Title: Alma-Tadema (Catalogue of the Funt Collection)
Sotheby’s, 1973
Hardback and Paperback
No ISBN
The Funt Collection
In 1967 Allen Funt (1914–99), the creator of TV’s Candid Camera and the director/writer/producer of such films as What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? (1970), was looking for works of art to hang on the walls of a room he had decorated in Victorian style, when Alma-Tadema came into his sights.
“I didn’t even know the name,” he later admitted, “until a dealer in London asked me one day if I wanted to see a picture by the worst painter who ever lived.” Funt disagreed, and it was the beginning of a love affair that led him to assemble the largest collection of Alma-Tadema paintings ever owned by one individual – including, since he had always had a ready market for his work, Alma-Tadema himself.
Funt later asked, “How did it happen, I wondered, that I should have selected a painter without advice or guidance and come up with the work of a man who ranked last of all the artists of his time? I jumped to the defence. I swore I’d find someone worse no matter how long it took me. Soon I found myself with a homeful of Alma-Tadema paintings and a warm feeling of sympathy for this painter who received rather critical treatment. I have now discovered many better painters in his time and many worse. Because I had received my share of brickbats from the critics, I enjoyed sympathising with Alma-Tadema.”
But disaster struck: Funt’s accountant, a man with the apposite name of Seymour Goldes, was charged with embezzling the grand sum of $1,285,826 from his client, and promptly committed suicide. Funt was left with, in his own words, “everything a rich man has – except cash”. The only tangible assets he could turn to were his paintings, and so, after a swan-song exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (where they were described by one critic as “refreshing camp”), they were sold at Sotheby’s Belgravia – which is where I came in, as the compiler of this sale catalogue.
