Here’s Looking At You
Philip Mould is an art dealer, author and broadcaster specializing in the discovery of lost antique portraiture. This month he opens a major gallery in Dover Street, London.
A love of wild flowers and plants instilled in me by my parents and honed during an early childhood spent roaming fields and hedgerows ultimately led me to an even more all-consuming interest in historical British portraits. The connection may not be immediately obvious but both are visually striking, both are embedded in our social history and both offer the thrill of a chance discovery.
My Roman Catholic grandparents produced an impressively large tribe of children that spilled out into the adjacent neighbourhood and countryside, and my father spent much time with a neighbour called Mrs Piggott. She was a naturalist who, I got the impression largely raised him as well, in the process introducing him to the fields, woods and ponds of southern English countryside that in the eighteenth century was home to Gilbert White, the father of modern English naturalism.
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