Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  47 David Nash, or ‘Nashpiece ’. Chatwin had known him at Marlborough. Before joining Sotheby’s he worked as a gravedigger in a Wimbledon cemetery and as an electrical engineer at the Horton lunatic asylum.

  48 Rear-Admiral Paul Furse (1904 – 78), botanist and plant collector, had been forced to abandon a mission from Kew Gardens to bring back a sample of cow parsley growing only on the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush. Chatwin decided to complete Furse’s quest.

  49 Indian miniaturist, (1600 – 27). C.W.: ‘On the afternoon I first met Bruce I took him to Charles Ratton, a great dealer, and the flat from which he sold. At about 3.30, I found a magnificent signed Mughal painting of the Infant Prince Shashuja by Abul Hassan. Bruce then came back ten days later, bought the Daulat and sent it to Howard Hodgkin, who sent me a photo. One year later, I bought it off Howard. Bruce was cross that Howard had made money by selling it to me.’

  50 Howard Hodgkin (b.1932), British artist.

  51 George Ortiz Patino (b.1927), millionaire collector known by Chatwin as ‘Mighty Mouse’ and grandson of Bolivian tin magnate Simon Patino, who since 1949 had used his fortune to build a collection of art from the ancient world; also known as Tizberg. C.W.: ‘We always had nicknames: Bruce was known as Marcel Bruce, or Preuz; Elizabeth and Bruce as “the Chattys”.’

  52 Welch’s children – Nellington. Thomas, Adrian, Sam, Lucia – were known by the collective noun Knellingtons; Ortiz’s children as the Tizbergs.

  53 Hunting for a specimen of cow parsley among small bushes of holly oak, Chatwin fell and scraped the skin off his arm. D.N. diary: ‘Awoke next morning, B feverish and his arm v swollen & septic. Decide reluctantly to return to avoid gangrene.’

  54 British aesthete and eccentric (1906 – 87) who spent much of his latter years in bed in Wilsford Manor, designing jackets for a novel set in Marseilles that he never wrote: Lascar, A Story of the Maritime Boulevard, A Story You Must Forget.

  55 Probably the cottage on the Wilsford estate later rented to V. S. Naipaul.

  56 Tahitian Woman and Boy, 1899. A photograph of Chatwin holding up this painting appeared in the Daily Mail on 24 November 1964 under the headline: ‘Lot 32, star of the biggest sale of Impressionists and drawings ever held.’ The article went on: ‘It was Chatwin who arranged the Gauguin sale. Sotheby’s had a telephone call from Mrs Austin Mardon, American-born widow of a tobacco company director. She has nine children, lives in Ardross Castle, Ross-shire. She said she had a painting to sell. Chatwin went to Scotland, was staggered to see the Gauguin in a bedroom. Its whereabouts had been unknown for 40 years. Mrs Mardon bought it in 1923 for £1,200.’

  57 C.W.: ‘I had a small Graham Sutherland which Bruce talked me into selling and a Samuel Palmer sketchbook page.’

  58 Derek Hill (1916 – 2000), landscape and portrait artist who had been at Marlborough and known Robert Byron; Bruce and Elizabeth often stayed with him at St Columb’s, Letterkenny in County Donegal.

  59 The case was at last coming to court.

  60 Chatwin called more than once on the archaeologist Sinclair Hood who was excavating at Knossos. Together with Hood’s wife Rachel, they went to look for the endemic Cretan tulip on the Nida Plain on Mount Ida. ‘We did find one example, growing up through a terribly prickly thorn bush!’ This may have been the specimen he brought back for Admiral Furse.

  61 E.C.: ‘It was the first time my parents ever met Bruce, and then I announced I was engaged and they hadn’t paid much attention. “That’s nice,” but they couldn’t remember him.’ On 26 June, Gertrude Chanler wrote to Margharita: ‘At the time we did not realise that all this was so serious . . .’

  62 The first transatlantic sale using the Early Bird satellite, featuring paintings by Winston Churchill. E.C. to G.C.: ‘The Early Bird sale went like a bomb. Churchill made unheardof figure – £14,000.’

  63 E.C.: ‘He’d overheard my parents calling me Lib and misheard it as Liz.’

  64 E.C.: ‘We kept the engagement secret because we didn’t want people at Sotheby’s to rag us.’

  65 Ivry’s brother, Alexander Raulin Chevalier Guild (1940-66) had come back from Northern Rhodesia and was working for the Conservative Party in Woodbridge.

  66 Mummy and Bobby.

  67 E.C.: ‘This is exactly what he did wear, a pale grey suit.’

  68 The Chanlers were Catholics. G.C. had written to E.C.: ‘One thing you must do is see what can be done about Bruce getting the required religious instructions . . . This is very important.’

  69 Peter Levi (1931-2000), Jesuit priest, author and poet. Through Levi, Chatwin found a Jesuit priest, Father Murray, to give Pre-Cana instructions.

  70 At Cowes.

  71 E.C.: ‘Now he’s got it.’

  72 E.C.: ‘We never gave this party.’

  73 Katherine Maclean, personal assistant to Peter Wilson or ‘P.C.W.’

  74 There was also slight amazement. E.C. wrote to G.C.: ‘We told Katherine and P.C.W. last Friday & then ran. They were really flabbergasted.’ Another person to register surprise was the American writer Leo Lerman, who had been asked by Wilson to write a history of Sotheby’s. On 13 July 1965 Lerman wrote in his diary: ‘Elizabeth is marrying Bruce. We couldn’t be more astonished at this Sotheby’s romance.’

  75 Female, 3rd c BC. E.C.: ‘People said, “What do you want for a wedding present?” and we said “You can give a contribution to the Greek Head.” It was one of the things Bruce had to sell when he needed money.’

  76 Close friend of Wilson and Bond Street dealer (1919-94) with a special love for tribal and ethnographic art, who virtually ran the Antiquities Department; also known as ‘K.J.H.’.

  77 John Courtney Murray (1904-67) SJ, American theologian.

  78 Peregrine Pollen, head of Sotheby’s New York office.

  79 E.C.: ‘He didn’t understand about deep freeze. He thought it was unhealthy, a newfangled thing that made food taste awful. Even his parents thought this. I used to give them half a lamb and they ate it up as fast as they could, as if it was going to go bad in a freezer. Of course, he came round to it completely.’

  80 Hugh Hildesley, who worked in Sotheby’s Pictures Department, and his Amercian wife Connie; he later became Rector of the Church of Heavenly Rest in New York.

  81 Leo Lerman (1914-94), American writer, had been engaged by his friend P.C.W. to write a history of the auctioneering firm, to be called The Seismograph of Taste: Sotheby’s 1744-1964. ‘He felt hampered at the start by the lack of business archives at Sotheby’s. The auction house also did not intend that Leo write honestly about auctioneering practices, which involved a great deal of obituary watching and sharp dealing.’ The Grand Surprise – The Journals of Leo Lerman, ed. Stephen Pascal (Knopf, 2007). E.C.: ‘I had to read the obituaries in New York when I first worked for Sotheby’s and find out if the deceased had had a collection and then Sotheby’s would write an oily letter.’

  82 Gouri Dixit, E.C.’s Bombay flatmate who worked for Air India.

  83 Indian restaurant.

  84 E.C.: ‘In those days you had to book through the operator, you couldn’t just dial. It was terribly expensive, we never did it. He sent me telegrams from the Queen Elizabeth. EACH TURN OF THE SCREW BRINGS ME NEARER TO YOU.’

  85 Alfred Friendly (1911-83) philanthropist, journalist, and a friend of Elizabeth’s from Harvard.

  86 Henry McIlhenny (1910-86) Philadelphia collector, philanthropist and bon vivant whose grandfather invented the gas meter. Chatwin had stayed with him in Donegal at Glenveagh Castle. ‘He has 8 gardeners, 8 indoor servants, 20,000 acres and 28 miles of fencing to maintain . . .’ James Lees-Milne’s diary, 4 August 1971.

  87 Sir James Durham Dundas, 6th Baronet (1905-67).

  88 Philippa Chatwin, daughter of Charles’s late brother Humphrey.

  89 E.C.: ‘A great big cast-iron range that was not used in summer; it was lit without opening the flue and smoked like mad.’

  90 A panel of Tory Island off the Irish West Coast where
Hill used to paint.

  91 E.C.: ‘We were staying in my mother’s flat in New York and decided to give a party. My father came and got drunk. I found the whole thing mortifying: he said to one lady in trousers, “Do you always go out in the evening dressed like that?”’

  92 Edgar Louis Vanderstegen (‘Teddy’) Millington-Drake (1932-94), painter and son of Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, British Minister in Montevideo at the time of the scuttling of the German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee in 1939. Chatwin stayed with him at his houses in Greece and Italy, and towards the end of his life said that Teddy was one of two men he had loved. E.C.: ‘Raulin Guild was probably the other.’

  93 Hewett owned a farm in Kent.

  94 Not until February 1966, after several false starts, would the Chatwins find Holwell Farm, a pink seventeenth-century house set in 47 acres near Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire. Gertrude advanced £17,000 as a wedding present for them to buy it.

  95 In the summer Wilson had at last appointed Chatwin a director, not with a vote as he had expected, but one of nine new subsidiary directors without voting rights. A new tax law meant that the partnership would not come into effect until the following April, by which time Chatwin had made the decision to leave Sotheby’s.

  96 E.C.: ‘There was a time when we all kept our stockings in the fridge. Word got about that if nylon was left out it would ladder quicker, so you put it in the fridge and it supposedly lasted longer.’

  97 Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965) founder of Helena Rubinstein cosmetics.

  98 E.C.: ‘They didn’t give me anything except my board and a little suede evening bag.’

  99 Judith Small, American dealer. E.C.: ‘They did marry and had a daughter, but divorced.’

  100 Porter Chandler had given a party in New York.

  101 London dealer in Indian art.

  102 E.C.: ‘I was enrolled at Edinburgh in a Russian course and language lab.’

  103 Stuart Piggott (1910-96) held the Abercromby Chair of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Chatwin had known of Piggott at Marlborough for his excavations of West Kennet Long Barrow. At the time of their meeting he had just published Ancient Europe, which included an illustration of Welch’s Siberian plaque. On 15 July, after inviting Chatwin to lunch, Piggott wrote in his diary: ‘Bruce C. very good value and should be a pleasure to teach.’

  104 E.C.: ‘He did, but it was only £275. We spent £8 a week on food.’

  105 They had taken possession of Holwell on 9 May.

  106 He was not allowed to have dealings once he became a partner.

  107 The Chatwins would not, in fact, move in until the following July.

  108 Gertrude had loaned half of the £6,500 that Chatwin needed to buy his shares.

  109 I.F: ‘Raulin shot himself in a totally uncharacteristic moment of aberration rather than allow himself to be sent back to a nursing home near Woodbridge. I don’t think anything has hit me as badly as that hit me. He was like Bruce, a man of magic.’

  110 Burnley Building Society, for the £4,000 mortgage on Holwell Farm – to rewire, reroof, put down floors and replace the beams.

  111 Mogul, jade-handled. E.C.: ‘He wanted to sell it.’

  112 Felicity Nicolson, who had taken over from Chatwin as head of Antiquities. E.C. to her mother, 13 December 1965: ‘She is a very small person, with a gloomy sort of face, but is really terribly nice and rather funny, as well as very clever.’

  113 Chief accountant, later chief executive of Sotheby’s, who was one of those furious over Chatwin’s resignation.

  114 For the kitchen.

  115 Hon. Edward (‘Eddie’) Gathorne-Hardy (1901-78), botanist; known by Francis Partridge as ‘wicked old Eddie’. Chatwin had met him with Allen Bole in Crete.

  116 Peter Davis (1918-92), botanist, expert on the flora of the Middle East and author of the multi-volume Flora of Turkey.

  117 Brother of Chatwin’s former lodger Anthony Spink; he lived at 11 George Square.

  118 Elizabeth’s parents came and stayed in the North British Hotel. ‘My father had late onset diabetes which meant he had to eat at regular hours.’

  119 Tamara Talbot Rice (1904-93), Leo Tolstoy’s god-daughter and author of The Scythians. ‘It was first through me that Bruce came to be interested in nomads.’ She had fled St Petersburg in 1918, pulled, so she claimed, behind reindeer under white skins in the snow. In 1927 she married David Talbot Rice (1903-72), art historian and Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art at Edinburgh University. His friendship at Eton with Robert Byron, pointing Byron in the direction of Byzantine art, drew Chatwin as part of his second-year course to study Fine Art under him. Byron described him as a sedate heron ‘sober always, even in insobriety’.

  120 Hon. Penelope Chetwode (1910-86), daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, m. 1933 John Betjeman; traveller in and writer on India. E.C. to her mother, 5 April, 1966: ‘She is sort of nuts but lots of fun and crazy about horses. She practically always rides everywhere even to dinner and takes the dog along. The whole performance is a scream. She has straight grey hair with bangs and is very round with an extraordinary voice & is also crazy about Indian architecture.’

  121 Simon Sainsbury (1930-2006), collector and philanthropist. Chatwin had had a brief romance with him in the early 1960s.

  122 Intense ochre red.

  123 Bought in Edinburgh.

  124 A neighbouring National Trust farm tenant had applied for permission to build a house on a corner of the Chatwins’ field. E.C.: ‘I had cards printed up and got friends to sign them whenever his application went in.’

  125 On 6 November 1966 Tennant addressed a letter to Chatwin in pink and green inks: ‘My dear Bruce, Your enchanting letter gives me joy. Please give my greeting to Peter Davis. Could I go on taking Art News Bruce? I do so love it. I’m dedicating a poem to you in my new volume. It’s called the Supreme Vision.’

  126 Nebraska novelist (1873-1947), known for her depictions of prairie life.

  127 E.C.: ‘Derek was always telling us, “Keep an eye out for Wemyss.” His house in Donegal was full of Wemyss ware, even with large pigs sitting up like a dog.’

  128 Hermes magnifying glass in the shape of an eye. E. C.: ‘Bruce is lying: he thought it a ridiculous present.’

  129 Alvilde Lees-Milne (1909-94), gardening expert m. 1951 James Lees-Milne (1908 – 97), architectural historian and diarist; they lived at Alderley Grange near Ozleworth.

  130 E.C.: ‘Jewish son of famous equestrienne who escaped from Germany, married a Minnesota mining heiress and bought a beautiful Palladian house near Malmesbury, Easton Grey.’

  131 English interior designer (1929-98), author of On Living – with Taste (1968).

  132 Vaynol Park, estate belonging to Sir Michael Duff.

  133 Alexey Kosygin (1904-80), Soviet Premier 1964-80.

  134 Wardrop Prize ‘for the best first year’s work’.

  135 Andrew Bache had been at Old Hall.

  136 American architect (b.1944).

  137 Fernand Legros (1931-83) art dealer and former ballet dancer who sold forgeries of Elmyr de Hory. Legros and de Hory had recently been charged with fraud and jailed.

  138 John Betjeman was not made Poet Laureate till 1972.

  139 Elizabeth’s brother John was getting married to Sheila Welch.

  140 Bliss Collection of pre-Colombian art at Dumbarton Oaks.

  141 Palais Stocklet, Brussels.

  142 Rudolf Habelt, bookseller.

  143 Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853-1940) German archaeologist.

  144 The Fritzdorfer gold cup is the oldest gold cup in Germany. The Rillaton gold cup was excavated from Bodmin Moor in Cornwall in 1837. Lost soon after, it turned up years later in George V’s dressing room as a receptacle for his collar studs.

  145 E.C.: ‘They’d been incredibly nasty because he was English.’

  146 Adam Kraft (1455-1509) German sculptor.

  147 Edinburgh dealer.

  148 Emilia and Evzen Plesl took him along in t
heir Skoda from Prague.

  149 E.C: ‘In 1987 we went back to see it.’

  150 Maurizio Tosi (b. 1944), Italian archaeologist.

  151 Giuseppe Tucci (1894 – 1984), Italian scholar in Tibetan and Buddhist studies.

  152 Danubian Neolithic settlement 40 miles east of Prague.

  153 This wedding became the funeral scene in Chatwin’s 1988 novel Utz.

  154 E.C.: ‘I didn’t see Istanbul till 1970.’

  155 Judith Nash.

  156 On 27 March 1967 Welch had written: ‘Dear Prewz, About to buy a very early Sassanian dish, 8 in dia., very heavy, so alive and stunning in quality that it just has to be bought. The subject is a REAL DISH: a fertility goddess who makes me believe in them. She dances in her buff and blue with great bodily vitality. She waves a sash overhead, and is accompanied by two big birds (peacocks?). Her face is so alive and benelovent that it might be a portrait.’