AS HEAD of Sotheby’s Russian department during its formative period, John Stuart was respected for his very detailed knowledge and understanding of Russian art and culture. But he was also a very convincing mimic and an engaging raconteur — and his love of motorbikes was almost as strong as his passion for icons.
Russia snared Stuart at an early age. John Innes Stuart was the only son of an Angus landowner. He was first introduced to the art and culture of Russia while at Eton. His Scottish Protestant parents were deeply upset when he expressed an interest in joining the Roman Catholic Church, and they asked his schoolmasters to get him interested in something else. Stuart, then 15, was given a book on the Russian Royal Family and became voraciously keen to find out more about Russia’s history, art and religion. He may have been encouraged in this by his art master, Wilfred Blunt, brother of the art historian Anthony Blunt. Stuart asked to be introduced to Russians in London who had escaped the Revolution, and he became close friends with the family of Count Vladimir Kleinmichel, who would later act as his godfather when he converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Stuart went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, to read history, but soon decided to change to Slavonic Studies. During his vacations he travelled across much of Russia and later spent time studying at the Central State Restoration Workshop in Moscow. On coming down in 1963, he took a job with Sotheby’s as what he used to describe as a “glorified porter”.
While he gained a reputation for his knowledge of Russian art, he also involved himself deeply in the Russian community of London, determined to perfect his Russian. Friends later complimented him on acquiring an extraordinarily good accent, even though his vocabulary, learnt from people who had escaped Russia during the Revolution, was rather old-fashioned and courtly.
Stuart left Sotheby’s briefly in the early 1970s to run a London gallery specialising in Russian art with Marina Bowater, an antiques collector. He studied in Moscow under Adolf Ovchinnikov at the Grabar Centre for Icon Research and Restoration, and also spent a year in Greece, immersing himself in its Byzantine heritage and the roots of Christian art. But he soon returned to the auction house in a more senior role, and in 1975 he published Ikons, his first major book.
Advertisement
As head of the Russian department he developed a strong market in all sorts of art, from icons and paintings to silverware and furniture. At its peak, Sotheby’s was conducting a big Russian sale almost every month.
From 1980 until he left the company in 1996, Stuart worked as a consultant. His swansong, in December 1995, was to oversee the most comprehensive sale of Russian art in Britain to that time. The collection, ranging from Byzantium to the post-Revolution period, raised a record £5 million in what was still a fledgeling market.
After leaving Sotheby’s, Stuart set up an art consultancy business with Ivan Samarine on the ground floor of a magnificent converted warehouse in Notting Hill. Stuart also spent a lot of time researching and writing what he hoped would be his defining work, Icons: The Triumph of Orthodoxy. Described as the first meaningful English-language study of Russian panel painting, covering the culture, history and art of Russia from the iconoclasm of the 8th century to the end of the 16th century, the book was submitted to his publishers, Alexandria Press, just before he died and will appear shortly.
But it was not only Russian icons that exercised Stuart’s passions. He was also fascinated by the leather-clad biker icons of the 1960s and 1970s, and would surprise visitors to Sotheby’s by offering to take them for a spin around London on the back of one of his many British motorbikes, often giving a commentary in a cod-cockney accent. In 1985 he wrote a cultural history of the rocker movement, entitled Rockers! Kings of the Road, which was said to be the book most shoplifted from London bookshops, and lent George Michael one of his leather jackets for an early Wham! pop video.
Stuart continued to enjoy riding motorbikes for most of his life, even though, to the teasing of his friends, he required an electric starter on his Triumph after a hip operation. When the V&A held an exhibition on British Street Style in the early 1990s they called on Stuart both for style advice and to lend motorcycles, original Fifties and Sixties bikers’ clothing, accessories and memorabilia.
Advertisement
At well over 6ft, Stuart was a larger-than-life character around the streets of his beloved St Petersburg, where in later years he devoted much of his time to refurnishing a 19th-century mansion, which was formerly occupied by the novelist and philosopher Ivan Turgenev. Its lavish decoration featured in a ten-page spread on Stuart in Russian Vogue this year.
Stuart was also involved in raising money for the World Monuments Fund in order to restore the Chinese palace built for Catherine the Great at Oranienbaum, just outside St Petersburg, and the early-19th-century Flag Pavilion on Yelagin Island.
He was unmarried.
Advertisement
John Stuart, former head of the Russian department at Sotheby’s, was born on May 20, 1940. He died of cancer on July 12, 2003, aged 63.