Dutch Old Master specialist Johnny Van Haeften has been a fixture at TEFAF from the outset. As the London dealer was preparing for the fair, we caught up with him to ask about his experiences.

How does today’s Maastricht compare to the way it was in the beginning?
It’s a completely different animal. The first fairs, starting in 1975, were called Pictura and were just for pictures. In 1978, the first year I did it, there were only 22 participants. The dealers were the only people there sometimes; you could fire a cannon and not hit anybody. The breakthrough came in 1985, when Pictura merged with the Valkenburg antiques fair. By pooling our resources, we were able to advertise, and the fair simply grew and grew from there.

What do you think of the new policy reducing the number of attendees?
It’s a rather extraordinary phenomenon; most fairs are desperate to get their numbers up. But the town is relatively small, and dinner reservations and hotels become quite complicated. But I’ve never been one who wanted to cut down the number of visitors, because I think the fair should be for everybody. The onlooker of today could become the buyer of tomorrow.

How did you get started?
I joined Christie’s straight from school in 1969. My main reason was to work with stamps; I’m a great collector, and I still grab stamp catalogues before Old Master catalogues. Eventually I discovered that my great love was Dutch Old Masters. I looked at them with a stamp-collector’s eye, which makes you realize the incredible detail. For eight years I tried to get into the Dutch pictures department, and they very wisely kept me out because I didn’t have the knowledge or the connections. The only way to get to my beloved pictures was to open my own gallery, so in 1977 I started from scratch.

Did your dutch ancestry influence your interest?
Having a Dutch name is nice if you’re dealing in Dutch pictures. We have a portrait of seven family members done by Jan van Bijlert called “The Van Haeften Family Making Music.” In the 1680s we did have an artist in the family, Nicolas van Haeften, quite possibly the worst painter that has ever been born.

Any notable acquisitions?
There was a Jan Lievens that turned up at Sotheby’s Amsterdam, a marvelous painting of card players from the 1620s. We bought it for about $2.3 million, which turned out to be highest price paid for any work of art in the Netherlands. I was introduced to the owner, the grandson of the original owner. During the war, the Germans overran his village and took everything they could, but they couldn’t take this Lievens and left it, thank God. Later on he found his grandfather dead in front of his house, presumably because he had tried to protect his property. I was very touched by this story. I got my photographers to print a very accurate life-size blowup of the painting on canvas, put it back into the original frame, and sent it to Sotheby’s Amsterdam as a present for the old boy. A nice gesture, I thought, but it backfired terribly. Sotheby’s panicked because they thought I had sent back the picture. They were wondering, is he going to pay? Eventually it was presented to the man, who was overwhelmed and delighted—plus he’s got the money to retire on.

Is this market healthy?
Everybody thinks of Old Masters as quite expensive, but in real terms, compared to contemporary art, they’re giving them away. There’s a great future to this market; it’s survived for 400 years, with a few blips. There were about 3,000 competent artists working in the Netherlands in the 17th century; for the moment, the supply is still adequate to satisfy demand.