‘I believe that it was after seeing the Impressionists at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927,’ wrote Mrs. Pleydell-Bouverie, ‘that I first fell in love with that school of painting, although I had seen them many times before in Paris and in London. At any rate from that moment my one wish was to collect.’
But that was not easy. She made an abortive beginning in the 1920s in the United States, where she abandoned her first purchases on her return to England.
In 1940 an inheritance from a distant relative gave her the means to begin again, but her war-time duties at the Red Cross Headquarters in London left her little time to spare. What there was she devoted to searching for pictures. There was not much competition, and wonderful opportunities offered themselves.
At one sale she saw Degas’s Repasseuse, a portrait of his son by Monet, and a Lautrec. ‘I took a deep breath,’ she wrote, ‘and bought all three.’ Captain Edward Molyneux was her most serious competitor and she learnt much from his kindly and encouraging rivalry. She sometimes buys at sales but the procedure she prefers is to have pictures under consideration on prolonged approval so that she can live with them and get to know them well.
‘My only regrets,’ she says, ‘are for the pictures I have not bought.’
John Rothenstein
