Meet Henry Miller

The Male Form is a cross-disciplinary sale celebrating the myriad representations of the male form throughout history. Assembled in collaboration with Henry Miller Fine Art, this auction will bring together artefacts and artworks from different cultures and eras, all concerned with the depiction of masculinity and male beauty.

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What do you do for a living?

I am art dealer, and the owner of Henry Miller Fine Art, an art gallery which focuses on the male form spanning many centuries and types of media, including paintings, drawings, prints and photography from the 16th Century to the present day. The works are displayed in my own period home in Walthamstow to give a sense of what the pictures look like within a domestic setting.

Where are you from? And what inspired you to go into the art world? 

I’m a Londoner by birth and although my parents moved to rural Suffolk when I was about seven, I moved back to the capital when I was 18.

I have been collecting art for as long as I can remember – well before I had any money to buy paintings, I would cut out pictures from magazines and stick them on the wall – so for me, becoming an art dealer, was an opportunity to turn my passion into a career. I realised there was no gallery anywhere in the world that truly specialised in the male form particularly in relation to older works so I gave up my job as a lawyer - the 70 hour weeks were not fun – and created the sort of gallery I would like to go shopping in myself.

What was your first job? 

When I was 16 I worked for a very short period as a stable lad in a racing yard. It didn’t last long. It’s an incredibly tough life and something I quickly realised I wasn’t cut out for.

 Name one of your triumphs:

I recently bought a Portrait of a Young Man by Robert Colquhoun, which has now been accepted by the National Portrait Gallery as being a portrait of his partner, and artist, Robert MacBryde. The attribution makes it quite rare thing, as well as explaining the obvious intimacy of the portrait study.

What is your strength as an art dealer? 

I am sure every art dealer will say this, but whether something is £500 or £50,000, I hope I have the ability to select things of real quality. It has always been very important to me that everything in the gallery collection has something special about it; whether that is composition, technique or historical interest. A very established dealer once commented that a gallery such as mine had been tried before, but it hadn’t worked because they’d lost sight of the quality of the art. It takes a little more than just hanging naked men on the wall.

What’s exciting you about The Male Form sale?

The fact that Bonhams is doing The Male Form sale at all is exciting in itself. This is the first time that any of the major auction houses has presented a collection of works around this theme.

As someone who has collected since the 1980s, it is a reflection of how times have changed, both in terms of the attitude of auction houses and the art world, but also in terms of wider society. It is virtually impossible to imagine such a sale happening 20 years ago.

There are so many good things in the sale that it’s difficult to pick just one, but I am very taken with Seated Young Man by Polychronis Lembessis. The artist came from a humble background – his father was a shepherd – and although he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, his career never really took off and he died penniless. It was only after his death that his reputation began to grow and in this picture - part study of the human form and part portraiture – it’s easy to see why.

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Which work of art has changed your life? 

There are so many to pick from, for a whole variety of reasons, but the picture which truly changed my life, was one of the first things I ever sold as a dealer. It is a 19th continental school, portrait of young man in a jacket. When I started my gallery, I had 26 pictures. I put them on the walls in my house and invited everyone I could think of to come along. I didn’t have any clients or a background in the art world, other than as a collector. Selling the picture, which I still love, gave me the confidence to go on and develop the gallery and leave my life as a solicitor behind.