If art features in the news these days, as often as not it is on account of the extraordinary prices that works can fetch on the market. I guess that, like me, you might have spotted the fact that Hockney’s Nichols Canyon is up for sale, and expected to go for $35 millions.* Every now and then I come across references to art as an investment, and with figures like that being quoted you can see why.
All of us working at the artistic coal face, I suppose, will have daydreams about being “discovered” by some wealthy patron, and getting for our work something close to what, in our secret hearts, we imagine it to be worth. Whether as a buyer or a seller of art work, however, it is important to bear in mind a word of caution.
You probably have not heard of Hercules Brabazon. No: neither had I until this week. Perhaps this should be surprising in view of his celebrity status as a watercolour painter in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A contemporary and friend of John Ruskin, he was supported by John Singer Sargent. He regarded himself as a “disciple” of Turner. An eminent, contemporary reviewer responded to Brabazon’s pictures as follows. “Only an eye accustomed to observe and to memorise the fleeting effects of light and a mind capable of discerning the difference between the recording of light effects and the representation of objects can see all there is in a Brabazon watercolour.” It sounds pretty impressive stuff.
In the light of this warm contemporary reception it is surprising that none of my art reference books contain any reference to him.** Shortly after his death his work fell from fashion, displaced in popular and critical taste by the rise of French Impressionism and all that followed it. By the 1960s it was possible to pick up a Brabazon for a tenner. Brabazon’s watercolours have now recovered in esteem to a great extent, and you might have to pay between £2,000 and £3,000 for one today. The trajectory of his reputation, however, does go to show that the notion of art as an investment might need to be entertained with some caution.
*That figure would put into the shade the $31.8 millions recently paid for a complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
**He does have an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.