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“The Master of …”: creating names for art history and the art market

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Abstract

The value of a painting is influenced above all by the artist who created it and his reputation. Painters nowadays are easy to identify and are used to signing their artworks. But what about those whose names have not survived the test of time? This paper contributes to the understanding of art valuation and art brands on the auction market. It focuses on a particular subset of anonymous artists labelled with so-called provisional names (“Master of …”). After considering the origins and reception of the practice of creating names for unrecorded artists, we empirically investigate the market behaviour of this niche segment. Based on comparative price indexes and hedonic regressions, we show that masters with provisional names have not only become autonomous brand names that are highly valued by the art market; they also outperformed named artists between 1955 and 2015. In the second phase, we analyse the provisional-name linked elements valued by the market. We find that art market participants pay attention to the creator of the provisional name, its long-term recognition and market visibility, and the typology of the names.

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Notes

  1. See The Master of the Plump-Cheeked Madonna (active in Bruges, first quarter of the sixteenth century), The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic, Augustine, Margaret and Barbara, Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza (New York), Renaissance (sale 2819), 29 January 2014, lot 105. Presale estimate: USD 400,000—USD 600,000.

  2. According to Nash (2008 p. 123), it was not until 1420 that Flemish artists progressively started signing their works. This practice was adopted only very gradually and was not systematic before the nineteenth century (Chastel 1974).

  3. According to Turner (1996, p. 611), anonymous masters should not be confused with named artist with the prefixed title “Master” and no surname, as in Master Bertram.

  4. Young British Artists.

  5. Note that the concept of petit maîtres remains debated since it is unclear whether their anonymity is due to their poor skills or to our current misunderstanding of their art (Bücken and Steyaert 2013, p. 6).

  6. Note that the same years correspond to the publication of other reference books relying on the Master’s concept (Beazley 1925; Stange 1934–1961; Sterling 1941; Berenson 1957–1968).

  7. Some authors however disagreed with this concept. Wilenski (1960, p. XI;12) criticizes the use of provisional names based on style ascription, claiming that they confuse rather than clarify, and recommends maintaining the anonymity of unrecorded artists.

  8. One of the main reasons is that Beazley’s system of attribution was highly criticized by one of his colleagues and rivals, Edmond Pottier, curator at the Louvre (Rouet 2001). On the contrary, Friedländer’s provisional names did not face such radical opposition.

  9. Provenance information affords evidence of previous appearances of these paintings on the art market (see for example, De Vos 1969, pp. 219–301).

  10. Based on a sample of 200 sales catalogues recorded in the Rijksbureau voor Kunst Documentie’s collection (The Hague), the INHA (Institut Nationale d’Histoire de l’art, Paris), and the Getty Provenance Index database.

  11. American Art Galleries, Highly Important Collection of Ancient Painting, 18 January 1918 (lots 70 and 56).

  12. In his prologue, Châtelet (1996) provides a historiographical synthesis on this controversial issue. Foister and Nash’s contribution results from a symposium that took place at the National Gallery in 1996. In their study, greater attention is paid to scientific investigations and technical analyses, but their conclusions still reflect the difficulty of concluding on a definitive identification. As pointed out by Campbell (1998, p. 72) “The painter of the “Flémalle” panels has much in common with Jacques Daret and Rogier van der Weyden and has therefore been identified as their teacher Robert Campin. It must be stressed however that there is no general agreement on this identification”.

  13. Hulin de Loo and Friedländer died in 1945 and 1958, respectively.

  14. This is the case, for example, of the Master of 1473, a Bruges master whose unique reference painting is a triptych entitled The Triptych of Jean de Witte, purchased by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium through the Brussels-based gallery Robert Finck in 1963.

  15. Born between 1390 and 1568 and active in the Southern Low Countries.

  16. Initially our sample accounts for 874 observations from which buy-ins were excluded. The Master of the Double Portrait of Cleveland and the Master of 1521 have been intentionally omitted from the sample because there is no firm evidence of their official recognition by the academic field and they might therefore be a salesroom’s invention.

  17. e.g. Master of the Saint Lucia Legend—Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy—Master of the Saint Lucy Legend—Maître de la Légende de sainte Lucie.

  18. There is a large literature about the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century workshop system and authenticity issues raised by such mechanism of production. A lot of paintings were produced under the name of the master who ran the workshop, while the identity of his pupils, assistants, journeymen and other executants was not meant to be divulgated. Nowadays, original and autograph paintings by the master are viewed as high-quality paintings while those executed by anonymous hands, from models provided by the master, usually have a lower symbolic and monetary value. Scientific technologies of investigation have played a major role in the differentiation of those hands.

  19. Under the category “Identified masters”, we include not only autograph paintings but all the works attached to the name of identified masters with attribution qualifiers (“attributed to”, “studio of”, “circle of”, “follower of”, etc.).

  20. Similarly, the category “Master with provisional names” includes pictures attached to the name of these masters with attribution qualifiers.

  21. And even this might be disputed. If one imagines a buyer with no art history knowledge, a name such as Lichtenstein could be associated to central Europe or Germany rather than to the USA.

  22. Artist’s names (in the case of unidentified masters, the paintings were sorted on the basis of the artistic school they belong to: Flemish, Antwerp, Brussels, etc.), attribution qualifiers (except for unidentified masters), date, signature, provenance, certificate, previous exhibition, existing literature, dimensions (height and width), materials, techniques, subjects, salesrooms, years. Most of these controls (except dimensions) are dummy variables that take the value 1 if the condition is satisfied or 0 otherwise.

  23. Most famous names have been confirmed by Ginsburgh and Weyers (2006, p. 24) who demonstrated that they were amongst the most sustainable and acknowledged names throughout art history.

  24. Master of the Parrot-0.858*; Master of the 1540s-1.189**; Master of Delft-1.144*; Master of the Antwerp Crucifixion-1.339; Master of the Legend of Saint Barbara 1.521**; Master of the Amsterdam Death of the Virgin-1.559**; Master of the Baroncelli Portraits 2.575***; Master of the Prodigal Son-1.525***. Note that most negative coefficients are related to the sixteenth-century masters, while rarer fifteenth-century artists have mostly positive coefficients.

  25. We conducted several interviews in 2017 in London-based art galleries and salesrooms specialized in the market for Old Masters.

  26. Most of the names created by Friedländer are logically found in his book (with the exception of the Master of the Gold Brocade), but are also included in Thieme & Becker and the Grove Dictionary of Art. Inclusion generates collinearity with the other variable “By Friedländer”. Indeed, 89% of observations are attributed to provisional names included in Die Altniederländische Malerei, 708 are attributed to provisional names mentioned in Thieme & Becker, and 661 observations are attributed to provisional names recorded in the Grove Dictionary of Art.

  27. Most of other variables remain robust when the Art Dictionaries variable is excluded from the model.

  28. These occasional cases do not seem to affect our results (cf. The Master of the Plump-Cheeked Madonna).

  29. Nonetheless, references to prestigious and well-known collectors could obviously add value to a brand name, especially about provenance.

  30. A third option would have been to include a binary variable for every creator, but with several cases of unique sales, this would have led to collinearity issues.

  31. In total, 59 lots ascribed to The Master of 1518 are detected after 1966 in our sample. Concerning the simultaneous use of both names, see for example: Jan van Dornicke, formerly known as The Master of 1518, Triptych with the Adoration of the Magi, Nativity and Flight into Egypt, Sotheby’s York Avenue (New York), Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture, 28 January 2010, lot 152. That some scholars and museums still leave this identification open is one possible reason for mitigating this behaviour (Born 2010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Centre Emile Bernheim, Université libre de Bruxelles, 50 av. Roosevelt, CP 114/03, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Kim Oosterlinck

  2. Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), Department of History, Arts and Archeology, Université libre de Bruxelles, 50 av. Roosevelt, CP 103, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Anne-Sophie Radermecker

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Correspondence to Kim Oosterlinck.

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Authors are thankful for Diana Greenwald’s relevant comments, and highly useful remarks and recommendations suggested by two anonymous referees during the reviewing process.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Standard hedonic controls

With the exception of prices and dimensions, each characteristic is described by a variable that takes the value of one (if the characteristic is present) or zero otherwise.

  • Attribution qualifiers By (autograph), By and studio, Attributed to, Studio of, Circle of, School of, Follower of, After;

  • Technique Oil, Tempera, Other techniques;

  • Material Panel, Canvas, Other Materials;

  • Subject Allegory, Genre scenes, Landscape, Mythology, Portrait, Religious, Other scenes;

  • Dimensions height and width expressed in centimetres;

  • Date takes the value of one if the painting is dated, zero otherwise;

  • Signature takes the value of one if the painting is signed, zero otherwise;

  • Provenance takes the value of one if provenance information is provided, zero otherwise;

  • Exhibitions takes the value of one if the painting was previously exhibited, zero otherwise;

  • Literature takes the value of one if the painting is mentioned in the literature, zero otherwise;

  • Certificate takes the value of one if the painting is accompanied by a written certificate of authenticity, zero otherwise;

  • Salesrooms Artcurial, Bonhams, Christie’s London, Christie’s New York, Christie’s others, Dorotheum, Drouot, Koller, Lempertz, Phillips, Piasa, Sotheby’s London, Sotheby’s New York, Sotheby’s others, Tajan, Other salesrooms;

  • Year of sale from 1955 to 2015.

See Table 7.

Table 7 Names of artists: (with the total number of observations by MPN)
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Appendix 2. Regression results

See Table 8.

Table 8 Results of hedonic regressions for MPN, names masters and anonymous masters
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Appendix 3. Regression results of Model 1 (robustness tests)

See Tables 9 and 10.

Table 9 Inclusion of each variable in the Friedländer model
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Table 10 Successive addition of each variable in the Friedländer model
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Appendix 4. Regression results of Model 2 (robustness tests)

See Tables 11, 12 and 13.

Table 11 Descriptive statistics by generations
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Table 12 Inclusion of each variable in the generation model
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Table 13 Successive addition of each variable in the generation model
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Appendix 5. Robustness test

See Table 14.

Table 14 Robustness test—cases of unique sales excluded from the generation model
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Oosterlinck, K., Radermecker, AS. “The Master of …”: creating names for art history and the art market. J Cult Econ 43, 57–95 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-018-9329-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-018-9329-1

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