Eric Estorick (13 February 1913 – 25 December 1993) was an American art collector, art dealer and author, who lived in London and ran the Grosvenor Gallery. He and his wife Salome endowed the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in Canonbury, north London. Early life and education Eric Estorick was born Elihu Estorick in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Jewish émigrés from Russia. He studied at New York University where he obtained a PhD in Sociology, and at the New School for Social Research in New York. He later taught at New York University and at Columbia University. Personal life In 1947 he married Salome Dessau (1920–1989), the daughter of a German Jewish refugee who became a textile manufacturer in England. Salome had studied art in London, and was involved in some of Eric's art collecting. Salome worked as a textile designer and invented stretch lace. She was employed by the clothing retailer Marks & Spencer, which was a customer of her father's business. Eric Estorick also subsequently worked for Marks & Spencer, and wrote a history of the company. Career During the Second World War he joined the United States Government Service, and became head of the British Empire Division of the US Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. In the 1940s he wrote several books on politics, including two biographies of Sir Stafford Cripps. In 1964 he used his contacts in Czechoslovakia to arrange for the recovery of 1,564 Jewish Torah scrolls that had been confiscated by the Nazi authorities when the Czechoslovak Jews were exterminated. Estorick had the scrolls transferred to Westminster Synagogue in London, and they eventually were distributed to Jewish congregations worldwide. Shortly before his death in 1993, Eric Estorick set up and endowed the Eric and Salome Estorick Foundation, which founded the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London. In addition to providing the works that form the core of the collection, Estorick gave paintings by Chagall and Kandinsky to be sold to fund it. London was chosen as the home for the collection in spite of offers to acquire it from the Italian government and from museums in the United States and Israel. Art collecting and dealing While a student in New York, Estorick met the American photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. Estorick later said: During their honeymoon in Switzerland in 1947, Eric and Salome Estorick met Arturo