Masterpiece is a fair in its maker's image – the sort of place where, instead of a mid-afternoon tea trolley, a Ruinart champagne chariot is wheeled up and down the aisles of furniture, paintings, sculpture and assorted works of art. It is typical of Simon Phillips, the sleekest antiques dealer I know. If you want some important English furniture with just a couple of centuries' light stately home use and have a six- or seven-figure sum burning a hole in your Savile Row-tailored pocket then I will have probably seen you having dinner with Simon at Harry's Bar.
Simon gives the impression of having been born with not so much a silver spoon but a large Havana cigar in his mouth. In a desert of bulimic modernity his shop just off Berkeley Square is an oasis of old school elegance: a place of tortoiseshell and ormolu, age-spotted mirrors and museum quality breakfront bookcases.
He was also chairman of the last Grosvenor House Antiques Fair. But when Grosvenor House closed after a 75-year run, he felt the want of a good fair and much in the manner of Disraeli who said that when he wanted to read a novel he would write one, Phillips set up Masterpiece. Now in its sixth edition, this glorious Woodstock of the fine and applied arts has stitched itself into the fabric of what a few people of my generation still persist in calling the Season.
The timing is genius, just after Ascot, around the time of Wimbledon, when you can be sure that everyone – or at least everyone in the market for a piece of vintage Van Cleef jewellery or Chippendale furniture – is in London. The sell is cashmere soft, but you can hear the chinking of cheekbones and champagne flutes all the way across the river.
What makes Masterpiece such an important event on the calendar is the quality and sheer variety of the merchandise: the edit is very good, enhanced by a mise-en-scène with pop-up restaurants by the Caprice group. But best of all is the capacity to surprise. Because there is sufficient space to accommodate both diversity and quality, whether it a Lalique pendant or a portrait of Nell Gwyn (two of this year's exhibits/items), you can never be sure what will turn up, and this is what makes it so fascinating.
This year, for instance, if you like paintings of clouds, you are in luck. There is an Italian landscape study by Sargent whose composition is such that I began to wish they had chucked a few landscapes into the recent show at the National Portrait Gallery. There is also one of those late Turners of the sort that makes the Impressionists seem almost slavishly realist; then you can compare Turner and Sargent's treatment of clouds with a couple of small sky studies by Monet offered by Richard Green, complete with what looks like red lightning in one and Durand Ruel provenance for both.
Given his wife's show at Tate Modern and the presence of one of his major works in the Fondation Louis Vuitton show Les Clefs d'une Passion, the Robert Delaunay picture of the Eiffel Tower (left) presented by Dickinson seems as topical now as it was when painted in 1925 – three years after a quite terrifying self-portrait by Chagall brought to the show by the William Weston Gallery.
There is of course the stuff you'd expect: Warhol, Riley, Moore, inter alia, but it is the bonkers pieces alongside the conventional blue-chip items that make the show what it is. Kraemer Gallery's 18th-century calèche for a "royal or princely child" is fairly far out, but if you were looking for a more up-to-date vehicle, there is also a Riva speedboat at the show. And I'm sure the Ruinart chariot could be made available ...
Uncommon Knowledge
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