Oliver Hoare
Eminent dealer in Islamic art whose career was overshadowed by stories of his affair with Diana
OLIVER HOARE, who has died of cancer aged 73, was a powerful and dynamic presence in the Islamic art world for some 50 years, though to his regret he became better known as one of several men who had romantic relationships with Diana, Princess of Wales, during the break-up of her marriage.
Unlike Major James Hewitt, who published intimate details of his affair with the princess, Hoare never spoke of their relationship, and published accounts have tended to include much hearsay, embellishment and speculation – if not downright fabrication.
A married father of three, Hoare was said to have begun his affair with the princess after the death of her father, Earl Spencer, in March 1992. Then 46, he was a friend of Prince Charles, and he and his wife Diane, the heiress to a French oil fortune, had been guests at Windsor Castle. The affair is reported to have ended in 1993 (or by some accounts as late as 1995) after Diane threatened divorce.
Before the princess’s death in 1997, there were plenty of rumours about their relationship, but little hard evidence. Andrew Morton, with whom the princess collaborated covertly on his book Diana: Her True Story (1992), later expressed chagrin that, while she had told him all about her husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, she never admitted her own infidelities.
In The Real Diana (1998), one of the first books to cash in after her death, Lady Colin Campbell, citing an unidentified “friend” of the princess, claimed that she had become pregnant by Hoare and had had an abortion. Not to be outdone, in his memoir Diana: Closely Guarded Secret (2002) the princess’s ex-bodyguard Ken Wharfe claimed to have stumbled upon the debonair art-dealer half-naked behind a potted plant in a Kensington Palace corridor, smoking a cigar. In Diana (2006), Sarah Bradford reported that when the relationship ended Hoare wrote Diana a “charming letter thanking her for all the happiness she had given him and returning her present of a pair of her father’s cufflinks”. Meanwhile, in The Diana Chronicles (2007) Tina Brown claimed that the princess had dreamt of marrying Hoare, moving to Italy and starting a second family.
There was, at least, some truth to claims made by her chroniclers that, as the relationship cooled, the princess had made between 300 and 400 silent phone calls to Hoare’s home, prompting Hoare to summon the police to investigate.
In August 1994 reports appeared in several newspapers alleging that Hoare had complained to police in October 1993 about a stream of anonymous calls to his home over the previous year. He was said to be concerned, as an expert in Islamic art, that he was being stalked by Middle East extremists, but when investigators traced some of the calls to the princess’s private apartments in Kensington Palace, Hoare was reported to have dropped his complaint.
In her 1995 Panorama interview the Princess admitted she had made phone calls “over a period of six to nine months, a few times, but certainly not in an obsessive manner.” She suggested that some unnamed “young boy” had made the nuisance calls and branded the “phone pest” claims as a “huge move” to discredit her.
The following year, however, a leaked police interview with Hoare reported that he had been “speaking with Diana regarding her separation with Prince Charles, and he has been consoling her and become quite close with her. Hoare’s wife, however, seems to be more on Prince Charles’s side than Diana’s, and does not like her. For these reasons, Mr Hoare believes that the calls are being made by Princess Diana.”
Speculation about their relationship continued to surface from time to time, overshadowing Hoare’s reputation as one of Britain’s most successful art dealers. When in 2015 he held an exhibition, Every Object Tells a Story, “an assemblage of the exotic and curious from the four quarters of the world”, at 33 Fitzroy Square, the story of his relationship with the late princess was not one he was prepared to tell.
Oliver Hoare was born on August 18 1945 to Reginald Hoare, a Norfolk landowner, soldier and War Office civil servant, and his Russian-born wife Irina. He was educated at Eton, and his enthusiasm for the Middle East was first sparked as an art history student at the Sorbonne in the 1960s. This led to travels in the region before he found employment at Christie’s in 1967. “For some reason they put me in charge of Russian art,” he said in 2015.
But one day he spied a pile of artefacts in basement storerooms that no one knew anything about. “I recognised them as ancient Islamic works of art because I had seen such things on my travels. So I was asked to assemble an auction.” A successful sale was held and the Islamic art department at Christie’s was born. After seven years at the auction house, by which time he was in charge of everything between China and Europe – including oriental carpets and Southeast Asian art – Hoare set up the Ahuan Gallery in Pimlico.
Among his biggest clients was Sheikh Nasser al-sabah of Kuwait, whom Hoare helped to acquire the majority of the collection of Islamic art formed in the late 19th century by the Comtesse de Béhague. He was also adviser to the Nuhad Es-said collection, the finest collection of Islamic metalwork in private hands, now in Qatar.
One of Hoare’s triumphs was engineering an exchange in 1994 between the Iranian government and the Houghton Family Trust in Britain of the “Houghton” Shahnameh, a valuable illuminated Persian manuscript, for Willem de Kooning’s painting Woman III, then housed in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The de Kooning was then sold to the American collector David Geffen for $20 million.
Over the course of the following decade, Hoare became adviser to Sheikh Saud Al Thani of Qatar and was involved in the acquisition of an estimated 75 per cent of works now housed in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. In 2005, however, he became embroiled in an inquiry into allegations that the sheikh had been embezzling funds by getting vastly inflated invoices sent for the art he was buying. Hoare maintained his innocence, as did the sheikh, and charges were eventually dropped.
In 1976 Hoare married Diane de Waldner de Freundstein, who survives him with two sons and a daughter.
Oliver Hoare, born August 18 1945, died August 23 2018