George Lucan Vane

George Lucan Vane curates the Westminster Cabinet in a manner half scholarly and half acquisitive. London counts him among collector culture’s respectable predators: a man who wraps appetite in curation.

George Lucan Vane is curator of the Westminster Cabinet of Foreign Curiosities, and London’s observers place him without hesitation among collector culture’s respectable predators. He runs the Cabinet in a manner half scholarly and half acquisitive, giving acquisitiveness the face of method. Where Nicholas Cedric Davenant’s sale rooms wrap the long harvest of recovered matter in sale-room ceremony, Vane wraps it in curation: catalogue, measurement, attribution and the patient language of scholarship.

The Cabinet belongs to the upper darkness of collector London, where cabinets of recovered curiosities are shown in Westminster houses and old objects travel by the same channels that move debt and salvage. Its speciality is the foreign: things that come up the river and through the basin rather than out of the city’s own ground, and which Vane is often among the first to examine, whether in a riverside customs shed or in a crate opened in his study. Those who have sold to him say he is scrupulous about every detail of an object except where it came from.

Companies meet Vane as a buyer, an authority or an obstacle. He pays for foreign finds, for translation and attribution, and for the retrieval of pieces he believes belong in the Cabinet; he can also make a find respectable, or quietly unmake it, with a single line in a catalogue. A band that brings him something he wants will be received with courtesy. A band that brings him questions about how his own collection was acquired will find that courtesy considerably thinner.

In person

A tall, extraordinarily thin and noticeably stooped man of sixty-three, George Lucan Vane is almost entirely bald but for a fine copper-grey fringe, with extremely long, narrow grey sideburns on an otherwise clean-shaven, long and deeply lined face. A very high forehead, narrow jaw, large protruding ears, long straight nose and heavy-lidded amber-brown eyes give him a watchful look, and a dark birthmark runs from his left temple towards the ear. He dresses expensively and eccentrically in purple-black, copper and faded turquoise: a scholarly coat over a copper-brocade waistcoat, narrow spectacles on a cord, foreign rings and a turquoise cravat pin. Catalogues, acquisition papers and measuring tools are seldom out of his long hands.