16 December 2024
Lyon & Turnbull
This New Year, we are delighted to present the art collection of the renowned banker and financier Bernard Kelly (1930-2022) at the Mall Galleries in London on 15 January 2025.
The 315-lot sale presents an eclectic mix of art and antiques - from Renaissance and Baroque paintings and bronzes to 20th Modern British art - described as ‘the quintessential connoisseur’s collection.’
Join Bernard's son, Anthony-Nöel Kelly as he discusses his father's passion for the arts and his collection with us.
Bernard Kelly was born in Brussels in 1930, the elder son of Sir David Kelly, a Foreign Office diplomat of Irish descent who was instrumental in dissuading the Swiss from assisting the Nazis, and was later British ambassador to Argentina, Turkey and the Soviet Union. His mother, the Belgian-born Comtesse Renée Marie Noële Ghislaine de Vaux was considered “one of the grandes dames of British diplomacy” and was the last descendant of the Comte de Vaux (1705-1788), a pre-revolutionary Marshal of France. Bernard’s godmother was Marie-Noële’s friend, Queen Marie-José of Italy.
Educated at Downside during the Second World War, Kelly completed his National Service between 1948-50 with the 8th Queens Royal Irish Hussars in Aden. He then went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history but was sent down after one term having failed his Latin preliminary (having never learnt Latin whilst growing up in Belgium). There followed a difficult period for Kelly, as not only did he have to leave Oxford but soon afterwards he suffered a motorbike accident which required three months’ treatment in hospital. Ever determined, he refused to lie idle during his recuperation and used the time to take articles with a small firm of solicitors. Once qualified, he moved to Simmons & Simmons, one of the big law firms in the City of London, and soon became a partner.
It was during this time that Kelly met Mirabel Fitzalan Howard, the daughter of the 3rd Lord Howard of Glossop and his wife Baroness Beaumont. They married in 1952 and together had seven sons and a daughter.
In the 1960s Kelly moved from law into banking, joining the buccaneering firm SG Warburg and making a name for himself as one of key figures that established the City as the centre of the Eurobond and Eurodollar markets. In 1975 Kelly moved his family to Monaco, where he started the Compagnie Monegasque de Banque. He and Mirabel became friends of Prince Rainier and his wife Princess Grace, the former Hollywood star Grace Kelly, who when once asked if they were related, said: “Oh yes, we’re all one great big happy clan!”.
After the 1979 election, the Kelly family moved back to England, where he was invited by his old colleague Sir Ian Fraser to become vice-chair of Lazard Brothers. Kelly would then go on to recruit the former defence secretary Sir John Nott to their team - “I had had enough of politics by then and Bernard was a colourful character, very persuasive”. Together, the trio injected new zest into the previously old-fashioned Lazard Brothers making them one of the leading independent banks.
Tall, slim and gregarious, Bernard Kelly was renowned throughout the City. As Oscar Lewisohn, one of his contemporaries, recalled: “his phenomenal stamina and wry humour were invaluable assets to his idiosyncratic style of banking.”
Kelly was often seen around London on his beloved bicycle, whether travelling from his home in Chelsea to the City, visiting auction houses and galleries to find works of interest or, famously, when the shares of Maxwell Communication Corp collapsed in 1991, visiting to the London home of Kevin Maxwell to shake his fist at the windows.
Kelly retired from Lazards in 1990, when he reached 60, but he never lost his appetite for business, maintaining a portfolio of boardroom roles and acting as a mentor to younger financiers for another three decades.
A highly successful entrepreneurial banker and financier who led a compelling and epic life, the rich narrative of Bernard Kelly’s life is aptly conveyed in the fascinating breadth and highly eclectic nature of his art collection.
The collection of Bernard Kelly is in many ways the quintessential connoisseur’s collection. It is not bounded by time or particular place, there is no narrow focus. Instead works that are obviously very significant sit happily side-by-side with those of much lesser-known artists; value is always aesthetic, rather than monetary, and everything is worthy of care and attention.
Aspetti, the leading sculptor in Venice at the end of the 16th century, was particularly renowned for his small scale works in bronze.
From his mother, Kelly absorbed the tastes of the grand houses of his Belgian relations, frequently staying with them for his school holidays. The period interiors of their chateaux – rooms filled with Old Master paintings, 17th and 18th century continental furniture, tapestries, porcelain and neo-Classical sculptures – were comfortable, asserting traditional values of an elite that was now surviving rather than thriving. This was the culture his mother continued to maintain whilst sharing houses in Chelsea with her eldest son, giving Bernard’s collecting a natural direction.
From his father, Sir David, Bernard inherited a more academic and bookish bent. The itinerant life of a diplomat tended to complicate the luxury of collecting, with the implication of packing cases arriving in the hall every four years. However, his father’s intellectual openness became in Bernard a willingness to consider all different sorts of pictures and objects. This meant that he not only loved things familiar to him from his Belgian background, but also what a more contemporary culture was making. This led him, in particular, to 20th century British Art, which he enjoyed for its provocation and rejection of convention.
Bernard’s son, Justin, recalls his father’s early approach to collecting thus: “In the early days whenever my father made a bit of money he’d cycle to a reputable auction house and ask their counsel on what was of interest coming up. He’d then leave one or two relatively modest bids and wait and see. That way he slowly started to build his collection.”
The subject of Mrs Hartley as a Nymph with the Young Bacchus is Elizabeth Hartley (née White), a celebrated beauty and stage actress who became notorious for her role in society scandals including the 1773 dispute known as ‘The Vauxhall Affray’.
And Crispin, another of Bernard and Mirabel’s eight children, reflects on family life with an avid collector: “Building his collection was an integral part of making a home for his large family and the appropriate setting for his gregarious nature. As youngsters, we might have to name objects in a dining room picture in French before starting breakfast. And for guests, introducing them to his environment was a reflection of his optimistic and energetic nature, whether the work was a Renaissance bronze, a Dandini chef d’oeuvre or a restless and vivid John Piper. Catholic and eclectic, his collection was an expression of his enthusiasm for life, for himself and all those around him”.
If Bernard Kelly’s collection can be said to have a centre, it is probably the group of predominantly 16th and 17th century Italian and Flemish bronzes. Some, such as the beautiful Venus and Mars attributed to Tiziano Aspetti, are highly significant and others are much less so, but one senses that all of them were enjoyed equally by Bernard; the smaller, less valuable examples intended to be plucked off the bookshelves and handed to admiring guests so they could follow their contours by touch. These bronzes, with their High Renaissance and Baroque obsession with Classical mythology as allegory, are, of course, complemented by the magnificent oil by Cesare Dandini, but they also form the starting point for the wider collection of sculpture, roosting on every shelf and windowsill (as well as on dramatic coloured stone plinths), ranging from the (neo)Classical, through to medieval ivories, 18th and 19th century portrait busts and on to the rather wild and sensual Secessionist and Jugendstil figures that lined the entrance hall to his apartment in the Piper Building.
Other Old Masters include a Four Seasons cycle by the Flemish Baroque painter Sebastain Vrancx (1573-1647) guided at £80,000-120,000 and the Ancien Regime history painting Psyche Abandoned by Cupid by Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays (1729-1765) with expectations of £40,000-60,000.
The paintings and works on paper are equally diverse, part grand country-house – such as Sebastian Vrancx’s Four Seasons cycle, Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshay’s Psyche Abandoned by Cupid, or Joshua Reynolds Mrs Hartley as a Nymph – part bohemian Chelsea flat, with its wonderful collection of Modern British Art, which Bernard started collecting in the 1980s, when the great Modernist artists of the early 20th century - Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Alfred Wolmark, Roger Fry - could be had very reasonably. Add in Ceri Richards’ elegant, quasi-surrealist painting of a ‘pearly queen’ and a perfect L.S. Lowry sketch of two heavily clad mourners at a northern funeral and the Modern British part of the collection speaks to a good eye and brave taste.
And then there is the collection of John Piper’s preparatory works for the murals that adorn the Piper Building, Bernard’s home for the last two decades of his life. ‘The Spirit Of Energy’, as the murals on this former home of the North Thames Gas Board are called, is one of the most important public commissions of Piper’s career and these studies give a marvellous insight into his process, on the one hand free and expressive, whilst on the other hand always keeping an eye on the practical and architectural.
The sale will be conducted live at The Mall Galleries, London and online on 15 January 2025, with viewing opening on Sunday 12 January.
