Following last week’s sales in London, every specialist I spoke with was in a buoyant mood. Assembling the works they offered couldn’t have been easy. Where the New York sales are now focused on large art collections that have come to term—my friend George O’Dell’s neat euphemism for everything from death to estate planning—collectors in Europe and the United Kingdom have generally not been pressed to sell their works all at once. (One Belgian couple did, however, choose the right moment to sell.) That said, securing property for the sales is only half of the art market equation; it only works, of course, if buyers also show up. And they certainly showed up in London. The result was the best sales cycle we’ve seen in five years.