Market dispatch·London
You'd Need £5m-£10m in the Bank: The Under-40s Reinventing the Old Masters Trade
The Art Newspaper profiles the 30- and 40-something dealers exhibiting at Frieze Masters — from family-firm heirs like Ambrose Naumann and Victor Custot to self-starters like Mattias Vendelmans and Charis Tyndall — navigating entry costs of £5m-£10m and a market long written off as dying.
The Old Masters trade is supposed to be a dying game: shrinking supply, ageing collectors, prices that only the ultra-rich can play with. But at Frieze Masters this week, the liveliest stands are run by dealers in their 30s and early 40s — a generation The Art Newspaper's Anna Brady calls a dynamic trend for the fair. Emanuela Tarizzo, the 38-year-old director of Frieze Masters, says many of them grew up alongside her in the trade and are now opening their own galleries or taking over family businesses.
The barriers they face are formidable. Johnny Van Haeften, the septuagenarian stalwart of the Dutch Old Masters scene, observes that when he started in the 1970s pictures were cheap and plentiful; today, he estimates, opening an Old Master gallery demands at least £5 million to £10 million in the bank. That capital reality shapes the two main routes in: the family firm or going it alone.
The heirs include Ambrose Naumann, 37, son of the dealer Otto Naumann, who was tending bar in 2012 when his father asked for help at Tefaf Maastricht; years as a "glorified intern" later, he started his own business when his father's lease ended, conceding that without his father's inventory he would never have managed it. Victor Custot, 29 and running a tech company, was talked into joining his father Stéphane's Waddington Custot in 2022 after a six-day "probation"; Laura De Jonckheere joined her father's Brussels gallery in 2014 and once converted a young American couple to Old Masters with a group of Hieronymus Bosch paintings.
The self-starters are no less striking. Mattias Vendelmans, 33, a first-time Frieze Masters exhibitor, has ditched the dark velvet walls and gold frames for glossy white floors, sells works over Instagram, and started dealing only in 2022 after working in Carsten Holler's studio. Willoughby Gerrish, 41, treats the fair as a calculated £100,000 risk and is moving into a 2,000 sq ft gallery on Jermyn Street, while Charis Tyndall, who took on the Charles Ede antiquities business in her early 20s, operates with no external backer at all.
