Tomas Harris – was a Scholar, a famous Artist, and an MI5 officer – a man of many talents
Tomas Harris was the son of my Great Grandfather Lionel Harris (Senior). See MANY photos of Tomas’s Art in my Tomas Harris Art Gallery.
Tomas Harris became a great artist. He painted, sculpted, engraved, created ceramics and stained glass art and windows, he was skilled in many techniques, and produced many fine works of art. He did not produce a lot of art during the War years, due to his work in MI5 with Garbo (see below), but it seems he made up for it in later years. I have gathered many photographs of Tomas Harris’s artwork which includes paintings, portraits (many self portraits), sculptures, glass work, engravings, drypoint engravings, lithographs and lots more and I have loaded them into my gallery of ‘Tomas Harris’s Art on this website (click the link to view the gallery), to which I am currently adding to EVERY day.
I have received many images of Tomas’s Artwork from new contacts that I found through this website, to all of whom I am extremley grateful.
Main contributers so far for my images that I have added to my Tomas Harris gallery include :-
- Jose Buces (second cousin to my father) – a newly discovered relative of mine who lives in Madrid
- Andreu Jaume, an author, who is working on a biography of Tomas Harris, who’s family actually own El Studio in Mallorca, which used to be the home of Tomas Harris when he died (1964) in a fatal car crash in Leuchmayor (Mallorca) which Hilda was thrown clear of the car and survived (click here for latest details about the accident).
- David Moore – an new collector of Tomas’s Art, who led me on the right path to Jose and Andreu.
Jose, has also been a wonderful wealth of information and has supplied me with many photographs for my Harris Family Tree and Harris Family Photo Gallery. He knows so much about many members of my family tree
I have added them to my family tree. Jose has also provided me with additional new contacts which I must follow up with in the very near future.
[SinglePic not found] Last year Andreu Jaume organised an Exhibition in Andratx ‘Andratx segons Harris 2009′ – , Mallorca, with talks and discussions about Tomas’s Art, The exhibition shows many of Tomas Harris’s works of art, much of it supplied by Jose Buces and Andreu themselves. The exhibition was for about 100 people, and was a success. Now there is talk of organising another one for the summer of 2010. I will post information of the exhibition when I know more… Please subscribe to RSS (see RSS link in the header) to stay informed of new posts to this site.
My thanks go out to Jose and Andreu and David Moore for the all their images, and heaps of information that has flowed into my inbox in during the last couple of weeks, and they say ‘There is more to come’.. 
THANK Q….
A bit of background about Tomas Harris
It was in the late 1920s that Lionel’s youngest son, Tomás, decided to follow his father into art dealing. Tomas Harris had already owned two art galleries of his own in London before joining his father Lionel who owned and directed the Spanish Art Gallery, in London. Tomás won a scholarship at the Slade School of Art when he was only fifteen and was trained as an artist there from 1923 to 1926, spending a year subsequently at the British Academy in Rome. Although he had a prodigious talent and continued to paint and exhibit his work throughout his life, the family’s dealing in works of art stimulated his interest in collecting too. He began by seeking out prints and drawings by the two Tiepolos, Dürer and Rembrandt, and then turned his attention to Goya., building up an unrivalled collection of the various editions of the Spanish artist’s major series of prints and lithographs, and studying rare states of the etchings. In his will, Lionel made it plain that Tomás was uniquely suited to run the London gallery, and the exceptional quality of the two exhibitions he organised in the 1930s, with major works by Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán and Goya and little known works from private collections, showed that he had the ability to develop the business further. Although Tomás and Maurice were actively trying to sell work from their father’s stock to major museums in the post-war period, it has been said that Tomás was ‘evidently trying to wind up his business’ then. And it may be that the stimulus to create, fostered by his house in Majorca, and his Goya collecting and the preparation of his Goya print catalogue left little time for dealing and selling.
NOTE : Tomás Harris’s Goya print collection, part of it now available for study in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings thanks to the generosity of his widow and his sisters,and his two volume Goya Prints and Lithographs(Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1964) have made a major contribution to the understanding of Goya’s etching and lithographic techniques, and have greatly increased the general appreciation of that part of the Spanish artist’s work. Art Historians are hard pressed to weigh the significance of his work as artist, collector and scholar, against the importance of his work for MI 5 during World War II (see other posts on this website) , since he was the individual responsible for much of the planning and control of the Double Agent known as Garbo, and invented himself many of the spurious reports sent to this agent (and thence to the German High Command) from Garbo’s imaginary network of spies, creating an ingenious web of deceptions, that succeeded in keeping the Germans in the dark about the intended D-Day landings. Tomás wrote his own account of his role as Garbo’s full-time case officer in a series of World War II double bluffs, now in the National Archives at Kew, available in print with the title Garbo, the spy who saved D-day(London, Public Record Office, 2000). ** Another book written by Nigel West and Garbo – simply called Garbo, is also a great read.. It reads like a fictional story about espionage in World War II, but its far from fictio – its a true story and of couse is about Tomas Harris in MI5 almost as much as it is about Garbo himself.
