To convince the Metropolitan to take the El Greco, Glaenzer arranged to have Berenson at his Paris gallery on July 27, when the museum’s president Frederick Rhinelander came to see the painting. “They seem to have been very much impressed by it [the El Greco], & I trust they paid some attention to my statement that they should have a Greco,” Berenson told Isabella Gardner, “and that if ever they were going to have one, Glaenzer’s was the one to have. But, I doubt whether the picture spoke to them, whether the form of art is one they really approve.” As Rhinelander hadn’t decided to buy the El Greco, Berenson tried to sell it to Gardner, and in early August Glaenzer agreed to hold it for her until August 15. But, she refused it, telling Berenson the $40,000 price was “preposterous.”
Meanwhile, Louisine Havemeyer tried to persuade the Metropolitan to acquire El Greco’s thirteen-foot Assumption of the Virgin. In July, she told Samuel Avery that the painting was on the market in Madrid for only $17,000. Avery explained that the museum trustees were already negotiating for an El Greco. Then, in September, Frederick Rhinelander suddenly died, and two months later, the trustees elected J. Pierpont Morgan to succeed him as the Metropolitan’s president. (“I hope that now that Mr. Pierpont Morgan is Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York that some truly fine paintings will be acquired,” Cassatt told Théodore Duret.) In October, Durand-Ruel (with a loan from Havemeyer) had bought Assumption of the Virgin, and by December he had written to Morgan. In March, when the banker was in Paris, the dealer showed him the picture and reported to Cassatt that Morgan “found it superb” and would “cable New York to advise the museum to buy it for 250,000 francs.”
But the Metropolitan continued to pursue the other El Greco. In January, William Laffan, a Metropolitan trustee and Morgan confidant, had telephoned Eugene Glaenzer from the banker’s house and asked him point blank “what interest has Berenson in the sale of this picture [Adoration.]” The dealer denied knowing that Berenson had any interest in the El Greco but later admitted to the connoisseur he felt uncomfortable not being forthright with the museum trustee. In the end, the Metropolitan’s board decided to purchase Glaenzer’s picture. If Berenson’s scheming earned him a fee, it also seems to have removed his chance to work for the Metropolitan and ruined his reputation with Morgan.
Cassatt now turned her attention to selling Assumption of the Virgin to another American museum and in January 1905, she approached Charles L. Hutchinson, the president of Chicago’s Art Institute: “It is a great museum picture,” she wrote. “I doubt if such another is for sale in Europe—It is in perfect condition and untouched.” On July 17, 1906, the Art Institute’s trustees approved the El Greco’s purchase, but only barely, by a vote of seven to six. Rightly, Cassatt credited herself and the Havemeyers for the presence of the “magnificent Assumption of the youthful Greco” in Chicago. “Did we not work hard to get it to America?” Cassatt wrote Louisine. “It never would have gone there if it had not been for Mr. Havemeyer.”
The El Greco boom continued. Two more canvases—St. Jerome as a Cardinal and Gentleman of the House of Leiva—arrived in Paris from Spain, purchased from the Cathedral of Valladolid for only 25,000 pesetas ($5,000) by a Madrid dealer. The following year, Durand-Ruel began negotiating for two Toledo altarpieces—Saint Martin and the Beggar and Madonna and Child with Saint Martina and Saint Agnes—but they went to a rival Paris gallery. Then, in June 1907, Durand-Ruel bought a second canvas from the On~ate palace—one of El Greco’s two landscapes—View of Toledo. Although he sent the Havemeyers a photograph, they declined the painting.
Three months later, agents from the Department of the Treasury walked onto the docks of Havemeyers & Elder’s Brooklyn refinery and in the course of their inspection discovered that the scales used to weigh raw sugar and determine import duties had been tampered with. A week later, the sixty-year-old Harry Havemeyer became ill, and on December 4, he died.
For over a year after Havemeyer’s death, Louisine showed little appetite for pictures. But early in 1909, she and her daughter Electra sailed for Italy and Spain. Again in Madrid, she went looking for El Grecos, making a pilgrimage to a church in the town of Illescas to see Saint Ildefonso. Ricardo Madrazo tried to negotiate the picture’s purchase, but, as he explained, the government was enacting laws to “prevent objects of art from leaving Spain.” When Louisine returned to Paris, Durand-Ruel showed her El Greco’s View of Toledo. One of the first landscapes ever painted in Europe, it would remain one of the most unusual. El Greco described Toledo as a cluster of grey Gothic buildings on a distant hill. A line of jagged structures climbs up to the city, where the cathedral and the palace (the Alcazar) are silhouetted against a dark sky. While across a lush foreground landscape loose strokes of green suggest tall grass and trees, the night sky exploding with lightning dictates the character of the painting; the threat to the spindly far-off city suggests the fragility of even the grandest human effort before a possibly vengeful god.
The painting reminded Louisine of Toledo as she remembered it in 1901. “The city is perched high in the clouds and is painted like a miniature,” she wrote. The art historian Kenneth Clark saw the canvas as “an exception to all rules, far removed from the spirit of Mediterranean art and from the rest of seventeenth-century landscape painting. It has more the character of nineteenth-century romanticism, though Turner is less morbid, and van Gogh less full of artifice.” On April 29, 1909, Louisine Havemeyer acquired the landscape for 70,000 francs ($14,000), securing a second El Greco masterpiece.
CHAPTER V
“A Picture for a Big Price”
Henry Clay Frick, Charles Carstairs, Otto Gutekunst,
and the Ilchester Rembrandt
On June 6, 1899, Henry Clay Frick and his family sailed from New York for France. At fifty, Frick was chairman of Carnegie Steel Company and one of America’s towering industrialists. He had several reasons to make the trip and hoped to mix work and pleasure, planning to travel and to visit galleries in Paris and London. Over the past five years, the Pittsburgh tycoon had become the city’s most voracious collector; he owned some seventy, mostly nineteenth-century canvases, including a fine array of Barbizon landscapes—lush, melancholy images of the countryside outside of Paris, with its fields, gigantic trees, and moody skies. The year before, Frick had bought several eighteenth-century English portraits and began to shift his attention away from the Barbizon school. Now he had reason to think of acquiring a Rembrandt. Recently, at the New York gallery of the London dealer Arthur Tooth & Sons, he had seen a canvas entitled Portrait of a Young Artist, a dark, three-quarter-length image of a man in a black cloak and tall, wide-brimmed hat. The figure was set into a dark weave of browns, blacks, and grays, and of shadow and light. A beam illuminated the man’s face and hands and sparkled on the brass buttons of his doublet. In the upper right corner, the picture was signed “Rembrandt 1647.”
The Portrait of a Young Artist happened to be the same Rembrandt that Bernard Berenson had recommended to Isabella Stewart Gardner three years before, and she had turned down. Ever since, Otto Gutekunst had been quietly trying to dispose of the canvas, which had appeared in the 1898 Rembrandt retrospective, at the Stedelijk (State) Museum in Amsterdam. Wanting to tap the American market, Gutekunst at some point turned the Rembrandt over to Arthur Tooth to sell.
The seventeenth-century Rembrandt was older and more serious than anything Frick yet owned—and, at $38,000, more expensive. At that moment, Rembrandt portraits were among the most coveted works of art in Europe and America—unsurpassed symbols of wealth and arrival. Only months before, Alexander Byers, a leading Pittsburgh collector, had acquired one, introducing the Dutch artist’s work to the city. The competitive Frick wanted to keep up; he knew that a Rembrandt would launch him as a collector of Old Masters and into an altogether new league.
But in June 1899, Frick, who was known as “Clay,” had much on his mind besides art.
Frick was a strong-willed, unbending, complex individualist, who had come to a pivotal point in his career as a partner of Andrew Carnegie. Frick had made his first fortune by the age of thirty in the manufacture of “coke,” or “coal cake,” which was burned with ore to produce iron, and fired with iron to make steel. By 1887, Frick had sold his coke company to Carnegie. Gregarious and charismatic, Carnegie was internationally famous not only for his talents as a businessman, but also for his philanthropies and popular writings, in which he championed the rights of workers and contended that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” Wanting to step back from the day-to-day operations of Carnegie Steel, Carnegie tapped Frick to run the firm. As partners in steel, Frick and Carnegie had proved an invincible team, investing in the most technologically advanced equipment, slashing production costs, and successfully pressing their mills to make them the most profitable in the United States at a time when steel was catapulting the nation into the forefront of the world’s industrial powers.
As a young man, Frick was thin and handsome, with dark hair and large gray eyes rimmed with white below the pupil, which as a child gave him a look of weary innocence and later a steady gaze. A photograph taken when Frick was around thirty shows him determined, moody, and restless, in a dark rumpled suit, leaning against a brick wall, his arms crossed, glaring at the camera, not unaware of the worldly figure he cut with a drooping mustache, a bowler hat, and heavy gold watch chain strung across his vest. At fifty, he had grown more solid and his neatly trimmed brown beard was turning white. His appearance was deliberately crisp and polished. He wore well-made dark suits, stiff collars, and always, a gold watch chain. He was among the best looking of American industrialists, and portrait painters easily smoothed out the intensity and confidence that comes through in photographs. In one photograph, taken of his family and friends together on a lawn, he alone casts an almost swaggering pose, putting his leg up on the chair, his arm on his knee, one hand in a pocket, the other holding a cigar, his hat jauntily tilted back.
Henry Clay Frick, ca. 1880, age thirty-one. Already the Pittsburgh tycoon had earned the nickname “King of Coke.”
In Frick, Carnegie had found a sharp-eyed accountant. He was a “thinking machine, methodical as a comptometer, accurate, cutting straight to the point’the most methodical thinking machine I have ever known,” observed Charles M. Schwab, another Carnegie partner. He “had no instinct for books or learning; was cold-blooded, ignorant of everything except the steel and coke business.’ruthless, domineering, icy.” According to James H. Bridge, who worked for both Carnegie and Frick, the latter had a “singularly charming, humane and charitable side,” which he revealed to his family, particularly to his daughter Helen whom he adored. Disciplined and relentlessly driven, Frick worked long hours and at a fast pace, wanting above all to prove to himself and to the watchful Carnegie that he was capable of single-handedly managing Carnegie Steel under even the most adverse conditions. He often commuted between Pittsburgh and New York by train, arriving in the morning and returning the same night, his day filled with appointments. Frick seemed “more refined than the Carnegie partners, who often came to the Windsor [Hotel] for dinner, and had the rough friendliness of Western men who do big things,” recalled Bridge. “He spoke little, his smile serving as an answer to, or acknowledgement of, Carnegie’s jests and habitual enthusiasms.” From himself, and those who worked for him, Frick demanded perfection.
To orchestrate a vast industrial complex, Frick kept his gaze trained on myriad details. His insistence on order, structure, and control was not simply a management tactic but an integral part of his personality. He loved figures and ledgers and clearly understood their power. His almost daily letters to Carnegie are long, rational reports, logically and carefully argued, and filled with specifics on all aspects of the business. One day he discussed railroad rates: “Would not be at all surprised but what we could get $1.00 a ton on all export business from Baltimore & Ohio [Railroad].” Two days later, he outlined a plan for a corporate restructuring: “My idea is that the stock in the Coke Company is to-day cheap at $150.00 per share.’It is only giving holders’about $1,000.00 per acre for unmined coal alone, with all surface land, ovens, improvements, cares, etc., etc., thrown in.” He was sensitive to the nuances of the operation and to his colleagues who ran it. “[I] do not think it quite fair that you should be so severe on McCague.’No one knows better than you the immense freight business of Carnegie Steel Company, but I doubt whether you are fully aware of the many deals the Freight Agent has to make of one kind or another to secure best rates, which he really takes great risks in doing. McCague is an exceedingly sensitive man, and it unfits him for business.” Frick reminded the distant Carnegie that he was “on the ground, and keeping the run of matters pretty closely, I am in [a] position to speak on these matters, and am satisfied, if you could view the whole situation as I do, you would thoroughly agree with me.” Although he wrote hundreds of business letters, he composed few to family members and friends, and in these he rarely expressed emotion.
The vigilance with which Frick oversaw the steel corporation he also applied to the operations of his private life, where he employed his own method of accounting to keep track of his structured extravagance. Starting in 1892, he put in place an ornate bookkeeping system with which he recorded every dollar that left his bank accounts. He printed up his own vouchers, engraved self-importantly in large black lettering—“H. C. Frick”—which his bookkeepers mailed out to merchants and tradesmen to document his purchases. When the vouchers were returned, the bookkeepers stamped them and filed them in steel drawers. With two and then three enormous houses, which were manned by dozens of servants, filled with furniture and paintings, and equipped with horses, carriages, and cars, the Fricks spent millions and generated some 23,000 vouchers. (Nine decades after Frick’s death, these vouchers, cataloged in dozens of metal file cabinets in the basement of his museum, remain a testament to his obsession with order.)
Reticent as he was, Frick revealed much about himself when he spoke about those he considered worthy of respect, including his fellow collectors. Making the case that the late Pierpont Morgan deserved to be memorialized in a portrait bust, he argued that the banker’s true monument was “the Steel Corporation itself’the greatest and most beneficent industrial organization conceived by the brain of man.” But, he added: “Those of us who knew him best like to think of Mr. Morgan as a man—as a human personality, strong, self-contained, dignified; and that is the aspect which the sculptor has so skillfully presented in the enduring bronze of his art.” When he met Isabella Stewart Gardner, she was sixty-eight and he a decade younger. He described her as “remarkable in many ways,” noting with a sense of detachment and perhaps regret that she “has the energy of youth.”
The fortunes Carnegie and Frick had made in steel came at a price. When they could, they saw to it that other people paid it. In their drive to boost profitability, they had broken strikes and driven out unions, most famously at the steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, where a gun battle between strikers and hired guards left more than ten dead and many others wounded. Although Carnegie had been in Scotland during the strike and had left Frick in Pittsburgh to handle the situation, their brutal tactics in dealing with the union damaged the reputations of both men. In the public mind, Frick came not undeservedly to represent the most ruthless of American capitalists and Carnegie a hypocrite, whose practices were awkwardly at odds with his public preaching on capital and labor. In an 1886 article in Forum, he had defended the “the right of the working-men to combine and to form trades-unions,” and argued that wage disputes should be settled by arbitration rather than strikes. Soon after, he advised against the hiring of strikebreakers.
If Frick’s life had been a triumph of industrial entrepreneurship, his dependence on Carnegie had frustrated his ambition and clouded his achievements. Fr
om the start, the Frick-Carnegie collaboration had been strained by the rivalry of two titanic clashing personalities who needed each other but often failed to see eye to eye. Even as chairman of Carnegie Steel, Frick had to defer to his senior partner, who had the power to dismiss him at any time. “While Carnegie was leading the high life in New York, London, and his Scottish estates, Frick stood at his post in Pittsburgh through fair weather and foul,” writes Carnegie’s biographer David Nasaw. “As long as Carnegie remained the majority stockholder in Carnegie Steel and the controlling stockholder in H. C. Frick Coke, there was no way Frick was going to win a battle with him.”
Frick had come to Europe in June 1899 trying to avoid such a battle. Recently deciding that he wanted to “retire,” Carnegie had given Frick his blessing to organize a buyout of the steel company. Over the past few months Frick had put together a syndicate to raise $320 million for the purchase. His partner in the scheme was William Moore, whose identity he kept from Carnegie because Moore was well known as a stock manipulator. Carnegie insisted Frick’s syndicate pay a $2-million option on Carnegie Steel to demonstrate their ability to complete the purchase—essentially a “break-up fee” put down in advance. He gave Frick until August 4 to get the deal done. Carnegie’s share of the fee was $1,170,000. When Moore produced only $1 million of that fee, and Frick and his partner Henry Phipps had to come up with the rest, they surely sensed trouble. Then in early May, Moore acknowledged he didn’t have the $320 million promised Carnegie. Refusing defeat, Frick proposed to raise the funds through a public offering, but needed time to organize it. The first challenge was to persuade Carnegie to extend the option beyond August 4. Wanting to present his case in person, Frick decided to make the trek to Skibo Castle in Scotland where Carnegie was spending the summer. It would demand all of Frick’s considerable business experience to complete the deal, but fortunately he had prepared himself well for the task.
Old Masters, New World Page 17
