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Auction PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

Peter M. Fairbanks Joins Heritage Auctions

Heritage Auctions has announced that Peter M. Fairbanks, an industry veteran with more than 35 years of experience in the fields of American and European Art, is joining Heritage Auctions as Director of Fine Art, West Coast.

Fairbanks, a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, received his Bachelor’s degree in Classical Studies from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and completed Sotheby’s Executive Training Program in London in 1974. Upon his return to the United States, he founded the Fine Art Department at William Doyle Galleries in New York. When Phillips (Son & Neale) Auctioneers, the London-based company, opened in New York, Fairbanks was appointed Senior Vice President, overseeing Business Development and Fine Art. In 1980, he was hired by Butterfield Auctioneers (now Bonhams), San Francisco, as Senior Vice President of Operations and Director of the Fine Art Department.

Fairbanks served on the Boards of the European Fine Art Foundation (organizers of The European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht, The Netherlands), the Hearst Castle Preservation Foundation and the American Conservatory Theater, among others. He is the Western Regional Representative of the Appraisers Association of America, and has served as a fine art appraiser continuously for the PBS television series Antiques Roadshow since its inception in 1997.

Fairbanks has penned articles for various art publications and is the author of the monograph on the French Post-Impressionist painter Henri Lebasque, the basis for the recently published catalogue raisonné. He has written and published more than 60 catalogues for Montgomery Gallery, most recently on California’s Society of Six.