During the Second Opium War (1856-1860), British and French troops fought to expand their privileges in China. The war ended in Beijing in October 1860 with the looting and burning of the Yuanmingyuan, one of the official seats of government of the Chinese Emperor to the northwest of the Chinese...

This article discusses the acquisition of East Asian porcelain for the furnishing of the Japanese Palace, Augustus the Strong’s pleasure palace in Dresden. It focuses on two important documents that give information on how and where porcelain was purchased in 18th century Saxony: firstly, the...

This article examines the exhibitions and sales of Yuanmingyuan (or ‘Summer Palace’) loot taken from China in October 1860 by two soldiers in the Anglo-French armies - James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1811-1863) and Captain Jean-Louis de Negroni (b.1820). Both men displayed their collections...

This article examines the ways how the formation of the Japanese ceramic collection of Sir William Van Horne (1843-1915) in Montreal was informed by art dealers and the global market of Japanese ceramics in the late 19th to early 20th century. Van Horne’s dealers, based in Japan and the US,...

The Hon. Henry Marsham (1845-1908) was a British businessman who collected Japanese works of art in Kyoto during the 1900s. His Kyoto ware collection at Maidstone Museum, Kent, is superior in both quantity and quality to other collections in Japan and overseas. The over 700 ceramic works in this...

This article attempts to show how East Asian art was sold and bought in Russia in the first decade after the revolution 1917 by taking the example of the State Museum of Oriental Art (SMOA) in Moscow. The emergence of the SMOA itself was a consequence of political change. East Asian art objects...

The trade in Far Eastern objects of art and consequently the establishment of an art market in Europe originated with the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (V.O.C.) in the seventeenth century. In Berlin during the period from 1850 to 1870, East Asian art was often sold in conjunction with...

In the example of research at the Museum Rietberg, the history of the art market for Chinese art from the provenance perspective presents itself as a history of collections. The article will demonstrate that an investigation into early art collectors can provide answers to the question when, how...

The subject of this article are the East Asian objects in the collection of Philipp Fürchtegott Reemtsma (1893-1959), a leading tobacco and cigarette manufacturer based in Hamburg. In 1968, to mark the tenth anniversary of Philipp F. Reemtsma’s death, his widow, Gertrud Reemtsma, produced a...

We analyze the evolution of the price of paintings in London auctions with a unique dataset of over 200,000 sales in the period 1780-1840. We build a price index for the representative painting through hedonic regressions controlling for the characteristics of auctions and paintings and for the...

This chapter analyzes the risk and return characteristics of investments in artists from the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region over the sample period 2000 to 2012. With hedonic regression modeling we create an annual index that is based on 3,544 paintings created by 663 MENA artists....

The record-breaking prices observed in the art market over the last three years raise the question of whether we are experiencing a speculative bubble. Given the difficulty to determine the fundamental value of artworks, we apply a right-tailed unit root test with forward recursive regressions...

This paper applies the Johansen Cointegration procedure to test the law of one price (LOOP) for twelve international markets of paintings using semi-annual data for the period 1985-2007. Cointegration test is performed in a pairwise arrangement. Price index for each market is estimated using the...

We analyze two reasons for export prices to be different across markets - namely, quality differentiation and variable markups - and attempt to parse their relative importance and some of their underlying drivers. To overcome the substantial measurement issues in this task, we consider a...