Old Masters, New World
Page 20
Charles Carstairs (ca. 1928) headed the London branch of the New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co. “Don’t be alarmed about the Duveens,” he told Otto Gutekunst. “They are smart, active people. We must be the same.”
Immediately on learning that Frick bought a Rembrandt, Carstairs tried to persuade him to acquire a second. When the collector declined, the dealer argued that he had lost an opportunity. “The Rembrandt is sold [for] $55, 000,” he told Frick. “And others are likely to go any time. I don’t suppose you are interested, but if you are, don’t delay acquiring masterpieces that would be a glory to any museum.” Soon after, Roland Knoedler told Lockett Agnew that he was “desirous of getting first class pictures by the masters.”
Indeed, Charles Carstairs soon began to reorient Knoedler gallery, changing its focus from canvases recently painted by artists in Paris to Old Master pictures, which he found readily on the market in London. There, in 1902, Carstairs opened a branch of Knoedler, taking over the wood-paneled space at 15 Old Bond Street, which had housed Lawrie & Co., and slipping an American firm into the shoes of the now-dissolved British gallery. In London, Carstairs sold paintings to Americans who liked to shop for art when they traveled abroad. By establishing the presence of the New York gallery in the city to which British aristocrats looked when they wanted to sell their pictures, he hoped to compete with English firms. He also had ready access to collections in Europe. “I have just returned from the continent where I have been a week picture hunting,” he wrote the banker Andrew Mellon in December 1906. Nevertheless, the American dealer depended upon London dealers to provide most of his merchandise.
One of those dealers was Otto Gutekunst at Colnaghi. After Henry Clay Frick bought Colnaghi’s Rembrandt Portrait of a Young Artist through Arthur Tooth, Gutekunst hoped to secure the Pittsburgh tycoon as a client. Ever since Bernard Berenson and Isabella Gardner had severed their ties to the London dealer, he had searched for Americans to replace them. Early in 1900, Gutekunst’s partner, Edmond Deprez, traveled to New York “with a view to extending our connection among art collectors in America.” Armed with a letter of introduction from Pierpont Morgan, Deprez attempted to get directly in touch with Frick, and sent him photographs of a “Rembrandt picture which we think might be of interest to you and possibly of taking a place in your collection by the side of the fine Rembrandt portrait already hanging there.” Making no headway with Frick, Deprez wrote Knoedler: “Should you be able to assist us in effecting a sale to Mr. Frick we will of course make it a matter of business with you.” Within a year, Colnaghi’s William McKay assured Roland Knoedler he had “other pictures in view,” and asked if “you are still willing to buy fine English pictures with us???” Soon Otto Gutekunst was addressing Carstairs as “Charlie” and wishing him well as he was about to sail from Liverpool to New York. “May you find things favorable over there and Clay in a good mood.” Still, it took time for the dealers at Colnaghi and Knoedler to launch the team that together combed Europe for extraordinary examples of the Western tradition with which to tempt Clay Frick.
In the fall of 1899, following his failed campaign to buy Carnegie Steel, Frick had many business distractions, most importantly the fraying partnership with Carnegie. At first, the two partners fought over the price the steel company had contracted to pay for its supply of Frick coke. At a Carnegie Steel board meeting on November 20, Frick claimed that the absent Carnegie had accused him of “cowardice in not bringing up [the] question of [the] price of coke” directly to Carnegie himself. “I have stood a great many insults from Mr. Carnegie in the past, but I will submit to no further insults in the future.” Almost immediately Carnegie decided to fire Frick, but before he could, on December 5, Frick resigned. At a famous meeting a month later, Carnegie confronted Frick face-to-face in Pittsburgh. “He came to my office and endeavored to frighten me into selling my interests in the Steel company at much below their value,” Frick later wrote. According to Charles Schwab, Frick flew into a rage, screaming that Carnegie was “a god damned thief.” Carnegie himself claimed that Frick “became wilder and I was forced to leave.”
Carnegie then persuaded thirty-two of his steel partners (all but two) to strip Frick of his investment, and pay him less than $5 million for his share of the firm, which was, in fact, worth between $15 and $30 million.
By then, Frick had hired the attorney John G. Johnson, and in February 1900, he sued Carnegie Steel for the profit he believed was rightfully his. In court papers, Frick exposed to public scrutiny the steel firm’s rancorous civil war, but also its profits, which in 1899 amounted to $21 million and would probably rise to $40 million that year.
In response, Carnegie and his board denounced Frick as “a man of imperious temper, impatient of opposition, and disposed to make a personal matter of any difference of opinion.’He demands absolute power and without it is not satisfied.” Nonetheless, by March, Carnegie and his partners settled with Frick, recapitalizing the steel company and alotting him a $31.6 million share.
When, only a year later, Pierpont Morgan created United States Steel, he bought Carnegie Steel for $480 million, paying Andrew Carnegie $226 million. Frick’s share of stock and bonds in the new steel giant doubled his fortune to some $60 million—or close to $1.5 billion today. If Carnegie was now “the richest man in the world,” Frick was a member of the same circle. Nevertheless, he had continued to accrue intangible costs. He had lost his job, broken from the coke and steel industries, which he had done so much to shape, and further damaged his reputation. Carnegie’s denunciation of Frick “was to contribute to the creation and confirmation—over many decades in the future—of the myth that Carnegie was a benevolent gentleman,” argues Kenneth Warren, “the head of a generally happy brotherhood of industrial leaders from whom a persistently uncooperative member had been expelled for the general good.”
Frick never saw Carnegie again. If Carnegie had failed to keep his reputation spotless, he had nonetheless persisted in besting Frick, who had been forced again and again to recognize his senior partner’s masterful abilities in controlling his own fate and shaping his public image. Finally, on his own, Frick would put those lessons fully to use.
Never one to stay still, Frick summoned his new fortune to focus on investing and to recast his life and his legacy. Although by 1903 he had divested his stock in U.S. Steel, he sat on its board and played a part as an adviser. Soon, he diversified his portfolio, putting his assets (sometimes with Andrew Mellon) into banking, insurance, and railroads. The taciturn Mellon remained his closest friend.
Frick also turned his attention east—to New York, which continued to outdistance any rivals as the nation’s financial and cultural capital and where he spent increasing amounts of time. In 1902, he rented an apartment at Sherry’s hotel, and, three years later, deciding to move his family, he leased (for $50,000 a year) one of the late William H. Vanderbilt’s two enormous brownstones, at 640 Fifth Avenue. (Edith Wharton famously dubbed Vanderbilt’s style as a “Thermopylae of bad taste.”) The Fricks now basked in a new scale of architecture and luxury, with nine bedrooms, a library, a boudoir upholstered in gold silk and satin, and sixteen rooms on the uppermost floor for servants. The house came equipped with “furniture, rugs, carpets, bronzes, bric-a-brac, tapestries, curtaining, oil paintings and their frames,” and a cabinet with 385 pieces of blue and white china. Frick selected the mansion in part because it had a fifty-foot picture gallery. “From that time on, he [Frick] collected intensively and did not have to restrict himself as to the size of the paintings,” his daughter Helen later wrote. Certainly, he planned it that way.
The move to New York thrust Frick into the most competitive field of Old Master collectors. To the south at Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue was Pierpont Morgan, whose Renaissance Madonnas looked down from the red damask walls of his Library. To the north, at Sixty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, were Harry and Louisine Havemeyer, wi
th eight Rembrandt portraits, several Goyas, and the full-length El Greco Cardinal. At 626 Fifth Avenue, the department store magnate Benjamin Altman was constructing a mansion where he would hang a Rembrandt and a Hals he had bought earlier that year.
At the Vanderbilt house, Frick had the walls of a picture gallery and many others to fill. Before moving in, Frick had asked George Vanderbilt if he might borrow some of the pictures from his late father’s collection, now on loan to the Metropolitan Museum. But in a letter enclosing the key to the house, Vanderbilt declined.
Fortunately, Charles Carstairs had already provided Frick with enough Old Masters to make a respectable showing in New York. Compared to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Frick had conventional taste. Following the Anglophile pattern established by Henry Marquand and Pierpont Morgan, he concentrated on Dutch landscapes and English portraits. He spent $75,000 on Meyndert Hobbema’s moody Village Among Trees and $91,000 on Aelbert Cuyp’s five-foot Dordrecht: Sunrise—a view of a glassy river with ships under sail as the sun is rising. His finest Dutch picture was a Vermeer—a corner of a room with light streaming through a window catching a pair of figures—a woman in a red jacket, seated in a chair, and a man in gray standing behind her. He seems to be taking a sheet of music out of her hands and she is staring straight out of the canvas, as though the viewer had just entered the room. Entitled Girl Interrupted at Her Music, the small picture was the fourth Vermeer to reach America. Frick had bought it from Carstairs and paid $26,000. Although four times the price Gardner paid for her Vermeer nine years before, the canvas was nevertheless relatively cheap. That the art world didn’t yet fully appreciate the Dutch artist’s genius is evident in the Knoedler ledger book, where the painting is listed among eight that Frick bought on September 18, 1901.
Two years later, for the first time Frick spent over $100,000 for a single picture—a half-length Gainsborough portrait of a delicate, heavy-lidded young woman named Mrs. Charles Hatchett. Soon after, he returned eight pictures to Knoedler, most of them Barbizon landscapes. In 1904 he paid $200,000 for both George Romney’s Lady Hamilton as “Nature” and Thomas Lawrence’s Julia, Lady Peel—“2 of the best known of the English school,” as Carstairs put it, each only a half-length but each expensive. A subject’s fame, as well as the beauty of his or her face and figure, factored into a portrait’s price. As a notorious femme fatale and the mistress of Lord Nelson, Emma Hamilton herself (painted at the age of eighteen) made the Romney desirable. But more complex and interesting was the glossy portrait of Lady Peel, the dark-haired wife of the prime minister Robert Peel, based upon Rubens’s famous portrait of Suzanne Fourment. Lawrence had painted Lady Peel straight on, underlining her bold sophistication and glamour, and enabling her strong classic features and sultry gaze to carry off an elaborate costume that ran down from a large black hat with a waterfall of red plumes to a row of gold bracelets inlaid with green and red gemstones encircling a white satin sleeve.
Eighteenth-century English portraits, redolent of wealth and nobility, suited Frick’s sense of order and optimism, and reflected his desire to view things as he wanted to, rather than as they were. As their numbers mounted, these portraits infused Frick’s collection with a current of well-bred hedonism, its atmosphere tilting more toward the garden party than the museum. Well aware of the social prestige attached to aristocratic portraits, Carstairs underlined Thomas Lawrence’s connections to European royalty, when he offered Frick the Marquise de Blaizel, dropping the fact that she sat for the portrait in the artist’s “studio [on the] Rue Royale, Paris, the year in which he received from the king of France, Chas. X. a set of Sevres China & the Cross of the Legion of Honor.”
Frick planned to occupy the Vanderbilt house in October 1905, and in June he sailed to Europe on the Kaiser Wilhelm II. In London, Carstairs had lined up several portraits, most importantly an El Greco portrait of a cardinal (St. Jerome). A far cry from Reynolds and Gainsborough, the formidable sixteenth-century Spanish portrait described the head and torso of an older man with an elongated, skeptical face and a pointed white beard. He is wearing a cardinal’s red robe, which armors him in a pyramid of chalky crimson, and his black eyes look off to the left. Before him is a large open book (presumably the Bible) on which his long-fingered hands point to black lines of text. Never before on the market, the portrait was one of the two El Grecos from the cathedral in Valladolid that had recently made their way to Paris. Its voyage from the Spanish church to a Paris gallery (Trotti & Cie) had stripped the Mannerist painting of its religious past and transformed it into an aesthetic object, which conjured a powerful presence.
In London, Otto Gutekunst also had a painting for Frick to see. That July he had acquired a Titian portrait, Pietro Aretino, from the illustrious Chigi family in Rome. Aretino was an influential satirist who made himself wealthy by extorting money from public figures fearful of his pen. Titian paints him as an older man with a sharp-eyed gaze, his brilliance and worldly success translated into the glinting orange satin of his sleeves, set off by a wide collar of rich fur and a heavy gold chain. The rare Renaissance picture was “comparatively little known up to now, having been kept in the private apartments of the palace,” Gutekunst explained, and he immediately hung it at Colnaghi. That August, in Burlington Magazine, Roger Fry described the Titian as a masterpiece—one of the “few portraits left to us by the greatest masters in which the relation of artist and sitter was as intimate.” He said he hoped that it would be purchased “for the nation.” By September, Frick agreed to buy El Greco’s portrait St. Jerome, along with two more conventional portraits—van Dyck’s Ottaviano Canevari and Mrs. James Cruikshank, by the Scottish Henry Raeburn, an heir to Joshua Reynolds. But Frick did not acquire Titian’s Pietro Aretino.
Meanwhile, Carstairs and Knoedler went to extraordinary lengths to prepare the Vanderbilt house for Frick’s arrival. They dispatched Thomas Gerrity, a Knoedler employee, to Pittsburgh to supervise the packing of Frick’s pictures and to organize their shipping to New York. Gerrity kept Carstairs, who was in London, informed of the progress of the move. Accompanying the paintings east, he reported that on September 15 Knoedler’s handlers delivered the crates to 640 Fifth Avenue. The dealers had a month to unpack and hang the paintings before Clay and Adelaide Frick moved in.
“We had gilders working night and day on all his frames,” Gerrity wrote Carstairs on October 4, “as the time was very short to get them ready, and a great many of them were in very bad condition.” He asked Frick if he wanted an estimate of the cost of the new frames and the repairs, but Frick had said, “No, not to waste time and go ahead and finish as quickly as possible.” Carstairs had sketched out a blueprint for the arrangement of the paintings. “There have been several changes in the hanging from the plan you sent me, chiefly on the north wall,” Gerrity reported. “The Grecho [sic] was hung over the mantel instead of the Rembrandt.” And the collector placed his other new acquisitions on either side: “the Raeburn to the right of the mantel’and the van Dyck on the left.” By October 6, Gerrity cabled: “ gallery hung.”
Frick “had several friends there [for] the evening,” Gerrity wrote Knoedler. “We got through hanging and [he] seems to me to take a great deal of pleasure in them, the Greco especially.” He concluded: “Everything looks well in the gallery and there is certainly room for a lot more.” The presence of the El Greco, now the crown jewel of the collection, caused its new American owner to recalibrate. On November 16, Knoedler spent the evening with the steel tycoon. Frick’s pictures “look very well,” he wrote Carstairs, “but he says he needs a few things to key up the collection—that is the way we want him to feel.” (Knoedler noticed on the floor, resting against a wall, another El Greco portrait that some other dealer had delivered to Frick. “He said he did not like it. Mrs. F. said it looked like [the millionaire] James H. Hyde, which was enough to settle it.”) Two weeks later, Charles Carstairs arr
ived from London and he immediately saw the Vanderbilt house as a market ally, its extensive wall space fueling Frick’s picture demand. To Thomas Robinson, his London assistant, he gave an assignment: “We must also find four splendid full-lengths for Mr. F’s dining room. Although,” he added, “we don’t want to talk about it.”
Not long after, Carstairs urged Gutekunst to send Titian’s portrait of Pietro Aretino to New York. “I am delighted to learn that the prospects of business are so good,” Gutekunst replied. “Also I hope, that Mr. Frick will keep the Aretino! What a grand thing to have him so interested in paintings just now; I will do my utmost to assist you in getting the right things for him, you may be sure.” He joked about the difficulty of marketing paintings in England. “I am sick not because I fear the thing may not sell readily but simply because I had hoped & wished to place it, before you wanted it over there & to show you that I also can sell sometimes.” As he put it: “The only market just now seems America.”
As the dealers hoped, Frick kept the Titian and paid Knoedler $90,000 for it. Gutekunst had wanted more money for the magnificent painting. But Carstairs reassured him that Frick was a long-term and potentially fabulous client, who might even fund major purchases. “We will no doubt sell him some more things.’He always told us he would help us finance any big thing that might come our way & what can one do with such a good friend but accede to his wishes and he is always so charming about it. The gallery looks stunning & he will unquestionably have the greatest collection in the country.” If Frick accumulated the “greatest” collection, Carstairs knew he needed to set himself to the task.