Roll up, roll up for Maastricht! The year's largest and best-known art fair is offering a Roman Paris, renaissance manuscripts, a Perugino, and, just for good measure, an unpublished Matisse

Apollo, March, 2005 by Susan Moore

March is a month when the dealers give the salerooms a run for their money. Most of the time, it is the dealer's loss and the auction-house's gain that the wealthiest clients of both are invariably also the busiest. Hardly anyone these days has the time to saunter down Mount Street or do a bit of window shopping on Madison Avenue or the Quai Voltaire on the off-chance of finding just what they want. The increasing response of the dealers to their rivals claiming ever more generous helpings of the retail art market is to mount a powerful rearguard action in the shape of a spectacular or specialist art fair. This month sees three that are, of their kind, the best in the world--and no auction-house, in any series of sales, can hope to match them.

Presiding over all and spawning many an imitator is the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) at Maastricht in the Netherlands, 4-13 March. Few could have predicted that a small picture fair founded in 1975, long before the eponymous treaty put the town firmly on the map, could evolve into quite simply the most dazzling art and antiques fair in the world--not least given its charmless location in an edge-of-town exhibition and congress centre.

The point is that it is precisely because the fair is where it is--in the middle of Europe, bordering Belgium and Germany and staged in a cavernous 290,000sq ft exhibition hall that is serviced by thousands of hotel beds, an international airport and excellent rail and road networks--that it had any chance of competing with the traditional art and antiques fair venues. None of these--Grosvenor House, the Grand Palais or the Carrousel du Louvre, or Manhattan's 67th Street Armory--could offer generously scaled stands to the 200-plus eminent dealers who flock to Maastricht from fourteen countries, or could so effortlessly accommodate 75,000 visitors.

What distinguishes Maastricht is not only its overwhelming scale but also the concentration of works of art that it affords--the fact that, according to London dealer Johnny van Haeften: '70 per cent--perhaps even 80 per cent--of the major Dutch art available on the international market at this moment will be on offer at Maastricht.' He, for one, closes his St James's gallery and takes his entire stock to the fair. If North European painting is what you are looking for, a trip to Maastricht certainly beats trailing around the galleries of Europe or waiting for something to come up at auction. And Dutch and Flemish masters are by no means the sole focus of this ever-broadening fair. In fact, Maastricht is a series of fairs within a fair, with sections devoted to paintings, drawings and prints, furniture and works of art, antiquities, books and manuscripts, jewellery and modern and contemporary art.

Maastricht offers a rigorous competitive platform for the dealers, who are judged alongside their peers. It also allows for the possibility of crossover buying. Certainly London-based antiquities dealer Rupert Wace is exhibiting for the first time this year on the strength of the fact that three of the most important pieces he has sold recently have been bought by new clients who happened to be contemporary art collectors. The centrepiece of his stand will be a life-size marble Roman marble statue of the youthful Paris leaning against a tree trunk (Fig. 3), its source a much-copied fifth-century BC Greek original. What marks out this one is that it was once in the famed collection of Sir William Hamilton, husband of Nelson's beloved Emma, whose first collection--and much of the second--was acquired by the British Museum. And, unlike many such Grand Tour treasures, it retains its eighteenth-century restorations. Price, 450,000 [pounds sterling].

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What else might one find in Maastricht's incredible melting pot? Hamburg book dealer Dr Jorn Gunther, for instance, offers a lavishly illuminated Missale Fratrum Minorum produced around 1469 by the German scribe Henricus Haring for the convent of S Francesco di Montone near Perugia, and decorated with glorious miniatures by Bartolomeo Caporali. Dated just a little later is Paris dealer Sarti's delightful profile portrait of a young man, believed to be an early work by Perugino (Fig. 1).

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From twelfth-century Auvergne comes a powerful Enthroned Virgin and Child, carved in walnut and with traces of what may well be original polychromy, on show courtesy of Paris dealer Bresset. If you incline towards metalwork, Brimo de Laroussillhe presents possibly the last of the refined late-twelfth century Limoges enamel chasses or caskets with vermiculated backgrounds to remain in private hands (Fig. 4)--and Spanish dealer Elvira proffers an even earlier and compellingly austere version in bronze, probably from eleventh-century Leon.

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Jumping forward, Robbig of Munich shows four baluster-shaped Meissen porcelain candlesticks designed by J.J. Kaendler, while Maurice Segoura of Paris shows a tour-de-force of German rococo carving in the form of an opulent gilt-bronze mirror. Galerie Meyer-Oceanic Art, meanwhile, flourish a very fine u'u or princely war club carved with ten stylised human faces, from the Marquesas Islands, Polynesia, dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Those with a taste for trick drinking cups should make haste to F. Payer Kunsthandel, who offers such a silver-gilt contraption with the mark of Hans Christoph Morbock, Vienna, 1689, and a Rothschild provenance.