So popular was Rembrandt that the nations of northern Europe fought over the artist’s legacy. Germany first advanced its claim with Wilhelm von Bode’s scholarship. But Holland celebrated its native son when Bode and the art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot organized the 1898 Rembrandt retrospective (with over 124 canvases and 350 drawings). Staged to coincide with the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina, this first modern “blockbuster” was groundbreaking on many counts. There for the first time “the general public could see’the chronological evolution of Rembrandt’s style,” explains the art historian Catherine Scallen. Canvases never before on exhibition appeared from far-flung points of Europe. A pair of portraits—A Gentleman with a Tall Hat and Gloves and Lady with an Ostrich-Feather Fan—came from the legendary Youssoupoff collection in Saint Petersburg, and a canvas called The Polish Rider, from Silesia, recently discovered by the Dutch art historian Abraham Bredius. The Dutch borrowed forty of the Rembrandts from England and twenty-four from France. Three months later, not to be outdone, the English staged their own Rembrandt exhibition in London. “It is as though we had regarded the Amsterdam exhibition of Rembrandt as a challenge,” wrote a critic in the London Times, “and had replied to it, ‘This is all very well but we can do it better in England.’ ”
Relative newcomers in the Rembrandt market, Americans had been making up for lost time. In the decade and a half since Henry Marquand imported Portrait of a Man, his compatriots had bought Rembrandts at a rapid clip, accumulating some thirty canvases. With the exception of the landscape and the seascape owned by Isabella Gardner, all the American Rembrandts were portraits.
Although a novice in the Old Master market, Frick could be certain that the Portrait of a Young Artist, if not one of the artist’s most famous pictures, was deemed genuine by Rembrandt scholars and fine enough to go into the Amsterdam exhibition. Indeed, not all Rembrandts were of equal quality. Problematically, his extraordinary manner of painting had encouraged imitators whose works were often taken as his own; exactly how many pictures Rembrandt painted was a matter of dispute. Bode’s first catalog published in 1883 identified 350 canvases; his multivolume catalog (completed in 1906) named 595 paintings. Two years later, Wilhelm Valentiner, another German scholar, boosted the number of Rembrandt pictures to over 640. Although scholars later attributed the Portrait of a Young Artist to one of Rembrandt’s contemporaries, at the time no one questioned the authenticity of the canvas. In early October, Arthur Tooth asked Colnaghi to write Frick a letter about the history of the Rembrandt he had just bought. In this letter, the London dealers strategically dropped the name of “our friend Dr. Bode” and bragged that the Berlin museum director had “strongly recommended it [Frick’s new Rembrandt] to one of his intimate friends who, however was not at the time quite rich enough to treat himself to such a high priced picture.”
By October 7, Arthur Tooth delivered the painting to Frick’s Pittsburgh mansion. The house was a Victorian clutter of ornate, stuffed furniture, encased in busily wall-papered rooms jammed mostly with small, sentimental pictures, overwhelmed by elaborate gold frames. Both literally and figuratively, the dark, brooding Rembrandt portrait didn’t fit. Frick wanted to put up the canvas in his music room, but the walls were full, and he hung the painting against a window, covered with velvet curtains. The large, somber Old Master picture swept into the late-nineteenth-century assemblage like a bracing draft. Until recently the painting had resided at the Earl of Carlisle’s vast Castle Howard in Yorkshire; now in Pittsburgh, it was an aristocratic visitor from the old world—the young man in the broad-brimmed hat appearing prosperous and confident, and holding the tools of his trade in his hands. With the figure dramatically highlighted against the rectangular field of darkness, the portrait was mysterious, and slightly melancholy, but also serene. In its plain black Dutch frame, Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Artist established a sense of order, history, and permanence. For Frick, the purchase of an Old Master was a turning point. Frick had observed Carnegie’s success at using his writings to mold his public image and to counteract the damage inflicted by Homestead. Even if “nothing of a ‘literary cuss,’ ” Frick was proving himself as a collector and harnessing the visual arts to create an alternate image to the dark figure who coolly masterminded labor’s defeat.
The Rembrandt’s $38,000 price probably seemed reasonable to Frick—only $12,000 more than he had paid for his most expensive Corot. Making his way for the first time in the Old Master trade, the Pittsburgh collector didn’t know that since Gardner rejected the Earl of Carlisle’s Rembrandt portrait the canvas had languished on the market. Soon he would recognize that to land in the company of major collectors demanded he buy Old Masters for which he would have to compete.
When in the summer of 1899 news reached Charles Stewart Carstairs that Clay Frick had bought Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Artist from a rival in London, he bolted to attention. Carstairs was in his early thirties, a tall, gregarious art dealer from an old-line Philadelphia family in both the art and whiskey trades. He worked for M. Knoedler & Co., a New York gallery, where up until now Frick had bought most of his paintings. Carstairs had been promoting Old Masters in Pittsburgh and he had sold the city its first Rembrandt. The dealer had been urging Frick to trade up to Old Masters and now, much to his consternation, the steel tycoon, one of his best clients, had bought the Dutch portrait from another dealer and had lavished significantly more on it than he ever had on any other picture. “How do you like your new pictures?” the dealer Roland Knoedler asked Frick after the Rembrandt arrived in Pittsburgh. “I am anxious to see them & to hear that you are pleased with all even if they did not come through M.K & Co.”
Charles Carstairs was involved in the creation of Frick’s collection from the beginning. In 1894, Carstairs, then twenty-nine, had sold Frick a small, sentimental, genre scene of a young woman walking in a garden by Daniel Ridgway Knight, a quickly forgotten American artist working in Paris. Frick had paid $1,350, which was for him a negligible sum. Roland Knoedler “must have been relieved” because two months before the dealer had told his partner in Paris he had “enough paintings by Knight in stock for the moment,” observes the art historian DeCourcy E. McIntosh. In gaining the confidence of Frick, Charles Carstairs had secured a collector who immediately stood out for the scale of his purchases, if not the singularity of his taste.
In 1895, the year after making his first Knoedler purchase, Frick spent eight weeks in Europe; he and his family paid the requisite visit to Carnegie in Scotland but for the first time they also traveled with Roland Knoedler in France. Photographs show the Americans seated at tables under striped umbrellas on a sunny terrace in Aix-les-Bains. (Over the next decade, Frick would take eight trips to Europe, each lasting at least several weeks and some as long as three months.)
Roland Knoedler
Knoedler (whose mother was French and who spent summers in Switzerland and France) introduced Frick to some of the pleasures of vacationing in Europe while making certain to encourage his buying of art. In the summer of 1895, Knoedler took Frick to meet the artists Rosa Bonheur and William Bouguereau in their studios in Paris. As the dealer hoped, when Frick visited Knoedler’s Paris gallery, at 2 rue de Gluck, he bought pictures in bulk for the first time—seven contemporary French canvases on which he spent over $32,000. For one picture alone—a melancholy landscape by Jules Breton called The Last Gleanings—Frick paid $14,000, the highest sum he had yet spent for a canvas. On August 9, his last day in the French capital, Frick snapped up three more paintings—landscapes by the French Jean-Charles Cazin. Soon after, he hammered home to Knoedler his desire to improve his collection: “I am relying on you to see that I get the first opportunity at any of Mr. Cazin’s pictures which you might consider masterpieces, and also anything else that may come up of any other first class artists which you think particularly fine.” By the end of 1895, Frick had s
pent $67,250 on eighteen pictures and become one of Knoedler’s major customers.
An immediate impetus behind Frick’s frenetic picture buying came from Andrew Carnegie, who had given $1 million to Pittsburgh to construct the city’s first major cultural institution, which would combine a library and a concert hall as well as a museum. His hope was that “not only our own country, but the civilized world will take note of the fact that our Dear Old Smoky Pittsburgh’has entered upon the path to higher things, and is before long, as we thoroughly believe, also to be noted for her preeminence in the Arts and Sciences.” Frick made certain that when the Carnegie Institute opened in September 1895 with an exhibition of some two hundred pictures borrowed from Pittsburgh collectors, he appeared to be one of the most important with twelve paintings in the show.
But Frick’s appetite for pictures needed no outside stimulus. In 1898, he put down $100,000 for twenty paintings. Most were Barbizon landscapes. He bought fifteen from Knoedler, including Camille Corot’s Ville D’Avray, which cost $25,000; he boasted to Carnegie that it was “the gem” of his collection. The following year he went back for a second, more expensive Corot, a misty gray scene with trees silhouetted against water and sky, called The Pond.
Adelaide Frick playing cards with Roland Knoedler in Palm Beach in 1904. The dealer also traveled with the Fricks in France.
When Frick was in Pittsburgh, Knoedler kept him informed. “The Vever collection is to be sold in Paris next Monday,” he wrote in 1897. “There are some good things in it but I think they will bring very high prices.” When Frick inquired about a Corot coming up at auction, the dealer replied: “[It] is very fine, though it might not suit a person who was in search of a silvery picture.”
Frick began to rely on the unprepossessing Roland Knoedler not only for art advice but for companionship. More a salesman than a connoisseur, Knoedler (seven years younger than Frick) put the tycoon at ease. At forty, Knoedler had a round face, lively eyes, and a gray handlebar mustache that gave him a look of joviality and optimism. Together the dealer and the steel magnate challenged each other to golf and gratified their taste for cigars. One year they made a pact to smoke less, reducing their consumption “to not over three cigars” a day. When Knoedler proposed extending the commitment into the new year, Frick responded with mock exactitude and formality: “I am getting along very comfortably on the three daily, but find occasionally that I have reached the maximum by about three PM so that I cannot indulge myself after dinner.’I shall take this matter up with you later, and have no doubt we can reach an understanding.” In the same letter, Frick joked that his eight-year-old daughter, Helen, had sold him some of her own drawings, insisting that her father pay her in gold. The silver controversy was raging, and “she understood that [gold] was what people generally demanded and what I was in favor of’and would accept nothing else. So I have discontinued purchasing her pictures for the present.” He advised Knoedler: “Here is a great opportunity for you.”
Roland Knoedler had grown up in the art trade, inheriting the gallery at 170 Fifth Avenue (on the corner of Twenty-second Street) in 1878 from his father, Michael Knoedler, one of New York’s leading art merchants. The elder Knoedler had emigrated from France in 1852 to work at the New York branch of Goupil (Goupil & Cie), the famous Paris gallery that later employed Theo van Gogh as a dealer, and also briefly his brother, Vincent. Goupil’s had started as a publisher of prints and had at first only acquired paintings in order to obtain the rights to publish engraved or lithographic reproductions that it would sell to a mass market. Tellingly, Roland Knoedler referred to the gallery as the “store.” His staff kept fastidious records of purchases and sales, which they wrote out by hand on the lined pages of large leather-bound books, records that suggest the well-established pattern of a high-volume retail business. Frick was customer “No. 51.” While prints made up the bulk of Knoedler’s sales, canvases by then-famous living artists, who had made their reputations in the European art establishment, generated an increasing amount of the profits. From Paris, Knoedler obtained a steady supply of French paintings for the American market. In 1895, the gallery moved up Fifth Avenue, to Thirty-fourth Street. Later the Paris dealer René Gimpel mocked the mercantile atmosphere of the gallery which sold prints for five dollars along with fine paintings, but acknowledged Knoedler had “an old name, a long reputation for honesty.”
By 1897, thanks largely to Frick, Pittsburgh’s demand for pictures was so strong that Roland Knoedler opened a branch of the gallery in the industrial city and dispatched Charles Carstairs to run it. By birth and temperament, Carstairs was well suited to selling art to America’s new industrial tycoons. Born in 1865, Carstairs went to work at age twenty for Charles Haseltine, his mother’s first cousin, who owned an art gallery in Philadelphia. That same year, he married Esther Haseltine, the dealer’s daughter. Roland Knoedler did business with Haseltine’s and, by 1894, he had hired Carstairs to work for him in New York. That Carstairs’s father and brother operated the family’s Pennsylvania whiskey firm may have helped him develop a rapport with Frick, who had held on to his grandfather’s Old Overholt distillery.
Charles Carstairs
A gentleman, Carstairs brought an old-fashioned sense of honor and loyalty to the art trade. In his thirties, he had a long, open face that looked boyish and innocent even with a mustache. He was calm, organized, articulate, and frank, and he carried on his work with an easy-going professionalism. Later, his Knoedler colleagues described his touch as “light” and his grip as “firm.” When Otto Gutekunst expressed outrage that Joseph Duveen had sold a painting of “an ugly old woman & early & flat,” which happened to be by Rembrandt, for a very high price ($110,000), Carstairs brushed it off: “Don’t be alarmed about the Duveens. They ask high prices and that’s the competition we want. They are smart, active people. We must be the same.” To his Knoedler colleagues, Carstairs preached the wisdom of going out of the way to secure clients who had the means to pay high prices by offering them the choicest pictures, and giving them price breaks. When a subordinate promised Philip Sassoon, one of the richest men in England, “any Sargent of ours he likes,” he apologized to Carstairs but explained he was simply following the latter’s advice. “I may in this way have sacrificed the difference between an English and a [higher] American price for a Sargent, but this is my interpretation of what you have often told me about taking a big view of a small matter in order to make a very important customer.”
With this strategy, the socially confident and sophisticated Carstairs, who was sixteen years younger than Frick, learned to handle the formidable and moody collector. The dealer enjoyed the company of the magnate and became one of his few close friends. Carstairs played golf with Frick, in England drove him to see some of the collections in the countryside, and they had, as he put it, “numerous picture talks.” Later, in 1910, when Frick loaned his collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he assigned Carstairs to supervise the hanging of the pictures. Two years before, Frick wrote the dealer: “There is no one whose judgment of the beautiful I have more confidence in than yours.”
For Carstairs, paintings were objects of beauty and pleasure, and a means to make a substantial income. He himself liked to live in the style of his clients. Eventually he had houses in London (on Chesterfield Street) and Paris (on the rue de Grenelle), as well as in the English countryside, and he filled them with fresh flowers, Old Masters and Impressionist paintings, including a Pissarro and a Berthe Morisot. Knowing Frick loved fine cars, Carstairs reported he had bought a twelve-horse Panhard. “I never knew so much about the suburbs of London and have enjoyed having it tremendously,” he wrote Frick. “Sunday I left at 10:20 with my mother & sister & went to Brighton, spent 4 hours there & was back at Carlton by 6:50. I have often wished you and Mrs. Frick were here.”
Not surprisingly, Carstairs despised his assignment in the sooty and provincial Pittsburgh
. Not one to complain, he didn’t let on. But, later, when Gutekunst grumbled about having to travel to Berlin, the American dealer commiserated: “I have done so much similar waiting in my past life in beastly places like Pittsburgh. It is a horrible existence.” Nevertheless, Carstairs saw the stupendous wealth accumulating in Pittsburgh as an art market opportunity. Conveniently for the Knoedler dealers, Pittsburgh lagged behind the East Coast in its taste for pictures, and to the western Pennsylvania industrialists they could continue to market Barbizon landscapes, which Boston collectors had first bought thirty years before and now considered almost passé. Yet, Carstairs recognized that Frick was ambitious, and attempted to direct him toward the increasingly expensive Old Masters. In 1898 and 1899, he sold Frick three half-length eighteenth-century English portraits—examples of prettily clothed, high-born women with powdered hair: George Romney’s Miss Mary Finch Hatton, John Hoppner’s The Hon.Lucy Byng, and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Miss Puyeau. He constantly encouraged Frick to trade up, arguing in 1902 that the collector should let go of a painting acquired only four years before, “as it is not up to the high standard you have established since its purchase.”
Old Masters, New World Page 19
