ERIC BRADLEY 1924 - 2002

ICON COLLECTOR, BUSINESS PARTNER AND FRIEND

Eric Bradley was a true collector. He had sufficient self-confidence to trust his own instincts and intuition and, only after that, the opinions of professionals. While respecting the latter he had enough worldly wisdom to take into account our feet of clay. He was modest and even self-effacing to meet, yet there was another side of his nature that was passionate and sometimes almost wild; so he was something of a gambler and did things with panache and style. He was shrewd but never mean. In the later part of his life he studied sculpture and produced a series of portraits and studies of the human figure in clay. With such interests and qualities, and with the support of his deserved success as a businessman, he was ideally qualified to be a collector.

He was interested in people as well as objects of art and he enjoyed the market place. His taste was consistent, without academic pretensions and never strayed far from his natural feelings and instincts. Eric's early liking for pewter and Jacobean oak furniture prepared the way for the icons that were to become the great passion of his life. Here his achievement was extraordinary. It is no exaggeration to say that during the comparatively short period of his activity as a buyer, the group of icons he assembled (numbering less than a 100) is not surpassed in range and quality by any collection in the West. Certainly there have been, and are, other important collections, but it would be difficult to find one so interestingly balanced between the Byzantine, Cretan and Russian schools of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, which form the core of the collection.

The collection was housed in his beautiful family house in Keats Grove in Hampstead (just a few doors up from Keats House). In the basement he had converted and extended the brick cellar with barrelled roofs and added a chapel-like domed rotunda. To this unique venue came byzantinists, scholars in various fields and art lovers from all over the world where they were received and entertained quite unpretentiously but always with generosity and kindness by Eric and Eileen.

If fate favoured Eric as a collector during the 1970s, enabling him to buy the series of truly remarkable Byzantine and early Russian icons that came onto the market, it was later less kind. There came a time when circumstances obliged him to put the collection up for sale. The British Museum was seriously interested but, after more than a year of negotiating, they could not raise the money. The collection eventually went to the museum of the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, known as the Menil Collection. The icons can be seen there today, though not more than 20 are on view at any one time. Some of the icons from the Bradley Collection, can be seen on the Temple Gallery's website, www.templegallery.com, in the section 'Some Important Early Masterpieces Formerly at the Temple Gallery', nos. 1(click here), 3(click here), 6(click here), 7(click here), 10(click here), 14(click here), 15(click here), 17(click here), 19(click here), 21(click here) and 30(click here).

At this stage Eric's already long established association with the Temple Gallery changed from client to business partner. This enabled him to stay at the heart of the world of icons, where his skill and his flair as a businessman were to guide our venture through the sometimes uncertain fortunes of the 1980s and 1990s. It was through his determination and daring that we acquired such masterpieces as nos. 2(click here), 8(click here), 9(click here), 23(click here), and 25(click here) that are now on our website. He was to continue working, always conscientious and concerned for others, until the beginning of 2002.