Breakfast at Sotheby's is a wry, intimate, truly insider-y exploration of how art acquires its financial value, from Philip Hook, a senior director at Sotheby'sWhen you stand in front of a work of art in a museum or exhibition, the first two questions you normally ask yourself are 1) Do I like it? And 2) Who's it by? When you stand in front of a work of art in an auction room or dealer's gallery, you ask these two questions followed by others: how much is it worth? how muc...

This "expert and elegantly written" book reveals how dealers have been a major force in art history from the Renaissance to the avant garde ( The Guardian, UK).Philip Hook's riveting narrative takes us from the early days of art dealing in Antwerp, where paintings were sold by weight, to the unassailable hauteur of contemporary galleries in New York, London, Paris, and beyond. Along the way, we meet a surprisingly wide-ranging cast of characters—from tailor...

Philip Hook returns to fiction in this collection of short stories. Many are set in the art world, of which the author has deep inside knowledge. Others are about cricket, football, war, espionage and marriage. Some are funny, some are moving, some are surreal. All of them are compulsive reading.

A revelatory, fast-paced account of the most exciting, frenzied, and revolutionary decade in art history—1905 to the dawn of World War I in 1914—and the avant-garde artists who indelibly changed our visual landscapeModern begins on a specific day—March 22, 1905—at a specific place: the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where works of art we recognize as modern were first exhibited. Drawing on his forty five-year fine art career, author Philip Hook illuminat...

In 1892 Degas' painting In the Café was sold for a mere 180 guineas at auction, with the public hissing as the hammer fell. Less than a century later another Impressionist work, Renoir's Moulin de la Galette, sold at Sotheby's for $78 million, accompanied by enthusiastic applause. In this history-cum-memoir Philip Hook, Senior Director of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art department, examines the public's change of heart toward Impressionism. Starting with its shocking novelty and con...

Parnello Moran buys a German romantic landscape at an auction, but then it's stolen from him. When he sets out to recover it he discovers all its recent owners met violent deaths. Gradually he uncovers a deeper past, and the biggest surprise of all - the secret of the soldier in the wheatfield.

1945, an art historian leads a convoy towards Dresden. Fifty years later, Oswald Ginn is sent a photograph of a masterpiece presumed destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. As the art world speculates, three people are propelled on an international search, and someone sits back and watches.

A man is found dead in a London hotel room, the only clue to his identity a polaroidof a lost Impressionist painting. A young man inherits his mother's diaries and realisesher early life in France was much more eventful than he'd realised.And as the extent of the past's effect on the present becomes clear, Daniel iscaught up in a web of conspiracy and betrayal that began decades ago.

While investigating the mutilation of a painting in a London gallery, journalist Minto Maitland finds himself drawn into a horrific story of brutality and betrayal during the Hungarian revolution. Exposing odd connections to art dealer Alexander Courtney, Maitland suspects an appalling secret.

Here for the first time is the history of art dealers, those extraordinary men and women who, over centuries (and almost entirely out of the public eye), built their profession on a singular skill: identifying the intangible but infinitely desirable qualities that characterize the greatest works of art—and finding clients for whom those qualities are irresistible.Philip Hook's riveting narrative takes us from the early days of art dealing in Antwerp, where paintings were sold by we...

As gentrification encroaches on historic Harlem, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award recipient Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of its storied legacy. Drawing on Harlem's history and her own observations, Rhodes-Pitts introduces a variety of observers who shared a common hope that Harlem would become the ground from which blacks fully entered America's democracy. ". a glittering living tapestry ."-Publishers Weekly, starred review

Nina Sankovitch’s American Rebels explores, for the first time, the intertwined lives of the Hancock, Quincy, and Adams families, and the role each person played in sparking the American Revolution.Before they were central figures in American history, John Hancock, John Adams, Josiah Quincy Junior, Abigail Smith Adams, and Dorothy Quincy Hancock had forged intimate connections during their childhood in Braintree, Massachusetts. Raised as loyal British subj...