Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a systematic and quantitative study of taste. More specifically it focuses on the painters of the seventeenth-century Low Countries and follows the changes in consumer evaluation of them from the seventeenth century up to 2008. Proceeding from the same starting point as Gerald Reitlinger in his monumental The Economics of Taste, it uses the prices paintings have fetched at auction as a basis for tracing trends in the taste of the art-buying public. Whereas Reitlinger's approach was rather intuitive, this study develops a sound methodological basis for researching taste and auction prices. It is not only quantitative methods and properties of auction prices that require a specific approach: in historical research quantitative data and analyses are only reliable when they can also be tested against qualitative or historical sources. Based on a statistical analysis, various 'universal' painters, such as Rubens and Rembrandt, a
