Maurice Rheims

Voltairean writer and auctioneer

Maurice Rheims, auctioneer and writer: born Versailles, France 4 January 1910; married (two daughters, and one son deceased); died Paris 6 March 2003.

"Second-hand junk dealer in the ephemeral!" was what the critic Renaud Matignon called Maurice Rheims. Before I ever knew anything about Rheims, I bought his Dictionnaire des Mots Sauvages (1969), a vast, learned assembly of unusual, difficult, arcane and clownesque words found in the works of 19th- and 20th-century authors. For many years, it has been providing my favourite bedside reading.

But I soon found out that Maurice Rheims was much more than a compiler of dictionaries. He was a leading expert in works of art and a writer of exceptional range, who wrote as he talked. Whatever he undertook was done with a lightness of touch and with deliciously ferocious wit.

He was born into an ancient Alsatian Jewish family. His father was General Léon Rheims, gassed at Douaumont, wounded at Verdun, and one of Marshal Philippe Pétain's oldest World War One friends. He had high military hopes for his son, but Maurice Rheims was a duffer at school and failed his "bachot" or baccalauréat not once but six times. He got his revenge on an educational system that was not adapted to a boy of such varied gifts when he was elected in 1975 to the Académie française. In his acceptance speech, he exulted: "I've finally got my bachot! – the happiest moment in my life!"

During a vacation in Savoie, at the age of 14 he negotiated his first deal: he bought from a village priest a sculptured oak pulpit canopy from the 15th century. At the time of his death his luxurious home in Paris had Picassos and Toulouse-Lautrecs hanging on its walls among a vast accumulation of precious art objects that make his home almost a succursal of the Louvre.

Rheims's first book was La Vie Etrange des Objets (1960). By 1935 he had become a valuer and auctioneer. He was very ambitious. The millionaire art collector Nubar Gulbenkian helped him to take the first important steps in his career; in 1941, he was in charge of the dispersal of the great Gentilo de Giuseppe collection. But during the Nazi occupation of France he was overheard expressing contempt for the boche and insulting an SS officer.

He was taken to the sinister transit camp at Drancy, to await transfer to Belsen. On his first day there, a gendarme, impressed by his elegant appearance and courtly manner, mistook Rheims for a lawyer who had lost his way and accompanied him to the exit. Rheims had a curious reaction to this comical contretemps, and demanded to be taken back to his cell. In later life, he said it was the result of a deep sense of solidarity with inmates destined to extermination in camps in Germany.

After having been put on the list of prisoners to be shot, he was set free by a last-minute intervention by Pétain, the old army friend of his father. By then, the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris was displaying a warning notice: "Off limits to dogs and Jews." Unable for the duration of the war to carry on his professional work, Rheims entered the Resistance and helped smuggle Jews and Communists from France into Switzerland. Then he managed to make his way to Algeria, where he jointed the Free French commando regiment of paratroopers.

At the end of the war, he returned to the Hôtel Drouot and took up his former post of expert auctioneer in a French art market enjoying its last days of glory. He became so well known that de Gaulle once hailed him with: "Well now, Rheims, still going about your nefarious activities?" One of his first commissions had been to dispose of the estate of Hermann Goering. Every morning he would scan the death announcements in Le Figaro and invite himself to the funeral ceremonies of aristocratic notables with a view to offering the bereaved family his professional services in the dispersal of the major effects of the dear departed. He was always fair and honest, and was often invited to share the funeral meats.

His life's work has been estimated at 600,000 blows of the auctioneer's ivory mallet, from the hat Napoleon wore at Wagram to the Planetarium of the Palais de la Découverte, by way of various Rembrandts; and thanks to him the Hôtel Drouot became the leading salesroom of Europe. He directed some legendary sales, like that of King Farouk's possessions, or the will of Louis XIV. But like everyone in the profession, he made one or two big mistakes.

In 1964, he and two accomplices flew to New York intending to acquire the Parke-Bennet salesroom, on sale at an advantageous price; but when they got there, they found they could not speak English. The deal was made in favour of Sotheby's. Rheims sold Fragonard's celebrated "libertine" picture, of an ardent young lover bolting the door before seducing a distraught beauty, for only one-tenth of its value, mistaking it for an anonymous work. He sold to the Louvre for a song a "School of Carache" which was actually Poussin's Olympios and Marsias, an enormous art scandal that took 30 years to settle in court.

In 1964, he auctioned the Beistegui collection at the Palazzo Labia in Venice. In the following year he founded the glossy art magazine Connaissance des Arts. He sold the Rothschild collection and the René Dreyfus library of rare books. In 1973, having sold his practice, he acted as expert at the prodigious Picasso sale. In addition to all this buying and selling, Rheims was a prolific author, with authoritative monographs of Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Carpaccio and many others. He was also a clever and witty novelist, and in 1983 his La Sainte Office gave an acidulous evocation of French high society through the eyes of Oscar, a very observant valet.

With Rheims's death, what auctioneer will be equal to the dispersal of his fabulous collection? His Voltairean shade will doubtless enjoy every minute of the performance.

James Kirkup