“I want her,” Marc Mayer says, his eyes locked on a Chinese ceramic figure maybe two feet high. Her chubby face is telltale. For him, she’s also irresistible. “You can spot a Tang a mile away,” he says, putting on his reading glasses, leaning in for a closer look. “Oh, wow,” he says, and that’s all he says. The fifty-four-year-old director of the National Gallery of Canada is smitten.

Like all lovers, he goes through phases. At the moment, he is deeply into collecting bugs for his living room shelves, but during another stretch he was most obsessed with seventeenth-century Chinese ceramics. He loved the objects themselves, thought they were beautiful, but in some ways he was more intrigued by how they were made. He became crazed with the notion of process. “Generations of craftsmen,” he remembers thinking, “trying to figure out the chemistry between the flames, the object, and the humidity — so that the glaze they put on this pot is the red they were looking for.”

Today Mayer’s own search has brought him to tefaf Maastricht, the European fine art fair held annually in this medieval river town in the Netherlands, just over the non-border from Belgium. He has dressed up for the occasion, tucking in a white shirt and knotting a striped tie, but he still looks a bit ragged. His grey suit is wrinkled in the back, and he’s fighting jet lag and a terrible cold. He was up most of the night after yesterday’s flights from Ottawa to London to Brussels, listening to German opera to quiet his head, and he’s spent this morning wracked by sneezing fits. But minutes ago, when he joined the murmuring line to enter the fair the day before it opens officially (favoured private and public collectors are given first dibs), he began to crackle with energy. “Here we go,” he said when the doors opened at noon. He didn’t take a moment to plot his course or run his finger over a map. He just went, to his left as it happened, and now he’s found ...