Maybe we should blame the film “Lust for Life”, 1956, in which Kirk Douglas strutted his stuff as Vincent Van Gogh. What is certain is the fact that the conventional idea of the artist as an unappreciated genius starving in a garret, whose merits will only be recognised when it is far too late for him to reap any earthly benefit, is ominously well entrenched. What is more, this heart-warming scenario of posthumous glory also has a flip side. It requires that any artists who have the misfortune to be admired in their own day had better make the most of it, since they will inevitably fall from favour in the fullness of time. According to the 2012 Sunday Times Rich List, whose accuracy it would be foolhardy to question, Damien Hirst (number 360, £215m) and Anish Kapoor (number 908, £80m) are doing quite nicely, thank you. So, does this mean that we should be musing on the posthumous obloquy they are bound to suffer?

The simple answer is no. The long view suggests that while some artists inevitably go up and down in the rankings, especially when it comes to the second best, there are exceptionally few genuine rediscoveries of slumbering giants. It is true that whole historical periods and regional schools can suffer blanket dismissal, but the pecking order within them tends to stay the same.

Anselm Reyle (1970-present)

Even with the might of Gagosian Gallery behind him, Reyle’s 10-year-old flame appears to be dimming. The German artist’s big signature foil paintings used to bring in a half-million dollars in the boom years, and became ubiquitous at art fairs — and somewhat symbolic of the “bling art” favored by contemporary collectors. Now you can find them for less than $100,000. What’s worse, nearly half of the paintings that came to auction in 2012 failed to find buyers at all.

Damien Hirst (1965-present)

Okay, this one is speculative. It’s too early to say what’s going to happen to the onetime YBA’s career now that he has left Gagosian amid what some analysts have called a “crash” in his market. Recent works by the artist seem to have dropped by a third when they have come up at auction recently. Does the drop in his secondary-market prices signal the end to his reign as the wealthiest artist in the world? Or is his primary market still holding strong? We’ll have to wait for time to tell on this one.

[...] misses out probably the most expensive contemporary artist ever – at least in modern times. Let me introduce you, if you don’t know it already to Friedland [above, a battle scene by Ernest Meissonier, painted c1861-75, which was bought for the whopping sum of $60,000 in 1878].

To put the Friedland sale in context, the most expensive paintings in the world at that time were Murillo’s Immaculate Conception – which the Louvre bought at the Soult sale in 1852 for nearly £25,000 and Raphael’s altarpiece, the Ansidei Madonna, bought for the National Gallery from Blenheim Palace in 1885 for £70,000.  As a Van Dyck nut, you’ll be astonished to learn that Friedland was almost as expensive as the Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, which was bought by the National Gallery as part of the same deal for £17,000.