Mary and Alan Hobart: Fitting tribute to a couple who championed Irish art
Mary Hobart and the late Alan Hobart with Paul Cézanne’s La Toilette Funéraire.
When Mary and Alan Hobart established a commercial art gallery in London in 1974, they named it 'The Pyms' in honour of their favourite gin-based tipple, Pimm’s. This may have seemed a frivolous gesture, but they soon proved themselves to be serious and formidable players in the art world. They once paid $7.7 million for Edvard Munch’s 1902 painting Girls on the Bridge, for instance, only to sell it a few years later for $30.8 million.
What distinguished the Hobarts from other dealers in the London scene was their dedication to promoting Irish art at a time when it was far from fashionable, and even the likes of William Orpen and John Lavery had often been passed off as British to ensure their work would sell. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the couple mounted exhibitions such as The Irish Revival, Celtic Splendour, and Irish Renascence, bringing artists such as Orpen, Lavery, Jack B Yeats, and Mary Swanzy to the attention of international buyers.
