The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Harry Fane
Debonair adventurer and Cartier watch expert who started a gallery with the Queen’s brother
HARRY FANE, who has died aged 70, was for 45 years the proprietor of Obsidian, the Mayfair private gallery dealing in vintage jewellery, and a worldrenowned expert on Cartier watches and clocks; in his younger days he was the business partner and travelling companion of the adventurer Mark Shand, the late brother of the Queen.
Harry St Clair Fane was born on March 19 1953, the second son of the 15th Earl of Westmorland and his wife, Jane (née Findlay). The Earl was a lord-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II and later Master of the Horse, and Harry was a page of honour to the Queen between 1966 and 1968.
The 15th Earl was chairman of Sotheby’s in the 1980s, although he laid no claim to art expertise – “I just saw to it that things ran all right.”
Harry’s older brother Anthony, who succeeded their father as 16th Earl in 1993, also made a career as an adviser on fine art, and both brothers absorbed their father’s dictum that in art and antique dealing an understanding of people was as important as expertise.
After Harrow, Fane began his career at Sotheby’s in London; there he befriended Mark Shand, who was working as a porter. After a spell in the Los Angeles and New York outposts of Sotheby’s, Fane struck out on his own as a dealer in pop artists including Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann.
He and Shand shared an apartment in New York, where their aristocratic pedigrees and good looks gained them entrée to the chic party scene centred on Studio 54, as well as seats at the tables of such fashionable hostesses as Diana Vreeland and Jackie Onassis.
Finding the art market saturated, Fane and Shand took a friend’s advice to start dealing in objets d’art, even though, as he recalled, “we had no idea what objets d’art meant”. They scoured Portobello Road and found a ready market in South America for clocks and candlesticks.
“We were both good salesmen, and Harry took care of the finances, which were not my strong suit,” Shand recalled in his memoirs. “Like posh swagmen in linen suits, with sacks of beautiful booty over our shoulders, we hit the rich and famous.”
Fane and Shand soon found that there was an under-recognised appetite for vintage Cartier objets – “cigarette cases, lighters, picture frames, paper knives and primarily clocks”. Fane became fascinated with the clocks and watches: “Louis Cartier’s idea was to make a jewel into a utilitarian object and a utilitarian object into a jewel… These are indeed jewels, that happen to tell the time.”
Fane and Shand enjoyed a gilded lifestyle in the mid-1970s, usually spending a month every year as guests of Prince Jagat Singh of Jaipur while they truffled out Cartier objets, India having been one of the jeweller’s biggest markets during its golden era of design in the 1920s and 1930s.
They would also spend at least two months every year on Bali, where, as Shand recalled, “a friend designed and built us a beautiful Robinson Crusoe house on a surfer’s beach”. On a trip to the island of Komodo, they had to hide from the famous “dragons” in a tree; the wind then blew their canoe off course and they were obliged to survive on dried fish for five days.
In 1978 Fane and Shand founded the Obsidian gallery, specialising in vintage Cartier. When the itchy-footed Shand quit, Fane made a huge success of the business, kickstarting what became a thriving market in vintage Cartier and eventually brokering deals with Cartier directly.
He continued to travel in south-east Asia with Shand as often as possible. In 1985 the photojournalist Don McCullin invited the pair to accompany him to remotest Western New Guinea in search of the elusive Orang Hutan tribe, who reputedly attacked approaching canoes with poisoned arrows.
Travelling in a canoe that they nicknamed “the Dildo” because its clapped-out engine made it vibrate so much, they survived near misses with crocodiles, and eventually met the Orang Hutan. As Shand recalled, the village elders “took a shine to Fane and seemed fascinated by the gold earring that glinted enticingly in his left earlobe”.
The party nearly came to an unpleasant end at the hands of Indonesian paramilitaries, but their interpreter saved the situation by pointing to Fane and saying: “This man friend of the Queen.”
Described by one interviewer as “elegant and debonair, if attractively crumpled around the edges”, Fane was uncompromising in his personal style: “When all the tailors hear I’m coming to town, you can hear them all closing their shutters in case I try and come in.”
Fane also designed his own pieces for his clients, lamenting in recent years the “loss of connection between the person who buys jewellery and the people who create it”. He was proud that the dedication of a book recently published by Cartier read: “To Harry Fane, who knows more about Cartier than Cartier.”
Harry Fane married, in 1984, Tessa Forsyth-Forrest, who survives him with their son and daughter. Fane was heir presumptive to the earldom for the last 30 years of his life, his older brother having only female issue; the heir is now his son, Sam.