputation makes a difference. It’s not like Washington, D.C., where most reputations are crusted with mud, slime, and doo-doo. By “reputation,” I don’t mean venerability. Rather, I mean renown for due diligence, research, experience, and judgment.

Perrin, the Paris dealer, offered what has to be the ultimate in luxury goods and one of the rarest, most precious objects at the fair. A tapestry, 111 by 93 inches, embroidered in coral beads and silver thread on a silk damask support, surely evoked “wow” in a dozen languages. It’s Sicilian, from around 1750, and it might have covered an altar in a patrician palace chapel. Coral was all the craze then among French, Italian, and Spanish elites, exerting a fascination as much as precious stones did, with coral fished off Sicily’s western cost prized for its many shades of orange, red, and pink.

It’s more than decorative, though. Coral symbolized hope, peace, and tranquility and, among Italians, was believed to thwart evil. Trapani, the Sicilian coastal town west of Palermo, was Europe’s center for embroiderers working in coral. This tapestry, yours for €160,000 ($174,000), was rare when made, but it’s rarer now given silk’s fragility. I’m not easily stunned, but I’ve been thinking about the object like a dog thinks of food.

I’ve never written about an Australian dealer, and don’t know whether or not there’s an Australian aesthetic, but if there is, jewelry designer Margot McKinney has got it. I’d just seen the Sicilian coral tapestry, so it was sheer kismet to visit McKinney’s contemporary jewelry booth. South Sea baroque means pearls, mandarin garnets, tourmalines, aquamarines, tanzanites, and opals aplenty. Her opals are mined in New South Wales, found by miners and mining companies McKinney has known for years, so she gets the best. A one-of-a-kind necklace, or collier, caught my eye, and how couldn’t it? It’s got a whole lot of sparkle and color, and it looks as if it just rose, Aphrodite-like, from the sea.

Opals aren’t seaside gems, but they look like it, with McKinney picking sea hues for the pistachio-colored pearls. It can be worn in five formats. It’s visual and tactile, though not Vermont taste, which is more Pilgrim than epicurean. Being Australian, McKinney and her staff are very nice. McKinney has been a jewelry designer for years — she’s the fourth generation in the business — but this is her first TEFAF showing. Good for her. And good for TEFAF to sponsor a special program aimed at first-timers who’ve been in business for between three years — no novices — and ten years.

Nicolas Fournery, a Paris-based dealer in Chinese and Japanese export porcelain, opened his shop in 2016. His booth is small — starter size — but so are the exquisite objects, among them a pair of figures, a European lady and a gentleman from between 1700 and 1720, made in China for the French market. Porcelain was, among Europeans, a much-coveted luxury good, but, as I wrote in 2023 when I visited the Meissen Museum near Dresden, its recipe was ferociously guarded by high-end Chinese and Japanese makers. It wasn’t until the 1720s that Dresden chemists cracked the code.

Until then, kings, princes, and dukes had to sate their yen for porcelain by buying Chinese or Japanese. Fournery’s two figures, about eight inches tall, are dressed as big shots would be in the court of Louis XIV, down to the man’s tunic, embroidered with chinoiserie figures in keeping with French Rococo taste. The makers probably used French contemporary engravings for inspiration. Colors are vibrant, which is rare. Fournery wants €38,000 ($41,000) for the pair.

I went to TEFAF on the two preview days, but my spies tell me the weekend turnout among collectors younger than, say, 50 was gratifyingly strong. I’ve been going for years and, until recently, traffic jams among motorized wheelchairs seemed inevitable. The vibe has certainly changed, and the addition of contemporary art dealers has probably helped. Younger buyers tend not to want to collect in depth but prefer to graze eclectically. Contemporary art speaks their language, has a hip factor, is less esoteric, and then there’s the curse of the dead white man.

Some of my cronies said that supply was a huge challenge, aggravated by Americans who are less likely than Europeans to sell their art as they ride off into the sunset, and more likely to give their collections to museums. “Things in America just don’t come back to the market,” one dealer told me. “That’s great for the public, but it’s killing the dealers.”

I’ll close with drawings, most of which are concentrated at TEFAF in the works-on-paper wing of the fair. I started as a print scholar, so I know what a niche interest works on paper are. Intimate, fragile, often monochromatic, the Old Masters are arcane and their splash is circumspect but still, in their way, splashy. The works-on-paper galleries displayed gem after gem. Each object demanded close looking, selfish art, I know, but with close looking comes a one-on-one conversation between art and viewer.

I saw Rosalba Carriera’s Portrait of a Young Cistercian Friar, from around 1720, at the Rob Smeets Gallery. It’s a pastel, which softens the subject but also invites subtleties. The Cistercian is young, and balancing the profundity of his life’s choice with inner calm, not certainty, and a natural skepticism, looking askance at the secular world. Carriera was a high-end pastelist specializing in portraits. The Cistercian Friar, just discovered, is going for €180,000 ($195,000). Carriera has been rediscovered not only because she’s a woman but because she’s extraordinary. Art can move us by its soft, sweet beauty. Art can make us laugh, too, as does a Gustav Doré watercolor shown in the Agnews booth. Doré is known for his grandiose illustrations of scenes from the Bible, which inspired Cecil B. DeMille’s religious movies. This watercolor, going for €12,000 ($13,000), is of an old, dozing monk with an enormous fly buzzing around his nose.

TEFAF is doing lots more contemporary art, much of it blue-chip and, I think, available at other high-end fairs. My taste, since I’m curious, tends to lead me to unusual places and things. Stephen Ongpin is a dealer in Old Master and pre-1945 drawings, mostly, but Lavinia Harrington’s Alone with you (I), from 2024, was lovely, moving, visceral, and challenging — so rare. Harrington was born in 1986 — so young — and is British and Italian. She works mostly on handmade paper, using pastel and raw pigment to respond to its fragility and tactile sensation. Alone with you (I) is 65 by 44 inches — not small — and looks like a dream waterfall. She scrapes the paper and applies layers of medium, so it looks like sculpture, too. It’s €18,000 ($19,500). And at Friedman Benda, the New York dealer, Ettore Sottsass’s glass rules. His glass pieces are organic and look like characters in a modern play. Sottsass (1917–2007) was Italian an architect and designer based in Milan. The glass on view is from the 1990s and in the €28,000–€83,000 ($30,000–$90,000) range. It’s not easy to find contemporary art that’s original, but Harrington and Sottsass do it for me.

TEFAF offers surprise after surprise. I think I found the first Surrealist work of art. The first Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924, but the first Surrealist nugget is from around 1700 — a small, bizarre, handsome painting called Ships on a Stormy Sea, Painted Over a Fragmentary Portrait of a Young Man. Offered by the London dealer Simon Dickinson, it’s inscrutable, painted by two different artists, about 30 years apart. One did the portrait, never finished it, and went off and died. Another took his half-empty canvas and painted a seascape fitting into the contours of the portrait, more or less, with the masts and sails becoming elements of the face. There’s lots of speculation about the artists. We’re not sure.

Why Surrealism? Ships on a Stormy Sea is an irrational juxtaposition and an art non sequitur. A stormy sea is turbulent, but what about what we don’t see? The young man is fashionably dressed, very bourgeois, but he’s thinking wild thoughts, a swabbie stuck in a land lubber’s body. It’s €120,000 ($130,000). Whoever did the last adjustment is a visionary, which is what we want an artist to be. Art can please us, but it can puzzle us, too.

TEFAF’s masters and the dealers seem happy with both sales and attendance. Since so many of the serious collectors are American museums, and museums operate on geological time, we won’t know for months what’s moved. The fair closed Thursday evening, so I’ll keep you apprised.