Speaker: Grant Ford
2 May 2023
The auction house is the public face of the art market. When the hammer falls, the price of an artwork can make headlines around the world, astounding and confounding many with the eventual result, whether selling for a new world record, only finding one bidder and scraping away or failing to find a buyer when pre-sale expectations and rhetoric were raging high.
How did we get to this point and where are we heading with new digital technology?
Join us as we look at the origins and development of London’s great auction houses, studying the notable characters in their histories, exploring the controversies and mapping their growth from small individual enterprises to monolithic international institutions. Many of London’s great auction houses have been around for over 200 years. This talk aims to give a succinct and colourful introduction to their histories. With one eye on the past we can give shrewd insight into their current practice and how they plan to place themselves in the art market of the future.
Profile
Grant is an Independent Fine Art Advisor, Private Curator and Representative based in Marlborough. He is a senior paintings specialist for BBC’s Antiques Roadshow and is particularly well known in the field of Victorian, Pre-Raphaelitism, Irish, Scottish, Sporting and European Art. He was responsible for Sotheby’s Victorian Art Department (2001-2016), as well as being a Senior Director and Head of British & Irish Art Post 1850. He spent 30 years at Sotheby’s and now represents a number of prestigious family collections. He is a regular guest lecturer in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada and elsewhere and has written extensively for many publications.