Auction house puts $11m on Getty's 'very British collection'

1.00pm - By LOUISE JURY


A rare glimpse into the home of the late American-born philanthropist Sir Paul Getty will be offered when a "very British collection" of paintings and furniture worth more than £4 million ($11 million) from his London residence go on sale this winter.

Sir Paul, who died last year aged 70, was the son of the American billionaire John Paul Getty but had made Britain his home for the last 30 years of his life. He became well known as a generous supporter of English cricket, cathedrals, galleries and film.

The sale of 18 Victorian paintings and works on paper and dozens of pieces of furniture from his large apartment in London reveal that he was a passionate Anglophile in private as well as in public.

A spokeswoman for Christie's auctioneers, who are handling the sale, said: "The diverse group of objects now being dispersed came from his London flat overlooking St James's Park. These offerings give the flavour and enthusiasms of an incorrigible collector and a good friend to England."

The art to be sold on 24 November includes works by Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt.

One work, an oil by William Powell Frith, entitled The Private View shows Oscar Wilde holding forth at the Royal Academy to a group of admirers which included Robert Browning, the poet, William Gladstone, prime minister, Anthony Trollope, the writer, and Lily Langtry, the actress and royal mistress.

The furniture to be sold as part of a sale the following day includes items from some of the most famous stately homes in the country - Castle Howard, Yorkshire, used in the television series Brideshead Revisited, Chatsworth in Derbyshire, and the Duke of Northumberland's seat, Alnwick, now known to millions as the film set for Harry Potter.

Harriet Drummond, Christie's head of British and Irish art, said Sir Paul's interest in Pre-Raphaelite art dated back to the 1960s when he had lived in Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk, London, for a while.

"He started collecting then," she said.

His last purchase had been of a Frederick Walker from the 2001 sale of the collection of Lord Leverhulme, the industrialist who built an empire on soap.

A drawing of Lizzie Siddal, the muse and later the wife of Rossetti, was bought from the collection of Lord Clark, famed for his TV series Civilisation and for fathering the maverick MP Alan.

He lent frequently to public exhibitions, including a couple of Rossettis to the recent exhibition at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, although always anonymously.

"It's a very British collection. He bought really superlative things, but sometimes they were quite quirky," Miss Drummond said.

Sir Paul overcame an early addiction to drugs and a number of drugs-related personal tragedies to become a pillar of the establishment in his adopted Britain.

He collected books and enjoyed watching cricket, even having a replica of the Oval cricket ground built at his country estate in the Chilterns.

He gave generously to institutions including the British Film Institute and the National Gallery.

- INDEPENDENT