Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art

Philip Hook is extremely well qualified to deal with his chosen subject.”—Edward Lucie-Smith, Artlyst “He writes better about the physical nature and impact of painting than anyone I have read for years.”—Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph   “A cultured, witty, clear-eyed, worldly teacher with a fully functioning sense of humor.”—William Boyd, Spectator. and the dealers’ personality, as he shows in his short biographies of the leading historical exponents, Hook incorporates every trait from cunning and charisma to scholarliness and subterfuge.” —Michael

Those who have purveyed art for a living range from tailors, spies, and the occasional anarchist to scholars, aristocrats, merchants, and connoisseurs, each variously motivated by greed, belief in their own vision of art and its history, or simply the will to win. Philip Hook’s history is one of human folly, and greed—yet ingenuity and heroism. From its beginnings in Antwerp, where paintings were sometimes sold by weight, to the rich hauteur of the contemporary gallery in New York, Paris, and London, art dealing has, he shows, been about identifying what is intangible but infinitely desirable, and then finding clients for whom it is irresistible. Philip Hook takes the lid off the world of art dealing to reveal the brilliance, cunning, greed, and daring of its practitioners.  . Rogues’ Gallery is learned, witty, and irresistibly readable. In a richly anecdotal chronological narrative he describes the rise and occasional fall of the extraordinary men and women who over the centuries have made it their business to sell art to kings, merchants, nobles, entrepreneurs, and museums