Until the last decade or so, the subject of money has often been curiously absent from most books about artists and art history. The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse, 1730–1900 offers an antidote to this much neglected topic, tackling a vast range of material about the role of capital and artistic production from the early stages in Dutch art to a regrettably too brief postscript on the present day. With no illustrations and just a few data-laden tables that might daunt some readers, the authors provide many new insights into the process of how art, picture dealing, and the commoditization of the artist all developed and interwove in the last few hundred years. The rise of the middle-class consumer is another focus, and how this factor and interactions with other forces affected the production of art form a powerful backbone to the research and individual arguments in each section.

The opening chapter zeroes in on the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, using this as both a protomodern prelude and benchmark for the modern art market before the emergence in Britain of the professional art dealer. The explanations and parallels are persuasive and create a base that chapters 2–4 expand in terms of the evolution in the eighteenth century of art galleries, academies, public exhibition systems and organizations, and picture dealers. This is considerable ground to cover, yet Thomas Bayer and John Page raise many salient questions that open new dialogues about these powerful elements of the art world. Sociological perspective is also given, although that is not the dominant methodology here. Thus, while chapter 4 chronicles the rise of the status of the artist and its impact in the art world, the next section explores the always revealing subject of the changing role and authority of the art critic in Britain.

For many readers, the examination of the history of picture dealing and its eighteenth-century trajectory will provide new perspectives on how middlemen and power brokers interacted as well as how revolutionary reproductive prints were in the marketplace, both in the United Kingdom and abroad. Similarly, patronage remains another area that twenty years ago was not deemed a very suitable subject for academic inquiry, but as this book and earlier ones (e.g., Diane Sachko Macleod’s Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity [Cambridge, 1996]) have ably demonstrated, there are critical lessons to be learned from serious study of this topic. In addition, there are probably vast amounts of primary materials like business records to keep researchers busy for years. The authors have accordingly scrutinized the business records of specific dealers like Arthur Tooth, thus providing data that, as they say, “show that the institutionalized trade contributed to a far greater extent to the increase in stylistic variety and innovation that occurred during this period than conventional art history hitherto acknowledges” (6). The professionalization also of commercial art exhibitions and of the art auction are related arenas that have typically been ignored by art historians in the past. However, the saga of James Christie’s auction firm encompasses not merely prices and consumer demand but also how vital a place Christie’s was as a forum for contemporary art.

Chapter 9, entitled “Commoditization and the Artist as Producer: Product Differentiation and the Domestication of Pictures,” considers why and how the Victorian era of the art market differed from the previous century, with conclusions amplified in the last long chapter. In the latter, the so-called Golden Age is chronicled, particularly how it abruptly came to an end, mostly due to photography, mass-marketed prints, and the etching revival. Another factor was the Grosvenor Gallery, cited (192) as a “remarkable model of differentiation on several levels.” Indeed, new points are made about this revolutionary enterprise and business venture, which aimed at no less than challenging the august Royal Academy and overhauling existing agendas for exhibitions in the ways that art was selected, installed, linked with exclusivity, and promoted in London. The final section, a four-page postscript, is far too short, even if it is tantalizing in its beginning assessments of such phenomena in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries as the blockbuster show, sensation pictures, and the “near duopoly … bordering on collusion” (205) of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. This section reads as if it had been severely truncated, when actually, several more pages of commentary, analysis, and even prediction of the future would have been welcome.

An element that is truly novel and highly innovative, even radical, is the merger of this text with a website (http://artmarket.tulane.edu) that includes almost all of the images mentioned in the book. In addition, there is a MediaWiki with links to reader input, and the invitation for feedback from readers regarding these websites and the interactive database still in progress are trailblazing in their implications for future publications on art. Some readers may miss seeing traditional images accompanying this text, but the websites offer both visual and economic details along with data on the transactions scrupulously researched for this impressive tome. For all these reasons, it is likely that art historians, cultural historians, and economists, as well as others, will find this volume extremely useful in increasing understanding of the dealer-centered market—especially during the Victorian era—and how it influenced artists’ decisions about what to paint for consumers.