The home of Stanley J Seeger was similarly intriguing for Macdonald. The art collector Seeger acquired Sutton Place, Surrey, formerly owned by J Paul Getty, in 1980. The house was full of quirky, diverse treasures, ranging from a four-poster Tibetan bed to the Francis Bacon triptych, Study of the Human Body, which Seeger and his partner hung in the great hall of the grade one Tudor mansion – at the time causing a few raised eyebrows. The pair’s audacity, and the confidence in their unconventional aesthetic, made for an extraordinary home. “These were high-value works, but they were more than that,” says Macdonald.
Seeger assembled art works and miscellaneous objects that interested him, then dispensed with them when he felt the collection was complete, and started again. He sold all of his 88 Picasso works in 1993. Then in 2001, in another clear out, he sold his Bacon triptych Study of the Human Body, along with many other masterpieces by Jasper Johns, Joan Miro and more Picassos. In another auction, titled One Thousand Ways of Seeing, the range was even more diverse, including a shooting script for Citizen Kane that belonged to Orson Welles, Winston Churchill’s armchair, Rudolf Nureyev’s coat-rack, a silver jug owned by Al Capone, and a small teapot that had belonged to Lord Nelson.