The $60 million man
Dan Bibb says he found a masterpiece. Why isn't the art world paying attention?
by Steve Fennessy
Two issues occupy Dan Bibb's mind these days. The first is his left leg. Bibb fell on it in August, and since then he's been hobbling. Bibb is a big man, with the body of a retired offensive lineman. His eyebrows slope up at the far corners, so that even though he is almost preternaturally cheerful, he sometimes looks like he's snarling. Which he clearly is now, as he makes his way down the aisles of the Scott Antique Market, his left leg pivoting in painful half-circles, propelling him forward.
But it's more than his leg. From around almost every corner, from behind the tables sagging under the weight of candelabras and urns and thick books with gold gilded edges fastened with metal clasps, the questions come. "Hi Dan. Sold the painting yet?" "Dan, I heard you turned down millions. Is that true?" "Dan, you remember us, right? Any news with your painting?"
Bibb tries to be polite. But his leg is killing him. He runs a forearm across his sweaty brow. He needs to sit down. Not here, though. Anywhere but here. Sure, some of these people are his friends, but most of them? Pontificators. Poseurs. Windbags. "I swear," he says on the drive home, "I bet some of them don't want me to sell my painting. They're jealous."
Bibb is 52 and lives alone. This is probably for the best, because the fact of the matter is there's simply no room for anyone else. Over the years, he has packed enough art into his two-bedroom condo in Buckhead to decorate a wing of Versaille. Oil paintings of long dead royalty cover the walls. Stone statues leave indentations in the carpet, which in spots is littered with hay, compliments of Bibb's pet rabbit. When Bibb has company, he clears massive art books off his leather sofa and peers at his guest over a coffee table loaded down with obelisks and old clocks and other objets d'art.
Once, long ago, when Bibb was a young collector, a fire consumed the apartment where he then lived. Firefighters punched a hole in the floor, right through a Persian carpet. All he could save was a portrait he attributes to Jean-Francois de Troy, from 1681. Bibb, an art restorer by trade, repaired the painting. He touched up the scorch marks and fixed the canvas. Today it hangs right near the front door, as if positioned for an easy exit, just in case.
For years, before he finally moved it to a vault, another painting hung on a wall in Bibb's home. Set inside an enormous black and gold wooden frame, the painting stretched almost from floor to ceiling. It was striking -- not just for its size, but its subject -- a man in his late thirties, with full red lips and a long chin, standing near a balcony, his hand resting on a sword handle, a swath of drapery behind him. At parties, guests would pose for photographs next to it. If they asked how he got it, Bibb was happy to tell them.
One day in 1977, when he was living in New Orleans, Bibb went to an auction house on Magazine Street. The catalog had intrigued him. But the auction it had advertised was long over; all that was left were a few paintings, which the auction house owners gladly brought out for him. The paintings were all large, he recalls. One was of an old ship at sea. Another was, according to the catalog, a "portrait of a 19th-century Irish gentleman in the manner of Sir Peter Lely." Lely was a 17th-century artist known for painting British royalty in pastoral settings.
Bibb so often says he is a modest man that it almost seems like bragging. But he is supremely confident about two things -- the quality of his art restoration ("I do phenomenal work") and the keenness of his eye. On that day in New Orleans, something struck him about the painting of the lantern-jawed man in the black billowy cloak. First, he didn't really look like an Irish gentleman, despite the red hair. Second, the painting seemed older than the 19th century. Bibb decided to buy it, although he won't say for how much. He brought it out to his Fiat Spider convertible and laid it over the top of the back seat. The painting was so long that the bottom jutted out over the tiny car's trunk; it occasionally scraped the pavement on the drive home.
So it was that Dan Bibb came to own a portrait not of a 19th century Irish gentleman, but of King Philip IV of Spain, painted in 1632 by one of the most revered and imitated of the Old Master painters, Diego Velázquez. At least, that is what Bibb grew to believe over time. Proving it was another matter.
Comments (2)
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Excellent article. I wish great success for Mr. D. Bibb with his resrarch. Robert M
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Re: The $60 million man
Posted by Andrea Wright on 12.15.09 Mr. Bibb's dedication to great art is remarkable, and truly commendable. I was fortunate to have seen his collection of Russian Icons at the Biedenharn Museum in Monroe, LA not long before some were destroyed/damaged in the museum fire in, I believe, 2005. Thank you for so thorough a story.
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