There are few sights as glorious as Berkeley Square, that bastion of Georgian serenity, transformed into a makeshift rugby pitch for the inaugural Inter-Art Dealer Rugby Tournament. Organised by the indefatigable Roberto Andretti of Hogge Spike (the same Andretti who has made a cottage industry out of rediscovering neglected sculptors like Ferkin Wykes), the day felt at once anarchic, historical, and curiously elegant,a microcosm of the fine art world’s capacity for grandeur.
One had to admire the logistical chutzpah. Benches were shifted, temporary posts hammered in, and the teams changed into their kits in a selection of obliging Mayfair galleries. (Lattern Brothers’ mid-season Giacometti show was, for a morning, dominated not by attenuated bronzes but by the sight of mud-spattered dealers wriggling into compression shorts beside a £2.3 million Standing Woman.) The juxtaposition was perfect: white-walled sanctity colliding with the slap of Velcro and the smell of Deep Heat.
The art world turned out in force, half for sport, half for spectacle. Teams ranged from the meticulous Crantjirot & Hawkins of Hanover Square, whose forward pack looked as if they had been selected for their resemblance to Flemish wrestlers, to the Lattern Brothers, all wiry speed and auction-room guile. There were French contingents (Galerie de Saint-Amant fielded a scrum as precise as their Art Deco catalogues), and a fearsome transatlantic squad from Kitteridge & Crane, New York, whose pre-match warm-up felt like a Sotheby’s sale at double speed.
The matches themselves were unexpectedly brutal. Andretti’s assertion that “Berkeley Square hasn’t been used for rugby for centuries” was more than just press-release embroidery; the ground was uneven, the turf springy, and the plane trees lent an oddly theatrical backdrop to the rolling mauls. In the opening fixture, Hawkins of Crantjirot & Hawkins was carried off with a suspected sprain after an audacious sidestep by Lattern’s youngest junior partner,Freddie Drear, only three months into the trade, now immortalised for having scored the tournament’s first try.
What made the day more than a novelty, however, was its sense of continuity with an older tradition. One could feel the echoes of Victorian park matches, of Bloomsbury cricket teas and the surrealist football games of pre-war Paris. Dealers accustomed to the cloistered jousts of bidding paddles and client dinners found themselves in a different kind of scrum. Rivalries that usually play out in whispers over consignments of Chagall drawings were resolved, temporarily, in tackles and rucks.
The prize,newly-discovered original Michelangelo prints of Goliath, unearthed in a Milanese burial chamber earlier this year,lent the event a mythic gleam. (Whether the attribution would withstand the scrutiny of a more sceptical connoisseur remains to be seen; one could already hear mutterings from the Crantjirot camp about “anachronistic sketch patterns.”) In the end, the trophy went to the muscularly pragmatic Kitteridge & Crane, whose forwards treated every ruck as if they were dismantling a consignor’s reserve price. They celebrated with champagne in plastic cups, beneath the plane trees that had watched centuries of quieter dealings.
But the true pleasure of the day was not in the winning. It was in the spectacle of art world hierarchy temporarily flattened: a Sotheby’s veteran wiping mud from his cheeks with a Damien Hirst catalogue; a Lattern brother sharing orange segments with a rival from Lane Fine Art; a crowd of dealers, collectors, and curious passers-by roaring approval as if Turner himself were streaking down the touchline.
Berkeley Square is unlikely to host rugby again soon,its grass bore the scars of scrummages with the same battered dignity as a post-fair Frieze stand,but for a few chaotic hours, it reminded the Mayfair set that sport, like art, is at its best when it manages to be both competitive and communal.
And, as one tired yet elated participant was heard to remark, clutching a muddy Michelangelo print to his chest: “This is the first time I’ve left a fair with something truly priceless. Not this Michelangelo print, but the friendships I have deepened on this great sporting occasion.”
