Alan Grieve, ‘entrepreneur philanthropist' who set up the Jerwood Foundation to finance arts causes

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Alan Grieve, who has died aged 97, was a solicitor who in 1977 established the philanthropic Jerwood Foundation for John Jerwood, and ran it as chairman after his client's death in 1991, transforming it from a little-known foundation making donations mainly in the fields of music and education, to an ubiquitous force in the arts world; he described himself as an 'entrepreneur philanthropist'.
Grieve was 30 when the senior partner of Taylor & Humbert, his Gray's Inn law firm, asked him to look after a 'tricky client' – tricky because he was based in Tokyo. John Jerwood was a British businessman who had made his fortune in the postwar years exploiting Japan's monopoly over the cultured-pearl industry. He was married to a Japanese woman but they had no children.
Grieve travelled the world for Jerwood, becoming his solicitor, business adviser and confidant. In the mid-1970s he was given power of attorney to create a charitable foundation, which Jerwood ran for 14 years as a personal fiefdom.
When Jerwood died in 1991, Grieve took control of an organisation with huge assets, and over the next two decades invested shrewdly to treble their value. Meanwhile, he set the foundation on a firm path of cultural philanthropy, building and adorning galleries, libraries, playhouses, dance studios and rehearsal spaces, and funding student bursaries and prizes ranging from drawing to dance.
In the mid-1990s, when the Royal Court Theatre was on the brink of closure due to safety concerns, Grieve offered £3 million to help rebuild it, though he dismissed as 'absolute nonsense' press suggestions that he had insisted the theatre be renamed the 'Jerwood Royal Court' until Buckingham Palace vetoed the idea.
Soon afterwards came Jerwood Space, a project involving the conversion of a Victorian school in Southwark into a nest of dance and drama rehearsal studios operating on what Grieve calls the 'Robin Hood principle', with rents calibrated according to what clients could afford, along with an art gallery that soon established itself as a focus for hip shows of contemporary painting.
By keeping the core of the foundation small – with just three council members, supported by a select advisory council of experts, including Grieve's daughter Amanda, Lady Harlech, the fashion muse and director of Chanel – he ensured that it remained both flexible and independent, able to cut through or avoid the red tape that is the bane of projects involving public funding.
For the Jerwood Space project, Grieve made his one and only application for a grant from the National Lottery. He was successful, but kept the money for only a matter of weeks: 'I realised that the Arts Council would want to bear in on me, tell me I hadn't done this or that. So I rang up Gerry Robinson [then chairman of Arts Council England] and asked to whom I should make the cheque out. I think you'd say he was taken aback.'
Other capital schemes included the Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts at Trinity College of Music (now Trinity Laban) when it moved to the Royal Naval College, Greenwich; the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum; the Jerwood Library at Trinity Hall, Cambridge; the Jerwood Sculpture Park at Witley Court, Worcestershire; the Jerwood Centre for the prevention and treatment of dance injuries at the Hippodrome, home of Birmingham Royal Ballet; the Jerwood Centre at Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere; and the Jerwood Hall at the London Symphony Orchestra's music centre, St Luke's, built in the shell of a Hawksmoor church in north London.
Grieve's particular passion was British art of the 20th century, and in 1994 he oversaw the founding of the £30,000 Jerwood painting prize for originality and excellence in painting in the United Kingdom. With the Turner Prize increasingly associated with the wackier end of the art spectrum, before it was phased out in 2004 the Jerwood became the prize many painters most coveted; winners included Craigie Aitchison, Patrick Caulfield, Prunella Clough and Maggi Hambling.
At the same time Grieve assembled a collection of British art for the Jerwood Foundation which started with Frank Brangwyn and David Bomberg, and included works by Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Winifred Nicholson, LS Lowry, Christopher Wood, Terry Frost and Keith Vaughan, to which he added the work of Jerwood Painting Prize winners.
He spent £1.5 million, never paying more than £100,000 for a work, and set about building a gallery to house the collection. In 2012 the Jerwood Gallery, designed by Hana Loftus and Grieve's son, Tom, from the architecture firm HAT Projects, opened in Hastings; by this time Grieve reckoned the collection was worth around £6 million.
The building won a RIBA National Award, but in 2019 the gallery, now Hastings Contemporary, cut ties with the Jerwood Foundation following a funding dispute. The Jerwood Collection of Modern and Contemporary British art is now accessible through a loans and exhibitions programme.
Alan Thomas Grieve was born in London on January 22 1928 to Lewis Grieve and Doris, née Amner, and educated at Aldenham School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read law. During National Service he was commissioned in 1949 in the Royal Armoured Corps (14th/20th King's Hussars) and thereafter served in the TA in the City of London Yeomanry (Rough Riders).
After a few years as an assistant solicitor at the City law firm Slaughter and May, in 1958 he joined Taylor & Humbert, becoming senior partner in 1980. He then oversaw the firm's merger with Parker Garrett and remained senior partner in the merged firm Taylor Garrett until 1989, when it merged again with Joynson Hicks to become Taylor Joynson Garrett (now Taylor Wessing), of which he became a consultant.
Grieve was appointed CBE in 2003.
In 1957 Alan Grieve married Anne Dulake, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, Amanda Harlech. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1971 he married Karen de Sivrac Dunn, with whom he had a son and daughter.
Alan Grieve, born January 22 1928, died May 14 2025
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