Harry Phillips was the London auctioneer who, in 1796, founded the firm that bears his name — an institution that would survive more than two centuries of ownership changes, market upheavals, and reinventions to emerge as a significant international auction house. A former clerk to James Christie, the founder of Christie's, Phillips brought firsthand knowledge of the London fine-art market to his own venture, opening rooms at 73 New Bond Street and positioning himself squarely within the fashionable commercial heart of Georgian London. His career illustrates how the late-eighteenth-century London auction trade was a world of personal reputation, professional apprenticeship, and fierce competition among a small number of Bond Street and King Street establishments.

Origins and Early Career

The precise details of Harry Phillips's early life are not extensively documented in the gemmological or auction-house literature, but his professional formation under James Christie is well established. Christie's had been founded in 1766, and by the time Phillips served there as a clerk, the firm had already conducted some of the most celebrated sales of the era, including dispersals from the collections of European aristocracy displaced by revolutionary upheaval. Working in that environment gave Phillips an intimate understanding of how to attract consignments, cultivate wealthy clients, and conduct sales with the theatrical authority that Georgian auctioneering demanded.

When Phillips opened his own rooms in 1796, the choice of 73 New Bond Street was deliberate: the street was already synonymous with luxury trade, and proximity to Christie's — rather than distance from it — signalled confidence. The early sales focused on fine art, books, manuscripts, and antiquities, categories that carried social prestige and attracted the bibliophiles, collectors, and estate executors who formed the backbone of the London auction market.

The Firm He Founded

Phillips's personal legacy is inseparable from the institutional history of the house he created. Under his direction and through the generations that followed, the firm cultivated a reputation as a serious alternative to Christie's and Sotheby's — smaller in scale but respected for specialist knowledge and personal service. The expansion into jewellery and watches came considerably later, during the twentieth century, as the market for signed pieces, estate jewellery, and luxury timepieces grew into a distinct and commercially significant auction category.

The firm's trajectory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was turbulent. LVMH — the French luxury conglomerate — acquired Phillips in 1999 as part of an ambitious strategy to build a third major auction house capable of challenging Christie's (which LVMH also owned at the time) and Sotheby's. The experiment proved commercially difficult, and Phillips was sold to private investors in 2002. After a period of reduced activity, the house was relaunched in 2008 under the name Phillips, shedding the longer historical styling and repositioning itself with a sharper focus on contemporary art, design, watches, and jewellery. Today the house operates internationally, with jewellery and watch sales conducted in London, Geneva, New York, and Hong Kong.

Significance in the Auction World

Harry Phillips's importance to the history of the auction trade rests on several foundations. First, he demonstrated that a skilled professional could successfully break from an established house and build an independent practice — a pattern that would recur throughout the history of the London art market. Second, the firm he founded proved durable enough to outlast not only its founder but multiple ownership structures, financial crises, and shifts in collecting taste across more than two centuries.

For the jewellery and gemstone trade specifically, the modern Phillips house occupies a distinct niche. Its watch department has become particularly prominent, regularly achieving strong results for independent watchmakers and complicated timepieces. Its jewellery sales, while smaller in volume than those of Christie's or Sotheby's, have attracted significant signed pieces and estate collections, and the house's Geneva sales place it within the same geographic circuit as the major international jewellery auction events.

The lineage from Harry Phillips to the contemporary institution is, admittedly, one of name and address rather than unbroken family ownership or management. Yet the founding act — a knowledgeable professional establishing rooms on New Bond Street with the intention of conducting serious sales for serious collectors — established a template that the modern house, in its own way, continues to honour.

Further Reading

• Phillips Auction House — About