1. Kenneth Clark (1903-1983)

Kenneth Clark was the grandest of grandees in the art world. During the war and after, his presence was everywhere on committees serving the arts. As with his hero John Ruskin there was always a social and moral dimension to his belief in the importance of bringing art to the widest audience. His landmark series Civilization was his greatest triumph – the last great synthesis of art, music, literature and thought – and the most influential art book and series of its time.

Shortly after he died in 1983, Sotheby’s held a sale of a part of his collection, and with Japanese, Chinese and African elements it was suitably eclectic. It was strong on medieval works of art and illuminated pages as well as Renaissance medals and maiolica. What separates it from all the other Art Historian collections was his passionate concern about the artists of his generation, and the sale contained works by the many artists who became his close friends: Victor Pasmore, Graham Sutherland, Mary Potter, Sydney Nolan, John Piper and above all Henry Moore. He bought from Moore’s first exhibition in 1928 and was an early supporter of all these artists and set up a special trust fund to support them. When he became director of the National Gallery in 1934 at the age of thirty-one, it was considered odd that the director should champion living artists, but in the end one must admit that Clark’s collection represented a largely neo-romantic view of British Contemporary art.

2. Douglas Cooper (1911-84)

The only English rival to Roland Penrose for the affections of Picasso was Douglas Cooper. It was fine as long as Penrose was living in France but post-war he was back in England and Cooper was in the South of France close to the artist, who took great pleasure in playing the two of them off against each other. Cooper, who had a well developed gift for making enemies, was scathing about Penrose and his collection, calling it “ready-made”.

A brilliant art historian and linguist, he became the world authority on cubism and his collection was correspondingly important. It was amassed largely in six years between 1933-39 from a shadowy German collector living in Switzerland named G. F. Reber, who had lost his money in the 1929 crash. Cooper concentrated on four artists: Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris, but he also had works by Klee and Miro. The collection was housed in Egerton Terrace in London until 1949, when Cooper and his companion, John Richardson, stumbled across the Château de Castille in the Gard district of the south of France, a sleeping beauty which they transformed into what L’Oeil dubbed le Château des Cubistes.

Cooper’s cubist collection was mostly of pre-war composition but it attained classic status and set the standard for all subsequent Picasso collections. Outrageous, extrovert, touchy and utterly confident in his views, Douglas Cooper wouldn’t suffer fools and developed a strong Anglophobia based on intense disdain for the Tate Gallery and the philistinism of a fox- hunting elite.

3. Robert (1906-2000) and Lisa Sainsbury

In the mid 1970s Denys Sutton, editor of Apollo magazine, lamented the decline of English collecting but pointed to the one big shining exception, Bob and Lisa Sainsbury. Their collection represents a rather continental fusion of ancient civilisations and modern masters that Jacob Epstein had pioneered in England. The Sainsburys brought this taste up to date with Henry Moore and Francis Bacon with a glance back to Picasso and Giacometti.

Of all the achievements of Bob and Lisa as collectors, surely the most remarkable is their early and unstinting support for Francis Bacon. They acquired at least a dozen of his works before anybody else and he became a close friend. Bob guaranteed his overdraft and it is said that the only time that the artist ever behaved well was when he was with the Sainsburys.

Their taste rapidly developed towards what was called, in those days, the primitive. Through John Hewett they were able to buy three New Guinea pieces from Pierre Loeb’s collection. The Pacific section was never as large as the African section but contains important pieces such as the Cook Island male figure or “Fisherman’s God”. The African works include the Yoruba shrine figure from Nigeria and a Benin bronze head as well as striking lesser pieces such as the “Derain” Gabon Fang Mask.

Today the collection can be seen at the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

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