For two rival art dealers, living in the past could be an occupational hazard . . .
BY ELLERY LLOYD
I suspect most people have, on occasion, peered at an old portrait or a vintage photograph and noticed that its sitter is the double of someone they know. Those who deal as I do in art and antiques, find this happens with some frequency.
On a buying trip to Naples once, I was offered for sale a medieval tapestry of an elaborately wimpled woman whose pale, oval face was eerily like my mother’s. At an auction house in Kent, I came across a lovely Pre-Raphaelite knight and, honestly, it was like looking in the mirror – but then I do often think my interests, my little quirks and obsessions, suggest I was born in the wrong century.
A little while ago, my nemesis, Edmund Jones, also proclaimed to have spotted my likeness. At a private view in Mayfair a while ago, he told me I was the doppelganger of a chap in a certain painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. I smiled politely while other guests chuckled, mortified I did not know the work to which he was referring, aware I was not in on the joke.
“Aren’t I right?” he asked guests with great delight, all evening. “Do you know the one I mean? That painting of the village wedding, the jolly fellow in the red shirt? It really is a striking resemblance.”
I tired of this quickly, and I had never much liked Edmund Jones with his fondness for tapestry waistcoats, cravats and working into every conversation where he went to school and university (Eton and Oxford).
Our paths crossed frequently, at rural auction rooms or country-house clearance sales both on the prowl for a sleeper, those rare-misattributed works we dealers hoped to snap up, clean up, confirm as a real-deal Degas or a Raphael and sell on for a fortune. Whenever I spotted him, my heart sank.
But it was only when I went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum that I began to truly hate him.
The painting he had described showed a group of Dutch rustic types at a wedding feast. There is lots of food and drink, a good deal of carousing. A chubby child is chasing a goose. And there I supposedly am, the jolly fellow in the red shirt: a round-headed village simpleton type, cheeks rosy as apples, blowing – with great concentration, crossed eyes and one little finger raised – on a tiny wooden flute. I stood in front of that painting for a long time, hot with embarrassment and irritation.
By the time
