Sales in the high-end art market are a fair gauge of investor confidence. The latest picture is not rosy.

Sales at auction worldwide dropped by 20.3 per cent to $5.55 billion for the first six months of 2019, a London firm tracking the market has reported.

The figures released by market analysis firm ArtTactic and reported by the Financial Times over the weekend suggest that the slowdown is being felt most keenly in the Chinese and Asian market, which has been one region where the luxury goods and collectables sector has relied on for growth.

While 2018 was a banner year for Christies when it sold the David and Peggy Rockefeller collection in New York for $832.6 million in a record for a single collection, Christies, Sothebys and Phillips each posted a decline year-on-year.

ArtTactic reported that post-war and contemporary art, which account for around 40 per cent of the market, grew slightly from $2.2 billion to $2.3 billion from a year ago, while Impressionist and modern sales tumbled to $1.5 billion from a high of $2.4 billion a year ago. Individual pieces from Claude Monet in 2019 and Amedeo Modigliani in 2018 fetched record prices in an otherwise flat or falling market for the year.

The steepest decline was seen in Chinese and Asian art, where sales have virtually halved from $875 million to $447 million in the last year and adrift from the $951 million in sales logged in 2017.

As with other asset allocations, buyers are becoming more cautious about investment decisions as the US-China trade dispute drags on and a maturing economy in China begins to slow. ArtTactic believed that it would be unlikely for art sales to pick up in the second half of the year as these factors continue to weigh.