New York, New York, U.S.A.: Random House, 1992. 1st Edition Fine hardcover, unmarked and unworn,558 pages,ncludes: Bibliographical References, Index And Chapter Notes. First edition stated on copyright page, 118 b/w photos on plates in 2 sections, world record prices graph,  dust jacket is clipped and very lightly worn"This remarkable book begins with all the dramatic immediacy of a blockbuster novel. Peter Watson takes us behind the scenes at the Christie's auction where van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet was sold for a world record price of $82.5 million. It was the first time such access had ever been granted a writer. The author then turns back the clock to trace the rise of the art market from three key events that took place in Paris, New York and London in 1882, through three critical areas - painting, books and Far Eastern art - right up to the present day. Marcel Duchamp considered dealers 'lice on the backs of artists.' William Blake believed that "where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on." Renoir took a more practical view: 'Get this into your head,' he told a friend. 'There's only one indication for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sale-room.' It may not be the oldest profession, but art dealing has been a vocation since the days of ancient Rome, and it is this crucial link between art and commerce that makes Mr. Watson's history such absorbing one. He has produced a book that is rich in both scholarship and anecdote, one that traces not only the development of the great auction houses, like Sotheby's and Christie's, and the recent and spectacular involvement of Japanese buyers, but also the development of that fascinating breed the dealers: flamboyant salesmen, fastidious scholars and some downright crooks. Generously illustrated with photographs, caricatures and pictures of famous paintings, this captivating and provocative history brilliantly brings to life the connoisseurs and market makers of the art world who have shaped our tastes and influenced our ideas about what constitutes great art." - Publisher. *** CONTENTS: Preface: Beauty as a Commercial Concept. 1. Selling Dr. Gachet; I. 1882-1929: The Post-Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2. "This Painful Subject . . . the Ruinous Tendency of Auctioneering" 3. Outroping, Sales by Candle and Mr. Colnaghi's Levee: The Early Years of the Art Market. 4. Paris in the Golden Age: Manet and the Birth of Modernism. 5. The Street of Pictures: Rue Laffitte and the First Dealers in Impressionism. 6. The Barbizon Boom: Taste and Prices a Hundred Years Ago. 7. Siegfried Bing, Murray Marks and Their Oriental Friends. 8. The Widows. 9. Du Vesne, Duvane, Duveen. 10. Quaritch, Hoe and Belle of the Books. 11. Vollard's Paris, Cassirer's Germany. 12. Sotheby's First Old Master. 13. "291" and the Armory Show. 14. The $10,000 Barrier: Taste and Prices on the Eve of World War I. 15. War and the Major. 16. The Kahnweiler Affair. 17. The Paris Dynasties. 18. The Cult of the Portrait: Taste and Prices on the Eve of the Great Crash; II. 1930-1956: The Un-Gentle Art of Making Enemies. 19. The Great Crash. 20. Bad Blood. 21. The Mathematician and the Murderer. 22. The Great Drought: Taste and Prices on the Eve of World War II. 23. War and the Marshal. 24. Peter Wilson Looks West. 25. Shanghai to Suez, via Hong Kong; III. 1957- Impressionism, Sunrise. 26. The Picasso Business and the Epiphanies of Leo Castelli. 27. Sotheby's versus Christie's. 28. The $2 Million Barrier. 29. Manhattan's New Street of Pictures. 30. Porcelain and Pensions. 31. The Apotheosis of Peter Wilson. 32. The Fall of Sotheby's and the Rise of Alfred Taubman. 33. The New Sotheby's and the New Collectors. 34. The Japanese Passion for Medama. 35. Van Gogh, Inc., and Kaneamari Gensho. 36. Picasso, Inc., and the Galleries of the Ginza. 37. False Start? The Market in Contemporary Art. 38. The Price of Pleasure: Art as Investment. 39. Manhattan to the Marais: The Revival of Europe. 41. Anticlimax: The Art of Zaiteku; Epilogue: The Post-Gachet World.