The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  The movement of the Rape of Europa had pursued a historical path, passing from Venice to Spain, on to France, before coming to Britain. In each case its movement had followed the economic and political fortunes of the rising nation. In 1895 Dr Bode, representing a resurgent Germany, had tried and failed to buy the painting. Now it was to fall to a representative of the new economic super-power across the Atlantic, a woman who had spent many summers living in a palace in Venice and had acquired a passion for Venetian art. She was also busy creating one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings in North America. Her name was Isabella Stewart Gardner.

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  Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson and the Creation of her Museum

  Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of a breed of newly-rich American collectors who benefited from the economic boom the United States enjoyed in the late nineteenth century. The population had risen greatly, with mass immigration from Europe, but industrial production had increased still faster. By 1900 the country, which possessed half of the world’s resources of iron ore and coal, was producing double the amount of iron and steel manufactured in Britain. Americans, like their counterparts in Britain who had created an Industrial Revolution a century earlier, produced a host of new inventions including Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Thomas Edison’s electric light and phonograph, Elisha Otis’ elevator and C. Latham Sholes’ typewriter. Even more important was the erection, at first in New York and Chicago, and subsequently all over the continent, of tall buildings, encased within a steel frame, which earned the nickname ‘skyscrapers’. This astonishing outpouring of creative energy linked to industrial development is often called the Second Industrial Revolution.

  One manifestation of America’s new-found economic strength was the appearance of giant corporations, such as U. S. Steel, General Electric and Standard Oil. The industrialists who ran these companies, men such as the oil magnate John D. Rockerfeller and the financier John Pierpont Morgan, became some of the richest men in the world. Morgan, like many of these industrialists, had begun his career making railways, which had spread across the whole continent following the Civil War, allowing the much more efficient transportation of manufactured goods and agricultural produce. These railroad pioneers were often referred to as ‘robber barons’ on account of their ruthless pursuit of success. Having made their fortunes, they wanted to invest their wealth in art; many of them proceeded to create museums to house their collections.

  J. P. Morgan had set up U. S. Steel in 1901, the first billion-dollar company in the world, buying Carnegie Steel, the creation of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, for $480 million on the way. Morgan a great art collector and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (opened to the public in 1924) is his legacy (Morgan also bequeathed over 4,000 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum in New York). Other railroad barons followed suit. The Walters Museum in Baltimore (opened in 1934), the Huntington Art Museum in Los Angeles (opened in 1928), and the delightful Frick Museum in New York (opened in 1935) all house the collections of these ‘robber barons’.

  Railways were not the only way to amass a fortune. The retailer Benjamin Altman and the sugar magnate Henry Osborne Havemeyer were both major benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum. Havemeyer’s lawyer John G. Johnson left his collection of Old Masters to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The retailer Samuel Kress, the banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon and the wealthy businessman Peter Widener were instrumental in founding the National Gallery in Washington in 1937, to which they bequeathed their collections.

  The most spectacular artistic coup was made by Mellon, then Secretary to the Treasury, who made a secret purchase in 1930–1, for $7 million, from the Soviet government of 20 paintings, including Raphael’s Alba Madonna. This is a classic example of the effect a rich nation can have on the art market. Stalin urgently needed foreign currency to finance his first Five-Year Plan, an attempt to promote the industrialization of the Soviet Union by the collectivization of agriculture (this policy was to fail spectacularly with the destruction of the kulaks, or independent farmers, leading to famine and widespread starvation), so he decided to sell some of the masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (then called Leningrad) to the richest buyer, namely the US government.

  The ruthlessness these wealthy bankers and industrialists displayed in their pursuit of art was symptomatic of the way that they had made their fortunes. There were, however, other collectors who were less ruthless than these self-made men. Perhaps the most notable was Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was fortunate enough to form the bulk of her collection before the ‘Robber Barons’ began collecting in earnest. The museum she created opened to the public in 1903, long before those endowed by Morgan, Huntington or Frick.

  Isabella was the daughter of David Stewart, a New Yorker who had made a recent fortune in Irish linen and mining investments. Her parents sent her to attend finishing school in Paris in 1856–8, where she met Jack Gardner, who came from one of Boston’s grandest and richest families. On returning to New York, the couple began dating and were married in 1860. Morris Carter, first Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, recorded that Boston ladies, up to Isabella’s death, repeated the apocryphal story that ‘Belle Stewart jumped out of a boarding-school window and eloped with Jack Gardner’.

  Isabella entered into the intellectual life of Boston and, under the direction of Charles Eliot Norton, professor of the history of art at Harvard University, she developed a love for Dante and began collecting rare books and manuscripts. After the tragic loss of Jackie, her only child, in infancy, Isabella indulged in her passion for travel, making extensive trips with her husband to Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Japan.

  A favourite destination was Venice, which the Gardners first visited in 1884, where they were guests of Jack’s relation Daniel Curtis at the Palazzo Barbaro, a fifteenth-century Gothic palace on the Grand Canal which was to serve as the inspiration for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Under the guidance of Daniel’s son Ralph, a talented amateur painter, Isabella embarked on an intense study of Venetian art. She also had the opportunity to meet such luminaries as the writers Robert Browning, John Ruskin and Henry James, and the painters James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase, who were frequent visitors to the palace. The Gardners were very taken with this delectable lifestyle, and were to return regularly to the palace, which they rented for the summer months from the Curtises.

  In this delightful setting Jack and Isabella entertained artists, writers and musicians. They commissioned views of Venice by Sargent and the Swedish painter Anders Zorn. Henry James, a frequent visitor, used the palace as the setting for The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove. Isabella made an equally striking impression on the locals. She would later delight in relating a charming anecdote, as Carter recorded in his biography, of a Venetian girl meeting a friend at a railway station and asking why she was there.

  ‘I’m waiting for the train.’

  ‘Why are you waiting for the train?’

  ‘Because Mrs Jack Gardner of Boston is coming on it, and I want to see her.’

  ‘Why do you want to see her?’

  ‘Because she is so wicked.’

  ‘How wicked is she?’

  (with awe) ‘More wicked than Cleopatra.’

  Returning to Boston must have seemed very tame after the excitements on offer in Venice. Impulsive, witty and reckless, with her almond-shaped eyes, her pale skin and dark hair, Isabella made a pronounced impression, with her provocative dresses designed by Charles Worth and her famous pearls, painted daringly by John Singer Sargent, encircling her waist. Isabella became notorious for her flouting of convention; she rode around town in an open carriage, accompanied by two lion cubs, and was rumoured to receive guests seated in a mimosa tree in her conservatory.

  Her every movement was followed with fascination by the press. In 1875 a reporter summed up her appeal:

  Mrs Jack Gar
dner is one of the seven wonders of Boston. She is eccentric, and she has the courage of eccentricity. She is the leader where none dare follow. She is 35, plain and wide-mouthed, but she has the handsomest neck, shoulders and arms in all Boston. She imitates nobody; everything she does is novel and original.

  Despite her foibles, Isabella was intensely interested in art and had begun collecting in earnest following the death of her father in 1891, leaving her a fortune estimated to be worth between two and three million dollars. She was later to comment: ‘I had two fortunes – my own and Mr Gardner’s. Mine was for buying pictures, jewels, bric a brac etc. etc. Mr Gardner’s was for household expenses.’ Initially, Isabella and Jack showed little interest in buying major Old Master paintings, but this all changed at the Thoré Burger sale in Paris in December 1892 when they acquired Vermeer’s Concert, an exquisite Dutch interior with two girls, one seated at the keyboard, the other singing, with a man seated between them. This little masterpiece, bought for FF. 29,000 (approximately $6,000), was the most tragic loss from the 1990 burglary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.

  By this date Isabella had already met Bernard Berenson. Berenson had been born Bernhard Valvrojenski in poverty in Lithuania in 1865, and had been educated by the local rabbi, who had a keen knowledge of literature. Ten years later Bernard (he actually spelt his name Bernhard until the outbreak of the First World War when he changed it to Bernard to show his preference for France over Germany) and his family emigrated to Boston. His father struggled to make a career and became a pedlar, selling his wares from a cart in the villages surrounding Boston. Berenson, however, had set his sights on higher things, and, through extensive reading and hard work, earned himself a place at Boston University, from where he graduated to Harvard.

  Harvard, founded in 1636, was the oldest and most esteemed university in the country. The university had entered a golden age under the presidency of Charles Eliot Norton. Norton had travelled widely in Europe, befriending the historian Thomas Carlyle and the art historian John Ruskin, and returned to America convinced that higher education should be designed to prepare undergraduates for economic and political leadership. Under his guidance the curriculum at Harvard included a wide range of subjects, giving students the best chance to discover their own particular bent in life. Undergraduates flocked to study under this enlightened regime. Businessmen were equally impressed and Harvard became the best-endowed university in America, with enormous sums set aside for research. As professor of the history of art and President of the Dante Society, Norton exerted a strong influence on Isabella Stewart Gardner. Berenson attended his lectures but Norton never seems to have liked him, possibly because the professor preferred the Middle Ages whereas his student was passionate about the Italian Renaissance. Certainly, Harvard undergraduates much enjoyed the story that Norton, on being admitted to heaven, recoiled in horror, exclaiming: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! So Overdone! So garish! So Renaissance!’

  Berenson was introduced to Isabella and was highly impressed by this grand Bostonian lady, with her burgeoning collection of paintings, furniture, textiles and stained glass acquired on her extensive travels. Isabella was equally taken with the brilliant young aesthete and helped to pay for his travels to Europe. During his time abroad Berenson acquired his passion for paintings. He met leading scholars of art history on his travels, including Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Giovanni Morelli in Rome, both men leading exponents of a new scientific method of analysing what constituted the characteristics of individual artists’ style (see p. 153).

  On his return to Boston, Berenson embarked on a dual career as an art historian and dealer. Realizing that he needed to renew his friendship with Isabella if he was to benefit from her desire to collect Old Master paintings, he sent her a copy of his Venetian Painters of the Renaissance when it was published in 1894, a work that established Berenson as the leading authority on Italian Renaissance painting. He enclosed a note with the book stating: ‘I venture to recall myself to your memory apropos of a little book on Venetian painters which I have asked my publishers to send to you. Your kindness to me at a critical moment is something I have never forgotten’. Berenson’s praise for the Venetian masters, their ‘love of objects for their sensuous beauty’, and the way that their paintings ‘seemed intended not for devotion … nor for admiration … but for enjoyment’ was music to the ears of Isabella, who had spent so many summers studying their works in Venice.

  The young art historian was to exert a decisive influence on the creation of Isabella’s outstanding collection of Old Master paintings. They embarked on a correspondence which continued for many years, Isabella encouraging Berenson in his desire to become an art connoisseur, while BB, as he signed his letters, whetted Isabella’s appetite with descriptions of all the great paintings he encountered on his travels. The correspondence is very revealing of the two conflicting strands in Berenson’s character: the high-minded aesthete, unsurpassed in his knowledge of Renaissance painting, and the picture dealer, looking to make the maximum profit on any sale. It is clear from Berenson’s correspondence that he was playing the role of a canny picture dealer from the moment he began offering his advice.

  One of the reasons that Berenson was such a good salesman was his brilliant way with words. He could empathize with Isabella’s love for Venice by writing: ‘I know no pleasure equal to that I get from pictures, from great Venetian pictures. It is like the pleasure I have when I come across a wonderfully beautiful line or verse, or when I catch a strain of infinitely tender melody.’ Isabella was flattered to receive such eloquent letters, and, in December 1895, she made a secret agreement with Berenson whereby he was to be paid five per cent of the purchase price of any painting Isabella bought on his recommendation, with first refusal on anything he was offered. Isabella entered the contract in good faith, little realizing that Berenson was also receiving a commission from Colnaghi’s in London on any sale he made for the firm. One of his first coups had been selling his new client Lord Ashburnham’s the Tragedy of Lucretia by Botticelli for £3,200 ($16,000), the first major painting by the artist to enter a North American collection.

  It was shortly after the sale of the Botticelli that Berenson heard that the Rape of Europa might be coming on the market. His informant was Otto Gutekunst of Colnaghi’s:

  Lord Darnley’s (whose name, by the way must not be mentioned, as he is a very touchy and peculiar man) “Ariosto” is not to be believed. Out of the question! But the Europa is a picture for a great coup. There is absolutely nothing against it, except, perhaps, for some scrupulous fool, the subject, which is very discreetly and quietly treated. You will find all about this in Crowe and Cavalcaselle page 317 etc and chiefly 322 and 323. ’Tis one of the finest and most important Titians in existence. Condition is perfect, not considering the dark varnish, and the landscape alone is a masterpiece of the 1st order. The price is £18,000 but we ought to get 20,000, if anything at all, and will divide whatever he might in the end be willing to take for cash. It would be jolly if Europa came to America?

  This letter, from a master dealer, is an excellent example of the chicanery of the art world. Gutekunst was anxious to assure Berenson that he was offering him the genuine article, and therefore carefully quoted the page reference from Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who had written an important monograph on Titian. Gutekunst also knew that Berenson was no respecter of tradition. He had reduced his list of attributions to Titian in Venetian Painters from almost a thousand works to just 133 paintings. He had also launched a devastating attack on the Exhibition of Venetian Paintings held recently at the New Gallery in London’s Oxford St in February 1895. This had been in the form of an alternative catalogue, published two days after the opening of the exhibition, and commenced with an attack on the Titians on view: ‘Of these,’ wrote Berenson,’ one only is by the master … of the thirty-two that remain, a dozen or so have no connection with Titian and are either too remote from our present subject or too poor to require attention.’ The re
st were dismissed as obvious copies, or by Titian’s followers and later imitators.

  Gutekunst may have deferred to Berenson’s expertise but he showed his skill as an art dealer in dismissing Titian’s Portrait of Ariosto as ‘not to be believed’. This may seem all the more surprising, considering that it was one of Lord Darnley’s most treasured possessions and Colnaghi’s had attempted to buy the portrait just a year previously (he was soon to sell it to the National Gallery for the colossal sum of £30,000). But Gutekunst reasoned that he was much more likely to achieve a sale of the Rape of Europa if it was the only top-quality Titian on the market. And he felt he had his hands full dealing with the ‘touchy and peculiar’ Lord Darnley.

  What Gutekunst had not realized was that Berenson was also playing a double game. He had heard that the Duke of Westminster was intending to sell his Blue Boy by Gainsborough, perhaps the most glamorous of all eighteenth-century English portraits. Bernard therefore calculated that he could earn considerably more if he offered the Gainsborough to Isabella, together with a lesser work by Titian, and sold the Rape of Europa to another client. His choice was Mrs Warren, a wealthy Boston society hostess and rival of Isabella, who had helped to fund his early travels in Europe, and whose husband was President of the Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

  On 26 April he wrote to Isabella offering her two paintings: Titian’s Portrait of Maria of Austria and her daughter for £10,000 and the Blue Boy for the much greater sum of £35,000 ($150,000). Berenson made his best sales pitch, claiming the painting as Gainsborough’s masterpiece, and urging Mrs Gardner ‘BE BOLD’, and was gratified to find that his client at once cabled back her acceptance. She did, however, question the price, writing, with a touch of melodramatic humour, that ‘although the price is huge, it is possible. Now, you see me steeped in debt – perhaps in Crime – as the result!’ She then added that it would mean that she would ‘have to Starve and go naked for the rest of my life; and probably in a debtor’s prison’.