This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
For two years now, a chorus of art-world doomsayers has been insisting that the trade is heading Thelma and Louise-style over a cliff. The gallery system no longer works, Britain’s billionaires are fleeing for softer tax regimes, Asian collectors have vanished into the mist and even Sotheby’s is struggling. Mediocre auction results only fuel the despair.
Some of that may even be true. What is also true is that the upper reaches of the market — works above $5 million — are quieter than they have been for a decade. But does weakness at the top trickle down to the rest? Hardly. The “art market” is not a single thing, but a patchwork of sub-markets that occasionally overlap.
The buyer of a Chinese imperial bowl does not necessarily also consider buying an Impressionist landscape. Even within a single artist’s oeuvre, appetite is uneven: late Renoir versus early Monet, Picasso’s Blue versus his eroticised 1960s works.
According to Dr Clare McAndrew’s UBS Art Market Report for 2025, all price points are down — except for the sub-$5,000 tier: “smaller dealers with turnover less than $250,000 reporting annual sales growth of 17 per cent, and fine art auction sales at prices less than $5,000 [are] increasing”.
Why? Two reasons. First, much of the traditional market is built on cyclical inheritance: every generation sells and rebuys furniture, ceramics and pictures that their parents once owned.
Second, the long decline in prices for traditional works has made fine art from earlier centuries remarkably affordable once more. English and European furniture, Old Master paintings, miniatures, ceramics, tapestries and sculpture — most have fallen by as much as 75 per cent since the millennium. For the few who still care, it is a buyer’s paradise.
When I joined Christie’s in 1997 — an earnest young man with ink-stained fingers and irrepressible enthusiasm — I was placed in the furniture department. It was then one of the firm’s great profit engines, second only to Impressionist and Modern pictures. The Badminton Cabinet, for example, was sold in 2004 to the Prince of Liechtenstein for £19 million.
In those days, great English furniture from legendary 20th century collectors — Percival Griffiths, Samuel Messer, Norman Colville — was sought after with an almost religious zeal. Condition and provenance mattered.
Great English Country House provenance mattered even more. A desk that had once graced a ducal library, and appeared in one of Country Life’s haunting black-and-white photographs of tranquil, empty interiors, carried a near-mystical aura.The peak came in 1999, when a single furniture sale totalled just under £10 million. The direction since has been mostly downhill. But there are signs of life again.
Sales formed from great collections assembled with care over years or decades have always outshone the anonymous “mixed ownership” auctions. Yet the prices have changed dramatically. Objects that sold for £100,000 at the turn of the century now fetch less than half that, sometimes a fifth.
That hurts, but it is also a temptation. Beautiful English furniture is now back within reach, and buyers are creeping back, slowly.
There are, however, new rules. Condition now matters more than ever: a fine commode in perfect order will sell at a price; the same piece with a replaced foot will not. What has changed is that provenance no longer holds its old sway.
Two decades ago, a titled origin was a passport to desirability. Today, it is something of a curiosity. Buyers want pieces from an approved design guru, not relics from generations of family ownership.
Consider the recent “tastemaker” sales at Dreweatts, Britain’s leading and most energetic outside-of-London auction house. In 2023, the Robert Kime sale carried a low estimate of £1.87 million and totalled £9.64 million — five times expectations, with every lot sold.
The sale of the contents of the Pimlico showroom of interior decoration company Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler in February 2025 brought in £650,000 against an estimate of £180,000.
Contrast that with the old-fashioned “attic” clearances from country estates — Adlington Hall, Powderham Castle, Brocklesby Park. Their results were respectable but modest: £870,000, £537,000 — double their estimates perhaps, but nothing like the decorator-driven feeding frenzies.
The shift is clear. The modern buyer cares less for lineage and more for atmosphere. They want pieces with the imprimatur of a renowned designer’s hand. The gilt mirror that once hung in a duke’s bedroom competes now with the painted console from a Mayfair decorator’s flat.
So whilst the billionaires are off chasing tax exile and the top end of the market takes a breather, others are rediscovering the world of the great connoisseurs of the 20th century, where beauty, craftsmanship and history are worth more than fashion, just as long as it’s guided by the hand of a great decorator with an “eye” for something.
If the doom-mongers are right that the art market is hurtling toward the abyss, it’s doing so in a very handsome Georgian armchair.
