Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  Gutekunst understood she wanted masterpieces and he delivered them. In only eight years, between 1894 and 1902, Colnaghi provided Isabella Stewart Gardner with ­twenty-­two pictures and most of her finest Old Masters. For these she paid $750,000. One hundred years later, the Botticelli, the Titian, the Holbeins, and the ter ­Borch all had held their attributions. The delicate, muted Annunciation by Fiorenza di Lorenzo would be reattributed to various artists (including “the Master of the Gardner Annunciation”) and eventually to Piermatteo d’Amelia. Three out of the four Rembrandts remained in the Rembrandt canon. Only Landscape with an Obelisk has been reassigned to Govaert Flinck, a Rembrandt contemporary.

  Otto Gutekunst, the dealer at P. & D. Colnaghi in London who secured masterpieces for both Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Clay Frick.

  In 1909, in a note apparently meant for posterity, Gardner herself put down her final assessment of her fraught relationship with the London art gallery and the Holbein transaction:

  I bought through the Colnaghis in June 1899 the two Holbeins from the Pole Carews. Colnaghi’s cheated Pole Carew & I think me. I do not care again to deal with the Colnaghi’s. However the Holbeins are splendid pictures & now in 1909 I can say, more than worth the money.

  While she blamed Colnaghi instead of Berenson for overcharging her, she recognized that in the end, as the prices of pictures soared, she came out ­ahead—not only in financial terms, but more importantly as a collector. Her pragmatic assessment of Colnaghi helps explain her ability to overlook Berenson’s deceit. If he had betrayed her as a friend and adviser, in the end, as a collector she had gotten from him what she ­wanted—a number of extraordinary pictures. She continued to buy pictures from him and kept up their correspondence until the end of her life.

  In 1934, when both Gutekunst and Berenson ­were close to seventy, Gutekunst spoke bitterly to Berenson about his dismissive and condescending attitude. He felt Berenson had insulted him with a backhanded ­compliment—saying that if Gutekunst “had devoted’[his] life to study,’[he] would have ranked with the best’who have.”

  “Down from your pedestal!” Gutekunst replied.

  To what ­else have I devoted my life?! Who are all this holy Circle, ‘the best of you??’

  Do they not all make mistakes? Have they not all from time to time accepted things they rejected afterwards or rejected some they accepted later? Are not you all, like us, just after ­money—we openly you quietly & less candidly!’We know too much about one another.’But I do mightily resent this high brow & superior attitude. I will not take second place to any living soul regarding eye & experience or honesty of endeavor & dealing & sincerity nor in balanced knowledge & understanding of Art: pictures, drawings & prints of all schools. I am no specialist, nor an Art Historian, critic, or writer. I am an expert who has to stand by his guns & always have paid for my mistakes myself.

  And he had. Starting in October 1903, at Gutekunst’s urging and hoping to enlarge their “circle of friends,” the Berensons spent six months in the United States, where the art world received them as conquering intellects. By now Berenson had written eight books and ­thirty-­seven articles. “They take it for granted ­here that he is honorable and learned and sincere whereas in En­gland from Roger [Fry] down they take the opposite for granted and of course in Germany and Italy and France he is much more loathed than liked,” Mary wrote in her diary. Frederick Rhinelander, who had succeeded Marquand as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other trustees met with him, raising the possibility that they might offer him the director’s job. In Philadelphia the Berensons visited the collections of the traction tycoon Peter A. B. Widener (“about the rottenest we have yet seen,” according to Mary) and of the Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson, who recruited Berenson to scout for pictures. Also, in New York, he agreed to advise Eugene Glaenzer, a Paris dealer with a branch on Fifth Avenue.

  Fenway Court

  By 1900 the heyday of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Old Master collecting had come to an end. The one picture she continued to want was a ­Raphael Madonna and she pestered Berenson to find her one. He had tried to discourage her; they rarely came on the market. “And buy me a heavenly Raphael Madonna,” she wrote Berenson on March 11, 1901, “and then let’s to sleep on our laurels. I think of putting on my pearls and begging from door to ­door—no other clothes but my Rosalina point lace!”

  Meanwhile, she had collected hundreds of other ­objects—sculpture, columns, sarcophagi, and mosaics from Ancient Rome, screens from Japan, and some 450 pieces of furniture. As a collector, she had largely achieved her aims, acquiring fine, sometimes extraordinary examples of many of Eu­rope’s greatest masters. While pleading poverty, she worried that inexpensive pictures did not meet her standards. “But I am beginning to feel very sure I must not have any 2nd rate things,” she told Berenson. “Is the Botticini one?”

  In the summer of 1900, the foundations of her museum ­were laid, and for two years she worked on constructing the building she called Fenway ­Court—her tribute to Venice, its palaces and art, in par­tic­u­lar to the Palazzo Barbaro. The exterior of the museum was disarmingly plain. But inside, she created a ­four-­story, ­sky-­lighted courtyard, into whose stone walls she set arches, balustrades, and other architectural fragments she had gathered in Italy. (She had brought back “columns, capitals, reliefs, frescoes, mirrors, cassoni, chairs, fountains, balconies,” as Berenson put it.) The courtyard was a vast version of the courtyard in the Palazzo Barbaro. In it she placed Greek and Roman sculpture. As she invoked the ancient city of Venice in the architecture she embedded in the museum’s walls, she worked it into a design, whose emphatic individualism and subjectivity was strangely modern.

  She hung her Old Master paintings on the museum’s second and third floors in galleries also filled with sculpture, furniture, and other decorative arts. She gave each of the rooms a distinct character, lining some with dark wood paneling, others with ­damask—and setting up startling juxtapositions. She placed a Roman mosaic with the head of Medusa in the center of the courtyard, not far from a chapel. Works of art also ran along the corridors. With her highly personal installation, she determined the way viewers would experience the ­art—figuratively taking them by the hand in hopes that they too would revel in it as she had. The private American museum with a collection acquired in less than two de­cades resembled “a great Italian villa,” wrote Rollin van N. Hadley, the museum’s director, “with the accumulation of generations dispersed in a seemingly haphazard fashion.” From her apartments on the fourth floor, Gardner could look out through the Venetian arches at her creation below.

  She hung Europa with ten other Old Masters in a ­third-­floor room that evoked the ancient grandeur of the Barbaro, its walls covered with rich red damask. There she also placed Benvenuto Cellini’s ­life-­sized bronze bust of Bindo Altoviti, as well as gilded tables and chairs, on a Persian carpet. On the wall below the Titian, she spread a ­six-­square-­foot expanse of pale olive green silk, which came from a dress designed for her by Worth, and with this fabric tied herself to her masterpiece.

  Fenway Court opened on January 1, 1903, with a party for three hundred, which began at 9 p.m. Members of the Boston Symphony played in a “music room” on the ground floor. Gardner set potted palms and flowers in the courtyard and illuminated it with candles and torchlight. The public was invited on February 23; admission required a $1 ticket and she limited attendance to two hundred a day. Subsequently, she opened the museum for a few weeks every spring and fall.

  Isabella Stewart Gardner, ca. 1915, wearing the pearls that appear in John Singer Sargent ’s portrait. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department.

  In 1903, Wilhelm von Bode visited Fenway Court. The German museum director had been keeping his eye on America. The year before, in an article titled “The American Competition in the Art Trade and Its Danger for Eu­rope,” he identified the threat posed by the new tycoons: “These gentlemen fro
m the iron trust stepped indeed with iron feet into the art market, stomping out the old order and creating a peculiar new one.” After his Boston visit, he tried to reassure the Old World, claiming that most of the paintings lost to America had already been rejected by Eu­ro­pe­ans, and he named three Gardner pictures (the Titian Europa, the Raphael Tommaso Inghirami, and the ­Dü­rer portrait) to prove it. He failed to mention that he himself had turned them down. But Gardner’s Benvenuto Cellini bust was one of three pieces he had seen in the United States that he believed “every large museum would love to own.” The Rembrandt expert praised the “splendid, tasteful installation” at Fenway Court, as well as the array of Italian and Dutch pictures, and declared all four of Gardner’s Rembrandts genuine.

  In 1904 Henry James visited the United States, and three years later he published his thoughts in The American Scene. Although he wrote only a few lines on the “wonderfully gathered and splendidly lodged” Gardner collection, these observations opened his chapter on Boston and drew it to a close. He celebrated the museum and its found­er as part of the “new” ­Boston—a “rare exhibition of the living spirit lately achieved, in the interest of the fine arts, and of all that is noblest in them, by the unaided and quite heroic genius of a private citizen.” But he paid his greatest compliment to Gardner in calling her museum (its “results magnificently attained, the energy triumphant over everything”) part of the old Boston and its “fine old disinterested tradition.”

  Fenway ­Court—private ­house and public ­museum—was Isabella Gardner’s ­self-­portrait and reflected both her brilliance and her eccentricities. Titian’s Europa continues to stand apart from the mainstream of American Old Master collecting. One hundred years later, many would agree with the art historian who called it “the greatest Venetian painting in the United States.”

  CHAPTER III

  “Mr. Morgan Still Seems to Be Going

  on His Devouring Way”

  J. Pierpont Morgan, Raphael’s Colonna Madonna,

  Gainsborough’s Georgiana, Reynolds’s Lady Elizabeth Delmé,

  and Lawrence’s Elizabeth Farren

  Although Isabella Stewart Gardner could only dream of possessing a Raphael Madonna, J. Pierpont Morgan actually succeeded in buying one. To describe Morgan as Gardner’s rival oversimplifies the situation, as his fortune was many times greater than hers and paintings ­were only part of his vast, encyclopedic collecting project. In April 1901, at Charles Sedelmeyer’s Paris gallery, Pierpont Morgan saw Raphael’s Colonna Madonna, the central panel of a Re­nais­sance altarpiece painted for the convent church of Sant’Antonio of Padua in Perugia in the sixteenth century and dismantled a hundred years later by the nuns needing to pay the convent’s bills. Hoping to capitalize on Raphael’s popularity and prestige and on the painting’s resemblance to the Ansidei Madonna (whose $350,000 price to the National Gallery in 1885 was still a record), Sedelmeyer was asking 2 million francs, or $400,000, for the picture. Although taste in Old Master pictures had fluctuated, Ra­phael, along with Titian and Leonardo, had been held in the highest critical esteem for centuries. Dying at thirty-seven (like van Gogh), Raphael had painted relatively few canvases. The astronomical asking price would not be a problem for Pierpont Morgan. Only weeks before, the sixty-­four-­year-­old banker announced he was assembling United States Steel, the largest industrial conglomerate in the world, and the first to be capitalized at over $1 billion.

  Morgan was already forging a reputation as the most omnivorous American collector of art. He began amassing a collection in 1890, the year that his father, Junius Spencer Morgan, died and left him a London merchant bank and $15 million. In the last de­cade of the century, his wealth had doubled. “Having become the greatest financier of the age,” Morgan “determined to be its greatest collector,” the Burlington Magazine, an En­glish art periodical, later observed. Although Morgan did not spell out his intentions as Henry Marquand had, his relentless art buying seemed driven in part by a desire to transform the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the museum became a depository for segments of his sprawling collection. Since 1888, Morgan had served as a museum trustee and in November 1904 he became the Metropolitan’s fourth president. But what­ever his future plans, Morgan kept most of his art holdings in London, determined to avoid the 20 percent tariff that the U.S. government imposed in 1897 on art over one hundred years old. (In 1904 Isabella Gardner would pay a $200,000 fine for customs duties levied against works she purchased for her museum six years before.) Meanwhile, he lobbied to have the customs duty eliminated.

  The banker J. Pierpont Morgan in 1902 at age ­sixty-­five. Morgan outstripped all other American collectors, buying not only magnificent single pieces like the Colonna Madonna but also entire collections.

  In sheer numbers, Morgan outstripped all other American collectors. He went after not only single, magnificent pieces, like Rembrandt’s portrait Nicolaes Ruts and a ­sixteenth-­century tapestry once owned by Cardinal Mazarin, but entire collections. In 1902, Morgan purchased two thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, a collection that James A. Garland had previously loaned to the Metropolitan. (After Garland’s death, the dealer Henry Duveen bought Garland’s porcelain for $500,000, and sold it for $600,000 to Morgan, who donated it to the museum.) He plunged into French decorative arts and also into Medieval art by gathering up (for $1.5 million) two collections created by Georges Hoentschel in France. He gave the ­eigh­teenth-­century collection to the Metropolitan Museum, where he also sent the Medieval art as a loan. In 1909, the banker suddenly went into Old Master drawings—acquiring the collection of 1,500 sheets put together by the En­glish dealer and connoisseur Charles Fairfax Murray. In the course of two de­cades he would spend a staggering $60 million on art, or well over $1.2 billion in 2006 dollars.

  Morgan’s collecting was so far flung that his taste was difficult to define. He seemed drawn to the ornate and elaborate, to decorative ­arts—bronzes, porcelain, glass, clocks, tapestries, furniture, Medieval ivories and ­enamels—and in par­tic­u­lar to finely crafted objects. One of the most beautiful was a gold and steel helmet whose motifs ­were so subtly sculpted (by Filippo Negroli, in ­sixteenth-­century Milan) that it is at first not obvious that the peak is a mermaid, lying on her back and grasping strands of hair from the head of Medusa in her outstretched hands. Dominated by objects rather than paintings and spanning so many periods and media, Morgan’s collection recalled the ­old-­fashioned “Kunstkammer”—a cabinet of wonders, which might range from painting and sculpture to shells, skeletons, and scientific instruments. If Old Master paintings constituted only one of Morgan’s collections, the banker nevertheless still had great influence in the small, highly visible picture market, whose participants (both Eu­ro­pe­an and American) studied his acquisitions, many of which he hung in his London ­house (opened to visitors by invitation in 1901).

  Raphael’s Colonna Madonna

  If not the greatest of all Raphaels, the Colonna Madonna was nevertheless a fine example of his extraordinary ability with ­paint—a complex image of ­smooth-­surfaced artifice, at once delicate and monumental, where, responding to the demands of his Catholic patrons, the artist cast the Madonna (with her innocent pale oval face) as the queen of heaven and paid tribute to her role in the church. She is seated on a throne, which climbs to a canopy far above her head and is set back into the picture’s space by three sharply drawn gray steps, distancing her and formalizing the scene. She is cloaked in dark blue and she bends her head. Both the mother and the young child in her lap stare down at the child Saint John the Baptist, standing at her left knee and looking up to return Jesus’s gaze. The forms of the children and the mother are gracefully drawn into the dark azure pyramid of her robe, which is evenly patterned with specks of gold. From under her hem, a pale blue shoe emerges, casting a shadow over the edge of the platform on which she sits.

  In the foreground, the church’s two founding fathers stand guard: Peter, an older man in an ­ochre-­t
oned robe, his expression serious and sad, and Paul, dark haired, dressed in red, and absorbed in a book he holds open in his hand. These male saints are among the finest passages in the ­picture—flesh and blood figures whose robes have the weight of sculpture and whose naturalism seems slightly out of sync with the idealized female saints (one in gray and ­rose, the other in green), whose ­porcelain-­like faces resemble the Virgin’s. Although the Virgin and her small company fill most of the painting, behind them Raphael describes a hilly landscape with two small buildings, one with a steeple that pricks the luminous aquamarine sky. Above the central scene is a semicircle with God the father holding the orb of the world and raising his hand in blessing. On either side float two ­light-­haired angels whose billowing green and gold robes echo the curves of their wings.

  The provenance of the Colonna Madonna reflected the po­liti­cal and economic vicissitudes of Italian history and it had been on the market (not always officially) for thirty years. After leaving the convent church, the Raphael altarpiece was purchased by a member of the Colonna family and went on display in the long picture gallery of their palace in Rome. There it remained until Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1798, when an En­glish dealer negotiated its purchase by Ferdinand I, King of Naples and the Two Sicilies. When Garibaldi dethroned Ferdinand’s heir, he fled to Spain and took the Raphael, which he decided to sell. Turned down by the National Gallery, the king (now the Duke of Ripaldo) hoped to have better luck with the Louvre. His agent loaned it to the Paris museum, where it became known as the “Madonna of a Million,” because he wanted a million francs. Several French critics called upon France to buy the painting by Raphael, whose name, as one wrote, “has become almost a synonym of painting itself.” The outbreak of the ­Franco-­Prus­sian War in 1870 prompted the duke, fearful for the painting’s safety, to ship it to London, where it went on view at the National Gallery. After the director Frederick Burton acquired the Ansidei Madonna in 1885, he dispatched the Colonna Madonna to the South Kensington Museum, where officials found it “to be in such an unsatisfactory state as to make it unfit for public exhibition.” In 1896, a London dealer managed to get the Raphael for 17,000 pounds, restored it, and sold it to Sedelmeyer.