Navigation for Nine To Noon
Rogues' Gallery
Wednesday March 1st
Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Strada, 1567. His hands hold the work of art but his eyes engage the unseen collector in a timeless image of salesmanship
Frans Francken the Younger, A Visit to the Art Dealer. In the early seventeenth century Flemish galleries like this one were already offering their aspirational clientele a ‘retail experience’ that combined a grand setting and art expertise.
Antoine Watteau, L’Enseigne de Gersaint (1720). How the leading dealer in Paris broke down threshold resistance and created the first shopping mall.
Leonardo, Madonna of the Rocks. Gavin Hamilton’s greatest triumph as a dealer was to discover this picture in Italy and sell it in London in 1785 for £800.
Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus, or, as its first British owner called it, ‘my picture of Venus’s bottom’.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Visit to the Art Dealer, featuring Ernest Gambart (standing, centre) as a gallerist of Antiquity.
Paul Gauguin, Riders on the Beach: declared degenerate by the Nazis and sold by Wildenstein to the Hollywood actor Edward G. Robinson in 1937.
Alfred Flechtheim by Otto Dix
Monet, Poplars. Durand-Ruel encouraged his most marketable Impressionist to paint landscapes in series, in different lights and seasons.
Félix Fénéon, almost certainly the only art dealer ever to have planted a terrorist bomb, at work in his office (painting by Félix Vallotton).
Commander Beauchamp’s Poussin: sold by Sotheby’s in 1956 for £29,000 to great fanfare. Peter Wilson lost £6,000 on the guarantee but deemed it worth the publicity.
The images in this gallery are used with permission and are subject to copyright conditions.