Jack Franses was a textile dealer who acquired his vast knowledge of his subject from his father and used it with great success in his own business and also when he — in a classic case of poacher turned gamekeeper — spent ten years at Sotheby’s.
To the last he continued to share his great knowledge of, and passion for, antique textiles, and he even provided valuations from his hospital bed. He did not let the ill-health of his final years dent his enthusiasm and zest for living.
The passion for his specialist subject was lifelong: at the age of 6 he had accompanied his father to Oxford to see a collection of church vestments. The memory of their beauty and quality helped to dictate his adult career.
Jack Franses was born in 1927, the youngest of the four sons of Sydney and Rebecca Franses. His father, who had come to Britain at the beginning of the century, was descended from a Jewish family who had left Spain in 1490 for Salonika in the more tolerant Ottoman Empire, and there set up as traders in Spanish, Italian, Byzantine and Moorish goods. Around 1600 they established themselves in Constantinople, dealing in Chinese and Islamic works of art.
Sydney Franses dealt in rugs, tapestries and textiles, and at one time or another, his sons followed him into the firm he established in London in 1909, before several branched out on their own. Under various initials, the Franses name continues to be prominent in the London, and now New York, trade.
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Jack Franses’s formal schooling effectively ended when he was evacuated from Ealing at the age of 14, and his much of his later education was derived from reading and travelling in the Middle East. At 16 he was accepted into the Middlesex Regiment, rising to become a sergeant instructor, and in 1948 he took part as a volunteer in the first Arab-Israeli War. During this varied military service he was noted for his accuracy with a 4.2 mortar.
After a period as a sea cook, he spent some further years travelling, visiting country houses and museums in Britain, Europe New York and anywhere that collections of Oriental art were to be found. On his return in 1952, he acted as his father’s driver on trips to museums and sales, learning from him about rugs — the structures, fringes, side cords, ends, dyes, types of area wool, and design — and in 1958 he joined the family business in Knightsbridge.
He left in 1969 to set up on his own as a dealer in rugs and textiles as Franses of Piccadilly, by which time he had begun to establish a remarkable network of connections with royal and wealthy collectors.
A significant encounter was with John Paul Getty in 1974. Getty had bought an early, important and expensive carpet at Sotheby’s, which had subsequently been declared by “experts” to be a chemically dyed 19th-century fake. Franses was brought in to arbitrate by Peter Wilson, the chairman of Sotheby’s.
As Franses knew, such early textiles derived their red from cochineal and tin, and he asked for one knot to be cut from the carpet and sent to Geigy, the pharmaceutical company, which told him the test would take up to two months; Getty had given Franses two days. The answer was produced in three — the dye was indeed cochineal and tin.
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It was not surprising, then, that a year later Wilson head-hunted Franses to run Sotheby’s Islamic Department in London, which he did from 1975 to 1986, dealing with rugs, textiles and tapestries, European and Oriental Works of Art. During his tenure he recorded that sales in Europe went from £200,000 to £5.3 million, and to more than £10 million worldwide.
At the same time Sotheby’s was expanding in the Far East, under Julian Thompson, (obituary, Feb 2, 2011). Thompson made his base in Hong Kong, where no auction of high quality Chinese art had ever been held, and his first sale in November 1973 was a remarkable gamble that paid handsomely, in part because the Chinese market was reaching a peak. The operation weathered the collapse that followed a year later, and continues successfully to this day.
Franses organised a number of successful Hong Kong sales of Islamic art during his time with Sotheby’s. However, he was years ahead of the market in organising a major auction in Dubai, and he greatly overestimated the possibilities at that time, leading to his departure from the auction house and return to the trade.
Franses relished the conflicts that came his way in matters of attribution and valuation, frequently challenging the figures and opinions provided by auction houses and other independent valuers. He always protected the interest of his clients, and in many cases provided advice that allowed interested dealers and collectors to offer at the correct price. Another facet of his expertise and advice was designing for Marks & Spencer, and designing and producing children’s rugs, including one of Beatrix Potter characters.
His greatest asset was his perfect recall of almost every rug or textile he had ever seen. Both at Sotheby’s and as a dealer, he advised numerous collectors, among them King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, the Shah of Iran and other Middle Eastern heads of state, as well as Indira Gandhi, maharajas and Hollywood stars. His expertise was invaluable to Lloyd’s loss adjusters in settling overinflated and underestimated insurance claims.
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He wrote, or collaborated in, a number of publications, including European and Oriental Rugs for Pleasure and Investment (1970) and Tapestries and their Mythology (1973). One of the achievements of which he was most proud was the collaboration he initiated between Sotheby’s and the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University to create an invaluable oriental arts course, which was launched in 1984 and still flourishes.
He was married three times, secondly to Philippa Scott, author of The Book of Silk, and Turkish Delights, a collector and fellow scholar. He met his third wife, Jane Hewetson, then working as a teacher in Dubai, when she was taken on to act as a bid-spotter during his sale. He was, she recalled, the only member of Sotheby’s staff to make time to talk to the temporaries.
He is survived by his second and third wives, two children from the first marriage and a daughter from the second.
Jack Franses, textile expert and dealer, was born on June 16, 1927. He died on December 10, 2010, aged 83