Old Masters, New World
Page 1
PENGUIN BOOKS
OLD MASTERS, NEW WORLD
A former reporter for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, Cynthia Saltzman earned degrees in art history at Harvard and Berkeley and an MBA at Stanford. Her last book, The Portrait of Dr. Gachet, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
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Praise for Old Masters, New World
“Old Masters, New World, a lively, knowledgeable chronicle of a three-decade buying spree that relocated some of the Western world’s most venerated paintings to the homes of American millionaires and, eventually, the museums they endowed….Saltzman’s graceful prose is equally effective in conveying the aesthetic splendor of an Old Master and the sharp financial maneuvers of an art dealer.
—Chicago Tribune
“Cynthia Saltzman has written a history as luminous as some of the canvases her Gilded Age moguls collected. A superb telling of how America’s entrepreneurs came into possession of Europe’s most beautiful paintings.”
—James Grant, author of Money of the Mind
“A vividly narrated and highly informative study … Saltzman deftly demonstrates that the often highly competitive process and volatile acquisition of cultural capital by dealers and their eager employers gives fascinating and important insight into the often fraught fusion of the culture and commodity that built world-class American collections.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Cynthia Saltzman offers the reader a fascinating and fabulous peek into the Gilded Age, when vulgar tycoons and stuffy patricians competed shamelessly to own the best that Europe could offer.”
—Dr. Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
“[Saltzman] draws on both her art history and business backgrounds in this vivacious, anecdotal, and perceptive chronicle of the ‘great migration of art’ across the Atlantic.…Art lovers will be thoroughly entertained by these tales of masterpiece fever.”
—Booklist
“By focusing on individual collectors, collections, and even on the often fascinating stories of individual paintings, Saltzman brings this fast-paced, high-stakes world vividly to life.…Appealing to history buffs, art lovers, and biography fans, Old Masters, New World will certainly give visitors to our country’s premier art museums something new to ponder.”
—BookPage
“Uncovering inside information that was meant to stay inside the dusty vaults of plundering robber barons, Cynthia Salzman brings to vivid life an international gallery of Gilded Age icons, not just the New World magnets caricatured in Puck as moneybag magnets of Old World objets d’art, but real people, men and women alike, frantic to lay hands on the power and beauty of immortality—the madness, Henry James called it—of art. A chronicle of American conquest like no other, this is the kind of hard-to-put-down history that makes you, no matter what’s already hanging over your mantelpiece, suddenly greedy for the richness of great painting.”
—David Michaelis, author of N. C. Wyeth and Schulz and Peanuts
“Cynthia Saltzman, a marvelously writerly writer, has studied the literature, read in the archives, and talked to the specialists.…She tells this story in aesthetically satisfying prose.”
—artcritical.com
Praise for The Portrait of Dr. Gachet
“A unique and fascinating biography: the biography of a painting.”
—Michiko Kakutani
“This engrossing, moving book makes us think about the tangled relationship of economics, politics, and painting, and the unpredictable, dramatic life of a work of art, a separate life that begins and endures long after the death of the artist.”
—Elle
“Saltzman has had a brilliant idea for a book, and she has executed it wondrously.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“As Saltzman spins tales of the painting’s travels and encounters, one glimpses a rich cross-section of lives deeply touched by the love of modern art, the debasing power of greed, and the psychological toll of war.…Lively, well researched…A passionate and detailed history.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“This is a rare and wonderful achievement—a scholarly thriller.”
—The Boston Globe
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
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Published in Penguin Books 2009
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Copyright © Cynthia Saltzman, 2008
All rights reserved
Pages 337–339constitute an extension of this copyright page.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Saltzman, Cynthia.
Old masters, new world : America’s raid on Europe’s great pictures / Cynthia Saltzman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-670-01831-4(hc.)
ISBN 978-0-14-311531-1(pbk.)
1. Painting, European. 2. Painting—Collectors and collecting—United States—History— 19th century. 3. Painting—Collectors and collecting—United States—History—20th century. 4. Painting—Europe—Marketing—History—19th century. 5. Painting—Europe—
Marketing—History—20th century. I. Title.
ND450.S25 2008
759.94075—dc22 2008022141
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For Warren, Matthew, and William
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part One: The Collectors
I. “American Citizen ’ Patron of Art”
He
nry Gurdon Marquand and van Dyck’s Portrait of James Stuart
II. “C’est Mon Plaisir”
Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson, Otto Gutekunst, and Titian’s Europa
III. “Mr. Morgan Still Seems to Be Going on His Devouring Way”
J. Pierpont Morgan, Raphael’s Colonna Madonna, Gainsborough’s Georgiana, Reynolds’s Lady Elizabeth Delmé, and Lawrence’s Elizabeth Farren
IV. “Greco’s Merit Is That He Was Two Centuries Ahead of His Time”
Mary Cassatt, Harry and Louisine Havemeyer, Spain, and El Greco
V. “A Picture for a Big Price”
Henry Clay Frick, Charles Carstairs, Otto Gutekunst, and the Ilchester Rembrandt
Part Two: The Painting Boom
VI. “Octopus and Wrecker Duveen”
Joseph Duveen Enters the Old Master Market
VII. “Highest Prizes of the Game of Civilization”
Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, Velázquez’s Philip IV, Three Vermeers, and Record Prices
VIII. “Thanks Not in [the] Market at Present”
Bellini’s St. Francis and Falling Prices
Part Three: The Great War and the Picture Market
IX. “If This War Goes On, Many Things Will Be for Sale”
Old Master Spoils
X. The Feast of the Gods
Bellini and Titian’s Masterpiece Comes on the Market
Epilogue
Photo Inserts
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
TEXT
Page
2 Henry James, ca. 1906.
11 Corsham Court, Wiltshire.
15 The Picture Gallery, Corsham Court, ca. 1890.
24 John White Alexander, Henry G. Marquand,1896.
30 Frederick, 2nd Baron Methuen.
44 The Metropolitan Museum of Art—Fifth Avenue facade, 1917.
48 Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1888.
56 Isabella Stewart Gardner and a gondolier on the Grand Canal, 1894.
59 Bernard Berenson, 1886.
65 Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti, 1903.
66 Bernard Berenson and Mary Berenson in England, 1901.
87 Otto Gutekunst.
91 Isabella Stewart Gardner, ca. 1915.
94 J. Pierpont Morgan, 1902.
103 Thomas Gainsborough, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1785–88.
111 H. O. Havemeyer and Louisine W. Elder, ca. 1883.
122 Mary Cassatt, Portrait of the Artist,1878.
133 Paul Durand-Ruel, ca. 1910.
147 Henry Clay Frick, ca. 1880.
153 Adelaide Childs Frick, 1901.
165 Adelaide Frick and Roland Knoedler playing cards, 1904.
169 Charles Carstairs, ca. 1928.
181 able from Charles Carstairs to Henry Clay Frick, November 5, 1906.
201 Joseph Duveen, ca. 1900.
210 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Elizabeth, Lady Taylor, ca. 1780.
228 Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna, ca. 1505.
236 Hans Holbein, the Younger, Thomas Cromwell, 1532–33.
252 Arthur Morton Grenfell, ca. 1914.
256 Isabella Stewart Gardner, ca. 1910.
262 Courtyard, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1915.
265 John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Gardner in White, 1922.
INSERTS
Page
1, above: Anthony van Dyck, James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, ca. 1634–35.
1, below: John Singer Sargent, Elizabeth Allen Marquand (Mrs. Henry Gurdon Marquand), 1887.
2, above: Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662.
2, below: Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, ca. 1665.
3, above: John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1888.
3, below: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self-Portrait, Aged 23, 1629.
4: Titian, Europa, 1560–62.
5 above: Raphael, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints (the Colonna Madonna), ca. 1504.
5, below: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children, 1777–79.
6, above: El Greco, Portrait of a Cardinal. Probably Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (The Grand Inquisitor), ca. 1600.
6, below: Edgar Degas, At the Louvre, ca. 1879.
7, above: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Polish Rider, ca. 1655.
7, below: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1658.
8, above: Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, 1480.
8, below: Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529.
He was a plain American citizen, staying at an hotel where, sometimes for days together, there were twenty others like him; but no Pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of Patron of Art.
—HENRY JAMES,THE GOLDEN BOWL
Introduction
One takes, moreover, an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of civilization.
—henry james, 1876
In the late nineteenth century, as industrialization transformed the United States into a world power, artists and writers decried the nation’s meager collections of art. “I cannot tell you what I suffer for want of seeing a good picture,” Mary Cassatt complained from the confines of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, in June 1871. The twenty-seven-year-old artist had spent five years painting in Europe and longed to return. The novelist Henry James viewed the problem more broadly. Americans, he told his mother in 1869, seem to have “the elements of the modern man with culture quite left out.” Ten years later, in writing about Hawthorne and famously listing the cultural assets missing from the United States in the early part of the century, James, who had himself decamped for England in the mid-1870s, conveyed his own sense of deprivation: “no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches, no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures.” Later, in 1906, when the British critic Roger Fry served as curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he tallied the museum’s pictorial shortfall: “no Byzantine paintings, no Giotto, no Giottoesque, no Mantegna, no Botticelli, no Leonardo, no Raphael, no Michelangelo.”
Henry James looking at a painting, ca. 1906. A friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s, the novelist explored America’s appropriation of European art in his fiction.
This book tells the story of the first Americans who set about to erase the country’s deficit in Old Master pictures. They were a small group of culturally ambitious individuals made fabulously rich by the industrial revolution; they would spend record-breaking sums to acquire European canvases. From the 1880s through the First World War, American collectors drew scores of pictures out of ancestral houses in England and on the Continent and shipped them across the Atlantic, setting in motion one of history’s great migrations of art. At the center of this enterprise were the coke and steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, the sugar magnate H. O. Havemeyer and his wife, Louisine Waldron Elder, the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s second president, the railroad financier Henry Gurdon Marquand. It is a story not simply of collectors, but also of connoisseurs and dealers; of rivalry, nationalism, and economic conquest; and of the extraordinary pictures themselves.
The phrase Old Master came into common currency in Paris, art capital of Europe since the reign of Louis XIV, following the French Revolution, to distinguish the painters who worked before the overthrow of the ancien régime from the modern artists who came after. The Old Masters are the painters who shaped the European tradition from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, particularly the seminal figures from the Italian, Flemish, Dutch, French, German, and Spani
sh schools. An “Old Master picture” implies not simply a painting of a certain age, but one of uncanny allure, worthy of contemplation, study, and even passion—an illusion of the physical world, created by an artist of consummate skill, arresting in its imaginative range, its aura, its beauty, and its truth.
To the West, a “painting” generally refers to “oil on canvas”—a picture created by mixing pigment with oil and brushing it onto fabric attached to a wooden rectangle, and when completed framed in wood or gold. These gilded borders not only set off the colors of a canvas, but also suggest the high value—aesthetic and monetary—assigned by Europe to its finest pictures. In the early Renaissance, artists in Italy painted in tempera on wooden panels and in “fresco,” where they applied colors to wet plaster, enlivening walls of churches and palaces, and fixing images to a particular place. Then in the mid-fifteenth century, artists in Northern Europe, including Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, began experimenting with oil paint. Gradually, the Venetians and others in Italy adopted the technique, which enabled them to layer colors in transparent glazes, to articulate rich blacks and deep browns for the first time, and to exploit brushwork to new effects. At the same time, artists shifted from painting on wood to painting on canvas. Also in the Renaissance, painters elevated themselves from craftsmen paid for their time to professionals compensated according to the more elusive notion of reputation. Soon, Europe’s best artists became larger-than-life figures, engaged and handsomely rewarded by temporal and spiritual rulers for glorifying their reigns.
The American demand for Old Masters at the turn of the century caused the art market to boom. In the early 1880s, a Rembrandt portrait cost an American financier only $25,000. By 1911, Rembrandt’s landscape, The Mill, went to the Philadelphia streetcar tycoon Peter A. B. Widener for $500,000, a record sum for a painting. That record was smashed only two years later, on the eve of the First World War, when Widener acquired a Raphael Madonna, and again, soon after, when Czar Nicholas II bought the Benois Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci for 310,000 pounds, or over $1.5 million. The equivalent of more than $30 million in dollars today, the Leonardo’s price remained, in relative terms, the highest sum paid for a work of art for seven decades. Only in 1987, when van Gogh’s Sunflowers was auctioned at Christie’s in London for $39.9 million, did a modern canvas eclipse an Old Master as the world’s most expensive picture. More recently, paintings by Pablo Picasso, Gustave Klimt, and Jackson Pollock have raced to the top of the art market. The precipitous ascent of prices for twentieth-century pictures reflects the taste for large modern and contemporary canvases but also their relative abundance; they are plentiful enough to fill seasonal auctions in New York and London and to sustain a market.