Ben Smith Lewis

The Last Leonardo


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third-rate provincial school but which, they believe, might be by an artist of great renown.

      The painting Parish spotted was a seventeenth-century Dutch pastoral scene, which he brought to the attention of the renowned Old Masters gallery Colnaghi. It was a gesture that displayed an appropriate combination of knowledge and ambition. Colnaghi took him on, and he worked for them in New York for two years, from 1980 to 1982, but not in a high-profile position. It was not an easy business in those days, he recalls. ‘No one was selling old Italian pictures or English pictures, or anything like that, in New York at the time.’ After a couple of years he went to work for Christie’s. It was another low-paid job, but he was becoming increasingly fluent in the lingo of art market insiders: ‘I was essentially the guy on the floor, taking the pictures into the back room, black-lighting them [putting them under an ultraviolet light to show up how much over-painting had been done], turping them down [cleaning them with turpentine], showing them to all the trade [that is, not to private collectors but to dealers and gallerists, who usually get the first look at new arrivals].’ He had one further invidious task: ‘I was the one who always got sent down to the front counter to tell people that their van Dyck was really not what they thought it was, and thank you for coming.’

      ‘So I told the girl, “Don’t tell anyone about this. It could be worth $100,000,”’ Parish told me. ‘And I called my boss, who was still over at the main building, and I said, “I think there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And he was totally dismissive. “Shut up. Get back to work.” End of story. What was I to say? I’m just a flump. He was an expert. So I totally forgot about it. About two weeks later, I’m in a meeting with someone, and I get a call from him and he says, “Oh my God, there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And I’m like, “Yes.”’ Parish’s deadpan indicates a life full of rejections because he didn’t come from the right social strata for the art world.

      So he set himself up once again as an independent dealer, specialising in Italian painting. Once again, it didn’t work out. It was still difficult to find buyers for the Italian pictures he unearthed. In the meantime, his wife gave birth to triplets and he moved out of New York to a larger house. He now had a large family and a small income. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, buying old paintings and then ‘shovelling’ them through the auction houses. It was around this time that he became a born-again Christian, a highly unusual commitment for someone in the art world.

      Help came around 1996 in the form of a phone call from the largest Old Master dealership in the world, founded by Richard Green. Green has galleries on Bond Street in London, but was looking for someone to find paintings for him in the United States. ‘In their heyday, they were flipping,’ says Parish – using another art market term, this time referring to fast-turnaround buying and selling – ‘something along the lines of six hundred pictures a year – two hundred at fairs, two hundred through their galleries and two hundred through auctions.’ Parish worked for Green’s son Jonathan, who told him, ‘Go and look for pictures for us.’

      At the time, the United States was awash with paintings whose value their owners did not have a clue about. From the late nineteenth into the middle of the twentieth century, American collectors had ‘vacuumed up’ European Old Master paintings, usually buying from impoverished European aristocrats whose wealth had been eroded by the recessions of the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, and by the two World Wars. ‘All the Americans were desperate for class, and all the Europeans were desperate for money,’ says Parish. This was the era in which the precursors of today’s billionaire art collectors, robber barons like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon and John Rockefeller, amassed peerless collections which later formed the foundations of the country’s great museums. But less prominent middle-class families also collected. The paintings they bought were often unsigned and in poor condition. Over the years they had been damaged, become the victims of misguided restoration, and been passed down from generation to generation until they reached the hands of people who weren’t interested in art. ‘These pictures were finally starting to bubble up into the market.’

      Thus was born a perfect storm of lightning-fast information technology, surging supply and deep demand. Parish was a like a meteorologist who tracked the new commercial climate. ‘There was this frontier in terms of Old Masters, where all these pictures were coming up and no one knew what they were being sold, and I was looking