The new Marchioness of Bristol currently faces something of a dilemma. As an art consultant specialising in modern, post-war and contemporary work, she’s more Richter than Reynolds – unlike her husband, whose taste is ‘very English’, and who, as the pair build a collection together, is bringing a lot of ancestors with him. But negotiating is what Meredith (née Dunn) does best. ‘It actually feels sometimes that I’m like Switzerland,’ she says speaking on the phone from New York, where she has been meeting clients.
‘You have to balance the client and whoever you’re buying from. It’s like a tightrope.’ And then there’s the diplomacy required to reckon with a client’s (not always stellar) taste: ‘There was one who had some paintings in the house that I wasn’t so keen on,’ she says. ‘We moved those into a different place that wasn’t so... visible.’ Ancestors, consider yourselves warned.
Meredith, 36, was raised in Boston, where trips to the Museum of Fine Arts with her mother had her hooked on art from an early age. She took up painting at school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, then went on to study history and art at Barnard. She started her career in New York at Gagosian, one of the biggest galleries in the world. ‘I spent two years travelling with Larry [Gagosian],’ she says. ‘I was literally on a plane for two years... I was going to every opening, four countries in one day, meeting the top collectors, parties, openings, everything. It didn’t stop.’ She worked with de Kooning, Douglas Gordon and John Currin. And then Larry was working with Bono, Mick Jagger – ‘everyone’. Though Meredith is far too discreet to speak about her own relationship with Gagosian’s starrier clients: ‘I was... exposed to them,’ she says, carefully.
Meredith's top tips for buying contemporary art
But one artist with whom she had a truly special relationship was Cy Twombly. ‘He was of a different era,’ she says. ‘The grace, the gravitas, the knowledge and just the depth of his character was unbelievable.’ She and Larry would visit him in Rome and in his studio in West Virginia: ‘You would walk in and see these books of Greek and Roman literature just piled all the way up to the ceiling. It was magnificent.’ She helped open the Gagosian Gallery in Athens, with Twombly’s Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves as the inaugural show. From Gagosian she went on to BlainSouthern in London, and then back to New York to work for Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (‘I thought, who do I really respect in the art world?’), who owns Salon 94, champions young artists and works with the likes of Jay-Z and Beyoncé.
However, Meredith soon tired of being able to work only with a set roster of artists. ‘I wanted to be more well-versed and well-rounded in what I was showing my clients,’ she says. And so it was that she set up her own advisory business in the summer of 2016. Those in the know come to her for all reasons – perhaps they’re building a collection, maybe they want a piece sold or located, sometimes they just want something beautiful for their sitting room. (Meredith then also handles the less glamorous part: appraisals, shipping, insurance.) Clients value her insider knowledge and discretion, and appreciate her hands-on approach. ‘The average person does not know the ins and outs of the art world,’ she says – which is why she is there to help. Her clients are the sort of people who simply don’t have the time to be shopping around. Instead, Meredith gets to know and understand their tastes (which ‘can take time, but that’s the fun of it’) and advises them on what they should be seeing.
This savvy bunch are a mix of American, British, European and South Americans, serious investors and younger collectors. Their tastes are manifold, so Meredith buys a variety of artists – from Kusama to Moret to Matisse – at a variety of prices. The lower end is £10,000, but prices reach right up into the millions. However, Meredith stresses, ‘I always say, “Buy what you love.” Buy to hang on your wall, don’t buy for an investment. Buy something that you personally love. That’s important.’ Some clients come to her via her family – she’s one of six ‘and it doesn’t hurt that everyone in my family works in finance’ – while others have come to her through the art world. ‘Everyone just knows everyone. It’s a very small industry,’ she says. ‘And the thing about the art world is that there are only so many collectors and there are way too many advisors and consultants.’
Hers is a true 24-hour job, across multiple time zones; she will be up at 4am if she needs to talk to someone in China. After all, these are the sort of people who, ‘when they need something, they need it yesterday, not in five minutes.’ She travels the world for client meetings and, of course, fairs. ‘There’s probably an art fair every week,’ she laughs. She lists a year in fairs: Frieze (New York, London and soon LA), Frieze Masters (a favourite of Meredith’s), Maastricht (also great), Basel in Switzerland, Hong Kong and Miami (‘lots of socialising – and by lots I mean, like, five parties a night’). But she still makes time to get to her favourite museums – the Beyeler Foundation when she’s in Basel, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum back home in Boston, Tate Modern and the Royal Academy when in London.
It was on one of these many trips two years ago that she met Frederick Hervey, 8th Marquess of Bristol, 38, over dinner at Eight Over Eight in Chelsea, and they married this spring at the Brompton Oratory. She’s teaching him about the contemporary art world, while he is ‘opening my eyes to older English work’. She’s already got him into abstract expressionism, though ‘there were some pieces we agreed on and some that we agreed to disagree on.’
They’ve decided to experiment with mixing paintings old and new in their home. It could be Meredith’s diplomacy at work again, or maybe, just maybe, both she and Fred are coming round to new ways of seeing.
