The 6th Baron Hindlip, who has died aged 83, was a stylish and socially adept auctioneer, better known throughout his working life as Charlie Allsopp, who rose to be chairman of Christie’s.
An observer of the upper strata of the art world once remarked that many people there pretend to know more than they do, but that Charlie Allsopp was the very opposite: a man of wide knowledge, profound taste and natural charm, but one who always preferred to let on less than he knew.
If there was any truth in an old quip about Christie’s being “gentlemen pretending to be auctioneers” (Sotheby’s supposedly being the reverse), the image if not the reality was personified by Allsopp. A friend of royalty, contemporary artists and prominent buyers – and a conscientious trustee to families with important collections – he was also fiercely loyal and discreet.
For Allsopp the business of the auction house was more to do with long-term relationships than moments of high drama on the podium, but he had plenty of those too. No account of his career would be complete without mention of the sale on March 30 1987, on behalf of the Chester Beatty family, of one of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series – in front of a packed crowd of (as one report put it) “anonymous dealers and agents, several Japanese and Mr Jeffrey Archer”, plus 600 more watching screens in adjoining rooms.
“Bobbing around in his pulpit like an over-enthusiastic evangelical preacher”, as was his wont, Allsopp opened the bidding at £5 million and raised it in half-million increments.
The leading telephone bidders were anonymous at the time, but according to later accounts the first to drop out was the Getty Museum from Los Angeles; then the US billionaire Walter Annenberg, who had hoped to complete his great Impressionist collection; followed by the Australian tycoon Alan Bond.
Within less than five minutes, Allsopp brought his gavel down to the remaining unseen bidder, in due course revealed as the Yasuda Fire & Marine insurance company of Tokyo, at a then world-record price of £24,750,000. The evening’s sale of Impressionist and Modern works in toto also set a Christie’s record as well a landmark in its rivalry with Sotheby’s. Allsopp himself described the experience, with characteristic lightness, as “like skiing down a perfect piste in absolutely perfect weather”.
Charles Henry Allsopp was born at his mother’s family home in Northamptonshire on August 5 1940, to Henry Allsopp, a Coldstream Guards officer, and his wife Cecily, née Borwick; Henry would inherit the Hindlip title from his elder brother in 1966.
In earlier generations Allsopp had been a significant name in the beer trade, Samuel Allsopp having taken over his uncle Benjamin Wilson’s Burton-on-Trent brewery in 1807. Samuel’s son Henry was raised to a baronetcy in 1880 and to a peerage in 1886, but the family lost control when the business almost failed in 1911; their fortune dwindled and the Allsopp brand disappeared in 1959 after a merger with Ind Coope, eventually to become part of Allied Breweries.
Charlie was educated at Eton and served in the Coldstream Guards for three years before joining Christie’s in 1962 as a £6-a-week trainee on the front desk. By 1964 he was sharing a cramped office with, among others, Brian Sewell, then an up-and-coming Old Masters specialist, later a famously waspish art critic, who claimed in his memoirs to have predicted that the “innocent golden retriever” Allsopp would one day chair the firm.
Sewell was right – but Allsopp rose through the firm as a generalist and client handler rather than a specialist. His business-winning skills and breadth of knowledge, particularly in modern art, were honed in the late 1960s as general manager of Christie’s New York office, where he worked under the formidable resident director John Richardson, a friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso.
Allsopp returned to join Christie’s board in 1970, becoming deputy chairman in 1985 and chairman of the London operation from 1986 to 1996. He was the face of the firm but administrative detail was never his forte – he left that to the chief executive, Christopher Davidge, with whom he had a somewhat fractious relationship – and it was never suggested that he had any role in the price-fixing collusion with Sotheby’s that emerged as a major business scandal of the 1990s.
He set another record – the highest price paid for a piece of furniture – with the £8.6 million sale of the monumental “Badminton cabinet” on behalf of the Duke of Beaufort in 1990; and he made headlines in 1997 with an auction in New York of 79 dresses from the collection of Diana, Princess of Wales, which raised more than $3 million for cancer and Aids charities. Behind the scenes, he was altruistically involved in securing numerous major works of art for national collections.
Allsopp succeeded as 6th Lord Hindlip on his father’s death in 1993. He remained chairman of Christie’s International until 2002 and was thereafter briefly deputy chairman of Agnew’s, the Bond Street specialist in Old Masters. He published, in 2016, An Auctioneer’s Lot: triumphs and disasters at Christie’s.
He married, in 1968, Fiona McGowan, an interior decorator and grand-daughter of the 1st Lord McGowan, an industrialist who co-founded ICI. Sharing an eye for houses with scope for improvement, the Allsopps moved home numerous times until they settled on a small estate at Inkpen in Berkshire.
But in 1999, having always wanted “a house with water”, they found a Dorset property with frontage to the River Lydden where they commissioned what Country Life called “a modern Georgian masterpiece” on the site of a 19th-century farmhouse, and created splendid formal gardens.
Charlie gave devoted care to Fiona through the long battle with cancer which ended her life in 2014; he is survived by their son and three daughters. The heir to the barony and baronetcy is Henry Allsopp, an art dealer born in 1973; their eldest daughter is the television presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who described her father as “a great auctioneer, the best of his generation, an artist, a gardener… a real star [who] worked hard, played hard and went further than anyone ever expected. He died at home… surrounded by love, flowers and photographs.”
Lord Hindlip, born August 5 1940, died June 5 2024
