Page 10 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

PREFACE

The things really worth living for can never be had for money. Scholarship, the fact that
your mind can take in the thousand-fold splendour of things, doesn’t cost a penny.

ANTAL SZERB in Journey by Moonlight

little over seven years ago my Gallery Manager, Harriet Baker, left me to become a mother. I

A then interviewed a group of contenders for this essential position, a job working for an employer
who, by then, was rather fully set in his ways and mildly dubious about ‘change’. Although I
had fleetingly come across Andrea Gates when a drawings’ expert at Messrs. Christies I really
did not know her at all. It took little more than a nanosecond to select her from the bevy of contenders for
the post. Her strong personality, poise, obvious self confidence and above all her command of language
made the choice what is commonly termed ‘a no-brainer,’ that is to say self evident. It took me several years,
somewhat reserved as we both tend to be, to get to know her better and to weigh her obvious talents. In 2008
I asked her to liaise with my old Courtauld friend, Christopher Wright, as well as with Richard Beresford,
in the preparation of a catalogue on Jacques Blanchard since we had been fortunate to acquire not one but
two excellent works by this comparatively rare artist. I was sufficiently impressed with the outcome that
Andrea was landed with one of the hoariest chestnuts that had ever come my way, a complex attributional
problem relating to four paintings in that authorship minefield that is Florentine Seicento Art. This
conundrum had already exercised the best minds for several years. Andrea tackled the problem head-on and
rewrote the catalogue twice. The final result, A Florentine Four Seasons, appeared in 2009 and while not
everyone may necessarily fully agree with the conclusions therein, in fact few experts ever do universally
agree where Florentine Seicento is concerned, the methods of deduction, the style of writing and the pinning
down of the twentieth century provenance on the basis of a clue I had provided were exemplary. Indeed,
about this time, or shortly thereafter, I had occasion to talk about Andrea with her former Head of
Department, a noted Christies’ director who described her as being possessed of “flashes of brilliance” and
with this thumbnail assessment I can wholeheartedly concur. All in the same year there followed the editing

8