Tailoring tycoon stitched together major art collection
Modern art was tailor-made for Tyneside couple. Tony Henderson reports
As the head of a Tyneside tailoring “empire”, Lionel Jacobson was also a leading collector of modern artworks.
He was the chairman, managing director and president of Jackson the Tailors, based in Newcastle. The business merged with tailors Burtons in 1953 and Mr Jacobson became chairman.
Together with wife Ruth, he built up a collection of contemporary British art which included works by leading artists David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry – who he met at the Stone Gallery in Newcastle – and Henry Moore.
Much of the collection was sold at Newcastle auctioneers Anderson & Garland in 2008 in a major sale of around 300 lots, with part of the proceeds going to charity.
Now paintings by Bomberg and artist Reuven Rubin, both works which were favourites of Ruth Jacobson, will feature in the Anderson & Garland Modern Art and Design sale on January 27.
Bomberg’s painting titled St Ives Cornwall is estimated at £50,000–£80,000 and Rubin’s View of Galilee at £30,000–£50,000.
A further highlight of the sale is Clay Pans by Emily Kam Kngwarreye, one of the most important figures in contemporary Aboriginal art. It is rated at £40,000–£60,000.
Viewing of all works in the sale will take place at Anderson & Garland’s Westerhope showroom on January 23 and January 26.
A&G director Julian Thomson said: “This is a rare chance for collectors, scholars and the wider public in the region to view works of international significance locally.
“For many visitors, this will be a once in a lifetime chance to see paintings by Bomberg, Rubin and Kngwarreye without having to travel to London or overseas. It is a reminder that Newcastle can and should be part of the global art conversation.”
Lionel Jacobson died in 1978 and Ruth in 2009. Born in Newcastle in 1905, Lionel Jacobson attended the city’s Royal Grammar School and later read law at Oxford. After a brief spell practising law in London, he joined his father’s tailoring firm at 23.
Ruth was a life member and fundraiser of the Friends of the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle.
Keen on local and especially smaller charities, she and her husband set up a trust fund. But their main endowment was the Ruth and Lionel Jacobson chair of clinical pharmacology at Newcastle University Medical School.
She was chairman of the fundraising committee of the Northumberland Association of Youth Clubs, a governor of Rutherford Comprehensive School, and a member of the development trust committee of Newcastle Church High School.
She was also active in the Newcastle Ladies’ Cancer Committee and was the first female board director of Metro Radio.
Lionel Jacobson was also a major benefactor of Newcastle University’s Shefton Museum of Greek Art and Archaeology and played a part in a remarkable story in 2004 involving a 2,500-year-old terracotta lion’s head.
The two halves of the head spent centuries apart. Lionel Jacobson bought the right half of the head at a Christie’s auction and loaned it to the university’s museum in the 1970s.
The university’s Professor Brian Shefton traced the second half to a Swiss collector who bequeathed it to the museum, making the head complete.
Prof Shefton said at the time: “I had been immensely pleased to get our half of the lion’s head, and I thought that there was absolutely no chance of the other half ever being found.”
The head once formed the upper portion of a waterspout from the guttering of a shrine or temple built by Greek colonists living in southern Italy in the 5th century BC.
Really interesting how industrial wealth gets channeled into cultural legacy. What stands out is the Jacobsons didnt just buy art, they embedded themselves in the regional arts infrustructure through board roles and patronage. That pattern of coupling private collecting with institutional support used to be way more common than it is now, dunno why that balance shifted so much in recent decades.