Elegant in a handmade suit from Naples and Berluti shoes, Noortman looks the part of the polished European dealer. Trained primarily by his father, he caught the bug for the family business during an extended art-buying trip the pair took when he was 18. In New York for the semiannual Old Master paintings auctions, they bought a tiny 17th-century oval portrait on panel from a dealer friend, which they hung in their hotel room to admire. Three nights later, Robert produced the small gem during drinks with another dealer, who promptly bought it. Father and son made enough of a profit, recalls Noortman, to cover their travel expenses for the week, “a wonderful lesson in the art business,” he says, adding of his father, “he’d tell you what he thought was good and why, but always left room for you to teach yourself.”
A Manet seascape, priced at $1.95 million
For this month’s Maastricht, Noortman has lined up a number of paintings that, while respectable, don’t compare to the three Rembrandts that Robert had on offer in 2004. “He’s slowly developing his own style,” says Jan Six, head of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department in Amsterdam and a longtime friend. “His father was a brand, and you can see that he wants to continue [it] in the way that he dresses and talks about art. At the same time, he’s more contemporary, and he understands the new money.”
Touring the preview of Sotheby’s sale of Robert’s personal trove last December in Amsterdam, Noortman points to a collection of 19th-century Inuit snow goggles as one of the “fun” things his father delighted in, and says that for his own collection, he hopes to find “more wonderful objects.” Two weeks later he is halfway across the globe. “In China buying contemporary art,” he writes by e-mail. “Amazing fun.”
