A Buyer's Market

"A Buyer's Market" is the second novel in the twelve volume series A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1905-2000). Edgar Deacon owns an antique shop in the neighbourhood of Shepherd Market. Anthony Powell moved to London during the autumn of 1926, renting rooms in Shepherd Market. Jenkins/Powell, describes Shepherd Market, as a place,

"scarcely touched by rebuilding",

meaning that it is decaying. He also compares it to,

"one of those tumble-down dwellings depicted by Canaletto or Piranesi, habitations from amongst which arches, obelisks and viaducts, ruined and overgrown with ivy, arise from the mean houses huddled together below them."

For "The Stonemason's Yard" (1726-1730) , in the National Gallery, London, the Venetian artist Canaletto (1697-1768) took as his subject matter a working area of Venice.
Giovanni Battista Paranesi is famous for his etchings of Rome and of Carceri d'Invenzione.

The real paintings referred to in "A Buyer's Market", Gainsborough's "Mrs Siddons" and Rubens' Chapeau de Paille, are part of the London art environment of Jenkins, although his choice of profession, the art book business, remains a largely avoided topic.

A Buyer's Market Locations

Albert Memorial
Eaton Square

Residence of Sir and Lady Walpole-Wilson.

Louvre Museum

In the first novel in the sequence, A Question of Upbringing, Nick Jenkins, Powell's narrator stayed at Touraine (reference to city of Tours). A Buyer's Market features a flashback to Paris, after the Great War, which Jenkins visits with his parents. While on a visit to the Louvre Museum the Jenkinses stumble upon Edgar Deacon in front of Perugino's St. Sebastian. Deacon is the painter of Boyhood of Cyrus, a work compared to that of the Pre-Raphaelites, Simeon Solomon and Puvis de Chavannes.