Old Masters, New World
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15 “first-rate genius”: Henry James, “The Metropolitan Museum’s ‘1871 Purchase,’” 1872, in James, The Painter’s Eye, 52.
16 “bewildered the viewer”: William Cullen Bryant, in Howe, I, 107,108.
16 “laborious people”: Joseph C. Choate, in Tomkins, Merchants, 16.
17 “patron of the fine arts”: HGM, MMA Annual Report, 1888, 414.
17 “pure and applied”: George Fiske Comfort, in Tomkins, Merchants, 30.
17 treasures to come: Ibid., 35.
17 “world’s masters”: Joseph C. Choate, ibid., 23.
18 “of the High Renaissance”: Jaynie Anderson, “National Museums, the Art Market and Old Master Paintings,” Kunst und Kunsttheorie, 1400–1900, ed. Peter Ganz (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrossowitz, 1991), 375.
18 Franco-Prussian War: Katharine Baetjer, “Buying Pictures for New York: The Founding Purchase of 1871,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 39 (2004), 167, 177.
18 gullible Americans: Ibid., 163, 164.
18 “other works of art”: MMA Annual Report, May 1872, 20.
18 “nineteenth century painting”: Roger E. Fry, “Ideals,” 58.
18 “acquire the best”: HGM to CWD, August 16, 1882, MMA, EP.
19 “will be proud”: J. Alden Weir, in Dorothy Weir Young, The Life & Letters of J. Alden Weir (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 159.
19 “I would get in time”: HGM to J. Alden Weir, ibid., 160.
19 “than go to heaven”: William Merritt Chase, quoted in H. Barbara Weinberg, “Late-Nineteenth-Century American Painting: Cosmopolitan Concerns and Critical Controversies,” Archives of American Art Journal, 23, no. 4 (1983), 19.
19 “cultural arena”: Ibid.
19 “should be encouraged”: Richard Morris Hunt, in Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 15.
20 American art: Ernest Knaufft, “Henry G. Marquand as an American Art Patron,” American Review of Reviews, 27 (January–June, 1903), 172.
20 Henry Gurdon Marquand: For HGM biography, see: The National Cyclopedia of American Biography VIII, ed. Ainsworth R. Spofford (New York, 1898), 390. Dictionary of American Biography XII, ed. Dumas Malone (New York, 1933), 292–93.
20 their own ships: George Barton Cutten, Silversmiths of Georgia (Savannah, GA: Oglethorpe Press, 1998), 89. See Deborah Dependahl Waters, “Silver Ware in Great Perfection: The Precious Metal Trades in New York City,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, eds. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 355–75.
20 rivers on either side: Edgar Allan Poe, “Doings in Gotham, Letters III and V,” 1844, in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, eds. Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 199.
20 “suburb”: Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835, in Jackson and Dunbar, Empire City, 178.
21 “brother’s store”: Excerpts from HGM Diary, 1832, private collection.
21 “New England notions”: HGM, 1891, in Tomkins, Merchants, 77–78.
21 “once in ten years”: Philip Hone, May 1, 1939, in Ric Burns and James Sanders, New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 76.
22 “farewell”: Excerpts from HGM Diary, June 6, June 7, November 1842.
22 “aspirations”: E. A. Alexander, “Mr. Henry G. Marquand,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 94 (March 1897), 563. For Henry Kirke Brown, see Thayer Tolles, “Modeling a Reputation: The American Sculptor and New York City,” in Voorsanger and Howat, eds., Art and the Empire City, 135–67.
22 “suffer but to enjoy”: Henry James, Roderick Hudson (first published 1875), ed. Geoffrey Moore (London: Penguin Group, 1986), 342.
23 larger than Europe’s: Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 743.
23 “New York he knew”: Harper’s Monthly, 1856, quoted in Burns and Sanders, 71.
23 in the Western Hemisphere: The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 923.
25 “under that head”: HGM to Richard Morris Hunt, October 7, 1885, Allan Marquand Papers, Princeton University Library.
25 private “museums”: See Danielle O. Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 29 (1994), 151–81.
25 “well-painted Madonna”: Max Liebermann, quoted in Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 87.
26 “ready to part with”: Frederick Methuen to H. Herbert Smith, May 12, 1886, MMA, EP.
26 “in an embassy”: Voltaire, in Corsham Court (Wiltshire: privately printed, 1993), 25.
26 relentless collectors of art: Frank Herrmann, The English as Collectors (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1972), 3–5.
26 rapid rate: See Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
27 Alnwick Castle: Francis Haskell, “The British as Collectors,” Treasure Houses, 51.
27 “with their guineas”: Gustave Waagen, in Herrmann, 148.
27 quantities of pictures: Herrmann, 6, 365. Brian Allen, “England, XIII, Collecting and Dealing,” The Dictionary of Art (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 1996), 10, 365.
27 “hottest time of the war”: Anna Jameson, “Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art,” London, 1844, in Herrmann, 14n1.
27 “price levels”: William N. Goetzmann, “Accounting for Taste,” American Economic Review, 83, no. 5 (1993), 1373.
27 “with the Louvre”: Théophile Thoré, in Brian Allen, “England,” 10, 367.
28 “painted for them”: Henry James, “The Picture Season in London,” Galaxy 24, 24 (July 1877), in Haskell, Ephemeral Museum, 78.
28 pair of Claudes: Rembrandt’s Man in an Oriental Costume was sold to William K. Vanderbilt, who bequeathed it to the Metropolitan in 1920. Rubens’s David and Abigail ended up in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
28 financial crisis: David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 8, 9, 92–93.
28 political power: Ibid., 39–43.
29 [National Gallery’s] board: Methuen to Smith, May 12, 1886, MMA, EP.
29 “do his best” for the paintings: Ibid.
29 “make me an offer”: Smith to CWD, May 16, 1886. MMA, EP.
30 “sale in hand”: Lawrence Alma-Tadema to HGM, July 7, 1886, Allan Marquand Papers, Princeton University Library.
30 Sargent: See Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
30 Frank Millet: See H. Barbara Weinberg, “The Career of Francis Davis Millet,” Archives of American Art Journal, 17, no. 1 (1977), 2–18.
31 “necessity of selling”: CWD to HGM, July 16, 1886, MMA, EP.
31 “care to sell”: Smith to CWD, July 21, 1886, MMA, EP.
31 “put on it”: CWD to HGM, July 22, 1886, MMA, EP.
32 for himself: CWD to HGM, July 23, 1886, MMA, EP.
32 James Stuart: See Brown and Vlieghe, Van Dyck, 257–59. Arthur K. Wheelock, “James Stuart,” in Van Dyck (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 259–60.
34 “superstition and despotism”: John Lothrop Motley, History of the United Netherlands (New York: Harper, 1866–68), vol. 1, xxii.
34 “inexhaustible inventiveness”: Walter A. Liedtke, Anthony van Dyck (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 37.
34 American collectors: Walter Liedtke, “The Havemeyer Rembrandts,” in Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, et al., Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), 65.
34 “any bargain”: HGM to CWD, October 5, 1886, MMA, EP.
35 a commission: Ibid.
35 importing works of art: Kimberly Orcutt, “Buy
American? The Debate over the Art Tariff,” American Art, 16, no. 3 (Autumn 2007), 82.
35 “in funds”: Methuen to Smith, undated letter, 1886, MMA, EP.
35 Masaccio: These paintings have been reattributed: the Lucas van Leyden (An Unidentified Scene) to Jorg Breu the Younger; Rubens’s Portrait of a Man to van Dyck; the Masaccio to Fra Filippo Lippi.
36 “where they are going”: HGM to CWD, October 12, 1886, MMA, EP.
36 “the country”: George Boughton to HGM, November 6, 1886, MMA Archives.
36 “afternoons”: Frank T. Robinson, “Van Dyck’s Masterpiece,” Boston Evening Transcript, January 29, 1887.
36 “intelligence”: Ibid.
37 “2 or 3 days”: HGM to CWD, October 25, in Ormond and Kilmurray, Early Portraits, 199.
37 “dignement”: Henry James to Henrietta Reubell, April 1, 1888, ibid.
37 “van Dyck of the period”: Auguste Rodin from the Daily Chronicle, May 16, 1902, ibid., 150.
37 “thank you”: John Singer Sargent to HGM, March 18, [no year given], Marquand papers, Princeton University Library, ibid., 199.
37 Water Pitcher : Alexander, “Mr. Henry G. Marquand,” Harper’s, 568. See Walter Liedtke, Vermeer and the Delft School (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 379–81. Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 877–80.
38 Gabriel Metsu: Ben Broos, “un celebre Peijntre nomme Verme[e]r,” Johannes Vermeer, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art and the Hague: Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, 1995), 55, 56, 47. Lord Powerscourt had sold Young Woman with a Water Pitcher to Agnew’s; it then went to the Paris dealers Stephan Bourgeois (of Bourgeois Frères), and Charles Pillet, 146–50.
38 American collectors: See Walter Liedtke, “Dutch Paintings in America: The Collectors and Their Ideals,” B. P. J. Broos, Great Dutch Paintings from America (The Hague: Mauritshuis; San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1990–1991), 14–59.
39 “art of describing”: Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xx.
39 forebears: John Lothrop Motley, in Oliver Holmes, John Lothrop Motley (Boston and New York: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879), 89.
40 “without condition”: HGM to MMA trustees, January 10, 1889, MMA Archives.
40 “whole country”: Alexander, “Mr. Henry G. Marquand,” Harper’s, 566, 562.
40 “all the world”: Alfred Trumble, The Collector, III, February 15, 1892, 81.
40 “fashion over there!”: Humphrey Ward to HGM, in Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” 176n8.
40 academic discipline: For early art history, see James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 90.
40 Marquand’s own son Allan: See Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, The Eye of the Tiger: The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883–1923 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
40 “on the continent”: Wilhelm von Bode, “Alte Kunstwerke in den Sammlungen der Vereinigten Staaten,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, 6 (1895), 16, 17.
41 “good taste”: Bode, in Quodbach, “Versailles,” 60.
41 “pictures systematically”: Bode, “Alte Kunstwerke,” 13.
41 “controls Mr. Marquand”: Hiram Hitchcock in Tomkins, Merchants, 81.
42 “in the Museum”: Everett Fahy, “How the Pictures Got Here,” in From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, eds. Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 65.
42 “double portrait”: Keith Christiansen, “Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement,” in From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, ed. Keith Christiansen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milan: Edizioni Olivares; New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 150.
43 “snatch his monument”: Morrison H. Heckscher, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Architectural History, MMA Bulletin (Summer 1995), 33.
43 at the Louvre: “Rearrangement of a Picture Gallery at the Museum,” MMA Bulletin 1, no. 5 (April 1906), 69; and “Recent Changes in the Gallery,” MMA Bulletin, 1, no. 6 (May 1906), 87.
43 “serious attention”: Roger E. Fry, “Ideals of a Picture Gallery,” 59. For the plan, see Flaminia Gennari Santori, “ ‘European Masterpieces’ for America,” Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art, ed. Christopher Green (London: Courtauld Institute of Art in association with Merrell Holberton, 1999), 107–18.
43 “Marquand Gallery”: MMA Bulletin, 6, no. 1 (January 1911), 4.
CHAPTER II. “C’EST MON PLAISIR”
45 “the best terms”: BB to ISG, August 1, 1894, Letters, 39.
46 “for fr. 29,000”: John Lowell Gardner, Diary, Monday, December 5, 1892, ISGMA.
46 “between 150 and 200 thousand!”: Ralph W. Curtis to ISG, August 12, 1892, ISGMA.
47 “only like him”: ISG to BB, February 19, 1900, Letters, 205.
47 “vulgar millionaire”: BB to ISG, January 14, 1900, ibid., 201.
47 “need apply”: ISG to BB, December 2, 1895, ibid., 43.
49 “private musicale”: Greta, “Art in Boston: The Sargent Portrait Exhibition,” The Art Amateur: Devoted to Art in the Household 18.5 (April 1888), 110, quoted in “Documents,” Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, “Mrs. Gardner’s Renaissance,” Fenway Court (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1990–91), 26.
49 “thin and shadowy”: BB to MB, September 1897, in Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson, The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 286.
49 “New York foreigner”: ISG to BB, December 19, 1904, Letters, 354.
49 “Madonna with a Halo”: Henry James to Miss Reubell, February 22, 1888, Houghton Library, Harvard University, b MS Am 1094 [1074], in Ormond and Kilmurray, The Early Portraits, 210.
49 ropes of pearls: See Brandt, “Mrs. Gardner’s Renaissance,” 25.
50 as a collector: Ibid., 10. “Mrs. Gardner’s Venetian palace was and remains her self-image in the persona of a great Renaissance patroness of the arts,” 11.
50 “models to have enjoyed”: Ibid., 12.
50 “her every action”: Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 188. Kathleen D. McCarthy observes that “her motto’flew in the face of the notion of female self-sacrifice,” Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 161.
50 cosmopolitanism: For ISG, see Carter, Gardner; Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1965).
51 “comfort and luxury”: Julia Gardner to Mrs. Catherine Gardner, October 8, 1859, in Carter, Gardner, 19–20.
51 “people condemned to them”: Henry James to ISG, from Lamb House, Rye, February 2, 1899, ISGMA.
51 “health & gaiety as I last saw him”: Ibid.
51 “the natural result”: Henry Higginson to ISG, May 28, 1919, ISGMA.
51 “to rejoice as myself”: ISG to Julia Gardner, February 28, 1859, in Carter, Gardner, 17.
51 “visits to the seals”: ISG to BB, August 14, 1896, Letters, 62.
51 stillborn baby boy: Orders for Internment, Mount Auburn Cemetery Historical Collections, Cambridge, MA.
52 “inward fire”: ISG Journal, in Carter, Gardner, 38.
52 “poor dear Joe”: ISG Journal, July 16, 1874, ibid., 45.
52 “wittiest man”: Class of 1882. Harvard College, Sixth Report of the Secretary, 1882–1907 (Cambridge, MA: Privately Published, 1890), 75–76. John Jay Chapman in Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 120.
53 “im
mortalize you”: Henry James to ISG, January 29, [1880], ISGMA.
53 “her motto of C’est mon Plaisir ”: Leon Edel, Henry James, A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 258.
53 “a palace of art”: Henry James, The Golden Bowl (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 143.
53 “of the Roman Empire”: Henry James, notebook, July 15, 1895, in Clara Kozol, “Henry James and Mrs. Gardner: A New Perspective,” Fenway Court (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1972), 9.
53 “in the public’s face”: John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera (1871–84), ed. Dina Birch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 265.
53 “outside anecdotal interest”: James McNeill Whistler, in Margaret F. MacDonald, “Whistler: Painting the Man,” Margaret F. MacDonald, Susan Grace Galassi, and Aileen Ribeiro, Whistler, Women, & Fashion (New York: The Frick Collection, 2003), 8.
53 “to be signed, you know!”: ISG to Whistler, December 4, 1892, in Eye of the Beholder: Masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, eds. Alan Chong, Richard Lingner, and Carl Zahn (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2003), 199.
54 promote himself and his work: MacDonald, “Painting the Man,” 5–14.
54 “to anybody else!” John Singer Sargent to ISG, August 29, 1895, in Chong, et al., Eye, 196.
54 “summer afternoon!”: Whistler to ISG, December [1892], ISGMA.
54 “in all times”: “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock Lecture,” February 20, 1895, The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler 1855–1903, eds. Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort, and Nigel Thorp (University of Glasgow, online edition, 2003–07).
54 “a good beginning”: ISG to Charles Eliot Norton, July 12, 1888, M S Am 1088 (2494), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
55 “off we started again”: ISG Journal, in Carter, Gardner, 70.
55 “portraits of Doges”: Henry James to Catherine Walsh, (Venice), June 16, [1887], in Henry James, Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (London: Pushkin Press, 1998), 95.
55 “sinking into the lagoon”: John Lowell Gardner to Theodore F. Dwight, July 5, 1892, in Carter, Gardner, 128.
55 “Exactly like me”: ISG to Joseph Linden Smith, November 4, 1894, in Chong et al., Eye, 215.