Blackstone’s Schwarzman stirs London art market with record purchases

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US private equity executive Steve Schwarzman is shaking the London art market by paying record prices to acquire paintings by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, the leading 18th century society portrait artists.

Schwarzman, who was given an honorary knighthood last year by the UK government, is restoring Conholt Park, a 17th century 2,500-acre estate in Wiltshire that he bought for £80mn in 2022. As he makes plans to furnish the house, he is rapidly building a collection of masterpieces by making private offers to owners through dealers.

He recently acquired Reynolds’ “Portrait of Lady Worsley” from the family of David Lascelles, Earl of Harewood, for about £25mn. The portrait, which has been at Harewood House in West Yorkshire since the 18th century, shows a society heiress who was involved in a notorious court case after eloping with her lover.

Schwarzman, co-founder of private equity group Blackstone, has also bought Gainsborough’s portrait “Lady Bate-Dudley”, a 1787 painting which has been on long-term loan to London’s Tate Gallery. It was withdrawn from the Tate collection last year after the owner sold it privately through Simon Dickinson, a London gallery.

The billionaire declined to comment this week but people close to the transactions confirmed that he was the buyer of both works. The Lascelles family decided to sell the Reynolds’ portrait to help cover the upkeep of Harewood House after receiving an anonymous offer through Christie’s private sales department.

The £25mn price is a record for Reynolds, apart from the £50mn paid by the National Portrait Gallery and the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles two years ago for the exceptional “Portrait of Omai”, a Polynesian islander. The sale price of the Gainsborough is not known, but it is thought to be well in excess of the artist’s auction record of £8.2mn in 2019.

Representatives of Schwarzman have made approaches to other owners of rare 18th century paintings, according to people with knowledge of the London market. Sales have been made easier by the fact that he is not applying for export licences for the works, so there is no risk of any deal being blocked by the UK government.

London art advisers said there had been rumours for months of an anonymous buyer bidding for works at high prices. The market in 18th century paintings is thin because few tend to be offered for sale, and it often takes a buyer willing to offer a knockout price to families that have held them for decades.

Schwarzman also owns Miramar, a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island that he has restored and filled with art. He said last year that it would become a private art museum on the death of him and his wife Christine. His honorary knighthood was partly in recognition of his philanthropy in the UK, including a £185mn gift to Oxford university.

Reynolds’ portrait of Seymour Fleming, who became Lady Worsley by marriage in 1775, is an iconic painting of the stepdaughter of the first Lord Harewood. Her husband Sir Richard Worsley brought a case of criminal adultery against the military officer with whom she had an affair, provoking a scandal that was dramatised by the BBC in 2015.