Sir Alec Martin

Artist Jacob Epstein (1880 - 1959)

Datec. 1930s

MediumBronze

Dimensions63 x 61 x 37 cm

ClassificationsSculpture

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Donated by Sir Alec Martin through the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1965. © The Estate of Jacob Epstein.

Object number1247

DescriptionAlec Martin joined Christie’s auction house as an office boy in 1897, a month before his thirteenth birthday, and rose through the company until he became the managing director, a post which he held from 1940–58. His knowledge and passion for art informed his own activities as a collector and he was described as having catholic tastes and a discerning eye based on quality rather than investment potential. During his lifetime he also served as a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, a trustee of the Wallace Collection and as honorary secretary of the National Art Collections Fund. He was knighted in 1934 and during his lifetime had his portrait painted by John Laviers Wheatley, as well as by Sickert. His obituary in the Times described him as ‘Smallish, roundish, indefatigable, bright of eye ... long remembered as adviser to many and as good and faithful friend to more – one who retained to the last a sense of adventure’.
Martin certainly acted as a ‘good and faithful friend’ to Sickert. The two men were introduced by the collector, Hugh Lane (1875–1915), in around 1899 when Martin was only fifteen years old and Sickert was approaching forty and just divorced from his first wife. In his recorded reminiscences for the BBC in 1961, Martin described his lifelong friendship with Sickert as ‘one of the landmarks of one’s life to have known him and be in his inner circle of friendship’. They shared many interests in addition to art, including the music hall and swimming in the Serpentine. Martin respected Sickert as one of Britain’s greatest living artists, but also recognised his vulnerability in old age and frequently took practical steps to alleviate Sickert’s money worries. He remained a trusted friend and adviser for many years, attending Sickert’s eightieth birthday tea party in 1940. He is recorded as present at Sickert’s funeral in St-Martin-in-the-Fields in 1940 and continued to look after the artist’s posthumous interests as sole executor of his will.

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