The Property of a Lady (lots 228 to 238) A great deal is known about the collecting achievements of the distinguished Dutch collector Henry Knight (d.1971). The great-grandson of an officer in Wellington's army who settled in the Netherlands after the Battle of Waterloo, Mr Knight ran an insurance company in Holland called Nieuw Rotterdam Co. An omnivorous and discriminating collector of Chinese art, between 1930 and 1970 he was for many years one of Bluett's most important international clients, while the company became his major source for pieces. Roger Bluett wrote that: 'Henry Knight, who built up perhaps the best collection of 18th century porcelains in Europe as well as magnificent early pieces, was fond of telling of how it was my late father who told him to buy 'Chinese taste porcelains. Their time would come my father used to say, and how right he was'. Knight displayed his collection privately first in The Hague, and then at his flat in Scheveningen, but it was little-known until the Rijksmuseum curator Jan Fontein selected many pieces from the Knight Collection as part of an outstanding exhibition of Asian art which he curated in Amsterdam in 1954. Knight's pieces came through Bluetts from many of the great collections including Sir Percival David, J.P.Morgan, A.L.Hetherington, Sir Alfred Aykroyd, Raymond Oppenheimer and the Duke of Kent, to name only a few. A fuller description of this remarkable collector is published by R.Davids and D.Jellinek, Provenance, op.cit. p.276, from which much of the above biographical information is abstracted.