Duveen The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time by SN Behrman (The Little Bookroom, £8.99)

THE story of Joseph Duveen gives a fascinating insight into how the modern day art and antiques dealer came into being, and how many of the world's famous paintings found their final resting-places.

Forget the likes of Lovejoy, Lord Duveen, as he became, was undoubtedly one of the most successful art dealers of the 20th Century.

He was born in 1869, above a furniture shop in Hull, one of the 11 children of an obscure dealer in Delft ceramics.

Early in life he noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America plenty of money, and his astonishing career was the product of that simple observation.

From 1886, when he was 17, he was perpetually journeying between Europe, where he stocked up, and America, where he sold.

Many of the most famous Italian Renaissance pictures of the world passed through his hands and, after the exchange of very large amounts of money, into the hands of some of the richest men in America and from them into public galleries.

During his dazzling career he was art dealer to such as John D Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst.

He used his skills to fill the mansions of the rich with masterpieces.

Among his most significant acquisitions were such as Rembrandt's Old Lady with a Book and Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy.

Duveen deployed a variety of strategies, such as telling an individual he was not yet ready to own a work of such importance, suggesting that he could not afford it, or indicating that the painting was destined for another, more sophisticated buyer. The result, invariably, was to make a client so lust after an object that by the time Duveen mentioned a price, regardless of how astronomical, the sale was a fait accompli.

By the time Duveen died in 1939, at the age of 69, Europe was on the verge of the Second World War and the dawn of a new era in art collecting.

This book captures the spirit of an extraordinary man.

Beverly Abbs