Descended from a patrician family of prosperous merchants and scholars, Ying Yeung Li was born in China at the particular wish of his mother, who travelled there expressly from Hong Kong, where the family had largely taken refuge during the turbulent events that swept the Chinese mainland in the period leading up to the Second World War.

It was in Hong Kong that Yeung, as he became known, spent his earliest years, living as part of a traditional household composed not only of his parents and siblings but also numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as a great-aunt who according to the practices of her own and previous generations, had bound feet, as Yeung still vividly recalls. Most members of the household were descended from Yeung’s paternal grandfather, born in the mid-19^th century, who again in accordance with past tradition had taken three wives, as well as an official concubine. The children of these various unions were generally referred to by their numerical position rather than their name, with Yeung’s own father, as twelfth in succession, being known as ‘Number 12’.

Together, the family occupied a sprawling colonial era residence, more compound than house, standing on an extensive plot close to the harbour. But at the age of seven, Yeung was sent back to China, staying with his two grandmothers, who had never left, and remaining for four years, a time Yeung remembers as one of great hardship for his own relations and the country as a whole.

Returning to Hong Kong, Yeung was schooled in the rudiments of English before being packed off again, this time to a boarding school in Nottinghamshire, together with his older brother. By his own admission, he was lazy and badly-behaved, and after scraping through O-levels spent a year in Oxford, followed by another year in London, battling to achieve 3 A-levels, although in one subject, art, he found he naturally excelled. At the suggestion of his tutor, the well-known artist and teacher John Stonehouse, he applied for art school and was accepted by both City & Guilds and Byam Shaw. Yeung chose the latter and spent four happy years completing a diploma, also winning several prizes for painting and photography.

It was in his final year that Yeung spotted a newspaper advertisement for a job in a Mayfair art gallery, which turned out to be Marlborough Fine Arts, at that time a leader in the field of contemporary British art. One interview, then another, and he was in, working as head of operations in the Graphics department under the tutelage of the redoubtable Valerie Beston, relationship manager for Francis Bacon and other top artists represented by the gallery. During the eight years he spent at Marlborough he became an indispensable and popular member of the team, generally known to colleagues and clients as ‘Leo’, a play on his family name. In the course of time he met and befriended not only Bacon, who twice presented him with a signed colour print, but other luminaries including Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, Frank Auerbach, Victor Pasmore, Graham Sutherland, Eduardo Paolozzi, R. B. Kitaj, and John Piper. It was also at Marlborough that Yeung met the renowned critic and author John Russell Taylor, with whom he would spend the next 47 years as John’s life partner.

All the while, Yeung continued to pursue his own independent career as an artist, to which he returned full-time after leaving Marlborough in 1984. Whether in photography or painting, and latterly in ceramics and textiles, he has gone on to develop and refine his artistic practice, informed in part by the collection of art books that are offered here, many of which were gifted or bequeathed to him by John Russell Taylor, whose own extensive library is likewise presented here for sale. Taken together, these twin collections encompass virtually the whole of art history, from antiquity to the present day, reflecting two remarkable lives whose union was forged at the heart of the London art world but which spanned the globe from East to West.