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The Oxford dictionary describes a collector as a person who collects or gathers together works of art etc. This is a fitting description of
the late Dr. Bryan Alton who as a young medical student was encouraged by Henry Naylor, an antique dealer in Liffey Street, to collect
quality porcelain. He married Dr. Winifred Tempany in May 1950 and as his career progressed so too would the couple’s interest in
collecting expand. Before purchasing Bryan would investigate, both by reading and consulting experts, everything he could about some
object in which he was interested and so, today, we see the result of over fifty years of assiduous searching.
In his practice, he would become physician to the late President Eamon de Valera and was elected a member of Seanad Éireann (1965-
1973), being twice elected to that office. When de Valera retired in 1973, the new President Erskine Childers naturally had his own
doctor but Bryan was at a dinner in 1974 where the president had a massive heart attack and it was he who attended to him and went
with him to the hospital.
I got to know Bryan and Winifred when he was made a member of the Corporation of Goldsmiths, of which I was secretary, and he later
became Master Warden in 1987. He was a great asset to that body, including using his influence to get a special 24p postage stamp
commissioned to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of that organisation and to convince the National Museum to
mount a silver exhibition in the annex in Merrion Row that year.
For an auction house to hold a sale for the collection of one person shows the extent of that individual’s love of acquiring objects of
beauty, value and interest. This eclectic mixture of items ranges from a superb and rare 18th century Meissen porcelain model of ‘The
Peeping Harlequin’ by Johann Kandler to a set of four Irish Georgian silver candlesticks by William Townsend to a signed and numbered
lithograph by Picasso.
Douglas Bennett, July 2016