What Dealers Keep In Their Personal Collections: Katrin Bellinger

Town & Coutnry does a mini-profile of Colnaghi Old Masters dealer Katrin Bellinger and her Anabelle Selldorf-designed London home where she keesp her personal collection:

For her formidable personal collection—more than 900 works, including paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures—Bellinger narrowed her focus to a particular theme: artists at work, from the Renaissance to the present. She chose the topic because she loved the idea of “looking over the artist’s shoulder” and because it didn’t conflict with her clients’ holdings. It also allowed her to build a collection for less than a king’s ransom, and it reminds her of her youthful ambitions. “I studied art for a year,” she says, “and quickly realized my limited talent. But it helps to have learned how art is made.”

The London house, which has four and a half floors, includes two adjoining living rooms, one a step down from the other, the upper one filled with light and devoted to paintings (the light is too strong for drawings). Here you’ll find a self-portrait by the 19th-century painter Henri Fantin-Latour, its dark shadows pierced by a flash of light on the artist’s hand. An oil by the French actor and writer Sacha Guitry—of an elderly, glowering Claude Monet, standing, hand in pocket, in front of a large blank canvas—commands the wall above the doorway to the darker lower living room. There, a beguiling drawing by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Punchinello as a Portrait Painter, hangs above the fireplace.

Katrin Bellinger: Master Collector (Town & Country)