Page 15 - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione - Visions and Ecstasy

FOREWORD

Vanitas vanitatum omnia Vanitas

T his last winter's long spate of cold weather allied to an eighteen hour power cut in Mason’sYard which
left the gallery dark and chilly, caused me to remember and reflect upon a similar winter early in 1978
when, in mid-January, there were six foot snow drifts in the countryside and then in February a further
four inches of snow fell. At that time I had just moved into 6 Mason’sYard and hung up my shingle
outside.The yard bore little resemblance to its present day appearance. Two sides were then derelict with
demolished building plots screened by hoardings while a run-down transformer station and public convenience,
the favoured haunt of a specific class of‘socialite’, occupied the present central site ofTheWhite Cube. I had no
clients, no telephone, no furniture, the building was damp and decaying and unrestored with a shop front largely
constructed of Fablon and I perched uncomfortably on a pile of telephone directories not quite clear as to how
I would proceed to start a business. I had just spent six happy years at P. & D.Colnaghi and Co. at 14 Old Bond
Street, the doyen of the trade and nicknamed‘TheAnnexe toThe British Museum n Bond Street’. Just three years
earlier, circa 1976, I had carried out my first important old master trade selling three pictures to the Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart, and on the basis of this feat, brought to fruition in the midst of the worst recession then known since
1926 and with Irish bomb makers and riots making the streets of London unsafe, I was made a director. Shortly
afterwards I identified and secured the purchase of George de la Tour’s Meal of the Poor, then in two separate
sections, which we subsequently sold to Berlin. It was during my last year at Colnaghi that I sold a series of old
masters to Southern European clients on several occasions and had the temerity to ask them whether they were
collecting for their private pleasure or for other purpose.When I learned that the paintings were destined for an
art fund, a form of alternative investment just coming into favour and being rigorously pursued by Rothschild
at Colnaghi with a fund called Poliarco, I could not but help exclaim that I thought it strange that one would shop
for a commercial enterprise of this kind at the top end of the market when, in fact, maybe better profits might
be derived by buying closer to the source.Thus it was that six months later I was made a proposal to advise on
the running of the fund and, to my bewilderment, to write my own terms of engagement.The direct consequence
of this was to open a small office at 6 Mason’sYard, a former small warehouse building once celebrated as the
locale named the Indica Gallery whereYoko Ono first met John Lennon. Having seen Colnaghi grow from a small
firm of about twelve employees when I joined to nearly forty, with a typing pool of highly attractive young nubile

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