Although there is something of the manor in Adrien Meyer, he was, rather, to the rostrum born. Meyer got the urge to be an art auctioneer at age eight, when, while growing up in Paris’s affluent Seventh Arrondissement (“not far from the Musée d’Orsay”), he went with his father, a banker, to the sales conducted at the venerable Hôtel Drouot. He instantly became intrigued by the man who waved a wooden hammer but ruled the room with sheer force of charm and a curious knack for getting people to raise their hands.
“I was hooked by this mysterious, very different world—I never thought for another moment about doing anything else,” Meyer told me one winter morning while sipping tea in a V.I.P. “skybox” overlooking the softly lit auction room at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center, his professional home since 2014.
