When Clinton Pugh bought a handful of discounted paintings from Sacha Jafri, he was a successful restaurateur and the other a struggling artist.
Now he has been forced to sell up, while Jafri sells his art for millions to the Beckhams and Obamas.
Pugh, father of the actress Florence, has revealed that in the late 1990s he purchased some of the earliest known works of Jafri, then an unknown graduate of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art and now one of the world’s most expensive living artists.
Pugh, a renowned restaurateur in Oxford, said that Jafri had approached him in 1998 to ask if he could display paintings in his restaurant that he had spent three years creating for his degree show.
He said that he “loved” the three artworks and put them on the walls of his Lemon Tree restaurant, adding: “After about a year Sacha approached me and said ‘Look, I really need some money. Would you buy them off me if I drop the price a bit’.
“I bought the whole lot I’m guessing for about £3,000. A few years later one of my duty managers said he [Jafri] seemed to be doing quite well. But I didn’t pay much attention. It was only when he sold that painting [in 2021] for a ridiculous amount of money that I really noticed.”
Jafri, a 48-year-old Old Etonian whose mother Suzi was a boarding school housemistress and whose father Sonny ran a wine business in Surrey, became one of the world’s most famous artists in 2021.
Clinton Pugh with two of the paintings he has decided to sell after struggling with his restaurant business
MURRAY SANDERS FOR THE TIMES
That year his paint-splattered 17,000 square feet The Journey of Humanity, sold at a charity auction for $62 million, one of the highest prices ever achieved by a living artist. The painting, which was the equivalent size of four basketball courts, was also recognised at the time as the world’s largest art canvas.
Jafri’s stock has been slowly rising over the last decade, with reports from 2014 claiming he had sold pieces for about £100,000 each.
The Journey of Humanity
FRANCOIS NEL/GETTY IMAGES
In a Sunday Times article the next year, Jafri said his most lucrative work to date had been a painting celebrating the career of the footballer David Beckham, which sold for $1.4 million. He told the newspaper that “by the time I was 30, I was married twice, divorced twice [and] lost everything twice”.
His collectors now are reported to include the former US president Barack Obama, George Clooney, Madonna and Beckham.
Pugh said this week that he was being forced to sell Jafri’s three artworks after Oxford’s introduction of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods led to the loss of his restaurants and some £1 million. “These paintings are potentially a national treasure. And because of all the financial crap I’ve lost my pension, lost almost everything.”
• Florence Pugh’s father blames low-traffic zone for bar closure
Pugh contacted Jafri earlier this year and visited his studio in Dubai where the artist recorded a video explaining his thinking behind the early artworks. The studio also, for insurance purposes, gave an estimated £1 million plus valuation for the three paintings.
The paintings had, Jafri said, been influenced by his readings of Franz Kafka and, roughly, depicted a human passing through a vortex into a transitional world and trying to connect with its higher frequency energy.
Pugh, 67, said: “I went out to Dubai to see him at his studio after contacting him saying I’d bought these things. I wanted to know what they meant; what he was thinking of when he created them.
One of the paintings Pugh is selling
“I always remembered him [from 1998] as very charming, very bright and with a sparkle. I went to see the paintings at the Ruskin and loved them. I could see his presence had been growing in the art world but hadn’t really thought before about selling. He must have been an extremely talented artist at the time. Otherwise I would never have bought and exhibited them at the Lemon Tree.”
Jafri, who is largely based in Dubai, has said he has given about $130 million to charity from the sale of his artworks, which drew praise from his former teachers at the Ruskin School of Art.
After the charity sale of The Journey of Humanity in 2021, its emeritus professor Brian Catling said: “Sacha was always a total original. An absolute one-off that was obviously destined for recognition.”
The world’s most expensive living artists
Flag, one of 40 versions of the American flag made by Jasper Johns, was sold privately to a hedge fund manager in 2010 for about $110 million making this 1958 work the most expensive [known] painting by a living artist. Johns is now 95.
Jeff Koons’s Rabbit sculpture, created in 1986 by the American artist sold for $91.1 million in 2019 as collectors competed to buy what has become a cultural icon. It is thought, as with Johns’s Flag, to have been bought by the American financier Steven A Cohen.
Jeff Koons with Rabbit
BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was sold at auction in New York for $90.3 million with buyers keen to purchase what is not only one of the British artist’s revered paintings but one of his double portraits: featuring the artist and his lover Peter Schlesinger.
Jasper Johns’s 1959 oil painting False Start, painted when he was still in his 20s, was bought in a private sale in 2006 for a reported $80 million by the financier Kenneth Griffin and his former wife, Anne.
In 2021, the art world was stunned when Beeple’s digital artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days was bought for nearly $70 million. The collage of 5,000 images created by Beeple, known as Mike Winkelmann, can now be displayed in a virtual museum.
Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days
CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2021
The same year Sacha Jafri’s The Journey of Humanity — then the largest canvas in the world — was bought at a charity auction for $62 million by the French Algerian businessman Andre Abdoune with proceeds being donated to various children’s charities.