The Art Collector Who Gave It All Away
A suburban terraced house might not be the first place you’d look for one of Britain’s most remarkable art collections, but that’s where you’d find the staggering selection of works owned by former BBC Radio 4 news journalist Tim Sayer.
Amassed over fifty years, Tim’s collection spans the breadth and depth of 20th century art, with paintings, sculptures, ceramics and sketches from names as varied as Henry Moore, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Sonia Delaunay and Anthony Caro crammed into every corner of the home he shares with his wife Annemarie.
Perhaps even more extraordinary, is that in 2016 Tim chose to gift his entire collection to the Hepworth Wakefield. The donation, comprising over 400 works, marked one of the UK’s largest bequests in recent years.
It was described as “one of the most significant and generous donations to a regional gallery in the UK” by then Director of Tate (and now Arts Council England chair) Sir Nicholas Serota, who went on to say “at times like these, with public funding cutbacks, arts and heritage organisations need all the private help the can get. It would be wonderful if Tim Sayer’s example encouraged other collectors to be as generous. I hope that we can make private giving to the arts and other charities an everyday part of our social and cultural life.”
The collection was exhibited at the Hepworth from 30 April to 25 October 2016 as The Tim Sayer Bequest: A Private Collection Revealed before returning to Tim’s home, where it will remain for the rest of his life before transferring to the Hepworth permanently.
Tim, who was inspired to gift his collection to the Hepworth after a visit to the gallery in 2015, said “it gives us great satisfaction to pledge our collection to The Hepworth Wakefield, where it will be enjoyed by generations of gallery goers for many years to come within such a superb building and inspiring art historical context. As a self-confessed ‘art-oholic’, my collection has been a lifetime’s passion, inspired by seeing the collection at Kettle’s Yard, which I’m delighted will be on display concurrently. I was amazed by David Chipperfield’s remarkable building with its sequence of ten beautifully-lit gallery spaces, and I realised that it would be the perfect home for my collection.”
The beginning of the collection lies in Tim’s teenage years, when aged seventeen he bought a portfolio of one hundred and eighty three antique prints from a Richmond junk shop for ten shillings (a number of them have since been valued at several thousand pounds, having been identified as the work of 17th century French master Claude Lorraine).
The intervening decades saw Tim amass an incredibly impressive art collection on relatively modest means, often spending half his yearly salary on art.
Since his first gallery purchase, a John Nash watercolour from the 1972 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Tim has acquired works by artists including Naum Gabo, Prunella Clough, David Nash, Jonathan Miller, Ewen Henderson, Gordon Baldwin and Gerhard Richter (who broke the record for the most expensive work by a living artist in 2012, 2013 and 2015), never spending more than £7000 on any piece.
Private Giving
