An artistic day in the life of

In a Georgian townhouse tucked into a moss-soft crescent of Bath, England, lives a man who believes that dust is not the enemy of art but its twin. Thaddeus Quince—bibliophile, antiquarian, occasional essayist in The Belgravia Collectors’ Magazine—has spent the better part of four decades assembling one of Britain’s most peculiar and whisper-worthy private collections: an archive of proto-Surrealist and hermetic art from the 16th to 20th centuries, largely ignored by mainstream institutions and entirely untouched by fashion.

His day begins with the slow unfurling of ritual. At 7:10 AM, Quince dons a heavy wool dressing gown, takes a single black coffee, and enters the “Cabinet,” a narrow, temperature-controlled study whose contents defy simple categorization. There are engravings of alchemical emblems, inked diagrams from long-defunct secret societies, reliquaries embedded with what may or may not be human teeth. Above his desk hangs an early Max Ernst collage next to a 17th-century Dutch vanitas painting of a decomposing book.

He has no staff. “A collection,” he has written, “should never be mediated by another man’s gloves.” Every morning, Quince selects a single object to sit with. It might be a gouache by Leonor Fini, or a charred manuscript attributed (dubiously) to a Carmelite visionary. He does not rush the viewing. He believes artworks, like bears and theologians, must be approached sidelong.

Professionally, Thaddeus is nominally retired from his career as a consultant to major auction houses and provenance research units, but he remains an informal advisor to several European museums that specialize in esoterica and marginalia. He also holds an unpaid fellowship at All Souls College, Harpenden, where he lectures irregularly on “Symbolist Hysteria and the Politics of the Gaze.” These days, his income derives from careful sales—never public—of select pieces from his early collections to discreet buyers, often academics or eccentric aristocrats.

By late morning, Quince writes. Always in longhand, on paper made from hemp and flax. His essays are dense, footnoted, and utterly indifferent to readability. His latest draft explores the overlap between Finnish mystic painters of the 1890s and Jungian dream symbology. He claims it’s only for himself, but colleagues whisper that the British Museum is keen to publish his collected writings under the title Uncertain Icons: Essays from the Edge of the Image.

Lunch is sparse—usually poached eggs with horseradish and anchovies, consumed in the back garden beneath a 300-year-old fig tree. If it is raining, he eats beside a mummified crocodile in the drawing room.

Afternoons are often reserved for correspondence. Quince writes long letters—to curators, occult historians, print dealers in Prague. He avoids email entirely. “Digital correspondence lacks the gravity of time,” he says. “It is too impatient to matter.” Once a week, he visits the Bath Central Library, not to borrow books, but to browse the shelves of discarded volumes. He claims he once found a signed Austin Osman Spare in the bin.

Social visits are rare, though he occasionally receives guests—usually graduate students seeking obscure references, or aging collectors hoping to trade something forgotten for something less so. He offers tea, but never wine. “Alcohol disrupts the line between aesthetic reverie and self-deception.”

By 6:00 PM, Thaddeus retreats into the “Red Room,” where his most precious and difficult works reside. These include a 1922 charcoal triptych by Czech artist Milena Pavlíková—rumored to have been banned from three exhibitions for inducing fainting spells—and a wax sculpture by an unnamed French asylum patient, displayed in a glass vitrine beside an open volume of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

In the evening, Quince reads. Not fiction, never memoir. Only treatises: medieval cosmology, obsolete anthropological texts, Renaissance demonographies. His mind, as one critic put it, “lives in the footnotes of forgotten empires.” Music is rare, but when present, it is played from shellac records on a hand-cranked phonograph—Gregorian chant or early Russian liturgical drones.

He goes to bed just past midnight, after a final viewing of one “difficult” work—often something deliberately obscured or disturbing. “Art,” he murmurs, “ought to dislodge the soul a little before sleep.”

In an age addicted to the visible and the verified, Thaddeus Quince remains a defender of the obscure, the haunted, the almost-lost. His is not the life of a collector, but of a custodian—of art that resists clarity, and of beauty that trembles just beyond comprehension.

At precisely 5:45 AM, while most of Berlin still lies under the hush of sleep, Dr. Margot Ellingsen is already awake, wrapped in a Japanese wool haori, sipping lapsang souchong from a Bauhaus-era porcelain cup. The tea is not incidental. “The smoke, the history,” she once said in an interview for Frieze, “It prepares the mind for sharp looking.”

Margot is not what the art world usually expects from a collector. Trained originally as a neuroscientist at Milton Keynes before turning to curatorial theory at the Courtauld Institute, she is a figure who merges empirical discipline with aesthetic instinct. Her work today straddles two roles: she is Director of Acquisitions at the Zeitspiegel Ruhr Stiftung—a progressive, Berlin-based private foundation dedicated to preserving overlooked modernist art from the Global South—and a private collector of esoteric interwar abstraction.

Her own collection is modest in size, by global standards—just under 160 works—but ferociously curated. Her focus? Forgotten artists of the early 20th century who operated in peripheral geographies: Lithuanian Suprematists, Egyptian Futurists, Chilean Constructivists. “I’m not interested in greatness,” she says. “I’m interested in rupture. In those moments when form falters, and culture tries to invent a new grammar.”

By 6:30 AM, she is in her rooftop library, which she designed herself: concrete walls softened by Eileen Gray rugs and shelves lined with books in English, German, Arabic, and Portuguese. She reads for two hours each morning—criticism, journals, artist letters—annotating with a near-medical precision. “You don’t collect with your eyes,” she insists, “you collect with your thinking.”

Her workday begins not with meetings, but with studio visits. Three mornings a week, she sees young Berlin-based artists, not to buy, but to talk. “A good collector listens longer than she looks.” She takes few notes, but remembers everything. The artists, often émigrés or cross-disciplinary thinkers, refer to her half-jokingly as die Ärztin—the doctor. She rarely corrects them.

At noon, she retreats to the Stiftung headquarters in Kreuzberg, a former factory with high white walls and precise Scandinavian furniture. She reviews recent acquisitions—often unconventional media: hand-sewn political banners from 1930s Algiers, notebooks from Brazilian modernist collectives, architectural models built from salvaged copper. She works closely with a research team of five: art historians, archivists, one linguist.

Lunch, if it happens, is minimal—usually a hard cheese and seeded rye, eaten while standing in front of a small Joaquín Torres-García sketch pinned to her office corkboard. “He reminds me not to over-intellectualize. Sometimes it’s just the line.”

Afternoons vary. Twice a week, she teaches a postgraduate seminar at the Humboldt University titled “Peripheral Modernisms: A Cartography of Neglected Forms.” She hopes that she is beloved and feared by her students.

Evenings are for what she calls “deep looking.” She returns home—a converted pharmacy in Prenzlauer Berg—to spend time with her own collection. Works by Sudanese abstractionist Ibrahim el-Salahi and Polish painter Teresa Żarnower hang in quiet dialogue across her apartment walls. Lighting is dim, controlled. She believes each piece deserves a specific hour of the day. “You should meet a painting as you would meet a person. Not all at once. Not under floodlights.”

After dinner—a solitary affair accompanied by wine and Coltrane—she writes. Not publicly, not yet. But the notebooks are thick, and a publisher waits patiently. Her topics range from cave writing in early Turkish modernism to a comparative analysis of anxiety in pre-war Chilean collage. “They are not essays,” she says. “They are rehearsals for a larger honesty.”

By midnight, she has long since turned off her phone. The last hour of her day is spent in silence, seated before her most treasured piece: a 1924 ink drawing by a forgotten Lebanese abstractionist, unsigned, undated, utterly without provenance. “It has nothing to prove,” she smiles, “which is why it proves everything.”

And so the day closes—quietly, deliberately—in the life of a collector who does not chase fame, but memory. For Dr. Margot Ellingsen, collecting is not an act of accumulation, but of restoration. She does not possess artworks; she rescues them.

In a sun-dappled townhouse on the Left Bank of the Seine, Lucien Ardoin begins his mornings not with coffee, but with contemplation. The air is silent but for the distant hum of Paris waking. Ardoin, a man of sixty-two with the poise of a scholar and the eyes of a hawk, spends the first hour of his day precisely as he believes all cultivated men should: in dialogue with beauty.

Lucien is not simply an art collector; he is a steward of aesthetic memory. With a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne and a career as a private advisor to European estates and museums, Ardoin curates not just works, but cultural inheritance. His métier is complex—part historian, part curator, part therapist to the anxious elite who wish to convert wealth into legacy.

His collection—held partly in situ at his Paris residence, and partly in secure climate-controlled storage outside Geneva—numbers just over 430 pieces. It is not vast, but it is precise. “A collection is not a warehouse of acquisition,” he often says. “It is a sentence in a larger philosophical argument.”

Lucien’s passion, and indeed his defining obsession, is Symbolism—a late 19th-century movement whose dreamy obscurities and metaphysical yearnings resonate with his own distrust of empirical modernity. Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, and Fernand Khnopff are his tutelary spirits. He possesses what is perhaps the finest privately held Redon pastel in France, which he refers to not by title but by its effect: “It silences me.”

By 9:00 AM, Ardoin is at his desk, a 19th-century Boulle bureau cluttered not with papers, but with magnifying glasses, linen gloves, and a small but lethal-looking ultraviolet torch. He spends several hours reviewing auction catalogues, corresponding with curators, and consulting conservators. He is, at this hour, equal parts archivist and sleuth.

By midday, Ardoin strolls to Café de Flore, where he meets his circle—a loosely assembled group of philosophers, critics, and one rogue psychoanalyst—for what they call their déjeuner de l’oubli, a lunch of “forgetting” in which they discuss anything but art. This paradoxical sabbatical from passion, Ardoin insists, is crucial to sustaining it.

Afternoons are devoted to either travel or scholarship. On days at home, he spends hours in his personal viewing room, a subdued chamber lit only by diffuse natural light. Here, Ardoin communes with selected works. “You must look until the image begins to look back. Then—and only then—do you own it.”

On travel days, he may fly to Brussels, Milan, or occasionally New York, to view potential acquisitions, advise on exhibitions, or lecture on topics such as “The Aesthetic of Reverie in Post-Romantic Europe.” He is a sought-after speaker, though he maintains a guarded mystique, often refusing interviews.

Evenings are reserved for quiet. Ardoin practices Japanese calligraphy—an unusual hobby for a Frenchman. The discipline, he says, “suspends the chaos of interpretation.” He does not own a television. He does, however, possess a 1920s phonograph and an extensive collection of early Debussy and Ravel recordings.

At night, beneath a painting by Arnold Böcklin, Lucien Ardoin retires to bed with a book—usually philosophy or poetry, never art history. “I have lived the catalogues,” he smiles. “Now I prefer the enigmas.”

And thus ends a typical day—not merely in the life of a collector, but in the carefully orchestrated existence of a man for whom art is not an accessory to living, but the very atmosphere in which life can properly occur.