Anthony Lester: The Man Who Made a Life Discovering British Art

The art critic, curator, collector and contributor to EyeOnLondon Anthony Lester died on 19th August aged 80, at the end of a life full of accomplishment.

But it had the most inauspicious of beginnings, with his farmer father Don inclined to introduce him as, “My son, who is thick as two planks”.

For Anthony, born in Oxford, was assailed by severe difficulty with reading, and although he longed to be an archaeologist his disability meant that he left school with no qualifications. It was not until 1987, when he was in his forties, that his affliction was diagnosed as acute dyslexia, but his father’s stinging appraisal haunted him for the rest of his days. The resultant shyness, too, stayed with him for much of his life.

However, his eye for identifying works of art was already developing, and when he was 11 his fortunes began to change when he bought a box of sundry pictures and frames at a local auction with a winning bid of £5. Among them was a watercolour he had recognised as being by the Scottish painter William McTaggart (1835-1910), and watercolour paintings became a passion for him.

At 16 he was able to open a market stall selling bric-a-brac and within six months had earned enough to enable him to open his own gallery in Wallingford specialising in watercolours and drawings, and he began to build a reputation.

Another watershed came in 1982 with the death of his mother, Edith, whom he had nursed through cancer, when he decided to concentrate on research and, inspired by a fellow dyslexia sufferer, A A Gill of the Sunday Times, began submitting articles to magazines.

In all Anthony reckoned to have had 750 articles in publications ranging from The Big Issue to Country Life to The Sunday Express to Antique Collecting to Woman’s Own to The World of Antiques and Decoration. A readers’ survey in 1988 in the Antique Dealer and Collectors’ Guide voted him the most popular writer on art.

He then became editor of Watercolours, Drawings and Prints, and adviser for Judith and Martin Miller’s Miller’s Antiques Price Guide, a vital reference for collectors. For more than 20 years he had a regular column, “Art Market”, in the Antique Trades Gazette.

Anthony was an author with a number of books to his name, including The Stannards of Bedfordshire (1984), Then and Now: The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours (2019) and A Changing View: The Wapping Group of Artists (2021). His voracious appetite for art research resulted in an impressive archive of unpublished material on British artists, which he happily shared with collectors, dealers and museums around the world.

He also curated several key exhibitions including Pure Gold: 50 years of the Federation of British Artists (2011) and The Art of a Nation: Irish Works from the Allied Bank and the Crawford Art Gallery Collections (2015), both at the Mall Galleries in London, a venue with which he had a long association.

There was also a long-standing association with the art fair organisers Gay Hutson and Bunny Wynn, and he was chairman of the vetting committee for the 20/21 International Art Fair at the Royal College of Art.

He did not confine his fund-raising skills to art, however. For instance, he raised thousands of pounds for Mencap, having met and become friends with the charity’s secretary general, actor Brian Rix (Lord Rix).

Anthony’s reputation continued to grow and in the 1980s he was invited to become an expert appraiser on BBC Television’s Antiques Roadshow, but then withdrew from the limelight, being more comfortable as an off-screen expert. He was back on screen four years ago, though, when he brought an object for appraisal at the Roadshow himself. He also advised for the BBC’s long-running series Flog It!, in which members of the public bring their treasures for auction.

A popular lecturer on art and antiques, he was host of the celebrated Art & Antiques Weekend at the Imperial Hotel, Torquay, where he would invite colleagues from the Antiques Roadshow and Flog It! to be guest speakers.

He was also an indefatigable and generous supporter of working artists and artists’ associations. In 2011 he created the Anthony J Lester Art Critic Award, which he presented to charity art societies, including the New English Art Club and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. Such support brought him fond recognition in that he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Miniature Society, Companion of the Pastel Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of British Artists and Honorary Member of the Wapping Group of Artists. He was a long-standing member of the International Association of Art Critics and the Critics’ Circle, and a Life Member of both the Royal Society of Arts and the Chelsea Arts Club. For over 40 years Tony was a devoted supporter of the Federation of British Artists, the nine art societies that are based at the Mall Galleries.

Anthony’s diffidence dogged him throughout his career, until, at the Mall Galleries, he was introduced to the portrait miniaturist Elizabeth Meek MBE in 2004. He was organising and selecting works for a “Not the Turner Prize” show for The Daily Mail, which carried a £20,000 prize for works of conventional art; Elizabeth was at the same time administering the annual exhibition of the Society of Women Artists, of which she was president. They hit it off straight away and were married in 2008, Elizabeth banishing his reserve and bringing out in him a penchant for colourful hats and multi-hued shirts. They were perfect partners and became a familiar and popular couple at the Chelsea Arts Club.

But in his later life, Anthony was stalked by ill-health, first with Parkinson’s disease, then prostate cancer and finally pancreatic cancer. To the end, though, he kept his zest for life, even able to joke about his father’s cruel remark: “I think one plank would have been enough”. He is survived by Elizabeth and his brother Geoff.

For more London arts and culture, visit EyeOnLondon at eye-on-london.com.

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