No reserve
Meet Sotheby’s new art supremo
When Lord Harry Dalmeny was nine years old, he watched, rapt, as the public bid at auction for a piece of his family history. The scene was Mentmore Towers, the “Jacobethan” revival pile built by Sir Joseph Paxton, and the collection, which contained works by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Chippendale, generated £6million over 18 sessions.
“My grandmother sat on the front row and bid when she thought things were too cheap,” Dalmeny chuckles. “My sister Jane had to pull her arm down when she got to £170 on bowls that we didn’t want back.”
Forty years later, Dalmeny has just assumed the chairmanship of the auction house that arranged that sale: Sotheby’s. And, despite spending his entire career at the company, during which time he has risen steadily through the ranks, the promotion seems a bit of a surprise to him.
“I haven’t used very sharp elbows,” he says.
Others are less surprised. Over the years, the Old Etonian has earned a reputation as one of the art world’s most talented and exuberant auctioneers, having brought the gavel down on some of Europe’s highestprofile sales, as well as raising around £18 million at various star-studded charity auctions. (At one of these, held to mark what would have been Freddie Mercury’s 65th birthday, Dalmeny wore a suit cut away at the back to reveal suspenders and a bra.)
He is also a networker par excellence, with 9,000 names in his contacts book, ranging from conceptual artists such as Rolf Sachs to members of the Royal family.
He will have to mine those contacts for all they are worth in the coming years. Sotheby’s, like its chief rival, Christie’s, is having to cope with an uncertain economic situation and a reluctance by owners to sell their art. Sotheby’s is also still dealing with the ramifications of a sale in November 2015 which failed to get close to the $500million the auction house had guaranteed the owner it would pay.
“I’m trying to make sure that we have a ‘tweed and Twitter’ mash-up – that we don’t lose the old by chasing the new, but that nobody beats us to the new,” says Dalmeny, leaning back in his chair in an upstairs study in the Sotheby’s rabbit warren. Part of this will involve forging links with the next generation of owners; “the people that have taken over collections or built up collections of their own” in the West and in expanding markets like Asia.
Schmoozing is a major part of the job – a charity auction here, a ball there. The new chairman is a fixture in Gstaad and St Moritz during the ski season and St Tropez during the summer, and was once flown out to the latter on a private jet in the middle of a Cornwall family holiday to do a charity auction.
But Dalmeny insists his address book is not his most valuable asset. “I hope my integrity is the most important thing,” he says. “People come to me because I am the chairman of Sotheby’s in the UK.”
Integrity has sometimes been in short supply at the auction house. In 2002, its former chairman Alfred Taubman went to jail following a commission-fixing scandal, which found Sotheby’s and Christie’s had colluded during the Nineties to maximise profits at the expense of their clients. The trial also exposed a litany of dodgy practices, from “chandelier” bids (when an auctioneer appears to take a bid from someone in the audience even though no one has made one), to secret reserves, interest-free loans to buyers and undisclosed price guarantees.
“I can put my hand on my heart and say that what was done in the late Nineties was in a time of innocence,” says Dalmeny. “There wasn’t compliance from the top of the company to the bottom.”
He knew Taubman, who died in 2015, although not well. “I can’t comment on what went on in car parks in JFK Airport [the price-fixing deal was struck in a limo at the perimeter of the airport]. I was going around attics in Britain pulling furniture out at the time. But there was always a massive fondness for ‘Uncle Alfred’, as he was known. When he came over to London he used to have a lobster club sandwich and a cigar in the Sotheby’s café.”
Competition between Dalmeny and Orlando Rock, his opposite number at Christie’s and one of his oldest friends, is politely fierce. From their year at Eton, eight boys joined the auction houses – seven of them to Christie’s. But Dalmeny says his fate was sealed in 1967 when his grandfather, the sixth Earl of Rosebery, sold his collection of “amazing” claret. “I could have never joined Christie’s – they sold my cellar!” Having two major auction houses in the market is good for all concerned. “Otherwise you become a little bit like Facebook, with everyone complaining about you.”
Whatever he might say about his own lack of ambition, Dalmeny – who has five children and separated from his wife of 20 years, Caroline, in 2014 – says he likes to “live on the edge” and talks at a speed which seems to reflect his pace of life: exhaustingly fast. One of his favourite things to do is “skeleton” bobsleigh racing and, in particular, the Cresta Run in St Moritz.
His family, too, is full of high achievers. His great-grandfather, the fifth Earl, is said to have had three aims in life: to win the Derby, to marry an heiress, and to become prime minister. He achieved all three. Dalmeny chuckles at the image. “He won the Derby while he was Prime Minister. I mean, can you imagine Theresa May!” His eyes glint wickedly.
But what of his own goals? For the first time, he’s completely silent. “Um. Yes. Well, you know, I want to be extraordinarily good at something that I have not had on a plate. I’ve got five children and I want them to feel that what you go out and make for yourself in life is much more important than what you get given.”
In Dalmeny’s case, this inheritance will be an estate near Edinburgh and the Earl of Rosebery. “It doesn’t allow you to abdicate your responsibilities, but the pleasure I get when a client after a sale says ‘this is what I wanted to happen’, pushes me.”
The solemnity doesn’t last long. “The other thing I would really like to do is ride the Cresta Run in under 50 seconds.” He laughs uproariously.
As for art, his advice is simple. “You should buy the best of what you can afford, of what you like.”
Finding the next big thing is the million-dollar question. “Through the course of history there have been thousands of artists who sell their work professionally, but relatively few sell more after they’re dead than when they were alive,” he says.
It’s pot luck, finding the next Damien Hirst. “You have to be a bit scattergun, experiment and get it wrong – and be not afraid to get it wrong.”
As for his own collection, it’s mostly Dansaekhwa – Korean minimalist art – but he wishes he had picked up some Modern British before the David Bowie sale in November last year.
His dream auction is a toss up between the Vatican and Windsor Castle. “The Vatican has unparalleled stores of majesty, and the royal collection is managed in such a clever way.
“I’ll never forget going to the libraries at Windsor and being handed a book containing all the Leonardo drawings. I remember thinking that that would make the greatest lot in history. Thank goodness I am never going to be asked to deal with them.”
‘I want to be extraordinarily good at something that I have not had on a plate’