Eric Holder; lovely Times obit of a beloved watercolour dealer
Hyfler/Rosner
The Times
February 03, 2007
Eric Holder
May 1, 1915 - January 15, 2007
Watercolour dealer who made affordability, conviviality and
a love of painting his stock-in-trade
Eric Holder was the co-founder of Abbott & Holder, the
watercolour dealers, a greatly loved London institution.
Despite the move in 1987 from a large private house in
Barnes to a more conventional shop in Bloomsbury after
Holder's retirement, it remains an agreeably eccentric
business, and the monthly lists of new stock are posted to
clients with the proud claim: "Money back AND a box of Black
Magic chocolates should (unlikely) we be wrong".
As Holder once wrote: "Gifts worth giving come from the
heart." Abbott & Holder is still the first call for those in
search of unusual and reasonably priced presents, as well as
for serious connoisseurs.
Eric Arthur Holder was born in Tottenham in 1915, the son of
Arthur, a piano maker, and Jane Holder, whose Quaker and
socialist convictions influenced him greatly. She involved
him from an early age in soup kitchens for the unemployed
and in boy scout camps in Epping Forest.
Although he later lapsed from formal Quakerism, it remained
a guiding element, and he retained a Shavian socialism.As a
teenager he became interested in drawings, which he used to
buy and sell from the back of a bicycle, and while training
as an accountant in 1936 he struck up an acquaintance with
Robert Abbott.
The son of a land agent, Abbott's curriculum vitae included
the editorship of a Herefordshire paper, a period as a
Quaker minister and a brief spell as headmaster of a private
school. At that time he lived in a flat next door to the
Tottenham Friends meeting house and bought and sold
paintings more or less as a hobby, in which Holder helped
him.
At the outbreak of war Holder was living in Rosslyn Hill.
During the Blitz, as a pacifist, he joined a Friends
ambulance unit based at the London Hospital students'
hostel.
He was, he recalled, an "uppish youth", and at the tribunal
to register as a conscientious objector he ended a response
"as Hegel said", earning the rebuke: "Don't say that to me,
young man. I am a professor of philosophy."
In 1941 he married his first wife, Peggy, and moved to the
Highgate house where two years previously Mark Gertler had
committed suicide. In 1942 he and Abbott issued their first
typed and carbon-copied list of 157 paintings and drawings
for sale. The low prices and characteristic comments were
there from the start. There was a Frank Brangwyn oil study
at £70, but more typical was a two-guinea tempera panel by
Edward Richard Hughes ("was a 19th cent near Pre-Raph, but
is quite charming nevertheless"), or "a luminous small
seapiece" by Helen Allingham at 15/- .
They also used the Robbins Gallery in Southampton Row: "Nora
Robbins had a delightful gallery but few pictures; we had
pictures but no gallery. She was secretary of the Women's
Amazon Movement, while I was a pacifist, so we got on very
well."
The fourth list came out in August 1944, and soon after
Holder went to Italy to work with refugees for the UN. From
1947 to 1951 he was in Sardinia implementing a Rockefeller
Foundation mosquito-eradication scheme. He had a team of
bandits working under him; others held up their pay truck,
killing three carabinieri. Holder wrote up these
experiences, rather in the manner of the lists.
While he was away Abbott proposed by letter that they take
the lease of a large house in Barnes, 73 Castelnau, owned by
an artist friend. It was, he wrote in 1947, on a bus route,
big enough for two families, and had "enough wood on the
estate to last though the winter".
From 1951 they ran the business together at Castelnau,
opening all day Saturdays and by appointment at other times,
and issuing lists again from 1952. For a couple of years
they were also associated with a gallery in Portobello Road,
and put on exhibitions at the Alpine Club's South Audley
Street rooms. The latter venture worried some old friends,
lest it presage a "move into Big Deal Land. May we assure
them that this is not so, and that we will continue to have
lots and lots of lovely pictures at prices under £10.
Bicyclists are still welcome in Barnes."
The freehold was acquired in 1957, but Abbott had a severe
heart attack the following year, and Holder bought him out
in 1959. His wife died in 1961, leaving him with two sons
and a daughter, who helped in the business, and in 1962 he
married Anna, an Italian. Even in that year, a Burne-Jones
pencil study of Adam and Eve could be had at 12/6d - perhaps
equivalent to £20 today. Such a thing would now cost £15,000
or more.
Conviviality was a key element of a visit to Castelnau,
especially at the summer and Christmas exhibitions. "Wines
will be served according to the picture taste of each
client. Thus: Early English watercolours - claret; Victorian
watercolours - madeira; Victorian oils - port;
Pre-Raphaelites - cyder; comic drawings - whisky & soda;
Etchings - sherry; English 1920-1939 - Gin & - ; art
nouveau - brandy & water; Modern Abstracts - Alka-Seltzer."
Saturdays often seemed like club meetings of collectors.
Another part-time helper was Robert Abbott's nephew, John,
who joined the business full-time in 1971. They bought, in
bulk, albums and folios of work often by minor artists or
talented amateurs. Having viewed carefully, they would
decide what bundles of drawings on offer were worth to them,
and rigidly stick to their predetermined limits, whatever
the blandishments of the auctioneer.
A preoccupation that was regularly voiced in the lists was
the refusal of auctioneers to take responsibility for their
attributions, since "picture prices depend on the singer not
the song. Important therefore to ask how much of the price
is for the picture and how much for the attribution."
Another bonnet-bee was those who bought for investment
rather than love. A satirical scheme to offer vacuum-sealed
containers of selected works to put in store and later be
profitably returned to the market unopened, thus ensuring
that "no tedious picture gazing is involved", garnered
publicity, followed, to Holder's exasperated amusement, by
serious inquiries.
Having issued List No 198, Holder retired in March 1981. By
that time the average price of the pictures had risen
gradually from £5 in 1944 to £45.
A year later, following the death of his second wife, he
married Helen Monfries, and in 1987 they settled at Lewes in
Sussex. John Abbott continued in Castelnau until the same
year, when the move was made to Museum Street, in a
congenial enclave of print and drawings dealers and
bookshops opposite the British Museum. A "£50 and under"
table was descended from the 5/- box at Castelnau.
Philip Athill, who joined in 1979 as a part-timer and now
runs the business, recalls how Holder treated large and
small clients with equal attention. "Rude and gushing
Sloanes adored him for not being rude and gushing. He
insisted that shopkeeping, and buying, should be fun."
Holder enjoyed gardening and walking on the Downs with his
dogs. As the house was called Newlyn, he collected Newlyn
School paintings to hang in it.
His health declined after a car crash in 1999 and the onset
of Parkinson's disease. He is survived by his wife, the two
daughters and son of his first marriage, and a stepson from
his second.
Eric Holder, watercolour dealer, was born on May 1, 1915. He
died on January 15, 2007, aged 91