The market in Old Masters paintings has been given a new lease of life. In the first half of this year, Christie's made $183 million from the sale of paintings created before 1850 – a 232% year-on-year increase after a long period of declining sales.
That's partly thanks to a new, younger cohort of collectors. Of the new clients of Christie's attending all sales in the first six months of 2026, the auction house described 47% as “millennial/Gen Z”, up from 45% a year earlier. At rivals Phillips, “nearly one-third” of new buyers were “millennial and Gen Z collectors”.
Earlier this month, Old Master artworks sold for a combined £51.3 million at Sotheby's in London, including £8 million for a rare, early Rembrandt. The “results represent a resounding endorsement of the power of Old Masters to captivate collectors across generations”, said Elisabeth Lobkowicz, head of Old Masters at Sotheby's.
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Until recently, Old Masters paintings had been a “backwater for scholarly private collectors and institutions seeking to fill gaps”, says Emma Crichton-Miller in the Financial Times. Most of the “best pictures by all the best artists” had already been snapped up by museums and the market entered a lull due to the dearth of exciting, big-name artworks. Younger buyers are helping to solve that problem, because they are, as Crichton-Miller puts it, “untrammelled by tradition”. They are often seeking works by lesser-known or overlooked Old Masters, such as the 17th-century female painter Artemisia Gentileschi.
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Why are Old Masters so popular?
Another attraction is that many of these artworks are relatively more affordable compared with modern and contemporary art. “For $250,000, you can buy a painting that could hang in the Louvre, but $10 million gets you a bad Picasso,” Patrick Williams, a gallerist in New York, tells The Economist. “Portraits and figurative art [in particular] are in vogue, because they are Instagrammable,” notes the paper. “People spend so much time looking at pictures of other people on social media that they are primed to connect to painted ones.” These younger buyers are attracted to the authenticity and simplicity of a bygone age – notwithstanding the “revolutions, plagues and awful dentistry”.
As for desired themes, religious and, as the FT puts it, examples of “Dutch Protestant domesticity” are out; the weird and wonderful are in – “‘difficult subjects' such as beheadings or martyrdoms,” for instance. On 30 June, a 17th-century Dutch painting by an unknown artist of two skulls sold for £431,000 with Christie's in London – 440% more than the low pre-sale estimate. Many wealthy younger collectors made their money in the ever-changing world of technology, and they have shown a propensity to mix and match eras and styles. As art advisor Evan Beard tells Margaret Carrigan on Artnet, “I can see the skull painting very at home in a collection with some [modern skull paintings by Gerhard Richter]”.
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