Such successes are far from guaranteed. Like any other industry to which people are drawn by the glow of fame and fortune emanating from those at the top, the art world has a very narrow peak of achievement and a wide base of footsoldiers, bottom-feeders and also-rans. One of those at the base of the hierarchy was Alex Parish. As he himself says, ‘I’ve been down to a suitcase more than once in my life.’ Born in 1954 into a lower-middle-class American family, he majored in art history at Ohio Wesleyan University and then moved to New York, where he worked in the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art. He left after two years and tried unsuccessfully to set himself up as a dealer, but ‘through a combination of zero training, zero initiative, a certain amount of youthful lack of discipline, etc., I ground to a halt after a few years’. He went to London in the early 1980s and took a one-year course in the art market, not at a prestigious establishment like Sotheby’s Institute of Art, but at a private school, the New Academy for Art Studies, run by art historians Lucy Knox and Roger Bevan. When he returned to New York, he worked for a while in another gift shop, this time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then ‘begged to get the shittiest job at the shittiest auction house in New York City, and managed to do it. I worked there for two years and ended up writing their catalogue.’ While he was there he succeeded in identifying an interesting-looking undervalued painting that had been consigned to auction, the kind of painting known in the trade as a sleeper. The Salvator Mundi can well lay claim to being the greatest sleeper ever discovered.
The painting Parish spotted was a seventeenth-century Dutch pastoral scene, which he brought to the attention of the renowned Old Masters gallery Colnaghi. It was a gesture that displayed an appropriate combination of knowledge and ambition. Colnaghi took him on, and he worked for them in New York for two years, from 1980 to 1982, but not in a high-profile position. It was not an easy business in those days, he recalls. ‘No one was selling old Italian pictures or English pictures, or anything like that, in New York at the time.’ After a couple of years he went to work for Christie’s. It was another low-paid job, but he was becoming increasingly fluent in the lingo of art market insiders: ‘I was essentially the guy on the floor, taking the pictures into the back room, black-lighting them [putting them under an ultraviolet light to show up how much over-painting had been done], turping them down [cleaning them with turpentine], showing them to all the trade [that is, not to private collectors but to dealers and gallerists, who usually get the first look at new arrivals].’ He had one further invidious task: ‘I was the one who always got sent down to the front counter to tell people that their van Dyck was really not what they thought it was, and thank you for coming.’
At Christie’s, Parish found once again that he had a talent for spotting sleepers. ‘I was working late one night in 1985,’ he remembers. ‘I was the only person around from my department, and a picture came in. I got a call from a girl downstairs, “Please come take a look at this painting before you leave.” I went down and there was an enormous picture, four feet by six feet, with a couple of mirrors, just dropped off by some picker.’ A ‘picker’ is a dealer-middleman who buys from myriad regional auctions, from the estate sales of deceased collectors and from antique shops across the United States, and then takes the works to New York and consigns them for sale, hopefully for a higher price. ‘I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh my God, this could be by Dosso Dossi.”’ You need a thorough knowledge of sixteenth-century Italian painting to know a Dosso Dossi when you see one. He is one of those few artists, like El Greco or Gustave Moreau, who seem to exist outside history. His mysterious paintings of obscure allegories and mythological scenes, featuring magicians, pygmies and unicorns alongside the more conventional array of saints and madonnas, all bathed in the gentle, golden evening light of Venice, reach forward from the Renaissance to the Primitivism and Surrealism of the twentieth century.
‘So I told the girl, “Don’t tell anyone about this. It could be worth $100,000,”’ Parish told me. ‘And I called my boss, who was still over at the main building, and I said, “I think there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And he was totally dismissive. “Shut up. Get back to work.” End of story. What was I to say? I’m just a flump. He was an expert. So I totally forgot about it. About two weeks later, I’m in a meeting with someone, and I get a call from him and he says, “Oh my God, there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And I’m like, “Yes.”’ Parish’s deadpan indicates a life full of rejections because he didn’t come from the right social strata for the art world.
Experiences like these led Parish to an epiphany. ‘The pickers and runners would arrive at Christie’s with a truckload of paintings, and I would value each picture. I’d look at what they had and it was like, “No, that’s $4,000. That’s $2,000. We don’t want that, we don’t want that, we want this.”’ He could see that most of the runners did not know enough about art history to know what they were buying. ‘I saw a gap in this supply chain for someone who had the knowledge to go out and look in the backwaters of America.’
So he set himself up once again as an independent dealer, specialising in Italian painting. Once again, it didn’t work out. It was still difficult to find buyers for the Italian pictures he unearthed. In the meantime, his wife gave birth to triplets and he moved out of New York to a larger house. He now had a large family and a small income. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, buying old paintings and then ‘shovelling’ them through the auction houses. It was around this time that he became a born-again Christian, a highly unusual commitment for someone in the art world.
Help came around 1996 in the form of a phone call from the largest Old Master dealership in the world, founded by Richard Green. Green has galleries on Bond Street in London, but was looking for someone to find paintings for him in the United States. ‘In their heyday, they were flipping,’ says Parish – using another art market term, this time referring to fast-turnaround buying and selling – ‘something along the lines of six hundred pictures a year – two hundred at fairs, two hundred through their galleries and two hundred through auctions.’ Parish worked for Green’s son Jonathan, who told him, ‘Go and look for pictures for us.’
Jonathan Green sent Parish into the hinterlands of America to scour auction houses, estate sales and remote regional galleries for promising works of art. ‘I needed to be trained at first, because I didn’t know anything about the breadth of merchandise they bought, but it turned out to be a happy marriage because I didn’t hugely affect the bottom line there,’ Parish told me, indicating that his salary was modest. Meanwhile, his contract permitted him to buy and sell works of art for himself on the side, although a gentleman’s agreement meant his employer got first refusal. In addition to travelling, he subscribed to trade newspapers and catalogues, going through them and asking for Polaroids of any pictures that looked promising. But, he says knowingly, ‘Within a few years the digital revolution totally reinvented this business.’
At the time, the United States was awash with paintings whose value their owners did not have a clue about. From the late nineteenth into the middle of the twentieth century, American collectors had ‘vacuumed up’ European Old Master paintings, usually buying from impoverished European aristocrats whose wealth had been eroded by the recessions of the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, and by the two World Wars. ‘All the Americans were desperate for class, and all the Europeans were desperate for money,’ says Parish. This was the era in which the precursors of today’s billionaire art collectors, robber barons like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon and John Rockefeller, amassed peerless collections which later formed the foundations of the country’s great museums. But less prominent middle-class families also collected. The paintings they bought were often unsigned and in poor condition. Over the years they had been damaged, become the victims of misguided restoration, and been passed down from generation to generation until they reached the hands of people who weren’t interested in art. ‘These pictures were finally starting to bubble up into the market.’
Thus was born a perfect storm of lightning-fast information technology, surging supply and deep demand. Parish was a like a meteorologist who tracked the new commercial climate. ‘There was this frontier in terms of Old Masters, where all these pictures were coming up and no one knew what they were being sold, and I was looking