Daniel Katz Gallery

Danny Katz began dealing in art in 1968, firstly helping out in his father’s antique shop in Brighton. It was there, through early interactions with collectors, that he began to form his understanding of taste and refinement. His true education, however, came through the Salerooms in London, where he learned the key ingredients of the art trade – looking, listening, and handling objects, and then through long periods of fastidious study at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
 
Danny was fortunate to meet the late Anthony Radcliffe at the V&A, then Assistant Keeper of Architecture and Sculpture, and the two would form an extraordinary relationship which informed not only Danny’s subsequent career but also a more general symbiotic exchange between dealer, collector and museum academic. Over the course of their friendship, during which Tony tutored Danny over a sustained period, great leaps were made in the field of studying Renaissance bronzes, both in terms of stylistic understanding and their physical manufacture. Danny supplied the sculptures that formed collections, and the collecting in turn stimulated new scholarship. in this area.
 
Danny’s famously discerning eye got to work early on in his career, notably when spotting in a shop window in Brighton an intriguing bronze that turned out to not only be a rediscovered sculpture, but also a rediscovered sculptor. It was a double figure group of Bireno and Olimpia by Ferdinando Tacca, that he loaned for an extensive period to the V&A and eventually sold to the Chicago Art Institute.
 
Most of the world’s top museums now have examples of important European sculpture thanks to Danny, notably amongst which are: the large marble figure of a Bathing Woman by Giambologna discovered by Danny and sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum 40 years ago; an intensely beautiful ivory Christ at the Column by Francois Duquesnoy at the NGA Washington; and a large Jacopo Sansovino St John the Baptist in bronze now in the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein. 
 
Danny’s inexhaustible appetite for new knowledge and discovery means he is just as well-known today for the breadth of his expertise as its depth, collecting across many fields, including but not restricted to: Ancient Art, Old Master and 19th Century Paintings, Modern British Art and Arts of the Islamic World.