John Rusel Taylor and Alfred Hitchcock
Olympia Auctions will present the private collection of John Russell Taylor (1935–2025) on February 11, 2026, offering a rare and intimate insight into the visual imagination of one of Britain’s most influential cultural critics of the post-war era. Best known as the authorised biographer of Alfred Hitchcock, Taylor’s career spanned more than six decades and encompassed film, theatre, literature and the visual arts.
Taylor achieved international renown with Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (1978), written with the director’s full cooperation and still regarded as the definitive biography of the filmmaker. Over his lifetime, he authored around 50 books on subjects ranging from British drama and Hollywood cinema to Art Nouveau and modern painting. He served as The Times’ theatre and film critic in the 1960s and as its art critic from 1978 to 2005. Educated at Dover Grammar School, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, Taylor was admired for combining scholarly rigour with an exceptional visual memory and a wide-ranging cultural intelligence.
In the catalogue introduction, art historian Andrew Lambirth recalls Taylor at the height of his influence in the 1980s, noting his lightly worn erudition, lucid prose and generous authority. More a cultural critic than a narrowly defined art critic, Taylor moved effortlessly between disciplines, a breadth of interest that is reflected throughout this deeply personal collection.
Taylor acquired his first original painting at the age of twelve and continued collecting for more than seventy years. He researched instinctively, without notes or recordings, relying instead on what Lambirth describes as a phenomenal memory. Bookshops along Charing Cross Road and stalls on Portobello Road were among his favourite hunting grounds, where he sought out artists overlooked by fashion but rich in visual and human interest.
The collection spans paintings, drawings, prints, illustrated books, and theatre and ballet designs. Artists represented include Edward Bawden, Frances Hodgkins, Paul Nash, CRW Nevinson and Austin Osman Spare, alongside drawings by Édouard Vuillard, Edward Burne-Jones and Graham Sutherland. Highlights range from a rare Vorticist abstraction by Frederick Etchells to Neo-Romantic works by John Craxton, Keith Vaughan and Robert Colquhoun, as well as theatre and ballet designs by Alexandre Benois, Osbert Lancaster and Patrick Procktor.
Recurring themes echo Taylor’s own writing: the First World War, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, women artists, émigré and Jewish artists, inter-war British Romanticism, and overlooked figures in modern British art. As Adrian Biddell of Olympia Auctions observes, the collection’s defining quality is its diversity, reflecting Taylor’s encyclopaedic mind and his belief in visual impact and cultural significance over market value.
John Russell Taylor died in August 2025, aged 90. This auction represents not merely the dispersal of a collection, but a lasting portrait of a critic who shaped Britain’s cultural conversation for more than half a century.
