THE FAMILY JEWELS

Most countries can boast at least one mammoth private collection of cars where all sense of scale has been subsumed to a frenzy of acquisition often lasting decades. And all those biggest, greatest collections are supplemented by many more cars that the public never see, that are usually far from gleaming and museum-ready, but equally if not more romantic. This was as true of the James Hull Collection, where meat-and-two-veg Brits were just as prominent as the headline-grabbing Jaguars, the Schlumpf reserve collection, Evert Louwman’s Dutch colossus, or the enigmatic French Baillon Collection that caused such a stir when it came to market in 2015.

In Belgium, a country that already seems to punch massively above its weight in the classic car world, that collection is the one assembled over three generations by the Mahy family. At one time unquestionably the largest private collection in Europe, if not the world, it now totals more than 1100 cars dating from 1895. Since the 1980s, some 400 cars from the collection