I have to thank The Art Newspaper for introducing me to Brian around 22 years ago. I had read his articles and reviews in the paper and elsewhere; no matter what the subject, they displayed a bristling passion and dumbfounding depth of knowledge, conveyed with a seductive, concise flair for description and an impudent, almost lurid sense of humour. One could never confuse any other writer with him. He was unique. He was opinionated and he was fearless. He was never, ever dull. Most importantly, he never talked down to his readers, naturally assuming they would understand every reference to literature and history. But even if you didn’t get everything, or strongly disagreed with his opinions, after reading one of his columns, you felt you had learned something valuable.
I knew he was frequently a figure of fun for his “posh” manner of speaking, but after hearing him on chat shows, I failed to see what was so humorous about it—that was just the way he spoke.
One afternoon while I was visiting the offices of The Art Newspaper, and chatting with Anna Somers Cocks about my next assignment, the phone rang. It was Brian, wanting to speak to Anna immediately. As she took his call, I exclaimed, “Brian Sewell? He’s my favourite art writer!” Anna concluded her conversation with, “Brian, I have a writer here who is a huge fan of yours. Can he say hello?” She handed me the phone and I introduced myself, unable to contain my enthusiasm. “Mr Sewell, I’ve always wanted to meet you!”
Silence. “Why?”
That shut me up. “Oh well,” he continued, “since you’re a friend of Anna’s you must be all right. Come for lunch this Saturday.”
Brian’s house on Eldon Road was easy to find. In a row of manicured house fronts, his was the one fronted by unpruned bushes and overgrown vines. I was greeted at the door by his dogs, all mutts, all rescues: Titian (orange and fat), Mrs Macbeth (small, happy and practically blonde) and big, loping Mop, whom, I learned, Brian had rescued as an abused puppy in Turkey and carried home in a travel bag.
Brian and I sat down to his favourite lunch, of cheese, hard bread and Parma ham, and he instantly grilled me for information about what was going on in galleries and museums in New York and elsewhere in the States. He explained that he used to travel to the US frequently, mostly to visit his old friend Joe McCrindle, but he had not gone since “nouvelle cuisine”, where desserts had “chocolate squiggled on the edge of one’s plate”.
Afterwards he took me around every room in the house, covered floor to ceiling with paintings, drawings or bookshelves, to test my connoisseurship, and seemed pleased with my answers.
After I returned to New York, I spoke to Brian at least once a week about exhibitions and auctions, gossiping about dealers and curators. I stayed with him whenever I visited to cover Old Master sales for The Art Newspaper, poring over catalogues. He was usually dismissive with most attributions, but every so often would murmur, “That’s rather good.” He seldom went to previews, preferring to view pictures in the departments before they went on display.
One afternoon in the racks at Sotheby’s, Brian and I were shown a canvas by Pieter de Grebber of St John the Evangelist in half-length. He nodded approval, noting, “You know, that’s much better than Pieter de Grebber. It’s not as smooth as he usually is. I think it’s somebody else.” Once we were home, he went to his photo files to check on De Grebber, when he received an excited phone call from Sotheby’s telling him that he was right. The work was by Frans Hals, the final canvas in the artist’s unique set of paintings of the evangelists. Brian was simultaneously thrilled and mildly annoyed. “I knew it was good,” he said with a wry smile, “but I really should have kept my mouth shut.” (Sotheby’s credited Brian in its auction catalogue note, and the picture was bought by the Getty.)
Brian frequently complained to me, “You get all the good exhibitions in America. We get nothing.” When I told him I was going on a press trip to Copenhagen for a preview of a Met show, The Golden Age of Danish Painting, he wangled an invitation to join me. The trip seemed micromanaged to the second, and after a quick run-through of the pictures chosen for the show at the Statens Museum, we journalists were whisked off to Tivoli Gardens for what promised to be a lengthy food-and-alcohol-filled afternoon. Brian had little patience for diversions and, midway through lunch, got up from the table and loudly announced to the stunned organisers: “We came here to look at pictures—not to have lunch.” He turned to me and said, “Let’s go”, and we spent the rest of the afternoon back at the Statens Museum, looking at “the pictures you really want to see”.
He marvelled at the huge Fall of the Titans by Cornelis van Haarlem, and Filippino Lippi’s insufficiently known Meeting of Joachim and Anne outside the Golden Gate (which Brian described as “the best Burne-Jones ever painted”), but was rendered speechless by Mantegna’s miraculously well-preserved Christ as the Suffering Redeemer. Afterwards, I learned what an ekphrasis was, when Brian noted that Mantegna had to have made many sketchbooks with drawings after classical antiquity, of which none had seemingly survived.
Brian was well known as a journalist and colourful TV personality, but his collection of paintings, drawings and sculptures was known to only a few. He bought astutely at auctions and estate sales during their glory days of the 1960s and 70s and lent to exhibitions rarely. An altarpiece model by Andrea Sacchi went to an oil-sketch show at Wildenstein, New York; a rare Academy male nude study by James Barry to the Tate for its 1983 retrospective of the artist; and his great Matthias Stom to a show at the Barber Institute in 1999.
During one of my visits, Brian had been invited to lunch at the National Gallery by its then-director Neil MacGregor, whom he had known since he was the editor of the Burlington Magazine, if not before. He was extremely pleased by the invite. Though Brian had long been a gadfly of the art establishment, he also wanted to be acknowledged by them as more than just an entertaining scribbler. He disparaged the National Gallery’s Artist’s Eye exhibitions, where contemporary artists chose from the collection pictures that supposedly related to their own.
“I think Neil should have a series on the critic’s eye,” he said (to feature his own choices first), and planned to suggest it to the director at lunch—or at least propose that he be given a chance to give lectures on the topic in the auditorium.
Brian returned home glum and dispirited. “All Neil wanted was to find out if I planned to leave the National Gallery my Sacchi and my Stom.”