Peregrine Pollen
Connoisseur with ‘the flair factor’ who steered Sotheby’s to dazzling success in the US art market
PEREGRINE POLLEN, who has died aged 89, was the first representative of Sotheby’s auction house in the United States. Pollen was posted to New York in 1960 by Sotheby’s London chairman Peter Wilson, who is credited with transforming the firm from a quiet London specialist in rare books to a flamboyant international artmarket leader. Having served in wartime Washington, Wilson saw the US as a rich source of saleable artworks that had been shipped across the Atlantic in earlier eras
– a belief confirmed by Sotheby’s 1958 sale, for almost £800,000, of seven Impressionist paintings consigned by a New York banker.
“The Americans collected with great taste and foresight,” Pollen told The Sunday Telegraph, early in his tenure, “long before the Europeans took an interest.” He rented a small office on 5th Avenue, lived in the Yale Club, and rapidly built a client base that enabled Sotheby’s to outsell its local rival, the old-established Madison Avenue auction house of Parke-bernet.
In doing so Pollen acquired a devil-may-care reputation enhanced by lean good looks, cowboy boots and a full-length overcoat that had belonged to Lady Astor’s coachman. Legends of his experiences as a young man related that he had once been a nightclub organist, an attendant in a lunatic asylum, a pantry boy on an ocean liner, a gasoline attendant and a Latin teacher; he also had the polish of a colonial governor’s former ADC and the eye of a natural connoisseur from a family of collectors.
Pollen himself spoke of “the flair factor” as an essential ingredient of art-market success. “We lived on our wits … and we didn’t worry much about the expenses.” Having expanded his reach to South America, he once carried four Impressionist canvases rolled inside a Beatles poster on to a plane at Buenos Aires to help their owner avoid confiscation.
Parke-bernet had long been in Wilson’s sights as a possible merger partner, but when that opportunity arose in 1964, following the suicide of its chairman, Sotheby’s board was hesitant – provoking Pollen to an impassioned speech which ended “if we can’t find anyone else to run Parke-bernet, I’ll run it myself.” Peter Wilson declared it “Peregrine’s finest hour” and the deal proceeded.
Pollen was a key lieutenant to Wilson in the expansive phase that followed. High-profile events included the 1966 sale of African art left by the cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein, and an auction the following year of treasure salvaged from the wreck of a Spanish ship which had sunk off Florida in 1715: Sotheby’s exhibition of lots included a live macaw in a reconstruction of the captain’s cabin.
They also staged the first sale of collectable photographs and the first to be connected by transatlantic satellite, with simultaneous bidding in London and New York. Pollen himself was a proponent of greater use of sale price guarantees to win business, with a rising scale of rewards for the auction house if bidding went above the guaranteed sum.
He was president of the New York operation until he returned to London in 1972, and deputy chairman of the parent company from 1975 to 1982. He was also its largest private shareholder, with a five per cent holding, and was widely seen as a potential successor to Wilson (who retired in 1980 to become life president) until profits began to turn to losses – blamed on overexpansion in the US, sharpened competition from Christie’s and internal inefficiencies.
In due course a new-broom outsider, the newspaperman Sir Gordon Brunton, was appointed chairman and several directors departed – including Pollen, though he remained a significant shareholder.
Descended from a line of Hampshire baronets and MPS, Peregrine Michael Hungerford Pollen was born at Norton Hall in Gloucestershire on January 24 1931, the son of Sir Walter Pollen MC – chairman of several Sheffield steel companies – and his wife Rosalind, daughter of the City banker Robert Benson, who amassed a great collection of Italian paintings.
Peregrine was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Classics but was best known for setting a record of 14 minutes for the challenge of running a mile, riding a mile and rowing a mile in immediate succession. He did National Service in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and went on to serve, from 1955 to 1957, as ADC to Sir Evelyn Baring, the governor of Kenya during the later stages of the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising.
Pollen joined Sotheby’s in London in 1957, first in the Old Masters department, then as assistant to Wilson. He became a director in 1961, and enjoyed the reflected glory two years later of watching the auction for £19,000 (a record price per square inch at the time) of a Leonardo drawing of the Madonna and Child, with the infant holding a cat, that his great uncle Arthur Pollen had bought for 12 guineas in 1902.
Travelling 100,000 miles a year for Sotheby’s, and separated for some years from his wife Patricia, Pollen described himself in a 2017 father-and-daughter interview as having been a somewhat “negligent” pater familias. But his children refuted the self-criticism. His second daughter, the writer Bella Pollen, described him as unconventional, spontaneous, non-judgmental and insatiably curious: “There was nobody he couldn’t charm.”
He inherited Norton Hall, a Georgian mansion and estate where in later years he indulged his passion for trees, planting more than 6,000 over 40 years, including many rare specimens, and replacing devastating losses from Dutch Elm disease and Ash Dieback. He was a trustee of the National Arboretum at Westonbirt, originally created by his greatgrandfather (Robert Benson’s father-in-law) Robert Holford.
He was also an instinctive collector whose pursuit of art that delighted him bordered on obsession. He inherited Old Masters from the Holford-benson side of the family and made his own extraordinary collections in fields as diverse as minerals, shells, natural history specimens, 18th and 19th century watercolours, Modern and Contemporary paintings and tribal art.
Peregrine Pollen married, in 1958, Patricia Barry. They had a son and two daughters, divorced in 1972 but remarried in the late 1970s after Peregrine had two more children in another relationship. Patricia died in 2016; he is survived by his five children.
Peregrine Pollen, born January 24 1931, died February 18 2020