On 15 October 1958 Sotheby’s of Bond Street staged an ‘event sale’ of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn and Somerset Maugham were there as celebrity guests. The seven lots went for £781,000 – at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world centre of the art market and Sotheby’s as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and pointed the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years.

Sotheby’s had pulled off a massive coup by capturing the impressionist market from Paris and New York and now began an inexorable rise, opening offices all over the world. A huge expansion of the market followed, accompanied by rocketing prices, colourful scandals and legal dramas. London transformed itself from a fusty place of old master painting sales to a revitalised centre of contemporary art, crowned by the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. Tate Modern successfully united new, mostly foreign, money in London with art, offering its patrons a ready-made sophisticated social milieu alongside dealers in contemporary art.

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. While Sotheby’s is the lynchpin of the story, Stourton populates his narrative with a glorious rogue’s gallery of clever amateurs, eccentric scholars, brilliant emigrés, cockney traders and grandees with a flair for the deal.