With Goya’s The Forge, Manet’s The Bull Fight, and Degas’s Dancers (The Rehearsal), Frick broke from his usual pattern—these modern images adding substance and seriousness to a collection dominated by English portraits. The Forge was a six-foot canvas, painted in the early nineteenth century, where Goya focused on three laborers who struggle to work molten metal at an anvil. Seen from the back, the central figure swings a long hammer over his head, aiming for the anvil over which the two others bend. His gray and white shirt with its rolled-up sleeves is as complex and eloquent a passage of paint as any that Goya had applied to evoke the more sumptuous clothing of aristocrats. Certainly Frick saw steel-making as a heroic enterprise, but the respect for the iron workers conveyed by Goya’s ennobling image seemed at odds with the history of the strikebreaking collector, who may not have seen the irony.
Frick quickly countered the avant-garde notes by adding three full-length van Dycks—Paola Adorno in 1914, Anne, Countess of Clanbrassil in 1917, and Sir John Suckling in 1918 to the four van Dycks he already owned. (“Owing to war losses” the Earl of Denbigh, who was serving in the British Army in Egypt, sought a “private purchaser” for Anne, Countess of Clanbrassil, according to the agent who wrote Frick about the painting in May 1916.) In 1917, Frick acquired his fourth (and second full-length) Gainsborough of Jane Clitherow, Mrs. Peter William Baker, a portrait of a young woman with towering powdered hair walking outdoors in a long gold satin dress.
During the course of the war, Frick also extended his line of grand-manner portraits into the industrial age by purchasing four full-lengths by James McNeill Whistler—Arrangement in Brown and Black: Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder; Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux; Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, and Arrangement in Black and Gold—whose subject was the French dandy Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, dressed in white tie. Frick could now display 350 years of English portraiture, starting with subjects from the reign of Henry VIII and ending with portraits of his own contemporaries. The presence of Mrs. Frances Leyland, depicting the dark-haired wife of a Liverpool shipowner, whom Whistler painted in the early 1870s when Frick was starting out in the coke industry, underlined the absence, among his two-dozen female portraits, of any image of the reclusive Adelaide Frick.
By the beginning of 1915, the Knoedler dealers needed capital. On February 11, they wrote to Lewis L. Clarke, president of the American Exchange Bank, explaining their intent to borrow $200,000 from each of three banks in order to weather the current depression, which had forced smaller galleries out of the market: “We feel that the present crisis will give us opportunities to buy abroad, and that this country will benefit tremendously in the pictures it will be able to acquire.”
Even as he proposed building Knoedler’s inventory, Carstairs had failed to sell two major paintings—Bellini’s St. Francis and Hugh Lane’s Holbein of Thomas Cromwell. Lane was struggling to stay afloat. He “was in here [at Knoedler] nearly every day worrying me to know if we were going to help him,” and “very upset as he hadn’t heard from you,” a London assistant wrote Carstairs. Lane was planning to travel to New York soon to testify at a trial in a case involving the valuation of paintings. But meanwhile without Carstairs’s knowledge, he authorized someone else in New York—Alice Creelman, the widow of the American journalist James Creelman—to sell his pictures. On the morning of April 2, Creelman visited Frick’s house, and that afternoon she wrote him a note about “a small collection of wonderful paintings belonging to a little man’ruined by the war and [who] must part with them or go bankrupt.” She mentioned a “beautiful Titian’and a superb Holbein.” Soon after, she offered Frick the Holbein (Thomas Cromwell) for $300,000. A week later, she dropped the price to $290,000, and a day after that to $225,000, claiming that she would sell the canvas with the Titian together for $365,000. Before Creelman acknowledged that Hugh Lane owned the paintings, Frick must have already guessed. She failed to mention to Lane that her New York buyer was Frick.
If Lane betrayed Carstairs in turning to Creelman, Frick also went behind his dealer by agreeing to buy paintings from her. Across Creelman’s April 10 letter, Frick scribbled a note: “Told her $215,000 net” to have the Holbein delivered to him in New York and to pay a commission of $10,000 (less than 5 percent) to “her & friend.” Frick instructed Bankers Trust to pay her only after he had been shown the Holbein “in order that I may satisfy myself that it is the one I saw in London and which was cleaned by Dr. De Wilt [sic] of Knoedler & Company.” Frick also agreed to buy Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap.
When Lane arrived in New York, he realized that his double-dealing had caught up to him. “I congratulate you on your bargains,” he wrote Frick from the Saint Regis Hotel. “But I must confess that I am angry’as there is no reason why we should not have done the deal direct!”
Hugh Lane’s brief visit to New York would have a tragic conclusion. He stayed only a week and a half, spending his last evening with Frick. On May 1, he headed back to England on the Lusitania. Six days later, a German torpedo struck the Cunard liner off the coast of Ireland and within eighteen minutes the ship had gone down. Hugh Lane was among the passengers lost. (“No news has been received of poor Sir Hugh. It looks hopeless,” Creelman wrote Frick, immediately jumping to the subject of the pictures. “I hope you have received the Red Cap Titian.”) Lane’s death further slashed the prices of his Old Masters. In the end, for both the Holbein and the Titian, Frick paid $315,000. On May 14, Duveen cabled Berenson in Italy about Frick’s Titian. “If Frick does not want to keep it, I would strongly urge you to take it for yourselves, if, as you tell me, he paid relatively little for it,” Berenson replied. He was curious about the price: “Was it under £10, 000 [$50,000]?”
A year into the war, Carstairs in London told Frick that “business is absolutely stagnant here, but, curiously enough no one seems to have pictures of importance for sale.” He concluded: “I presume everyone is waiting until the war is over.”
In New York, Jack Morgan began to disperse his father’s collection. Early in 1914, he agreed to let the Metropolitan Museum exhibit some 4,000 of Pierpont Morgan’s acquisitions, including 39 tapestries, 260 Renaissance bronzes, 550 works of enamel, 900 miniatures, and over 50 Old Master pictures. The vast exhibition filled thirteen galleries and well served to promote the parts of the art inheritance that Jack wanted to sell. “It may well be doubted whether even he [Pierpont Morgan] realized what a bewildering abundance of splendid objects he had accumulated,” wrote the Metropolitan’s director, Edward Robinson, “or what a display they were capable of making.” In 1916, Jack Morgan gave the museum the Colonna Madonna. The following year, he turned over some 7,000 objects (from some 17,000) to the museum—most of them pieces of sculpture and decorative arts—including his father’s Medieval collection. Morgan’s gift would be one of the largest in the museum’s history. Among the paintings he gave were Gerard ter Borch’s Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid and Metsu’s The Visit to the Nursery, from the Kann collection.
On January 10, 1915, Adelaide and Clay Frick met Joseph Duveen at the Morgan exhibition. If in the past Frick imitated Morgan as a collector, now he sought to acquire pieces that the banker had owned. According to René Gimpel, Duveen spotted the Knoedler dealers at the Morgan exhibition, standing in front of Fragonard’s famous Progress of Love—ten panels depicting courtship. Made originally for a mistress of Louis XV, the pale paintings decorated a room at 13 Princes Gate. Duveen told Gimpel that he said to himself, “Aha,” the Knoedler dealers “want to sell them to Frick.” The following morning he “hurried around to Morgan’s,” and bought the Fragonard panels for around $1 million; by March 1, he sold them to Frick for $1.25 million—the highest price the tycoon ever paid for a work of art. (He would add $45,000 for frames and moldings required to install the Fragonards in a room in the new house.) By inse
rting an allegorical confection from France’s ancien régime in the midst of English and Dutch portraits and landscapes, Frick refashioned his collection to more closely follow Morgan’s aristocratic model.
Frick also asked Jack if he would sell his father’s most celebrated English portraits—Reynolds’s Lady Delmé and Her Children and Lawrence’s Elizabeth Farren. “I would like very much to have two full-lengths for my dining room,” Frick explained. Uncharacteristically, he didn’t inquire about the price but volunteered “$500,000 prompt cash.” The large sum suggested Frick’s insatiable appetite for British art and his reluctance to treat a gentleman like Jack Morgan as he would have dealt with someone in the trade. Despite Frick’s generous terms, Jack held on to the pictures.
The Morgan collection proved a windfall to the Duveens. “We have had a tremendous season here—in fact the greatest in the history of the firm,” Joseph Duveen wrote Berenson from New York in July 1915. From the Duveens, Frick also bought quantities of Morgan’s decorative arts—$4.7 million worth of Chinese porcelains, Italian bronzes, majolica, and eighteenth-century furniture. Duveen’s sale of the eighteenth-century paintings to Frick was a cutting blow to Knoedler. “We were all very upset at seeing in all the papers that he [Frick] had bought the Morgan Fragonards from Duveen,” Frederick Menzies wrote Carstairs, “as I am afraid it will be such a good advertisement for them.”
By the spring of 1915, Carstairs had stored Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert for over a year at Knoedler in New York and he was increasingly anxious to turn the investment into cash. On May 14, 1915, Joseph Duveen cabled Berenson that Frick wanted his opinion on the Bellini landscape and that he had “advised Frick [to] purchase it saying you informed me it was great.” He added, “Should like cable from you which I can show him in enthusiastic praise this would please him.” Where twelve months earlier Carstairs had refused to let Frick have the Bellini for $200,000, he settled in early May for only $170,000, and then finally $168,000, because Frick paid with 367 shares of Columbia Trust Co. stock (at $460 a share). Since Arthur Grenfell had acquired the masterpiece in 1912, its price had fallen by a quarter. In a matter of days, Bernard Berenson got word that Frick had bought the Bellini. On May 16, from Settignano, he sent the cable that Duveen had requested.
CONGRATULATE FRICK BELLINI WHICH ONE MASTERPIECES ALL ITALIAN ART.
Arthur Grenfell had probably no idea that Frick had bought his Bellini and also his Titian—Man in a Red Cap. At the outbreak of the war, Grenfell, who was now forty-one and a father of five, had, like his brother Francis, joined the 9th Lancers, a cavalry division, which left for Belgium only weeks after the British mobilization. On November 1, 1915, after he had been in the trenches for over a year, he wrote Frick a remarkable and moving letter. Earlier they had met as fellow financiers and collectors, when Grenfell visited Frick’s collection in New York, but they no longer had much in common. To the English aristocrat trying to survive on a battlefield, New York must have seemed closer to the world he had once known in England than the wasteland where he found himself in Belgium. The reserved Englishman wrote with a disarming honesty that betrayed his despair. He recalled his visit to Frick: “I look back so often to the pleasure I had of meeting you & seeing your beautiful pictures that I felt I must write & tell you so. I suppose in times like these one’s emotions get stirred up & big things appeal to one.” Among these “big things” were “the really big pictures.”
The letter conveyed the horror with which Grenfell and his English contemporaries had to cope. “Poor Newton has been killed. You may remember he was with me’,” he told Frick. So had one of Grenfell’s brothers. In fact, he wrote, “Most of my friends have been killed or wounded.’One doesn’t see any sign of this Armageddon coming to an end. It has been a terrible war—the most savage & cold-blooded killing machine versus human nerves & endurance.”
Frick wrote back on November 29 a letter of some five sentences. He told Arthur Grenfell he “was aware of the sad loss” he had suffered and he extended his “deepest sympathy,” but he was insistently optimistic, revealing he hadn’t really understood the soldier’s message. “You are certainly having a most difficult time, but it seems to me that things are shaping up so that you will be able to put an end to this war before many months.”
By the end of 1915, Carstairs let Frick have two more paintings that once again expanded the dimensions of his collection—Bronzino’s Medici Prince and the early Netherlandish Deposition by Gerard David. The Bronzino cost only $72,000 and the small, exquisite David even less.
In 1914, again the meticulous, record-keeping Frick took an accounting of his collection. He had a list drawn up of his fifty-nine most important paintings—their names hammered out by assistants on a typewriter onto long sheets of paper. Of these, he had bought forty-six from Knoedler and five from Duveen.
A later typewritten statement made immediately clear the extraordinary purchases he had made in the early part of the war. In just thirteen months, between July 1914 and August 1, 1915, he had spent $843,316 on paintings at Knoedler.
The London banker and collector Arthur Morton Grenfell, an officer in the 9th Lancers, fought in Belgium in World War I.
Three years later, in May 1918, Frick again tallied his paintings, now compiling the number he had bought since 1910, and their prices. In those eight years, he calculated he had spent over $9 million—some $190 million in 2006 dollars—on pictures.
In any accounting of Frick’s collection, Charles Carstairs and Otto Gutekunst had an outstanding record. Of the dozens of Old Master pictures the dealers had persuaded him to buy, the identities of only a handful are questioned. Although neither had formal academic training in art, the dealers more than proved themselves as connoisseurs. Yet, the part they had played in forming Frick’s collection, vividly recorded in the stock books and letters of their galleries, remained invisible to the public eye and was largely forgotten.
CHAPTER X
The Feast of the Gods
Bellini and Titian’s Masterpiece Comes on the Market
In June 1916, Berenson sent a letter to Duveen in New York: “I write in tearing haste to tell you that I could procure you the Duke of Northumberland’s Bacchanal (painted by Giovanni Bellini & Titian).” He added: “Only it must be done very quietly and discreetly.” He warned the dealers to address their reply to him at Baring Bros. in London. “Italian censorship,” he explained, “communicates every word contained in letters about works of art to people from whom we have every right & interest to keep it secret from.”
What the Duveens replied isn’t certain, but three months later, on September 30, they questioned Berenson about the painting and in a cable to the firm in London he explained its significance as a work of art: It “ranks with Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus as among the few greatest imaginative creations of the Quattrocento and in my opinion America does not yet own [a] masterpiece comparable to it.” He advised them not to let “such a work fall into other hands.”
As Berenson knew, the Northumberland Bacchanal, or The Feast of the Gods, was legendary since its inception. Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists specifically mentioned the picture and claimed that Bellini had left it incomplete and that, after Bellini’s death, Titian had finished it. (In fact, Titian had repainted the background.) Spread across the strange but ravishing painting (as though in a frieze) are seventeen carefully characterized figures—most of them classical gods and goddesses, caught in distinctly human guise. They are dressed in greens, oranges, blues, reds, and countless other colors that Bellini created by spreading glazes, one upon another, and mixing ground glass into the paint to produce tones as luminous as stained glass. The subject is a bacchanal of classical divinities and a youthful company of male and female figures, eating and drinking and making erotic advances, some lost in their own thoughts and some gazing at the others. Bellini playfully signed the canvas by pai
nting his name onto the image of a piece of paper stuck to a wine barrel in its lower right corner.
The Feast of the Gods depicts revelry, debauchery, and seduction. The central figure is a handsome, intoxicated, but contemplative Mercury seated on the ground, staring across the clearing at a young woman who has fallen asleep. Although her body is covered in a white robe, she is essentially a “nude,” stretched out in the lower right of the canvas. The contours of her face are delicately inexact, breathing the airy atmosphere of the whole scene, which is full of movement, but oddly still. A young man leans over her, one of his hands raising the hem of her skirt. Between Mercury and the pale young woman are Jupiter, holding a cup to his mouth, a swarthy Pluto, and a peasantlike Apollo also imbibing. Besides the gods, who are identifiable by their traditional attributes (a helmet, an eagle, etc.), there are other figures—a child with a wreath on his head, two satyrs, and three standing young women, one carrying a blue and white porcelain bowl, from which to serve the feasting gods, yet also turning as though in the midst of a dance.
That the painting is difficult to read oddly increases the pleasure of looking. The eye moves from one figure to another, seeking clues, from a women in blue balancing a terra-cotta jar on her head, to the contoured blue stockings on the stretched-out legs of the youth in the foreground, to the glint on the silver rim of an overturned cup. Twilight and shadow, sky, trees, rocks, glass, metal, wood, grapes, a violin, drapery, flesh—Bellini showed he could paint them all.
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