The full life of Monty
Going for a Burton... how the off-the-peg tailor’s family helped Yorkshire artists on the road to fame. John Vincent reports.
He arrived in Britain alone from Lithuania in 1900, aged 15 and unable to speak English and died while making an afterdinner speech in Leeds 52 years later. Between times, Meshe David Osinsky had become Sir Montague Maurice Burton, given his name to the expression the full Monty and established the largest multiple tailoring firm in the world.
Burton, who borrowed £100 from a relative to start the business in 1903, was knighted in 1931 for services to commerce and charity and when he died in 1952 his empire covered 600 shops and 14 factories.
His sons, Stanley and twins Raymond and Arnold and their wives, were collectors and patrons of contemporary art and their legacy can be seen at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate and the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds.
Sold by Bonhams, philanthropist Arnold Burton’s collection included one of Dame Barbara Hepworth’s first works in bronze, Cantate Domino (1958), which realised more than £500,000. His wife Barbara also had a keen eye and 31 gold boxes from her collection made £450,000, including a spectacular Louis XV snuff box which fetched £158,500.
Forward-thinking teachers in Yorkshire art schools also played their part in developing talent, leading to the emergence of artists and designers such as Hepworth, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Kenneth Armitage, David Oxtoby, Norman Stevens, Mike Vaughan and John Loker.
Artist Fred Johnson (1917-1998), a tutor at Bradford Regional College of Art from 1952, was particularly influential, tutoring Hockney, Oxtoby, Loker, Tony Bevan and Doug Binder. He supported Hockney’s transfer to the painting course and encouraged him to submit pictures for the Royal Academy’s 1957 Summer Exhibition.
An influential critic and collector was Yorkshireman Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968), whose friendships with
Moore, Hepworth and Ben Nicholson contributed to their success. In 2017, Bonhams sold five works from Read’s collection, one of which, Yayoi Kusama’s No. AA made more than £500,000.
One of the most important collections of Modern British Art sold by Bonhams belonged to Cyril Reddihough, an
Ilkley solicitor and longtime friend of Nicholson, who collected early works of both the artist and his wife Winifred and then supported his second Barbara Hepworth. Paintings from the collection exceeded all expectations in 2016, Nicholson’s Pill Creek making £722,500, a Henry Moore plaster a record price of £1.86m and a Barbara Hepworth bronze £206,500.
Another generous patron was Leeds GP Geoffrey Sherwin, who amassed a significant collection of British Surrealist artists in his Leeds home and conceived the idea of creating a separate sculpture gallery at the front of the old Leeds
City Art Gallery, fighting to secure the £150,000 funding needed to make the Henry Moore Institute a reality.
A final word on Montague Burton and the full Monty, meaning “the works”. It referred to a complete set of clothes issued to demobbed Servicemen after the Second World War.