Article written by Anthony Blunt – Tomás Joseph Harris (1908–1964) – Artist, Art dealer, and MI5 Intelligence Officer
Tomás Joseph Harris (1908–1964), artist, art dealer, and intelligence officer was born on 10 April 1908 at 21 Lymington Road, Hampstead, London, the youngest son and sixth of the seven children of Lionel Harris (d. 1943) and his Spanish wife, Enriqueta Rodriguez. His father had founded the Spanish Art Gallery in Bruton Street and was responsible for importing almost all the important works of art which came from Spain into England in the years before and after the First World War. Tomás was educated at University College School and at the age of
fifteen won the Trevelyan-Goodall scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied from 1923 to 1926, concentrating mainly on sculpture. He continued his studies in the arts by spending a year at the British Academy in Rome, but in 1928 he decided to become an art dealer. He set up a small gallery of his own, first in Sackville Street and then in Bruton Street, but after a short time moved it to join his father at the Spanish Art Gallery. He continued to run the latter after his father’s death in 1943. He was also a talented amateur musician, and played the piano, the saxophone, and other wind instruments. On 10 August 1931 he married Hilda (b. 1919/20), daughter of Ernest Campbell Webb, of London; there were no children of the marriage. As a dealer Harris continued the policy of his father and brought to Britain not only Spanish paintings, including works by El Greco, whose importance was only just beginning to be recognized, but also medieval tapestries, Oriental carpets, Renaissance jewellery, and other objets d’art in which the palaces and religious houses of Spain were rich. He had an astonishing instinct for discovering works of art in unexpected places, and on one occasion bought a group of panels from a fifteenth-century German altarpiece which were among the contents of an outhouse at a country sale in England. He had a reputation for absolute probity which sometimes aroused the jealousy of his less successful competitors. At the beginning of the Second World War, Harris joined a branch of intelligence which was later dissolved and in 1940 was transferred to the security service, where his intimate knowledge of Spain was of great value. His greatest achievement in this field was as one of the principal organizers of operation Garbo, which was the most successful double-cross operation of the war and which seriously misled the Germans about allied plans for the invasion of France in 1944. The success of the operation, which was described by a senior commander as worth an armoured division, was mainly due to the extraordinary imaginative power with which Harris directed it. In 1945 he was appointed OBE. Even during the war Harris did not completely relinquish his activities as an artist and in 1943 he held a one-man show at the galleries of Reid and Lefèvre in King Street. After the war he gradually freed himself from his commitments as a dealer and spent more and more time in Spain, first at Malaga and then in Majorca where he designed and built a house at Camp de Mar. Here he was able to paint as much as he wanted, and he also experimented with making ceramics and stained glass and designing tapestries, three of which were woven at the royal tapestry factory at Madrid. His great versatility enabled him to master all the technical problems involved in these activities with astonishing ease. At the same time Harris devoted much time to collecting, concentrating first on drawings by the two Tiepolos (which were shown by the Arts Council in 1955) and later on the engravings of Dürer and the etchings of Rembrandt. His greatest achievement was, however, to form a magnificent collection of etchings and lithographs by Goya which in 1979 was accepted in part payment of death duties and is now in the British Museum. Finding that the standard works on Goya were seriously misleading he decided to write a book about the etchings himself and the result was the two volumes published in 1964 which became the standard work. In writing Goya: Engravings and Lithographs he was helped by Juliet Wilson. Harris was notable for his warmth, his generosity, and the enthusiasm with which he threw himself into any undertaking. He died in a motor accident at Lluchmayor, Majorca, on 27 January 1964. In 1975 an exhibition of his work was held at the galleries of the Courtauld Institute, to which his widow and sisters had presented a fine collection of textiles formed by his father and himself.
Post written by: Anita Harris
