January 2009

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‘Hullo, please take your shoes off,’ is Douglas Latchford’s greeting. I add them to the tidy row beside the front door and step forward in socks into one of the most remarkable rooms in London. To visit Mr Latchford during his infrequent trips to London is to step out of 18th-century Mayfair into a serene beauty that evokes the ruined Khmer temples of Thailand and Cambodia, the area that has been his primary home for more than 50 years.

Semi-shuttered windows, potted ficus trees, and opera arias playing quietly from an unknown source set the tone for his collection of full-sized Khmer stone deities placed against the walls, some drenched in gold jewellery. Other treasures – an Indian Chola bronze of Rama, a Chinese horse, pre-Khmer bronze bells of the 2nd century, a pre- Angkor linga and yoni, a 12th-century finial for a palanquin – stand on the floor, tables and pedestals in the L-shaped room (Fig. 5). The lighting is soft, the star statues accentuated with ceiling spotlights.

Mr Latchford, tall and majestic with crew-cut white hair and wearing a black Thai silk jacket and three gold wrist bangles, watches me absorb the scene. Then he speaks. ‘All Khmer sculpture when it was in situ would have been lit from above, so you see the shadow under the nose and the mouth and down over the pectoral muscles.’ He watches again, then sums up the room. ‘The collection is not overwhelming in size but the museum in Phnom Penh agrees that the pieces are the best of their type.’ He is returning to Thailand for five months the next day, leaving his statues behind. ‘I miss them madly. The problem is that my work is there.’ And the work funds the art.

Born in London, Mr Latchford first went to Asia in 1951, to work in shipping. Shortly afterwards he founded a pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution company in Bangkok, which he still runs, while also building condominiums. It was at a dinner party in Bangkok in 1955 given by François Duhau de Berenx (who would later advise Doris Duke on her Asian art acquisitions) that he first encountered ‘what was to become the passion of my life. I saw a piece on the floor. Greek and Roman sculpture is wonderful but I responded to this on another level. Indian statuary is wonderful, too, but this was more refined, simple, pure. In Khmer art the form of both the male and female bodies are just great. François saw my reaction and said “there’s another one at the shop where I bought this”. I went and bought it. I paid, I remember exactly, 18,000 bart –
a dollar was about 25 bart, so that’s about $700’, he laughs. ‘I had to go and borrow money to buy it, to speak very meekly to my bank manager. I put it in my house and began to read.’

He calls for his assistant to bring books and maps to the table, so that he can point out examples and places as he speaks. ‘I did a lot of reading and looking, in the Guimet and in America – the Met, Los Angeles, Cleveland – and in Phnom Penh.’ He points to an illustration in Adoration and Glory, a book on Khmer art he wrote with Emma C. Bunker a research consultant to the Denver Art Museum’s Asian Art Department. It is a 9th-century bronze of Avalokiteshvara from north-west Cambodia. ‘That is my best piece, it is in the bedroom. It was sold to me by a dealer in Hong Kong. It was wrapped in jute. When I sent it to London to be cleaned and mounted, I had the jute carbon dated to the 8th century. When this book came out, a French stonemason for the Phnom Penh Museum said my book was good to study to learn all about fakes.
He’s since eaten his words.’ Similarly, the Musée Guimet questioned the authenticity of his stone sculpture of Shiva and Skanda (Fig. 3). ‘So I invited them to come and look. They came while I wasn’t here, and then wrote and apologised.’

‘The problem with scholars’, Mr Latchford believes, ‘is they learn from books, not out in the field. They haven’t seen and touched. I’ve been looking at things for 50 years. I would drive out two to three hours from Bangkok on bumpy roads through dry landscape and past villages, in a little Jeep, and just look and look at things. There were several substantial temple-city ruins. The free-standing statues had all been taken by dealers and the French, whatever. The rest was there, at Phnom Rung and Muang Tam and Phimai. All 11th- and 12th-century Khmer. I walked around, studied, learnt. It was an open-air encyclopedia.’

He also hunted down off-site sculptures. ‘I would show local governors a picture of a sculpture and ask them if they’d seen anything like it. One time the governor of Surin Province said, “oh yes, there’s one lying over there in the field”. I bought it and brought it to Bangkok. John D. Rockefeller bought it. It’s now in the Asia Society in New York.’

At the same time, he was buying from dealers in France, London and Hong Kong. ‘I would buy what I could afford, but the best then was not what you could buy later. The farmers started digging up pieces like that’ – he waves his hand towards a superb 9th-century Bakheng-style Vishnu – ‘in the 1960s and 70s, things buried for a thousand years. A lot was discovered. With the Khmer Rouge, availability finished till 1981. Subsequently, there has been more control by the authorities over farmers digging. The big supply is I think finished, good pieces will come only from time to time.’

He stands up, needing to be close to the pieces he has found, loved and must now leave for a time. He goes to the Vishnu, then to another statue nearby. ‘I had both of those in the Sixties. I parted with them through Spink to buy something else. They went to the same collector. I bought them back from him through his agent last year. They’ve come home. I have a great feeling for them.’ He moves to the statue of a fine-boned goddess. ‘She’s an 11th-century Uma. There are probably four others in the world of a similar quality.’ He pauses, reveling in the sculptor’s achievement.

Uma, like several other statues, is dressed in gold jewellery as she would have been in her temple, most of it made before she was: an elaborate crown, necklace, pendant, belt. Mr Latchford has published his jewellery collection in Khmer Gold, again working with Ms Bunker. ‘It was buried in earthenware pots in times of stress. Most pots were broken by the finder but I have one.’ He recently donated some royal gold regalia to the National Museum of Cambodia, in thanks for which he was awarded the Neak Okya, the country’s ancient and highest award; the award brooch is pinned on his jacket. ‘They had no security, the ceilings used to be infested with bats. But I had an email today from the new director, Hab Touch, who’s doing great things. Now the gold has to go in a special room with locks, alarm system, track lighting and cameras.’ He hopes a new wave of collectors will follow him in making gifts. ‘The buyers of Khmer seemed to dwindle after Rockefeller, Brundage, Annenberg. Now more people are interested again. One person bought four pieces in last week’s Christie’s sale, spent more than $7m. There’s no reason why he and others should not donate pieces. It’s preserving the art in the country of origin.’

The music has stopped. He goes into an alcove to change the disc. ‘I love good art. I have Indian pieces, too, and some Picassos and Hockneys. I collect Fabergé, too. Few people know that Fabergé came to Siam in 1904 and made pieces for the royal family. But my primary interest is Khmer, I probably have 100 pieces in bronze, gold and stone. I only buy what I feel I can live with, and what improves my collection.’

Auctions hold little appeal, he says, since the great sale of the Kreiling collection of Khmer art at Sotheby’s in 1989. But there are other ways to enjoy the chase. Mr Latchford and his collector friends sometimes sell to each other, or simply swap. ‘I’m thinking of exchanging that south Indian piece with a friend’s pre-Angkor stone Vishnu. And another deal I’m trying to do with Doris Wiener is so stimulating; she’s had a piece I want for 18 years.’

He displayed even more patience to win a Baphuon Shiva. ‘I missed it in 1967 when it was bought by an American dealer. It was exhibited in 1969 at Asia House. The Kimbell Museum bought it after the exhibition, then about 15 years ago deacquisitioned it to buy French Impressionist paintings. It went to a private collector in America. I saw it at his house. We used to play golf together. We talked about it and after I let him win at golf I came away with it. I gave him three pieces in exchange.’

The future of such a fastidiously accumulated collection is not easy to control. By publishing it, Mr Latchford says he is already taking it into the public domain, and he makes it available for scholars. His preference is for it to be kept together in Cambodia, but he is anxious about its safety.

We are standing in front of a single-piece sand- stone sculpture of a serenely smiling cross-legged Shiva being worshipped by the small, dumpy Skanda (Fig. 3), the one the Guimet questioned. It was probably made in the second quarter of the 10th century for Jayavarman iv’s new capital at Lingapura, today’s Koh Ker, and is possibly a symbol of the king and his son. ‘This is spectacular. I was shown a picture of it in pieces in the mid-Eighties. The head of Shiva was off, the arms broken, Skanda’s feet broken. I bought it. It arrived in three pieces. Neil Perry-Smith, one of the leading restorers of stone, metal and gold, put it together. These had been clean breaks, there’s no restoration.’ Indeed, the breaks are invisible. ‘Go by the wall so you can see Skanda’s face’, he says, so that I can observe how the artist has trapped religious bliss in the face. ‘I sum it up in one word: adoration.’

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