Bendor Grosvenor

Bendor Grosvenor

Bendor Gerard Robert Grosvenor (born 27 November 1977) is a British art dealer and art historian. He is known for discovering a number of important lost works by Old Master artists, and appears in the BBC1 art programme, Fake or Fortune?.^[1]

Grosvenor was educated at Harrow School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and the University of East Anglia where he completed his PhD entitled "The Politics of Foreign Policy: Lord Derby and the Eastern Crisis, 1875-8".^[2] His first major art discovery was a mis-catalogued portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 2003 that was being sold at a London auction as a work by Lawrence's pupil, George Henry Harlow.^[3] From 2005 until 2014 he worked for Philip Mould Ltd, where he made a number of significant art historical discoveries, including lost works by artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, on whom he is an acknowledged specialist. In 2013 Grosvenor discovered the Lost Portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie by Scottish artist Allan Ramsay at Gosford House, the home of the Earl of Wemyss near Edinburgh,^[4]

Grosvenor is a member of the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on National Records and Archives, and the Lord Chancellor's Forum for Historical Manuscripts and Academic Research. He also works as a journalist and writer, and presents programmes for BBC2's The Culture Show.

The name Bendor is derived from the Grosvenor family's medieval heraldic shield, a bend or, a golden bend (diagonal stripe), which they used until 1389 when it was claimed instead by the Scrope family, in the case Scrope v. Grosvenor. Bendor is the grandson of Robert Grosvenor, 5th Baron Ebury, and the 4th cousin once removed of Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster. He is also of Swiss heritage.

References

External links

• Bendor Grosvenor website
• Bendor Grosvenor on Twitter