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When Judy DeFord, a retired art teacher in Seattle, received an e-mail from Catherine Person Gallery recently, she saw a familiar name on its list of artists. It was a former student, Allyce Wood.

"I thought, 'Great!,' and I decided to make a purchase," Ms. DeFord said.

But instead of making the 10-minute trip to the gallery, she logged onto Amazon Art, a fine-arts and collectibles category that Amazon introduced in August. She clicked on images, selected a drawing and bought it for $160.

Amazon is betting that millions of buyers like Ms. DeFord will buy paintings and prints in the same way they now buy shoes or books online. To entice them, it approached galleries in a few countries including the United States with a proposition: put your work on our site and, for a percentage commission on each sale, we will expose you to 100 million customers in North America and 200 million customers worldwide.

Amazon makes no claims about the quality and imposes no taste criteria. "We are not doing any curation," Peter Faricy, Amazon's vice president and general manager of Amazon Marketplace, said in a recent interview. "We look to the galleries for that."

Amazon does not disclose sales figures.

Kate Nielsen, a Brooklyn artist, got the call after someone at Amazon mistakenly thought she was a gallery owner. "It's such a monster company, it was disconcerting," Ms. Nielsen said. "I thought, 'How did you find me, this little person in Brooklyn?'"

To date, the company has signed up more than 180 galleries and offers more than 43,000 works from 4,500 artists, ranging from "Untitled (Dollar Bill)," by Ryan Humphrey of New York, selling for $10, to Monet's 1868 portrait of his son Jean ($1.4 million), and, at the top, Norman Rockwell's 1941 painting "Willie Gillis: Package From Home" ($4.85 million). Ms. Nielsen offered her digital prints for $45 each.

The company said 95 percent of the works cost less than $10,000. About a third of them cost between $250 and $1,000.

Sellers pay a commission that starts at 20 percent for works up to $100, and decreases to 5 percent for works over $5,000.

Amazon has ventured into fine-art territory before with an unsuccessful partnership in 1999 with Sotheby's to conduct online art auctions. Since then, the online landscape has altered drastically. Customers can buy art online from Etsy, eBay and Costco, and from auctions. Start-ups like Artspace, Artsy and Artsicle have made it their mission to try to demystify the art-buying experience and broaden the audience.

The online activity reflects a shift in consumer behavior. Increasingly, buyers have shown a willingness to select art online and pay for it online, too, without ever seeing the original work.

The market research company Ibis World, in a recent report on the online market, estimated that online sales in the United States added up to $287 million in 2012, or less than 2 percent of a $17.4 billion art market.

The numbers suggest a category in its infancy, with room for growth, especially in the lower reaches of the market. Whatever their private worries, dealers are doing their best to describe Amazon's incursion into the fine-art arena as a good thing for all concerned. A broadened customer base, some say, will be the rising tide that lifts all boats.

"I don't think Amazon is looking to build relationships with individual artists and warehouse product," said Pete Borowsky, the founder of Zatista, a gallery in Philadelphia. He added: "That's where the comparison with the book market breaks down. There is only one of a particular artwork."

The New York Times

(China Daily 10/13/2013 page12)