Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  Marquand had no interest in Impressionism. He would probably disagree with the ­avant-­garde paint­er who quipped, “a ­well-­painted turnip is as beautiful as a ­well-­painted Madonna.” Yet in his quest for Old Masters he sought those that ­were “well-­painted,” revealing that he shared the modernists’ conviction that the value of a painting depended first and foremost upon its formal aspects.

  “The Rest of the World Painted for Them”

  Early in 1886, Frederick Henry Paul, 2nd Baron Methuen, had written Frederick Burton, director of the National Gallery, to say that “there ­were several pictures at Corsham that’[he] might be ready to part with.” It was not an easy letter to write. The famous Methuen collection had been assembled in the 1720s by his ancestor Sir Paul Methuen, a wily diplomat who had served as En­glish ambassador to Portugal and Spain, and as Trea­sur­er of His Majesty’s ­House­hold in the courts of George I and George II. Described by Voltaire as “one of the most generous, bravest, and most sincere men his country ever employed in an embassy,” Sir Paul now looked out from a portrait in a powdered wig and ceremonial uniform. Like many En­glish diplomats, Methuen found that his travels on the Continent wetted his appetite for pictures and gave him opportunities to buy them. He kept his renowned collection at his ­house in London and when he died in 1765, he left it to his cousin and namesake, an affluent woolen ­manufacturer and Frederick Methuen’s ­great-­grandfather, who acquired Corsham Court and built the gallery to ­house the pictures.

  Sir Paul was a member of En­gland’s wealthy and powerful ruling class, which in the course of the eigh­teenth century became Eu­rope’s most relentless collectors of art. Britain’s amassing of Old Master pictures went hand in hand with the rise of its empire. As the En­glish nobility came to dominate the country’s economic, po­liti­cal, and social life, they erected enormous ­houses in the country and took the Grand Tour, a cultural pilgrimage to the Continent, whose most important destination was Italy. There, they spent part of their vast wealth on ­art—particularly on Italian Baroque paintings. Even before 1700, the British (ignoring laws forbidding the importation of pictures) began purchasing canvases from Eu­rope at a rapid rate. In the season between September and March, when the aristocracy stayed in London, art auctions occurred on a regular basis. In 1766, James Christie began holding both “estate” sales with assorted property and sales consisting simply of Old Master pictures. By 1778, when Thomas Gainsborough painted his portrait, Christie had established his firm as the principal art auction ­house in London. (Sotheby’s was launched in 1744 by Samuel Baker and began by dealing only in books.)

  At first the En­glish kept their new collections in London, but in the middle of the eigh­teenth century they started moving them to their country ­estates—to Blenheim Palace, Houghton Hall, and Alnwick Castle. The Methuen van Dycks ­were only two among hundreds of paintings now scattered throughout En­gland, Ireland, and ­Scotland— the geo­graph­i­cal dispersion of pictures signifying the distribution of economic and po­liti­cal power of a landed aristocracy. By contrast, France concentrated its Old Masters in Paris where a series of absolute monarchs had made certain their art collections outpaced those of the nobility. The French Revolution in 1789 and the Napoleonic wars caused a massive uprooting of works of art and ushered in the halcyon days of British collecting. “Scarcely was a country overrun by the French when En­glishmen skilled in the art ­were at hand with their guineas,” observed the German museum director Gustave Waagen. Between 1770 and 1830, the En­glish imported unpre­ce­dented quantities of pictures. In London, “Caraccis, Claudes, Poussins, arrived by ­ship-­loads,” noted the En­glish art writer Anna Jameson. “One stands amazed at the number of pictures introduced by the enterprise of private dealers into En­gland between 1795 and 1815, during the hottest time of the war.” Indeed, the period between 1780 and 1820 was the first “bull market” in Western art, according to the economist William Goetzmann, and “coincided with rising consumer price levels.”

  That En­gland’s Old Master paintings ­were privately held and dispersed throughout the country had the effect of keeping them under wraps. But the quantity and quality of these Old Master holdings became absolutely clear in 1857, when an exhibition entitled Art Trea­sures of Great Britain in the industrial city of Manchester brought many of the finest canvases together under one roof. After the French critic Théophile Thoré visited the show, it must have caused him some pain to acknowledge that “the collection of pictures’is about on a level with the Louvre.” Two de­cades later, Henry James observed the vast dimensions of En­gland’s aesthetic wealth: “Whether or not the En­glish have painted, the rest of the world has painted for them.”

  Frederick Methuen had grown up with his family’s pictures, as had his father before him, and was well aware that the gallery had stood still in time, not only because it was worthy of preservation but because Sir Paul’s heirs had failed to match his achievements and had drained the family’s resources. Now Methuen needed money. A veteran of the Crimean War, in his late sixties, the baron held a largely ceremonial job at Victoria’s court; he loved shooting and cricket, and had recently added property to the Corsham estate and thus to his taxes. His collection offered a way to raise funds. In the 1840s, his father had financed renovations at Corsham by selling Rubens’s David and Abigail, Rembrandt’s Noble Slav (Man in Oriental Costume), and a pair of Claudes.

  Methuen’s cash shortfall spoke to a wider financial crisis plaguing Britain’s landowning nobility, some seven thousand five hundred families who still held over three quarters of the real estate in the British Isles. Starting in the 1870s, Britain imported cheap grain from the American Midwest, Canada, and New Zealand, causing the price of En­glish wheat to decline, and, with it, the income from farmed estates, as well as their value. At the same time, the nobility faced higher taxes and Parliament passed a series of Reform Acts, which undercut its ­long-­held po­liti­cal power.

  Historically, the British legal code forbade the nobility from selling “settled land” and tangible property, but in 1882, to allow beleaguered landowners some flexibility to respond to their economic troubles, Parliament passed the “Settled Land Act,” to permit the sale of land and “chattels,” of which Old Master paintings ­were often the most valuable. Between 1870 and 1919, according to the historian David Cannadine, ­seventy-­nine of the country ­houses in En­gland, Scotland, and Wales ­were torn down. Within months of the passage of the Settled Land Act, the Duke of Hamilton auctioned part of his collection in a sale with two thousand lots that ran seventeen days, and generated 500,000 pounds. Frederick Burton purchased fourteen major pictures for the National Gallery. Four years later, the Duke of Marlborough put dozens of paintings (including eigh­teen Rubens and fifteen van Dycks) from Blenheim Palace on the block. Already, Burton had bought the most celebrated of the Marlborough ­pictures—Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna for 70,000 pounds ($350,000), making the altarpiece the most expensive Old Master on record.

  Methuen’s first hope was to sell some of his paintings quietly to the National ­Gallery—to deposit them close by and in a setting worthy of their quality and of his family’s achievement as collectors. Parliament had founded the gallery in 1824 after buying ­thirty-­eight Old Masters assembled by the late John Julius Angerstein, a German Jew and found­er of ­Lloyds—a collection En­gland wanted to keep. Twelve years later, in 1836, to ­house the new museum, the British government constructed a building with a columned portico on Trafalgar Square appropriately facing the monument to Napoleon’s conqueror, Lord Nelson. In contrast to his pre­de­ces­sor, who sought pictures on the Continent, Frederick Burton focused on securing paintings from Britain’s own collections and on preserving the nation’s fabulous pictorial wealth. Burton replied to Methuen that he “would take the earliest opportunity of laying the matter before the [National Gallery’s] board.” But he waited until May to visit Corsham with two trustees, and then failed to make offers on any of
Methuen’s pictures. Meanwhile word that the Methuen van Dycks ­were on the market traveled fast. By the end of February 1886, the dealer Charles Deschamps approached H. Herbert Smith, a real estate agent who managed the Corsham property, and asked if he could make an appointment to see the van Dycks. Smith passed Deschamps’s request on to Frederick Methuen.

  At first Methuen put Deschamps off, but in early May he invited the dealer to inspect the paintings. He told Smith that he did “not think they [the National Gallery trustees] have the slightest intention of bidding for either of the van Dycks,” and hoped Deschamps would “do his best” for the paintings. Methuen had assured Smith that “the van Dycks have never been in the market in my time or offered to anyone. I have not seen any dealer or had any communication with one on the ­subject—but have left Mr. Deschamps’ hands free and shall wait until he can make me an offer.”

  In early July, the artist Lawrence ­Alma-­Tadema, whose elaborate grand piano for Marquand was still being finished by craftsmen in London, informed his American patron that his friend Charles ­Deschamps “has all the threads of the van Dyck sale in hand.” Ever since Marquand let it be known he was looking for Old Masters, Deschamps had tried to supply them. But the ­Belgian-­born dealer and the American collector had an uneasy relationship, as Marquand distrusted people in the art trade. He turned to Deschamps only because he had established links to En­glish own­ers of Old Master paintings and Tadema recommended him.

  Frederick, 2nd Baron Methuen. In 1886 he told the director of the National Gallery in London that he “might be ready to part” with some of his family’s Old Masters.

  By early July, Deschamps tried to convince Marquand to take the two Methuen van Dycks, sight unseen, and recruited two of America’s ­expatriate ­painters—John Singer Sargent and Frank ­Millet—to help him. At the time, professional artists ­were leading experts on Old Master pictures and Deschamps knew that Marquand relied on them to advise him. Millet, a Harvard graduate and former newspaper correspondent, just that year had moved with his family to the Cotswolds, where he gathered an informal colony of American artists and writers including Henry James and Sargent, who was spending the summer. The ­thirty-­year-­old Sargent had made his name as a portrait paint­er in Paris, but had recently fled to London. He had exhibited a ­full-­length of a ­dark-­haired, ­sharp-­profiled woman (the American Virginie Gautreau) in a long black dress, provocatively titled Madame X. The French critics had complained that the skin was too pale and the dress, with its strap down off the shoulder, too risqué.

  “I can only say that both Millet and Sargent ­were most enthusiastic about the pictures,” Deschamps wrote Marquand on the eve­ning of July 16. Of course, the ‘Duke of Richmond’ is the greatest work; but the ‘Betrayal in the Garden’ is also a magnificent picture. It has all the strength and glow of colour of Rubens, but with more delicacy.” For both pictures together, he explained, “the steward of the estate’has reason to believe that £12,000 would be taken,” but suggested that Marquand offer £11,000. He added: “The Portrait alone is worth at least £8,000.” He urged Marquand not to wait. “Such pictures are seldom on the market, and it is only ‘bad times,’ that have induced the own­er & his next heir to sell. The pictures must have hung on the walls for several generations, but they have in no way ­suffered.’The family are about to take up their residence at the ­house, and I fear that Lord Methuen is very anxious to arrive at some decision. A good crop, and circumstances might alter the necessity of selling.”

  Only days later, Deschamps told Marquand that Methuen, now informed of the American’s interest, insisted on getting no less than 15,000 pounds ($75,000) for both canvases. “Under these prices he does not care to sell.” The dealer jumped in to justify Methuen’s price. He claimed he had heard that Frederick Burton “considers it [James Stuart] one of van Dyck’s very best works. They [the National Gallery trustees] would certainly have bought it for the nation, had they not unfortunately bought Lord Marlborough’s Charles I.” He added that “Millet & Sargent are in ignorance of the price wanted, but they both ­were saying that the picture was beyond any value that could be put on it.”

  But Marquand held off. He grasped the risks involved in buying Old Master paintings. Wishful thinking had directed the labeling of many pictures and misattributions abounded. Van Dyck’s early paintings could be mistaken for the work of Rubens, whose pictures were more valuable—and whenever possible, they ­were. Problems originated with artists like Rembrandt, Rubens, and El Greco, who all ran large workshops and seemed to have signed canvases executed by assistants when they closely enough resembled their own. There ­were also thousands of Old Master ­copies—oil paintings made over the centuries in good faith by aspiring artists, for whom copying was part of academic training. Further muddying the waters ­were fakes and forgeries.

  Yet, even without an authoritative text on van Dyck, the long history of the two Methuen paintings in an illustrious En­glish collection where various commentators had taken note of their presence, gave Marquand confidence that they ­were authentic. By the end of the summer, he resolved to see the van Dycks for himself.

  Marquand sensed that his visit to Corsham would embarrass and unsettle Baron Methuen and he chose a time when the own­er was away. Now, standing on a vast Oriental rug in the silent gallery, ­Marquand was making a first American sortie into one of En­gland’s trea­sure vaults. If Marquand did not share Sir Paul Methuen’s passion for Italian Baroque pictures, he ­couldn’t help but admire the En­glish diplomat’s ambition, and the way he had assembled a fine collection of paintings from the Continent and made it his ­own—made it En­glish. The New Yorker, who had filled his mansion floor to ceiling with works of art, recognized that he was in a way Sir Paul Methuen’s rightful heir. Although he had come to examine the stars of the collection, he suspected that virtually all the paintings in the ­house ­were for sale.

  James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox

  Marquand found the portrait of James Stuart in the dining room where traditionally the En­glish hung their portraits. The canvas is a lifelike, ­life-­sized “full-­length,” close to seven feet in height, and more an En­glish than a Flemish picture. It portrays a lanky, ­fair-­haired young man, with golden curls falling to his collar, standing with his right hand on the head of a brown greyhound, which looks devotedly up at him. He is splendidly dressed, in a suit of black ­satin—a black doublet with slashed sleeves, black breeches, a black jacket, a black cloak—and stockings of the palest green. His tapered fingers are splayed against the ­ink-­colored doublet. He wears a tall, wide collar, a triangle of intricate white lace (later known as a van Dyck collar). Emblazoned on his sleeve is a white, ­eight-­point star and hanging from a green ribbon around his neck is a gold ­medal—both decorations, like the ceremonial “garter” on his left leg that he wore as a member of the Order of the Garter, or the Society of Saint George. He appears the embodiment of grace and nobility, his pose conveying his highborn rank. His ­opulent dress buttresses his sense of refinement, elegance, and sophistication. He has a delicately arched nose and a long, thin, pale face, which is open and innocent. His eyes gaze straight out, and slightly down, and his glance is oddly contemplative, tempering the bearing and clothing that otherwise epitomize a distant, arrogant royal realm, and hinting at weakness. In the portrait, van Dyck constructed the image of an aristocrat who appears also to be a flesh and blood ­human being. He captured his mood and a flicker of doubt that took possession of his face.

  The portrait was one of some two hundred that van Dyck painted in En­gland in the 1630s, when Charles I lured him to London to serve as his court paint­er. James Stuart was a favorite cousin of the king. Educated at Cambridge, he served in various government posts, including Heritable High Chamberlain of Scotland. Like certain others in the royal family, he may have been a Catholic.

  As Charles I intended, van Dyck left a glorious visual record of the court and his ­reign—in portra
its of the king, his queen, and their children, and of members of the nobility who sought out the artist’s ability to transform them from ordinary creatures into unforgettable self-­possessed individuals, each of whom embodied the fullest meaning of the word aristocrat. Famously, van Dyck elongated the proportions of his sitters so their height was sometimes as much as nine times the length of their heads. Van Dyck had stayed in En­gland less than a de­cade, but his influence on English portraiture had been radical and ­pervasive—an influence visible in the parade of Methuen family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and George Romney, hanging with the van Dyck in the dining room.

  What made the portrait of James Stuart unforgettable was the play of bold, visible brushstrokes that evoke the physical presence of the ­seventeenth-­century nobleman, as in the green that suggests the weight and texture of the gleaming silk of his stockings, which sag slightly on his ­well-­formed legs.

  Well aware of the portrait’s appeal, Frederick Methuen set the price of James Stuart at more than twice the price of the van Dyck altarpiece. Portraits generally had a larger market than religious pictures since collectors wanted canvases that easily fit into their ­houses. The Duke’s figure offered a cultivated presence; the dark, violent image of the Garden of Gethsemane did not. Yet both James Stuart and The Betrayal of Christ more than met Marquand’s criteria for the Metropolitan Museum. Together they represented van Dyck’s two sides—the religious (or history) pictures and the portraits painted for private clients, which generated his large income. Still, the Protestant Marquand could not look at The Betrayal in purely art historical or aesthetic terms. He balked at buying a canvas that had originated as an altarpiece and whose ­life-­sized theatrics may have smacked too much of what the American historian John Lothrop Motley called the “superstition and despotism” of ­seventeenth-­century Catholicism.