When the late Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, was nine, his grandmother Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, gave him a painting of a hummingbird by the French artist Simon Bussy.

The artist was a friend of Henri Matisse; he had, in 1903, come to England and married Dorothy Strachey, a cousin of Lord Rothschild. That first painting ignited in the late Lord Rothschild the collecting bug. By the time we met in 2023 at Eythrope — his house near Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire, completed in 1883 by the ‘maniacal collector’ Ferdinand de Rothschild — he had 60 works by Bussy.

‘I have been captured like a magpie, as a collector,’ Lord Rothschild told me at the time. ‘I am half Bloomsbury and half Rothschild and it has always been all around me on both sides of my family wit

See Full Page