Jeremy Stephen Maas, M.A.

Jeremy Maas was born on 31 August 1928 in Penang of a Dutch diplomat father and American mother. He was educated at Sherborne and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he read English. He always attributed his devotion to Victorian art, on which he was to become an authority, to reading William Gaunt's Aesthetic Adventure (1945) while at Oxford. After graduating, he worked briefly in advertising and then for a firm of printers through which he met Leonard Bonham, head of the auction house. Maas was already a modest and knowledgeable collector of English mezzotints and he persuaded Bonham to let him start a prints and drawings department at the saleroom, a venture which taught him the commercial intricacies of art dealing. In December 1960 he left Bonhams and, with a capital of £2000, opened his own gallery in Clifford Street, Mayfair, with the intention of specializing in Victorian paintings which, at that time, were not only unfashionable but held by most art historians and collectors to be in the worst possible taste. Initially Maas dealt mainly in watercolours of the Norwich School and the eighteenth-century English pictures that had come to him with his £2000 investment, using the proceeds from these transactions to buy top-quality Pre-Raphaelite paintings at risible prices. The Pre-Raphaelite collection was put on sale at the gallery in 1961 and, though it attracted purchasers from major museums and galleries, including the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the private collector was still chary, though Maas was assiduous in educating his customers to his own taste. Sotheby's opened their Victorian department (Sotheby's Belgravia) in 1970, an indication that Maas's campaign to rehabilitate the art of the period in academic and public esteem was succeeding. When, in 1969, he published his first book, Victorian Painters, he chose for its jacket a reproduction of `Flaming June' by Lord Leighton for which in 1963 he had paid the then very high price of £1000 and failed to sell to a British institution or collector. He resorted to a South American connoisseur to recoup his money (in fact he doubled it) and the picture still hangs in the Puerto Rican Museum at Ponce, now worth several million pounds. Not surprisingly, the life of Gambart, the most successful contemporary art dealer of the Victorian period, attracted Maas but documentary evidence in England and Gambart's native Belgium was sparse and Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World represented years of detective work by the author when it was published in 1975. Like William Gaunt before him, Maas was fascinated by the unconventional, often eccentric, lives of the Victorian painters and craftsmen and the contemporary, salacious gossip about them and he amassed a wealth of material which formed the basis of his Victorian Art World in Photographs (1984). It had taken almost two decades for Maas's mission on behalf of Victorian painters to convert the art world but commercial competitors began to appear on the scene and, as prices rocketed in the 1980s, he lost his taste for dealing, sold the gallery to Harlech Television and handed over the reins to his son, Rupert, though remaining a revered figure in the trade as chairman of the annual Watercolours and Drawings Fair which he helped to start in 1986. At the time of his death on 23 January 1997 Maas had just completed his introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition of Victorian Fairy Painting which opened at the Royal Academy in November 1997. In keeping with Maas's own penchant for bawdy humour and saucy innuendo, the eulogy at his memorial service at St George's, Hanover Square, was delivered by his old customer and friend, Barry Humphries.