TEFAF - The European Fine Art Fair

The Art Newspaper has a good section on the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) now displaying in Maastricht.  The website has a special page set up for the fair at http://www.theartnewspaper.com/special/maastricht which includes info on old and new dealers, museum exhibitions and special events.

The site also has a beginners guide to the show.  Overall, the site is well worth taking some time and exploring the various articles and details about this art fair.

Early sales reports from the fair have been very positive, including the sale of a Henry VIII portrait (see image) selling for around $3.9 million to a European collector (reported by the Antiques Trade Gazette).The art fair runs through March 25th.

From the Beginners Guide on the Art Newspaper website

The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) brings together a huge array of works, from classical antiquities to contemporary art, with everything from jewellery to armour and antique wallpaper in between. The Art Newspaper spoke to scholars, dealers and auction experts—as well as members of each vetting committee—to produce a brief, introductory guide to some of the key objects and fields you will find under Tefaf’s roof.

OLD MASTER PAINTINGS

Key objects

Pentecost, a perfectly preserved late 15th-century panel by the Bruges Master of the Baroncelli Portraits (with the dealer Jean-Luc Baroni). A Vase of Flowers in a Window, With a Distant Landscape Beyond, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621). A rare oil-on-copper work by one of the leading painters of Dutch floral still-lifes (with the dealer Johnny Van Haeften)

What you need to know

Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings have been a feature of Tefaf Maastricht since the fair’s inception 25 years ago. The most fecund of these artists, notably the landscapist Jan van Goyen and the genre painters Adriaen van Ostade and David Teniers the Younger, can often be found in multiple examples sprinkled through the booths, as can the bumptious peasants of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, himself a Tefaf institution. Art historians may sniff, but Pieter the Younger’s cheerful copies of his father’s inventions are perhaps the most popular and expensive 17th-century northern Old Master paintings after Rembrandt, particularly with Belgian and German collectors who are loyal visitors to the fair.

The artist’s enduring popularity can be attested by the sale of The Battle between Carnival and Lent, a copy of his father’s painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which set a record for the artist, going for £6.9m at Christie’s, London, last July. There is a good chance it may resurface at Tefaf.

Source: The Art Newspaper