The Major

When the bidding reached -L-100,000 ($280,000), the bulky old gentleman in the puce-and-green-striped tie emitted a genteel "whew," and he blinked his eyes incredulously at every -L-10,000 jump thereafter. The work on sale last week at Sotheby's in London was his: Rembrandt's brooding St. Bartholomew, one of the most important Rembrandts still left in private hands. The final price of $532,000 fell well short of the $2,300,000 paid last fall by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art for Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer; but still and all, the smaller (34 in. by 30 in.) and less ambitious St. Bartholomew had brought the fourth highest auction price yet for a single painting. When the painting was knocked down (to Agnew's, another big London art dealer), the old gentleman got up and drove off to his castle in Shropshire. He had spoken to no one during the sale, and no one had spoken to him.

Major William Mandeville Peareth Kincaid Lennox has never bought a work of art in his life; yet he owns one of England's more romantic collections. He inherited more than 90 paintings that hang helter-skelter in ill-lit confusion in the library and the drafty halls of Downton Castle. Ten years ago, the major wired the castle for electricity, and now a TV set sits smack beneath Rembrandt's Flight into Egypt. A caged budgerigar chirps beneath Rembrandt's The Cradle. In addition, there is a Van Dyck ("A lovely one of a galloping horse," says the major) Rubens' portrait of Grotius ("Actually, they tell me now it may be a Van Dyck"), and a painting by Rembrandt's pupil Dou called Woman Drinking Soup out of a Bowl ("Personally. I think she is drinking wine)."

Major Lennox admits to a certain affection for his paintings, but once, when a Rembrandt fell off the wall, his chief concern was whether it had disturbed the budgerigar. "I'm not an artistic sort of chap," he says forthrightly. "Don't understand pictures at all." He sold the Rembrandt to keep up his 14,000-acre estate on which he farms, raises sheep, cattle and daffodils. The daffodils are his real passion. He grows 200 varieties, and says with greater pride than when speaking of his art collection: "I don't know where you could find more beautiful daffodils than in our grounds."

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