Page 13 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

FOREWORD

Vanitas vanitatum omnia Vanitas

T his winter’s long spate of cold weather allied to a recent eighteen hour power cut in Mason’sYard
which left the gallery dark and chilly, caused me to remember and reflect upon a similar winter early
in 1978 when, in mid-January, there were six foot snow drifts in the countryside and in February a
further four inches of snow fell. At that time I had just moved into 6 Mason’sYard and hung up my
shingle outside.The yard bore little resemblance to its present day appearance.Two sides were then derelict with
demolished building plots screened by hoardings while a run-down transformer station and public convenience,
the favoured haunt of a specific class of‘socialite’, occupied the present central site of TheWhite Cube. I had no
clients, no telephone, no furniture, the building was damp and decaying and unrestored with a shop front largely
constructed of Fablon and I perched uncomfortably on a pile of telephone directories not quite clear as to how
I would proceed to start a business. I had just spent six happy years at P. & D.Colnaghi and Co. at 14 Old Bond
Street, the doyen of the trade and nicknamed ‘The Annexe to The British Museum in Bond Street’. Just three
years earlier, circa 1976, I had carried out my first important old master trade selling three pictures to the
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, and on the basis of this feat, brought to fruition in the midst of the worst recession then
known since 1926 and with Irish bomb makers and riots making the streets of London unsafe, I was made a
director. Shortly afterwards I identified and secured the purchase of George de laTour’s Meal of the Poor,then in
two separate sections, which we subsequently sold to Berlin. It was during my last year at Colnaghi that I sold a
series of old masters to Southern European clients on several occasions and had the temerity to ask them whether
they were collecting for their private pleasure or for other purpose.When I learned that the paintings were
destined for an art fund, a form of alternative investment just coming into favour and being rigorously pursued
by Rothschild at Colnaghi with a fund called Poliarco, I could not but help exclaim that I thought it strange that
one would shop for a commercial enterprise of this kind at the top end of the market when, in fact, maybe better
profits might be derived by buying closer to the source.Thus it was that six months later I was made a proposal
to run the fund and, to my bewilderment, to write my own terms of engagement.The direct consequence of
this was to open a small office at 6 Mason’sYard, a former small warehouse building once celebrated as the locale
named the Indica Gallery whereYoko Ono first met John Lennon. Having seen Colnaghi grow from a small firm
of about twelve employees when I joined to nearly forty, with a typing pool of highly attractive young nubile

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