There is a good MA dissertation by Ian McIntyre available online which gives helpful information on the pattern of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s collecting. Robert read history at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1924 to 1927, but never entered a museum and spent much of his time playing bridge. Then he studied accountancy. But he began to collect private press books whilst still at Cambridge which led him to Zwemmers in the Charing Cross Road. This was where he first encountered the work of Jacob Epstein. He acquired two Epstein drawings and Epstein’s Baby Asleep in 1931. The following year he bought Henry Moore’s Mother and Child from the Mayor Gallery for £158. In 1933 he established the Gemini Press with Blair Hughes-Stanton. So, the question is who or what formed his taste ? It was presumably partly a matter of his milieu. Epstein was deeply interested in the art of Asia and the Pacific Islands. So was Henry Moore. But the biggest influence is likely to have bern Roger Fry, whose Vision and Design had popularised the idea of treating African, Asian and American Art as part of a common formal language.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
I would suggest that the people who really shaped the Sainsburys’ taste were Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and, after 1949, Giacometti. And a young dealer, John Hewett. They were urged on by George Eumorfopoulos who advised them to “only buy MUST HAVES”.
And their own preferences : almost everything they bought was physically small, so that it would go in their house, and, especially in the early years, not too expensive. They set themselves a financial limit of a thousand pounds a year. And everything had to pass what Epstein described as a “stomach reaction” of personal approval.
It is perhaps worth pointing out how brave their taste was. Epstein was consistently criticised, indeed ridiculed, in the press in the 1920s. J. B. Manson, the Director of the Tate, declared that Moore would enter the Tate “over my dead body”.
Dear Mark, Thank you. This is very helpful and good to know. Charles