Confident dealers offer their best art & antiques in Maastricht; Preview video online

There are 30,000 items worth more than 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) offered by 260 top-tier galleries at the world’s most influential art and antiques fair. Two highlights are extraordinary paintings by Rembrandt and Renoir.

Attracting leading international collectors and museum officials, the 24th annual European Fine Art Fair, TEFAF, in the Dutch city of Maastricht, is open March 18th to 27th. The fair's focus is on great rarities, ranging from antiquities to modern design.

While TEFAF officials recently reported that China is now the second largest market for art and antiques (beating out the UK), many of the buyers here will be European and American, according to some dealers.

“We now see players in the art market with unlimited means,” Jacques Billen, director of the Brussels-based antiquities dealership Galerie Harmakhis told Bloomberg. “The auction houses are extremely successful. Though the dealer market is shrinking, Maastricht is still an opportunity to meet people who are not looking for us.”

Among the show's stars is Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo," priced at $47 million, from New York-based Otto Naumann Ltd. Casino magnate Steve Wynn paid 20.2 million pounds ($32.2 million) for the work at Christie's in 2009. Prior to that, the painting was in the collection of Johnson & Johnson heiress Barbara Piasecka Johnson.

Another draw is the lovely early example of Impressionism titled “Femme Cueillant des Fleurs,” by Renoir, which depicts Monet's first wife picking flowers in a meadow. This picture is a rare de-accession from the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Mass., and comes with a compelling backstory. It is priced at $15 million by Dickinson.

Some twenty more works by Renoir can be admired in the Hammer Galleries (New York) display in TEFAF Paintings. Among them is a fine painting of Renoir's son Claude dating from around 1906. It will go on public show for the first time at TEFAF.

The world’s largest Fancy Vivid Yellow Square Emerald Cut diamond, exhibited by Graff, weighs in at 118.08 carats. It is named after the Delaire Graff estate, one of South Africa’s finest vineyards and priced at €18 million.

Michele Beiny is showing Pandora’s Box. Designed and created by Salvador Dali and executed by Carlos Alemany, this gold box is veneered with lapis lazuli and studded with diamonds. Dali’s signature is in diamond-encrusted platinum.

A major Miró exhibition is being mounted by Landau Fine Art which includes paintings, drawings and sculptures. Wienerroither & Kohlbacher is exhibiting Egon Schiele’s superb 1914 gouache and pencil work on vellum Sitting Nude, priced at €1.7 million, while Galerie Daniel Blau has one of three close-up portraits that Lucian Freud painted of his mother in 1972-73. The Painter’s Mother was always Freud’s favourite and is going on public view for the first time with a price of £2.8 million.

Cohen & Cohen has a highly important pair of Chinese leopards dating from the reign of the Kangxi Emperor c1720. These magnificent 99cm long enameled porcelain figures, with an asking price of £3.5 million, are believed to have been made for the Emperor himself.

Littleton & Hennessy Asian Art, from London, are showing a rare and highly lacquered bronze figure of Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara dating from the early Yuan Dynasty in China c1300. Priced in the region of $8 million, this 147cm high bronze, probably made in the Yunnan area, is among the most powerful of the few surviving Buddhist images from this period.

A suit of South German Stechzeug jousting armour dating from c1490-95 is the only authentic example of its kind remaining in private hands. Exhibited by Peter Finer, it is on sale for €1.9 milion.

Charles Ede, is showing a strikingly beautiful rose granite head of the young Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun from the late 18th Dynasty (1361-1352BC) with a price in the region of £550,000.

Take a fast-moving video tour of the 2011 TEFAF floor from the vantage point of the BMW M3 Gt2 Art Car, designed by Jeff Koons, which is also on view at the fair.