The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Apparently the sixtyish newlyweds had not expected to become celebrities, but they were certainly that in Southern California. Sunset magazine, in a rapturous account of the house Henry had built for Arabella, described San Marino as “The most truly magnificent residence in the whole of California,” and Los Angeles breathlessly awaited the date when the Huntingtons would move in. They shortly returned from their European wedding trip, but they remained in the East while weeks turned into months. Each new trainload of furniture and art objects which arrived in Los Angeles from Joseph Duveen spurred new speculation that the Huntingtons were about to appear, but the couple remained elusive and the house stayed empty except for caretakers. Finally, in January of 1914, when the Huntingtons did arrive, their private car was met with such a raucous crowd of well-wishers and the merely curious that Arabella was actually frightened. For this reason, perhaps, they remained only a few weeks. Then they were off again, for somewhere else.

  Arabella clearly was not ready to commit herself to living in California. Nor would she ever be. For the rest of their lives she and Henry Huntington would limit their stays at San Marino to a month or so each year. Where Arabella led, it seemed, her adoring Henry followed. At the same time San Marino was becoming the main repository of their collective treasures.

  As collectors they had become a team which has probably never been surpassed. Henry, working through such celebrated book dealers as Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, concentrated on his rare volumes, and presently he was building another magnificent edifice just to house his library. Arabella, working largely through Duveen—though she also used other dealers, much to Duveen’s annoyance (he could actually turn threatening and abusive on the subject)—concentrated on art. Through Duveen she bought such celebrated works as Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. She was assembling one of the most important private art collections in the world, while he, according to Oscar Lewis, was turning San Marino into “one of the world’s most important storehouses of the literature and history of the English-speaking people.” Huntington once told Dr. Rosenbach that “the ownership of a fine library is the … surest way to immortality.” And when he died his library was “the largest ever gathered together by a single man in the United States.” It still is.

  James Maher describes the joint efforts of the Huntingtons this way: “If Arabella, in her great years as a collector-patron, became the American equivalent of Madame de Pompadour and Isabella d’Este, then Huntington must be accounted a latter-day Medici prince for his achievements in the Florentine humanist tradition.”

  Though Henry Huntington was totally serious about his collection and his bid for immortality, he also had a sense of humor. Dr. Rosenbach’s biographers, Edwin Wolff II and John F. Fleming, tell of a bedside incident when Huntington, in the hospital and about to undergo minor surgery, summoned both Rosenbach and Duveen to his room. Noting that there “was no love lost between these two giants,” the authors describe the following scene:

  When the nurse announced that Mr. Huntington was ready to see them, the two men soberly entered the room. Huntington lay on the bed in his hospital shirt, his head only slightly raised and his two arms extended. With a slight motion he pointed to chairs on either side of the bed.… The two dealers sat stiff in their chairs, looking at Mr. Huntington and each other and uttering words of encouragement in a manner … far from encouraging. Suddenly, Huntington, rather amused … turned to Duveen and asked, “Sir Joseph, do I remind you of anyone?” Nonplussed, Duveen answered, “Why, no, Mr. Huntington, I don’t believe so.” Then he turned his head toward Dr. Rosenbach. “Tell me, Doctor, do I remind you of anyone?” The Doctor, quite as much at a loss as Duveen, muttered that he really did not know. “Well, gentlemen,” said Henry Huntington, still lying flat with his arms outstretched, “I remind myself of Jesus Christ on the cross between the two thieves.” The Doctor and Sir Joseph smiled weakly.

  When Henry and Arabella were not collecting, they found time to prepare their joint wills. San Marino and its contents were to become the Huntington Art Museum. The library was to become the Huntington Library. A trust fund of $8,000,000 was set aside to provide an income to maintain these institutions, which, of course, remain two of the great cultural adornments of Southern California today.

  As she grew older, Arabella began losing her eyesight, and thick corrective lenses were prescribed. In 1924, when she was—if we are to believe the date on the Huntington Mausoleum—seventy-four, Oswald Birley was commissioned to paint both her and her husband’s portraits. According to Maher, Birley originally intended to paint a portrait of Arabella that the average wealthy society woman would want—that is, a kind and flattering one. But Arabella, whose eyesight was still sufficiently keen to recognize what Birley was up to, would have none of it. He was ordered to start over, and to paint her as she actually looked.

  At the Huntington Museum, where the Birley portrait hangs, it is possible to see the extent to which Birley followed her orders, and the result is both powerful and unnerving. Arabella’s height has already been noted, and even though Birley painted her three-quarter length, seated in a brocade chair, it is obvious that here is a woman of towering strength and determination. The years had added to Arabella’s girth, too, and here is a massive figure. The beauty of her youth is gone, though the chin, doubled and dewlapped, is still strong. The lips are pursed, unsmiling, arrogant, and her nostrils are flared in such a way as to suggest that she had just detected some unpleasant odor in the air. For her portrait she chose to dress all in black. A voluminous black dress covers her almost entirely, and her large white fingertips emerge from a pair of black lace half-mittens. Two strands of black beads descend across her bosom. Most extraordinary is her enormous black headdress, which rises in great folds of fabric above her head and falls in great cascades about her shoulders. The huge hat seems like a milliner’s interpretation of the headpiece of the Great Sphinx at Giza.

  Arabella’s face is dead-white, and apparently she insisted that Birley paint her with her glasses on. Behind the thick lenses and the heavy black frames her eyes gaze out balefully, challengingly, at the viewer: I dare you to come closer!

  Why, one wonders, did Arabella want to present herself to posterity in such an unattractive way? Was her final statement intended to be: Listen, most of the story of my life has been invention and deception, burying the facts, distorting the truth, and so now, at last, you can really see me as I am, as the tough and ruthless old woman I became? In the past, I have been dishonest. But I will give you honesty at the end.

  Perhaps. But perhaps not. Even at the end Arabella was an enigma, a woman who would not offer all the answers. Arabella died not long after the Birley portrait was completed, and her husband died three years later, in 1927. The answers lie buried with them at San Marino.

  Her near-blindness, for example. How much of that was fiction, how much of it was theatre, a device she employed, perhaps to gain attention, or to provide her with some inner source of amusement? Or did she find that a handicap offered a useful tool with which to further control and dominate her world?

  In Merchants of Art, Germain Seligman, a Paris art dealer from whom Arabella also bought, recalls a visit to his gallery in 1923, the year before her death.

  She had just dropped in to say hello, she said, as she was no longer in a buying mood and had everything she wanted to own. She was in her seventies by then, but still carried her unusual height with a splendid bearing. I seated her in one of the rooms opening onto the garden where we chatted for a while and then, with no other thought than to please her, I showed her a number of objects of a type which I knew she enjoyed, among them a delightful little marble Venus by Falconet. Looking at me somewhat reproachfully through thick-lensed glasses, she said, “You really shouldn’t go to so much trouble for me. You know my sight has become so bad that I can hardly see anything.” Whereupon she leaned forward for a closer look at the little figure, not over a foot high ov
erall, and exclaimed, “What a lovely thing. Isn’t it a shame that the little finger of the left hand is broken!” I couldn’t help bursting into laughter as I congratulated her upon her bad eyesight, for the whole hand was certainly not over half an inch long. Almost before I did she threw her head back in a hearty laugh.

  Just out of curiosity, she said, just because she liked to keep up with what the art market was doing, what was the price of the little Falconet?

  Seligman named a figure. Arabella bought it.

  21

  THE GRANDS MESSIEURS

  Rich Americans of the early twentieth century did not lay out great sums of money for art and culture without certain accompanying feelings of guilt. They might speak, reverentially, of being merely temporary “custodians” of their treasures for a one-day grateful public, but they privately admitted their own greedy longings for some sort of personal immortality. They might chauvinistically proclaim that it was American capitalism’s manifest destiny to claim the finest art from a decaying European aristocracy, and yet, at the same time, they were troubled by the suspicion that collecting art was, au fond, frivolous.

  Henry Frick, for example, after paying about $400,000 for Velásquez’ Philip IV of Spain, tried to rationalize the expense by explaining that Philip IV himself had paid Velásquez the equivalent of $600 for the portrait in 1645. Elaborately computing the interest at 6 percent between the year of the commission and 1910, the year he acquired it—as though the painting were like shares of General Motors stock—Frick could prove that the price he had paid amounted to pennies. Henry Huntington used the averaging system. To justify his paying Duveen $620,000 for Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Huntington would point out that for some of the paintings in his and Arabella’s collection they had paid only $5,000, and for others as little as $500. “When you average ’em all up, the price for each isn’t bad,” he said.

  Still, the new American millionaires were constantly under critical attack on both sides of the Atlantic. They and their wives were the subject of caustic cartoons and pious editorials in which they were accused of plundering and raping the great art collections of Europe just to decorate their own pompous mansions. (Even though the Europeans were welcoming the rapists with eagerly open arms, and begging them into their drawing rooms to admire the portraits of their ancestors.) Americans, without a fixed aristocracy, were accused of trying to invent one; deprived of noble or distinguished ancestors, they were trying to borrow them. Stung by the criticism, they responded defensively. What else but guilt, for example, could have goaded Mrs. Maria Hotchkiss—the widow of a munitions manufacturer whose fortune was based on an invention which had wonderfully refined the machine gun, which had wonderfully helped dispatch the lives of thousands of young men in several wars—into endowing a splendid school for boys in Lakeville, Connecticut?

  And all the time, helping to assuage the collective guilt of rich Americans, there was Joseph Duveen, who eventually became Lord Duveen of Millbank and whose considerable fortune was based on the discovery that Americans had a lot of money and Europeans didn’t. Behind every grande dame, it may already have been noted, there was usually a grand monsieur, and between 1886, when he embarked on his astonishing career at age seventeen, and 1939, the year of his death, that gentleman was apt to be Duveen.

  The way Duveen gained his reputation for impeccable taste and expertise is interesting. In addition to his you-deserve-beautiful-things approach, he also used the opposite technique. He would tell a prospective client that he or she was “not ready” for great art, and that “you must work your way up to it.” Not surprisingly, when a millionaire was told that he was not good enough to own an Old Master, he was frustrated, tantalized. Duveen would offer to start off the neophyte collector with something from what he literally or figuratively referred to as “my basement,” and that was usually a painting from the Barbizon School, for which Duveen had little use. Then, when the customer had become sufficiently educated by the Barbizon piece, Duveen would offer to buy it back and replace it with a Rembrandt or a Rubens. His Barbizon paintings circulated back and forth while he prepared his customers for bigger, better, and more expensive things.

  For years he refused to consider Detroit a fit city to house an art collection, until finally the newly rich automobile manufacturers Henry Ford and Horace Dodge had almost literally to come to him on bended knees, begging him to let them be his customers. He felt the same way about Pittsburgh, and Henry Frick had to move from there to his palace on Fifth Avenue in New York City before Duveen would consent to do business with him. Duveen’s methods of whetting appetites until they had reached insatiability were outrageous, and one of his more useful sales tools was his wife. Having acquired a particularly important painting, he would approach a prospective buyer and shake his head sadly, saying, “No, no, I am afraid that is not for sale. I know it is probably the finest Tintoretto in the world, but I have promised it to Elsie. I cannot disappoint her.” Up, up, up would go the offer, until finally Duveen agreed that he would have to break the terrible news to Elsie. (Actually, Lady Duveen had grown accustomed to entering a room and discovering that a painting she had grown quite fond of was gone.)

  When customers, as they occasionally did, complained about Duveen’s prices, his favorite riposte was, “My dear woman, when you are buying something that is priceless, no price is too high.” Another favorite saying was, “To fill a collection with paintings worth fifty thousand dollars each is easy. But to build a collection of paintings worth a quarter of a million each—that’s hard work!”

  To a special customer, such as Arabella Huntington, Duveen’s approach was a mixture of fawning servility and imperious command. When she traveled, Duveen took care of all her steamship and hotel reservations. He advised her on clothes, and often shopped for her. He helped select her jewels, and who knew what under-the-counter arrangements had been made with the jewelers into whose emporiums he directed her? If he didn’t care for the way she was wearing her hair, he would tell her so, and she would change it. Once, when she had bought a roomful of antique furniture from a rival dealer, she called in Duveen to pass judgment on it. He pronounced it inferior, and Arabella promptly telephoned the dealer and told him she was returning it. “It’s in the back yard,” she explained.

  In only one arena was Duveen not able to be much help to Arabella, and that was New York society. For one thing, her personal background was too shadowy and uncertain. For another, her husband Collis—whom Oscar Lewis has described as “scrupulously dishonest”—had made so many enemies that New York society did not want him in their houses. Arabella might live next door to the Vanderbilts, but she was never invited to their parties: Vanderbilt and Huntington were old and bitter railroad rivals. Down the street, Mrs. Astor also failed to give the nod—even, for many years, to the upstart Vanderbilts.

  Later, when Arabella became Mrs. Henry E. Huntington, she had made herself notorious—a curiosity, a side-show freak. After all, for an aunt to marry her nephew was more than merely uncommon; it was a social gaffe worse than belching at the dinner table. (Awareness that this might be society’s reaction may have been why Arabella put Henry off for as long as she did.)

  But in the ancient country homes and drafty castles of England, and in the damp palaces of Rome, Venice, and Paris, Duveen was able to serve Arabella well. He saw to it that she was entertained in splendid fashion by the aristocracy and landed gentry in Britain and on the Continent, where doors were flung open to her everywhere. One wonders, of course, whether Arabella ever suspected that her enthusiastic hosts and hostesses were really inviting her into their homes in hopes that she would spot something she might want to buy.

  There was, meanwhile, always a serious question as to how much Joseph Duveen actually knew about art. As a salesman, of course, he was a nonpareil, and he was a master of bluff and bluster. Once, at a gathering at the home of one of his important New York clients, to whom he had just sold a Dürer for several hundred thousand dollars,
Duveen was confronted with a young French art scholar, who had been taken in hand by the host’s daughter and proudly shown the Dürer. After studying the painting for several minutes, the young Frenchman whispered, “I don’t think this Dürer is the real thing.” To his horror, the young woman immediately turned to her father and told him that the Frenchman had declared the Dürer a fake. The shaken father then turned to Duveen. Duveen laughed his big, hearty laugh, and cried, “Oh, that is amusing. That really is terribly amusing. Do you realize, young man, that at least twenty other art experts, here and in Europe, have made the same mistake as you have, and have declared this painting not to be genuine? Oh, how amusing that you have been taken in too!” He had instantly made everyone in the room feel like artistic imbeciles, and presently the Frenchman was apologizing for his “mistake.” The rest of the evening, however, cannot have been very festive.

  On another occasion, during one of the many lawsuits which peppered his long career, Duveen was asked whether he was familiar with Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. “Of course I’ve heard of the picture,” he said, “but I’ve never actually seen it.” When it was pointed out to him that Ruskin was a writer—and an art critic, at that—not a painter, and that The Stones of Venice was a book, Duveen merely laughed again, and said that he had always thought that Ruskin was a painter, and not a very good one at that.

  Duveen loved lawsuits. He loved to sue other people, and he equally enjoyed being sued. For most of his life he was involved in at least one piece of litigation, if not several, at any time. His habit of publicly denouncing his competitors as charlatans and crooks, and of marching through their galleries shouting, “Fake! Trash! Garbage!” assured him of a steady stream of libel and defamation actions, which he seemed to relish as a kind of tonic in the day-to-day routine of selling. He also enjoyed suing, and being sued by, members of his own large and contentious family, most of whom seemed also to be in the art business, and each of whom periodically claimed that he was being tricked and cheated by the others. When Joseph Duveen’s art dealer father, Sir Joel Joseph Duveen, died in 1908 and left a $7,000,000 fortune to twelve children and a brother, Joseph quickly arranged to “borrow” his brothers’ and sisters’ inheritances in return for “shares” in the family business. From time to time Joseph would dole out a few thousand dollars to his siblings, but there were long periods when the others received no income at all from their investments. When they grumbled and complained, Joseph would laugh and say, “So sue me!” For the most part, since they knew he wanted to be sued, they didn’t sue.