The Grasset Collection: An Appreciation

I first met Juan Manuel Grasset 35 years ago, not long after I had joined Sotheby’s, when he acquired Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s exquisite Still life of flowers in our December sale in 1987. I didn’t realise at the time, but in the previous 15 or so years he had already assembled a really significant collection of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings including Jan Brueghel the Elder’s River landscape, still lifes by Van der Ast, and the wonderfully atmospheric Barent Avercamp Winter scene.

Private collectors made up a minority of the buyers at the time, in a field still dominated by art professionals. But Manolo (as Juan Manuel was known to his friends) was part of a pioneering band who had realised that they could buy great works directly at auction and he, and his wife Maria, were regular visitors to the London July and December sales. It became clear to me very quickly that Manolo had an extremely good eye and knew the market better than anyone. Over the next two decades we would meet up regularly at every pre-sale viewing and I was privileged to get to know Manolo well and to see the collection grow, helping with some notable acquisitions including the Van der Hamen from New York in 1994, the superb Floris Van Dijck in London in 1995 and Beert’s largest and most ambitious still life in London in 2006.

It was a collection that was lived with and enjoyed every day. Manolo was a quietly passionate collector who knew his pictures inside out and loved discussing them with like-minded people. He developed close friendships with the leading scholars in his field of interest, not least Fred G. Meijer, who came to know the collection very well and wrote the text for the exhibition in San Diego as well as the essay that forms part of this catalogue.

The most remarkable feature of the collection is the breadth and quality of the still-life paintings that make up its core. Although these were almost all painted in the Low Countries, in a short period of a little over half a century, they show great variety and chart the evolution of this genre of painting in its most important moment. What makes the Grasset collection particularly fascinating are the numerous cases where one artist is represented by multiple works. This allows us to examine and understand the character of an artist in great detail. Whilst seventeenth-century still-life painting may have been Manolo’s first love, he was also drawn to landscape painting of the same period, particularly the intimately observed and meticulously rendered scenes of Jan Brueghel and his contemporaries. Towards the end of his period of collecting, he made his most significant acquisition – Canaletto’s View of the Grand Canal, Venice. At first sight, it may appear surprisingly at odds with other works in the collection, but in its finish, attention to detail and extraordinary refinement, it is very much in keeping with the aesthetic that Manolo most admired. Charles Beddington’s essay, later in this catalogue, places this important work in the context of Canaletto’s œuvre.

During the thirty or so years over which the collection was assembled and in the decade that followed its completion, the Grasset collection was a hidden treasure, known only to those fortunate enough to have been invited to visit Manolo and his wife in Spain. It is wonderful that during his lifetime, the collection and the extent of his achievement in forming it, became known to a wider public at major exhibitions, first, in 2016, in San Diego and later, in 2019, at the Museum of Fine Arts, in St Petersburg, Florida, where the pictures were so beautifully shown that Manolo himself commented, ‘I think I never saw the collection as brilliantly displayed as it is here’. These exhibitions along with the present catalogue provide a lasting tribute to an extraordinary endeavor undertaken over nearly half a century by a remarkable collector.