Page 8 - Christie's London China Trade Paintings Kelton Collection

SELECTIONS FROM
THE KELTON COLLECTION

RICHARD KELTON (1929-2019)

You know everything I collect is about water.
Those of us lucky enough to have spent hours with Richard Kelton in his maze of interconnected apartments in Marina del
Rey, California were taken on a voyage – centered on the Pacifc – with many stops and covering huge swaths of time. It
always was an immemorial journey – one without an end, and, although he was the most genial, knowledgeable, and expert
guide, each of us suspected that each such trip was equally a voyage for him as for his guest.
For many of us, it started in what we had all thought would be familiar territory – the art of Paul Gauguin, which drew many
of his visitors in search of loans, of ideas, and of insights. How unknowing we were – and how stupid if we saw the Gauguins
and then left, fguring that was it. “Au contraire,” as Gauguin himself would have said; we were just beginning, and, if we felt
confdent in our knowledge of the frst “stops” – the places inhabited by the peripatetic painter – we were wrong.

Richard would always gauge his visitors – their curiosity, their sense of ownership of their “feld,” and their attention span.
If one passed muster in one or all of those categories, a door would open into another apartment in what would become, if
he or his visitor wished, an entire afternoon or evening of travel – through time and through space, through one apartment
and then the next and the next until each of us realized that we were in what was a warren of water – of sea voyages and the
various encounters of others they produced.
We would be with Captain Cook – whether in New Zealand, Tahiti, or Hawaii. And the sheer adventure of the collection
of objects, ephemera, books, prints, etc. brought alive a series of encounters between a group of errant Englishmen – in
the main – and the lands that they did nothing to discover – that had happened centuries before – but brought into global
consciousness. Or we could discuss Bougainville or the Germans who spent so much time in the Marquesas just after
Gauguin’s death. Always, as soon as we were accustomed to the port in which we had landed, we were back on the ship and
in the world of water which is the Pacifc – a continent of water that obsessed Richard Kelton from his undergraduate days at
Stanford through the winters of Law School and Yale and then throughout his later life.
Like most truly great collectors, his was a knowledgeable addict, fnding value in Chinese paintings on glass made for the
Europeans who ventured there. I well remember discovering Canton with Richard and realizing the brilliance of its location,
up a wide river on either side of which was the British Hong Kong and the Portuguese Macau. Somehow, learning about
Gauguin never taught us anything about that! And having long discussions about Java and the pre-European voyages of
Hindu priests to that island and Cambodia or the multi-cultural crews on 18th and early 19th century ships that brought the
large world to each port – all of this was as easy to him as discussing the latest flm is to us.

By the time we got to the third or fourth apartment, we arrived in what was surely one of the very greatest private collections
of Australian Aboriginal art – and exhaustion set in. We had traveled too far through time and space to be able to make the
transition to songlines and other modes of “travel.” I remember feeling like I did at the end of a graduate seminar with George
Kubler at Yale – ready to rest a week or two before recommencing the journey.
Richard Kelton never fagged and, one sensed, never repeated himself. There was so much to talk about that each of his
companionable excursions was diferent than the last. How we will all miss him, his deep knowledge, his sometimes highly
speculative, but always challenging theories, his tenacity, his love for the worlds he discovered through collecting. He is no
doubt on another voyage now – more like the Australian Aboriginal songlines, one suspects, but we can no longer follow him.

Richard Brettell, Founding Director, The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas

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