Old Masters, New World
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In line with their exalted aims, the Metropolitan’s founders imagined a universal collection—painting and sculpture, but also decorative and industrial arts. (“A great museum—one worthy of New York City and of our country”—one trustee asserted, “should represent the History of Art in all countries and in all ages, of art both pure and applied.”) But problematically, where most European museums originated as the collections of princes and kings, amassed over centuries, the Metropolitan was a contemporary of the railroad station; it began simply as an idea, a vision in the minds of New Yorkers, who asked for donations of money and art, and who dreamed of treasures to come. At the opening of the Metropolitan’s Central Park building, the attorney and trustee Joseph C. Choate called on his audience, which included the United States president Rutherford B. Hayes, to fund the new museum. “Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets—what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain’and railroad shares and mining stocks’into the glorified canvas of the world’s masters.” One of the museum’s most generous benefactors, Marquand would give hundreds of thousands of dollars—in part, to launch an art school and to fund the purchasing of plaster casts. He donated American pottery, Renaissance sculpture, and decorative arts, antiquities, bronzes, enamels, porcelain, and Roman glass.
But Marquand came to realize that to secure the Metropolitan’s place among the ranks of European museums he needed to elevate its collection of Old Masters. Again the Louvre set the standard. When Napoleon conquered Europe, he affirmed the legitimacy of his regime and advanced the glory of France by expanding the Paris collections with art seized by the French armies from Italy, Holland, and Spain. When plundered pictures arrived in Paris, the emperor’s museum director, Dominique Vivant Denon, hung them in the Louvre. Breaking away from the haphazard picture displays traditionally favored by aristocrats, he gave the Paris collection new weight by arranging the paintings in chronological order and according to school. From then on, to compete with the Louvre, a museum needed to display a lineup of the best European pictures—Flemish, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Italian—and above all, examples of the groundbreaking works on which the tradition stood, the art of the High Renaissance. By the end of the nineteenth century, Europe’s “national” galleries boasted collections not simply of their own schools of art but of virtuosic Old Masters that related the history of Western painting and that signified political authority and cultural achievement.
In 1871, before the Metropolitan officially opened its doors, the museum’s board had stocked it with 175 European pictures—mostly Dutch and Flemish paintings, which William Tilden Blodgett, a businessman and trustee, had bought in Brussels and Paris for $147,000 from dealers who claimed to be selling two private collections forced onto the market by the Franco-Prussian War. In fact, the dealers had cobbled the “collections” together, unloading their own inventories on the gullible Americans. Only a year later, the trustees acknowledged their disappointment: “Perhaps, a half dozen [pictures] may be sold or exchanged for other works of art.” Later, in 1906 the Metropolitan’s curator, Roger Fry, complained of the painting collection’s poor quality and the museum’s unsystematic approach to acquisitions. The paintings, for example, “have been brought together by no fixed and determined law. They express the aim of no one intelligence nor even of what a museum may sometimes boast—a communal intelligence or tradition.” Fry argued that the one aspect of “art which is adequately represented” was the “sentimental and anecdotal side of nineteenth century painting.”
By 1882, the pioneering Marquand was searching for canvases of an entirely different order. He insisted to the London dealer Charles Deschamps: “I care not to buy common place good things—it is more desirable to go slowly and acquire the best.”
When the American artist J. Alden Weir was setting off for Europe, Marquand assigned him to scout for acquisitions. Shortly after arriving in London, Weir discovered Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Man at Agnew’s gallery. “We began the day by spending $25,000 for a rare picture,” Weir wrote his father. “Of all the pictures I have ever seen for sale, this is, I think, the finest. Now we will have one very remarkable picture of which the country will be proud.” When Marquand saw his Rembrandt in New York, he thanked Weir: “What a gorgeous thing! The pleasure of owning such a work is very great.” He added, “If one fine thing in a year could be had, what a gallery I would get in time.”
A cosmopolitan patron and collector, Marquand shared the perspective of America’s leading artists and architects, who after the Civil War looked to the Old World to set standards and sought their art education abroad. “My God, I’d rather go to Europe than go to heaven,” the artist William Merritt Chase reportedly observed in 1872. Commentators argued that American culture needed to overcome its insularity and isolation. By the 1860s, there was a “different sort of confidence, a belief in American ability to benefit from full participation in the international cultural arena,” the art historian H. Barbara Weinberg writes. In the early 1850s, Richard Morris Hunt became the first American to get the rigorous, classical French architectural training of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Determined to bring the neoclassical monumentality of Parisian architecture to New York, he began to change Manhattan’s landscape. “It has been represented to me that America is not ready for the Fine Arts, but I think they are mistaken,” he wrote his mother. “There is no place in the world where they are more needed, or where they should be encouraged.” Painters like James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt moved to Paris; all three made their reputations there and remained in Europe, benefiting not simply from the high level of instruction, but from the abundance of Old Master pictures. Sargent and Cassatt, as well as Thomas Eakins traveled to Spain to study Velázquez, and, in Haarlem, Sargent copied Frans Hals. Marquand had made his fortune in the rapid transformation of the United States from an agrarian to an industrial nation now challenging England in its economic might, and he presumed that in taking cultural lessons from Europe, the New World would more than measure up. As a financier at a time when European money funded American railroads, Marquand believed that Old Masters would work as artistic capital to stimulate the development of American art.
Henry Gurdon Marquand
Marquand’s own affinity for the visual arts originated with his father, Isaac, and his eldest brother, Frederick. The two Marquands had distinguished themselves as silversmiths whose decorative wares, redolent of material and social success, were renowned for their craftsmanship and design. But Isaac and Frederick (who was twenty years older than Henry, his youngest brother) were also entrepreneurs who readily shifted gears to keep pace with the accelerating economy of New York. Born in Connecticut, Isaac had worked as a silversmith in Savannah, Georgia, before moving north to Manhattan. There, in 1803, he opened a jewelry store at 166 Broadway, in one of the narrow, four- and five-story buildings that lined the fashionable street, lit by whale oil lamps until the 1830s when gaslight replaced them. The silver trade was international, and Isaac Marquand and his partners in Savannah and New Orleans marketed not only American pieces, but also silver and jewelry from England, which they imported on their own ships.
Henry Gurdon Marquand was born in New York in 1819, six years before the opening of the Erie Canal transformed the city into America’s major port and the center of the nation’s international trade, manufacturing, and commerce. The population of Manhattan was then not much larger than Philadelphia’s and the tallest structures were steeples. In 1844, standing on the walls surrounding the reservoir near Forty-second Street, it was possible to look straight down to the Battery and to the Hudson and the East rivers on either side. Commentators complained of the monotony of New York’s architecture and the absence of civic monuments. “One sees neither dome, nor bell tower, nor great edifice, with the result that one has the const
ant impression of being in a suburb,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835.
Marquand had scant education, and at fifteen he went to work for Frederick at Marquand Bros., now at 181 Broadway. He commuted to Manhattan by ferry from the family’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. “My wages to be something like [$]150,” he wrote, “which was considered a good salary for [the] 1st year. Rather better than it would have been had it not been my brother’s store.” Early on, he was hungry to learn and restless. “Dull, dull, dull.’Bookkeeping is very tedious work,” he complained to his journal. “I felt [a] great deal like quitting my business & trying some more professional life.” A devout Presbyterian, he attended church at least once a day and in his journal he transcribed the sermons he had heard. Struggling to adhere to the tenets of Calvinism, he admonished himself for his impatience with work and for his persistent professional and intellectual ambitions. “Oh why this longing after something else? This thirst for worldly wisdom, this desire of worldly entertainment’ought not I to be filling my mind with heavenly knowledge?” Indeed, soon New York’s most worldly entertainment of all—its soaring financial markets—grabbed his attention and did not let go. (Later, Marquand rejected the arguments of the Presbyterians and voted to open the Metropolitan on Sundays, enabling the working class who had only that one day off, to visit the museum. “Must a man who walks in Central Park shut his eyes when he comes to a statue or a work of art?’New York has a great mixed population and we cannot expect those who have been differently brought up to agree with the early New England notions.”)
In 1838, Isaac Marquand died and Frederick sold the jewelry store to several of his partners in order to concentrate on real estate and finance. (The firm’s successor, Ball, Tompkins & Black, became Tiffany’s chief rival, and, for a while, stamped the prestigious Marquand hallmark on its silver.) In New York, the real estate market boomed, as the city advanced to the north. “The spirit of pulling down and building up is abroad, the whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years,” the mayor Philip Hone observed in 1835. Working for Frederick, Marquand began by collecting rents, but soon turned to investing: “Nothing is so engrossing as the love of money and the occupation of the mind with the grasp of wealth,” he wrote on June 6, 1842, at the age of twenty-three. “I have, for the past week had before my eyes a speculation in a certain stock and the prospect of a profit and found I have had no relish whatever for taking up a book of any kind.” In the seven years leading up to 1835, the volume of trading on the New York Stock exchange had multiplied fifty times to reach some 8,500 shares a day.
At the same moment Marquand was facing a crisis with his thirty-three-year-old brother, Josiah: “What scenes and trials we have here to endure, truly our path is thorny,” he wrote on June 7. “This day’s transactions furnish bitter recollections and retrospection. With case of bros Josiah who has recently or gradually for some one or two years, undergone mental alienation. Having come to the conclusion that it would be to his and our advantage to have him put under restraint, he went quietly out today with Mr. Trask and myself to the asylum, then to receive medical care & treatment.” Josiah doesn’t appear again in Marquand’s journal, but characteristically, in 1877 Henry and Frederick endowed a building at Bellevue Hospital in their brother’s name.
Five months later, in November, perhaps to escape New York and also to further his education, Marquand suddenly announced to his journal he might go abroad: “Now contemplating to commence on Tuesday a tour through France, Italy & Switzerland.” At the time, few Americans traveled to Europe. Only three years before, Cunard launched the first regularly scheduled transatlantic crossings, with steamships sailing from Liverpool to Boston twice a month. The innocent, even puritanical Marquand anticipated dangers ahead, and melodramatically bid his “native land’a land of Sabbaths & much privilege’farewell.” He even asked for the “grace, to be kept from temptation.” Nevertheless, he sailed, and, as he feared, the voyage changed him.
In Rome, Marquand met Henry Kirke Brown and other American expatriate sculptors, who had moved to the city to study its Ancient and Renaissance sculpture, and he began “to frequent studios” and to understand the artists’ “hopes, aims, and aspirations.” There Marquand fell under the spell of what Henry James called “the old and complex civilization.” He seemed to experience the sort of aesthetic awakening described by the New England heroine of James’s 1875 novel, Roderick Hudson, when she is in Rome: “Beauty stands there ’ and it penetrates to one’s soul and lodges there, and keeps saying that man was not made to suffer but to enjoy.” By the time Marquand returned to New York, art and architecture had usurped the place that religion had held at the center of his life, and from then on he put himself in the front lines of the campaign to support the visual arts in America. He confirmed the significance that Rome held for him in 1852 when he decided to spend a year there with his new wife, Elizabeth Love Allen. The first of their six children was born during the course of their Italian stay.
Once back in New York, Marquand built up a fortune speculating in foreign exchange and then in railroads, as Americans raced to lay tracks across the continent. By the end of the century, the United States would be linked by 175,000 miles of tracks—a network whose length had multiplied five times in the thirty-five years since the Civil War and was larger than Europe’s. Railroad securities dominated the New York Stock Exchange, and Marquand and his brother-in-law, Thomas Allen, plunged into the cut-throat industry in 1867 when they bought the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, which ran from St. Louis to a mining region in southeastern Missouri and then to Arkansas and Texas. The business climate was volatile and at one point the railroad went into receivership, but by 1880, Allen and Marquand had made it profitable. At that moment, Jay Gould was building a southwestern railroad network and bought up lines that competed directly with the Iron Mountain and also one that formed a critical link in its system. Seeing their business siphoned off, Allen and Marquand agreed to sell out to Gould, in a deal that brought Marquand $1 million.
In his drive to accumulate capital and to advance American art, Henry Marquand was emblematic of New York. Even in 1856, Harper’s Monthly observed that “a man born forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.” Between 1820 and 1880, Manhattan’s population had grown by a factor of eight, to 1.2 million, and by 1900 the city (with 3 million people) was surpassed only by London as the largest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere. Half of New York’s inhabitants were immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Germany, but recently Russian and Polish Jews and other Eastern Europeans had joined them. Tenements lined the Lower East Side, a dark, disease-ridden quarter and one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Commentators decried the city’s persistent contrast of wealth and poverty. Although New York had struggled for recognition as a center of art and culture, the city gained ground in the late 1860s and 1870s with the founding not only of the Metropolitan Museum but also the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Oratorio Society, and the New York Symphony Society. In 1883, the Metropolitan Opera opened a 3,700-seat house on Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street.
John White Alexander, Henry G. Marquand, 1896. Princeton University Art Museum. Marquand served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than a decade.
For decades Marquand had championed and purchased the work of American painters: the Hudson River landscapists Frederick Church and Thomas Cole, as well as Kenyon Cox, Samuel Colman, Eastman Johnson, and John La Farge. Starting in the early 1880s, he stepped up his commitment to the arts. In 1882, he commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to design an office tower in lower Manhattan and a mansion on the Upper East Side. (“I like noisy fellows around & you come under that head,” Marquand told the architect, who had built the financier a summer house in Newport.) Hunt’s Beaux Arts architecture adapted the grand forms of the European past to meet the
demands of the Gilded Age. He had erected one of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers (the eleven-story Tribune building), and an equally conspicuous turreted castle, for William K. Vanderbilt, which inspired a procession of mansions up Fifth Avenue.
If not on the Vanderbilt’s scale, Marquand’s red-brick-and-sandstone house at Sixty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue nevertheless enclosed one of New York’s most spectacular private “museums.” Visitors stepped into a central hallway gleaming with mosaics that shot up four stories to a skylight and they immediately encountered a nine-foot blue and white Renaissance altarpiece. Throughout the ground floor and the bedrooms above, the collector displayed a Victorian abundance of art from his own day and the past—paintings and sculpture, Chippendale furniture, Dutch and English silver, Venetian glass, Greek coins, Persian textiles, Limoges enamels, Roman mosaics, Gobelin tapestries, snuffboxes, and watches. Despite its eclecticism, Marquand’s collection gave no hint of the revolution in the theory and practice of painting recently sparked in France by Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists. Examples of the new painting, which rejected history and myth to focus on contemporary life, had appeared in New York early in April 1886, when the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel opened an exhibition of over two hundred French pictures.