Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  Gutekunst rarely minced words, freely condemning competitors or works of art that he didn’t like or that he hadn’t handled. Annoyed when Berenson sold a painting by Cima obtained from a dealer in Italy, he told the connoisseur the picture was rubbish. He denounced Elia Volpi, a Florentine dealer, from whom Berenson sometimes bought pictures, as a “beast & a liar.”

  Berenson, for his part, complained when Gutekunst hadn’t alerted him to the Earl of Carlisle’s Velázquez, which an American dealer sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Gutekunst retorted: “Lord Carlisle’s Velasquez [sic], the child & dwarf, was ugly & quite repainted & flat, yet he sold it to [Arthur] Sulley … who placed it in America for something like £15,000.” He reassured Berenson, “We could buy the beastly thing for £5000 for years but would not touch it.” In fact, the fine Velázquez (Don Balthasar Carlos with a Dwarf) still hangs in the Boston museum.

  When Berenson questioned whether one of Gutekunst’s paintings was not fresh to the market, the dealer denied it. “Do you think then, that I am so short sighted, and such a blasted idiot to offer you pictures which have been… about, already either ­here or in America, as which might mislead you or get you into trouble?”

  Under Gutekunst, Colnaghi came to rival Agnew’s as London’s leading gallery for Old Master paintings. “If I ­were a rich man wishing to collect works by the Old Masters,” wrote Charles J. Holmes, director of the National Portrait Gallery in 1902, “judging by their keenness of sight and the uniform accuracy of their judgment in the ­sale-­rooms, I think I should myself go to Mssrs. P. & D. Colnaghi.”

  The Rape of Europa

  Once Isabella Gardner began to rely on Berenson to find pictures, he fanned her collecting ambitions: “If you permit me to advise you in ­art-­matters as you have for a year past, it will not be many years before you possess a collection almost ­unrivalled—of masterpieces, and masterpieces only.” Seven months later, she replied: “Shan’t you and I have fun with my Museum?”

  As soon as Otto Gutekunst recognized that Berenson had an American client for Old Masters, he leaped at the chance to provide them. When Gardner said she wanted a “Filippino Lippi; and a Velasquez [sic] very ­good—and Tintoretto,” Berenson relayed the message to Gutekunst and the dealer responded. “We are on the track of the Filippino, & of a Tintoretto, and also the Velasquez [sic]. What is your friend prepared to give? Does she require one of the tip top quality? We know one which we think is of such quality and which you may have seen at the Old Masters [exhibition] last time.”

  In Berenson, Gutekunst had a link to the American market. The connoisseur and the dealer served as ­go-­betweens, brokers, and experts, negotiating the transfer of Old Masters between buyers and sellers who otherwise ­wouldn’t come together and lacked an easy means to communicate. As they promoted Old Masters, they exploited the fact that the market was embryonic and inefficient, transactions ­were often secret, and information was hard to get. Naturally, they preferred buying ­pictures in private sales rather than at auction, where prices ­were public information. When the Colnaghi partners bought a van Dyck at auction, Gutekunst pointed out they would be forced to limit their commission.

  By ­mid-­January 1896, Gutekunst had obtained a Tintoretto, Portrait of a Man, and also a Rembrandt ­self-­portrait—one of his earliest, painted in 1629, when he was only ­twenty-three years old. Berenson sent Gardner photographs of the canvases, assuring her that the Rembrandt would be reproduced in Bode’s cata­log and claiming that “if not sold by Feb. 18, [the canvas] goes to the National Gallery.” The price of the Rembrandt was 3,000 pounds ($15,000) and the Tintoretto 500 pounds ($2,500) and she bought both. After the Rembrandt arrived, she held “quite a little reception’[with] some delicious music.”

  Meanwhile, Gutekunst set his sights ­high—on two of the most celebrated paintings in En­gland. “Could you place such a picture as Gainsborough’s famous The Blue Boy, or Reynolds’ Mrs. Siddons as Tragic Muse?” he asked Berenson. The Blue Boy is a ­full-­length portrait of a ­dark-­haired, ­innocent-­faced youth named Jonathan Buttall, wearing a gleaming, pale blue silk “van Dyck suit,” and striking a sophisticated pose with his hand on his hip. He is set against a stormy sky. Exhibited at the Royal Academy the year it was painted, the portrait instantly ­became famous. “I advise you to borrow, to do anything, but to get that picture,” Berenson told Gardner on April 14. “To bring that beauty to land’a bait of less than $100,000 will be out of the question.” Seeming to want to test her resources and resolve, Berenson asked her to agree to buy it before he specified the price. Twelve days later, he ­informed her he had gone ahead and bid 30,000 pounds ($150,000) for the Gainsborough, instructing her to reply by cable: “nobb=no, Blue Boy”… yebb = Yes Blue Boy.” On May 8, she cabled: “yebb.”

  “Now, you see me steeped in ­debt—perhaps in ­Crime—as the result!” she wrote. Gardner often complained about spending large sums for pictures and planned to borrow money to buy the Gainsborough. Still, her $150,000 offer signaled that she wanted masterpieces and was willing and able to pay for them.

  Already Gutekunst was working on a far more important painting: Lord Darnley’s Titian: Europa—a “picture for a great ‘coup,’ ” and “one of the finest & most important Titians in existence.” There is “absolutely nothing against it,” Gutekunst argued, “except perhaps for some scrupulous fool, the subject, which is very discreetly and quietly treated.” The “subject” was the “Rape of Europa,” a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; in the center of a canvas that mea­sured almost six by seven feet, Titian had placed the large, pivoting figure of Europa, flung across the back of a white bull, the naked body offset by a commotion of diaphanous white drapery.

  According to Ovid, Jupiter had spied Europa, the daughter of the king of Tyre, when she was with friends on a beach. Struck by her beauty, he disguised himself as a friendly bull (“No threat no menace in his eye; his mien peaceful”). But the moment Europa climbed on his back, the bull took off, carry­ing her across the water and eventually to Crete, where he returned to human form. Later, Europa gave birth to Jupiter’s son, ­Minos—founder of Ancient Greece, and thus, of Western Civilization.

  Titian painted the bull sweeping Europa away, swimming from left to right across the canvas, through the water. Her legs are lifted and her arms reach above her head. One hand grasps one of the bull’s horns, to keep her from sliding off his back into the sea, and the other catches a length of pale crimson drapery now soaring against a volatile blue sky. Crowned with a garland, the bull is strangely ­human—intelligence painted into large black eyes that glance behind at a dolphin in the water. Europa casts her gaze high into the sky, where in the ­upper-­left-­hand corner of the picture float two winged cupids carry­ing bows and arrows. Her head is thrown back, her face in shadow, her mouth slightly open in an expression of alarm and capitulation. The unstable position and the flying drapery convey the violence of the abduction and the complicated passions involved. “Just as the position of her body suggests surrender as well as fear,” wrote the art historian Erwin Panofsky, “so does the action of her arms suggest an embrace as well as a desire for ­self-­preservation.” The painting had an illustrious ­provenance—commissioned by Philip II of Spain, one of six “poesies,” painted for the king by Titian, each illustrating a myth from Ovid. “I have finally, with the help of divine grace, brought to completion the two pictures that I began for Your Catholic Majesty,” Titian wrote the King in 1562. “One is Christ in the Garden, the other the poesia of Europa carried by the bull, which I send to you.” In the lower left corner, the artist signed the canvas: titianus. p.

  A master of the High Re­nais­sance, a contemporary of Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome, Titian was long celebrated as the greatest of the Venetians. Born around 1485, he was apprenticed to Giovanni Bellini and worked with Giorgione. There seemed to be nothing he ­couldn’t do in paint. He produced not only subtle, magnificent, and penetrating portraits, but also
large, complicated religious and mythological scenes. (Gardner certainly knew the ­twenty-­foot-­tall Assumption of the Virgin on the high altar of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice.) By the time Titian was in his thirties, the courts of Eu­rope wanted his work. He received commissions not only from Philip II but also from Philip’s father Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, Alfonso I, Duke of Ferrara, and his sister Isabella d’Este, in Mantua.

  The Rape of Europa exemplified Titian’s late style, its loose brushwork and dissolving atmospheric effects seeming to anticipate Impressionism. “The old Titian was, in his way of painting, remarkably like some of the best French masters of ­to-­day,” Berenson observed. Oddly, Berenson had omitted Europa from Venetian Paint­ers and seems not to have laid eyes on the picture. (“You will find all about it in Crowe and Cavalcaselle pages 317 ­etc.,” Gutekunst told him.) Titian’s Europa had remained in the Spanish royal collection until the early eigh­teenth century when Louis Philippe, duc d’Orléans, acquired it. When, in 1798, the Orléans collection was sold and the paintings went to En­gland, Europa ended up in the possession of the 4th Earl of Darnley, who hung it in his ­house, Cobham Hall, in Surrey. Its condition Gutekunst described as “perfect,” “not considering a certain amount of dark varnish. The landscape alone is a masterpiece of the 1st water,” he added. Even among the dazzling company of Italian paintings from the Orléans collection displayed in London in 1798, according to the art historian Francis Haskell, Europa “was possibly the single most beautiful picture in the ­whole Orléans gallery.”

  The Colnaghi dealers themselves had “discovered” Europa in part through Wilhelm von Bode, who had been corresponding with Lord Darnley about the painting for more than two years. But, at some point, possibly because of the cost, Bode had turned the painting down. In February 1896, Gutekunst told Berenson that to persuade Lord Darnley to let go of his Titian would require 18,000 pounds. In his view, they could then sell the picture for 20,000 pounds, or $100,000. What Gutekunst needed from Berenson was a “firm offer.” He didn’t dare to inquire about the picture without ­one—or even to ask for a photograph. “Lord Darnleigh’s [sic]…name, by the way, must not be mentioned,” he warned, “as he is a very touchy and peculiar man.”

  The art dealer was in a delicate position. Officially, as he explained, “in the own­er’s words,” the Titian was “not for sale.’At the same time, it can be bought for £18,000.” Simply by suggesting to Lord Darnley that he might want to dispose of his heirloom Old Master, the dealer risked insulting him. Thus Gutekunst maintained the fiction that Lord Darnley had no thought of selling, while at the same time delivering a bid. Own­ers often wanted dealers to tell them what their paintings ­were worth. “There is no wish to sell the Portrait by ­Velasquez [sic],” an En­glish nobleman wrote in 1902, “but if Mssrs. Colnaghi’s client can give £30,000 for it, his offer would be entertained.”

  Gutekunst hoped to buy and sell the Titian without investing a cent of Colnaghi’s ­capital—engineering what financiers later called a “riskless-­principal transaction.” Once he identified a saleable Old Master, he lined up a buyer who agreed to a specific price (enough to cover both the cost and a commission), and at that point approached the picture’s own­er. (Problematically, if the buyer reneged, the Colnaghi partners would have to come up with the funds to purchase the picture.) Dealers generally preferred to buy pictures outright, but few had the capital. Frequently when investing in an expensive picture, the Colnaghi dealers brought in partners to raise enough cash. “We will do everything we possibly can to make it worth your while selling pictures for us,” Gutekunst explained to Berenson in October 1895, “but as we naturally lay out a lot of money in various ways constantly, we have sometimes in certain cases to take in another person to go 1⁄2 shares or 1⁄3 shares.” He even proposed to loan Berenson funds to invest in certain pictures with him.

  While he was waiting for the Duke of Westminster to accept Isabella Gardner’s 30,000 pounds for The Blue Boy, Berenson proposed Titian’s Europa to one of her Boston ­rivals—Susan Cornelia Warren, whose husband, Samuel Warren, was president of the Museum of Fine Arts. Berenson hadn’t seen a photograph of the picture because Gutekunst hadn’t been able to get ahold of one, but perhaps that was just as well. The erotically charged canvas was a radical choice for an American at the end of the nineteenth century. None of the fifty pictures that Henry Marquand gave the Metropolitan Museum depicted a nude; in Boston, only ten years before when the Museum of Fine Arts opened on Copley Square, a committee had made the decision to cover the plaster casts with fig leaves.

  “Sorely troubled about the confounded Titian,” Gutekunst wrote Berenson in early April. He still ­couldn’t get ahold of a photograph. “Fancy one of the finest Titians in the world, of spotless preservation & pedigree…as it ­were, in the market, and we should not be able to see it!?”

  Then, in early May, the Duke of Westminster let Gutekunst know he would not sell The Blue Boy after all. He “only smiled coldly’at the same time he was interested to hear of the offer, ­etc.,” Gutekunst reported.

  Earlier Gutekunst wired Berenson to ascertain what he could “safely get for” Titian’s Europa. Once “I know that, you may rest assured that we will get it as cheap as it can be had. I like a good margin!” By the end of April, he finally sent Berenson a photograph. “There is more money in this than in the other things,” he wrote, “and if I try and pull that through for you, you must please try and pull this through for me.… I want some of his other pictures badly. Tata!” He worried still about the picture’s propriety: “Let me know at once… your impression of the subject.” But he described the condition as “matchless,” and “the colours, particularly of the landscape, wonderful.”

  On May 10, Berenson finally told Gardner about Titian’s Europa. If the painting’s large size, mythological subject, flamboyance, and eroticism would put off most Americans, these very qualities would, on the contrary, appeal to her. In fact, the extraordinarily beautiful canvas by a celebrated Venetian was exactly the sort she wanted to have, and far more to her taste than The Blue Boy. (She had bought only one En­glish picture and then sold it.) But Berenson knew Gardner would not be pleased she was second in line. Recently, after he proposed she purchase a Tintoretto and a Giottino but before she had made up her mind, he sold them to another collector. “I should only like to say first that in future and for all time,” she told him, “please don’t let me and some one ­else know of the same picture at the same time.”

  Berenson tried to explain away his offer of the Titian to Warren. Knowing he was skating on thin ice, he chose his words carefully. “Now as you can not have The Blue Boy,” he wrote, “I am dying to have you get the Europa, which in all sincerity, personally I infinitely prefer. It is a far greater picture, great and great tho’ The Blue Boy is. No picture in the world has a more resplendent history.” He told her about the commission from Philip II and claimed that Philip IV gave it to Charles I when he was visiting Madrid. “It was then packed up to await his departure.” But when “the negotiations (for his marriage to Philip’s sister) came to nothing, and Charles left Madrid precipitately, the picture remained carefully ­packed—this partly accounts for its marvellous preservation.” Berenson called The Rape of Europa “one of the few greatest Titians in the world…being in every way of the most poetical feeling and of the most gorgeous colouring,” and “the finest Italian picture ever again to be sold.”

  A few days before, Gutekunst, impatient to sell the Titian, encouraged Berenson to lower the painting’s price. “If you ­can’t get 20,000, take 18,000. But I see far more chance in it, than in the Damned B. B. [Blue Boy].” Ignoring Gutekunst’s counsel, Berenson told Gardner the Titian’s cost was 20,000 pounds. He failed to inform her that the Europa was not officially on the market, that, in fact, its “price” would be set by what she was willing to pay. Gardner immediately agreed and sent Berenson a check that covered the 20,000 pounds, as well as his commission
of 5 percent. Meanwhile, Gutekunst succeeded in purchasing the Titian for only 14,000 pounds: “I commenced by offering [Darnley] £12,500.” Gutekunst explained to Berenson, “but had to come up to £14,000 to pull it off, in the end and no more pictures from Him!!” He was disappointed because he assumed Berenson had gotten her to pay only 18,000 pounds. “We must be content with 2,000 [pounds] a side,” he wrote. In fact, Berenson never revealed to his partner how much Gardner actually gave him. He sent Colnaghi’s the 14,000 pounds due Lord Darnley, but instead of splitting the 6,000 pounds left over with the London dealer, he sent simply the 2,000 pounds that Gutekunst expected. He also never mentioned the additional 1,000 pounds Gardner gave him as commission. In the sale of Europa, Berenson deceived both his partner and his client. Seven thousand out of 21,000 pounds (or some 30 percent) of the Titian’s price amounted to profit; and of that, 5,000 pounds went to Berenson.

  Only weeks before Gutekunst had warned Berenson that he was risking his reputation as a disinterested expert. A dealer he had recently seen in London “seemed to think he had heard that you had been selling pictures, that is to say not only advising people or friends to buy certain ones, but making money in this way…so be careful.”

  For his part, Berenson managed to keep his conversation with Isabella Gardner away from the market. “The Europa is yours,” he wrote to her from Paris on June 18. A month after she paid for the picture, it remained in London. As was her habit, she had left the heat of Boston for her summer ­house, Beach Hill, in Prides Crossing. “When comes Europa?” she demanded on July 19. “I am feverish about it. Do come over, just to unpack her and set her up in her new shrine! Do!” She kept up her correspondence with Berenson, evoking the heady atmosphere in which she thrived and elevating their level of intimacy. “I am leading such an open air life just ­now—driving, seeing polo, and people. Flowers and pictures seem to belong to another ­existence—flowers in Brookline, pictures in Boston!”…Some day, by the way, you must say a little to me about that heart of yours.” In late July, Gutekunst had the Europa packed and taken to the ocean liner Lucania, and the canvas set sail for America.