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American folk art, however humble its origin, is soaring in value as well-crafted objects like pewter pots, duck decoys, quilts and scrimshaw (erotic examples in particular) become ever scarcer. Photographs are commanding fine arts prices; an original print of Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico sold last week for a record $22,000. "We can see the day when a single photograph will fetch $100,000," says Philippe Garner, a Sotheby's photographic expert. Almost any object from the once scorned 19th century now seems as precious as Suez Canal Co. stock was in its heyday. Twenty years ago, a New York dealer reminisces, "people were giving away Victorian furniture for wood scrap." Today those otherwise indestructible pieces, long derided by the English as "chocolate" (they are Hershey brown), still cost less than glued-and-screwed contemporary furniture—but probably not for long: already a Victorian sleigh bed sells for as much as $30,000. Early American furniture, particularly colonial adaptations of Queen Anne, Chippendale and Hepplewhite, are worth far more than 18th century English pieces of the same style.
Victorian painting from both sides of the Atlantic has emerged triumphantly from post-Reginal depression. Long dismissed as sentimental kitsch, mighty canvases of noble beasts, Highland crags and soul-pierced virgins were selling for at most $1,000 in 1967; they go these days for up to $100,000. A sale of 19th century paintings at Christie's in Manhattan returned $1.9 million. "It was a lot of rubbish," snorted one Christie's man.
Over the past six months, such objects as ivory and jade pieces and antique silverware have all recorded huge price increases at auction. Among several categories of fine arts that experts believe to be underpriced but rapidly appreciating in value: 17th century old master drawings and prints; Victorian furniture, paintings, drawings, porcelain, silver and antiques of all kinds; Japanese pottery and porcelain, ivory and enamels; Italian baroque paintings and Renaissance statuary; American primitives; Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Also upward bound are American Indian artifacts, antique gold watches, rare manuscripts, books and autographs, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and art deco furniture. It seems that nothing that can be collected is being neglected. Well, almost nothing. Among the few items that have not appreciably gained in value in recent years: Jacobean furniture and portraits by lesser English artists of the 18th and 19th centuries.
What kind of people are spending for such things? And why? An immensely wealthy individual—a Getty, a Norton Simon, a Mellon—finds in great art what eluded Alexander of Macedon—a last world to conquer. It is a lust to which overachievers have been notoriously susceptible, from Catherine the Great, who built Leningrad's incomparable Hermitage ("I am not a nibbler but a glutton") to U.S. Industrialist Joseph Hirshhorn, the great benefactor of the Smithsonian ("I have a madman's rage for art"). To be sure, such stupendous collectors and donors still make record purchases. But it is not the proud possessors who crowd the salesrooms and find bonanzas in baubles.