Last year, art sales in Britain rose 8 percent, to almost $14 billion, according to the annual Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report. Equivalent sales in France declined 5 percent, to $4.1 billion, according to the report.

Art dealers appreciate that Paris is a gateway to major private collections in Europe, most notably the Fondation Louis Vuitton and François Pinault’s soon-to-open Bourse de Commerce in France, and the Prada Foundation in Italy .

“We’ve seen lots of European collectors, though it would have been nice to see more Americans,” said Dominique Lévy , co-founder of Lévy Gorvy, a dealership based in New York and London. “There’s an energy now in Paris.”

Lévy Gorvy is exhibiting at FIAC for the first time, choosing it over the Frieze Masters in London. The gallery’s Paris debut was proving a commercial success, particularly at the Wednesday preview, when it found a buyer for a 19-foot plexiglass mural that the French Pop artist Martial Raysse painted in 1966 for the Swiss home of Princess Catherine Aga Khan. It sold to a private European foundation for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.