NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  Morland Agnew remained ignorant of how close he had stood to the thief of the Gainsborough. “So far as I know it came from a sick man who was lying ill in one of the Western states. Remorse perhaps suggested restitution. It was a good job we took the matter up, for if the man had died, as they tell me he is likely to, the probabilities are that his children, not knowing the value of the picture, might have destroyed it. I do not think that the man who sent the picture back was the original thief. That individual’s name, I am of the opinion, was Worth.”

  The Daily Telegraph, relying on information from Scotland Yard to frame this “romance as strange as any in fiction,” scooped the competition by reporting: “When Mr. Agnew sailed for England on the Etruria with the canvas there was also on board the man who stole the picture. His identity has not been made public but it has been ascertained that he has been living quietly in England with a family who are not aware of his past.” The Times then went one better. Pronouncing “the third sensational chapter in the remarkable history of the portrait,” it reported the rumor “that the man who stole the picture is named Adam Worth, or Wirth, and is well known to Scotland Yard.” None of the papers made the link with Henry Raymond, disgraced so many years before.

  “Its authentic history during the last quarter of a century will probably, and for very obvious reasons, never be disclosed—except by highly imaginative writers,” The Times declared, which did not stop the more popular newspapers from speculating wildly on how the Duchess had made her way home, and quizzing Morland Agnew to the point where the art dealer was thoroughly exasperated. “Papers full of reports of the finding of the lost Duchess … make rather much use of my name. Much interviewed again. Am getting sick of the Duchess and feel very tired. Too much excitement lately,” he grouched. Agnew became still more peeved when one newspaper wickedly published a cartoon of the art dealer in a tight embrace with “The Dear Old Dutch.” Even though the portrait was not yet on display, art connoisseurs and journalists descended on the Bond Street gallery in droves. “We have been literally overwhelmed with callers,” Agnew’s manager, Mr. Thompson, told reporters, adding, as proof of his long service with the firm, that the painting “looked as fresh and beautiful as on the day it first appeared in these galleries … the face is perfect and bears no trace of the adventures that have befallen it.”

  Conjecture over the worth of the painting was rife. “Her value must have been considerably increased by the hide-and-seek that this winsome lady has played with the detective force of two continents,” the Evening News averred. But Agnew adamantly refused to say how much had been paid to get the painting back. “You may take my word for it,” he tried vainly to convince the inquisitive, “I paid nothing in the way of reward for return of the painting, and do not expect to be asked for any.” He was roundly and rightly disbelieved on both sides of the Atlantic. “The newspaper reporters of their own accord stated that the price paid was from $5,000.00 to $25,000.00, some stating one figure and some another,” Pinkerton reported to Agnew from Chicago. “As agreed with you, we have never given out a figure.”

  The painting was once again a style statement: “Now that the stolen duchess has been restored to her rightful owners, will the picture … set the fashion again?” wondered one newspaper and, like all the best journalists, immediately supplied the answer, noting that Mrs. Morland Agnew, now recovered from her traumatic journey, and her cousin, Mrs. Lockett Agnew, “have already made up their minds on the matter … exact duplicates of the famous Gainsborough hat are to be made for them in celebration of the restoration of the famous picture.” The paper concluded that this “would undoubtedly lead to an increased demand for the Gainsborough hat, cartwheel brim, feathers and all. So matinee attenders have plenty of trouble in store for them.” Canny seaside entrepreneurs cashed in by setting up lifesize cardboard replicas of the Duchess, with the face cut out, so that holiday-goers could peer out for the camera, to pose as “the real Gainsborough,” for sixpence each.

  As the public pondered the romantic history of the portrait, speculation mounted over its possible future. “It is to be hoped,” noted one critic, “that after all the buffeting in dark and secret places which it has undergone, the masterpiece may now find a permanent and secure position in one of our public galleries, to be a lasting memorial to the greatness of one of the most brilliant artists of our race; an enduring representation of the beauty of one of the most charming and notable English women.”

  Morland Agnew was adamant on one point. “Now that the picture is in our possession once more we are going to take good care that it doesn’t go on its travels again before we find a purchaser,” he declared loftily, unaware that Pierpont Morgan was closing in, having chased Morland Agnew and the Duchess across the ocean.

  “My ship was faster than his,” Morgan later boasted to Bishop Lawrence. “He arrived in London on Saturday, I on Sunday. I sent word to one of the firm that I must see him on Monday morning before he went down town. He came to Prince’s Gate [Morgan’s London home] and I said ‘You have the Duchess of Devonshire?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  “ ‘You remember that my father, on the afternoon before that picture was stolen, was about to buy it, and was going to make his decision the next morning. He wanted it. What my father wanted, I want, and I must have the Duchess.’

  “ ‘Very good,’ said the dealer.

  “ ‘What is the price?’ asked Mr. Morgan.

  “ ‘That is for you to say, Mr. Morgan.’

  “ ‘No, whatever price your firm thinks is fair, I pay.’ ”

  This was Morgan’s habitual, brusque method of doing business. According to one contemporary report, Senator Clerk of Montana also made a bid for the painting, “but Mr. Morgan was given the preference by the sellers because of his many previous purchases.”

  By April 12, four days before his sixty-fourth birthday, Morgan had struck a deal, “subject to Sir William Agnew approving the purchase.” This the old man duly did, although he was plainly disgruntled that his younger relatives had stolen the limelight by selling the Duchess before he had a chance to examine her. From Vienna he wrote to Morgan: “I have this morning arrived here and heard by telegram that my people have sold you the Duchess. Well, I am glad, although I did not wish anything done with the picture until I reached London. It is, I hear, in very dirty condition and will require some few weeks cleaning and putting into order. I have been greatly excited about the picture and my first thought, as the picture is my property (or rather was), at a fitting time to offer it to you, for I feel it as no one can and towards your collection I feel too the greatest interest, greater than in any other in the world. I congratulate you in possessing the finest Gainsborough in the world. Pardon me if I write incoherently—for I am much moved.”

  The American magnate was delighted with his acquisition and the fresh flood of publicity it brought him. By the terms of the deal with Agnew’s, Morgan, like his father before him, agreed to let the painting go on display at Agnew’s Seventh Annual exhibition in November and December 1901. Just in case history might repeat itself and the portrait vanish once more, Morgan insisted he would pay for the picture only when it was finally delivered. In return, the art dealer agreed not to reveal who had bought the Duchess. But Morgan could not contain himself. For days Agnew’s refused to divulge the name of the new owner, until, as Morland recalled, “a reporter flatly contradicted our denials with ‘Well, all I can say is Mr. Morgan is standing on the steps of the Ritz telling everyone he has bought it!’ ”

  Pierpont Morgan was good copy—“more columns of newspapers in more different countries were filled with stories about Mr. Morgan than about any man in public or private life”—but the conjunction of one of the world’s wealthiest men and one of the world’s most beautiful women was irresistible. Newspapers broadcast the event far and wide, although the full story of the painting’s theft and return remained a piquant mystery.

  “This was one of the many
cases where he did the thing that men do who seek advertisement to attract attention to themselves or to their business or for political reasons,” noted his simpering biographer and son-in-law, Herbert Satterlee. “In whatever field he entered, he bought the highest priced corner lot; he added championship horses to his stable; built the best steam yacht, and purchased the most notable pictures, books and objects of art for his collections … he always showed a perfect disregard for the element of investment or ‘getting his money’s worth,’ and yet almost everything that he bought increased in value—‘The Duchess of Devonshire’ was a good instance of this.”

  Canny self-publicist that he was, Morgan steadfastly refused to say how much he had paid for the painting. When a clergyman friend pressed him on the matter, Morgan’s reply was calculated to keep speculation roiling: “Nobody will ever know. If the truth came out, I might be considered a candidate for the lunatic asylum.” In fact, the price he paid—£30,000, or $150,000—was huge but hardly insane, and barely even extravagant by Morgan’s standards. Had the truth come out, he might have been considered, not so much mad, as highly fortunate. Morland Agnew later wondered whether he had agreed to part with the picture “rather hastily.”

  Morgan’s characteristically highhanded acquisition of one of Britain’s most celebrated art treasures was not greeted with universal approval. If Worth was symbolic of one sort of nightmare for respectable Victorian England—the crook lurking beneath a moral cloak—then Morgan was beginning to represent another: the barbarian multimillionaire denuding the Old World of its valuables with wads of newly created cash. A cartoon in the New York World from this year showed Pierpont Morgan arrogantly demanding of John Bull: “What else have you for sale?” and imaginative London street peddlers mocked the mogul’s omnipotence by offering a “license to stay on earth,” signed by J. Pierpont Morgan, for a penny apiece.

  The master dialect humorist Finley Peter Dunne perhaps best encapsulates Europe’s insecurity in the face of such stupendous buying power as that wielded by the Colossus of Wall Street: “Pierpont Morgan calls in wan iv his office boys, the president of a naytional bank, an’ says he, ‘James,’ he says, ‘take some change out iv th’ damper an’ r-run out an buy Europe f’r me,’ he says. ‘Call up the Czar an’ th’ Pope an’ th’ Sultan an’ th’ Impror Willum, an’ tell thim we won’t need their sarvices afther nex’ week,’ he says, ‘Give thim a year’s salary in advance …’ ” Many British art experts were alarmed at the steady drain of Britain’s art treasures by “nouveau” American millionaires. Into the fray strode none other than Henry James.

  James’s last novel, The Outcry, was not published until 1911, but in thinly veiled form it is a direct response to the issues raised by Morgan’s purchase of the celebrated Gainsborough. In the author’s words: “The Outcry deals with the question brought home of late to the conscience of English society—that of the degree in which the fortunate owners of precious and hitherto transmitted works of art hold them in trust, as it were, for the nation and may themselves, as lax guardians, be held to account for public opinion.” The novel, which ran to four editions, tells the story of Breckenridge Bender, a wealthy American determined to secure the best and most valuable of Britain’s artworks, whatever the cost. The acquisitive millionaire and the “lax guardians,” Lord Theign and Lady Sandgate, are shamed by a young connoisseur when they consider selling off their ancestral portraits, including the fictitious Duchess of Waterbridge, by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

  James’s descriptions of the “beautiful duchess,” painted “down to her knees, with such extraordinarily speaking eyes, such lovely arms and hands, such wonderful flesh tints,” “the most beautiful woman of her time,” leave little doubt that the Duchess of Waterbridge is intended to represent Gainsborough’s celebrated Duchess of Devonshire. As Adeline R. Tinter observes, the identity of Breckenridge Bender is still more obvious: “the billionaire with the cheque book in hand, who enlivens The Outcry, ready to buy only the most expensive pictures, has clearly been modelled on the American financier” J. Pierpont Morgan. Morgan and Bender even have the same blunt way of expressing their desires: “I must have the duchess,” said Morgan. “Bender knows what he wants,” James writes of his fictionalized Morgan. “He most usually wants what he can’t have.” Lord Theign’s money troubles are the result of his elder daughter’s gambling habits, a daughter whose name and extravagant tendencies have a strong though surely coincidental ring: “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with—and all to throw so horribly away.”

  James, like Worth, had abandoned his American origins and chosen to identify himself with England and the English; just four years after The Outcry was published, the novelist adopted British citizenship. This novel, inspired by one of the most famous art acquisitions of the century, was intended as a warning to the British art world of the looming dangers of rapacious American art collectors. “The art world is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of stopping,” one of James’s characters laments. “Precious things are going out of our distracted country at a greater rate than the very quickest—a century and more ago—of their ever coming in.”

  Whatever the misgivings of British art connoisseurs, Gainsborough’s Duchess was now securely the property of Pierpont Morgan, but she had one more London season to run before disappearing into the millionaire’s maw. On May 23, 1901, one day shy of twenty-five years since she had left it in the dead of night, Georgiana returned to Agnew’s Bond Street gallery. “This time it will be guarded with the greatest care,” one paper noted tartly. “Men will watch the famous picture night and day, and when closing time comes each afternoon the gallery will be thoroughly searched to make sure that no visitor remains in hiding.”

  Cleaned and relined, Georgiana took the breath away. “She looks splendid,” thought Morland Agnew. In November the painting was again put on display for Agnew’s Seventh Annual Exhibition. For two months, thousands of visitors flocked to see the painting, and once again she worked her peculiar spell. “The music halls were full of songs,” Agnew’s official history records, “the papers of poems about the lost duchess, and Duchess of Devonshire hats had again become the raging fashion.”

  And while the crowds milled and fawned on the prodigal Duchess, in their midst might have been seen a little man with rheumy eyes and a dagger cough, who knew that enchanting image better than he knew his own face.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Nemo’s Grave

  From a cautious distance, Worth had observed the excitement surrounding the return of the Duchess. He had read of J. Pierpont Morgan posturing on the steps of the Ritz and wryly noted the fevered speculation over how the painting had come back to London. But with the loss of his prize, he seemed to fold in on himself again. His brio turned to self-pity, his health became even more precarious, and his drinking verged on the suicidal.

  What little remaining energy he had was devoted to making a home for the two children he knew he had wronged, who were, as Pinkerton noted, “all in the world he had to care for.” With the profits from the return of the Gainsborough, he took accommodations in Camden at 2, Park Village East, a large, rambling house that was as solid and bourgeois as his earlier London accommodations had been flashy and extrovert. How wealthy Worth now was as a result of the Gainsborough deal is unclear: Pat Sheedy later claimed he would not take any part of the $25,000 he said Worth had received from Agnew’s, a statement which is surely untrue and may cast doubt on the authenticity of the figure as well. Agnew’s calculated it had cost a total of £7,500 to retrieve the painting, but again that figure is open to question, since the partners never specified the amount paid as ransom. Eddie Guerin thought the sum nearer to £1,000, and pronounced it “the worst deal Harry ever made in his life.”

  If not the worst deal, parting with the Gainsborough was certainly the hardest decision Worth had ever made. With it went his pretensions to aristocratic life and worldly (i.e., criminal) success.
The forgery was exposed. But in its place was a feeling perhaps more human than anything he had felt since falling in love with Kitty Flynn: a visceral need to create the family life he had never known, and so find himself. Returning the Duchess had released him, but the rupture was agonizing and with each fresh accolade to the lovely portrait that was no longer his to control, Worth dwindled a little more.

  “The sudden return to town of Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire has caused nearly as great a sensation as if the beautiful Georgiana had come back to life, with a fresh lease of beauty and of charm.” The recovery had also brought back to life the ancient debate over its authenticity. “Never previously in the history of art and its masters has such intense excitement been aroused over a work … as has been awakened by the discovery of the long-lost portrait by Gainsborough of the Duchess of Devonshire,” wrote one observer, noting that, in the matter of authenticity, “the critics have advanced every feasible as well as every untenable argument that they can devise.” Some again said it depicted not Georgiana but Elizabeth, the other Duchess of Devonshire; others that the work was not by Gainsborough; and still others that there was such a painting, by Gainsborough, but that the “one newly brought to light is a spurious copy.”

  The Pall Mall Gazette pronounced magisterially that “she is not, after all, the more famous of the two duchesses … she is not Georgiana, but Elizabeth,” yet with equal conviction insisted that, once the portrait was exhibited, the suggestion that it was by anyone other than Gainsborough “will vanish as the morning mist before the sun. The portrait is typically and thoroughly Gainsborough.”

  The Times suggested that the matter of authenticity be settled by holding an exhibition of the collected paintings of both Georgiana and Elizabeth, and then comparing the likenesses in a sort of artistic identity parade. “An exhibition in London of as many of these pictures as could be got together, with the newly-recovered duchess as the ‘leading lady’ would form a great attraction in itself, and be useful in settling one or two points about which there may be some little doubt at this present time.”