Simon Gillespie

Background

About Simon Gillespie

With my team of highly-trained conservators, over the past forty years I have treated artworks by great artists from Rubens and Renoir to Hockney and Freud, Titian and Twombly, Picasso, Pissarro, Van Dyck and Velasquez, Breughel and Banksy, Lowry and Lichtenstein, Munch, Miró and Millais. My client list is extensive and includes leading auction houses, galleries and a large private client base, as well as corporate collections and museums which do not have their own conservation departments. Since 2016, I have worked alongside Bendor Grosvenor on the BBC4 programme Britain's Lost Masterpieces. The conservation treatment carried out on paintings as part of this TV programme has resulted in the re-discovery of previously lost or unknown masterpieces, including- a mythological scene on panel by Jacob Jordaens- a portrait by Allan Ramsay- a portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, found at Pollok House, Glasgow, Scotland. The painting had been thought to be a copy of a painting by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens that had been lost for nearly 400 years, but after restoration was found to be the original by Rubens. Its discovery made the news worldwide- a portrait of a young cardinal by Titian in the collection at Petworth House- a pastoral scene by studio of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Joos de Momper at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery- a portrait of George Oakley Aldrich by Rome-based fresco and portrait painted Pompeo Batoni- a Madonna and Child painted in oil on panel from the National Museum Cardiff, long thought to have been an unimportant copy of a Botticelli by an unknown artist, which after treatment was declared by Laurence Kanter, chief curator of the Yale University Art Gallery and a Botticelli specialist, to be “clearly” from Sandro Botticelli’s studio, with "more than a bit of it" by the master himself. Previously, I worked with Philip Mould and Fiona Bruce on the BBC show Fake or Fortune, as part of which I treated a Pietà from St John the Baptist's Church, in Tunstall (Lancashire) which was revealed to be by the Italian painter Francesco Montemezzano. Philip Mould said of the result of the conservation treatment: “It was an extraordinary transformation and on a scale that is pretty well unmatched."