Does Monet Beat the Dow? How Artworks Perform as an Investment

Everyone loves a story about collectors who bought art for a song and sold it for a million. Once in a blue moon, that actually happens. In the case of Impressionist art, though, dappled landscapes and dreamy portraits by Monet, Renoir, and Degas were oftentimes considered investments before the paint on the canvas had dried.

By the 1920s, Impressionism-as-investment was so entrenched a concept that the New Yorker magazine’s Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, could confidently write in 1926 that “with European monies and industrial values ruinously fluctuating, important modern art, if bought early and modestly rather than belatedly and dearly, is still the gilt-edged investment here.”