George Joseph Demotte

Who was George Joseph Demotte?

George Joseph Demotte, alternatively Georges-Joseph Demotte was a Belgian-born art dealer, the owner of galleries in Paris and New York specializing in the sale of medieval French art.

His portrait was painted by Henri Matisse in 1918.

Obtaining an illuminated copy of the Persian Shahnameh, he broke it up into sheets to maximize profits by selling the illustrations individually.

In 1923 he sued his former New York agent, Jean Vigoroux, in the French courts for embezzlement, while simultaneously suing Sir Joseph Duveen for slander in the American courts, for having declared a medieval statuette that Demotte had sold a fake. Neither suit had been settled when Demotte died, accidentally shot by a friend and fellow art-dealer, Otto Wegener, while returning from a boar-hunting trip. Wegener was cleared of homicide by the French courts, but ordered to pay compensation to Demotte's family.

His galleries, estimated at the time of his death to be worth $2,000,000, passed to his seventeen-year-old son Lucien Demotte.