Obituary: Jeremy Maas

Jeremy Maas

Art dealer who showed Pre-Raphaelites in his gallery and helped to create a market for Victorian paintings

JEREMY MAAS, the art dealer who has died aged 68, was an authority on Victorian painting.

            His role as a pioneer in the revival of Victorian pictures in the 1960’s and 1970’s, though never widely known, was in some ways comparable to that played earlier by John Betjeman in the revival of Victorian architecture.

            When Maas opened his gallery in 1960 Victorian art was considered a byword in bad taste. That it came to be taken seriously was in no small measure due to his enthusiasm and erudition.

            His Victorian Painters (1969) remains the most readable survey of the subject and, though it has spawned many successors, has never been superceded. The pictures which have passed through his small art gallery in Clifford Street, Mayfair, particularly in the early years, included masterpieces of Pre-Raphaelite and High Victorian painting.

            Jeremy Stephen Maas was born in Penang, Malaya, on Aug 31 1928. His father, the son of the Dutch ambassador to London, had little interest in art, but thanks to his American mother, Jeremy early developed a love of painting. After a cosmopolitan childhood spent in the fashionable spas of Europe he was sent to Sherbourne and, after National Service, went up to Pembroke, Oxford, to read English.

            At Oxford Maas read William Gaunt’s Aesthetic Adventure, which fired his enthusiasm for Victorian art. There also he met his future wife Antonia, then an art student at the Ruskin. They sang madrigals together in Priscilla Tolkien’s house while J R R Tolkien was correcting the proofs of Lord of the Rings in the next room. They were married in 1956.

            After Oxford, Maas worked briefly in advertising before joining a firm of printers who supplied the auction catalogues for Bonham’s. By that stage Maas was already a keen collector of English mezzotints and he managed to persuade Leonard Bonham to let him start a prints and drawings department.

            In 1960 he left Bonham’s to open his own gallery with a capital of £2,000 and initial backing from John Keil, the antique furniture dealer. There he was soon joined by his erstwhile flatmate and Chelsea drinking companion, Henry Ford. In the absence of a market for Victorian pictures, the gallery dealt mainly on 18th-century British paintings and also exhibited the work of some contemporary artists such as John Ward.

            In 1961 Maas put on his first successful show of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The exhibition was a milestone in the Victorian revival, remarkable not only for the quality of works on display, many of them at absurdly low prices, but also for the people who attended the private view. The gallery was thronged by the grand-children of the Pre-Raphaelites whose families in many cases had not been on speaking terms since the 19th century. Maas found himself amid an admiring group of Pre-Raphaelite ladies, such as Diana Holman Hunt and Virginia Surtees, descendants of the original artists or their models.

            In 1963 Maas made his greatest coup by buying Leighton’s Flaming June for £1,000. People said he was mad when he bought it and greedy when he promptly sold it for twice that sum to Luis Ferre, the South American collector .The painting provided the cover and the inspiration for Victorian Painters.

            Published the year before Sotheby’s opened their Victorian Galleries, this was the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of Victorian painting. Its strengths were a thematic approach and a lively fund of anecdote and quotation.

            By this time Maas had assembled in his elegant house in Twickenham a remarkable collection of books and photographs which were later to bear fruit in his Victorian Art World in Photographs (1984). He was fascinated with the byways of his subject, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of 19th-century street maps. When discussing a forgotten Victorian artist he would often refer to what Frith had said about him, and this gave an almost uncanny sense that he was seeing Victorian art through Victorian eyes. He was also fond of discussing the sexual peccadilloes of Victorian artists, particularly in mixed company, and would relate fondly how Mulready could never paint a model unless he had slept with her first.

            Other books followed, including Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World, a masterly study of the most successful cotemporary dealer of the Victorian period. Gambart had covered his tracks well and Maas’s book was an exercise in detective work which involved many years’ research in England and Belgium. Maas never discovered Gambart’s diary and was always worried that it might turn up and invalidate some of his conclusions.

            There was a certain irony in Maas’s interest in Gambart, whose dealing style was greatly at variance with his own. Where Gambart was flamboyant and a natural gambler, Maas was cautious and hid a delightful sense of humour under his reserve.  Gambart was a great salesman whereas Maas maintained that his pictures were good enough to sell themselves, and did not easily accommodate himself with the whims of rich private buyers.

            Private clients there certainly were, such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of whose early forays as a collector came when he bought a Millais stained-glass design from the Maas Gallery. But Maas’s essentially academic approach and his refusal to compromise on aesthetic matters made him more at home with museum directors, and some of the greatest works that he sold went to institutions such as the Ashmolean, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum New York.

            For 10 years Maas had the field to himself, but with the opening up of Sotheby’s Belgravia in 1970 and the entrance of other, more commercial competitors into the market, Maas found himself outgunned.

            As stock prices rocketed in the 1980s he was unable or unwilling to pay the sums demanded in order to secure the great pictures.

            In 1987 the gallery was bought by Harlech Television. This allowed Maas’s son Rupert to step in, with much greater capital resources, and develop new fields of interest such as Victorian engraving.

            Jeremy Maas remained a revered figure in the trade, and an admirably laconic chairman of the annual Watercolours and Drawings Fair which he helped start in 1986.

            At the time of his death he had just completed the introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of Victorian Fairy Painting, due to open at the Royal Academy in November. The essay breaks new ground in its exploration of opium addiction and Victorian stage lighting.

            His knowledge of music was almost as profound as his love of art. His fondness for loud ties was curiously at odds with his taciturn manner and his terrible pipe.

            He is survived by his wife; they had two sons and a daughter.