Martin Mortimer, aesthete of wide-ranging interests who was a world authority on 18th-century English glass chandeliers – obituary
Alongside his career with antique glass dealer Delomosne, he kept fast motorbikes, did petit-point, and had a passion for early church music
Martin Mortimer, who has died aged 94, was the world’s leading authority on English glass chandeliers; in a 62-year career with the glass and porcelain dealers Delomosne, he established an unrivalled reputation.
The publication in 2000 of Mortimer’s book The English Glass Chandelier underlined what had been plain for years: his absolute command of his subject. He was not only held in the highest regard in the world of antiques, serving with distinction on the Council of the British Antique Dealers’ Association for nine years – and awarded a Long Service Award in 1990 – but was also consulted by museums, fellow dealers and collectors across the world.
If this eminence was no more than his learning deserved, it tended to obscure a hinterland more unexpected than Mortimer’s correct exterior suggested. He delighted, for example, in running a series of powerful motorcycles; took equal pleasure in the most intricate petit-point; had a passion for early church music, yet found opera painful and pointless. Most poetry he considered incomprehensible, but he was profoundly moved by Anglican ritual.
There was a kind of subtle subversion behind almost everything that informed him. It was reflected in his Abraham Lincoln style beard, no less obviously by his height, 6 ft 3 in. Yet he had a stock of seemingly limitless kindness and took endless pains in helping, guiding, advising. He could be suddenly sharp, though never maliciously, and he had an understated humour that could be devastating.
Mortimer’s other talents included art: he drew precise pencil sketches of wine glasses, in many ways more revealing than any photograph, capturing the translucence of glass and its shimmering depths. He was also a muralist in the mould of Rex Whistler, and the walls of his London house teemed with views, framed by stone balustrades and exactly realised draperies, of playfully idealised classical harbours, city squares and landscapes.
Mortimer’s career had its moments of calamity and even high farce. Memorably, at the house of a rich client, he set about lowering a 6 ft 18th-century chandelier for cleaning. Even with its dressings and arms removed, the chandelier was formidably heavy. Mortimer, perched on a swaying stepladder, attempted the lowering task single-handed. The resulting disaster had a hideous inevitability about it, but the shattered fragments were eventually restored.
The youngest of five boys, Martin Christopher Fortescue Mortimer was born in Kensington on July 4 1928, the son of George Mortimer, an aircraft engineer, and his wife Elsie, née Money, always known as Dorothy. The family subsequently moved to Chislehurst, where Martin’s mother died when he was one. George Mortimer re-married in 1933 and his new wife, Helen Proctor, became the mother Martin had never known.
By the late 1930s, the family had moved to Devon. It was here an interest in how things work – which would prove critical in his innovative approaches to restoring chandeliers – was sparked in Martin. It expressed itself in a passion for motorbikes, whose engines he enthusiastically took apart, and in mending watches. His two-wheeled freedom allowed him to explore an ever larger number of country houses. His knowledge of them would become encyclopaedic.
After attending Shrewsbury School, in 1948 he was taken on by Delomosne, established only in 1905 but already one of London’s most prestigious dealers in porcelain and glass.
Within six months, Mortimer registered a remarkable coup: he discovered a 16th-century goblet by one of the most celebrated Venetian glassmakers, Giacomo Verzelini, active in England from 1571. He found it in the home of a former nanny, who used it as a flower vase. The autocratic head of Delomosne, Bernard Perret, dismissed the attribution, but Mortimer was right, and today the glass is in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
At the same time, Delomosne’s expertise in chandeliers was consistently reinforced. The devastating fire at Hampton Court in 1986 saw the company called in to restore a 17th-century chandelier in the King’s Audience Chamber, the chandelier reduced to an unrecognisable ruin. That, a year later, it had been fully restored and re-hung was eloquent proof of Mortimer’s startling technical capacity. No trace of the devastating damage remained.
The painstaking restoration, begun in 1991, of the Port Royal chandelier, “wonderful but flawed”, as Mortimer called it, presented a different challenge. It was a late 18th-century piece held at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, the former home of the American millionaire H F du Pont. Successive restorations had proved less than sympathetic. It took months of exacting work to return it to “a form its maker should recognise”.
Throughout, Mortimer wrote prodigiously. Articles appeared in a huge range of publications.
In 1987, with the lease of Delomosne’s London shop expiring, he agreed that the business should be moved to Wiltshire. New and elegant premises were acquired near Bath. Let loose in these bucolic surroundings, he set to work on a new creation: a garden. This proved characteristically inventive. In 2009, he retired, though he remained a benign guiding hand in Delomosne’s future direction.
Throughout, a sustaining comfort was his Anglican faith, which manifested itself in a commitment to ancient forms of worships, above all the Book of Common Prayer, as well as in a (discreet) dismay at the ordination of women. Yet he was in every sense a deeply devout Christian: forward-looking, enlightened conservative, erudite, wise and sympathetic, with an astonishing sympathy for the past. And no less accepting of a future he may not always have welcomed.
In 2002 Mortimer was appointed MBE for services to antique glass.
His final years were painful. Failing eyesight, the death of his wife and the creeping indignities of old age took an inevitable toll.
His wife, Sara, died in 2013. There were no children of the marriage.
Martin Mortimer, born July 4 1928, died October 1 2022