“I am not only satisfied; I am delighted!” Gutekunst replied. “You have done very well my son & we can do with this money, by Jove! Frick will never regret that purchase!” To this he added: “Do make him buy the Hoppner & Bembo. When those 2 are gone I shall get drunk twice over!!” He understood Carstairs’s strategy. “I am delighted at Frick’s interest in such a case & the nice way in which he seems willing to assist you & you us. It is most valuable, it is everything to have such a man.”
Yet Frick was a temperamental and difficult client, who made his own decisions about each painting he purchased, sometimes after borrowing a picture for months. “I look on you as a great expert,” he told Roger Fry, but “prefer to make up my own mind as to what I want in my collection.”
Nevertheless, Frick’s collection depended upon the collaboration between the collector and the dealers Charles Carstairs and Otto Gutekunst, who sought out pictures, acquired them, and persuaded him to buy them. Replacing Berenson, Carstairs became Gutekunst’s conduit to the American market, and together they proved a shrewd and stable team, bound by mutual trust and respect, who risked their capital to acquire masterpieces. Frick’s collection reflected not only his own taste, but the taste and entrepreneurship of his friend Carstairs and also of Gutekunst, who deliberately stayed in the background. Where Berenson shrank from acknowledging to Gardner any debt to Colnaghi, Carstairs treated the London dealer as an equal and revealed to Frick he was a partner in many transactions. At one point in 1911, Carstairs and Gutekunst (who seems never to have visited the United States) talked about merging the London and the New York galleries.
Inside information on the buying and selling of pictures was critical to a dealer’s success, and Carstairs and Gutekunst traded it freely. When Carstairs was in New York, Gutekunst jammed his letters with news of the London market. “Sulley sold his Vermeer which belonged to him with Wertheimer to a friend of ours in Berlin [for] 16,000 through Bode)!!” he wrote in February 1906. “I have been pondering over the Ashburton pictures,” he reported the following year. “I do not know of course what is now remaining but the collection has been I hear more or less picked over here & at Berlin.” He ran matter-of-factly through their accounts. “I sincerely trust & hope with you, that the March and subsequent bills will be paid, for the monies now & later due by your firm represents practically all the funds from which we can meet our forthcoming liabilities.” In addition, “we have had to miss a number of very tempting purchases which presented themselves lately.” He often gave advice. “I find that unless a picture is well set before the public and well written up the amateur [collector] is so ignorant that he is not impressed or sufficiently artistically warmed up.”
More and more, the dealers felt the pressure of time. If Gutekunst learned of a picture that might be for sale, he wanted to get ahold of it before word leaked out to rivals. Once they purchased a canvas, they sought to unload it as quickly as possible, as the amount of capital at risk kept rising. The Old Master trade began to operate at a quickened pace, driven by the volatile and cutthroat nature of business in the industrial age—a rapid tempo to which the veterans of American industry like Frick were more than accustomed.
The Knoedler dealers kept up constant correspondence among their branches in London, Paris, and New York. And at the top of the first page of each letter, they wrote the name of the steamship on which they planned to send the mail across the Atlantic. These evocative names—Mauretania, Lusitania, Umbria, Campania, Baltic, Olympic, St. Louis, La Lorraine, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse—gave their international communication not only a sense of urgency but also glamour. “It is nearly 6 o’clock, but I must write you a line by this steamer,” Carstairs told Gutekunst, on January 10, 1911. (From London, letters were rushed to the ports of Southampton or Liverpool; from Paris to Le Havre.) Often in even greater haste, they communicated by cable, ensuring that news would cross the Atlantic overnight. Cables to collectors about paintings pressed the case for their artistic importance and for the fleeting opportunity to possess them.
By 1905, Gutekunst had set his sights on finding Frick a major Rembrandt. He hadn’t given up on Lord Lansdowne’s The Mill, for which he thought even Bode’s budget-conscious German museum would give $300,000. (“Before I speak to anyone do you want it?” Carstairs asked Frick.) Meanwhile, Gutekunst went after the equally legendary “Youssoupoff Rembrandts,” the pair of portraits—A Gentleman with a Tall Hat and Gloves and A Lady with an Ostrich-Feather Fan—that had been among the revelations of the 1898 Amsterdam Rembrandt retrospective and the London Times described as “of immortal, unchanging interest.” At that moment Edmond Deprez had just returned from Saint Petersburg, where he had tried to buy them. “We would stamp F’s collection for once & all,” Gutekunst wrote. Characteristically, he gave Carstairs a rundown of paintings that Deprez had seen in Saint Petersburg. “2 Rembrandts, a fine Boucher worth 4000–5000 pounds & a van Dyck of the supremest Genoese quality & period: a full length lady in blue!!!”
But soon after, Gutekunst began to fret about the risk involved in purchasing the far-off and high-priced Russian Rembrandts. “Naturally if he [Frick] takes them and pays us a commission, we will have to stand back of him in event of the pictures not being as fine as recommended or as in good condition as they should be and we would have to be justly responsible to him for the money.” He needn’t have worried. Deprez returned empty-handed. Soon, however, as Gutekunst cast his telescope about the European landscape, another Rembrandt came into his view.
The Ilchester Rembrandt
On November 5, 1906, Charles Carstairs cabled Henry Clay Frick from London:
JUST CONCLUDED PURCHASE GREATEST REMBRANDT PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF EXISTING SEE ROLAND FOR PARTICULARS AND CABLE DECISION CARSTAIRS.
The “greatest Rembrandt” was a large, late self-portrait, signed and dated 1658, when the artist was fifty-two, and at what many believed to be the height of his powers. For almost one hundred years, the portrait had been in the collections of the Earls of Ilchester, who had hung the canvas in its gilded frame over the mantel in the drawing room of their vast house at Melbury Park, their countryseat in Dorset, one hundred miles southwest of London.
For four months Otto Gutekunst had been negotiating with Giles Fox-Strangways, the 6th Earl of Ilchester, to acquire the Rembrandt portrait and completed the transaction that day. Gutekunst and Carstairs had agreed to invest in the picture together—as they often did with canvases that they otherwise could not afford. Together they paid 31,000 pounds or $155,000, a substantial sum, exactly equivalent to the 1904 operating budget of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The dealers risked their own capital, certain of the Rembrandt’s market value and betting on a high financial reward.
Charles Carstairs in London cabled Henry Clay Frick in New York about the Ilchester Rembrandt immediately after acquiring it with Colnaghi’s.
Immediately after cabling Frick, Carstairs telegraphed instructions to Knoedler in New York: “rembrandt sure. give clay first offer.” He also advised Knoedler to ask Frick for $225,000, a sum more than twice the $100,000 that Isabella Stewart Gardner had spent on Titian’s Europa a decade before.
For Carstairs and Gutekunst, gaining possession of the famous Rembrandt was in itself an entrepreneurial feat. Henry Fox-Strangways, the 5th Earl of Ilchester, had died in December 1905, and his son Giles faced steep inheritance taxes, which the British government began to levy in the 1890s. Aware of high prices recently fetched by Old Master pictures, the earl rightly saw the family’s Rembrandt as a major asset, which might quickly generate cash. Early in 1906, Fox-Strangways got in touch with Herbert P. Horne, an English architect, designer, and expert on Italian Renaissance art, who lived in Florence. Immediately thinking of the American market, Horne wrote his friend Roger Fry, who had recently been appointed Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A graduate of Cambridge, Roge
r Fry was forty, a painter, critic, and a leading figure in the Bloomsbury circle. He had established himself as an expert on Renaissance art with a book on Giovanni Bellini. That month, he had launched his gallery of “masterpieces,” at the Metropolitan, where he hung several of the late Henry Marquand’s Old Masters and also Titian’s Pietro Aretino, which he borrowed from Frick. Later, Fry’s fluent and persuasive writings on Cézanne and other modernists would help build their reputations in England and the United States. In 1910, he introduced the British public to the avant-garde painting of France with the groundbreaking London exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which, according to Virginia Woolf, in her Fry biography, threw the public “into paroxysms of rage and laughter.”
On April 19, Horne informed Fry that he had been “approached the other day on behalf of an English noble lord who has the intention to apply to the courts for permission to sell a certain famous Rembrandt (a portrait of the painter by himself).” He asked: “Is it likely that you would care to consider it for the Museum, or for one of your collectors in America?” He also requested that Fry “not speak of this matter to any one.” But Fry, who was in New York through mid-April, didn’t answer Horne’s letter.
A month later, on May 14, Horne wrote to Fry again. This time he identified the Rembrandt’s owner as Lord Ilchester, “who has just succeeded to Holland House, Melbury, & c. It is he, who wishes to sell his Rembrandt, in order to pay death duties. The picture—a portrait of Rembrandt by himself—has been reproduced in the big German book on Rembrandt, and elsewhere. I have never seen it, but am told on good authority that it is very fine.” By now, Horne learned that Fox-Strangways had given the London collector Herbert Cook the right of first refusal on the Rembrandt, and “has already said something about it to Agnew, and another dealer.” Horne continued to press his own case: “You would no doubt do much better dealing with him [Fox-Strangways] direct, or thro’ your own agent, than by waiting till it gets into Agnew’s hands,— should it prove a picture which you might care to buy. If you would let me know by return, I could arrange the matter with Lord Ilchester before he leaves here at the end of next week.”
On May 17, Fry replied, but with little enthusiasm: “Although our funds are not likely to enable us to purchase the picture immediately, it would certainly be worth while for you to meet Lord Ilchester and discuss the matter.” (Fry had purchased fifty-six pictures for the Metropolitan in 1906 and reported to his wife on April 13, “I’ve spent all my allowance on pictures for the whole year.”) Could it wait until the end of June, Fry wanted to know. Even if he had exhausted the Metropolitan’s picture budget, the curator realized he could try to interest the museum’s president, Pierpont Morgan, in acquiring the painting. The following week, Horne met with Fox-Strangways and his wife, who had come to Florence. To keep his hand in the fire, he persuaded the earl not to “turn over the picture to the tender mercies of Agnew.” Soon after, Fry told Morgan that Lord Ilchester would be willing to sell the Rembrandt for £30,000. The banker had countered with a lower bid, which was refused. “I showed Mr. Morgan’[the Ilchester] Rembrandt and told him that it was of the highest importance to the museum,” Fry later wrote, “and that now was the time to redeem the promise that when I found something really big he would raise a subscription. The only result was that Mr. Morgan tried’to acquire it himself.”
At this point, Otto Gutekunst jumped into the fray. Failing to get the price he wanted from Fry and Morgan, Fox-Strangways now gave Gutekunst and Carstairs permission to see his celebrated Rembrandt. Carstairs arranged to visit Melbury on July 17. He was excited. According to a catalog, the Dorset house had over 150 paintings lining its two drawing rooms, dining room, morning room, smoking room, library, bedrooms, sitting rooms, and dressing rooms, as well as its pantry, saddle room, harness room, and the passages between.
On paper, the Ilchester Rembrandt had attributes that Carstairs knew would appeal to Clay Frick, including an aristocratic provenance running back to the 1730s when Stephen Fox, the 1st Earl of Ilchester and a Whig member of Parliament, acquired the picture. Although it was not clear what had happened to the Self-Portrait in the seven decades between the time it had left Rembrandt’s Amsterdam studio and the time it reached Fox, Bode and other Rembrandt scholars did (and would) not question its authenticity.
At first glance Carstairs understood why. He recognized the Self-Portrait as of a totally different order than the lackluster example of Rembrandt that Frick already owned. Bode’s complimentary appraisal of the portrait as the “the most dignified of all Rembrandt portraits of himself” only hinted at the painting’s extraordinary power. At Melbury House, Carstairs found the painting in the drawing room—high on the wall over the fireplace—facing French doors opening onto a lawn that descended to a lake.
The dark Self-Portrait dominated the light-filled room. It is an atmospheric picture of rich blacks, deep browns, and effects of chiaroscuro. The artist is wearing a round, black velvet cap and a robe with shimmering pleats of gold, the vertical strands of paint running across his chest evoking the fabric and arming him as though with a breastplate. His massive pyramidal presence fills most of the canvas. He portrays himself not as a painter, but as a ruler, or elder statesman, seated on a wooden chair, as though on a throne, and holding a staff, or scepter—a man of weight, wisdom, and power, ideas conveyed also in the seriousness of his inelegant, aging, worldly face. Although measuring only three feet by four feet, the three-quarter-length portrait seems, with its ornately carved, gilded frame, much larger—and the artist seems larger than life. He has placed himself against a background of black that envelops the upper half of the canvas. Gold light rakes down, illuminating his face and hands, as well as the painted architecture of his garments. A sash of china red crosses twice over the torso, igniting the ornamental glory of the costume, signaling the sense of force that comes through in the hands thrust into the foreground, one in each of the lower corners of the picture. The right hand emerges from a sleeve composed of bold brushstrokes of white. The left hand holds the staff, its long capable fingers pulling slightly to keep it in place. The artist painted this portrait the year he declared bankruptcy; the virtuosity of the painting technique embodies and announces his resilient genius, through the sheer lushness and melancholy grandeur of his creation.
Returning to London, Carstairs immediately sat down and wrote Roland Knoedler. By then Otto Gutekunst had agreed to pay 31,000 pounds for the Rembrandt and the earl had tentatively accepted Colnaghi’s offer. “I have just been this morning to see Lord Ilchester’s great portrait of Rembrandt by himself.’It looks as though we ought to get it,” Carstairs told Knoedler. “We will have to deposit tomorrow morning 31,000 pounds to her ladyship’s account.” Carstairs referred Knoedler to the painting’s entry in Bode’s catalog, to identify the picture. “This Rembrandt appears to me as monumental, much greater than the Russian pictures [the Youssoupoff Rembrandts] & a picture for a big price.”
Carstairs had been cultivating Frick’s taste for “masterpieces,” and the Ilchester Rembrandt more than embodied the sort of painting he had in mind—what Gutekunst irreverently called “Angel’s food,” or “Big-big, big game.” The purchase of this well-known English Rembrandt would remove any question of Frick’s Pittsburgh provincialism and put him on an equal footing even with Isabella Stewart Gardner and Pierpont Morgan, as a player with not only the money but also the discrimination to compete for the most highly esteemed Old Masters—the canvases at the very top.
Carstairs and Gutekunst now tried to persuade Fry to leave the Rembrandt to them: “can you come lunch tomorrow. if not when will you call. very important,” Gutekunst cabled Fry on July 17. That same day, Fry explained to Gutekunst that he “had Lord I’s verbal promise not to sell without letting me know.” Learning that Colnaghi had offered £31,000 for the Rembrandt, Fry gave Morgan another shot.
>
HAVE BECOME CERTAIN THAT THERE IS NO CHANCE OF GETTING THE REMBRANDT AT PRICE YOU MENTIONED. UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES I SUPPOSE THERE IS NO HARM IN MY BRINGING IT TO NOTICE OF A POSSIBLE AMERICAN PURCHASER.
Fry either knew or guessed that Frick was Knoedler’s client, and may have hoped to persuade the tycoon to purchase the painting for the museum.
But, now Morgan suddenly decided he did in fact want the picture. “will take the rembrandt at price you mentioned payable after my arrival in new york. no time to arrange now,” he cabled Fry from London on the seventeenth.
The following day, Fry met with Carstairs, Gutekunst, and Deprez at Knoedler’s gallery at 15 Old Bond Street. His aim was to acquire the Rembrandt for the Metropolitan. For their part, the Colnaghi and Knoedler dealers wanted neither to give the painting up to Fry and Morgan nor be forced to pay more than they had negotiated. Compromising, they agreed that if Fry matched their offer, they would sell it to the Metropolitan and forfeit their regular commission. On July 18, Fry cabled Morgan that he and the London dealers had reached a settlement that effectively left the banker out:
IT WAS AGREED BETWEEN GUTEKUNST, CARSTAIRS, DEPREZ AND MYSELF AT KNOEDLERS AT 6 PM THAT THEY WOULD LET THE MUSEUM HAVE IT FOR THEIR COST PRICE £31,000. BUT THE MUSEUM ONLY.
They telegrammed this information to Ilchester.
That same day Fry sent Morgan a second cable, explaining more fully the circumstances, which might still enable them to obtain the Rembrandt for the museum.
YOUR WIRE CAME TOO LATE YESTERDAY EVENING. A FIRM OF DEALERS OFFERED THIRTY THOUSAND FOR REMBRANDT. LORD ILCHESTER ACCEPTED VERBALLY.
Fry reported he had seen the dealers that day:
THEY ARE WILLING OUT OF CONSIDERATION OF THE MUSEUM TO HAND IT ON WITHOUT PROFIT PROVIDED IT IS FOR THE MUSEUM AND NOT FOR ANY PRIVATE BUYERS. THEY ALSO HAVE TO REALIZE ONE THOUSAND PAID AS COMMISSION. I ASSURE YOU THAT COMPARED WITH OTHER IMPORTANT REMBRANDTS THIS IS STILL REASONABLE AND THINK THE MUSEUM OUGHT THR’ YOU TO ACCEPT OFFER. MONEY MUST BE PAID QUICKLY AS THE DEALERS WILL BE OUT OF POCKET.
Old Masters, New World Page 21
