The Economist reviews Giusseppe Eskenazi’s 50th Anniversary show and offers a biography of the dealer and his wares:

Mr Eskenazi was born in 1939 in Istanbul to a Sephardic Jewish family. His father, Isaac, later moved to Milan where he joined the family antiques business. Isaac, a passionate anglophile, sent the 13-year-old boy to England to be educated. Mr Eskenazi speaks six languages. It is his Italian wife, however, who is fluent in Mandarin.

In 1960 father and son opened a London office, buying in England for the Milan gallery. Milanese taste tended towards Chinese export wares and other decorative pieces. The younger Eskenazi was far more attracted to earlier objects. He began buying what he liked as well as what the Milanese wanted. Soon his exceptional eye and increasing knowledge of early Chinese objects attracted two major collectors, Hans Popper and Ezekial Schloss, European émigrés based in New York. He became a bold bidder for both, occasionally spending more than they told him they would pay. […]

In 1979 he sold an exceptional Tang horse to the British Rail Pension Fund for $125,000. (He spent a week having to justify its price.) Ten years later, the fund sold it at auction for £3.74m. The Tang market, though, can be turbulent. In the slump of the 1990s, the same horse was sold for half that price and it is now on offer again—this time for $10m.

Emporium of Wonders (Economist)