Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  But Berenson was misinformed. Although the van Dyck certainly suited Frick’s taste, he declined it. The timing was terrible. The financial markets had been in trouble and he was one of the financiers Morgan recruited to help stabilize them. He agreed to take a small ­three-­quarter-­length portrait of Marchesa Giovanna Cattaneo. London’s National Gallery in fact bought two portraits. Carstairs would take a year to sell Elena Grimaldi. In July 1908, he showed the Philadelphia traction magnate Peter Widener and his son Joseph the portrait, and two smaller paintings of Grimaldi’s children, Filippo Cattaneo and Maddalena Cattaneo. (They had hung together in Genoa.) He lowered the price of Elena Grimaldi from $490,000 to $450,000, a sum that Widener agreed to pay, but for three pictures, instead of one, and he gave less than half in cash.

  The son of a bricklayer, Widener had begun working at his brother’s Philadelphia butcher shop and translated his experience into a chain of meat markets. Meanwhile, he had gotten into politics, holding several offices in the city and building connections that assisted him in winning a contract to supply the ­Union Army with mutton during the Civil War. After failing to get the nomination for mayor of Philadelphia, he and his friend William L. Elkins began investing in ­horse cars, then cable and trolley cars, in Philadelphia. By the ­mid-1890s, they had built transportation systems not only there but also in Baltimore, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. Widener lived in a mansion he called Lynnewood Hall, in Elkins Park, on the northern outskirts of Philadelphia.

  Widener’s ­picture-­buying had been encouraged by his friend the attorney John G. Johnson, who sought out expert advice from Berenson, Wilhelm Valentiner, and others, and prided himself on discovering pictures that had been overlooked by his wealthy clients. Widener played in a regular poker game with Johnson and Elkins, also a collector, when they talked about buying art.

  Even though Frick squandered his chance with Elena Grimaldi, Carstairs knew the collector would not be happy to learn that his dealer had sold it and two other Cattaneo paintings to Widener. He broke the news to Frick from London on July 2, 1908. “My feelings on the subject are somewhat mixed. I always expected you to take this great picture,” Carstairs wrote. “[I] longed to see it in your gallery & in your possession.” The Wideners ­were “very keen on all 3 from the first moment & bought them immediately,” he explained. Frick quizzed Carstairs on the terms of the purchase. “Mr. Widener gave us $450,000 and ­fifty-­two pictures which cost him $250,000,” he replied, revealing the favorable deal Widener had negotiated. More willing to spend freely on pictures than Frick, the traction tycoon would become the steel tycoon’s most formidable collecting rival.

  Duveen and Berenson

  When plotting to buy the Rodolphe Kann collection, Joe Duveen worked with his uncle Henry and left his father out. Learning of this maneuver, Joel reasserted himself as the head of the firm, but the family’s conflict led to its reor­ga­ni­za­tion, and Joe and Henry became partners in Duveen Brothers. Joe’s younger brothers Ernest, Louis, and Benjamin remained in the business but ­were simply employees. Soon after, Joe Duveen established an alliance with Bernard Berenson that proved one of the most lucrative in the history of the art trade. Apparently Duveen heard that Berenson had questioned some of the attributions of the Italian paintings in the Hainauer Collection, which he had bought in 1906, and hired the connoisseur to examine the pictures. Soon he enlisted Berenson to expand his trade in Old Masters. In 1909, Duveen gave Berenson a secret contract promising him 25 percent of the profits of every picture he authenticated. For the Duveens, Berenson provided invaluable ser­vices, in both buying and selling pictures. He scouted for Old Masters (mostly but not exclusively Italian pictures) and advised their “various ­houses [branches] about things proposed” to them. He also spent much of his time “working up” eloquent letters promoting paintings the Duveens had purchased, posing as the disinterested scholar writing about a par­tic­u­lar picture strictly for the art historical record. As a means of marketing Old Masters, Berenson’s letters ­were hard to surpass.

  About Italian paintings that the Duveens wanted to buy, Berenson spoke frankly: When Louis Duveen asked about a Giovanni Bellini Madonna, Berenson spelled out the problems:

  “The face of the Madonna is made over entirely, the Child rather less, all the hands considerably. The Child’s body on the other hand and his legs especially are in good condition. The landscape has been ­over-­cleaned. The blue of the Virgin’s mantle is crude. Nevertheless, I would advise you to buy the picture for it is a very grand Bellini and a perfectly authentic one.”

  Berenson specified exactly what the dealer should pay. “You must try and get the picture for £4,000 or less, because although it is a very great work of art, you yet are taking considerable risks owing to its condition.” Nine months later on the subject of the same Bellini, Berenson produced a very different sort of letter, and one that the Duveens could show to their clients. He thanked them for granting him a glimpse of the Madonna, declared it a “masterpiece,” claimed he would “speak of your picture in the course of further studies,” and asked for a photograph. Accompanying the official letter was a note verifying that he had written on the right ­picture—“presumably on the one that came from the Rev. Langton Douglas.”

  The ­Berenson-­Duveen partnership worked well for both parties, as Mary Berenson candidly explained to her family in 1913. Joe and Ernest Duveen had just visited I Tatti. They “have an im­mense satisfaction as a Firm in the first rate ‘goods they have handled’ since they began to take B.B.’s advice,” she wrote. She named the Italian works Berenson had found for the Duveens to sell: “Two Titians, a Giorgione, a Donatello, a Crivelli (what a jewel!), two Bellinis, various Tintorettos, a Perugino, a Pinturicchio, a Fra Filippo, a Botticelli, a Filippino and I ­can’t tell how many others.”

  Berenson feared that by stealing too much of his time, the Duveens would undermine his own ability to stay at the forefront of his field and to maintain his public image as the independent connoisseur, a fiction in which his employer had a vested interest. Even to Henry Duveen, he pretended to be commercially detached from art: “So you may be grateful that I am only a scholar and not a salesman in disguise,” he wrote on February 25, 1913. “Not that I object to making money. Far from it. But I want to make it with scrupulous honesty and absolutely above board.” He wanted to make it “only as a scholar and a gentleman can.’I cannot afford to let it take up too much of my time.” If he stopped writing, he warned, he would lose his “reputation and authority,” and the cost would be steep not only to himself but to the Duveens. But Berenson knew as well as anyone the market value of Italian pictures and two months later, on April 7, when he learned what the Duveens had spent on a Bellini, he chastised his “dear Friends.” “This seems to me a very foolish transaction, and I have every reason for being seriously dissatisfied with it as a business proposition.” He reminded them of his value: “That I can look at art with the commercial eye should be potent to you.” Problematically, as he explained, by overpaying for a lackluster picture, the Duveens would drive up prices of really fine paintings by the same artist.

  For the Berensons, the steady income from Duveen allowed them to pay for traveling, renovations, a car, and Bernard’s enormous library. “I loved hearing them boast,” Mary wrote, for each picture “means some fun for us ­all—motor-­trips, ­house-­furnishings, B.B.’s ogetti, ­opera-­boxes (!) and so on.” She described the Duveens as “notoriously fickle,” and depicted Berenson bridling at the dealers’ demands. “They are continually at him to make him say pictures are different from what he thinks,” she explained, “and are very cross with him for not giving way and ‘just letting us have your authority for calling this a Cossa instead of a school of Jura.’ ”

  Otto Gutekunst was rightly worried about Joe Duveen’s designs on Henry Clay Frick. Recently, Frick had paid Duveen $138,000 to fill his Prides Crossing ­house with furniture and decorative arts, but he had yet to buy a painting from
the dealer. (Duveen never abandoned the decorative arts, recognizing that his influence depended in part upon his control over the design of his clients’ ­houses.) In November 1906, Roland Knoedler informed Charles Carstairs that Duveen had “left two Italian pictures” (a Fra Filippo Lippi and a Pollaiuolo) at the Fricks’. At that point Frick seemed indifferent to Re­nais­sance pictures and he had Duveen take them back. (The Pollaiuolo proved difficult to sell. Joe asked Henry to get Altman to take it, but Henry refused: “I cannot pronounce the name of the artist.’I would stutter and look foolish. Don’t insist. Let BB sell it to Mrs Jack Gardner,” which he proceeded to do.)

  Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Elizabeth, Lady Taylor, ca. 1780. Joseph Duveen sold the portrait to Henry Clay Frick in 1910 for $190,000.

  Some three years later, on February 1, 1910, Duveen finally succeeded in selling an Old Masters painting to ­Frick: Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Elizabeth, Lady Taylor, a young woman with powdered hair and ostrich plumes on her hat. Duveen’s coup rattled even the nonchalant Roland Knoedler. Two months later, Knoedler anticipated that at the Charles Yerkes auction, Duveen would strike again and go after a Frans Hals portrait for Frick. “I made up my mind that we ought not to let Duveen get this picture at any price within reason,” he told Carstairs. Bidding for the portrait soared past $100,000 and Knoedler won it for $137,000. Soon after, Frick acquired the picture for the auction price, plus 10 percent, or some $150,000. Only five months later, Duveen got Frick to pay $194,000 for another ­Hals—Portrait of an El­der­ly Man. With Reynolds’s Elizabeth, Lady Taylor, Duveen maneuvered himself into a position alongside Carstairs and Roland Knoedler as a principal supplier to Frick of Old Master pictures. He followed the pattern Carstairs had established, selling portraits and landscapes, most of them Dutch and En­glish pictures. A year later, Duveen persuaded Frick to spend $550,000 on two ­full-­length En­glish portraits, each over seven feet tall: Gainsborough’s The Hon. Frances Duncombe and Romney’s Charlotte, Lady Milnes. At $225,000 a piece, the En­glish ­full-­lengths ­were among Frick’s most expensive pictures.

  Frick was clearly wary of Duveen. When, in May 1911, he agreed to buy the En­glish portraits, he himself (in his blunt, choppy handwriting) wrote out a contract and a schedule of payments for the dealer and had Duveen sign it.

  CHAPTER VII

  “Highest Prizes of the Game

  of Civilization”

  Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, Velázquez’s Philip IV, Three Vermeers, and Record Prices

  With Henry Clay Frick’s purchase of the Ilchester Rembrandt, the heyday of his collecting began. Settled in the Vanderbilt ­house, the magisterial portrait demanded paintings of equal caliber. “Is there anything ­else of great importance that you have in the picture line?” Frick asked Charles Carstairs in the summer of 1908. “I feel rather in the humor of buying some more this summer, but, it must be very important.” When Roger Fry persuaded Frick to take a Rubens portrait (sight unseen) that cost only $15,000, the collector was skeptical of the worthiness of a picture that came so cheap, and voiced his dis­plea­sure: “I do not wish to purchase anything unless it ranks with the Rembrandts I have and the Velasquez [sic].”

  The ambition to acquire “important” pictures also infected Frick’s ­competitors—Pierpont Morgan, Peter Widener, Benjamin Altman, and Arabella Huntington. Now in their sixties and seventies, they had years of experience buying pictures and limited time left. Already possessing substantial collections, they sought to upgrade and round them out. They wanted paintings that ­were famous, ­costly—the envy of the world and of one another. Contriving to be given first refusal of every major Old Master to appear on the market, they observed each other’s moves.

  The dealers encouraged their clients’ appetite for masterpieces. “We can only approach you when we have something really and utterly great,” Henry Duveen told Altman. For his part, Roland Knoedler gladly arranged to take Frick to visit the ­ninety-­foot picture gallery behind Altman’s new ­house. Already Frick had asked the dealer to get him the dimensions of the Altman gallery and also of Widener’s, which was ten feet longer. After taking stock of Altman’s collection, Frick, Knoedler noticed, was “more anxious than ever to add to his present holdings something exceptional, fine.”

  At the turn of the twentieth century, Wilhelm von Bode had dismissed the American threat to Eu­rope’s Old Masters. As long as Americans bought in a haphazard way, their occasional triumphs in the Old Master market didn’t alarm him. But by 1906, Bode found to his dismay that Americans ­were beginning to or­ga­nize and to collect “systematically and scientifically,” employing the very principles he used to guide his purchasing for the museum in Berlin. Bode acknowledged that he and other German scholars had unwittingly promoted American ­picture-­buying by publishing “large, scientific cata­logues.” Certainly, the drive for masterpieces reflected the influence of Bode and rival connoisseurs; more than ever, Americans leaned upon experts to guide them to the finest pictures and to purge their collections of everything not up to the mark.

  Peter Widener hired the Metropolitan curator Wilhelm Valentiner to weed out his Dutch pictures and relegate any embarrassing examples to the scrap heap. To sort through his Italian paintings, he brought in Berenson. “I hear you’re going to Philadelphia to bust up Widener’s collection!” Morgan remarked to the connoisseur. Mary Berenson described the pro­cess to Isabella Stewart Gardner: “They [the Wideners] have really nothing of importance among their Italians, and their best other picture, outside of the Van Dyck, is a fine Frans Hals. But to stick to the ­Italians—we could not leave one single great name.” Peter Widener was a widower in his midseventies, whom Mary Berenson described as “very broken,” and deferential. He was “trotting round and saying meekly ‘Mr. Berenson, is this a gallery picture, or a furniture picture, or must it go to the cellar?’ (that is their formula and about 160 pictures are already in the cellar!) He was very much pleased whenever we would allow a picture to stay in the gallery, even if shorn of its great name. But we had to banish several.”

  Competition among the Americans caused Old Master prices to soar. In the two de­cades since Henry Marquand secured his van Dyck for $40,000, the Old Master market had been steadily rising. The 1907 sales of the Kann collection and the Cattaneo van Dycks marked a new level of American spending and launched a boom in Old Masters that would last almost until the First World War. By 1909, Bode estimated that “simple portraits by Frans Hals and Rembrandt, if of excellent quality” or landscapes by Cuyp and Ruisdael “sold on average for one million marks [$250,000].” Also in 1909, the habit of buying Old Masters became suddenly cheaper for Americans when the ­Payne-­Aldrich Tariff Act eliminated the 20 percent customs duty on art over twenty years old. According to a New York customs collector, Senator Nelson Aldrich “put the free art paragraph in the tariff bill especially in the interest” of Morgan’s collections, so the banker could transfer them from En­gland to the United States without the tax penalty. In 1911, Morgan ordered the packing of his collections to begin.

  America’s unpre­ce­dented spending on Old Master pictures reflected the strength of the nation’s economy and the concentration of wealth in the hands of industrialists and financiers. By 1914, the United States’ national income climbed to $37 billion, more than triple the income of either Germany or Britain, the next two largest economies. America “was in fact an entire rival continent and growing so fast that it was coming close to the point of overtaking all of Eu­rope,” writes the historian Paul Kennedy. The major American art collectors, even if lacking the wealth of Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rocke­fel­ler, had a surfeit of money. After amassing large collections, they still ended up leaving substantial fortunes—­Altman, some $35 million; Widener, $50 million; Morgan, $68 million; and Frick, $95 million.

  News of Old Masters fetching record prices caused Eu­rope’s art heirs to survey their holdings; naturally the most celebrated canvases (often their pro
udest possessions) caught their attention, because they would generate the highest sums. The inflated values transformed canvases into fungible assets their own­ers could no longer afford to keep, as their opportunity ­cost—the income lost by not investing the money tied up in a ­picture—shot up. Masterpieces swept onto the market at an ­ever-­faster pace. How a par­tic­u­lar painting ended up in a par­tic­u­lar collection depended upon a web of finance and circumstance; a picture’s path was rarely straight or smooth.

  Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, 1909

  As higher taxes left the landholding nobility financially ever more pressed, En­gland kept delivering major Old Masters to the market. For two de­cades, Hans Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan had hung in the National Gallery on loan from the Duke of Norfolk. Hoping to keep the Holbein, Charles Holroyd, the gallery’s director, warily asked the duke in 1909 if he would be willing to sell the painting. The reply, although affirmative, was not reassuring. The duke would be willing to sell the Holbein if offered a price “far in excess of its [the picture’s] real value.” He hoped to get as much as 60,000 pounds for the painting.