Georges Anthony d'Offay (born January 1940) is a British art dealer, collector and curator. His was born to a Seychellois father. Life and career Georges Anthony d'Offay was born in January 1940 in Sheffield to a French father. He began dealing in art in the late 1960s, operating from premises in Dering Street off the top of New Bond Street in London. He closed the gallery in 2001 and founded Artist Rooms in 2008. He has been the recipient of the UK Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award (2009), The Prince of Wales Medal for Arts Philanthropy (2011) and the Paolozzi Medal (2011). He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by The University of Edinburgh, De Montfort University, Leicester and Sheffield Hallam University. Anthony d'Offay Gallery (1965–2001) In 1965, at the age of 25, he opened his first gallery in London and for 15 years organised mostly historical exhibitions of early 20th century British art including Abstract Art in England 1913-1915 (1969) which critically reassessed the importance of the Vorticist movement in the UK. In the 1970s, he started to show contemporary art. In 1980 he opened an exhibition space for contemporary art on the first floor at 23 Dering Street. The gallery was run by Anthony d'Offay with Anne Seymour, formerly a curator at Tate, and Marie-Louise Laband who masterminded every aspect of the gallery including the exhibition programme. Together they inaugurated a programme of international contemporary art, starting with an exhibition by Joseph Beuys in August of that year. Beuys' large installation from that show Stripes from the House of the Shaman was sold to the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The gallery also organised and funded events, publications, performances and lectures. The last exhibition at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, of Bill Viola, had 70,000 visitors. Artist Rooms d'Offay closed the gallery in 2001 and worked on building a collection of over 1000 artworks. The collection, then valued in excess of £100 million, was donated jointly to the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate in 2008 with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments. Since 2009 there have been more than 120 Artist Rooms exhibitions in museums and galleries across the United Kingdom. These free shows have been seen by some 29 million visitors. 55,000 young people are in Artist Rooms education programmes and a 10-fold surge in