TEFAF Maastricht Returns With 276 Dealers and a $9.9 Million Renoir on Offer
In Maastricht this spring, TEFAF is once again making its case as the art world’s most concentrated lesson in connoisseurship — and its most theatrical marketplace. The fair’s 2026 edition brings together 276 dealers from 24 countries, spanning more than 7,000 years of art history, from antiquities and Old Masters to 20th-century icons.
For New York dealer Hall, the draw is straightforward: TEFAF is where galleries reserve their most consequential discoveries. In an email, he described it as “the most important fair for pre-1914 paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture and the decorative arts in the world,” adding that the competitive staging and visual ambition of the booths can be “worth the trip” on its own.
Among Hall’s highlights are works by French genre painter Louis-Léopold Boilly (including a canvas not seen publicly for more than a century), Baroque French landscapist Claude Lorrain, 19th-century German Realist Adolph Menzel, and Baroque painter Salvator Rosa — represented by what Hall says is the artist’s only known work on copper.
The centerpiece of the presentation is an early Italian panel: Bernardo Daddi’s “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter and Paul, Saint Zenobius, a Bishop Saint and Six Angels” (1335–37), priced at $6 million. Hall has called the gilded, gold-ground painting “a unique survival from 14th-century Florence.” Modest in scale — roughly two and a half feet tall — the work likely functioned as a devotional image for a private home, evoking the atmosphere of an ecclesiastical interior. The surrounding panels, Hall notes, were likely executed by Giovanni Gaddi, the Master of the Misericordia.
TEFAF’s reach, however, is not limited to the pre-1914 canon. Landau Fine Art, based in Montreal, Canada, and Meggen, Switzerland, is bringing a cross-section of 20th-century material, including paintings and sculptures by Italian artist Marino Marini (1901–1980), works by Spanish artist Joan Miró (1893–1983), and pieces by American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997).
Anna Janson Evans of Landau Fine Art, a longtime TEFAF exhibitor, emphasized the fair’s breadth and density of expertise. Speaking by phone, she said TEFAF “remains, to us, the greatest art fair in the world,” citing the range of periods represented and the concentration of specialists across categories.
In New Orleans, M. S. Rau is using its third year at TEFAF to underscore its ambitions at the top end of the market — while still keeping a foothold in more accessible price points. Owner and CEO Bill Rau is presenting what he calls an “exceptionally important” painting by French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1919): “Le chapeau aux cerises” (ca. 1884), tagged at just shy of $9.9 million.
The intimate portrait, under two feet tall, depicts Aline Charigot — Renoir’s future wife and a recurring presence in his work — wearing a hat decorated with cherries. Rau described Charigot as the artist’s “favorite muse,” and positioned the painting as a product of Renoir’s peak period. Elsewhere in the booth, the gallery is also showing works by French Impressionists Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) and Claude Monet (1840–1926), alongside a Fauvist Henri Matisse (1869–1954) that Rau says has already prompted loan requests.
According to Rau, the Matisse was shared with the gallery’s email list only a week before, and the response was immediate: requests to borrow the painting arrived from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Musée d’Orsay. Not every object at M. S. Rau is priced in the millions, however; the gallery says it is also offering works starting at $20,000.
As always at TEFAF, transparency around pricing varies: some dealers disclose figures to the foundation, while others keep them private. Still, the numbers that do surface — from Daddi’s $6 million devotional panel to Rau’s near-$9.9 million Renoir — signal the fair’s continued role as a bellwether for the high end of the market, where scholarship, scarcity, and spectacle converge.
TEFAF Maastricht runs with a roster that reads like a map of the global trade in historic and modern art. For collectors and institutions alike, the fair remains a place where museum-grade works appear briefly, under bright lights, before disappearing again into private hands — or, occasionally, onto a museum’s loan calendar.
