Old Masters, New World
Page 5
In contrast, the portrait of the Duke of Richmond suited his Anglophile taste. A formal portrait of a royal cousin of a doomed English king, it celebrated the English ruling class, English power and English traditions, and provided a noble ancestor for the American, whose grandfather had been born in England. But above all, the portrait more splendidly manifested van Dyck’s genius. The enthusiasm that Sargent and Millet expressed for the picture would be echoed throughout the twentieth century, recently by an art historian who saw it as proof of van Dyck’s “inexhaustible inventiveness.” Marquand’s choice of a portrait over a religious picture was one that would be made again and again by American collectors.
Determined not to be overcharged, Marquand negotiated. “I have thought carefully over the picture belonging to Lord Methuen,” Marquand wrote Deschamps on October 5. “I feel sure that the great dealers would not give over 6 or 7,000 pounds for it [James Stuart] at the utmost.” Nevertheless, “I wish to be liberal & do not expect any bargain.” The van Dyck’s value in the marketplace was bound up with its identity as a celebrated work of art, its greatness ratified by Sir Paul Methuen’s prominence as a collector, and by the consensus of commentators who recognized the painting’s aesthetic impact and the ways it realized van Dyck’s ambitions. The handsome subject, the large scale, and the fine condition were all desirable attributes. (Paintings with faded colors, abraded surfaces, and flaking paint became ghosts of their original selves.) But Marquand knew that the van Dyck’s value also depended largely upon what he was willing to pay. The market for Old Masters was idiosyncratic and inefficient and had few players. Once the National Gallery had backed away, he remained the only serious contender; he offered Methuen 8,000 pounds ($40,000)—the exact amount that Deschamps had told him the painting was worth. The collector also refused to pay the dealer a commission. (To the cost he would have to add a 30 percent tariff that the United States charged for importing works of art.)
Earlier Methuen insisted to Herbert Smith that he would not negotiate. “I have consulted the best authorities in England among others Lord Northbrook—who advises me not to take less than £10,000.” He claimed Marquand faced competition from one of “the most independent and best judges in Europe—who are more than anxious to possess the picture” but happened to be short of cash. He threatened to “hold the picture back until next year when they are in funds.” Yet within days Methuen accepted the American’s offer.
Seizing the opportunity, Marquand now decided to buy more. Into the transaction he brought three additional Old Masters that he had admired at Corsham, for which Methuen added only 1,600 pounds ($8,000) to the bill. Two were Flemish—a large, unfinished canvas of Christ Before Pilate by Lucas van Leyden and a Rubens, Portrait of a Man (a man in black with a white ruff). The third had been painted in fifteenth-century Florence by a giant of the Italian Renaissance— Masaccio. It was a double portrait of a young woman in a cranberry-colored dress looking into the eyes of a young man on the left, whose face and red hat are only partially in view, cut off by a window frame through which he is leaning, his hands on its lower edge. Her luminous, subtly sculptured face is the center of attention. But, throughout the canvas, every detail, from the pearls along the edge of her headdress to the trees in the garden seen in the distance through a second window, is described with arresting precision. While formal and ceremonial, the portrait possessed a disarming intimacy in the two faces set so close together and gazing at each other.
In deference to Methuen, the American agreed not to broadcast his purchases in England. “I wish you to present my compliments to Lord M & ask him to give me all the historical details he can of the 4 pictures—and tell him specially that whatever his wishes may be—I will respect them concerning the public exhibit of them,” Marquand wrote Deschamps on October 12. “If he does not wish it—I will not lend them to Grosvenor, nor [the] National Gallery.” A gentleman, he put the best face on the Englishman’s loss. “I know it must be a struggle to part with such old friends,” he wrote. “They will, however, educate a new country & do good service I trust where they are going.”
At the end of October, the artist George Boughton delivered a check for 9,600 pounds (about $1 million in 2006 dollars) to Methuen and had Marquand’s pictures delivered to London. A friend “who is writing a paper on van Dyck in England was saddened to think such a master work was leaving the country,” Boughton told the collector. By Christmas the Methuen paintings arrived in New York and Marquand hung the van Dyck in his front hall. He invited members of the public—“those who are sincere in art, not the curious and shallow,” as one journalist put it—“to study the picture between three and six o’clock on Monday afternoons.”
“There stands before you an unmistakable type of the English gentry, a representative of royal blood and manners,” wrote a reporter in the Boston Evening Transcript. “All is grace and taste, feeling and intelligence.” Another critic praised the portrait’s “beauty and freshness, power and vitality of color.” He mused that Sir Frederick Leighton, head of London’s Royal Academy, might “exclaim on hearing that the portrait had gone to America, ‘it is a national calamity; it is van Dyck’s masterpiece.’ ”
But the most eloquent praise would come from John Singer Sargent, and not in words. Late in the summer of 1887, Marquand commissioned the artist to paint his wife, Elizabeth. In September, Sargent sailed for America and she sat for him in Newport.
“Sargent has done a grand thing of Mrs. Marquand & leaves in 2 or 3 days,” Marquand wrote Deschamps on October 25. Marquand failed to mention that in the full-length, Sargent had taken inspiration from America’s new van Dyck. Not only is Elizabeth Marquand dressed in a long black dress with a white lace collar, but in setting her against shadowy brown and in placing her elegant white fingers splayed against black, he borrowed from James Stuart. Most importantly, he gave the American aristocrat a sophisticated and easy confidence, which suited her just as the sense of hauteur had suited the seventeenth-century English lord.
Sargent exhibited the portrait in Boston in 1888 and then at the Royal Academy in London. Henry James immediately understood that the “noble portrait” would repair the damage done by Madame X. “Mrs. M. will do him great good with the public—they will want to be painted like that—respectfully honourably, dignement,” James told Henrietta Ruebell on April 1, 1888. From Newport, Sargent went on to Boston and then New York, and the commissions he executed in the course of the trip established him as America’s leading portrait painter. Later, Auguste Rodin would label the American expatriate the “van Dyck of the period.” Sargent himself thanked Marquand for the commission. “My debt of gratitude to you is one of very long standing. You have not only been a constant friend to me personally, but a bringer of good luck. My going to America to paint Mrs. Marquand’s portrait was a turning point in my fortunes for which I have most heartily to thank you.”
Earlier Marquand had attempted to appease Methuen with the thought that his paintings would “educate a new country.” Already, one of them had.
Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
The encounter with van Dyck’s James Stuart elevated Henry Marquand’s collecting ambitions. “In regard to buying anything else, I do not expect to waste my time on seeing everything which will not rank with the Rembrandt & van Dyck,” he told Deschamps on October 13, 1886. In 1887, he set out for Europe, again tracking Old Masters. At a Paris gallery, he saw Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher.
The painting’s subject was nothing more than a pale woman in a dark blue dress, standing in the corner of a darkened room, one of her hands grasping the handle of a brass pitcher and the other holding the frame of a leaded-glass window, which she might be opening, although the intent of the gesture remains unclear. Vermeer stayed close to his subject and set her into an intricate arrangement of shapes and colors—a chair, a table covered with a thic
k tapestry, a brass plate reflecting the tapestry’s reds, blues, and golds, and a string of pearls on a blue ribbon hanging on the edge of a wooden box. On the wall is a large map of the Netherlands, suggesting the world outside. The woman’s face is turned and framed by a luminous white headdress. Vermeer has conveyed her beauty in the delicate balance of her outstretched arms, the ultramarine dress that narrows at her waist, the planes of elusive blue, gray, and yellow in the translucent white fabric that crowns her head. Light from the window spreads across the background wall and flows down the left edge of the young woman’s arm, and everywhere accentuates and sharpens the contrasts of texture and hue. What might at first glance have seemed a straightforward and easy-to-read Dutch genre scene was in fact a seductively intricate and complex surface of paint.
Until he saw the painting, Marquand may never have heard of Vermeer. The seventeenth-century Dutch artist had only been “rediscovered” two decades before by the French critic Théophile Thoré after over a century when many of his pictures had been misattributed to other Dutch artists whose works were more valuable. In 1742, August II, the Elector of Saxony, bought Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, thinking it was a Rembrandt. Two decades later, England’s George III acquired The Music Lesson (A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman) as a picture by Frans van Mieiris. Even Vermeer’s masterpiece, The Art of Painting, went to Count Czernin in the early nineteenth century as a Pieter de Hooch. Similarly, the Vermeer that Marquand saw in Paris had until recently been attributed to Gabriel Metsu. Thanks to Théophile Thoré, Vermeer’s reputation was ascending. In the 1870s, the Louvre bought The Lacemaker and Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie Woman with a Pearl Necklace.
Seventeenth-century Dutch painting readily appealed to American collectors. Where the artists of Italy and Spain focused on the human figure and illustrated narratives chosen from history, literature, mythology, and the Bible, artists in the Netherlands painted portraits, landscapes, still lives, and genre scenes. “As distinguished from the narrative art of Italy,” writes the art historian Svetlana Alpers, “central aspects of seventeenth-century Dutch art—and indeed of the Northern tradition of which it is a part—can best be understood as being an art of describing.” Painters recorded the complicated and prosperous Protestant world they saw around them—the well-ordered city streets and canals, harbors crowded with square-rigged ships, stark white church interiors, and scenes of peasant and bourgeois life. Artists like Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema painted vast reaches of flat green pastureland beneath even vaster expanses of volatile sky. In portraits brimming with character and life, Frans Hals and Rembrandt depicted the merchants and bankers of Holland (in their fine black clothes and white ruffs) with at least as much transcendent virtuosity and penetrating analysis as van Dyck had brought to bear on kings and aristocrats. Americans had long valued the republic of Holland as a model for the United States and counted its citizens among their forebears. But the attraction of Dutch paintings for Americans sprang from their potent marriage of realism and visual splendor.
The $800 price of Young Woman with a Water Pitcher failed to reflect its brilliance and rarity. (Thoré attributed some seventy paintings to Vermeer, but later scholars cut the number to thirty-five.) Marquand decided to acquire the Dutch canvas, making it the first Vermeer to arrive in the United States. With this Vermeer and van Dyck’s James Stuart, Marquand launched Dutch pictures and grand manner English portraits as the two categories of Old Master pictures that the American tycoons who succeeded him would insist on possessing.
Within a year, Henry Marquand had amassed some thirty-five Old Masters, most of them seventeenth-century Dutch pictures. Wanting an audience to judge his new canvases, he put them on display at the Metropolitan. The positive response spurred him to act. “Being impressed that they would be of far greater service to the public to remain where they are in a public gallery, rather than in private hands, I hereby offer them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art without condition,” he wrote the trustees on January 10, 1889. Later that year, he was elected the Metropolitan’s second president. In 1890, he added thirteen more pictures, including a Leonardo da Vinci Madonna, Jan van Eyck’s Lamentation, and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Landscape.
Every painting is “interesting” and Marquand is “the most liberal patron of the fine arts in New York, and we might even say in the whole country,” wrote a critic in Harper’s. In The Collector, Alfred Trumble called Marquand “the greatest collector in America because he collects not for himself alone, but for a whole people and for all the world.” England also took note. “Everyone here who cares for art is much interested in this step of yours,” the London Times critic J. Humphrey Ward wrote Marquand. “But we tremble a little at the thought of what may happen to our old collections if our Old Masters become a fashion over there!”
The most important assessment came from Wilhelm von Bode, the Berlin Gemäldegalerie’s director, who visited the United States for the first time in 1893. Bode was one of the German scholars who had since the 1860s been laying the foundations of fine arts as an academic discipline. He had a doctorate in art history from Leipzig, and was working on a Rembrandt “catalogue raisonné,” which identified the artist’s paintings, for the first time set them in chronological order, and illustrated each with a black-and-white photograph. Such catalogs established the canon, while providing an invaluable reference for dealers and collectors. (In the United States, Yale had first offered fine arts courses in the 1870s, and Harvard followed suit a decade later. At Princeton, in 1882, Marquand’s own son Allan, whose doctorate in philosophy came from Johns Hopkins, began teaching a course in Early Christian and Byzantine art. Marquand paid Allan’s salary with funds from his brother Frederick’s estate.)
Bode found the Metropolitan’s new building “ponderous and in bad style,” but claimed that the Marquand pictures “would be a treasure to every gallery on the continent.” To the European, the number of paintings seemed small: “only fifty.” He pronounced both Rembrandts genuine, but reattributed several pictures, including the Masaccio double portrait, which he thought “probably a work by Cosimo Rosselli.” He identified the van Eyck as “an especially fine, bright work by Petrus Christus.” Finally, the Leonardo he demoted to a “school picture.” (In the latter two cases, Bode proved right.)
What Bode failed to acknowledge was that he stood as Henry Marquand’s foremost competitor for Old Master pictures. Bode had preceded the American financier in the art market, and had an advantage that Americans would take time to acquire—scholarly knowledge and expertise. In 1893, Bode breathed a sigh of relief. Even if the Americans showed “extraordinarily good taste” in their European purchases and willingly paid high prices, he reassured his German audience that “no one [in the United States] collects Old Master pictures systematically.” Indeed, as Americans focused on Rembrandt portraits, Bode acquired ten of the Dutch artist’s religious and mythological pictures for Berlin.
As the Metropolitan drew international recognition, behind the scenes, Marquand had a revolution to quell. In 1895, the attorney Robert de Forest headed a group of museum trustees campaigning to oust the controversial and incompetent director Luigi P. di Cesnola. According to the trustee Hiram Hitchcock, in the course of a meeting Joseph Choate and others claimed that Cesnola “hindered progress, prevented gifts, was deceptive, brusque, insulting, domineering, unjust to subordinates, not a good manager, not in touch with art here and in Europe, does not fairly represent us, is a martinet, owns the Museum, controlled Mr. [John T.] Johnston and now controls Mr. Marquand.” In his midseventies and depressed over the death of Elizabeth, Marquand resisted change and saw de Forest’s plans as insubordination—a battle between the “conservative forces” and the “Impressionists.” Hyperbolically, he predicted ruin, “unless the youthful element be kept quiet.” On February 10, de Forest and another trustee stopped a
t Marquand’s house, and his son Allan turned them away. “I am angered,” Henry Marquand wrote, “at the manner in which I heard yesterday that a scheme was on foot to remove the Director of the Museum.” Soon after, when the Metropolitan’s board voted on Cesnola, J. Pierpont Morgan took Marquand’s side, and the director held on to his job. While Marquand kept the trustees’ respect and devotion, the fight over the director cost him influence and power.
By 1901, when the trustees commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint Marquand’s portrait, the elderly collector looked thin and frail. Sargent painted him in his customary black suit, but placed his head in his hand, and his elbow on a table, in the classic pose of “melancholy.” Yet he suggested Marquand’s former energy in the arm he has thrown over the back of his chair, and made him at once both resolute and sad. Marquand had recently watched his financial legacy collapse when the investment firm owned by his son (Henry Marquand & Co.) and to which he had loaned over $100,000, went bankrupt.
In February 1902, Henry Marquand died. Because of the family’s troubled finances, the collection that had filled the house on East Sixty-eighth Street went on the auction block in New York in a series of sales that ran for five days and raised $700,000. The most expensive picture was Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Reading from Homer, which sold for $30,000. At the turn of the century, the taste for modernist art had not yet knocked the Victorian artist into obscurity. But the private collection, scattered by the auction, was inconsequential compared to the fifty Old Masters the visionary Marquand had already given the Metropolitan. These paintings rightly stood as the collector’s legacy, recalibrating the museum’s aesthetic standards and laying the foundation for what would become one of the great Old Master painting collections in the world. At the start of the twenty-first century, the Metropolitan still keeps thirty-five of Marquand’s pictures. Five or six of the collector’s paintings “rank with the finest works of art in the Museum,” notes Everett Fahy, chairman of the Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings—Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Man, Ruisdael’s Landscape (the Forest Stream), the Petrus Christus Lamentation, as well as Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher and van Dyck’s James Stuart. In the 1970s, scholars identified the Masaccio Portrait of a Man and a Woman at a Casement, which Marquand had bought at Corsham Court, as a Fra Filippo Lippi and as one of the museum’s rarest and most important pictures—the “first double portrait in Italian art.”