Riches of Empire

Twice a year, Sotheby's Martin Gallon scours New Zealand for art treasures on behalf of the famous auction house. He tells MICHELE HEWITSON what he's looking for.

Do you like this painting? Give it a cursory glance - it's by the English painter Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), and most of us will think one of two things: that it's a perfect example of sentimental Victorian chocolate-box art, or that it's a very nice portrait from a more innocent time when art most certainly did not mean Damien Hirst and cows in formaldehyde.

When Martin Gallon casts his eye over such a painting, his eyes light up and there's real tenderness in his voice. "I think it's stunning. It's so innocent. She has a very pure, clean face. She looks like she was a nice person."

You might expect him to have a rather more technical take on Portrait of a Young Girl, Said to be the Artist's Niece. But even the head of Sotheby's Victorian pictures department is allowed a little gush when he's in love.

He'd like some more of Ramsay's charm. Gallon's in town to encourage New Zealanders to trawl their cobwebbed attics (although he'd prefer a dry, light-controlled environment) for treasures such as the Ramsay.

One other reason Gallon is so fond of girl with parrot: it sold at Sotheby's, London, in June last year for £419,500 ($1.47 million). And it was found here, by Gallon, on one of the two trips he makes each year.

He's holed up at the Metropolis Hotel off Auckland's High St (appearances count for a lot when you've got Sotheby's on your business card), playing host to the hopeful legions who trail up the marble stairs, clasping their polythene-wrapped pictures, dreaming of riches.

Last year, in Christchurch, a woman turned up with three paintings coddled in tea towels. They were worth £10,000 each.

It's just like The Antiques Roadshow, isn't it? People turn up and Gallon has to tell them the oil their great aunt left them in her will should fetch 25 pence. Well, "very politely," Gallon laughs. The main difference between this show and television is that it all takes place behind closed doors. Gallon won't let me get so much as a peek at the paintings a couple turn up at his door with. That would be, he says, a breach of the trust between Sotheby's and prospective sellers.

Which is a bit rich, really, given that the name Sotheby's and scandalous breach of trust have recently been near-synonymous. Gallon is far too circumspect - he's the very model of a Sotheby's man, with his pinstripes and starched collars and amicable, measured tones - to say much more than that the auction house does "absolutely have to win back the public confidence. If anything, we learn from these things that it is something that must never happen again."

He is, in any case, a man who deals in optimism - he needs you to believe at least in the possibility that your watercolour is worth more than the paper it's painted on. The works that he is after - and he says Sotheby's takes between $200,000 to $300,000 worth of art out of New Zealand each year - are out there.

"You'd be surprised," he says. Think back to the 19th century, "all of those folk coming from Britain, they were very wealthy and they brought wagon-loads out."

Wagon-loads of the stuff that makes the self-taught expert's eyes twinkle (he started as a porter, moving paintings, sweeping the floor). The Victorian period is not as glamorous, he concedes, as the Impressionists or the Old Masters, but it is very old Sotheby's - although the auction house is a different world, he says, from the one described in Vanity Fair as being all "silk ties, mahogany auction boxes, and upper-crust Englishness."

Oh, all right, the boxes may be mahogany (he's not certain), but the modern auction room is high-tech. There are, says Gallon, computers and currency converters flashing. In the near future, there will be images of the item under the hammer on video screens. And from November 1, New Zealanders can bid on-line for art and antiques at Sothebys.com.

That is one good thing about the legacy of Dede Brooks, the CEO-turned-price-fixer. She spun staid silk ties into "a dynamic international company," says Gallon

Much has changed but, looking at Gallon looking at that painting, you can still see the 18-year-old who got bitten by the auction bug on his first day at work. A painting sold for £78,000. He was earning 3000 quid a year. "I've never really been cured. It's a bug which has stayed with me."

You can see that. And if you saw a painting of him you'd say, 'Now, there's a portrait of a man who understands the polythene-wrapped dreams of all of us.'

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