5. Horace 'Woody' Brock

Dr Horace ‘Woody’ Brock

On a recent trip to lecture in Boston, I had the great privilege to visit the home of Dr Horace Wood ‘Woody’ Brock. Woody was probably the first collector I ever met. Before I joined Christie’s as a graduate trainee in September 1997, I visited the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, at the time the most important art fair in the Western hemisphere, a place where the international great and the good would visit to buy the best the world’s dealers had to offer. As I wandered around the fair, I walked onto the Asprey stand - probably the last fair Asprey’s attended - and inspected a rather elaborate English clock with superb gilt bronze mounts. I don’t remember the maker, but it was highly decorative. After a minute or two, I was approached by a tall, rather impressive figure in glasses, dressed immaculately in a dark chalk-stripe suit. He demanded - in his unmistakeable firm East Coast American tones - why I was interested in said clock. This had never happened to me, and I certainly wasn’t expecting anyone to take any notice of me. Was he, perhaps, more interested in my girlfriend who I had dragged along and was rather bemused by all of this? No, it seemed he was curious - insistent even - to know what I was doing with my life, where I had been to university, and which department I was to be joining at Christie’s. As I said that I was shortly to join the furniture department, he sensed a like-minded soul (and he was right). To my great surprise, I was invited to meet him later in the week for breakfast at Claridges, where I tried hard to keep up with his insistence that I will enjoy furniture - having never previously shown any interest in that direction. Woody was right of course, and it all changed after I joined Christie’s in September 1997 and found that I really did enjoy the study of 18th century furniture, which Woody considers in our discussion here, to be the zenith of great design of almost any age.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, ‘Emperor’, 1992. Krystian Zimmerman (piano), Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Some objects from Woody’s collection in US museums today:

Garniture Set (one clock and 2 vases), 1736–1770. Chinese hard-paste porcelain, gilt bronze, enameled metal. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Horace Wood Brock 2020.421

Pair of gilt-bronze-mounted petrified wood vases, mounts attributed to Jean-Claude Chambellan Duplessis, c. 1760. Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Horace Wood Brock Collection, museum purchase funded by Brown Foundation Accessions Endowment Fund. 2021.372.1,.2

Longcase Clock (régulateur), Oak veneered with tulipwood and amaranth; gilt-bronze mounts; enamelled metal; glass about 1755–1760, case stamped by Balthazar Lieutaud (French, master 1749, died 1780). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2021.63

Exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2009, including Woody’s essay ‘The Truth about Beauty’

Furniture presented by Woody to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where these superb pieces are beautifully displayed in a Regency-themed room.

Giltwood armchair, designed by Henry Holland, similar to one mentioned by Woody during our discussion on beauty in design,

Woody’s chosen object:

Drinking vessel in the form of a Basilisk, silver-gilt with nautilus shell, by Elias Geyer, Leipzig c. 1600 (Geyer almost certainly trained in Nuremberg before he became a master craftsman in Leipzig in 1589). Dresden, The Green Vaults, 1610 inventory, no. IV.158. (SKD museum)