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Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 19452000
By (Author) James Stourton
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Apollo
3rd February 2026
9th October 2025
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Political geography
942.1085
Paperback
448
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
A Times Best Art Book of the Year, 2024
'A riot of a book' Country Life's Books of the Year, 2024
The modern art market was born on a single night. On 15 October 1958 Sothebys of Bond Street staged an event sale of Impressionist paintings from the collection of an American banker, Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Czannes, one Van Gogh and a Renoir. Movie stars and other celebrities attended in black tie and saw the seven lots go for 781,000 at the time the highest price for a single art sale.
Overnight, London became the world centre of the art market and Sothebys an international auction house. The event signalled a shift in power from dealers to auctioneers and pointed the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years. In this climate Sothebys and Christies became a great business duopoly as aggressive, dominant and competitive in the field of art sales as Pepsi and Coca-Cola were in soft drinks. The resulting expansion of the market was accompanied by rocketing prices, colourful scandals and legal dramas. Over the decades, London transformed itself from a place of old master sales to a revitalised centre of contemporary art, a process crowned by the opening of Tate Modern in 2000.
James Stourton tells the story of the London art market from the immediate postwar period to the turn of the millennium in engaging and fast-paced style, populating his richly entertaining narrative with a glorious rogues gallery of clever amateurs, eccentric scholars, brilliant emigrs, cockney traders and grandees with a flair for the deal.
James Stourton is an excellent art historian and brilliant storyteller; a heady combination that makes Rogues & Scholars the must-read art book of the year. * Will Gompertz *
A perceptive, authoritative and highly readable account of the golden age of the British art market. * Philip Hook *
With panache and characteristically elegant penmanship, James Stourton throws open the doors to a riveting chapter in the history of art in which glamorous eccentricities, serious scholarship and a good deal of swindling cohabit... Stourton brings us a gripping and thoroughly researched chronicle of the post-war art market, punctuated with the occasional you couldnt make this up moment. Rogues & Scholars is just as entertaining as it is educational. * Wolf Burchard *
Riveting and gossipy -- Laura Freeman * The Times *Books of the Year* *
Praise for James Stourton's Heritage:
[A] huge, energetic and tightly written tome on the two-and-half-century history of conservation battles in our homeland... A masterful, dynamic and extremely readable survey of one the major issues of our times. Or all times
James Stourton is a British art historian, a former Chairman of Sotheby's UK and the author of Great Houses of London, British Embassies, and the authorized biography of Kenneth Clark. Stourton frequently lectures to Cambridge University History of Art Faculty, Sotheby's Institute of Education and The Art Fund, and is a senior fellow of the Institute of Historical Research. He also sits on the Heritage Memorial Fund, a government panel which meets to decide what constitutes heritage and should be saved for the nation.