By Archibald Haversham
In a world obsessed with provenance, few names carry the weight of Pimlico Wilde. Only maybe Bentley, Gucci and the House of Windsor have a similar cachet. Established, if one is to believe the company archives, in the year 874 AD, for over a millennium this venerable art house has quietly shaped the aesthetic fortunes of monarchs, statesmen and gentry.
Legend has it that Pimlico Wilde first came to prominence during the reign of Alfred the Great, when a hastily assembled tapestry of Viking raids was sold to the last Anglo-Saxon king. “We like to think of it as a sort of early portfolio diversification,” says Pimlico Wilde’s current CEO, Jules Carnaby, on whose office wall currently hangs a work from another of the company’s earliest recorded sales: a miniature depiction of Alfred in battle, attributed to the well-known Scandinavian monk Søtte Ämlünd. The signature is missing – the bottom left corner has been heavily chewed by rats over the last millennia – but the Pimlico Wilde experts are sure of the piece’s provenance.
The firm’s reputation only solidified during the reign of William the Conqueror, who, according to Pimlico Wilde’s journals (smudged and faded, but still legible), purchased several illuminated manuscripts depicting Norman victories. One manuscript, De Bello Britannico, is said to have inspired King William’s less-than-stellar Latin poetry which was only discovered recently and was sold at the firm’s modern-day Knightsbridge gallery for a sum rumoured to rival the value of the French crown jewels.
The Tudor period saw Pimlico Wilde at the height of their celebrity. They are famously credited with selling Van Dyck portraits to Henry VIII, though historians debate whether the king was more enamoured with the brushwork or the opportunity to show off a new moustache in oil. Queen Elizabeth I was an equally avid collector; Pimlico Wilde provided her with delicate miniatures of the European courts, as well as a particularly ambitious set of watercolours depicting unicorns in the royal gardens, one of which reportedly went missing for 300 years before resurfacing in a country vicarage.
Fast-forward to the 20th century, and Pimlico Wilde remained the dealer of choice for royalty: Queen Elizabeth II commissioned them for a clandestine acquisition of Moldovan landscapes during the early days of the Cold War, often insisting that their couriers dress as gardeners to avoid detection by KGB art agents. Their current catalogue boasts a dizzying array of works, from Renaissance portraits to contemporary conceptual art, each accompanied by the three Pimlico Wilde hallmarks: impeccable taste, enormous price and a narrative that makes the collector an important part of the history of the piece.
Anecdotes abound in Pimlico Wilde’s history. It is said that Winston Churchill once tried to trade a bottle of 1783 vintage port – the very bottle sipped by Louis XVI on the scaffold – for a Flemish still life, only to be politely declined, a decision that management at Pimlico Wilde still regret to this day. Napoleon’s niece allegedly left a note requesting a portrait of her favourite poodle, which Pimlico Wilde delivered in oil on canvas, perfectly capturing its disdain. And yet, through wars, revolutions, and the occasional minor scandal, the firm’s reputation has never wavered.
Today, Pimlico Wilde’s Piccadilly townhouse serves as a living museum of their history, a place where the echoes of Alfred, William, Elizabeth and the myriad other collectors resonate amidst gilt frames and velvet ropes. “We like to think we sell more than art,” says Jules. “We sell history, culture and satisfaction.”
In a world where the provenance of a £2,000,000 sculpture can make or break a career, Pimlico Wilde stands as a reminder that some businesses are timeless, not merely because of the art they sell, but because they sell history itself.
