In contrast, no matter what a collector is willing to spend, finding a masterpiece of Renaissance, Baroque, or even eighteenth-century painting on the market borders on the impossible. When, in 2004, the Metropolitan acquired Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna, painted around the year 1300, they paid some $45 million for a painting no larger than a sheet of typing paper. The price spoke to the Duccio’s formidable beauty and importance in the history of art, but also its absolute rarity: It is one of only twelve Duccios in existence and, unless another is discovered, the last that will ever be sold. The eleven other paintings now reside in public museums (in Florence, Paris, and London), which in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries acquired the majority of Old Master pictures, removing them from the art trade for good. Those Old Masters that remain in European private collections are unlikely to leave the countries where they now reside because of export restrictions.
From the moment of creation, paintings are fragile and easily punctured, torn, or abraded, and their vulnerability enhances the sense of their rarity and value. Even a large canvas is surprisingly light, weighing only a few pounds. Most of the weight of a “picture” lies in its frame. If taken out of their frames and off their stretchers, paintings can be reduced to only a fraction of their size. In 1907, to transport seven van Dyck portraits—one over seven feet tall—secretly from Italy, a dealer reportedly rolled them up and inserted them into a metal tube that he attached to the undercarriage of a car to disguise it. Because they are highly portable, paintings have always been traded and moved—pulled down from one wall and put up on another, bought and sold by dealers, hauled from country to country by conquering armies. The van Dyck portraits had hung for four centuries (“Some blackish, but all of them recoverable, and most of them exquisite,” a dealer reported) in a palace in Genoa, passing down through generations of the family for whom van Dyck had painted them.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, countless other Old Masters quietly bided their time in European private collections waiting to be summoned onto the market by American fortunes. Acquiring masterpieces demanded colossal wealth but also discrimination, taste, timing, and opportunity. To respond to America’s demand for Old Masters, experts and dealers raced around Europe, following every lead to see pictures face-to-face and to negotiate purchases and sales. The most aggressive kept up relentless travel schedules. In the course of a single week in January 1913, the dealer Ernest Duveen sped from Paris to London, moved on to Edinburgh the following day, returned to London, then to Paris, from where he shot south to Florence for a meeting, before boarding a train back to the French capital at the close of the weekend.
Suddenly the staid picture trade accelerated its pace to keep up with the industrial age. Dealers in New York whipped off letters and dispatched them to the docks along the Hudson River to make sure their mail would catch the next steamer. Telegrams flew back and forth between galleries in London, Paris, and New York. In 1910, when two Raphael Madonnas appeared in a London exhibition, the dealer Joseph Duveen telegraphed the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who was in Italy: “ wire whether they are authentic. are they in good condition? must have your advice.” Berenson was the first American to earn his way into the circle of Europeans who were professionalizing art history and who wielded the power to attribute Old Masters and set their value in the marketplace. Preparing to converse with Henry Clay Frick about a Vermeer that a colleague had just secured in London, the dealer Charles Carstairs could not recall the details of the picture and refused to risk waiting to receive the information by mail. He sent a telegram from New York: “ cable colors vermeer forgotten.” The Vermeer to which he referred was one of three that he handled in 1911 and 1912. Of the thirty-five canvases Johannes Vermeer painted, the United States would eventually possess thirteen.
International politics and competition played no less a part in Old Master collecting in the industrial age than they did in the seventeenth century when England’s Charles I had vied with Marie de Medici and Cardinal Richelieu for masterpieces. “Bless the war, that you have the chance [to buy],” Bernard Berenson sardonically wrote Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1917, when he delivered the news that Giovanni Bellini’s legendary The Feast of the Gods, long locked in an English castle, was on the market. “For without it the Feast never would have left its old home, nor I be in a position to urge it upon you.”
Gardner had started acquiring Old Masters in the 1890s and for a while she had the field largely to herself. But by 1906, when Joseph Duveen invited her to survey a Paris collection of one hundred Old Master pictures (including eleven Rembrandts) that he had recently bought, she had to contend with Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, the retailer Benjamin Altman, and Arabella Huntington, the widow of the railroad baron Collis P. Huntington. The one painting Gardner wanted was Andrea del Castagno’s Portrait of a Young Man—its subject a Florentine in a red tunic whose intelligence and confidence jump out of the frame. His contoured face is dominated by black eyes and his piercing gaze sizes up his viewer. Berenson advised Gardner to buy the Castagno and two other Italian Renaissance paintings. She replied: “Woe is me! Why am I not Morgan or Frick?”
The legacy of America’s Gilded Age art-buying binge now stretches across the country in rooms full of Old Masters in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Henry E. Huntington Library near Los Angeles, and other public museums. But the stillness and beauty of the museum galleries reveal little of the rough and tumble involved in the very worldly pursuit of pictures.
That aspect of the story unfolds in written records. Letters and cables, penned and typed out a century ago by dealers, experts, and collectors reveal the tangle of motivations and circumstances behind each art purchase. Large leather sales books document the canvases that went in and out of galleries and the details of every transaction—dates, prices, sellers, buyers, investors, and middlemen. These account books rivet the attention with such names as Rubens and Rembrandt, Bruegel and van Eyck, Caravaggio and Botticelli, Watteau and Poussin, Dürer and Holbein, and the titles of their masterpieces. These documents unveil the combination of ego, idealism, and ambition that fired America’s Old Master collecting, and they suggest the complexity of the process by which a nation acquires its culture and art.
PART ONE
The Collectors
CHAPTER I
“American Citizen … Patron of Art”
Henry Gurdon Marquand and van Dyck’s
Portrait of James Stuart
Henry Gurdon Marquand approached Corsham Court through a large stone gate leading down a drive banked by tall trees, through which he could glimpse pastures and woods stretching into a ten-thousand-acre estate. Close to the city of Bath, and almost exactly one hundred miles from London, Corsham was a towering asymmetrical building of honey-colored bathstone with rows of pointed gables, turrets, and chimneys dating back to the reign of Elizabeth I. Since the eighteenth century, Corsham had been the country seat of the Methuen family, who had renovated and expanded the building so that it now contained over sixty rooms.
Corsham Court, in Wiltshire, was bought by Paul Methuen in the 1760s to house the famous London collection of Old Masters he had inherited.
It was late September 1886. Marquand was sixty-eight, an American banker, railroad magnate, and insatiable collector of art. Earlier, from Paris, he had written Charles Deschamps, a London art dealer, that he planned to “rest 1 or 2 days” at Brown’s Hotel in London after which time “I will go to Corsham to see the pictures.” He added: “I find everyone here desirous in the extreme to sell & solicit a bid.”
Marquand’s trip was prompted by two paintings by the seventeenth-century artist Anthony van Dyck: The Betrayal of Christ and the portrait James Stuart, Duke of Richmond an
d Lennox. He had come not as a casual tourist to admire the Old Masters in the Methuens’ celebrated collection, but as a self-appointed ambassador from the New World on a cultural mission, scouting for a fledgling museum that New Yorkers had founded in 1870 in a Manhattan brownstone: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Charged with this public quest, Marquand had no interest in run-of-the-mill canvases but wanted only pictures by the most celebrated painters in the history of art—masterpieces that would set a standard for American artists and public taste, and help define and advance American culture.
Marquand wore the black frock coat and narrow black pants of the American middle class, disguising (except for his gold watch chain) the fact that he was a rich man. Thin and gaunt, he had a vigorous, craggy face, with a Roman nose, arched eyebrows, a high forehead, and a serious gaze. His appearance was purposefully understated and he looked more like a professor than a financier.
In a formal, full-length portrait, the artist John White Alexander rightly cast Marquand as both a thinker and a doer—an angular gentleman in a dark suit, interrupted while hard at work, standing with spectacles in one hand, architectural plans in the other. Although the desire to expand the Metropolitan’s collections was one Marquand shared with his fellow museum trustees, characteristically he had handed himself the assignment and had come to Corsham alone. Born to a family of silversmiths, he had made his fortune most recently by speculating in railroads, and for a time left his Wall Street desk to take charge of a Missouri line. If asked to explain his search for masterpieces, no doubt he would have spoken of the educational and moral value of great art, particularly for shaping an immigrant nation. What he might not confess was that for him acquiring art was not a duty, but a passion. He had earned his place on the Metropolitan’s board not simply as a pillar of the community and a donor, but because for decades he had campaigned to promote American architecture and art. In his twenties, he had befriended New York’s artists (one a fishing companion), patronized their work, and taken up their struggle to forge an American School. Before sailing to Europe in the 1850s, he had asked the Hudson River School’s Asher B. Durand and other artists to make sketches that he would carry with him to broadcast their achievement to painters abroad. As a collector, he had stocked his oversized Manhattan house with so many works of art that to fend off a dealer he once asserted he could find no space for even a clock.
To reach the van Dycks at Corsham Court, Marquand crossed a dark stone vestibule. As he passed through a series of state rooms, each lined with Old Master paintings, he began to suspect he had come to the right place. But when he entered the picture gallery, he was certain. The gallery stretched seventy-two feet, its walls covered in gleaming crimson damask, and on three sides, dark Old Masters in gilded frames formed tiers of rectangles from the chair rail to the ceiling. Built in the 1760s and preserved almost exactly as it had been created, Corsham’s red gallery was an accounting in fine and decorative arts of the economic and political might of eighteenth-century Britain. The sole purpose of the room was to display a splendid array of mostly Italian canvases—pictures by Caravaggio, Bronzino, Veronese, and others painted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when these artists believed their highest calling was to portray the human figure in complex narrative scenes and when a major patron was the Catholic Church. Marquand counted some forty paintings. There were images of the Madonna and Child, the Adoration of the Shepherds, and many saints, but also portraits, landscapes, an enormous image of Charles I on horseback, and romantic vistas of the Italian countryside by Salvator Rosa. Over the white marble mantel was Peter Paul Rubens’s Wolf and Fox Hunt—a battle scene of sorts, with two men and a woman, finely clothed and mounted on horses, their chargers rearing over a tumult of foxes, wolves, and dogs tearing apart the flesh of their prey.
Marquand discovered one of the two van Dycks, The Betrayal of Christ, to the right of the fireplace. The Flemish painter, a prodigy, had famously distinguished himself as the most talented apprentice in Rubens’s Antwerp workshop, and here at Corsham, hanging beside his master’s hunting scene, The Betrayal more than held its own. It was a dark, turbulent canvas (nine feet across and seven feet high) of physical and psychological drama. Van Dyck had chosen to paint the moment of treachery: Judas Iscariot, shoved by Roman soldiers, leans toward the dark-haired Jesus, grasps his hand, and prepares to deliver the false kiss. Faces only inches apart, betrayer and betrayed almost collide before a teeming crowd. Above their heads, a pair of disembodied hands shoots upward, flinging a rope intended to settle around the prisoner’s neck. Van Dyck, whose father was in the textile trade, poured the theatrics of the scene into the painted drapery. A gold cloak billows up over the back of Judas, conveying his momentary power, and a red stream of cloth cascading over the outstretched arm of Christ, who is robed in blue, prefigures the bloody tragedy about to transpire. The artist set the encounter beneath menacing branches, in stormy darkness, and the protagonists’ faces are illuminated by torchlight. Henry Marquand recognized that the van Dyck before him was more complex and possibly finer than any painting he had ever seen in America.
Casting his eyes down the length of the English gallery, Marquand became acutely aware of the impoverished state of the painting collection in his museum in New York. The Metropolitan was smaller than the English country house, and at sixteen years old was still struggling to escape its provincial character and youth. Yet, in contrast to the silent private gallery, the New York museum already boasted over 350,000 visitors.
The Metropolitan had progressed from its original brownstone to a freestanding house on West Fourteenth Street, and then in 1880 to a new building, constructed (with $500,000 from New York City) in Central Park—an awkward redbrick, neo-Gothic structure that warned of aesthetic deficiencies within. Glass cases crowded a large central exhibition hall. They contained porcelain, enamels, and manuscripts, as well as Cypriot art, from a ten-thousand-piece collection, the museum’s largest and most important. Ancient sculpture and artifacts were indispensable attributes of a traditional museum, but the New York Times complained: “there are too many of these Cyprian objects’it’s bad art.’Archaeologically, ethnologically, they may touch us a great deal, but artistically hardly any.”
The Picture Gallery at Corsham Court, ca. 1890. The eighteenth-century room with van Dyck’s Betrayal of Christ to the right of the fireplace remains much as it was when Henry Marquand visited in 1886.
The Methuens’ collection of Old Masters—not even one of England’s finest—was grander than the hodgepodge of mostly mediocre pictures lodged in two rooms at the back of the Metropolitan’s second floor. Writing anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, Henry James took accurate measure of the museum’s paintings: “It is not indeed to be termed a brilliant collection, for it contains no first-rate example of a first-rate genius.”
The lackluster state of the Metropolitan’s collection was not for want of ambition. The founders sought to create an art museum that would hold its own against the Louvre, London’s National Gallery, and other museums in Europe, and would establish New York, the capital of American commerce and finance, as the capital of American culture as well. In 1869, the publisher and poet William Cullen Bryant made the case that an art museum was mandatory for the booming industrial America. “Our republic has already taken its place among the great powers of the earth. It is the richest nation in the world.” But, even Spain, “a third-rate power of Europe and poor besides” had a major museum in the Prado, “the opulence and extent of which absolutely bewildered the viewer.” Indeed, a series of Enlightenment-inspired public collections had appeared in Europe in the early nineteenth century, after the opening of France’s national museum in the Louvre. In 1793, four years after the Revolution, the painter Jacques-Louis David and the Committee of Public Safety transformed the palace of the Bourbons (a royal residence since the fifteenth c
entury) into a public gallery, granting French citizens access to the royal collections of classical antiquities, paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, France’s rivals asserted their nationalism by creating art galleries in their capital cities: the Rijksmuseum (State Museum) in Amsterdam in 1817; the Prado in Madrid in 1819; the National Gallery of London in 1824. In Germany, the return of the art seized by Napoleon spurred the Prussian King Frederick-William II in 1823 to found the Berlin Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery).
Although based on European models, the Metropolitan had a distinctly American character—founded and managed not by a city or state but by private citizens with a public mission “to humanize, to educate and refine a practical and laborious people.” The idealistic Marquand threw himself into building the museum and its collections, joining fifty members of the New York establishment including the Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows, the artists John Kensett and Worthington Whittredge, the architects Calvert Vaux and Richard Morris Hunt, and the railroad owner John T. Johnston, the museum’s first president. Marquand had served as a museum trustee since 1871, soon joined the influential executive committee, and in 1883, he became the Metropolitan’s treasurer. Marquand saw the Metropolitan more as a school than as a temple. “The trustees had no idea of making this a show place or a mere palace of amusement,” he insisted in a speech. “Their prime object and grand aim has been to provide here a collection of objects that would be strictly useful in the improvement of the arts, bringing up the taste of the people of this country to the highest standards.” He also charged the museum with improving the quality of American design: “This building is as much intended for the humblest artisan in wood and metals as for the most luxurious patron of the fine arts.”
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