Last year the massed banks of tulips were yellow; this year they are all pink. Otherwise, the Maastricht Art Fair invites one in with the same display of overpowering luxury that has been its hallmark for 20 years.

It is not a democratic event. This year, with the approval of the dealers, the entry price has gone up substantially to keep the numbers of non-buyers down. However, the 220 dealers exhibiting have a new worry. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have managed to gain entry with galleries that they now own, and the dealers are afraid that these auctioneers’ Trojan horses might lure away their own clientãle.

The visitors, untroubled by all this, are just looking at the thousands of gorgeous works of art on sale amid the flowing champagne. Among the first to arrive, along with Germans and Dutchmen, was the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Among the most startling items are a gigantic bronze spider ( below ) by Louise Bourgeois, one of the series that she showed in the Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2000, on sale for four million dollars at Hauser & Wirth. Then there’s Salvador DalÍ’s largest known painting, a Colossus figure symbolising Spain that is spewing out famous works of art — €2.8 million (£1.9 million) at Lopez de Aragon.

The two star paintings this year are both portraits of women. There is an intensely colourful Renoir of a girl in a garden, Among the Roses , on the Acquavella stand, priced at $45 million (£23.3 million) — though murmurings about Renoir’s artistic stature are getting louder. On David Koetser’s stand there is an exquisite profile of a golden-haired girl by Jan Lievens, painted when he shared his studio with Rembrandt.

Mark Weiss is triumphantly showing a portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger by Holbein. After some debate about the attribution it was fully endorsed by the Maastricht vetting committee, and the handsome young man’s head gleams forth, newly cleaned, on the Weiss Gallery stand for $10 million. Wyatt’s head was later, alas, severed by Queen Mary.

Early sales at the fair included a resounding $1.3 million at the stand of the Mayor Gallery, London, for a work by the pop-and-performance artist Claes Oldenburg — a pair of green shoes made out of muslin soaked in plaster, then painted with enamel. A sensual Paris and Oenone by the 18th-century Jean-François de Troy also sold for a six-figure sum on the Bernheimer-Colnaghi stand.

The European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht, till Sunday. Admission €55, including catalogue

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