Seller Story: Art Dealer Anthony McNaught, Santa Cruz, CA

“I grew up as a diplomatic brat, so we lived all over the world: Beirut, Baghdad, Libya— mainly the Middle East and Europe. In Beirut, when I was eight years old, I used my pocket money to buy a coin from a coin dealer down on the docks, for what was then about $3. A friend of my dad’s who was into numismatics saw it and said we should get it evaluated. It turned out to be a gold coin that was about 2,200 years old; someone had covered in pitch to keep it from getting looted. It was worth about $8000, then. So that was pretty cool for an 8 year old.

When I was older, I helped an art dealer friend of the family who got sick. He was unable to work, so I was detailed to help him one summer. I would take pictures of various paintings he was interested in, get them developed and take them back to him.

One day I saw a painting I thought was really nice and was selling for nothing, so I bought it on my own. A couple of days later I was in London dropping some paintings off at a restorer, and the restorer came out to help me bring them in. He said, ‘What’s that?’

I said, ‘Oh, that’s just something I bought.’

He said, ‘Will you take 50 pounds for it?’

I had paid 5 pounds for it the day before. So I thought, Yeah I would do that.

So then I went, Oh, it’s like low lying fruit. I thought I was going to have to work for a living, but actually I can go around looking at paintings.”

What do you look for in a painting?

For me, it’s an unmediated translation of the artist’s eye, an emotionally expressive quality that is intuitive. A lot of that happens in the brushwork. Palette’s very important. An artist can choose to change many things about their work, but our ideas of color become fixed at an early age. Even as Picasso was exploring his many diverse styles, from Cubism to Neo-Classicism, his palette choices remained constant.

What are you excited about right now?

I’m a big fan of Danish modernism. The Danes are like the Russians in that they don’t transplant well. I’ve never met a Dane or a Russian that was happy living in the United States. They all pine for the homeland. A lot of Danish artists went to Paris in the teens and twenties of the last century. They painted there with the first generation of the School of Paris; they were exposed to the ideas of modernism, and then they went back to Denmark and they never exhibited a lot outside of their country. So you have this pool of very interesting Danish painters that has just remained sort of sequestered. If they were French painters of the same quality, their work would be selling for 5 or 10 times as much.

Any favorite pieces in the sale?

I really like the Olga Alexandrovna, who was the Grand Duchess, sister of the last Czar of Russia. She was the only one to survive from that family. She lived in Denmark and was a really good painter; Her cousin, Queen Elizabeth II of England, has nine of Olga’s paintings in the breakfast room of Sandringham, her country estate.

We also have a number of pictures by Victor di Gesu. We bought his estate a bit more than 10 years ago. He was kind of a reclusive guy, he studied in Paris after the war on the GI bill, and didn’t ever really sell his work. Of all the major acquisitions I’ve ever made, that was a real stroke of luck, getting a hold of him.