Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  Carstairs told his colleague Charles Henschel not to reveal to anyone that Knoedler had bought back some of the Grenfell pictures. “It is often easier to sell them when [they are] someone ­else’s property,” he explained. He also had sympathy for his client. “I regret very much the unfortunate condition that Grenfell seems to have gotten into.”

  Only a month later, another Knoedler client, the financier, James Hamet Dunn, asked Carstairs for a loan of $50,000 against those Old Masters he had purchased from the gallery. Dunn was forty, a Canadian stockbroker who had moved to London. He consigned his entire collection to ­Knoedler—including a Bronzino, Portrait of a Medici Prince (Lodovico Capponi), William Hogarth’s Miss Mary Edwards, and Gainsborough’s Sarah, Lady Innes. “He is very keen about his little collection and does not want to sell any of them if he can possibly avoid it,” Carstairs explained, “but all their securities are very much depressed and to sell they have to suffer severe losses.”

  In August 1913 Frick was in London, searching for paintings. “Frick takes up all my time and I ­haven’t much time to write,” Carstairs told George Davey. The dealer probably took Frick to inspect the Bellini St. Francis. (Earlier he had sent him a ­black-­and-­white photograph of the picture; Frick had made a ­half-­hearted offer of $200,000, and Carstairs had refused it.) From London the dealer had pi­loted Frick to Longford Castle to inspect the Radnor pictures. With Colnaghi, Carstairs had recently bought seven paintings from the estate of Lord Taunton, including the ­full-­length El Greco portrait Vincenzo Anastagi painted in Italy. “Frick is deeply interested in it,” Carstairs wrote Knoedler. “I showed it to him in its dirty state and it was shipped yesterday for [the restorer] De Wild to put in order.” In November, Frick bought the El Greco for $125,000.

  Six months later, in May 1914, Frick sailed again to Eu­rope. In London, Carstairs had plenty of ­pictures, including J. M. W. Turner’s vast Cologne: Arrival of a Packet Boat: Eve­ning (Frick bought it for $150,000) and a Holbein portrait of Thomas Cromwell, which the dealer Hugh Lane was anxious to sell. The ­thirty-­eight-­year-­old ­Irish-­born Lane had made enough money trading Old Masters in London to assemble a collection of modern French paintings, one of the first in Britain. The nephew of Lady Gregory, found­er of Dublin’s Abbey Theater, Lane was a thin, pale aesthete with large round eyes, dark brown hair, and a dark mustache. In a portrait commissioned by his friends, John Singer Sargent emphasized Lane’s elegant fingers, holding a pair of gloves, while grasping the edge of his overcoat.

  Lane’s Holbein of Thomas Cromwell was dark and needed cleaning; the image of a scroll had been painted onto the blue background, and a restorer would have to remove it. Frick was “greatly impressed,” Carstairs wrote on May 26, “but seems to be quite cross with me for not having cabled him about it last year. I suppose he regrets having to give any additional money.” Frick already owned an arresting ­Holbein—Sir Thomas ­More—a ­half-­length portrait of Henry VIII’s chancellor and the Catholic martyr, which he had purchased two years before. By ­mid-­June, Frick was back in New York. “The Holbein is coming out very beautifully,” Carstairs wrote from London. “The table cloth is a beautiful emerald green, which places the man well behind the table, and that, together with the blue background, makes a wonderfully brilliant effect.” Lane, he claimed, now talked about asking 80,000 pounds (or $400,000) for the picture.

  Hans Holbein, the Younger, Thomas Cromwell, 1532–33. “Have option on Hugh Lane’s Holbein sixty thousand pounds cash,” Charles Carstairs cabled Henry Clay Frick in June 1914.

  On June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Bosnia, and Eu­rope seemed on the brink of war. Two days before, ­sixty-­seven of Arthur Grenfell’s pictures came onto the block at Christie’s. Earlier, an En­glish acquaintance sent Frick a list of the Grenfell lots, explaining that his “City friends” had a lien on the pictures and he was hoping they would “realize as much as they can.” In fact, Frick had met Arthur Grenfell several months before in New York, when he and a friend came to see his collection. Returning to En­gland on the Oceanic, Grenfell sent Frick a letter of thanks and offered to let him know if he got wind of any “masterpieces” in London.

  Hugh Lane had sold Arthur Grenfell most of his pictures, and at his auction the dealer spent 33,000 pounds on nine canvases, including Titian’s Man in a Red Cap, to prop up the prices. Altogether, the ­sixty-­seven pictures for which Grenfell had originally paid over 100,000 pounds went for less than half that sum. Later that year, Grenfell would declare bankruptcy, his debts running to over 1 million pounds. Suddenly pressed for cash himself, Hugh Lane quietly put some of his own paintings on the market, offering to Charles Carstairs Man in a Red Cap at cost, as well as Holbein’s Cromwell. On June 6, Carstairs cabled Frick about the Holbein:

  HAVE OPTION ON LANES HOLBEIN SIXTY THOUSAND POUNDS CASH UNTIL TOMORROW MORNING HE PAYING US COMMISSION TEN PERCENT THINK HE NEEDS MONEY TO PAY FOR HEAVY PURCHASES GRENFELL SALE.

  Frick fired back: “thanks not in market at present.”

  By now, Eu­ro­pe­ans had begun to withdraw gold from America. At the end of July, the stock exchanges in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York ­were shut down.

  The crisis in the markets drove James Dunn to let go of his pictures. On July 27 Dunn sent Frick a coded tele­gram asking if he would loan him 150,000 pounds against holdings of Lake Superior stock and paintings on which he had spent 100,000 pounds, with the right to “take any of [the] pictures at cost.” Three days earlier, Carstairs also wrote Frick about ­Dunn—the steady dealer acting as though the collector’s financial troubles ­were simply a matter of course: “I think our friend Dunn is ­hard-­up. Would it interest you to give him £15,000 and a commission of 10% to us for his Bronzino?” The Bronzino was a ­three-­quarter- ­length portrait of a pale young man in a doublet of black taffeta and velvet, looking every bit his part as a Medici prince. “It would certainly be an admirable picture for the mantel in your library,” Carstairs wrote. Before Frick replied, Carstairs and Gutekunst themselves bought the Bronzino and thirteen other Old Masters and modern canvases from Dunn.

  “Very sorry indeed to hear of Dunn’s condition,” Frick wrote on August 1, 1914. “Conditions are such at present that I think it wiser to take up some good securities that are selling very low rather than add to my collection of pictures.” Oblivious to the disaster about to befall Eu­rope, he concluded with news about his game of golf: “Myopia is in fine shape and I am playing daily.”

  PART THREE

  The Great War and

  the Picture Market

  CHAPTER IX

  “If This War Goes On, Many

  Things Will Be for Sale”

  Old Master Spoils

  On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Rus­sia and, two days later, on France. On August 4, Britain, allied to Belgium and France, declared war on Germany. By August 6, when Austria joined Germany against Rus­sia, World War I began.

  From France, Mary Cassatt kept Louisine Havemeyer abreast of the deteriorating situation. “Here the days pass with leaden feet,” she wrote on August 13. “May the battle in Belgium be a crushing defeat for Germany.” She had heard that “bomb throwing from aeroplanes is to be spared us. Otherwise,” she worried, “what would be left of the cities of Eu­rope.”

  Three months later, from her beloved Paris, she continued: “This is the saddest place, war and all its horrors the only subject.” Rumors flew. She had heard that “half the Brussels museum has been sent to Germany’a German Art Critic (!) has advised their stealing all works of Art. The Rubens’ at Maline are burnt! It is too sickening.” By December, Cassatt had moved south to a villa at Grasse, near Nice. “The great Rus­sian victory I had so counted on is not to be. Yet, for the Germans have cut through that line & escaped.”

  Upon the outbreak of hostilities, Henry James fathomed what lay ahead, calling it “the plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness.” He saw the war as sh
ifting the perception of the recent past. It “is a thing that so gives away the ­whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with what­ever abatement, gradually bettering.” Now, in James’s view, the recent past revealed itself as the “treacherous years.” Riding the crest of those years was the market for Old Master paintings.

  With the war, communication and transportation between the combatant countries stopped, and international trade came to a halt. “Ev­erything is at a stand still ­here—” Charles Carstairs reported from London. “Finances, exchange, and everything gone to pot. I don’t know what will be the outcome.” The Duveens shut their galleries in Paris and London. Without sales, the Knoedler dealers felt acute financial pressure and hoped that the British moratorium on payments would allow them to extend a large loan.

  Otto Gutekunst and his partner Gustave Mayer, an American who had joined the firm in 1911, took steps to distance themselves from their German names and created a letterhead to prove their loyalty to Britain. On Colnaghi’s stationary, below the name “O. C. H. Gutekunst,” they printed the name of the German town where Gutekunst had been born and the details of his British citizenship: “Wertemberg—Denationalized 1889, Naturalized 1893.” (Despite the nod to xenophobia, Gutekunst would later be interned in En­gland as an enemy alien.) On September 23, Berenson, who was in Britain, begged Henry Duveen in New York to pay him 10,000 pounds the moment the moratorium was over, or he would “be threatened with bankruptcy.” On October 10 he wrote again, filled with “despair,” demanding that the Duveens send him money.

  Fearing for the safety of fragile Old Master paintings in the London gallery, Carstairs decided to send Knoedler’s most valuable canvases—two Goyas, the Bronzino Medici Prince, and the Bellini St. ­Francis—to New York. A month after the declaration of war, the National Gallery’s director Charles Holroyd reported to the museum’s board that he had put “50 pictures of supreme importance in the cellars for security.”

  Despite the art trade’s slowdown, the war, like others before it, caused an upheaval in the possession of ­art—forcing paintings out of the hands of those trapped in the crossfire. In applying for a bank loan in 1915, Carstairs pointed out the disturbing truth that warfare had traditionally created a buyers’ market for bystanders and victors. “En­gland acquired her great Masterpieces during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and now America’s opportunity has come.”

  In New York, Henry Clay Frick, by accident and planning, was positioned to capitalize on the paintings let loose by the Eu­ro­pe­an war. Frick was ­sixty-­five and if his field of operation was now primarily the private realm (he was a member of several corporate boards), he was no less terrifying a figure and kept his dealers on their toes. The dealer René Gimpel who met him in New York thought he resembled “an old Scotsman, with a white beard, cut just so, to the fraction of an inch, and washed with white soap. His suit always looks new.” His appearance was as immaculate as ever and his gaze as steady. “His features are so regular, his face so pleasant that he seems benevolent,” wrote Gimpel, “but just at certain moments you see and comprehend that you are mistaken, that his head is there, placed on that body, for his triumph and your defeat.” When in November 1915 the ­eighty-­year-­old Peter Widener died, Frick had the good fortune to be the last major American art collector of his generation left in the market.

  A creature of habit, Frick spent long summers in his Prides Crossing mansion on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. From there, he viewed the conflict on the other side of the ocean with detachment and malaise. Like many Americans, he thought the war inevitable and didn’t envision the horror that would ensue. (“This war, of course, is a terrible thing, but I presume it is just as well to have this trouble in Eu­rope.”) He also had a distraction. In 1912, he hired the architect Thomas Hastings to design a mansion on the Lenox Library site, where he would display his stockpile of Old Masters and live out his life. By now, the Pittsburgh tycoon had learned his way in matters of taste, absorbing the lessons of restraint, old money, and ­aristocracy—lessons taught not only in Europe but in the neoclassical aesthetic of Morgan’s new library. The limestone house rose three tall stories and ran the entire length of a Fifth Avenue block. Along ­Seventy-­first Street, Frick erected a ­hundred-­foot picture gallery. In 1913, the Armory Show rattled New York with the modernism of Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, but Frick’s ­house with its round arches and fluted columns, its echoes of Ancient Greece and Rome and Re­nais­sance Italy, kept the twentieth century at ­bay. The ­industrial-­age palace triumphantly took shape in New York, against the distant backdrop of a Eu­rope going up in flames.

  Frick returned to New York from Paris on June 5, 1914, and ­immediately went to see his new ­house. “I found [it] had progressed marvelously,” he told Roland Knoedler. “The picture gallery is going to be a dream; I like its proportions im­mensely.” Frick stayed in Prides Crossing waiting for the ­house to be finished; Charles Carstairs came from London to hang the collection. At the gallery’s far end Carstairs placed the two Veronese allegories. Over the mantel, he set Frick’s most expensive ­picture—the Velázquez Philip IV in his alluring red military jacket—and on either side other Spanish pictures: a Goya portrait and El Greco’s St. Jerome as a Cardinal. In the hall, the dealer placed the enormous, luminous Turner Cologne and another Turner, The Harbor of Dieppe, one of James Dunn’s paintings. Carstairs hoped that the empty wall space would prompt Frick to keep not only the Turner but five other Old Masters, which came from Dunn and Grenfell, including Bellini’s St. Francis, for which the dealer found a “wonderful place.” To Gutekunst, he expressed his thanks and acknowledged the contribution made by the London dealer to the New York collection. “The gallery looks superb,” he wrote. “The far end is held up by the 2 fine Veronese and the other end has the Velasquez [sic] over the mantel. Do you see you ­were very much identified with its appearance and character? Mr. Frick as you know, is a smart man and thoroughly appreciated the traces and character of our band.” Inextricably bound together, Frick’s mansion and his art together would form a monument that reshaped his legacy, trumping the image in the public mind and perhaps in his own, of his brutal ascent in coke and steel, and securing his place in the line of artistocratic collectors that stretched back to the Medici.

  Carstairs had still not persuaded Frick to take the Bellini, when he heard from London that the collector had competition. “I saw Lockett Agnew, who told me that the govs of the National Gallery had been asking about our Bellini,” Knoedler’s Frederick Menzies wrote on November 16. “He had talked it up to them and also told them he was interested in it.” Carstairs replied by cable that Frick lacked enough enthusiasm to reserve the Bellini: “bellini free price to ng 55k pounds’think clay interest.”

  In a matter of days, Menzies wrote back that Charles Holroyd “was going to put it before the governors who ­were having a meeting today.” He asked Carstairs to return the Bellini to London. “He [Holroyd] gave me to understand that the NG ­were quite in a financial position.’I am glad to hear Frick interested as the fact that the National Gallery contemplates buying the picture may influence him to close.”

  On November 16, 1914, his mansion still unfinished and furniture yet to arrive, Frick and the family moved in. Two days later, Carstairs explained to Lockett Agnew that he had decided to keep the St. Francis in New York. “The place where we want to hang this is not ready,” Carstairs wrote. “He [Frick] is quite capable however of purchasing it [at] any moment, and I therefore cabled our London ­house not to tie it up.”

  Frick had always considered works of art as investments. Now, thanks to the war, he began to rake in the sort of bargains he had constantly sought, and these paintings would transform his collection. On December 4, 1914, from Carstairs, who noted things ­were “very quiet,” he made a bulk purchase of six ­nineteenth-­century pictures, including Turner’s The Harbor of Dieppe and three others once owned by James Dunn. Carstairs had wanted
$475,000, but Frick paid only $441,000, and in the form of 7,230 shares of Pennsylvania Railroad stock at $65.20 a share. Carstairs had little choice but to agree. He evaluated the pictures in the list he sent to Frick:

  A Woman’s Portrait by Goya for $45,000

  The Forge by Goya for $125,000

  The Bridge by Maris for $54,000

  A View of Dieppe by Turner for $175,000

  The Bull Fight by Manet for $13,500

  The Dancers by Degas for $45,000

  Frick acknowledged the railroad securities might fall. “It may probably look a little small that I could not concede your request to make this 7500 shares,” he wrote. “But I really doubt the wisdom of making a purchase of pictures at this time, and do so rather reluctantly. It is most difficult to tell what the future has in store for us, and at present it seems to me that pictures will decline rather than advance in value.” He protected Carstairs from total loss by agreeing to take back the railroad stock on January 20, 1916, at fifty dollars a share. Frick was articulate in his defense of the investment. “When business revives, Pennsylvania will make enormous earnings; their rates are high enough, what they need is volume of business, and if you hold this stock it seems to me you are bound to realize ere long the full price for your pictures.” The price of the Maris Bridge, which he had purchased in 1906 for $75,000 and returned to Knoedler two years later for a credit, fell by almost 30 percent.