Robert Erskine, gallerist, collector and television presenter

In a talk at the Ashmolean Museum in 1992, Howard Hodgkin recalled his old friend Robert Erskine’s “almost infallible” eye for quality when collecting antiquities, citing his acquisition of, “for a very small amount of money, a cardboard box full of shards of an archaic black-figure Greek pot. He [Erskine] spent the next six years of his life sticking them together. Then he realised there were some pieces missing and the dealer he bought them from said: ‘Oh, yes. I’ve got some pieces from the top of a wardrobe in Lord Elgin’s house. I think they fit your vase.’ They did, and they had the name of the artist.”
The signature was that of Sophilos, and this rare early Attic black-figured dinos (wine-bowl) and stand from about 580BC was considered of such exceptional interest and quality that it was later acquired by the British Museum, where it remains one of the star exhibits in the Department of Greece and Rome.
Hodgkin’s story was equally illustrative of Erskine’s generosity (he sold the vase for considerably below its market value) and passion for sharing his enjoyment and knowledge with others.
Between the early 1960s and late 1980s he found a natural outlet as a television presenter, fronting a number of scholarly TV series that he devised and wrote himself. His programmes generally used objects to tell stories from antiquity with economy and force, combining solidly reassuring knowledge of the facts with recognisable opinions of his own. Clive James, then The Observer’s television critic, hailed him as “supreme among the post-Kenneth Clark generation of aesthetic talking heads”.
In the art world, however, the maverick Erskine was considered more noteworthy as the pioneering founder of St George’s Gallery Prints in the 1950s. His idea of making prints available to everyone inspired a revival of British printmaking and set it on the road to the Pop Art boom of the 1960s.
His roster of printmakers included many of the leading names in British art: John Piper, Terry Frost, Ceri Richards, Michael Rothenstein and Julian Trevelyan.
Erskine was married three times: in 1955 to Jennifer Cardew Wood; in 1969 to Anne-Marie Lattès; and in 1977 to Lindy Blackburn, who survives him with their two sons, together with a son from his second marriage.
The youngest of four brothers (one of whom was killed in action in 1945), Robert William Hervey Erskine was born in 1930 at 6 St James’s Square, the London home of his maternal grandfather, the 4th Marquess of Bristol. Robert’s father was the Unionist politician Lord Erskine (elder son of the 12th Earl of Mar and 14th Earl of Kellie), who in 1934 was appointed governor of Madras. The family followed him there and for the next six years lived at Government House, where an Indian groom would regale young Robert with stories from the Mahabharata.
By the time they returned to England in 1940, he had been instilled with a lifelong love of India and its traditions and in due course his curiosity extended to various other ancient civilisations. His interest in the arts and ability to draw, meanwhile, came from his mother, Lady Marjorie Hervey, whose extraordinary family seat in Suffolk, Ickworth House, became their home on their return from India.
At Summerfields prep school, Erskine became an avid collector of old coins. Later at Eton he demonstrated no enthusiasm for the usual sporting preoccupations of the British upper crust and instead gravitated towards the drawing schools, where he and his friend Hodgkin began collaborating on illustrated books, Hodgkin doing the drawings and Erskine the script.
The Eton art master at the time was Wilfrid Blunt (brother of the now notorious Anthony), a brilliant teacher and according to Erskine “a very splendid and over-the-top character” who inspired his charges to begin collecting Indian paintings.
Erskine was not expected to get into Cambridge but he so impressed the examiners with his remarkable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon coinage (and his beautiful handwriting) that he won a scholarship to King’s College to read archaeology.
Arriving there after National Service with the Scots Guards in Malaya, he fell in with like-minded friends such as Mark Boxer, Peter Hall and Jeremy Sandford and soon began holding exhibitions in his rooms — he was one of the early exhibitors of the young Austrian artist Ernst Fuchs. He also befriended Bryan Robertson, later director of the Whitechapel Gallery, who was then running the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge and whose exhibition of contemporary prints was a big influence.
On trips to Paris in the holidays, Erskine was photographed in Le Figaro newspaper seated next to his good friend Michel Molinari, the photographer, and Jean Cocteau, and bought prints by Picasso, Matisse and Braque. He was struck by the fact that in France artists’ prints were an important part of the culture and had been for many years, but the same was not true in England.
He began frequenting the well-known print atelier of Lacourière, master printer of Picasso and Matisse, where the pungent odour of printer ink cast a powerful spell, and after leaving Cambridge in 1953 he determined to set up his own business.
The endeavour promised little in terms of financial reward but Erskine was not overly concerned about money, cushioned by various family inheritances which, however, never quite matched his munificence and occasional swashbuckling extravagances.
Erskine established his print gallery in 1955 at 7 Cork Street, sharing the ground floor and basement with Agatha Sadler, owner of St George’s Gallery Books, from which Erskine took his gallery’s name. The publisher George Weidenfeld had his offices upstairs.
Running north from the Royal Academy, parallel to Savile Row, en route between Sotheby’s and Christie’s and home to galleries such as the Mayor and the Redfern, Cork Street had long been regarded as an artistic hub and was still a go-to thoroughfare for buyers of contemporary art.
St George’s Gallery Prints was soon publishing as well as selling prints and Erskine borrowed the idea of the “suite”, a set of prints on a particular subject and in a particular medium, from Picasso’s etchings for the dealer Ambroise Vollard. He also played a key role in the formation in 1958 of the Curwen Studio as a facility dedicated to artists’ lithography.
Famous for his generosity towards his artists, Erskine invariably shouldered most of the printing costs himself and charged a commission of 20 per cent rather than the standard 50 per cent, which did not come close to covering his expenses.
The weight of prejudice against fine art print, meanwhile, was enough to persuade Erskine to invest £2,000 of his own money (a very large sum at the time) on a promotional film about the process of printmaking called Artist’s Proof, in which six artists each demonstrated the creation of a picture using a different print technique.
The atmosphere of the bookshop and print gallery was bohemian and erudite, with the bearded Erskine the embodiment of the beat impresario. He cut an energetic and dynamic figure, intensely engaged not only with his printmakers but also as a collector of everything from pre-dynastic Egyptian sculpture and Boulle cabinets to bits of ancient Greek pottery.
His collecting was sometimes done in collaboration with Bruce Chatwin, who had begun working as a porter at Sotheby’s, just round the corner from Erskine’s gallery, in 1958.
Meeting for the first time at the nearby rooms of the antiquities dealer John Hewett, Erskine remembered Chatwin looking like a young curate, “rather wet behind the ears”, and he could not resist bluffing him by pretending to know the provenance of a black necklace from Hewett’s hoard, airily hazarding: “Crimea — or somewhat west of there.” Chatwin was duly impressed and it was sometime before he realised he had been taken in. They quickly became friends, sharing a fascination for ancient objects with interesting, researchable histories, and each having an exceptional eye.
Chatwin at that time had next to no money and was keen to supplement his small Sotheby’s salary by trading in antiquities. Erskine agreed to put up the money for several buying expeditions, while Chatwin found customers for their purchases from his Sotheby’s client list.
In December 1961 they went to Cairo to find material and in 1963 they set off on another buying trip to Afghanistan, via Cairo and Tehran. Their collaboration eventually reached the ear of Sotheby’s and when Chatwin was made a junior director there in 1966, it was on condition that he cease dealing with Erskine. They remained close friends until Chatwin’s death in 1989.
In its later years, the main focus of activity at St George’s Gallery Prints was a large annual show held in an external venue under the title The Graven Image. Sponsored by Trust Houses Ltd, the exhibitions offered prizes to students and one notable winner was the RCA student David Hockney. The prize money paid for Hockney’s first trip to America and started the infatuation with that country so evident in the pictures that made him famous.
The last of these shows was held in 1963, after which Erskine sold his remaining stock to the new publisher Editions Alecto, where he became, as he put it, a “very sleepy director”.
His focus had by then switched to television, where he had begun introducing a slot called Collector’s Piece on ITV in 1962. He quickly demonstrated a gift for genial and articulate exposition and a shrewd sense of the medium’s possibilities. He was attracted as much as anything by the ephemerality of television and professed himself uninterested by contrast in writing books for posterity, although in his television work he proved again and again that while pictures are important, the script is everything.
Robert Erskine, gallerist, collector and television presenter, was born on October 13, 1930. He died on August 2, 2024, aged 93