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Forbes family sells £5 million art hoard from their London home
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent9 Jun 2009
They are a family who love making money and spending it collecting.
Now the sons of the late flamboyant publishing magnate Malcolm Forbes are selling £5million of artwork from their London home.
The art has been bought over decades since Christopher "Kip" Forbes told his father he could assemble a collection of Victorian art for what Malcolm had spent on a single Monet Water Lillies.
But with brothers Steve, Robert and Timothy less keen on the Victorians, it has been agreed to sell a dozen paintings to give them a share of the value.
All the works have hung for years in Old Battersea House, the riverside home the brothers use in London.
They are being sold by The Fine Art Society, the Forbes' family dealers since 1968. The family has sold works before, with an auction of about 300 pieces six years ago raising £17million. But this sale is expected to be the last.
The paintings include two important works by the Pre-Raphaelite Sir John Everett Millais, For The Squire and Trust Me, each on sale for £850,000, and another two by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Princess Chained To The Tree and Mirror Of Venus, worth £1million between them.
The most valuable is Portrait Of A Baby - Miss Amy Brandon Thomas by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, which shows the daughter of Charley's Aunt playwright Walter Brandon Thomas. It is on offer for an undisclosed sum.
Speaking from New York, Kip said he was not very sad to see them go: "One has had a great deal of fun with them but my siblings and I have fun moving things around. I used to say I liked my artists safely dead, but I don't mind them alive now."
His new interest in living artists includes allowing students from the drawing school run by the Prince of Wales - a personal friend - to use the Battersea house as a studio.
But it also includes a collection of memorabilia connected with the royal family, including Queen Victoria's undergarments - kept tactfully in a bathroom cupboard so as not to embarrass Prince Charles when he visits.
Kip, 58, said the increase in value of many of the paintings was a relief to his siblings: "For a long time I was always the brother who spent money, but when my brothers saw what things have sold for they decided I wasn't quite as stupid as they thought."
The sale has meant a major re-hang of the house involving about 60 works moving - although such disruption is common as the family regularly lends to exhibitions.
It will free some space for rival passions such as Steve Forbes's collection of Churchill memorabilia and Robert's of photography, including a David Hockney picture.
But Kip admitted his brothers would not get much more space. "A little bit," he said. "We all inherited the collecting disease from my father but the symptoms are all different. We've all been pretty good at spending the money. But now one is having, like everybody else, to be constrained."
Old Battersea House was found by Malcolm Forbes in 1970 when squatters inhabited the council flats next door. He paid the council a peppercorn rent in return for restoring it.
Even after the last auction the walls are packed with artwork and the memorabilia of a well-connected dynasty.
Photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip and American presidents including Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan bedeck table tops.
A signed photograph from Elizabeth Taylor is a reminder she spent her honeymoon to seventh husband Larry Fortensky at the house.
The works will go on show this week at the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair that opens on Thursday and runs until 17 June.
Buyers can then view work through The Fine Art Society.
