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October 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1363

Jack Baer (1924–2016)

By Flavia Ormond

JACK BAER, who died in London on 4th May 2016, was a much-loved figure in the London art world, renowned for his integrity, charm and wry sense of humour. His generosity of spirit and his exquisite lunches were legendary. His exhibitions of eighteenth-century Italian and French oil sketches and nineteenth-century French landscape painters were trend-setters. Jack was an invaluable supporter of this Magazine as well as of the National Gallery. He was, in essence, an art historian manqué, and one of the first dealers in this country to bridge the awkward gap between the commercial and the museum worlds.

Jack’s father, born in Frankfurt in 1885, was sent to school in Switzerland and became a stockbroker, settling in London in 1903. His German wife was born in England. Jack was born on 29th August 1924. When he was a boy, his father refused to have German spoken at home because the language had changed so much. In 1938 he was sent to Bryanston, a new public school where the boys were treated like junior adults. He was there with Peter Thornton, later Keeper of Furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and for one year, Lucian Freud, who was ‘rather frightening and sophisticated’. Jack went on to the Slade School, temporarily housed in the Ashmolean Museum, where he drew from casts, and he continued to draw for pleasure all his life. At the Slade, Jack was influenced by the art history lectures given by Tancred Borenius, soon to be editor of The Burlington Magazine. He subsequently joined the Royal Air Force.

When Jack returned to civilian life in 1945 he longed to study at the Courtauld Institute of Art, but since it accepted only postgraduates, his father, primarily a collector of English watercolours, encouraged him to try the art trade. Jack’s first job was as a ‘runner’ for a Mr Milling in the Squire Gallery off Baker Street. His personal motto became ‘honesty before all’ and wisely he decided to break out on his own. He was deeply impressed by the Ellesmere picture sale at Christie’s in 1946, where remarkable pictures were sold from the former Orléans collection. In 1948 Jack took over the Hazlitt Gallery in Ryder Street and built it into a world-class concern. In the 1950s and 1960s he produced annual exhibitions on Barbizon School painters, which were accompanied by slim, illustrated catalogues often sold in aid of charity. After 1955 he was in touch with museums in America.

In the early 1960s, encouraged by the taste of the collector Denis Mahon, Jack bought Italian Baroque and Rococo paintings, then rarely seen in Britain. Denys Sutton, editor of Apollo, also advised Jack and wrote the introduction for Hazlitt’s catalogue of the Tillotson Collection – John Tillotson was admired as a ‘true amateur, not a speculator’. Jack was also in touch with Brinsley Ford and convinced the latter to buy an oil sketch by the Neapolitan painter Corrado Giaquinto, an artist of whom Brinsley apparently had never heard. Another friend was Delves Molesworth at the V. & A., with whom Jack travelled to Italy. He also helped his friend Ellis Waterhouse, then Director of the Barber Institute in Birmingham, to find pictures for that collection. Among his English private clients was Harry Hyams, the property tycoon responsible for Centre Point, whom he met through his friend and adviser Arnold Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council.

In 1973, Jack joined John Quilter, owner of the distinguished firm Gooden & Fox, in Bury Street, and together they established Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. In the late 1970s Jack was joined in Bury Street by his long-term acquaintance Stefanie Maison, an independent dealer specialising in nineteenth-century French drawings. Her exhibitions of drawings added another area of interest to the firm’s activity. A further addition to Jack’s team was the young American Lock Whitney. Lock remembers how Jack taught him how to dress in suits from Savile Row, worn with polished shoes and a gold watch-chain. Jack also introduced Lock to plein-air oil sketches by – at that date – unknown nineteenth-century painters, including Simon Denis, which were enthusiastically welcomed by the collectors John and Charlotte Gere; John had bought his first oil sketch from Jack in the 1950s. In 1979, Hazlitt’s exhibition The Lure of Rome introduced a number of northern artists drawn to Rome to the British public for the first time. During these years Jack would invite university students to the gallery for the pleasure of encouraging their sense of connoisseurship. In the mid-1980s he and his growing band of Hazlitt colleagues returned to the theme of Italy, and the gallery’s exhibitions, worthy of a museum, benefited from Jack’s ever-expanding friendship with Italian art historians. In 1990 he promoted modern British art in the exhibition of the still-life painter Eliot Hodgkin (1905–87). Although Jack was the instigator, he acknowledged that its success was helped by the support of Hodgkin’s family, Brinsley Ford and the Geres.

Jack’s devotion to the museum world led to his non-commercial loan exhibitions in the gallery. Among these were the Tillotson collection landscapes and the Andrew Gow Bequest for the Fitzwilliam and John Martin for the National Art-Collections Fund in the 1970s, and Samuel Palmer and Drawings by Guercino from the Collections of Denis Mahon for the Ashmolean in the 1980s. Jack played a crucial role in the acquisition of important paintings for the National Gallery, arranging for Neil MacGregor to acquire Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter landscape, the first German nineteenth-century picture to enter a British public collection. Jack’s life membership of the George Beaumont Group meant that he shared his ‘love of looking’ with the Gallery’s other patrons, and his enthusiasm helped the Group to grow.

Successive editors of this Magazine, Neil MacGregor (1981– 87) and Caroline Elam (1987–2002), describe Jack as a rock-like figure who fought for the publication’s survival. In 1985–86 Neil and Kate Trevelyan, then Director, saw trouble brewing with the Thompson group and realised they must establish the Magazine’s independence; in this Jack played a key supporting role. In 1991 he became a Trustee of the Magazine’s new charitable foundation, a position he held for twelve years.

In 1992 Jack was appointed a member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and in the following year Chairman of the Acceptance in Lieu Panel. During his eight years in the latter role his well-judged combination of authority and diplomacy – along with his fundamental fairness – lent the Panel’s operations a credibility and effectiveness that continue to bear fruit. These public engagements made an immeasurable difference to the saving of works of art for this country. In 1997 Jack was knighted in recognition of his contribution to the nation’s artistic heritage.

Jack was apparently indifferent to owning valuable pictures, enjoying the art trade for its own sake. His house in Kensington is still hung with small decorative paintings and drawings, many of which were gifts, and including the delicate works by his second wife, Diana; over the years Jack had organised several exhibitions of Diana’s work at the gallery (Fig.III). After fifty-four years, in June 2001, Jack retired from Hazlitt’s, but his dealing continued – the joy of a lifetime.

 

FLAVIA ORMOND