*
A seller on eBay France listed this nice series of sanguine drawings from the antique this morning. They are not large drawings, slightly larger than a legal sized piece of paper, but the seller has listed them for prices that I honestly believe will never find a buyer. They are monogrammed "L.C." and dated 1802. For the life of me I cannot figure out why a seller would be asking over three hundred and fifty euros each for these drawings. Value depends upon many things, subject matter (nude boys bring the most, followed by male nudes, and at the low end are female nudes; if you own a pre-adolescent female nude of good quality, you can name your own price, they are just that rare), medium, condition, age, and an identifiable, listed artist. These drawings are nicely executed but certainly not worth the equivalent of four hundred fifty dollars each. At that price, the seller will have them long enough to love them even more than he does now or he may be forced to lower those outrageous prices quite a bit. The market will find their value quite quickly and it is definitely not what he is asking. I suspect the seller has no experience in the market and simply pricing them according to the age and some dream in his or her head. I found two nice early male nudes recently on eBay France and made the seller a discounted offer on both. He came back saying he had twenty watchers and had been offered about twenty euros more than my offer. A few minutes ago I noticed they had not sold and he has re listed them at twenty euros less than my offer. Watchers are just that most of the time....... simply watching. A real serious buyer will have programmed an automatic bid on a bidding site like bidnapper and you won't see him before seven or eight seconds before the auction ends. That's called "lurking." You will never know he's there until you see his winning bid. Buying the work of art is his purpose, not driving the price up with an open bidding war. Dreams are funny things when they run up against market realities, they tend to burst like bubbles.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
