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Art investment sales rep Alex Williams says I’m deceitful.
We met earlier this week when he hoped I’d buy paintings from him, and he wasn’t best pleased when I told him I wrote an investigations column for the Mirror.
Williams works for a company called Morgan & Brooks Limited, which I came across after a reader forwarded me the unsolicited email she had received.
“Last year we averaged 16.67% returns for our clients and 2023 is looking even better,” the message gushed.
According to its Twitter account, “Morgan & Brooks is an established art gallery, based in the heart of London.”
On the home page of its website you can see its name plastered all over what looks like a swanky exhibition space.
But there’s something not right.
If you look at the window at the front of the gallery you can make out a few letters of the name, and it’s not Morgan & Brooks.
They’ve used a picture from the website of the Paris-based Perrotin group of galleries, you can see it on the Perrotin website here.
After discovering that Morgan & Brooks does not have a physical gallery in the heart of London, or anywhere else, I contacted its website, posing as an elderly potential art investor.
I was phoned by Williams who touted the prospect of “immense capital growth”.
“We only deal with your blue-chip artworks, they are highly validated established artists, mainly UK-based,” he told me.
“We get the art works directly from source, the artist, or from their estate or management.”
Really? One of the works I was offered was by the late Adrian Heath, whose estate is represented by The Redfern Gallery in London.
It told me that they’d never heard of Morgan & Brooks.
I asked Williams if I could visit their “established art gallery” but of course this wasn’t possible. “We are more of an advisory service where we do private consultations with our clients, I am more than happy to meet you,” he said, describing art investment as “very lucrative, and also a lovely market to be involved in.”
Another painting he offered was by Alan Davie, who died in 2014, called Thin Man’s Magic and which would set me back £27,000.
This painting was sold in 2020 by London dealership Alan Wheatley Art, and a spokesman estimates its worth today at no more than £12,000.
The third picture that Williams wanted me to buy was by the late Paul Feiler, titled Janus XXVI and priced at £20,000.
The untitled work by Adrian Heath was the most expensive painting I was offered, priced at £42,000.
Williams said it could fetch as much as £100,000 if auctioned next April.
“I would contact Christie’s and Sotheby’s and put a buyer’s premium on it, I wouldn’t accept anything less than £70,000 and that could be as quick as April next year, how does that sound?”
He then got pushy, repeatedly asking me to pay a “subject to viewing” deposit, or risk losing the picture to another buyer.
When I met him and explained that I worked for the Mirror, I asked why Morgan & Brooks misleadingly claimed to have a central London art gallery.
“We have many different galleries that we use, that we hire,” he said.
What about implying that a Perriton gallery picture was their own premises?
“It’s not down to me, I did not make the Twitter account or website.”
Could he justify the prices being charged for the works he sells?
“Everyone’s got a different opinion on what a work is worth,” he said.
“We estimate the growth by comparison to similar pieces. If you ask five different people you will get five different valuations.”
If pictures like the Heath really are such a good bet, why doesn’t buy them himself? I’d borrow £42,000 if I could turn it into £70,000 by next April.
“That’s like saying why doesn’t an estate buy every house that comes up,” he said.
“I wish I could buy a £40,000 painting every day. I’m playing the long game, I’ve got other obligations. We do buy them, and we do make money on them.”
He accused me of being deceitful and said he was “really disappointed” to discover I was not a potential investor: “I was looking forward to a nice conversation about art.”
Morgan & Brooks was incorporated in January 2021 and has one director, 41-year-old Nigel Simper. I messaged him and received a reply marked only as from the Morgan & Brooks Team.
So, why do they claim to have a gallery?
“On certain platforms such as Instagram there are non-negotiable categories that have to be selected, one of which is Art Gallery, which best defines us,” they replied. “We have recently had our website updated, we will be speaking to the design and development company to make changes to this on our website, so we appear correctly.”
What about claims on their website that they’ve featured in the national Press, including the Sunday Times, Guardian and Mail on Sunday. I’d checked our comprehensive cuttings library and could not find a single story about Morgan & Brooks.
Their reply included what purported to be cuttings from the Guardian and Mail on Sunday (the sent nothing proving they’d been in the Sunday Times) but these were adverts, not editorial. When I met Williams, he’d maintained that taking out adverts means that it is fair to claim that they’ve been “featured” in a publication.
I also asked about other painters named on their website under the heading “Our artists”, including Bridget Riley, David Hockney, George Condo and Marc Chagall. In what sense were they “Our artists”?
“We own works from these artists,” they said. “We have relationships with the direct sources for these artists, as we mainly deal in the primary market, which refers to works that have not been sold publicly before.”
Some of my questions were not answered, such as was the Morgan & Brooks claimed curator really the prestigious Xiaoyu Weng, who would seem to be working in Canada as the curator of Modern and Contemporary Art as the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Nor was I given any explanation why previous companies run by Nigel Simper – Morgan Brooks Ltd, Ron Supplies Ltd, J&A Solutions Ltd – were they put into compulsory liquidation.
“We are very proud of the service we offer our clients,” they said. “We have looked up who you are and can see that you write about investment scams and other financial wrongdoings, so we are baffled that you would consider us in this bracket from an unsolicited email sent to an individual.”
Meanwhile, here’s some advice for art dealer Alan Wheatley.
“If you’re buying a painting you’ve got to like it, you’re going to live with it in your home, that’s the most important thing.
“We would never tell someone to buy a painting as an investment. No one’s got a crystal ball and can say what might happen to the price.
“I know what I’m doing and I’ve been caught by the market, the market’s not what it was, the last six to eight months have been pretty dire.
“Only buy a painting if you’re passionate about it.”
investigate@mirror.co.uk
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