From the Fine Art Connoisseur March/April 2026 Editor’s Note:
Great Art Ahead
My faith in connoisseurship’s survival is always restored by The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) at Maastricht, a small but charming city in southeastern Holland. My pilgrimage there this month — my first since 2019 — will surely prove no exception. 
Widely considered the world’s best fair for art, antiques, and design, TEFAF’s 39th edition will host over 260 dealers and galleries hailing from 20 countries, offering works that span 7,000 years. This year’s eight sections are devoted to Paintings, Works on Paper, Antiques, Ancient Art, Jewelry, Modern & Contemporary, Design, and Arts of Africa & Oceania.
Before TEFAF opens, a huge team of experts vet every artwork for quality, authenticity, and condition. The stands tend to be visually spectacular, with superb design, lighting, and installation, and some exhibitors “hold back” their top treasures for as long as a year in order to unveil them there. This is a pop-up museum where everything happens to be for sale.
Close looking is one of TEFAF’s key pleasures. You can easily spot hundreds of directors, trustees, and patrons from museums around the world, exercising their connoisseurial eyes and combing the displays for possible acquisitions. I can’t wait to explore the halls, and then I will publish a large article about what I saw in the next issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. Get ready for some visual treats.
In 2012, the nonprofit European Fine Art Foundation, which runs TEFAF, established the TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund, through which museums can obtain support for conservation projects. This year’s beneficiary is Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, which proposed The Boar Hunt, a monumental masterpiece painted by Peter Paul Rubens for himself c. 1616–18. Its repair is central to a four-year research initiative on Dresden’s holding of nearly 40 Rubens works, and the cleaned painting will hang in glory again from June 2027 onward in the special exhibition Rubens in Dresden. In Maastricht this month, I am looking forward to attending a lecture about the project.
If you can’t make it to Holland this month, fear not. TEFAF’s New York edition (May 15–19, 2026) will bring together 88 exhibitors hailing from 14 countries and offering superb modern and contemporary art, design, jewelry, and antiquities. This is the only art fair held at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory that activates its 16 historic period rooms with immersive displays mounted by the dealers. Many of those spaces were designed by the most prominent talents of the 19th century, including Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, and Herter Brothers.
Finally, please enjoy our 12th annual set of Collectors of Contemporary Realism profiles, which begin on page 94 of this issue. We send our deepest thanks to these inspiring individuals who have so generously shared their thoughts and artworks with us.
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