The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  There were major obstacles to overcome, however, if the sale was to go through. There was a growing furore in Europe over the sale of so many artistic masterpieces to collectors in the United States. European governments appeared powerless to stem the flow of works of art crossing the Atlantic. A cartoon in the New York satirical magazine Puck in June 1911, with the simple title The Magnet, showed John Pierpont Morgan, with his characteristic top hat and carbuncled nose, moving his dollar magnet across the Atlantic towards Europe, with inevitable consequences.

  The Italian government determined to issue export licences to prevent the unrestricted export of works of art. In the case of Sacred and Profane Love Isabella’s trustees were reluctant to part with such a large sum of money but this was no bar to the Rothschild family who were determined to acquire the Titian at any price, offering the incredible sum of 4,000,000 lire for the painting (the Villa Borghese and the whole collection was only valued at 3,600,000 lire). In the event the Italian government stepped in, acquiring the whole Borghese collection for the nation, and Sacred and Profane Love remains at the Villa in Rome, where it has become the iconic symbol of the museum.

  Isabella was no more successful in acquiring a second major Titian belonging to the Earl of Darnley, the so-called Portrait of Ariosto (as a major Italian Renaissance poet he was of particular interest to the literary – minded Isabella), which Gutekunst had mentioned to Berenson in the context of the Rape of Europa several years previously. The Eighth Earl (as the Hon. Ivo Bligh, he had captained the England cricket team to Australia in 1882 and reclaimed the Ashes – the term was coined by a cricketing columnist penning a mock obituary of English cricket) had inherited Cobham Hall in 1900 and was soon in financial difficulties. In 1903 Robert Ross, friend of the disgraced Oscar Wilde, wrote to Herbert Horne, the art collector and Botticelli expert living in Florence, about a surprise visitor to the Carfax Gallery, which he was running in London. Ross was intrigued by the conversation that ensued and recorded: ‘Lord Darnley came and paid us a visit. He was very nice but stupid. He said the picture [the Portrait of Ariosto] was not for sale in the ordinary way, but that he might consider an offer of £40,000 clear. Certainly not less.’ Horne was well aware of the fabulous collection at Fenway Court in Boston, much of it bought through the services of his Florentine neighbour Bernard Berenson, but, before a deal could be done, the National Gallery intervened, paying £30,000 to acquire the portrait (now known as Young Man with a Blue Sleeve).

  By now the professional relationship between Isabella and Berenson had cooled as the level of her acquisitions dropped. He had, however, played a vital role in creating one of the great art collections in North America, including works by Titian, Raphael, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Rubens and Velázquez. In doing so, Berenson may have been guilty of sharp practice, but Isabella herself was also capable of disreputable dealing. In November 1900 she wrote to Berenson about the Chigi Botticelli Madonna and Child: ‘can it be sent to me smuggled, do you think, so that I may get it here now, as soon as possible, without any duties?’

  In the event the sale caused a furore, and Prince Chigi was fined by the Italian government for selling it without an export licence. The fine was 315,000 lire ($63,000), the amount he received, though, once the fracas had died down, it was reduced on appeal to 20,000 lire, later still to just 10 lire. Berenson had originally told Isabella that the painting was over-priced at $30,000 but, a few months later, advised her to buy it at $70,000, making a handy profit of $7,000 on the deal. Such was the painting’s fame that it was exhibited at Colnaghi’s in London en route to Boston.

  In addition, regardless of the money he was making from Isabella, Berenson was genuinely fond of her. He recorded his feelings in September 1897 in a heart-felt tribute:

  Mrs Gardner grows on me from moment to moment. She is the one and only real potentate I have ever known. She lives at a rate and intensity, and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin, and shadowy. What has she not done? Nothing I fancy that she has really wanted. Then she seems really fond of me, not of my petty repute, nor the books I have published, and that is charming.

  Seven years later Isabella had become one of the wonders of the New World. Berenson gave a wonderfully flattering description of the transformation: ‘You have become, here in Europe, a most marvellous American myth, and people repeat stories about you as they must have done about Semiramis or Cleopatra or Elizabeth or Catherine the Great of Russia.’ Isabella responded to his flattery and loved the whole idea of creating something unique in America, writing in jest: ‘Shan’t you and I have fun with my museum’.

  The flirtatious nature of their correspondence has led to suggestions that Isabella and Berenson had an affair, but there is no positive evidence of this and it must remain pure supposition. Isabella certainly treasured a youthful photograph Berenson gave her of himself in profile, his boyish face, full, curving lips and wavy dark hair curling down over the collar of his coat like some romantic poet. There was no love lost between Jack Gardner and Berenson, but this appears to have been based on Jack’s well-founded suspicion of Bernard’s underhand dealings in overcharging Isabella for paintings he bought for her. Jack was known to be touchy. He had made Isabella promise not to show Sargent’s portrait of her, with a string of pearls round her waist, in public. He had also threatened to horsewhip anyone he heard telling the joke going round town that Sargent had painted Isabella ‘down to Crawford’s notch’, a pun on a resort in New Hampshire and the name of Francis Crawford, one of Isabella’s admirers.

  Jack Gardner may have been over-suspicious of Berenson, but he was not alone in his view. The painter Mary Cassatt saw through him immediately. ‘I don’t care for Berenson,’ she wrote, ‘he is a bit too commercial for me’. The art historian had written to his cousin, the lawyer Lawrence Berenson, in a letter dated 17 October 1922, a defence of his actions: ‘I do not earn money by trade. I earn it by enjoying such authority & prestige that people will not buy expensive Italian pictures without my approval.’ For Gutekunst, who knew the business activities of Berenson as well as anyone, this lofty attitude was not good enough. ‘Business is not always nice’, he reminded his colleague. ‘I am the last man to blame you, a literary man, for disliking it. But you want to make money like ourselves so you must do likewise as we do and keep a watchful eye on all the good pictures and collections you know or hear of and let me know in good time … If the pictures you put up to us do not suit Mrs G. it does not matter, we will buy them all the same with you or by giving you an interest in them – as you please. Make hay while Mrs G. shines.’

  Following Jack Gardner’s death Gutekunst, knowing that neither he nor Berenson would enjoy such a windfall again, wanted to know exactly how rich Isabella was. But he resented the fact that Berenson passed on the blame for any suggestion of financial impropriety in his dealings on Colnaghi’s. This resentment increased over the years, as Berenson gradually acquired the status of a great aesthete, pontificating on the arts from his villa at I Tatti outside Florence. Much later, in 1934, Gutekunst, whose career never reached such exalted heights, wrote bitterly to his former colleague: ‘are not you all, like us, just after money – we openly, you quietly & less candidly! … We know too much of one another … But I do mightily resent this high brow & superior attitude.’

  By this date, however, Berenson was immune to criticism. He was basking in his reputation as the greatest connoisseur of his day, and numbered as his protégés Kenneth Clark, recently appointed as the youngest ever Director of the National Gallery in London. He was happy to brush over any hint of impropriety in his association with Joseph Duveen, the most successful dealer to cash in on the boom in American art collecting. A descendant of Jewish-Dutch immigrants who had settled in Hull, Duveen entered a partnership with Berenson which lasted from 1912 to 1937 (Duveen was reputed to have paid him an annual retainer of £25,000 for his attributions). He was absolutely clear about his aims, which he summed up with admirable succinctness: ‘Eu
rope has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money’. A salesman of genius, Duveen managed to persuade his clients, including Henry Clay Frick, the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, Henry E. Huntington, J. P. Morgan, Samuel H. Kress, Andrew Mellon and John D. Rockerfeller, that purchasing works of art would buy them class. In particular buying Italian Renaissance art showed their discerning taste and aesthetic judgement.

  The partnership was so successful that Berenson could later joke that most of the Italian paintings entering America in the early twentieth century had his visa on their passport. The fact that Duveen and Berenson were both Jewish, and some of their clients were almost certainly anti-Semitic, makes their achievement all the more remarkable. Duveen himself ended up as Baron Duveen of Milbank and his legacy is the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum, housing the Elgin Marbles, and the major extension to the Tate Gallery. In America he was instrumental in the building of the National Gallery in Washington. Between them, Duveen and Berenson succeeded in selling numerous Old Masters to the great collectors who then founded museums in which they were displayed. The first, and in many ways the most remarkable of these, opened in Boston in 1903.

  Isabella had taken the decision to build a museum to house her ever-expanding collection in 1899. During a tour to Venice in 1897 the Gardners had spent a considerable time collecting architectural elements for the new building, which was to stand on a patch of land in the Back Bay Fens, recently landscaped by the architect Frederic Law Olmsted. But before work could begin Jack Gardner died of a stroke on 10 December 1898. Nevertheless, Isabella went ahead and acquired a suitable site for her ‘Venetian palazzo’, known as Fenway Court, using funds from his estate, valued at $3,600,000.

  The marshy site resembled her beloved Venice, with the foundations of the house resting on piles driven into the mud, in the way Venetian palaces had been erected over the centuries. The centre of the building was a Venetian style courtyard modelled on Palazzo Barbaro, an oasis of greenery, with a Roman mosaic as its centrepiece. The walls were encrusted with pieces of inset sculpture and so successfully was this done that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the old pieces, bought in Venice, and pastiches made in Boston. The Italianate feel of the courtyard was enhanced by the red tiled roof and overhanging cornice.

  This Italian style was already in evidence in other Boston landmarks, such as the Public Library, and stood in contrast with the French Renaissance chateau style favoured by the Vanderbilts in the extravagant mansions they were building in Newport, Rhode Island, at the same time. To counter the cold of the Boston winter, Isabella intended to capture a Mediterranean feeling by roofing the court and surrounding the central mosaic with palm and mimosa trees. Isabella’s friend Sylvester Baxter, writing in the Century Magazine in 1904, summed up the inspiration of Venice:

  Yes, we are in Italy! Or at least, Italy has come to us. … there are Venetian colonnades about the cloisters, Venetian windows looking upon the court, Venetian balconies, Venetian loggias, Venetian carvings embedded in the walls, Venetian stairs – all genuine, all ancient, all stones of Venice bearing the incomparable hue of age, touched with the friendly touch of time, weather-worn, smoothed and rounded by the centuries and here reverently placed to endure for a new lifetime in a new Renaissance for the new world.

  The motto over the door, however, was French and read C’est mon plaisir. This light-hearted allusion to pleasure harked back to the palace of Sanssouci (without a care) built for Frederick the Great at Potsdam when he wanted to escape from the cares of office in his capital of Berlin. In fact, Isabella’s motto is closer in feel to Louis XIV’s famous statement: L’etat c’est moi, and it was clear to all visitors to the museum that she was going to emulate the Sun King in controlling every aspect of the building and its collection. For Sylvester Baxter:

  Fenway Court was not only planned by its owner, in a way she was an actual builder of the house to an extent unprecedented in association with the execution of plans of such magnitude and scope. Virtually Mrs Gardner was her own architect.

  The long-suffering architect William T. Sears must have lived to rue this motto, as he had to endure constant interference from his patron to bring the project to fruition. Sears’ patience was sorely tested by his patron’s insistence on involving herself in every detail of the design. He recorded his travails in his diary:

  Sullivan [one of the key workmen] said she called him a liar and he would not do any more work for her.

  She insisted one of the wood panels had been placed bottom end up, but later said it was all right.

  When the local authorities failed to provide a permit for the Carriage Shed, Isabella, who regarded herself as above the rules, declared loftily:

  Go ahead and build it without a permit, if the City stops me I will not open my museum to the public.

  Locals were amused by the palace rising on the edge of the park. Morris Carter recorded the reaction of the Boston Herald on 10 April 1901 to the ‘huge structure … going up before the astonished gaze of residents of the Back Bay district’. One stranger had asked if it was to be a warehouse and receive the reply: ‘Begorra, it ’ud make a foine brewery’, but it was generally referred to in the neighbourhood as ‘Missus Gardyner’s Eyetalian palace.’

  The building was finally completed by the end of 1902 and a spectacular inaugural party was held on New Year’s Day 1903. On a cold, clear evening the cream of Boston society alighted from their carriages at the entrance to be greeted by a tall Italian major domo, as Morris Carter recorded:

  On the landing at the top of the horseshoe stood Mrs Gardner, dressed in black, her diamond antennae waving above her head; up the stairs the representatives of Boston’s proudest families climbed to greet their hostess, and then – except the chosen few, perhaps possessing less family pride, whom she invited to sit in the balcony – they climbed down the other side, some of them inwardly fuming, but most of them amused at the homage Mrs Gardner had exacted of them.

  The select audience then listened to a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra of Bach, Mozart and Schumann, presided over by Isabella seated in a carved and gilded armchair. When the music finished, the mirrored doors of the Music Room were rolled back, and guests gasped at the sight of the court, illuminated by Japanese lanterns and filled with the scent of flowers and the sound of water.

  ‘While the courtyard is yet in an unfinished state,’ reported the Boston Advertiser, ‘it already gives promise of beauty and picturesqueness even beyond that anticipated by those who understand that Mrs Gardner executes her projects in brilliant and inimitable fashion.’ The guests were then encouraged to wander through the rooms, admiring the priceless works of art on display in hushed silence. They were quite overwhelmed, ‘the aesthetic perfection of all things’, in the words of Henry James’ brother William, ‘making them quiet and docile and self-forgetful and kind, as if they had become as children’.

  Charles Eliot Norton, one of the few allowed into Fenway Court before its official opening, took justified pride in his former pupil’s achievement:

  I have been admitted several times to see Mrs Gardner’s still unfinished palace and have seen her collection of art. Palace and gallery (there is no other word for it) are such an exhibition of the genius of a woman of wealth as never seen before. The building of which she is the sole architect is admirably designed. I know of no private collection in Europe which compares with this in the uniform high level of the works it contains.

  At the heart of the museum was a Venetian salone, known as the Titian Room. The salone was designed around Isabella’s greatest coup, the acquisition of the Rape of Europa. Every detail was carefully worked out, with the painter’s great work placed beside the window on to the park, so that it would catch the maximum amount of sunlight flooding in. Isabella surrounded the painting with religious works by Titian’s contemporary Paris Bordone and from the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, his first master, together with portraits by
other sixteenth-century Italian artists, Baccio Bandinelli and Giovanni Battista Moroni, and a magnificent Velázquez of Philip IV, the owner of the Titian (it had been commissioned by his grandfather Philip II), which hung above a monumental bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini. The Titian itself was placed above two Venetian end tables, a putto attributed to the French sculptor Francois Duquesnoy, mimicking the pose of Europa, and a watercolour attributed to Van Dyck after the copy Rubens had made of the Titian. The walls of the room were of red brocade, and below the Titian, to give a particularly personal touch, Isabella placed a section of green silk, part of one of her evening dresses designed by Charles Worth.

  For Isabella this painting was the centrepiece of her ‘Borgo Allegro [happy place]’, as she called her museum. It was the painting Henry James referred to when he commiserated with his friend after she broke her leg falling on the ice in February 1902: ‘My imagination shoved rose leaves, as it were, under the spine of a lady for whom lying fractured was but an occasion the more to foregather with Titian. Seriously, I hope you weren’t very bad – that it was nothing more than the “Europa” could bandage up with a piece of that purple of which you gave me so memorable an account.’

  Following the triumphant opening of the museum Isabella decided to allow 200 members of the public to enter the sacred premises on specific open days, initially for two weeks every year, in the spring and the autumn. They were to pay $1 each, tickets sold in advance. Remarkably, her collection of European art was superior to that of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which was to open to the public in 1909.