Bendor Grosvenor

Bendor Gerard Robert Grosvenor (born 27 November 1977) is a British art dealer, art historian and writer. He is known for discovering a number of important lost works by Old Master artists, including Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Claude Lorrain and Peter Brueghel the Younger.^[1] He presents the BBC4 series 'Britain's Lost Masterpieces'^[2] with Jacky Klein, and does specialist research for, and appears in, the BBC1 art programme, Fake or Fortune?^[3] As a dealer he specialises in Old Masters, with a particular interest in Anthony van Dyck.

Life and work

Grosvenor was educated at Harrow School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and the University of East Anglia where he completed his PhD entitled "The Politics of Foreign Policy: Lord Derby and the Eastern Crisis, 1875-8".^[4] Before becoming an art historian he worked in politics, first as an adviser to the Labour MP Tony Banks, Lord Stratford, and then to the Conservative MP Hugo Swire.

His first major art discovery was a mis-catalogued portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 2003 that was being sold at a London auction as a work by Lawrence's pupil, George Henry Harlow.^[5] From 2005 until 2014 he worked for Philip Mould Ltd, where he made a number of significant art historical discoveries, including lost works by artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, on whom he is an acknowledged specialist. He now has his own company, and specialises in establishing the authenticity of paintings.^[6] He recently sold a newly identified portrait by Joan Carlile, the first professional British female artist, to the Tate gallery.^[7]

Grosvenor is a member of the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on National Records and Archives, and the Lord Chancellor's Forum for Historical Manuscripts and Academic Research. He also works as a journalist and writer, and presents programmes for BBC2's The Culture Show.

Jacobite portraiture

Grosvenor has made a special study of Jacobite portraiture. In 2009 he proved that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's iconic portrait of Charles Edward Stuart by Maurice Quentin de La Tour was in fact a portrait of Charles' brother, Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal York.^[8] In 2013 he discovered the lost portrait of Charles Edward Stuart by Scottish artist Allan Ramsay at Gosford House, the home of the Earl of Wemyss near Edinburgh.^[9] This portrait is now on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and has taken the place of the La Tour pastel as the definitive portrait of Charles.^[10]

Ancestry

The name Bendor is derived from the Grosvenor family's medieval heraldic shield, a bend or, a golden bend (diagonal stripe), which they used until 1389 when it was claimed instead by the Scrope family, in the case Scrope v. Grosvenor. Bendor is the grandson of Robert Grosvenor, 5th Baron Ebury, and the 4th cousin once removed of Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster. (He is fourth in line to the Marquessate of Westminster after the Earl of Wilton, Viscount Grey de Wilton, and his first cousin Alexander Grosvenor.) He is also of Swiss heritage.

Publications

• Starkey, David (2007). Grosvenor, Bendor, ed. Lost Faces: Identity and discovery in Tudor royal portraiture. Philip Mould Ltd. OCLC 122357300. 
• Finding Van Dyck. Newly Discovered and Rarely Seen Works by Van Dyck and His Followers. Philip Mould Ltd. 2009. 
• Grosvenor, Bendor; Hicks, Geoffrey (2009). Crap MPs: The 40 Worst Members of Parliament in History. London: The Friday Project. ISBN 9780007348688. 
• Hicks, Geoff; Charmley, John; Grosvenor, Bendor, eds. (2012). Documents on Conservative Foreign Policy, 1852-1878. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107035928. 
• Rutherford, Emma; Grosvenor, Bendor, eds. (2013). Warts and All: the Portrait Miniatures of Samuel Cooper. Philip Mould Ltd. ISBN 9780992726409. 

References

External links

• Bendor Grosvenor website
• Bendor Grosvenor on Twitter