INTERVIEW. Toulouse city of art? “A painting has already sold for more than 2 million euros” assures an auctioneer

What does your job involve?

We are treasure hunters. Concretely, people who wish to sell objects call us or stop by our premises to request an expertise. It also happens that we go to the sellers even if it is rarer. Once the expertise has been carried out, we offer these objects for sale. We are, in a way, the general practitioners of the art market! We give an initial “diagnosis”, and if we are not able to do so, because the object comes from a particular period or because we do not know the object in question well enough, we call on specialists. specialists.

Is Toulouse a great city of art?

Toulouse is a dynamic center of the art market, which regularly offers high quality sales. We are often surprised by what we can find here. To give an example, we already received a painting by Ribera, which sold for more than two million euros at a sale. On the other hand, although we sell a lot of beautiful objects found in Toulouse, there are few buyers from the region. 90% of our sales go elsewhere. We have buyers from other French cities but also abroad. We must also take into account the current economic situation. The French seem more cautious about their purchases of works, more worried. But overall, there are very beautiful objects in Toulouse.

Are there any Toulouse specialties in the field of art?

There aren’t really any “specialties” strictly speaking. However, there are trends that also govern the world of the art market. For a long time, between 2005 and 2015, Asian art was very renowned and very present in Toulouse. This is because many generals from the region had conducted exhibitions there. This market has tightened a little under the Chinese regime of Xi Jinping. But Toulouse benefits from its distance from Paris. People who live in the South, too far from the capital, come to have their works appraised here. This is why we often end up with very beautiful pieces.