Antiques Trade Gazette 59 back page farewell to the Kitchen Sink


preferred to do 100 at £1000 each. As a dealer my role has been to sort the best from the rest. You do need to be highly selective,” Julian explains. “In the end, 50 is an arbitrary


number and it may or may not be the optimum time to sell, but there are some wonderful works in the sale that seem ridiculously cheap to me. There are opportunities for those with a good eye,” he concludes. For him the art market has always


been about timing and perception. Another artist that he sought out


during his career-long search for the unjustifiably neglected was F.N. Souza, who was immensely popular in Europe during the 50s but was in penury by the time he visited him in his New York apartment in 1994. “As with Bratby I bought everything I could off him, especially the drawings which have always been my main line. I remember that I found an old premium bond among his stuff and he was delighted when I discovered that he had won £250. He was good company. He enjoyed drinking, womanising and joking. “I took him to the museum of Modern


Art in Delhi where he had the temerity to touch the surface of one of his own paintings, a Last Supper, and was marched out by the attendants.” Now the perception of Souza in his


homeland has been transformed. “In the 21st century the Indians found


him. They were looking for their Picasso and maybe they are right,” says Julian, who acknowledges that in this case his timing was out and he sold his Souzas too early.


His long career in the art trade began on January 1, 1962 when he started on £7 a week with Newman’s at 43 Duke St, only a few yards from his present shop. At the beginning, one of the main duties of the 19-year-old assistant was to lift pictures off the wall at Christie’s so that his boss could examine them, but that did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for the art trade.


It had been chance which aroused


his interest in art. “I went to a sale at Bonhams with my mother when I was 16 or 17. I bought a picture of St Jerome on a metal panel and I was hooked. I tried to be a painter, but it did not work so I got that out of the way early,” he says. Later, as a dealer he began to focus


on the Pre-Raphaelites and he now realises that it may not have been chance that led him to them. At prep school in Rottingdean the stained glass windows in the village church were by Burne-Jones and when he went on to Marlborough he admired the frescoes by Spencer


Above: Julian Hartnoll - Artmonger, outside his present shop in Duke Street, St James’s.


“He intends to remain the main source of expertise on Bratby, having bought the entire archive of 40 boxes with scrapbooks in which Bratby pasted all his press cuttings and correspondence”


Stanhope in the chapel. “The art master said they were mawkish, but I liked everything I was told not to like,” he says. After Newman’s he worked for Charles Ede at Folio Fine Art.


“Charles Ede was very clever. He employed young people and I found myself in charge of Old Master and 19th century drawings. There was a parcel of Burne-Jones drawings amongst the cellar stock and I was allowed to put a few in each catalogue,” he recalls. The chance to set up on his own account came in 1968 when an old family friend, Giles Eyre, revealed that he had been promised a large sum of money and Julian persuaded him to go into partnership as Hartnoll & Eyre at 39 Duke Street.


“I had to teach Giles how to deal as he had never done it before,” Julian reveals. “But we made a profit. My salary was


£6000 a year and we had fun. I remember that £10,000 was then the basic unit of currency for Pre-Raphaelites – perhaps £20,000 for a really good one – and there was an international clientele with some glamorous names among the buyers. We took pictures to Paris and held exhibitions in the Galerie de Luxembourg in the rue St. Denis. Lots of pictures passed through my hands and I remember buying de Lempicka’s iconic Autoportrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for £1250, selling it for £1500, buying it back for £1750 and reselling it at £2000. It would be worth a million today.”


It was at this time that he began to


produce the stream of regular scholarly exhibition catalogues that are still in demand today. “One of the main differences is that in those days the dealers could buy in the saleroom and add a lot in terms of expertise. Today it’s all in the auction catalogue.” After about ten years Hartnoll & Eyre


had effectively become two businesses. The partners went their separate ways and Julian used his expertise as a buyer to help build two major collections. He enjoyed buying for the French- based collector Joseph Setton who set up Pre-Raphaelite Inc, until he died in an air crash in 1984 and most of his pictures went to Andrew Lloyd Webber. He also acted as an agent for American millionaire Fred Koch, who bought and restored


Sutton Place in Surrey after his ambitions to turn St John’s Lodge in Regent’s Park into a major museum of 19th century art was halted by red tape. At first sight there seems to be a big


gulf between the Pre-Raphaelites and the gritty realism of the Kitchen Sink School to which Julian then turned his attention, but he sees plenty of parallels. “They were both groups of young men who were hugely successful in their time,” he says, though he does regret that Bratby, Middleditch, Greaves and Smith have to bear the Kitchen Sink label. He prefers to think of them as the Beaux Arts Quartet and believes they would be viewed differently if they had been bracketed with the other artists who exhibited at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery, namely Bacon, Auerbach and Kossof. As he looks to pastures new, he acknowledges that dealers are working in a very different environment from the one he started out in 50 years ago. But as a buyer rather than a seller, he relishes the chase and is confident that there are still pictures out there to be bought, it is just a matter of working out where they are. At the same time he draws comfort


from the fact that the spirit of Duke Street has endured. It is still a community of dealers and the fashion houses have not moved in. And despite the rise of contemporary art, Old Master dealers are still flourishing alongside White Cube.


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