Journal

I think I was interested in art long before I knew it would become my life.

I grew up in Paris in a family where beautiful things were simply part of everyday life.

There were paintings in our home. There were antiques. There were books, objects, furniture, things that had been kept because someone had loved them.

We went to the Louvre.

We went to museums.

We visited châteaux.

We looked at paintings and sculpture, architecture and gardens.

And we went to beautiful places simply because they were beautiful.

Wonderful cafés. Elegant tea rooms. Restaurants where the details mattered. Places where the way the table was set, the way people dressed, the way people spoke to one another were all part of the experience.

It was never presented to me as an education.

It was simply life.

But I think these things shape you.

Growing up in Paris gives you a very particular relationship with beauty.

You learn to notice proportions, materials, light, the quality of an object, the way a room is arranged.

You learn the difference between elegance and ostentation.

And you absorb a certain way of behaving in the world, of receiving people, of sitting at a table, of enjoying a beautiful place.

Paris gives you a very strong aesthetic sense without necessarily announcing that it is doing so.

After seeing an exhibition of Ramses II in Paris, I decided that I was going to become an Egyptologist.

I was fascinated by ancient Egypt, by the idea that an entire civilisation could survive through its objects, its buildings, its images and its writing.

Looking back, perhaps I was already interested in the same thing that would later draw me to art.

The idea that things can survive us.

That they can carry a story across centuries.

That by looking carefully, you can discover an entire world.

When I was eighteen, I began spending a great deal of time around the painters of Montmartre.

I got to know them, and they were wonderful people.

Very kind.

Very funny.

Very interesting.

They were painters who lived quite freely, and although much of what they produced was commercial, I loved their independence and their way of life.

They welcomed me into their world.

I was still studying at university, and somehow I began selling paintings to tourists myself.

I sold them at the Hôtel Meurice, on the rue de Rivoli, directly opposite the Tuileries Gardens.

It was a rather extraordinary place to begin.

Tourists came to Paris wanting to take home something that would remind them of the city, and there I was, selling them paintings.

I found it incredibly amusing.

There was something almost theatrical about it.

Paris, the Tuileries, the grand hotel, the tourists, the paintings, and this young student discovering that she actually enjoyed talking to people about what they were buying.

But beneath the fun, something important was happening.

I was discovering that I had an instinct for art.

I liked looking.

I liked talking about paintings.

I liked understanding what attracted someone to a particular work.

And I loved the moment when a person suddenly saw something they wanted to take home.

From there, quite naturally, I moved towards the art world itself.

Not all at once.

There was no particular day when I decided that this was what I would do.

It happened through encounters, friendships, paintings and people.

The world of Montmartre gradually opened onto another world.

A world of artists, collectors, dealers, museums, connoisseurs and old collections.

I became increasingly interested in what made a work important.

Its history.

Its provenance.

Its quality.

Its rarity.

The artist behind it.

The people who had owned it before.

And eventually I specialised in the secondary art market and in important antiques.

What had started with selling paintings to tourists became a serious profession.

But I think the essential part had begun much earlier.

It began with a child in Paris who wanted to become an Egyptologist.

With endless visits to museums.

With paintings and antiques at home.

With the habit of looking at beautiful things.

With the extraordinary generosity of a group of Montmartre painters who let a curious young woman into their world.

And perhaps that is why I have never thought of art simply as a profession.

It has always been a way of looking at the world.

A way of asking questions.

And what can it tell us about the people who came before us?

Perhaps my childhood dream of becoming an Egyptologist was never entirely wrong.

I did not end up studying ancient Egypt for a living.

Instead, I spent my life following objects through time.

Paintings.

Antiques.

Works of art that had travelled from one generation to another.