Works of a great collector, from jade and rare Chinese porcelain to Degas and Vuillard

On August 31, Sotheby’s will unveil the collections of the late Sir Joseph Hotung, who died last year at the age of 91. The Hong Kong businessman and philanthropist was renowned for his collection of Chinese jades: more than 300 pieces spanning the Neolithic period to the Qing (1644-1912), on long loan to the British Museum. Hotung was a very private man: only an inner circle of family and friends was familiar with the other works of art displayed in his labyrinthine London apartment.

The jade has been bequeathed to the British Museum, as has the lion’s share of his collection of early blue and white Chinese porcelain — possibly the finest of its type in private hands. It was still in situ in London when I visited in early summer to meet his daughter Ellen, before the apartment’s contents were dispersed — some 400 works of art destined for sale in Hong Kong on October 8 and 9 and London in December, with highlights also previewing in mainland China, Taiwan and New York.

It confounded my expectations. Some collections may be read as autobiography. Hotung’s spoke more of his character, and its subtlety only slowly revealed itself. Nothing was here, or placed, by chance.

Offering a clue were the first, and smallest, objects encountered in the imposing entrance hall. To one side lay an 18th-century brass key — to the door of the British Museum, where he served as a trustee. It was presented after he funded the refurbishment of the China and South Asia gallery. Beside it, a balance to that implied worldly glory (his knighthood came in 1993), was a black iron-glazed vase of the Northern Song dynasty, as unassuming and understated as the man himself.

A sense of his reserve is evident even in the grandest and rarest works of art in the collection, their lack of flamboyance perhaps a nod to the austerity that marked his formative years in Shanghai and schooldays in Tianjin. Hotung’s father was Eurasian, his mother English. His grandfather, Sir Robert Ho Tung — famed as the richest man in Hong Kong — is represented in photographs with George Bernard Shaw, both in Chinese dress. The death of both patriarchs in quick succession obliged him to leave the US, where he had studied and married, to take over the family real estate business in Hong Kong. This was the early 1960s, a time of political upheaval. “He was under a lot of pressure, and worked like crazy,” Ellen said. Art had little place in his life.

That all changed in the mid-1970s, when a delayed flight left him with a couple of hours to kill in San Francisco. He wandered into an antique shop and was captivated by the stark simplicity and purity of a pair of translucent white jade bowls. He was hooked. His passion for this most revered of materials was a means of immersing himself in the vast sweep of Chinese history. Less sanguine about the country’s present, not least its stance on human rights, he left Hong Kong before its handover to China in 1997.

The interiors he assembled in London were fusions of east and west. Even in the seemingly traditional dining room, with its English furniture, silver made for George III and Old Master paintings (not least a still life by the 18th-century Spanish painter Luis Egidio Meléndez, estimate £500,000-£700,000), a second look revealed the side-tables as Chinese altar tables, while the Gillows dining table was circular, the preferred Chinese form.

In the drawing room, there was harmony of form and patination between the finest of English mahogany and Chinese huanghuali wood furniture that Hotung liked to gather in pairs. Far rarer than the Chippendale furniture in the collection, this group of Chinese huanghuali is the most valuable to come to the market in years — a folding horseshoe-back armchair alone is expected to make more than £1mn (HK$10mn-HK$15mn).

In the hall, the dialogue changed to China and France. Four monumental modern scroll paintings of fruit and flowers by Qi Baishi (HK$18mn-HK$30mn) dominated the staircase wall. Below, the flowers were by the 19th-century painter Henri Fantin-Latour, the mauve asters echoed in the luminous Junyao purple and blue-glazed tripod narcissus bowl placed beneath, one of the best of its kind (HK$4mn-HK$6mn). There were French applied arts but also a gem of an 11th- or 12th-century gilt-bronze Buddhist figure of Avalokitesvara, a rare survival from the Dali Kingdom (HK$15mn-HK$20mn). Behind this bodhisattva hung Édouard Vuillard’s enigmatic “Gentlemen in Black” (c1895-99, £2mn-£3mn), heralding the unexpected sight of a wall of Vuillards in the drawing room above. These nine works chart the evolution of the artist’s career over 35 years, beginning with the dazzling “At the Divan Japonais”.

Presiding over all is Degas’s portrait of his friend Eugène Manet, the brother of Édouard, painted as a wedding gift to him and his bride, Berthe Morisot. Hotung paid a record auction price for the painting in 1981. It returns to the block, among a handful of rare Degas portraits, with expectations of £4mn-£6mn.

In Hotung’s various private studies and the corridors between them, the collection seemed to blossom to fill every surface, wall and window ledge. Here were outstanding Khmer and Gandharan stone sculptures, Chola bronzes, ancient Roman silver, Iznik ceramics and much else besides.

A massive Yongle-period carved cinnabar lacquer box and cover (HK$8mn-HK$12mn) is the star of the Chinese lacquer that was housed with the blue-and-white porcelain. The latter collection began only because Hotung was drawn to the scene painted on a Yuan dynasty jar illustrating an episode from the 14th-century Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms. “It is a story about virtue, morality and duty and so it spoke to him, because that is who he was as a person,” Ellen explained. Three pieces from the collection it spawned will come to auction, among them a mighty Yuan fish jar (HK$20mn-HK$25mn).

For Hotung, art was a universal language, a way of opening the door and learning about different cultures, the resonances between disparate works of art. “There are people who go through their whole lives without art,” he once said. “I nearly did.”

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