P. & D. Colnaghi & Co.
[1] The business that became the Colnaghi gallery was established by Italian firework manufacturer, Giovanni Battista Torre, in Paris, France, in 1760.
Torre opened a shop with the name "Cabinet de Physique Expérimentale", where he sold scientific instruments, books and prints.
[3] Arriving in London, Colnaghi joined Torre and Molteno, who had become successful selling prints by leading engravers such as William Wynne Ryland and Valentine Green.
The London business moved to 132 Pall Mall in 1786 and Colnaghi married Anthony Torre's sister-in-law Elizabeth Baker.
Paul Colnaghi continued to work in the business until he died at his home at St George's Place Hanover Square, on 26 August 1833.
With American art dealer Bernard Berenson, Colnaghi established a collection of Old Master paintings for Isabella Stewart Gardner for her house in Boston, including the Rape of Europa by Titian, acquired from Lord Darnley in 1896.
The firm sold two paintings from the collection of Prince Mario Chigi Albani della Rovere—Botticelli's Madonna of the Eucharist and Titian's Portrait of Pietro Aretino—to Henry Clay Frick, now in the Frick Collection, although the sale of Italian paintings dried up after Prince Chigi was prosecuted under a new Italia law prohibiting the export of pictures.
Through Knoedler, Colnaghi sold to Mellon a Rembrandt Self-portrait that Gutekunst had acquired from the Duke of Buccleuch, and Holbein's Portrait of Edward VI.
Colnaghi worked with Max J. Friedländer and Wilhelm von Bode on the acquisition of a selection of paintings from the Hope Collection for the Berlin State Museums.
[9] Colnaghi sold Holbein's Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan to the National Gallery for a record price of £61,000, acquired from the collection of the Duke of Norfolk.
Colnaghi was involved in the secret sales by the Soviet government of works from the Russian Imperial collection in the Hermitage in the 1920s and 1930s, along with Knoedler and Matthiesen in Berlin.
As Thesiger also wished to retire, and John Baskett wanted to start his own business, Jacob Rothschild bought the company in 1970.
[10][11] Colnaghi then moved into a custom-built gallery in St James's in London where they show European Old Master paintings and sculpture, and art from the Spanish-speaking world.
[13] Victoria Golembiovskaya, the founder of an art consultancy called House of the Nobleman, joined the firm in 2019 as Coll's co-CEO to establish Colnaghi’s first modern and contemporary department and left at the end of 2021 to set up her own independent agency.
[15] In 2002, Katrin Bellinger Henkel and Konrad Bernheimer bought them from Christoph Graf Douglas, the former head of Sotheby's in Germany and the son-in-law of Rudolf August Oetker, whose company owned Colnaghi and its archives between 1981 and 2001.
