Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  As a collector, Louisine was competitive. She carried on a long-­distance rivalry with Isabella Stewart Gardner and, following Mary Cassatt, expressed contempt for the Boston collector’s grand gestures and theatrical style, which differed so completely from her own. Early on in her memoirs, she recalls going out of her way to welcome Mrs. Gardner to her ­house in New York, and then was stung when Gardner did not reciprocate in Boston. “When the time arrived she ran true to Gardner form and gave some feeble excuse in order that a competitor should not see her works of art. I was very angry.” Cassatt commiserated: “Of course, Mrs. Jack Gardner did not like to see the riches in your ­house, & her pictures must have increased in number if she has the ‘best collection of Old Masters in America!’ ” Cassatt concluded with faint praise: “I was struck with a Cranach.”

  However different, Mary Cassatt, Louisine Havemeyer, and Isabella Gardner shared an advanced taste in Old Master painting that set them apart from the American tycoons who ran the country’s museums and favored ­seventeenth-­century Dutch art and ­eigh­teenth-­century En­glish portraits. The women’s lack of power and position freed them to go their own way and allowed them to experiment. Like Isabella Gardner, Louisine Havemeyer had not balked at buying nudes. At Cassatt’s urging, she acquired a Courbet nude, knowing Harry would not be pleased. Characteristically, he came around and eventually they owned six.

  H. O. Havemeyer

  By the time, Harry Havemeyer met Mary Cassatt, he was already a major Old Master collector, who famously snapped up eight Rembrandt portraits in five years and hung them together in his study in the ­Sixty-­sixth Street ­house. He bought the first two Rembrandts together in December 1888 from Cottier, a New York dealer, for $60,000, and only three months later, in March, added the ­third—the portrait Herman Doomer, called “The Gilder.” In 1884, the dealer William Schaus reportedly spent $42,000 on the picture in Paris (in addition to a $12,500 customs fee), hung it in his gallery in New York, and asked at least $60,000. “Chances to study pictures of this kind are rare enough, and the art world ought to feel grateful to the man who has risked so large a sum as must be hazarded in the purchase of a picture so costly,” wrote the New York Times. What Havemeyer paid isn’t certain but it seems unlikely that the tycoon would have paid full price after the dealer had failed to sell the painting in New York for over four years.

  Havemeyer seemed to buy his Rembrandts with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in mind, because within days of purchasing the first ones he loaned them to the museum. Already in 1888 he had given the museum a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, which he had bought from Samuel Avery, a dealer and museum trustee. But Havemeyer’s generosity earned him little respect at the Metropolitan. “I think Havemeyer is quite interested in our museum,” Henry Marquand wrote the director Luigi Cesnola, “& if he gives the Gilder [after the Gilbert Stuart] he can keep the others to decorate his ­house. It will all come right.’I think you have done Havemeyer twice.” But Harry Havemeyer was rarely “done,” and he kept the Gilder and his other Rembrandts for himself.

  Despite the Rembrandt loans and gifts to the Metropolitan (Japa­nese textiles, Tiffany glass, and $10,000 to keep the building open on Sundays), Havemeyer failed to break into the circle that ran the museum. According to Marquand, Samuel Colman had claimed that “Mr. Havemeyer is a hard man to get along ­with!—though very knowing.” Marquand concluded, “fear he won’t do.” Avery thought Havemeyer would have no more interest in the Metropolitan than the museum had in him. “I doubt if H. O. H. would accept a position [on the board], he seems to shrink from all outlying associations. He is a most able businessman, has a strong character, rather positive and unyielding, of few words and rather rough in manner.” Then he added with all the false modesty that his patrician condescension could muster, “I think he would lose patience with our slow and often unbusinesslike way of doing things in our board.” Later, in 1903, and again in 1904, the trustees nominated Havemeyer to their board, but failed to elect him.

  To the Metropolitan’s rebuffs, Havemeyer characteristically responded by assembling an array of Rembrandts in a private ­house more spectacular than those at the museum. If Rembrandt was the mea­sure of art and taste, and in New York of 1890 it was, Havemeyer proved that he could do better than the museum’s entire board. “I am quite sure that no other person owns eight examples of the works of Rembrandt as beautiful as the eight Rembrandts which are in one room of Mr. H. O. Havemeyer’s ­house in Fifth Avenue,” Wilhelm von Bode told the New York Times.

  Harry Havemeyer’s rise to a dominant position in the sugar refining trade began within his own family. His victory over his older brother in the line of succession was the first of many he would savor in the constant ­survival-­of-the-­fittest struggle required to turn the family firm into an empire and then to manage and manipulate the sugar refining monopoly in the United States.

  Born in 1847, Harry Havemeyer was the eighth child of Frederick Christian Havemeyer, who with his cousin had inherited their fathers’ “sugar ­house” in lower Manhattan, then expanded the firm, and across the East River, in Brooklyn, constructed a refinery that was the largest in the United States. There, ships delivered casks of raw sugar and barges pulled by tugs picked up the refined.

  Harry grew up in a large brownstone but his childhood was anything but smooth. When he was four, his mother died, and within a year a younger brother was also dead. Although Frederick Havemeyer, who had attended Columbia University for two years, could afford to send his five surviving sons to college, he apprenticed ­four—George, Theodore, Thomas, and ­Harry—in the sugar firm so they would learn the competitive trade from the ground up. Despite its sweet scent, the Brooklyn refinery was a dangerous place, and in 1861, twenty-­four-­year-­old George was killed in a machinery accident. At that point, Frederick made Theodore and his ­son-­in-­law Lawrence Elder partners in the firm, and changed its name to Havemeyers & Elder. The following year, at age fifteen, Harry went to work on the floor of the Brooklyn factory. There was “no part [of the business] we considered too dirty or too arduous or beneath us,” Theodore later claimed. In 1869, Harry moved to the firm’s headquarters, at 98 Wall Street, where he learned financing and merchandising. Eventually, he took over that aspect of the business, while Theodore ran the refinery; at ­twenty-­two, Harry too became a Havemeyers & Elder partner.

  By the early 1880s, a stampede of new entrants into sugar refining intensified competition on the East Coast, slashing profits even for the most efficient firms, and forcing the inefficient to operate at a loss or to go out of business. So confident ­were the Havemeyers of their dominating position in the industry that in 1882 when a fire destroyed their Brooklyn plant, they spent $7 million to construct a ­sixteen-­acre, ­state-­of-­the-­art refinery, which produced three million pounds of sugar a day, “cheaper,” as Theodore Havemeyer put it, “than anyone ­else.”

  Three years later, Harry insisted that his father put him in charge of the firm and threatened to leave if he failed to get his way. Although Theodore objected, Frederick Havemeyer acquiesced to the demands of his younger son. Frederick’s response to Theodore suggests that Harry had inherited his gruff forthrightness from his father: “Get it down as a fact, that Harry is King of the sugar market,” Frederick wrote.”

  Harry Havemeyer’s next steps confirmed his father’s assessment to be correct. He gained his grip on the sugar industry because his family controlled 55 percent of the country’s capacity, and by the sheer force of his recalcitrance and hard work. Havemeyer’s personality riled even other participants in the Sugar Trust. One Boston refiner hesitated to join because “he considered him [Havemeyer] a brute.” Secretive about the operation of the trust, Havemeyer kept information from other stockholders. When trust officials ­were testifying before a congressional committee, the New York Tribune reported that “Nobody has seemed to know anything what­ever about the trust’s business, although the witnesses have included thos
e most largely interested.” If the trust’s board kept rec­ords of its meetings before 1891, they don’t survive. Early on, Havemeyer was disarmingly direct about the Sugar Trust’s purpose. When asked by a member of the Ways and Means Committee, if “when you sell in this country you control the price?” he answered “Yes, Sir.” In another response, he called price control the trust’s “principal object.” In 1890, when the McKinley Tariff Act eliminated import duties on the raw sugar purchased by American refineries, the profits of the Sugar Trust (with 80 percent of the refining capacity) soared to $28 million.

  Maintaining that level of success, Havemeyer fought off not only competitors but government regulators, who kept the trust under constant attack. In 1890, responding to the unpre­ce­dented power of the “trusts,” the United States Congress passed the Sherman ­Anti-­Trust Act. It ruled that “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraining of trade or commerce among the several states, or with foreign nations” was illegal. When that same year New York State found the Sugar Trust in violation of its corporate laws, Havemeyer reincorporated in New Jersey. Asked about the new company, Havemeyer snapped: “Well, from being illegal as we ­were, we are now legal as we are; change enough, isn’t it?” Harry, now ­forty-­four, officially took over from Theodore as President and Chief Executive of the blandly named American Sugar Refineries Company and paid himself a salary of $100,000. Two years later, when the Justice Department charged American Sugar with violating the Sherman Act, the case (U.S. vs. E. C. Knight) went to the Supreme Court. To defend the Sugar Trust, Havemeyer hired John G. Johnson, the Philadelphia attorney and art collector. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court dismissed the suit in January 1895, finding that sugar refining involved manufacturing and not interstate commerce, and that whether the Sugar Trust restrained trade was an issue not for the federal government but for the states. A ­near-­lethal blow to the Justice Department’s attempts to enforce the ­anti-­trust act, the Court’s decision was a victory for Havemeyer.

  But Havemeyer endured the most brutal battles in the marketplace. Two years after the Sugar Trust was formed, Claus Spreckels, a San Francisco refiner, threatened the monopoly by building a Philadelphia plant that refined three thousand barrels of sugar a day. In response, Harry and Theodore Havemeyer and a third partner bought 45 percent of Spreckels’s firm, and then sold it to the trust, which bought out the rest. The Havemeyers made $1.1 million on the deal. Harry waged a far costlier war against John Arbuckle, a Toledo coffee roaster, who developed a machine that filled a paper bag with coffee, sealed it and labeled it, and who then began to package sugar and to construct his own refinery. Havemeyer retaliated by buying a ­coffee-­roasting plant in Toledo and slashing the price of coffee. Arbuckle parried, driving the margin between raw and refined sugar to an all-time low. “There was only one way to get along with Mr. Havemeyer, and that was to be just as arbitrary as he was and not give way,” Arbuckle argued. One newspaper cartoon showed the plump tycoons standing on barrels heaving packages of coffee at each other. After hemorrhaging millions, Havemeyer and Arbuckle agreed in early 1901 to call off the fight and to cooperate. The resolution of the ­three-­year Arbuckle war allowed Havemeyer the freedom to travel, and only weeks later, on January 30, 1901, he and Louisine set sail for Italy.

  “Why Buy a Monk When You [Can]

  Have a Cardinal?”

  After their excursion to the south of Spain, the Havemeyers returned to Madrid, where Mary Cassatt had remained. In their absence Cassatt had enlisted an unlikely and amateur agent, Joseph Wicht, to seek out Old Masters; he spoke En­glish, and was a godson of an “intimate” of an Infanta (a ­Princess)—a connection Cassatt assumed would lead her to members of the Spanish nobility. Wicht took the Havemeyers to see a Velázquez portrait in the Duchess of Villahermosa’s collection, but they “did not admire it sufficiently to buy it.” From a dealer they acquired (for $4,000) a painting by the Flemish artist Joachim Patinir. But the canvas was “too primitive and the ­whole transaction scarcely big enough to interest deeply Mr. Havemeyer,” Louisine observed. Searching for Old Masters, she and Cassatt found a small El Greco, Christ Carry­ing the Cross, and for some $250 Louisine bought it. Harry didn’t like it and said so. (Later, scholars recognized the small “El Greco” as a copy.)

  Before sailing for New York, the Havemeyers stopped in Paris and expanded their modern French holdings with canvases by Millet, Corot, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, and their first three Cézannes. Although Louisine Havemeyer later reminisced in her memoirs about the romance and adventure of their Eu­ro­pe­an trip, Harry Havemeyer probably recalled it with more frustration. After three months, he returned to New York with only two Old ­Masters—the small El Greco and the Patinir; Veronese’s homely “wife,” which he had reluctantly agreed to swallow, arrived sometime later. Back in Paris, Cassatt quickly grew discontent with Joseph Wicht’s progress in Madrid. “I must explain why I said I thought it would be better to see about the pictures before September,” she wrote Louisine on June 16.

  All the pictures Wicht spoke about are in private collections where they had been probably for generations, & the suggestion was made either by Wicht or some one for him that the own­ers should sell. Now he thinks that any time will do. My opinion is in the contrary, that if you shake the tree you ought to be around when the fruit falls to pick it up; in other words now that the idea of selling has been put into their heads, if some one ­else offers to buy they will let the things go.

  That June Cassatt returned to Spain, and through Wicht she purchased a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington. “Wellington is yours at 17,975 francs [some $3,600],” she wrote Harry triumphantly: “As you left it to my discretion I bought it on the principal I have always seen you follow of getting a fine thing when it comes in your way. The picture is full of character & fire. I hope it will please you’I am ready to be off again if any other prize is in view.’Perhaps Louie & I will get you the Prado if you only give us time, & even if I have to take more journeys with disappointments.”

  Soon after, Louisine asked Mary Cassatt if she would recommend that the Havemeyers try to acquire the Cardinal, the El Greco portrait that Manuel Cossio had discovered in the On~ate palace. Cassatt’s reply on August 30 was characteristically frank: “As to the Cardinal, I would not dare to advise buying the picture, until I had seen it myself,” and she reminded Louisine of the risks. “This summer or rather spring,’D. R. [Durand-­Ruel] wrote me an enthusiastic note, to hurry down & see the head of the Cardinal, a splendid Greco!” she explained. “Palpably a copy & a poor one; & when I turned it down, the own­er went off to [the critic and dealer Theodore] Duret & he came hurrying to tell me what a find!” Perhaps recalling that Cossio had described the Cardinal as one of El Greco’s two masterpieces, Cassatt suddenly changed her mind; the Cardinal “must be a fine picture & it is so unique. You ought to have it, nothing of such a rare artist of that quality exists in a private gallery.” Presumably at this point Cassatt sent word to Joseph Wicht to take the steps necessary to secure the Cardinal for the Havemeyers.

  But after a year, Wicht had made no progress in negotiating the El Greco’s purchase. That spring of 1902, the Prado was presenting a retrospective of El Greco, with sixty-one paintings, including many on loan from private collections. Presumably not wanting to miss the Prado exhibition, Paul ­Durand-­Ruel decided to go to Spain, and on June 16, he telegraphed Harry Havemeyer: leave for madrid wednesday can i do anything for you.

  Paul ­Durand-­Ruel was ­seventy-­one years old, a grandfatherly gentleman, a monarchist, a devout Catholic, and a pioneering dealer, who in the 1870s had been the first to support the controversial art of the Impressionists. For two de­cades, he and Mary Cassatt had worked together. He exhibited and sold her pictures and she served as an intermediary with the Havemeyers and other Americans, advocating paintings he represented. But they had a somewhat stormy relationship, as Cassatt periodically felt the dealer did not
promote her work as she wanted him to. “She has a lot of influence and Durand, who suspects that she is irritated with him, is trying to calm her down with promises and offers which he does not make good,” Camille Pissarro wrote his son Lucien. In introducing the Havemeyers, Cassatt had delivered some of the French dealer’s most important clients. From ­Durand-­Ruel, the Havemeyers had already purchased dozens of modern French paintings but also five of their Rembrandt portraits. (Between 1890 and 1908, the Paris gallery stocked over 550 Old Master pictures.) Eventually, over forty percent of the Havemeyers collection would come from ­Durand-­Ruel. The dealer’s support of the French ­avant-­garde and his relationship to Cassatt more than convinced the Havemeyers that he stood apart from the rest of the trade.

  Although ­Durand-­Ruel purposefully presented himself as a disinterested lover of art, he had also proved a skillful speculator, who in the 1860s profited from a near monopoly in Barbizon paintings and the following de­cade recognized the Impressionists as an opportunity. He purchased his first canvas from Claude Monet in 1871 and within two years he had spent 70,000 francs on Impressionist pictures. In 1876, the group held its second exhibition in ­Durand-­Ruel’s gallery. Gradually, the dealer changed the marketing of modern art, by shifting attention away from par­tic­u­lar canvases to the entire span of an artist’s work. He also pioneered ­one-­man exhibitions (for Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and also Cassatt) and expanded the audience for the Impressionists by publishing illustrated cata­logs and periodicals that extolled and explained their pictures. To her brother Alexander, Cassatt explained Durand-­Ruel’s rationale for the 1886 exhibition of French paintings he held in New York. “Affairs ­here [in Paris] he complains are at a standstill & he hopes to have better luck in America.” In May, ­Durand-­Ruel moved the show from its original location to the National Academy of Design, and added ­twenty-­one pictures, including two Cassatts from Alexander’s collection. “The exhibition was successful.’The public and all the collectors did not come to laugh, but to see for themselves the notorious paintings that had created such a stir in Paris,” ­Durand-­Ruel wrote. He reiterated: “Do not think that Americans are savages. On the contrary they are less ignorant, less ­close-­minded than our French collectors.” The United States would prove the most important market for modern French pictures. At the 1886 New York exhibition, Havemeyer bought a small still life by Manet, entitled the Salmon, for 15,000 francs, or $3,000. Two years later, ­Durand-­Ruel opened a branch in New York and delegated his sons Joseph and Charles to run the gallery, which, in 1894, moved to a brownstone at 389 Fifth Avenue owned by Harry Havemeyer.