Juan Antonio Pérez Simón

Crenaia, the Nymph of the Dargle, Frederic Leighton, oil on canvas, 1880. Model, Dorothy Dene. Part of the Pérez Simón collection on loan to the Leighton House Museum, 2014–15. Juan Antonio Pérez Simón (born 1941) is a Spanish businessman and art collector, resident in Mexico, who became rich in the telecommunications business. Pérez Simón has assembled a collection of over 3000 paintings, including works by Dalí, Goya, El Greco, Rubens, Van Gogh and Monet.

Art collection Pérez Simón's interest in art began as a teenager. He started collecting in his 20s, first prints and cheap Mexican landscape paintings as for some time he and his wife had little money. Today, Pérez Simón's collection includes works from the fourteenth century onwards but he does not enjoy contemporary art, feeling that it is too intellectual and lacks emotion. fifty paintings owned by Pérez Simón were put on display at London's Leighton House Museum in the exhibition A Victorian Obsession: The Pérez Simón collection. The permanent collection of the museum was placed in storage to allow the works to be hung throughout the house. The selected works were those of Frederic Leighton and other important British Victorian painters, many of whom Leighton would have known, such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Albert Moore, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, John William Waterhouse, Edward Poynter, John Melhuish Strudwick and John William Godward. The paintings were not labelled, in order that they fit in with the decor of the house.

In his review of the exhibition, Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times, described the works included as "demented escapism" and Pérez Simón as "Mexico's richest lover of droopy damsels in distress and muscular Greek nymphettes".

Works from the Pérez Simón collection

Family Pérez Simón is married to Josefina. They have a daughter María José, married with Jorge, and two grandchildren.