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Brian MacDermot
Late Irish Guards
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 Brian Hugh MacDermot, who died on 12th September 2013, aged 82, was born in Paris in 1930, into a family that descended from the Irish Kings of Moylurg, later Princes of Coolavin, who in turn were descended from the Kings of Connacht. His father, Francis Charles, known as Frank MacDermot, was a senator in the upper house of the Irish Parliament, and his mother, Elaine Orr, an American previously married to the poet E E Cummings. Brian (pronounced ‘Bree-an’) was educated at St Paul’s in the United States, Downside, and New College, Oxford, where he read history. He served in the Irish Guards from 1952 to 1955, when he experienced the Middle East and North Africa for the first time.
On leaving the Army, Brian worked at the stockbrokers Cazenove before becoming a partner at Panmure Gordon (1964-76), whose history he later wrote. With an Aston Martin and Knightsbridge residence, and a busy social life, Cosmopolitan described him as one of England’s most eligible bachelors, listing his ‘known hang-outs’ as St Moritz, Raffles Hotel in Singapore, and Ethiopia.
Brian had many interests beyond the City and his social life. In 1960 he reported for the Irish Times from Rhodesia and ventured into the Congo as it descended into post-colonial chaos. He also worked with Dr Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa, and filmed in the Ethiopian Danakil territory with Wilfred Thesiger. In 1965 he lived for a period with the Nuer tribe of cattle raiders on the borders of western Ethiopia and southern Sudan, being adopted into the tribe as ‘Rial Nyang’. He wrote about this experience in 1972 in The Cult of the Sacred Spear, demonstrating that ‘it was possible to become almost totally accepted by a primitive people’. Later, during the long Sudanese civil war, his affection for his Nuer fellow-tribesmen led him to found the Southern Sudan Association. When one of his frequent trips to Africa caused him to miss a Rothschild deal, he coolly despatched a telegram: ‘Unavoidably delayed in Kalahari Desert. Hope not too inconvenient for takeover bid. Will return soonest’.
Moving on from the City, Brian opened the Mathaf Gallery in 1975, on the corner of Motcomb Street in Knightsbridge, specialising in Orientalist painting at a time when this was an unfashionable genre. Soon he had created a market for forgotten 19th century artists such as Ludwig Deutsch, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Rudolf Ernst, finding clients among wealthy Arabs and, later, a demand from other collectors around the world. While some western observers regarded this style of art as both patronising and colonialist, Brian’s view was ‘…that a lot of political nonsense has been uttered about Orientalism…… At the end of the day, these were artists working within the social and political conditions of their time and there is little, if any, point in judging them according to current political correctness’. Claude Piening, Sotheby’s Head of Orientalist Art, believed that Brian, through sales of these pictures in the Middle East, had not only shown their buyers ‘a valuable visual record of their countries in an age before photography’ but had also ‘helped build cultural bridges between West and East’.
In 1985, Brian married Georgina (Gina) Gallwey, the daughter of an Army contemporary, Dayrell Gallwey of Tramore, Co Waterford. It was to be both an immensely happy marriage and a successful business partnership at the Mathaf Gallery. It also proved a prediction in that Cosmopolitan article some 20 years’ earlier: ‘This is one man who really plays for keeps: believing that marriage is a lifetime contract’. Brian and Gina had two children, Tom and Elaine. Tom is a serving officer in the Irish Guards.
Brian MacDermot was Master of the Worshipful Company of Bowyers (1984-86), vice-president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and a council member of the Royal Geographical Society, and chairman and trustee of the St Gregory Charitable Trust. He is survived by his wife Gina, and their children. |
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