Berenson continued to travel, “plunging into the wilds of Scottish country houses.” He visited Alnwick, the castle of the Duke of Northumberland, where he could see Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods. “Fine pictures too, but who shall speak of them to the owner of Europa?” he asked. “I hope you have now received her, and had your first honeymoon with her. What a beauty.” About his heart, he continued: “It exists but it is not to be written about. Some day with leisure before us I shall tell you.” But he turned quickly to the subject of art acquisition. “Meanwhile a good bit of it throbs for your museum, and again I come with a proposition.”
Enclosed in his letter was a photograph of a Rembrandt, entitled Portrait of a Young Artist, which he described as in “perfect condition,” and revealing the “sheer simplicity of supreme genius.” Gutekunst had purchased the portrait from the Earl of Carlisle, who kept some 274 paintings (including fifty Canalettos) at the enormous Castle Howard in Yorkshire. “I have never seen a Rembrandt which I personally have liked so well,” Berenson claimed. As he wrote from Scotland, it seems likely that Gutekunst recently showed him the picture in London.
In August, the Gardners took their annual voyage to Roque Island in Maine. By the time they returned to Boston on the eighteenth, Gardner had decided against the Rembrandt. “I have not one cent and Mr. Gardner (who has a New England conscience) won’t let me borrow even one more! I have borrowed so much already. He says it is disgraceful. I suppose the picture-habit, (which I seem to have) is as bad as the morphine or whisky one—and it does cost.”
A week later Isabella Gardner announced: “She (Europa) has come! I was just cabling to you to ask what could be the matter, when she arrived, safe and sound. She is now in place. I have no words!…I am too excited to talk.” She immediately recognized the Titian as a masterpiece, a painting that allowed her the very sort of aesthetic ecstasy for which she longed: “I am having a splendid time playing with Europa. She has adorers fairly on their old knees—men of course.” A week later she wrote again. “I am breathless about the Europa, even yet! I am back here tonight (when I found your letter) after a two days’ orgy. The orgy was drinking my self drunk with Europa and then sitting for hours in my Italian Garden in Brookline, thinking and dreaming about her. Every inch of paint in the picture seems full of joy.” Her response echoed the argument Whistler had made in his “Ten O’Clock Lecture” that “Art and Joy go together.”
Gardner hung the painting to the left of the fireplace in the living room of her Beacon Street house, where it took up most of the wall. The Renaissance masterpiece more than held its own in a Victorian room crowded with pictures (even over the doors), tables, chairs, chandeliers, and a tall potted palm. The collectors Quincy Adams Shaw, Edward William Hooper, and William Sturgis Bigelow, “and many painters have dropped before her,” Gardner told Berenson. “Many came with ‘grave doubts’; many came to scoff; but all wallowed at her feet. One painter, a general skeptic, couldn’t speak for the tears! all of joy!!! I think I shall call my Museum the Borgo Allegro.…Mr. Hooper long ago pleased me greatly by saying that I was the Boston end of the Arabian Nights. And now he only adds ‘I told you so.’ ” No doubt it also gave Gardner great pleasure when Henry James called her “Daughter of Titian.” She revealed to Berenson that she had borrowed a “pile of money” to buy the Titian, and “I think it was a good thing to do—and would do it again for a whacker; but don’t you agree with me that my Museum ought to have only a few, and all of them A. No 1.s.” She concluded: “Europa has made an impression.” Europa made its greatest impression upon her. She seemed to decide that paintings of this caliber were what she wanted, and it set her on an acquisition course.
Soon after her purchase of Europa, Gardner asked Berenson if she could acquire Giorgione’s famous Tempest from the Giovanelli Palace in Venice, a painting of a nude set in what was thought to be one of the first “landscapes” ever painted. In December 1896, she bought a major Velázquez—King Philip IV of Spain. When she heard that the Museum of Fine Arts was after a small Giorgione, Christ Bearing the Cross, she wanted it for herself. “They won’t move quickly enough to get it I fear.” Two years later she bought it. “Is the Pope going to sell you one of the rooms of the Vatican?” Henry James quipped.
From London, Gutekunst scanned the horizon. “I have been thinking of other great masterpieces we might try & propose to Mrs. G. if they can be got at all,” he wrote Berenson. He suggested “the largest and most showy Rembrandt in existence, Lord Cowper’s (at Panshanger) Portrait of Turenne on Horseback.” His mind wandered about the British Isles—to the “magnificent” van Dycks and a Moroni in Warwick Castle, Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds in the Wentworth Beaumont collection, and Rembrandt’s The Mill, Lord Lansdowne’s large landscape with a menacing sky. As a native of Germany, he did not share an Englishman’s sense that selling these Old Masters would mean disposing of British patrimony. From his perspective, the northern Renaissance paintings in English collections had long ago left home. “You can only make your future once,” he told Berenson, “and such a chance as Mrs. G. does not occur again in one lifetime. Do you agree or not?”
Meanwhile, thanks to Gardner, Berenson’s financial fortunes were improving. “Berenson has made a lot of money,” Mary Berenson wrote her sister, “and I have helped in it so I shall be able to see that [Mother] has everything to make her comfortable.” Gardner agreed to buy Rembrandt’s Mill, but complained of struggling to find money for her art purchases. She asked Berenson if he was doing his best to make the most of her expenditures; as always her tone was that of a close friend: “Don’t be cross with me!’About the terrible prices!’I want to pay the least necessary. Don’t you think I am right; and aren’t you entirely on my side of all these questions.”
On March 1, 1897, the Colnaghi partners asked Lansdowne if he would sell The Mill for 10,500 guineas. Turned down, they raised the bid to 16,000 pounds. Again Lansdowne refused them. Six months later, Gutekunst went after Holbein’s 1526 portrait Sir Thomas More in the collection of Edward Huth. His overtures failed. No less ambitious, Berenson wrote Gardner about his hopes to secure the great Czernin Vermeer, The Art of Painting (“one of the pictures of the world”), and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, in the Borghese collection in Rome. Both legendary canvases remained where they were.
For three years following the acquisition of Europa, Isabella Gardner purchased Old Master pictures supplied by Colnaghi at a rapid pace—two major Flemish portraits (Rubens’s Portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel and van Dyck’s Portrait of a Woman with a Rose), Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with an Angel, Fra Angelico’s Death and Assumption of the Virgin, as well as Carlo Crivelli’s Saint George Slaying the Dragon, which Berenson described as a “marvellous fairy-tale in gold and lacquer.” But the collaboration between Berenson and Gutekunst became increasingly strained and unstable. In March 1897, Gutekunst cautioned Berenson to reveal more to Isabella Gardner about his method of buying pictures. “People begin to find out that Mrs. G. buys of & through us and some other person abroad & although she will stick to you, it may be as well to forge the iron as long as it is hot & make hay while the sun shines, eh?” In January 1898, Isabella herself warned Berenson: Jack Gardner “thinks every bad thing of you, and I too am beginning to look upon you as the serpent; I myself being the too-willing Eve.”
A few weeks later, on February 2, Berenson attempted to deflect her criticism, apologizing for a delay in sending the Crivelli and turning to potential acquisitions—a Holbein from Vienna and Raphael’s Cardinal Tommaso Inghirami, a tour de force in which the artist painted the prelate close up, at a desk, pen in hand, and has him turning to look up to heaven, somewhat disguising his distorted eye. The price of the Inghirami was 15,000 pounds. Problematically for Berenson, Jack Gardner learned that a Florentine dealer was offering the same Raphael for only 200,000 lire, or half Berenson’s price.
When Isabella informed Berenson, he immediately claimed the owners suddenly agreed to take less than what they had originally asked. Satisfied with this explanation, Isabella Gardner bought the portrait. (Although in 1895 the American tariff on works of art had been eliminated, two years later the Dingley tariff act reimposed it. Thus Gardner had to pay a 20 percent duty when she imported Old Master pictures.)
“Our last week at Venice was one of great anxiety,” Mary Berenson noted in her diary on June 23, 1898. “Business complications with Mrs. Gardner—Bernhard was simply awfully worried and felt at times almost suicidal.” Despite his fears, Berenson continued to charge Gardner as much as he thought she would pay, sometimes recklessly when paintings had been recently sold and their prices were matters of public record.
That summer Gutekunst and the dealer Asher Wertheimer had spent 121,550 pounds to acquire eighty Dutch and Flemish pictures from the collection of Francis Pelham Clinton-Hope. Secretly Bode had arranged to have the Friends of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum advance money to make the purchase, and he got the first choice of the pictures, among them Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine. As Gutekunst hoped, Gardner agreed to take three of the finest Dutch paintings—two Rembrandts (Portrait of a Lady and a Gentleman in Black and a rare seascape, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee) and The Music Lesson by Gerard ter Borch. For these three, Berenson charged her 30,000 pounds ($150,000), or about 25 percent of what Gutekunst had paid for the entire collection.
“There is a terrible row about you,” Isabella Gardner wrote Berenson on September 25. “They say (there seem to be many) that you have been dishonest in your money dealings with people who have bought pictures. Hearing this Mr. G. instantly makes remarks about the Inghirami Raphael you got for me. He says things I dislike very much to hear’and quotes the differences of prices. I cannot tell you how much I am distressed…but I feel sure that you have enemies, clever and strong.”
“This danger may blow over,” Mary Berenson wrote Bernard. But she recommended he change the way he priced paintings to Isabella Gardner: “A new system must come into operation.” On October 17, she wrote in her diary: “Bad news’weighed on both our hearts. Bernhard’s enemies are trying to persuade Mrs. Gardner that he has cheated her over the pictures he has bought her, and her husband (who was always jealous) believes it. Still, she does not, & that is the important thing.”
On November 10, Otto Gutekunst again warned Berenson to stop taking risks:
Surely the money you & we have made all along was easily made and we had our lion’s share not of the glory but of the trouble and disappointment & hard work of it’you must not now talk of throwing it all up wantonly like a spoilt child who is tired of his toy.’Neither you nor we have ever had such a windfall as Mrs. G. before, nor shall we ever in our lives have another & you ought rather throw up for a time other—any other—work than the work with her. It will stop of its own account soon enough.
He couldn’t have known that less than a month later, Isabella Gardner’s circumstances would suddenly and permanently change. On December 10, 1898, she lost her most important ally when Jack Gardner suffered a heart attack and died. Now Gardner was in charge of her own financial affairs and felt the full weight of the responsibility.
Within weeks of Jack’s death, Gardner followed through on plans they had made together and bought property on Boston’s Fenway, where she would have enough space to build a gallery for her collection. She also commissioned the architect Willard Sears to make drawings for a new building; by June 1899 construction of her museum began.
Meanwhile, Berenson persuaded Gardner to buy a pair of Holbeins—portraits of Sir William Butts (physician to Henry VIII) and Lady Margaret Butts, which had to be disentailed by Chancery Court, and whose 16,000-pound price was a matter of public record. “The principal question remains now,” Gutekunst advised Berenson, “how will you treat Mrs. Gardner in the matter? This we must entirely leave to your wisdom, your knowledge of the woman’s character & your shrewdness.” He suggested that Berenson be honest, report the 16,000-pound price, and charge her a commission on top of it. Instead, Berenson informed her the Holbeins came from Colnaghi’s and the price was 20,000 pounds.
“Alas, alas.” She sighed. But, by early March she cabled Berenson the money and his usual 5 percent commission. She made plans to travel to London in the summer. Suddenly, on May 31, she demanded that Berenson explain. “Tell me exactly what you paid for the Holbeins.” She had received “a most singular letter from the former owners. I am afraid something is wrong in the transaction.” She already blamed the problem on the London dealers. “I never liked the Colnaghis, and’I absolutely did not want to have anything to do with them again. I have been very sorry to see that you have still employed them, but now I am sure the end has come.”
From England, on June 9, 1899, Mary delivered practical advice, suggesting Berenson reveal to Gardner about the way the art market truly worked:
Argue with her to prove that Colnaghis are invaluable for her gallery. Take her to Agnew’s miserable show which is the best he could have done for her in all these years and compare that with the Titians, the Crivelli, the Botticellis, the Pessellinos and all the other things they [Colnaghi] have got for her!
She wanted Berenson to explain that to “get Frizzoni’s Bellini” he “should be able to bribe his friends to urge him to part with it and so on.”
But instead Berenson threatened in a letter to Isabella Gardner not to “ever again undertake such big and complicated transactions as that Holbein business.” He continued to mislead Gardner into thinking her doubts about Colnaghi were well founded. “I am sorry you wrote!” Gardner replied. “Every word you said only confirmed my opinion of Colnaghi.’Agnew seems an innocent babe compared to them.”
When Gutekunst learned that an English seller had been in touch with an American buyer, he was alarmed. “The news is a great blow indeed. And Pole-Carew is a great scoundrel for it must be he who wrote to her,” he told Berenson. “May she not endeavor to find out from other [picture] owners what was paid to them? Naturally we will shield you.” He couldn’t understand why Berenson continued to deceive Isabella Gardner and suggested that instead he raise the commission he charged. “Might it not be safer and better in future to do business for her openly, for 10 percent or 15 percent rather than take such risks?”
Six weeks later, at the end of July, Berenson visited Gardner at the Savoy in London. They persisted in their mutual seduction. She was in mourning, dressed in black, and looked “aged,” he wrote Mary. “But as fascinating as ever, an American girl, she seemed, not really grown up but mellowed by life.” He had succeeded in persuading her of his innocence, or at least convinced her that whatever role he played with Colnaghi, he was serving her interests. The art transactions he treated as something that transcended simple business, and she accepted that.
Gardner informed Berenson that she was cutting back on her art acquisitions. She depended upon a trust set up by Jack Gardner for her income, which had fallen to about “half what it was before his death.” She complained that people thought her richer than she was:
The income of mine was all very well until I began to buy big things. The purchase of Europa and the Bull was the 1st time I had to dip into the capital. And since then those times have steadily multiplied.’Probably much of the misunderstanding comes from the way I spend my money. I fancy I am the only living American who puts everything into works of art and music; I mean, instead of into show, and meat and drink.
Nevertheless, in the course of 1900 she bought a small Raphael Pietà (5,000 pounds), Rembrandt’s Landscape with an Obelisk (4,500 pounds), and a fifteenth-century Italian Annunciation, which was attributed to Fiorenza di Lorenzo. All three came through Berenson from Gutekunst.
But gradually Berenson began to cut his ties to Colnaghi. Wanting to salvage the partnership, Gutekunst defended himself:
Business is not always n
ice and I am the last man to blame you, a literary man, for disliking it. But you want to make money like ourselves and so you must do likewise as we do and keep a watchful eye on all good pictures and collections you know or hear of and let me know in good time.’If the pictures you put us up to do not suit Mrs. G. it does not matter we will buy them all the same with you or by giving you an interest in them—as you please. Make hay while Mrs. G. shines.
At the end of March, Gutekunst reminded Berenson of the success of their business in America. “As to our relations to Mrs. G. remember that almost all her finest pictures came to her and to you through us and that some of them nay most of them are now worth already more than she paid for them.” Economic self-interest buttressed the Berenson-Gutekunst partnership on both sides, but their art market alliance depended upon mutual trust and became fraught as that trust diminished. Gutekunst felt angry that it was Berenson who accused him of betrayal. “I am too proud to contradict or even enter upon any of the allegations you make against me personally!” he wrote on March 26. “I could say a vast deal on that subject, but I refuse having nothing to ‘repent’ for, except the vanity of thinking that you believed in me, as a friend, should.”
The last painting to come into Gardner’s collection from Colnaghi was Albrecht Dürer ’s Portrait of a Man in a Fur Coat—one of the “children” of Gutekunst’s “fancy and longing,” which she bought for $55,000 in 1902. His influence on her collection had been profound—his taste for and expertise in Dutch and German pictures running alongside her passion for Italian Renaissance art. She claimed not to adore Rembrandt, but she bought four of his canvases, as well as the two Holbeins, and a ter Borch.
Old Masters, New World Page 10
