This is one of the Brazilian views that the painter did in Haarlem, after returning from America, the memory of which continued to haunt him to the end of his life. Not every discovery costs millions. Noortman was showing one of the most ravishing still lifes by the German painter Ottmar Elliger. Two roses with a surreal, very daintily sculptural quality to their petals, are laid across a tablet supported by the head of a smiling angel. It sold at the private viewing.
Small gems can take longer to go.
When the fair ended, the Agasse had not been sold. Moderate pricing is not confined to little-known artists. Luca Baroni, the director of Colnaghi in London, had discovered a ravishing imaginary landscape, or ''capriccio,'' by Francesco Guardi. Previously unrecorded, the composition of a church standing out on a high promontory against the golden glow of a late summer day is as superbly painted as it is poetic. That one, last seen in a public exhibition in Paris in 1956, is one of Guardi's small masterpieces.