Though he will be remembered for the originality of his eye, the pieces Christopher Gibbs (1938-2018) wrote for books and magazines are just as memorable.
‘Buy the beautiful, the grotesque, the evocative, the insane,’ he told Vogue-readers in 1967. ‘Just please don’t buy what everyone else does.’
Born to tread his own path, Christopher had a seemingly innate aesthetic confidence, and it was underpinned by a scholar’s passion for history and social context. Wit and intoxicating charm were characteristic assets, too.
‘I want to help people create places where they can live beautiful lives,’ he once told me. Over 60 years of doing just that, he set the benchmark for a maverick grandeur that has been copied but never equalled. As an antiques dealer, collector, decorator and mentor, he had an impact that is unmatched.
Inevitably Christopher is compared to other great English collectors, most notably William Beckford. But if there was something sepulchral about Beckford’s towering taste, Christopher’s was the opposite. He loved the charming as much as the grand, the uplifting as ardently as the serious.
In terms of décor, his homes distilled the mellow comfort of the English country houses he’d dreamed of since boyhood, and also expressed his affection for antiquarian libraries and cabinets of curiosity. The addition of Moroccan antiques and textiles added a haute- bohemian air that felt excitingly fresh.
Scale was key and Christopher deployed large – sometimes mammoth – objects to maximum decorative effect: over-life-size portraits; vast tables; a 13ft medieval lance. Entire branches of foliage often took the place of polite posies. In his refined hands, objects came together unexpectedly to make ‘fresh connections, new music’. ‘A merry muddle’ was his never-bettered description.
The pursuit of perfection was relentless and tweaking never ended. There could be tensions and furies. Fortunately he could rely on his soulmate Peter Hinwood (‘my friend Pete’) to help fine-tune and tinker.
One thing, however, never changed: the conviction that objects were to be lived with and enjoyed as much as revered. So the inevitable signs of wear were welcomed – provided they looked nice. No one captured carefree ancestral splendour as readily: a look whereby an old tweed cap – Christopher had many – might be chucked on the grandest marble-top table, or 16th-century Chinese porcelain perch on a fireplace amidst invitations and family photographs. Glass display cabinets and picture lights were anathema.
There was much serious majesty, yet curtains patchworked from remnants of old William Morris fabric and garden columns made of smashed, 19th-century plates pointed to cool insouciance. It’s what his imitators never seemed to understand: perfection lies precisely in not making everything perfect.
When it came to objects, what mattered most to Christopher was provenance. The miraculous twists and turns of a certain piece’s journey from, say, ancient Rome or Ottoman Turkey gripped and fascinated him. They were portals to vanished worlds and cultures.
His resulting almost-encyclopedic knowledge meant he was able to buy things auction houses misattributed.
He remembered everything. Seriously unwell, the last time I saw him at his set in Albany, he asked if I knew which stately pile the chair I was sitting on had come from. Shamefully, I’d forgotten. He hadn’t.
As easy shopping in the souk as he was pottering round St James’s, he seemed somehow both a pillar of the Establishment and a complete outsider. He got on as happily with the housekeepers, cooks and gardeners who made his homes so agreeable as he did with the dealers,collectors,rockstarsandroyalty who more famously made up his orbit.
Jokes helped, and Christopher could never resist them. So the bottom half of a Greek marble kouros figure (pictured) was cheekily nicknamed Bruce’s Bum after its previous owner, travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
Hamdulillah (Praise to God), the Arabic phrase he used as a greeting, quickly became Ham Diddly Doo Dah....
Hamdulillah indeed. Blessings upon him.
Rupert Thomas was Editor of The World of Interiors, 2000-22. This piece is from the introduction to Lucy Moore’s Christopher Gibbs: His World (Clearview Books, £50), out now
