Orna Mulcahy on people we all know...
Geoffrey hasn't missed an RHA evening in more than 40 years and as a result he has managed to build up quite a decent collection that he likes to refer to as his "pension". Naturally, he has a rather good pension too, from the Firm, but that's another matter. No, Art is his first love, and he has been very lucky, having started buying at a time when there were marvellous bargains to be had, when people didn't appreciate Irish art, or any art for that matter ...
He's thinking back to the 1950s when Percy French was 10 and 6 along the Quays and you could get a nice small Yeats from Waddingtons for £20, though it was hard to know what they were of. Well, it was a lot of money at the time, let's see, he would have been earning about £3 a week as an apprentice solicitor but he's glad he starved one whole summer to buy one. It's worth about €80,000 now - it's over there beside the Orpen. Now Orpen was another one you could buy for buttons, but that was before Bruce Arnold wrote his book.
Not that buying art is about investment. If people ask his advice about pictures, and the junior partners frequently do, he always encourages them to buy what they like, not what they think is going to appreciate, because you have to live with it on your walls, don't you? Privately though, he thinks that a lot of what young people like these days is terrible stuff - children paddling at the beach and acrylic gangsters and the inside of the Shelbourne Bar. Sort of thing you buy after two glasses of wine and hang in your den beside the plasma screen. Ugh!
Geoffrey likes a more cluttered, shabby-chic look himself and can't see the point of spending money on interior décor.
Olive, his long-suffering wife, has been angling for a new sofa in the drawing room for about 20 years, but instead Geoffrey will buy a picture or two, and then leave them stacked against the wall for her to trip over. Not all of them are masterpieces, though you have to look under the beds and behind wardrobes to find the really bad ones - sometimes it's very hard to see at these sales, particularly the ones that are hung in dark corners and sadly there are people out there who aren't being entirely honest about what they are selling.
Geoffrey is constantly prowling the galleries but he has also been known to drive to the back-end of Mayo on a stormy night to track down an alcoholic artist in his studio with a cash offer, and then he has a very good way with artists' widows. Mind you, some artists are very slow about dying - he can think of a few who are still churning the stuff out and it would be much better for everyone if they would just stop.