Among them is a leading collector of Islamic art – who has amassed 35,000 pieces – England’s foremost collector of Old Masters, and the Manchester businessman who started out selling vacuum cleaners and ended up with 2,500 works by Modern British artists. It has made him one of the world’s top 200 art collectors.
Also in the series, a fabulous collection of Venetian glass, images from the dawn of photography, and exquisite pocket watches spanning 300 years.
Episode 1 - Professor Nasser David Khalili
David Khalili is undoubtedly one of the great collectors of the world. He owns 35,000 pieces of art in eight collections ranging from Islamic Art, to Aramaic documents, Japanese enamels, Japanese Kimonos, Swedish textiles, and Spanish metalwork. He has allowed TV cameras in for the first time and speaks candidly about a lifetime of collecting and using art to promote peace between faiths. Among the objects he shows presenter Emmeline Hallmark is an exquisite illuminated Koran from 1327, a Japanese embroidered picture of a waterfall made of silk on silk from the Meiji period (one of only two known) and an Aramaic leather document which contains the first reference in writing to Alexander the Great and dates from 350 years before Christ
Episode 2 - Francesco Carraro
Francesco Carraro died in 2014, aged 84. Over fifty years he had built up the best collection of Venetian glass in the world. To do so, he worked with his wife, Chiara. In the late 1960s, Francesco realised that Venetian art produced between the wars was undervalued. He started collecting glass designed by masters such as Barovier, Zecchin and Carlo Scarpa - who is revered in Italy as one of the greatest glass innovators of Murano. The collection is a visual feast and the backdrop for the programme is Venice itself.
Episode 3 - David Lewis
David Lewis is Britain’s greatest collector of Old Masters. He owns 450 and every big name is represented: Turner, Constable, Rubens, Rembrandt, van Dyck. About 200 of them are on loan to national galleries but David shows us those which he keeps on the walls of his home. And they are spectacular. An Allori of Francesco de Medici, later Grand Duke of Tuscany; a tiny sketch of a woman at a window by Rembrandt; van Dyck’s portrait of a young man; Carolus Duran’s full-length painting of Madame Flandrin, wife of a diplomat who fled the Franco-Prussian war; Sebastiano del Piombo’s arresting portrait of Pope Clement VII; and the Impressionists - marvellous and rare works by Pissarro and Pierre Bonnard.
Episode 4 - Frank Cohen
Frank Cohen is a human dynamo who lives and breathes modern art. We meet him at a huge warehouse ‘somewhere in England’ - one of four in which he houses his 2,500 paintings. He shows us, among others, a massive canvas by Georg Baselitz, a sublime painting by Frank Auerbach (‘Primrose Hill, 1968’), a work by L S Lowry (who he knew and met many times), works by Edward Burra, and a rare painting by Patrick Heron from 1951 - the year of the Festival of Britain.
Episode 5 - The Greatest Watches in the World
In this programme, an anonymous owner’s collection of 400 watches from which Jonathan Hills at Sotheby’s selects six watches spanning 300 years. They include a watch made in London the year before the Great Fire and a 1973 watch by George Daniels, the man who single-handedly revived the English watch-making tradition but insisted on making every single component himself. There are images of the workings of each watch; not only the mechanisms but also the silver and gold repoussé decoration of the cases.
Episode 6 - Attilio Codognato – jeweller to the stars
In Venice we see the jewels of Attilio Codognato, who made pieces for everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to the Duchess of Windsor. But Codognato also collected modern art in the 1960s. He helped to organise the Venice Biennale and befriended American artists who flocked to Italy at that time, among them Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns. They partied together at his palazzo and he bought their work. Andy Warhol painted Attilio’s portrait using his silk-screen technique: it still hangs in the dining room. Codognato acquired an early painting by Twombly that has never been seen.
Episode 7 - Roger Thérond - Photographs
Roger Thérond was the Picture Editor of Paris Match in its heyday. He dealt with images of stars and politicians - the staple of twentieth century photography. What few knew - even those who worked with him - was that Roger Thérond spent every Saturday at the flea-markets of Paris buying images from the earliest years of photography, especially Daguerrotypes from the 1850s. They show a ‘lost’ France but that is exactly what intrigued this most private of collectors. Over fifty years he built up what is now acknowledged as perhaps the best private photograph collection in the world
Episode 8 - Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo – Modern Art
Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is a woman with a mission – to bring modern art of new audiences. She has already built a gallery in her home city of Turin (designed by the minimalist architect Claudio Silvestrin) to house the many works she has collected over the past twenty years. Now she is opening another gallery – in Madrid. In this programme she allows us to see the paintings she has chosen to hang in her own home, and talks about the state of art collecting today.
Episode 9 - Richard Burrows – Pre-war Art
Richard Burrows was the nephew of the pre-war painter Edward Le Bas and moved in exalted circles; he knew Augustus John, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell and other members of the ‘Bloomsbury’ set. When Edward Le Bas died, Richard was determined to save as much of his extensive art collection as possible. It survives now in his home – a tribute to a lost age of British art.
Episode 10 - Cecil French – The Pre-Raphaelites
The ‘forgotten’ collection of Cecil French gives us a window on the world the Pre-Raphaelites. He collected paintings that speak of the Victorian love of the romantic but he remained a mysterious character until his death in 1953. Then, the art world discovered a treasure-trove of work by artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Burne-Jones and Albert Moore. Today, these remarkable paintings are being conserved and we go behind the scenes for a privileged view.