David Benson, 1938-2023

By James Knox, 01.12.2023

David Benson

David Benson, who has died aged 85, served as either chairman or trustee of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation from 2010 until 2019. His twin pedigrees as an influential financier and as accomplished artist equipped him brilliantly for this role, offering astute advice and counsel as the Foundation charted a new course with its museum without walls strategy and other manifold activities.

DB (as he was known to those in the Fleming Collection) was born into one of the UK’s oldest banking dynasties. His ancestors were originally sheep farmers in the Lake District before gravitating via shipbuilding in Liverpool, to banking. Following a merger in the 1960s, the bank became known as Kleinwort Benson where DB was to spend most of his career, serving for many years as vice-chairman. The survival and growth of the family firm had led – to DB’s lasting regret  - to the sale of his grandparents’ outstanding collection of Italian Old Master paintings to the dealer Joseph Duveen for $4m in 1927 to re-finance the bank. However his grandparents’ voracious collecting suggests that a love of art was in DB’s DNA. 

 

His talent as an artist emerged at Eton where he excelled under the tutelage of the art master, the noted art historian, Wilfred, Blunt, who wrote of his star pupil, then aged 16: ‘He paints small watercolours on damp paper swiftly and competently. He is in short the charming amateur painter par excellence…this is exactly how it should be.’ Such was DB’s skill that following Eton, he trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art, but whether intended or not, his father later steered him via a stint with Shell into the family profession.

But painting remained his overriding passion. Favoured landscapes encompassed Sussex and Peeblesshire where he lived, while accompanied by his paintbox on business trips, he would find time to capture cityscapes such of Geneva or Zurich, or closer to home the City of London. He also painted at Bussento  - the house south of Naples, built by his American mother, whose first husband had been the Publishing tycoon, Condé Nast.

Alongside his unofficial career as an artist, DB provided invaluable support not just to the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, but also to other cultural institutions, namely the West Dean Foundation and Pallant House Gallery both in Sussex. He also played a crucial role in fundraising for the Royal Watercolour Society’s new gallery premises in London.

 

The long-established Edinburgh art dealer, Anthony Woodd, who was a close friend and neighbour in Peeblesshire, says of DB’s work: ‘He never painted in oils as he always felt at home with watercolour painting. His paintings are marked by good sense of colour, light and shade, with an eye for detail and perspective. That is the important element of any traditional work of art. He never changed his style so a Benson was easily recognizable and he had a clear idea of the path he wished to tread.’  Wilfred Blunt’s early critique of DB’s skill at picture making has stood the test of time, placing him in the great British tradition stretching back to the 18^th century school of gifted amateurs who excelled at topographical painting. No wonder that DB said on being made an honorary member of the Royal Watercolour Society, that he was prouder of this accolade than of his many city achievements. And it was fully justified.