Who's who

Master

Philippa Glanville FSA

An enthusiastic communicator, Philippa Glanville is now an independent adviser on the decorative arts, after a 40-year career as a curator.

After reading history at Cambridge & training as an archivist, she joined the Museum of London, where she planned the Tudor and Stuart Galleries, which opened in 1976.

Becoming the silver specialist at the V&A, she served as Keeper of Metalwork from 1989 to 1999, and devised the first phase of the award-winning Whiteley Silver Galleries, opened in 1996. She then went on to become the first Academic Director at Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild Collection, before retiring in 2003.

Her books include London in Maps (1972 Connoisseur/Ebury Press), Silver in England (Unwin Hyman 1987), Women Silversmiths 1697 -1845 (with Jennifer Goldsborough) (Thames & Hudson 1991), Elegant Eating (V&A 2002) and The Art of Drinking (V&A 2007).

She is a vice president of NADFAS (National Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies) and is about to become a trustee of the Art Fund, the national fundraising charity for art across the UK - helping museums and galleries to buy, show and share art .

She is a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. She is married to a fellow historian and they have two sons

She is curatorial adviser to the Harley Gallery, North Nottinghamshire and a recent project was an exhibition – "Dining with a Duke: Decoding Food and Drink at Welbeck 1695 to 1914", reflecting her longstanding research interest in the material culture of eating.

Upper Warden

Christopher Claxton Stevens

Christopher Claxton Stevens was born on 15th May 1952 and educated at Haileybury College and Christ Church, Oxford where he attained an M. A. degree in History.

After spending some years in the Furniture Department of the auctioneers Christie’s, King Street, in 1981 he joined Norman Adams Ltd, the long-established specialists in the finest 18th century British furniture based in Knightsbridge, London. He was a Director from 1986 until its closure in 2009. Besides being a keen collector of antiques, he has a love of furniture of all periods, including commissioning modern pieces.

He was author of 18th Century English Furniture – The Norman Adams Collection (1983), co-author of British Furniture 1600-2000 (2005) and editor of The Frederick Parker Collection: a Selection of Chairs (2006). He writes on furniture of all types and his lecture schedule includes West Dean College, Sussex and visiting lecturer at Lublin University, Poland.

Christopher joined the City Livery Company, the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers in 1977 and became the second youngest Master in the Company’s history in 2002. His work as Chairman of the Guild Mark Committee, aiding designer-craftsmen, is commemorated by the annual Claxton Stevens Prize, founded in 1989 and awarded each year by the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House.

Christopher has served on the Council of the Furniture History Society and was Chairman of the Regional Furniture Society for seven years until 2001. He is a Trustee of two museums: the Geffrye Museum in London and the Chiltern Open Air Museum of Buildings in Buckinghamshire, as well as of the Frederick Parker Foundation, set up to preserve the Parker Knoll Collection of Chairs, now at London Metropolitan University. He is a Course Adviser for the Furniture Conservation and Restoration Course at West Dean College, Sussex. He was elected a member of the Art Workers’ Guild in 2004 and a Trustee in 2008.

Middle Warden

Nicholas Somers

Nic Somers is an auctioneer and valuer with more than 40 years’ experience. He is the principal of Nicholas Somers and Company, a valuation and consultancy firm specialising in independent reports for Court relating to antiques and the fine and decorative arts. He frequently appears as an expert witness in Crown, County and High Courts.

His long career in art and antiques began in the mid 1960s in Shropshire as an auctioneer, then dealer. In 1967 he moved to London where he gained experience of the finest English furniture with one of the top London dealers – Royal Warrant holders M. Harris & Sons. Fond memories of those days include travelling to work in bowler hat with a tightly rolled umbrella and the cordon bleu lunches served on the premises for all staff.

During the 1970s he ran his own gallery in Worcestershire, before joining Sotheby’s Bond Street and then working in the West Country. From 1982 to 1990 he was a director of Bearnes Fine Art Auctioneers in Torquay, following a management buy-out from Sotheby’s.

He served as chairman of the Antiques and Fine Art Committee of the Incorporated Society of Valuers and Auctioneers from 1995 to 1997 and chaired the Antiques and Arts Faculty of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors 2003-2006.

He was a founder member of the Guild of Arts Scholars. He is a member of the Court of Assistants of the Worshipful Company of Turners and a Freeman of the City of London.

Nicholas has an abiding interest in all objects made of wood. He has long been a collector of treen and more recently has amassed an impressive collection of contemporary turned bowls and objects. He was the co-organiser of an exhibition on the importance of the craft of the turner in furniture and decorative arts, mounted by the Guild of Arts Scholars as part of The Worshipful Company of Turners’ Wizardry in Wood event in 2008.

He retains strong links with the West Country, particularly Devon, where his many interests include snipe-shooting on Dartmoor.

Deputy Master

Mark Bridge

Mark is Editor-in-Chief of the weekly newspaper Antiques Trade Gazette and has over 30 years experience of reporting and commentating on the art and antiques market. He is a founder member of the Guild of Arts Scholars and has edited its newsletter since its inception in 2005.

He was educated at University College School, Hampstead and Leeds University where he read English and French.

In September 1979, he went for a job interview at what he believed to be a book publisher. He was taken aback to be offered a post as a filing clerk on a newspaper, but he took the job nevertheless and has been working for Antiques Trade Gazette in a variety of roles ever since.

In those days Antiques Trade Gazette was published by a small team from a first floor flat above a French horn shop in Long Acre, Covent Garden. It was a small title but beginning to grow rapidly and Mark soon moved on to become a reporter and a sub-editor. His An Encyclopedia of Desks was published in 1988

When ATG was acquired by the Daily Mail Group in 1994, he was appointed editor and became more deeply involved in many aspects of the art and antiques business, working closely with the trade associations to organize, and ultimately chair, a series of ground-breaking conferences for dealers in the 1990s.

In 2000 he became Editor-in-Chief of all the Daily Mail Group art and antiques titles worldwide, including ATG and The Dealer in the UK and AntiqueWeek and AntiqueWest in the USA.

In 2008 he was part of a successful management buy out which led to the formation of ATG Media and he continues to play a key role in the company's development as a mutli-media business, with a flourishing live online bidding service at the-saleroom.com as well as Antiques Trade Gazette.

Mark lives in rural East Sussex with his wife Jane and son Robin. He plays cricket and rings the church bells in his home village. He has always enjoyed outdoor pursuits, including shooting, fishing, sailing, bird watching and hill walking. He is a keen vegetable gardener, with a 1948 Ferguson tractor and unfulfilled pretensions to self-sufficiency

Past Master

The late Dr. Geoff Egan FSA (1951-2010)

Geoff Egan was a specialist in Medieval and Post Medieval archaeology, a material finds expert with a profound and practical knowledge of the medieval and later archaeology of London and north-west Europe. In October 2010 he gave the Company of Arts Scholars, Dealers and Collectors' annual lecture, Treasures from the Thames, drawing on his encylopaedic knowledge of finds from the London rivers.

His experience in directing excavations (notably medieval and later) at Thames-side sites, resulted in the publication of Medieval Finds From Excavations in London (7 vols 1987-98), and his abiding interest in medieval and later material culture, particularly metalwork, resulted in over 100 articles.

He lectured at Medieval-Europe conferences, the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress (Michigan), in New England for the US Society for Historical Archaeology, and in the West Indies among other locations for the Society for Post Medieval Archaeology, of which he served as President. Publications for the Museum of London covered glass-working, religious-house and Shakespeare-playhouse assemblages.

In 2010 he joined the Portable Antiquities Scheme at the British Museum as National Advisor for post-1050 finds, with responsibility for screening some potential Treasure items. From 1996 he was a consultant on finds at Jamestown, Virginia (first permanent English settlement in America), taught for the Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Decorative Arts and Cambridge University, and acted as examiner for higher degrees for several universities, including Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Turku (Finland).

Geoff was born in North-West London, where lived all his life.

During his secondary education at the academic hothouse of Harrow County School (for several years the school got more pupils to Oxbridge than any other in the country) the emphasis was on classics. ‘Advanced classics’ and Russian were extras instead of games.

At Cambridge he started by reading classics but switched to archaeology, moving closer towards the field to which he had been heading since childhood.

Having secured an archaeological job at the Museum of London in 1976, he undertook a year’s course in practical fieldwork in 1977/8 based at Oxford University.

It was a schoolboy fascination inspired by a display in a local library and subsequently fostered by finds in the 16th/17th-century dyers’ area of the Thames in the City of London that led to part-time PhD on lead trade seals for medieval and later cloths at University College London. A secondment to the British Museum resulted in a catalogue of its cloth seals.

Among many interesting diversions from his eventual career was a period as gardener, dumper driver and lawn mower at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His stint there between school and college included work in the quarantine and experimental greenhouses. His hitherto unrecorded contribution to the furtherance of science came when he accidentally knocked the one-and-only bud from the stem of a tradescantia with unique symmetry, recently collected in South America. The imminent flowering of this rarity was eagerly awaited but Geoff saved it by pushing the bud into the soil, where it thrived (apparently unaffected and its new position unnoticed) to the delight of the staff of the Jodrell Laboratory.

A holiday in Norway after college, walking and hitching north from Bergen ended with a job excavating medieval Trondheim - the beginning of several lasting friendships and a long-term appreciation of things Scandinavian.

A journey of 100 days around the world in 49 plane flights in 1987 stemmed from a desire to visit a life-long friend working in Papua New Guinea.

Past Master

The late Jonathan Horne (1940-2010)

Jonathan was a dealer for 40 years specialising in early English pottery.

He was Chairman of the British Antique Dealer's Association 2001/4 and Vice-President of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology. A President of St John Ambulance, Kingston Division, a Freeman of the City of London, a Liveryman of the Stationers' Company, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

He was born in Cornwall at the beginning of the war. The family returned to Croydon in South London and endured the Blitz. Tradition says that he and his two brothers would be threatened that if they didn’t behave there would be no guns that night. It was their task to collect shrapnel from the lawn every morning so it wouldn’t get caught in the lawnmower.

Educated at Whitgift School in South London, as a teenager Jonathan Horne would cycle through Kent and took part in many archaeological digs, in particular Lullingstone Roman Villa, Reculver and Dover Roman Forts. For a time he was a trainee manager at Selfridges, however his interest in archaeology and history led to him to found his own antiques business in 1968. This initially consisted of a stall in Portobello Road on Saturdays. By specializing in a particular subject – English Pottery – he soon became an expert in his field and awas dmitted as a member of the British Antique Dealers’ Association after less than four years, serving as their Chairman from 2000 until 2003.

In 2003 he approached Lord Brooke with the idea of forming a Guild for the antiques market and their associates. As Peter Brooke had been MP for the City of London this gave great momentum to the idea, which resulted in the formation of the Guild in 2005.

Jonathan had many other interests. Joining the Honourable Artillery Company (TA) in 1958, he marched in the Lord Mayor’s Show for 51 years. In 1978 he left the active unit of the TA and became a member of the Pikemen and Musketeers, the Lord Mayor’s bodyguard, and became their Elder Drumbeater. He was a founder member of the Society of Post-Medieval Archaeology and, for a number of years, was their Vice-President. For ten years was President of St John’s Ambulance, Kingston Division.

Jonathan Horne married Rachael in 1972 and they had three daughters (two of whom took part in the Lord Mayor’s Show as Vestal Virgins) and three grandchildren.

In the 1980s Jonathan Horne started a publishing business producing short-run specialist books, mainly on English ceramics. This was not intended as a commercial venture but a way of spreading the word which would have otherwise never been made public.

Past Master

Geoffrey Bond

Geoffrey Bond, OBE OStJ, DL – lawyer, businessman and broadcaster, has brought a wide range of experience to the Company.

He is a Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers & Painters of Glass and was Sheriff of the City of London in 2003/4. He is currently Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Nottinghamshire

In professional life he is a former senior partner of law firm Ashton Bond Gigg, specialising in corporate and heritage law and as a broadcaster on radio and television, he had his own series on heritage for ITV in the 1980s and was an original expert on the Antiques Roadshow. He has lectured extensively on heritage, Byron and related matters.

In the world of business he is a former Director of Central Independent Television plc and former Chair of Impact Packaging plc and other companies, and currently non-executive Director of the Charles Lawrence Group plc.

He is active in the museum and heritage sector, chairing a number of bodies including the Museums and Libraries Association (London) (also a member of the MLA national board), the Group for Education in Museums and the Papplewick Pumping Station Trust. He is Deputy Chair of the Museum of Law and the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law and former Chair of Arts & Business East Midlands and a number of learned societies.

For many years he was Consul for Norway in the Midlands (a recipient of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit) and founder of the City of London Bridge Ward Club, Norwegian Business Scholars Trust and City of London representative of Seed Forum International. He has done extensive pro bono charity work, mostly for heritage organisations, and sponsored a number of educational initiatives.