Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  Paul ­Durand-­Ruel, the Impressionists’ first dealer, in his Paris gallery around 1910.

  Durand-­Ruel’s voyage to Spain proved well worth the effort. At the Prado, among the dozens of El Grecos, he found the Portrait of a Cardinal, loaned by the Count of Paredes de Nava from the On~ate palace and for the first time on public display. “It is a beautiful thing—something for a museum,” the dealer wrote. Indeed, the canvas is over five and a half feet in height, and the cardinal himself is a towering figure, tall and thin, seated in a ­throne-­like chair. He is dressed in ecclesiastical ­vestments—a loosely brushed expanse of cranberry, pink, and maroon, laced with white ­highlights—falling to the floor. His body fills most of the canvas, the folds of his watered silk robes spreading out beyond his chair on either side, almost to the frame, and a red cap standing on his head coming within inches of the top. El Greco exploited the expanses of billowing fabric to convey magnificence and power, animating the crimson surface of paint with strokes of white, crisscrossing, zigzagging, and running in vertical rivulets, echoing a vertical line of buttons.

  Although possessing the attributes of a formal portrait, the picture is highly unusual, not a flattering description of the appearance of a powerful prelate, but a complex and penetrating study of character, and difficult to read. The cardinal is an older man with a neat, graying beard, a high narrow forehead, and nearly-black eyes circled by round black glasses, which strike a strangely modern note in an official likeness three hundred years old. On two fingers of each of his gray and pale elongated hands, he wears jeweled rings, and his left hand curves to grip the arm of the chair. Instead of looking straight out at the artist, he glares through the spectacles, off to his left as though his mind was elsewhere, perhaps on the contents of a piece of paper he seems to have dropped on the floor in front of his chair, at the lower edge of the painting. Across the paper El Greco had signed his name in Greek letters: Domenikos Theotokopoulos. The white paper is delicately rendered to show creases left where it had been folded twice, and it lies on a black circle, which is part of a pattern of tiles composing a marble floor.

  Although the cardinal is seated perfectly still, a sense of disquiet emitted by the stare boring out of the dark eyes through the black glasses is amplified in various ways throughout the canvas, most conspicuously in the turbulence of the crimson robes. Behind him is a wall, but the background is oddly asymmetrical, split between a bright surface of gold brocade on the right and wooden paneling on the left, the two sides divided by a vertical column of dark green. El Greco also played with the rules of linear perspective, distorting the geometry of the tiled floor and the background wall, making it difficult to determine exactly how the sitter fits into the actual space of the room. In addition to spatial distortions, visible brushstrokes, and strident colors (crimson against dark, patterned yellow), what seems modern about the religious portrait is the way the artist employed the paint not to describe the exact look and texture of fabric, flesh, wood, or marble, but for expressive purpose. Strokes of beige, white, and gray model the contours of the cardinal’s long narrow face; vertical lines of black and white, his beard. The seriousness of his expression emerges in a line of dark pigment that separates his lips and in gray shadows around his eyes. Manuel Cossio had identified the subject of the Cardinal as Don Fernando Nin~o de Guevara, archbishop of Seville, a notoriously unyielding Inquisitor General, and for most of the twentieth century art historians saw the portrait as the personification of the ruthless Spanish Inquisition. And yet in the 1980s, two scholars argued that the subject was not Nin~o de Guevara, but his successor, the more moderate intellectual, Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas. What in the countenance had been read as anger, and thoughts of condemnation and retribution, might simply reflect a troubled, unsettled situation or state. Later ­Durand-­Ruel told Mary Cassatt that the “Cardinal was by far the finest thing of Greco’s there [in the exhibition in Madrid].”

  By July 1, the dealer was back in Paris. That day he saw Cassatt. They discussed the Cardinal and questioned whether the Havemeyers would want to own the large religious portrait: “It is too big for an ­individual,” ­Durand-­Ruel wrote Joseph Wicht. “Miss Cassatt whom I have seen yesterday on my return is convinced that the painting would not work for Mr. Havemeyer because of its large size.” Nevertheless, ­Durand-­Ruel asked Wicht to find out the Cardinal’s price.

  If Havemeyer heard the dealer’s reservations, he ignored them. By now, he had lost all patience with Cassatt’s failure to obtain Spanish pictures, and on July 1, he fired off a brief note to her, politely asking her to turn the Cardinal’s purchase over to ­Durand-­Ruel. He undoubtedly knew the request would come as a blow to Cassatt, who had emphasized that the dealer lacked her knowledge of Old Masters. Harry’s excuse was that he was following his wife’s desires: “Louie’s wish is that the purchase of the Greco be entrusted to Mr. ­Durand-­Ruel.” Nevertheless, Havemeyer kept Cassatt involved, asking that she cable him the Cardinal’s price so he could telegraph ­Durand-­Ruel “whether to buy or not.”

  Now charged with acquiring the Cardinal, the Paris dealer immediately sent off a letter to Ricardo de Madrazo, a ­well-­connected paint­er and dealer in Madrid, whose father and grandfather had served as court paint­ers to the Spanish king and as directors of the Prado. Within days ­Durand-­Ruel also wrote Havemeyer, emphasizing that the Cardinal was the finest picture in the El Greco exhibition and confirming that the collector in fact wanted it. “It is a beautifully drawn work and one of very beautiful color, but it is very large: 1 meter 94 by 1 meter 30.” Also he stated that officially the painting was not on the market.

  Durand-­Ruel’s enthusiasm also fired Cassatt, who still worried that dealers would take advantage of her American friends and who wanted them to “possess the Cardinal at a reasonable price.” After Joseph Wicht was killed in a hunting accident in 1902, she turned to his widow, whom she dubbed with the code name “Pepita.” Cassatt had emphasized to her new agent “the necessity of secrecy as regarded the name of the would be buyer, for if the count suspected Mr. Havemeyer of wishing to buy the picture he would create all the difficulties ­possible”—that is, demand the sugar tycoon pay a high sum. She meanwhile encouraged Louisine not to lose hope. “It would be rather a triumph to posses a really fine Greco, for with all their crowing none of them, not [Degas’s friend] Manzi more than the others has a really good specimen of that artist. I imagine this [the Cardinal] is the finest thing outside the Public Galleries in Spain.’My head is set on your having that picture for the new gallery.”

  On Christmas night 1902, Cassatt reported that she had instructed “Pepita” to attend to the four things: the Majas on a Balcony, two other Goyas, and El Greco’s Cardinal, for which she wanted her agent to offer $10,000. How she arrived at that figure she didn’t explain. She had few benchmarks to use as no major El Grecos had recently sold. Still, Cassatt’s price was only one third the cost of Havemeyer’s cheapest Rembrandt, and less than what he had paid for Manet’s Boating, which was not even ­twenty-­five years old. If Cassatt’s $10,000 bid was delivered, the Count of Paredes de Nava rejected it. Cassatt placed the blame on snobbery. “On no account will the own­er of the Greco sell to a stranger (or rather I fancy to us),” she wrote Louisine on January 5, 1903. In fact, the count thought Cassatt’s offer too low.

  By now ­Durand-­Ruel had a second El Greco in ­mind—Assumption of the Virgin, once the centerpiece of the high altar of Toledo’s Santo Domingo el Antiguo but recently on display in the Prado exhibition. The ­thirteen-­foot canvas had impressed the French dealer. In it, ­life-­sized figures crowd around an empty tomb and gesture up at the ­Virgin—in flowing robes of red and ­blue—standing on a half moon, her arms outstretched across the sky, almost to the frame. “Durand-­Ruel pere is in Madrid,” Cassatt wrote Louisine, and he had concluded that the Assumption was “a better picture to buy than the Cardinal!” No doubt the dealer’s enthusiasm for the large religious painting sprang in part
from his knowledge that it was on the market. Cassatt questioned his change of heart. “Still I would prefer the Cardinal. I asked DR if it was very characteristic of Greco, & he said yes especially the head, but it is a large picture.” Four days later, she pressed the Havemeyers not to compromise, reminding Louisine that when the dealer had seen both El Grecos at the Prado exhibition, he “then preferred the Cardinal. No let us stick to the Cardinal, if we can get it.”

  At least ­Durand-­Ruel’s trip to Spain produced one picture for the ­Havemeyers—a Goya portrait, Doña Narcisa Baran~ana de Goicoechea. That July, Harry again asked the dealer to rely less on Cassatt. “She very kindly advises Mrs. Havemeyer and myself in reference to art matters, but the price between us is never mentioned, except as a matter of interest; therefore, she can be entirely eliminated as a medium of conveying to us the price of pictures.” He also requested that ­Durand-­Ruel be more straightforward: “A simple cable, or letter, from yourself recommending a picture and classifying it, as you know there are so many different classes of pictures, would have more influence than the voluminous correspondence that has been carried on between us.”

  Nine months later, ­Durand-­Ruel reassured Havemeyer that he hadn’t abandoned Spain: “I have always my attention on the beautiful pictures by Goya or by El Greco that I have seen in Spain, but the greatest difficulty is to bring their own­ers to admit that they want to sell and to decide to give a price. They ask me to make an offer and warn me that it is necessary to make them very high to have a chance to succeed; it is difficult and dangerous.”

  Now, Cassatt gave up on the Cardinal (“truly too expensive”) and told Louisine that instead she should buy the Assumption, which the Prado’s exhibition cata­log had named as one of El Greco’s “three masterpieces.” But, the Havemeyers didn’t want El Greco’s altarpiece; it was simply too big for their ­house.

  Meanwhile, in Paris the dealer Eugene Glaenzer, was selling El Greco’s “Saint Ferdinand.” “Is it authentic? And what price does Glaenzer ask?” Cassatt inquired of ­Durand-­Ruel. Then she dismissed it: “Outside of Spain there are none of beauty.” Cassatt’s views notwithstanding, Glaenzer succeeded in selling the El Greco to the Louvre. Manuel Cossio had recognized the subject as the medieval king Saint Louis of France, and thus of historical interest to the French national museum. El Greco had secured a place in the world’s most prestigious collection, and the prices of his paintings would only rise.

  Within weeks, Harry Havemeyer asked ­Durand-­Ruel to approach the Count of Paredes de Nava and this time to offer 100,000 francs ($20,000), for the Cardinal. On December 29, 1903, Durand-Ruel informed Cassatt that the count “not only refused this offer, but declared he didn’t want to sell at all.”

  At this point, ­Durand-­Ruel suggested yet a third El Greco from the 1902 Prado ­exhibition—Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a painting of a friar and poet with short black hair and dark eyes. Although the artist clad the friar in church vestments and posed him in a ­high-­backed chair, he created a reserved yet intimate portrait that was radically different in mood from the Cardinal. The friar holds two books in his left hand, and he seems to gaze both at the viewer and off to the left, as though lost in thought. El Greco narrowed his palette, setting black and white against a background of dark brown and giving potency to the red of the friar’s lips and of the cross emblazoned on his robe. The inexact technique, the sketching in paint, breathes life into the serious face and robed body of the artist’s philosophical and melancholy friend.

  “This painting is superb and absolutely the same quality as the Cardinal,” ­Durand-­Ruel told Cassatt. He also sent a photograph of the painting to his son Joseph at the gallery in New York to show the Havemeyers. But the price was high: 200,000 pesetas or $40,000. “The painting is most remarkable and I will do my utmost to buy it,” the Paris dealer told his agent Ricardo Madrazo on January 9. ­Durand-­Ruel was not the only one who had expressed interest in the picture. The summer before, Madrazo had shown John Singer Sargent the stunning Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino. Now, in February 1904, Sargent raved to Edward Robinson, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, about the El Greco, calling it “most beautiful,” and “one of the best El Greco’s I ever saw.” Sargent observed “there seems to be a considerable awakening of interest in El Greco’s pictures.” Madrazo told Sargent the painting’s price was £4,000, or $20,000, half of what he quoted to ­Durand-­Ruel. That “the Louvre has lately bought two may account for the big price,” Sargent wrote.

  Judging only from a ­black-­and-­white photograph, Harry Havemeyer declined to purchase the painting. According to Louisine, he thought it a poor substitute for the El Greco he really wanted: “Why buy a monk when you [can] have a cardinal?”

  When later that spring Edward Robinson himself saw the friar’s portrait in Madrid, he authorized Sargent to purchase it, thinking that an artist would be able to negotiate a cheaper price than a museum director. Within weeks Sargent acquired Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino for only $17,000. The news exasperated Paul ­Durand-­Ruel, who later passed it along to Havemeyer (“Perhaps you may regret not having bought it”) to prove that in calling the El Greco “superb,” he hadn’t exaggerated and to spur Havemeyer to buy the Assumption. Although the dealer acknowledged that the size of the altarpiece was “an insurmountable obstacle” for Havemeyer, he reminded his client that the “painting is a masterpiece and that Cassatt hoped to see you [Havemeyer] purchase [it] for an American museum.” Ignoring the dealer, Havemeyer wrote on April 11, asking him to “cable us the price of the Cardinal by Greco.”

  Soon after, on April 22, ­Durand-­Ruel wired the Count of Paredes de Nava, who was in Rome, and offered him 150,000 francs for the Cardinal. The response came back that the count would now refuse even 200,000 francs. But within days, he cabled a price: 225,000 francs— $45,000, or more than twice what Boston had paid. “The Count de Nava would be, at this moment, disposed to give up his painting,” ­Durand-­Ruel wrote Havemeyer, “but he might change his opinion and I believe it is necessary to move fast.” The price is high, the dealer acknowledged, but “really beautiful works by El Greco are very rare.” On May 6, Harry replied by cable: “ buy greco 225.”

  On May 10, ­Durand-­Ruel responded. Madrazo would “inform by tele­gram the Count of Paredes de Nava, who is in Italy, that I have agreed to buy his portrait of the Cardinal at his price.” By May 20, ­Durand-­Ruel had received the 225,000 francs from Havemeyer and sent them on to Madrid. Havemeyer complained about the sum he had agreed to pay. “It seems to me that the mistake is made of an offer on these pictures at the full value one is willing to give. It is always desirable to bring a man to declare the lowest price which he will take, and if within the limit, then buy the picture, as otherwise they merely use the offer as a basis of dealing with somebody ­else to get a higher price.”

  If the Havemeyers’ advanced taste inspired their quest for El Greco, the purchase of the Cardinal depended also upon their tenacity and Harry’s recruiting of ­Durand-­Ruel to confirm the painting was a masterpiece and worth the sum its own­er was demanding. The silent member of the pioneering group who sent the Cardinal to America was Manuel Cossio, whose 1908 biography and cata­log would remain an important source on El Greco for the next century.

  At the count’s request Madrazo painted a copy of the Cardinal, which took him about two weeks. By May 31, the original arrived at ­Durand-­Ruel in Paris and the dealer kept it until October. “It is the most beautiful Greco to have left Spain,” Cassatt told the critic Theodore Duret. Exactly as she feared, art dealers now jumped into the market.

  “You are quite right, the Greco boom has come,” Eugene Glaenzer declared to Bernard Berenson, on May 31, 1904. “I started it last year with the Louvre picture & now no ­self-­respecting museum can afford to be without one.” Glaenzer, who had a branch of his gallery in New York, had purchased an El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, and he had ambitions to sell it to the Metropoli
tan Museum of Art. Berenson had tipped off Glaenzer that Adoration was coming up at auction, and in return the dealer promised the connoisseur 25 percent of the profits if he assisted in the sale to the New York museum. Painted in El Greco’s most mannered style, with its weightless figures, flickering light, and contracted space, Adoration resembled the canvas the artist had made as an altarpiece for his own tomb. “Ours is fortunately one better than any on the market or any that will come on the market,” Glaenzer boasted to Berenson. “It is my intention to play this card for all it is worth.’The purchase of a Greco by the Boston museum will help us tremendously as a great rivalry exists between museums.” The dealer, who had paid $7,500 for the canvas, planned to ask $40,000.