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spent searching for the cheapest hostelry to eat at as the house was
too cold to sit in for any length of time! It was in this manner that I
came across my first Guido Reni, and undoubtedly one of the most
beautiful pictures of my career (Fig. 14, p. 39)3. As I described in
2001, the discovery of this painting had a number of unexpected
consequences. First of all it put me in touch with the three leading
art historians who specialised in the Art of Bologna and Emilia. At
the same time it cemented a relationship with Roddy Thesiger and
Michael Simpson, then of P. & D. Colnaghi and Co. My friendship
with Michael subsequently resulted in my being offered a post at
Colnaghi after he was gravely injured in a car crash in Brussels and
I was drafted in at short notice to view a collection there. My time
at Colnaghi, first as a research assistant, then as General Manager
and finally, for the last two years, as a Director in the paintings Fig. 1.
department was, in retrospect, one of the most amusing and at the
same time rewarding experiences of my entire career, for in many ways it formed my taste in paintings – classic old
Colnaghi taste. We were all young then; the gallery was awash with pretty young things, either assistants or part
of a typing pool, and the building was often filled with shrieks of laughter caused by behaviour, which in today’s
oh so proper times would not pass muster as ‘politically correct’. My successes in making a series of sales to both
museums and privates led to my being headhunted and the subsequent reincarnation of The Matthiesen Gallery.

My initial brush with the ‘Divine’ Guido’s Martyrdom of St Catherine led to a lasting fondness for this master. We
never managed to acquire and export that painting, which then hung in a privately owned Ligurian chapel, but
is now in the local Diocesan Museum. Yet in my passion for baroque painting, originally initiated by my contact
with Thesiger and Simpson, I know that, after Caravaggio, perhaps the artist I most wanted to have on the gallery
walls was in fact Guido. In consequence, in the late ‘70s and throughout the ‘80s I made frequent trips to Bologna,
where I made a number of friends. The city held many attractions. First and foremost this was a time when I was
commissioning a number of high baroque frames, some very large and rather complex, such as those on several
works by Procaccini and Castiglione now in the Metropolitan Museum and the great Solimena now in Houston. I

3. See ‘Foreword,’ 2001: An Art Odyssey, Matthiesen Gallery, 2001, pp. 21-29.

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