John Jesse
Decorative art dealer with a celebrity client list and an eye for the rare, the beautiful and the strange
JOHN JESSE, who has died aged 83, was a decorative art dealer whose keen eye for the rare, the beautiful – and the downright bizarre – attracted millionaire collectors, including Andy Warhol, Barbra Streisand, Brad Pitt, Michael Caine, Luchino Visconti and Paul Mccartney, to his small shop at the top end of Kensington Church Street in London.
He began trading in the early 1960s, when he rented a stall in Portobello Road antiques market and became interested in Art Nouveau, which was generally regarded as kitsch – so much so that a “rather grand lady” customer told him that his 1890s Gallé vases, Mucha posters and Tiffany lamps were lowering the tone of the place.
Undaunted, Jesse developed an interest in the knick-knacks of the interwar rich, which in the 1920s and 1930s went under the name style moderne and were regarded by many connoisseurs as more tasteless still.
The term Art Deco, shortened from the French art décoratif, had started to gain currency after a 1966 exhibition highlighting the style at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. It was Jesse, a tall, craggily handsome man with a taste for flamboyant shirts and ties, who suggested to the art historian Bevis Hillier that he might use “Art Deco” in a book he was writing on the hitherto neglected genre. The book, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s, published in 1968, helped to spark a revival of interest in interwar design, which influenced everything from film settings to graphics, fashion, architecture and interiors.
Two years earlier Jesse had opened his Kensington shop and, as he recalled, “found a vein of gold and mined the seam”. Over the next 40 years items for sale ranged from furniture and lighting to glass and ceramics, vases from French designers including Lalique, silver and enamel 1930s powder compacts and exquisite items of jewellery – from diaphanous Art Nouveau plique-à-jour pendants to bold Forties cuff bracelets.
On one occasion the shop was half-filled by a white lacquer Art Deco piano from the Queen Mary, reputed to have been played by Noël Coward.
“It has always surprised me,” Jesse told an interviewer in 2006, “that as soon as my latest purchase was displayed in the shop, it seemed to acquire an aura of its own and the next customer to come in would automatically go towards it. Things just seemed to buzz, to have a resonance.” He recalled that on arriving back at his shop with new stock he would often see a line of limousines parked outside.
Jesse shut up shop in 2005, and items from his collection subsequently went under the hammer at Sotheby’s. These included a 1934 Surrealist table in the form of a hand by Costa Achillopoulo, executed in carved wood, a gold-painted bronze and ivory lamp in the form of a female parachutist, and a pendant in the form of a gas mask, made from oxidised silver, carved ivory and moonstone.
“The funny thing is that I’m not sentimental about objects,” he explained. “The thrill is in the chase and my favourite piece is the last thing I bought.”
In 2014 Jesse published an autobiography, A Fridge for a Picasso, in which his career as dealer was set against the story of an equally colourful, but often turbulent, London childhood.
John Campion Jesse was born in Stoke Newington, north London, on July 20 1936. His mother, Betty, had married Toby Jesse when she became pregnant, but the marriage fizzled out when the war began.
Betty subsequently became a typographer at Editions Poetry London, which published works by young poets, moving into a bohemian world of writers and artists, and taking lovers who sometimes gave young John presents.
He recalled sitting on Dylan Thomas’s knee, and liking Quentin Crisp, who gave him threepenny bits.
John and his mother spent the war years in a small flat in Cromwell Place, South Kensington, in a house they shared with, among others, Francis Bacon, who sometimes let John into his studio and plied Betty and other residents with tots of whisky in the shelter during air raids. As a small child, John collected shrapnel: “The budding dealer in me ensured there was a roaring trade for my souvenirs at school.”
After the war, his father moved to Turkey, where he ran a news agency and married a Russian woman, and in 1948 the 11-year-old John travelled to Istanbul to spend a holiday with them. His 12th birthday party was held in the house of Kim Philby, then First Secretary at the British Embassy, and he recalled a trip on the Bosporus in Philby’s speed boat, from which he fell into the sea and had to be fished out.
He also recalled, how, on the way out, during a stopover in Rome, he experienced the “worst thing that had ever happened” to him, when he was raped in his hotel room by a Turk. It affected him ever after, but for years he did not tell anyone about it.
When his parents’ divorce came through, his father moved back to London. John and his mother, who had had another child by Peter Johnson, a poet and child psychiatrist whom she later married, moved into Johnson’s house in Bramerton Street, while John’s father and stepmother moved into the flat in Cromwell Place.
His father had been granted custody of John, but their relationship was difficult and his father found it difficult to get a job. In 1953 the 16-year-old boy was removed from Burgess Hill School, Hampstead, having only achieved four O-levels, and told by his father that he would have to earn his own keep.
After a few months hitchhiking around France, where he managed to escape from a predatory lorry driver by jumping out of his cab and taking refuge in a forest, John got a job as a packer with Sanderson’s wallpaper company, then signed up as a regular in the Royal Army Service Corps, serving as a clerk at the War Office.
He continued his education at night school and the Regent Street Polytechnic – where, after leaving the Army in 1957, he enrolled for a four-year fine arts course, paying his way by taking a variety of menial jobs.
Towards the end of his course he married a fellow student, Sally Fleetwood, sister of Mick, the future drummer of Fleetwood Mac, and after the birth of their son took an £8-a-week job with Bob Lewin, whose Brook Street Gallery specialised in modern art.
In his autobiography Jesse recalled how in the early 1960s, when he and Sally were looking for a fridge, Lewin made them an offer. “You can have my fridge for £55,” Lewin told him, “or if you like I’ll exchange it for your Picasso sketch” – which Jesse had recently bought for £40.
“It seemed like a bargain,” Jesse recalled. “This was my first transaction and paradoxically was probably the catalyst that started me as a dealer. It was also the daftest, as the Picasso continues to rise in value, while the fridge is rusting away in a dump.”
After his first marriage broke down in the early 1970s, Jesse took full advantage of the delights on offer in Swinging London, partying hard and having affairs. Once, he invited Germaine Greer to dinner and during the meal his knee “accidentally” touched hers: “With utter politeness and smiling, Germaine turned and, looking at me directly, sang from the lyrics to Cole Porter’s song It’s All Right with Me: ‘It’s the wrong time and the wrong place. Though your face is charming, it’s the wrong face’.”
He had to laugh, but “at the same time I wished I could be swallowed up”. Yet they became great friends.
Some treasures that Jesse winkled out of dusty storerooms and obscure market stalls went on to become museum pieces. In 1969 he bought a Charles Voysey painted wooden clock, which he had spotted at the back of a high shelf in Portobello market and secured for £40. It turned out to be an important example of Arts and Crafts; he lent it to the Victoria and Albert Museum and it is now part of their permanent collection. After closing his shop, he continued to deal from home: “I can’t stop. I’m a buy-a-holic and wherever I go I am looking. If something catches my eye I can’t resist.”
In 1991, he married, secondly, Jackie Ryder, who survives him with a son and daughter from his first marriage.
John Jesse, born July 20 1936, died September 17 2019