The trailblazing collection of Mary and Alan Hobart

In 1975, a small gallery specialising in French and British realist art opened on London’s Brompton Road. With the husband-and-wife team Mary and Alan Hobart at the helm, Pyms was a quiet haven of classical English taste. Few suspected that within a decade it would become a leading player in the international art world.

Neither Mary nor Alan had a formal background in art, nor any connections in the fiercely competitive trade they had settled on. What they did possess, however, was a keen eye for quality and a rigorous approach to research. The boot of their car was filled with reference books used to study the paintings they discovered in England’s provincial auction houses.

As their friend Lord Kirkham recalled, ‘It was a magical wizard’s mix of both culture and commerce. Mary’s overwhelming good taste and Alan’s extraordinary dealer instincts.’

Their sharp wits led to the rediscovery of several paintings that had been thought lost, such as Sir William Orpen’s 1912 work The Blue Hat (possibly ‘the perfect Orpen’, as the art critic Bruce Arnold wrote) and Sir John Lavery’s On the Bridge at Grez (1884), now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. These finds quickly established Pyms as a place for superb quality, rarity, condition and provenance.

The couple decided to risk their reputation on modern Irish art, a category so little regarded that James Joyce’s description of Dublin as ‘the centre of paralysis’ might have been used as a metaphor for the entire genre. At the time, few people could name an Irish artist other than Jack Butler Yeats, and the country’s volatile politics and Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ seemed to leave little room for the arts.

To stage an exhibition titled The Irish Revival in London at a time of such high tensions was not without jeopardy. ‘We were lucky not to get a brick through the window,’ Alan later admitted.

In fact, the Hobarts knew exactly what they were doing — and were passionate about it. Not only was modern Irish art seemingly undervalued, but some of its key protagonists, such as Orpen and Lavery, had been misattributed as ‘British’ or even ‘English’ artists. Pyms held group exhibitions in which these exiled artists were placed alongside their Irish contemporaries, such as John Luke and Paul Henry, and academic scholarship backed them up.

One of the gallery’s most successful finds was the forgotten Futurist painter Mary Swanzy, who had studied in Paris and known Gertrude Stein. Her retrospective at Pyms in 1986 revealed a restlessly curious artist who had travelled as far as the Pacific Ocean in search of subject matter. She was the first of several pioneering female artists, including Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, whom the Hobarts championed for bringing Cubism and Futurism to Ireland in the 1920s.

‘These heroic women were alive to the most innovative forms of European painting, and it is with their work that the claims of the first generation of the Irish avant-garde rest,’ said Alan.

As Bruce Arnold wrote in the Irish Independent: ‘The Hobarts do for other painters the same kind of service they accomplished for William Orpen: that is, the rediscovery of works and their presentation with research, care and discrimination… Time and again they have… discovered and rescued paintings which were otherwise being ignored.’

As the Irish economy strengthened and Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday Agreement held, a burgeoning art market emerged. Pop stars and Hollywood actors — including members of U2 and Robert De Niro — attended private views at Pyms, and prices for Irish art rose rapidly.

The Hobarts, keen to support the country’s contemporary art scene, held exhibitions of living Irish artists such as William Crozier and Rita Duffy. Crozier’s wife, Katharine Crouan, says the Hobarts were responsible ‘for putting Irish art on the map. They educated British taste in the best of Irish art and demonstrated the international quality of Irish art to the Irish.’

Rita Duffy recalls, ‘Alan and Mary spent a lifetime believing in the possibilities of Irish art, and I am forever grateful for that crucial support. They would be so pleased to witness the powerful female voice, finally emerging from Belfast.

‘I remember well one particular phone call from Alan. He had negotiated the important sale of two large drawings into the Beijing Contemporary Collection, which resulted in the surreal experience of my receiving the Cultural Olympic Gold Medal for Ireland in London 2012. “China have given you a big medal,” said Alan. It wasn’t the medal that mattered — what was important was Alan’s nourishing belief in my work.’

On 19 November 2024, in The Private Collection of Mary and Alan Hobart — Pioneers of Modern British and Irish Art, Christie’s will offer works from the couple’s extraordinary collection previously in their homes at Farm Street in Mayfair and Cap Ferrat in the south of France. The collection includes prime examples of works by Orpen, Yeats, Swanzy, William Scott, Bridget Riley, Dod Procter, Augustus John and Sean Scully.

Many of the paintings for sale were featured in the 2023 exhibition Championing Irish Art: The Mary and Alan Hobart Collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin. These include Jack B. Yeats’s O’Connell Bridge (1925); William Orpen’s The Thinker on the Butte de Warlencourt (1918); Grace Henry’s Post-Impressionist The Rosary (1910); William Scott’s Reclining Nude (1956); and Mary Swanzy’s Female Nudes with Horse and Viaduct, from the 1930s.

As IMMA’s curator Seán Kissane said of the Hobarts’ collection, ‘It captures a century of Irish art, from independence to the present day.’ But perhaps even more importantly, ‘They have gorgeous stuff.’

The Private Collection of Mary and Alan Hobart — Pioneers of Modern British and Irish Art is on view from 13 to 19 November 2024, before the sale on 19 November, at Christie’s in London