THE RUSSIAN ART CONSULTANCY - Key Persons
Ivan Samarine, who founded the company with his partner the late John Stuart, is a name well known to those interested in Russian art. For years Stuart and Samarine ran the Russian department at Sotheby's, where they built up the Russian market and raised the international profile of Russian art.
John Spencer Innes Stuart was born in Aberdeen on May 20 1940 and grew up in Angus, where his father farmed after the Second World War. Johnny loved drawing, and at Eton, encouraged and influenced by Wilfrid Blunt, his art master, he sought to learn about the Italian Renaissance, Persian painting, and Chinese art.
Job Titles:
- Expert on Russian Art and Icons Who Established a Series of Record - Breaking Sales at Sotheby's
Johnny Stuart, who has died aged 63, had no equal outside Russia as an expert on Russian art.
The thriving market in Russian art today is largely his creation. He founded the Russian department at Sotheby's in 1976 and over the next 20 years built it up into a dominant position that was reflected in Sotheby's record-breaking Russian sale of 1995.
No aspect of his field left him indifferent. Aside from his principal interest in icons, he was equally fascinated with Russian painting of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as well as with porcelain and objets d'art.
His book Ikons, published by Faber & Faber in 1975, remains the most accessible general work on the subject. Stuart later undertook a far more ambitious and in-depth project, and shortly before his recent illness, after 20 years of study, he had completed the manuscript for Icons: The Triumph of Orthodoxy, a huge, comprehensive volume which is soon to be published by Alexandria Press.
Yet to describe Stuart as an art historian in the modern, professional sense did not begin to describe him. He belonged firmly in the great 18th-century British tradition of gentlemen eccentrics, polymaths and connoisseurs. He blended high scholarship with a plethora of interests in history, genealogy, interior design, pop culture and the Rocker scene of the 1960s.
For work at Sotheby's he habitually wore motorcycle leathers, and he cut a dash turning up for valuations on one of his classic bikes. His book Rockers (1987), about the English bike scene of the 1960s and 1970s, became an international bestseller and for a time was reputedly the most shop-lifted book in London bookshops; it continues to do brisk trade in Japan.
Johnny Stuart was handsome, charming, self-deprecating, and an excellent host. His hospitality combined with his wide-ranging interests gave his soirees the character of a salon.
A great raconteur, he was forever regaling his friends with wonderfully funny stories, and could spend hours discussing the finer points of style, interior design and architecture. Byzantium, Russian neo-classicism, the Ottoman world and Fifties Britain were his favourite styles - a synthesis reflected in his own homes.
Fascinated by languages and their sounds, he spoke fluent Italian, French and Russian. Even in languages such as Greek and Spanish, his knowledge of which was far more limited, his talent for mimicry often confused natives into thinking him one of their own. Gifted with a great ear, he could render exactly the accent or vocal mannerisms of his interlocutors, always to their great merriment.
He had the rare ability to communicate across generations and social classes. A bachelor, he was was a highly popular uncle and godfather. He died on July 12.
HEAD of Sotheby's Russian department during its formative period, John Stuart was respected for his very detailed knowledge and understanding of Russian art and culture. But he was also a very convincing mimic and an engaging raconteur - and his love of motorbikes was almost as strong as his passion for icons. Russia snared Stuart at an early age. John Innes Stuart was the only son of an Angus landowner. He was first introduced to the art and culture of Russia while at Eton. His Scottish Protestant parents were deeply upset when he expressed an interest in joining the Roman Catholic Church, and they asked his schoolmasters to get him interested in something else. Stuart, then 15, was given a book on the Russian Royal Family and became voraciously keen to find out more about Russia's history, art and religion. He may have been encouraged in this by his art master, Wilfred Blunt, brother of the art historian Anthony Blunt. Stuart asked to be introduced to Russians in London who had escaped the Revolution, and he became close friends with the family of Count Vladimir Kleinmichel, who would later act as his godfather when he converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Stuart went up to St John's College, Cambridge, to read history, but soon decided to change to Slavonic Studies. During his vacations he travelled across much of Russia and later spent time studying at the Central State Restoration Workshop in Moscow. On coming down in 1963, he took a job with Sotheby's as what he used to describe as a "glorified porter".
While he gained a reputation for his knowledge of Russian art, he also involved himself deeply in the Russian community of London, determined to perfect his Russian. Friends later complimented him on acquiring an extraordinarily good accent, even though his vocabulary, learnt from people who had escaped Russia during the Revolution, was rather old-fashioned and courtly.
Stuart left Sotheby's briefly in the early 1970s to run a London gallery specialising in Russian art with Marina Bowater, an antiques collector. He studied in Moscow under Adolf Ovchinnikov at the Grabar Centre for Icon Research and Restoration, and also spent a year in Greece, immersing himself in its Byzantine heritage and the roots of Christian art. But he soon returned to the auction house in a more senior role, and in 1975 he published Ikons, his first major book.
As head of the Russian department he developed a strong market in all sorts of art, from icons and paintings to silverware and furniture. At its peak, Sotheby's was conducting a big Russian sale almost every month.
From 1980 until he left the company in 1996, Stuart worked as a consultant. His swansong, in December 1995, was to oversee the most comprehensive sale of Russian art in Britain to that time. The collection, ranging from Byzantium to the post-Revolution period, raised a record £5 million in what was still a fledgeling market.
After leaving Sotheby's, Stuart set up an art consultancy business with Ivan Samarine on the ground floor of a magnificent converted warehouse in Notting Hill. Stuart also spent a lot of time researching and writing what he hoped would be his defining work, Icons: The Triumph of Orthodoxy. Described as the first meaningful English-language study of Russian panel painting, covering the culture, history and art of Russia from the iconoclasm of the 8th century to the end of the 16th century, the book was submitted to his publishers, Alexandria Press, just before he died and will appear shortly.
But it was not only Russian icons that exercised Stuart's passions. He was also fascinated by the leather-clad biker icons of the 1960s and 1970s, and would surprise visitors to Sotheby's by offering to take them for a spin around London on the back of one of his many British motorbikes, often giving a commentary in a cod-cockney accent. In 1985 he wrote a cultural history of the rocker movement, entitled Rockers! Kings of the Road, which was said to be the book most shoplifted from London bookshops, and lent George Michael one of his leather jackets for an early Wham! pop video.
Stuart continued to enjoy riding motorbikes for most of his life, even though, to the teasing of his friends, he required an electric starter on his Triumph after a hip operation. When the V&A held an exhibition on British Street Style in the early 1990s they called on Stuart both for style advice and to lend motorcycles, original Fifties and Sixties bikers' clothing, accessories and memorabilia.
At well over 6ft, Stuart was a larger-than-life character around the streets of his beloved St Petersburg, where in later years he devoted much of his time to refurnishing a 19th-century mansion, which was formerly occupied by the novelist and philosopher Ivan Turgenev. Its lavish decoration featured in a ten-page spread on Stuart in Russian Vogue this year.
Stuart was also involved in raising money for the World Monuments Fund in order to restore the Chinese palace built for Catherine the Great at Oranienbaum, just outside St Petersburg, and the early-19th-century Flag Pavilion on Yelagin Island.
He was unmarried.
John Stuart, former head of the Russian department at Sotheby's, was born on May 20, 1940. He died of cancer on July 12, 2003, aged 63.