Bruce called Wilson “The Beast” (a nickname given to him by the New York art journalist Leo Lerman). He can be glimpsed in On the Black Hill: “The antique dealer was entirely at his ease. He eyed the room up and down; turned a saucer over, and said, ‘Doulton’; peered at the ‘Red Indian’ to make sure it was only a print; and wondered whether, by any chance, they had any Apostle spoons.”
With a sleepy, slightly hesitant voice that proved effective particularly in America, Wilson was a prime example of “the export Englishman”. He was the son of a rakish Yorkshire baronet known as “Scatters” Wilson – so-called after his habit of carelessly leaving money about the room. It was not a trait Wilson inherited, for he never kept money on him and always took the back roads to his French chateau to avoid the motorway tolls. A late developer, he believed that people who suffered unhappy childhoods came out best in life. Described by his mother as looking like a periwinkle that might have strayed into a meadow, Wilson made no impact at Eton except to win a prize for a wild-flower arrangement, an honour he shared with Bruce. Unable to pass his first year history exams at Oxford, he left to work for Spink’s, then Reuter’s where he was sacked for not learning shorthand. From there, he sold advertising space in the Connoisseur before joining Sotheby’s in 1936 as a porter in the Furniture department.
Thereafter Sotheby’s consumed his life, apart from a spell during the war as an intelligence officer in Gibraltar and Bermuda. His code number was OO7, but his acquaintance with the traitors Blunt, Maclean and Burgess stoked stories that he was the Fifth Man. “Nothing would surprise me, that he was the Fifth, Sixth or Seventh man,” says the art historian John Richardson. “He was incredibly sly, devious, clever, dishonest, manipulative.” His Byzantine cast of mind, useful in counter-intelligence, was equally so in the art world, which tended to thrive on tight, cell-like cliques. Several Sotheby’s directors were former spies.
Wilson was icily cutting when he wanted to be, but he was a man of exquisite charm. “He did control people to a degree you wouldn’t believe possible,” says Elizabeth Chanler, who worked in his office from 1962. “You’d see clients coming in bristling with rage and stamping and the steam coming out of their ears. And they’d go out like lambs, smiling. He knew exactly how to touch people. Bruce had this in a different, less sinister way.”
Wilson lived in London in Garden Lodge, a huge house with a ballroom rented off Tomas Harris, the dealer friend of Burgess and Maclean. The house was a monument to his taste and judgement. Wilson’s interests ranged from medieval bronzes to narwhal horns. He kept a chateau near Grasse and a country house in Kent, Stone Green Hall (sometimes known as “Stone Groin Hall”), which he shared with his former manservant, Harry Wright, an ardent gardener and gambler for whom he acquired a grocery.
Whatever his fancies, Sotheby’s was Wilson’s first passion. He built up the firm by a combination of imaginative flair, enthusiasm and ruthlessness. He would stop at nothing to bring a work of art to Sotheby’s – even if he had to chip it off the wall himself. John Mallet says, “I remember cataloguing the limestone Romanesque head of a bearded prophet. PCW [Wilson] was the seller. It was attributed to a rather specific area of France. ‘How do we know?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ explained Wilson’s office, ‘the chairman knocked it off a ruined abbey there’.”
He would go anywhere for a sale and once he had got there talk about anything except the object he had come to see, until the very last second. “Then,” says Peregrine Pollen, “he made you feel that you were unbelievably perspicacious to have bought it and he was the only person who could possibly sell it for you because he understood your cleverness.” He deployed the same flattery on his staff.
“He was a great leader,” says Howard Ricketts, who had replaced Bruce in the Furniture department. “But he had his favourites whom he later destroyed. If you got into his orbit, woe betide you: he burned you up.”
Bruce admired his chairman’s savoir faire and dedication. He liked to imitate Wilson holding an auction and quietly knocking “this pretty little thing” down to himself via the sales clerk. “Sold to Mr Patch . . .” He adopted the same languid mannerisms, the same intonations, the same elaborate reaction to works of art. “I’ve always heard about your wonderful collection of pictures . . .” Wilson tells a client in What Am I Doing Here. Bruce adds: “‘Always’ was 30 seconds beforehand.”
Sometimes it was hard to work out where conscious imitation stopped. “Bruce modelled himself entirely on PCW,” says James Crathorne, who joined the Impressionist department in 1963. “Literally, he talked like him. They would go round speaking to each other in the same voice, with the words lengthened out.” Once Crathorne listened in bewilderment while they discussed Brancusi’s ovoid sculpture, Le commencement du monde. “Too mmmmarvellous. What a woonderful Brancusi. So beautiful.” A more normal response, says Crathorne, would have been to say: “That is a lovely thing.” “But this was an emotional reaction. They were vehemently angry to think people did not understand.”
Something else struck Crathorne. “When they looked at the Brancusi they didn’t hold hands, but they were touching each other. It was an enormously close physical tie.”
With Wilson’s arm on his shoulder, the schoolboy was tipped into what Lucie-Smith called “a world of baroque monsters”.
X
The Art Smuggler
The trouble is, Bruce wanted to be Genghis Khan, but he would have preferred living in Byzantium.
—Alison Oxmantown
LIKE A STENDHAL CHARACTER WHO ARRIVES FROM THE PROVINCES to the city, Bruce suddenly bloomed. Andrew Bache had known him as a lethargic pupil at Old Hall. He was surprised at the change he found on a visit from Cambridge in the early 1960s. “He seemed to be enjoying life, belting round London in a little car. There was an inquisitiveness, a curiosity, a great flowering of mind. He’d become worldly-wise.”
Guy Norton grew up with Bruce near Brown’s Green and was a contemporary at Marlborough. He remembers how intimidated Bruce had been in his early days in London. “He used to ring up a lot and ask me round and cook dinner.” Norton saw him again two years later. “He wasn’t the same person at all. It was a fantastic change, very fast and dramatic. You either sink or swim in London – and Bruce very much swam.”
In Grosvenor Crescent Mews, Anthony Spink observed his flat-mate’s transformation with a degree of wariness. He was struck by how intrigued Bruce was by the marriage of the interior decorator David Hicks to Pamela Mountbatten. Spink recalled an odd incident. “One weekend when I’d been away, he gave me the impression he’d been visited by Lord Mountbatten. ‘I met Mountbatten at the weekend. He came round here and you’d be amazed what happened’.”
In July 1960, Spink moved out of Grosvenor Crescent Mews. Bruce did not seek another lodger. Instead, he shed all the furniture and arranged for Hugh to repaint it during his school holiday. “I want you to come and see London,” Bruce told him, “before you decide to bury yourself in Birmingham.”
Bruce had chosen a particular shade of white, impressed by the architecture he had seen on holiday in Greece. In 1986, he would write to his architect John Pawson, then converting his flat in Eaton Place: “I suppose it’s because I’ve lived at various times in the incomparably beautiful whitewashed houses of Greece and Andalucia that dead white walls, in England, always used to be just that: dead . . . what I’d like is something the colour of milk (if there is such a thing).”
Howard Ricketts says, “Everything was white, including the bed covers.” Knowing he collected art nouveau, Bruce offered Ricketts an Emile Gallé glass vase. “It was the last piece in the flat. He was like a child, chucking everything out from pique.”
In his 1973 essay “The Morality of Things”, Bruce described the acquisition of an object as a Grail Quest – “the chase, the recognition of the quarry, the decision to purchase, the sacrifice and fear of financial ruin, the Dark Cloud of Unknowing (‘Is it a fake?’), the wrapping, the journey home, the ecsta
sy of undressing the package, the object of the quest unveiled, the night one didn’t go to bed with anyone, but kept vigil, gazing, stroking, adoring the new fetish – the companion, the lover, but very shortly the bore, to be kicked out or sold off while another more desirable thing supplants itself in our affections.” He asked himself: “Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter and say, ‘If these objects express my personality, then I hate my personality’?”
He was frustrated at not being able to use his “eye” to collect for himself. Every day he exercised his taste, was asked his opinion on what museums and collectors would then buy, which he had catalogued but could not himself afford to bid for. For a while the only decorations he tolerated, pinned up in the kitchen, were cut-outs in the style of Matisse. Lucie-Smith says that he had fallen in love with a particular Matisse, a simple image of a white china fruit dish drawn in chalky outlines and piled with oranges. The painting was coming up at auction with a £15,000 estimate. “It dated from Matisse’s austerest period, before he went to Nice. Bruce was threatening to sell everything he had to buy it. He was in lust for it.”
His austerity was short-lived. Not long after stripping bare his flat, he began to refurbish it once more into a “dandified” interior. This purge-and-binge cycle punctuated his life. The textile dealer Jonathan Hope had never seen anyone with two natures at such odds. “Half of Bruce despised being European and longed to be a Mauritanian nomad, renouncing everything; the other half was a worldly, acquisitive collector with an eagle’s eye for the unusual who longed to go riding with Jackie Onassis. It was a permanent battle of values.” The peremptory non-sequitur which is the hallmark of his prose is no less true of his character. Hugh Honour wrote, “He was a split personality, at any rate in this respect, and his extraordinary vitality and sharpness of perception owed much to the inner conflict of his two obsessive urges, the one sparking off the other.”
Bruce had learned from his father the sailor’s economical use of space. Even in his collector phase, the flat was never cluttered. His ideal house was a three-windowed Hausa mud hut in which he stayed in 1972. The outside was “the texture of a good-natured bath-towel”. Inside, a pillar supported a vault of thornbush logs. The door was made from a crate of canned pineapples from the Côte d’lvoire and the bed was an old French military camp-bed covered with camel leather. “It is home. I am happy with it,” he wrote in his notebook.
Bruce’s white-scraped floor and his careful arrangement of objects sought to emulate a hut, a tent or an Ingres interior, but the effect betrayed to Lucie-Smith his decorative taste. “He was full of decorator pronunciamenti, giving me specific injunctions and saws. ‘With flowers, it is mandatory to see the stem’.”
Howard Hodgkin has the Grosvenor Crescent flat in his 1962 painting Japanese Screen. It shows Bruce as “an acid green smear”, turning away from his guests, Cary and Edith Welch. The dealer Christopher Gibbs remembers Bruce “entertaining sparely, deliciously, beneath a blackened silver screen painted with aquatic plants by some observant Japanese botaniser. Did we eat our scrambled eggs and white truffles off blanc de Chine or the blue-sprigged porcelain of the Duc d’Angoulême? At any rate there were dhurries of dirty cream and washed indigo, there was a Tilly Kettle of a young Indian girl smoking a hookah, scrolls, drawings, and objects revealed with becoming ceremony. And there were books and spears and fish hooks from Polynesia, even books about fish hooks and about tomahawks and round towers and taboos and totems.”
One night, Hodgkin dined at the flat with the collector Villiers David. “It was incredibly elegant and tidy, as if a photographer was about to arrive.” The bedroom had a futon and a duvet, the first Hodgkin had seen. The desk was a sheet of thick plate glass on two trestles, with lots of blue writing paper in piles. The paintings, hung at eye level if you were sitting in a chair, included an eighteenth-century oval relief portrait, French, of a man in a wig, and landscape drawings by Cros and Le Roiseau. His Louis XVI chair was now upholstered in shiny black leather. He had bought from Lucie-Smith a Japanese Ngoro lacquer tray; and swapped his Piranesi of the Antonine Column for the skin of a small tiger shot by the Maharajah of Bikaner in the 1930s and given to Robert Erskine’s mother. Plus “The Bottom”.
Hodgkin, looking at the skylight, said to Villiers David: “What Bruce needs is a huge chandelier.”
“Dear boy, where would he get money from?”
In despair, Bruce replied, “I can cook. I could always make a living by cooking.”
“He really minded about not having money,” says Hodgkin, “and nobody was quicker to say in his inimitable way: ‘Could be valuable, you know.’ He was always thinking he’d found something valuable, that the philosopher’s stone was lurking in the next antique shop. He was forever a dealer.”
Bruce’s friendship with rich collectors like Villiers David, Welch and Ortiz encouraged him to spend more than he could afford. Kenelm Digby-Jones, who succeeded Peregrine Pollen as Wilson’s assistant, made him a member of the St James Club, where he dined on Sundays. “Bruce didn’t mind putting on a dinner jacket at all.” He bought a Messerschmitt bubble car and at work he began to stand out by virtue of his clothes. Discarding his stiff collars, his knotted ties and brogues, he began to dress in light grey suits, tailor-made from Henry Poole in Savile Row, and silk ties and slip-on shoes.
Ortiz says, “He liked to live well, but he told me he didn’t have enough money. How can you submit a young man to a first-class flight to Chicago to see the Campbell’s soup man, be met by his chauffeur, drive to his huge estate full of Impressionist paintings – and not be affected?”
Bruce made money dealing during his holidays. One attraction of working for Sotheby’s was the long summer break. He would set off abroad without telling anyone where he was going. “His idea of a holiday,” says Nash, who went with him to Afghanistan, “was to go where no one could reach him on the telephone.” Lucie-Smith says, “Bruce understood the value of absence and not just in his art.”
In his first summer, July 1959, he had gone, alone, on a walking tour of eastern Sardinia. He wrote, “It was terrifying to walk at dusk up the main street of Orgolos, the legendary ‘home’ of the Sardinian bandit, looking for a bed and having every door slammed in one’s face.” Finding Sardinia impossible in the heat, he headed for Tarquinia on the mainland, to explore the Etruscan painted tombs. The journey showed him to be a delicate traveller. He wrote to his parents: “My nose bled solidly for no apparent reason the day before yesterday for 1½ hrs.”
In December 1961, Bruce made the first of two journeys to the Middle East with Robert Erskine, who knew dealers in Cairo. Erskine says, “We were wheeling and dealing in antiquities and we thought, ‘Why not go to the source?’”
It surprised Erskine to discover how raw a traveller was his companion. “I don’t think Bruce liked travelling by himself. He was always worried about his stomach.” Arriving in Cairo on 17 December, they stayed in a little hotel, The Golden Tulip. Bruce opened his suitcase. It was stuffed with pills. When he discovered in Erskine’s valise a pill he did not have, he purloined the pillbox and added it to his own. “It was another example of the collector,” says Erskine.
Inevitably, Bruce’s stomach suffered. The principal dealers insisted on inviting them home to “pretty revolting” meals. Women peeped through the keyhole, while the host stood behind, not eating but offering more food and watching like a hawk, dish after dish. “Bruce was aghast. He thought he would catch every single disease – and did.”
Bruce’s Teutonic looks were appreciated by the Arabs. Erskine says, “I was in some shop in Luxor looking at coins when I heard: ‘Robert, Robert, rescue me!’ There was the sound of many running feet and Bruce burst in, followed by a mass of people who went away with a hang-dog look. Then we were sitting in Luxor station, waiting for the train, and a man suddenly jumped between us and said to Bruce: ‘You are my brother. I will never leave you.’ We had to push him off.”
They spent Christmas Day on
the Nile, taking a Sudanese railway steamer from Aswan to Wadi Haifa. Lunch posed a new threat. The waiter served a blancmange topped with a green leaf to resemble a Christmas pudding. Then, beaming like anything, he poured petrol over it from a can and set the creation alight.
Erskine found Bruce an imaginative traveller and fun to be with. As they wandered through the Temple of Hathor at Denderah, Bruce was seized by the idea, which he intoned in French, of buying the place and turning it into a grand hotel in which immensely rich American women could live out their last years. They would call the hotel The Hathor, after the goddess of love, and there would be another hotel for men, The Horus in the Temple of Horus at Edfu, 80 miles up the Nile. Erskine says, “He had this daydream, imagining the dining room over there, the bar obviously here, aspidistras, magenta lighting, Marlene Dietrich singing in the cabaret and plots of desert behind where they would be buried in grand, quasi-Egyptian tombs.”
On 6 January, the extent of Bruce’s naïveté declared itself as they prepared to leave Cairo with their spoils. In three weeks, they had bought much good material. In Luxor, while poking around a heap, Bruce had picked out a few bits of wood that turned out to be the parts of a 3,000-year-old stool. Erskine had also acquired some heavy Pre-Dynastic stone pots. Now the difficulty was to get them out of the country. It was not strictly legal then to take antiques out of Egypt.
One of Erskine’s dealers in Cairo claimed to have arranged for the customs officers to be bribed so that their cases were not looked at. “Bruce was in an absolute funk about this kind of thing. Quivering all over. ‘Oh my God, I feel very ill. You’d better go.’ Finally, we went through customs. When no one stopped us, he became a different person. He was like a fish which changed colour,” says Erskine. “A terrible old funker.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 16
