January 2009

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For several years before entering the family firm, Sir Peter was as an unpaid assistant for the tenor Josef Witt, then working as a producer in Rome, Genoa and Naples. This brought about a second great revelation in the visual arts. ‘Naples was a completely new thing for me. I didn’t know anything about the Grand Tour or the tradition of Italian view painting.’ Clearly, he fell in love with the city, encouraged perhaps by his Neapolitan wife, Luciana, whom he married in 1960 (divorced in 1984, they had two children). Compton Verney’s former saloon forms a perfect setting for a tightly focused group of paintings of Naples and its bay, and scenes of Neapolitan life, by Vanvitelli, Grenier de Lacroix (Fig. 6), Fabris and others. ‘I never really got to terms with northern Italy – Florence and so on – but driving back to England from Naples I did stop in Genoa. I did think of a Genoese collection for Compton Verney, but it hasn’t happened – the material just isn’t on the market.’

Sir Peter’s lively interest in the art market is evident from the piles of sale catalogues that surround his desk, each one neatly bristling with Post-It notes marking works that have caught his attention – he shows me, for example, a Fabris that he has his eye on, coming up for sale in New York: ‘some passages are slightly weak, but he’s an artist we specialise in’.

Perhaps the best known of the collections at Compton Verney is that devoted to ancient Chinese art, the subject of an article in Apollo in May (Fig. 7). This is an enthusiasm that goes back to another coup-de-foudre: ‘In 1984 I happened to be travelling in North America and visited the Sackler Museum at Harvard. I saw two fantastic Chinese bronzes and thought, oh my God, I want to know more. I had the good fortune to collide with Dame Jessica Rawson, then at the British Museum. She explained to me that the bronzes are burial goods, with an archaeological context – she is very good at motivating people.’ Among the recent major acquisitions is a bronze Late Shang wine vessel, formerly in the Albright-Knox Museum in upstate New York, which controversially sold it last year. ‘I’m in favour of deaccessioning’, says Sir Peter firmly. ‘When I was a trustee at the Tate I was appalled by how much was in store – and how much wasn’t worth storing.’