Curated collection
Final flourishes from celebrated coachbuilders, created as bespoke bodywork gave way to modern factories, standardisation and changing tastes around them.
Collection note
The great coachbuilding tradition did not disappear in a single moment. It receded through a series of remarkable final statements, produced as integrated bodies, industrial scale and changing economics made the independent atelier increasingly difficult to sustain. These cars capture that transition at its most poignant: established craftsmen applying generations of proportion, metalwork and bespoke detail to commissions that belonged to a vanishing world. The results can be magnificent, excessive or commercially hopeless, but each carries the tension of a discipline producing some of its most expressive work just as the industry around it moves on.
Enzo Ferrari blamed Wifredo Ricart for getting him pushed out of Alfa Romeo in the late 1930s, and when Ricart resurfaced after the war as chief engineer of a Spanish state-owned truck manufacturer, he built a...