Art’s Journey Leads to Knighthood

Even at the age of 85, or perhaps especially at 85, you want to get it right when you kneel down before the queen of England to accept a knighthood.

Arthur Gilbert was leaving nothing to chance. His morning coat and top hat were ready, of course, and a car was ordered to take him to Buckingham Palace on time. He had also borrowed a videotape of a friend’s investiture and memorized the moves for today’s ceremony.

Clearly, he had been practicing.

“You nod your head, step forward three paces to the stool, put your left foot up, kneel down on your right, and she sticks you with a sword,” Gilbert said. “She says a few words, you say a few words, and you back away.”

Gilbert, a native of Britain and a real estate developer in Los Angeles for the last half a century, is being honored by Queen Elizabeth II for donating his $125-million collection of mosaics and silver and gold decorative art objects to his homeland.

Much of the collection was displayed for two decades at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But in 1996, Gilbert abruptly announced plans to donate the collection to Britain after a disagreement with LACMA as to how much space should be allotted the collection. Although LACMA officials said the parting was amicable, Gilbert bought a half-page advertisement in The Times at the time claiming that the museum had reneged on a written agreement.

Today, Gilbert says of his split with LACMA, “I feel beautiful works of art should not be bound up one on top of the other.” Moving his collection to London, he said, has “turned out to be the right decision.”

But what is a knighthood to a man who left Britain behind for the wilds of Southern California?

“It is the fact that they acknowledge the gift. That is very important,” Gilbert said. “Also, it is the tradition. I love the old tradition of Britain.”

Gilbert’s fondness for tradition and history are evident in the 800-piece collection, which will be the centerpiece of a new museum scheduled to open next spring in restored Somerset House, built in 1776 on the banks of the River Thames.

The collection is, in a sense, Britain’s “heritage regained,” Gilbert said, because many of the pieces originally belonged to British aristocrats.

Each mosaic--painstakingly worked with miniature tiles--and elegant gold snuffbox has its own story, combining beauty with history. For example, one mosaic box depicting the head of Bacchus came with a letter to a Paris banker in 1881 thanking him for not having foreclosed on a loan and offering the gift as a token of thanks.

That particularly appealed to the real estate developer in Gilbert. In fact, his affinity for history lost out to other priorities in 1949, when Gilbert left London for Los Angeles.

“I’m a capitalist. And taxes in those days were almost 100%,” Gilbert said. “Secondly, I love the sunshine. I always loved the sunshine.”

Already well off from an evening-gown business, Gilbert and his late wife, Rosalinde, had intended to retire early in the California sun. Instead, he became a real estate developer, a philanthropist active in U.S. and Israeli charities and an accidental art collector.

Gilbert began collecting objets d’art to decorate his own home. In search of nice paintings to hang on the wall, he bought his first mini-mosaics in the 1960s. When a friend said he needed some silver to dress up the living room, he bought a “schmaltzy cabinet by 18th century silversmith Paul de Lamerie.”

By 1975, Gilbert had acquired enough mosaics for an exhibit in the center hall of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

Soon his collection will occupy 25,000 square feet in the South Wing and Embankment Building of Somerset House, where “we will try to show them as far away from each other as possible.”

Gilbert first learned that he was to be knighted--he’ll be one of a handful so honored today--when the British consul general visited him in Los Angeles in March.

“I said: ‘I can’t accept it. I’m an American.’ But he said, ‘When you became an American, did you write a letter renouncing your British citizenship?’ I said I had not, that I hadn’t realized it was necessary. ‘Well, then, you can accept it,’ he said.”

Gilbert said he feels that he is “a mixture of British and American,” and he seems to be. He is an avid tennis player who does his best to get in one game every day. But he also dresses for dinner and is fond of entertaining in stylish European restaurants with his second wife, Marjorie, from Yorkshire. He visits London every year.

Although Gilbert is happy having his collection in London, he says he misses visiting it at LACMA, where he enjoyed wandering around in tennis shorts to observe people taking pleasure in his art. “This could have been in L.A.,” he said with momentary regret before his investiture.

The art, yes. But never the knighthood.