A world-leading Chinese ceramics collection and the feud that tore it, and a family, apart
The finest collection of 17th-century Chinese pots in the world has been broken up after a bitter battle that split the family of late British diplomat Michael Butler, the man who amassed it. Two of his children tell their side of the story
It all started with some empty shelves. In 1960, Michael Butler, a diplomat at the British Foreign Office, was in search of ornaments to fill the white space in his house in London’s Chelsea. He decided to follow his collector friends to Sotheby’s, where he bought a box containing what were described as “six old pieces of Chinese porcelain” – among them a small 17th-century apple-green wine pot, complete with fine bamboo-shaped handles, which stole his heart.
From that moment on, he spent as many weekends as he could “pot hunting” and, over the course of almost 60 years, amassed a priceless hoard of 850 pieces that made up, by most expert accounts, the finest collection of 17th-century Chinese ceramics ever assembled.
In the 1980s, wanting his four children, Caroline, James, Charles and Katharine, to take up the porcelain mantle – and with a little efficient tax planning thrown in – Butler passed on 502 of his late Ming and early Qing pots to the next generation in a series of gifts, with each child owning a quarter share.
By the turn of the 21st century, Butler had retired as a diplomat, having served as Britain’s permanent representative to the European Commission and as a key adviser to prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He began to feel guilty that his most prized possessions were being stored in an old tool shed behind his grand house in Mapperton, in Dorset, southwest England. So Butler commissioned an architect to extend a barn in his back garden (used as a squash court) into a 500-square-metre, seven-room museum.
Sitting holding that very first green pot (bought for £15, now worth tens of thousands), his youngest child, Katharine, is still trying to fathom how this fabulous inheritance has shattered her family into pieces.
There had been signs of what Butler’s wife and mother to his children, Ann Ross Skinner, euphemistically describes as the “troubles” that lay in store for the family. Tentative arguments about the The Butler Family Collection (now thought to be worth at least £8 million (HK$75.5 million) began with the globetrotting civil servant’s separation from Ann in 1997, following revelations about his adultery. Eldest child Caroline had – in Katharine’s words – “a rather strong reaction”, and her father began to lose faith that she would respect his wishes to keep the collection intact.
