Lordly sum for fixer's art

Never was a man better named than the late Lord Goodman - at least when it came to his championing of the arts. So shrewd, even Machiavellian, was the approach of this brilliant lawyer and political fixer to that cause, that it mattered not to him where the money came from. Even if the Mafia was involved he didn't mind, one source says, his principle being that it would soon be purified by its association with art.

Now, a year after his death, we can watch what happens when Lord Goodman's own art collection meets the world of Mammon. On 23 June, the Knightsbridge auctioneersBonhams is selling 60 of the paintings, sculptures and cartoons which were collected by the great man from his student days onwards.

The auction is expected to raise about pounds 250,000. Tantalisingly, however, his executors declined to state exactly who or what would reap the benefits.

The works mirror the myriad experiences of Lord Goodman's rich life. They also reflect his robust sense of humour.

A courtroom scene by the 19th-century satirical painter and friend of Degas, Jean-Louis Forain, for example, is as soporific as such occasions tend to be, until one spots the figure of a female spectator busily eavesdropping on the whispered conversation of two clerks (estimate pounds 20,000 to pounds 30,000).

A selection of cartoons by Osbert Lancaster includes one in which a bearded and beleaguered pavement artist offers various caricatures of Goodman for sale. The caption reads: "No grant from the Arts Council."

Many contemporary artists are represented. Graham Sutherland, who captured Goodman's spectacular physical bulk in a 1973 portrait now at the Tate Gallery, is represented by one of his nature studies, Tree Form in an Opening (pounds 4,000-pounds 6,000). A sketch by Henry Moore of trees is valued at pounds 800, while an example of 1970s pop art byGoodman's close friend Bridget Riley could fetch pounds 500. The most recent work in the collection is a bronze portrait bust of Goodman created by Sir Anthony Caro in 1988. Rough-hewn, and bearing many of the artist's fingerprints, it is expected to fetch between pounds 10,000 and pounds 15,000.

The Goodman collection also includes fine works by early 20th-century British artists Paul Nash, Jacob Epstein and Roger Fry. Most valuable of all, however, will probably be a wash drawing of a beggar by Pablo Picasso entitled Le Mendiant, which could go for pounds 40,000. It is impossible to tell whether its late owner regarded the subject as a metaphor for himself in his capacity as fund-raiser.

Born in 1913, Arnold Goodman was educated at Cambridge University. After the last war his reputation for legal shrewdness and clever networking gradually helped build him a formidable clientele as well as bringing him to the notice of the Labour leader Harold Wilson.

In 1964 Wilson enlisted him to help resolve a strike in the TV industry, after which his public service career took off. Within months of Labour coming to power in October that year, he was made a peer. In 1965 he was appointed chairman of the Arts Council, in deference to his passion for theatre and art.