In 1897, the Paris dealer proposed the Colonna Madonna to Isabella Stewart Gardner, but when she asked Berenson’s opinion, he gave a damning appraisal: “As an expert I affirm that while doubtless Raphael superintended the execution of this altarpiece, laid it in himself, and painted some upon it, the altar-piece as a whole when it left his studio could not have been called an autograph work by Raphael.” Quickly Gardner lost interest in that “tiresome dreary Colonna Raphael.”
Charles Sedelmeyer missed Morgan’s visit to his gallery, but the banker seemed to need little convincing; he decided to buy the Raphael and pay the dealer’s $400,000 asking price. Sedelmeyer’s elegant handwritten invoice reveals that Morgan supplemented the altarpiece with Titian’s Holy Family, and portraits by Rubens and by Jean-Marc Nattier, and a hunting scene by an English artist named Morland. The bill amounted to 3 million francs, or $600,000. “Morgan the collector was recognizably the same man as Morgan the banker,” observes the historian Ron Chernow. “He hated to haggle.” Morgan’s banking partners fretted about his spending on art. “I hope, though we cannot hint it, that Flitch [Morgan] will not buy the National Gallery at the end of the year,” Clinton Dawkins wrote in December 1901. Seven months later he added: “We never see him and it is difficult to get hold of him. He spends his time lunching with Kings or Kaisers or buying Raphaels.”
Berenson naturally heaped scorn on Morgan’s acquisition. “Pierpont Morgan’s ‘Raphael’—the one I urged you not to buy—is exhibited in London at the Old Masters, and critics, I am happy to note are pretty well agreed about its worthlessness—relatively to pretensions and price,” he wrote Gardner on January 14. While Berenson and others in the art world sniped, the record-breaking Raphael thrust Morgan forward as the Old Master market’s most extravagant player, one who competed with the likes of the National Gallery and to whom painting dealers could now hope to sell their best and most costly wares. If the National Gallery’s director first gave Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna the distinction of being the world’s most expensive work of art, the Anglophile Morgan followed the English lead with his Colonna altarpiece. The art establishment’s view that Raphael’s art embodied immutable standards of beauty was one with which Morgan no doubt concurred. He saw the Colonna Madonna as a rare and magnificent High Renaissance painting and paid the asking price. Morgan “responded less to abstract qualities in works of art than to subject, history, rarity, and provenance,” explains his biographer Jean Strouse. The Raphael would have extraordinary value to the United States as it struggled to gather a group of pictures that would illustrate the history of European art. Morgan immediately put the Colonna Madonna on display at London’s National Gallery, suggesting that he intended to give the painting to the Metropolitan. “With the eventual disposition of his collection in mind, Morgan may well have felt it was his patriotic duty to acquire the painting,” writes the art historian David Alan Brown. In fact, the Colonna Madonna was the only major Raphael altarpiece to end up in America.
Born into the most privileged circles of America’s affluent middle-class, Morgan collected art not as a means of upward mobility but as a matter of course. He began buying rare books and manuscripts, and by 1902, he had secured ten thousand rare volumes, which he shipped from Europe to New York. (Books and manuscripts were exempt from the art tariff.) Eventually he would possess a library with over six hundred Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, including the Farnese Hours by Giulio Clovio, whose delicate images translated the sort of large-scale High Renaissance figures painted by Michelangelo and his Mannerist followers onto the pages of a book.
Just as Isabella Stewart Gardner liked to model herself on the Renaissance patron Isabella d’Este, Morgan similarly presented himself as a modern heir to the Renaissance bankers who were legendary buyers of art. While Gardner was erecting her Venetian palace, Morgan was constructing a Renaissance “library” in New York, beside the large brownstone at Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street that he shared with his wife, Frances Louisa Tracy. Designed by Charles McKim, the neo-Renaissance marble pavilion calmly asserted classical order and well-bred grandeur against the architectural medley rising in Manhattan. Although intended to hold Morgan’s books and manuscripts, the library would have worked well as a setting for his new Raphael. In the West Room, which he used as a study, he hung two other, smaller Raphael Madonnas. There Morgan sat at a desk and held business meetings beneath a sixteenth-century ceiling he imported from Italy. He had the walls of the room covered in crimson damask, which was woven with the insignia of Raphael’s patron, the Roman banker Agostino Chigi. “No one could really know Mr. Morgan at all unless he had seen him in the West Room (which was regarded as peculiarly his own room) in the Library’because the room expressed his conception of beauty and color in varied and wonderful forms,” wrote Herbert L. Satterlee, Morgan’s son-in-law and biographer. Although set in midtown Manhattan, Morgan’s magnificent library seemed worlds away from the financial and industrial hurly-burly that enabled its creation.
On October 23, 1901, the New York Times reported that “J. Pierpont Morgan has bought the celebrated Holy Family, by Raphael,” then asked: “Will he bring it to this side of the Atlantic? That is the question connoisseurs in Europe are asking with pardonable anxiety.” The paper repeated Sedelmeyer’s claim that the Raphael was “finer than anything in the Louvre or the National Gallery by the same painter.” On January 1, 1902, the New York Herald inflated the price that Morgan paid for the painting to $500,000. If the American press tended to celebrate Morgan’s patriotic purchase, in Europe the newspapers pointed to the record price as warning of future plunder, and demonized the American collector as the most rapacious of robber barons. “Curiously enough [Morgan’s] operations in pictures, tapestries & curios have done him more harm with the general public than steel or shipbuilding,” wrote Gaspard Farrer, of Baring Brothers. “Of the value of the latter they do not pretend to judge: but their imagination is struck when they hear of 2 to 10 times as much being given for curios as has ever been paid before.”
If the press portrayed Morgan as the most American of tycoons, he was in fact the most cosmopolitan of American collectors, a descendent not only of Renaissance bankers, but of eighteenth-century English collectors like the Earl of Cowper, who preceded him as a buyer of Raphael Madonnas. Morgan played the part of the English gentleman and collector with ease, brought up to take over the London bank that Junius Morgan had built, and spending much of his time in London at a grand house at 13 Princes Gate, which he inherited from his father. (Junius also left him Dover House, seven miles outside the city.) The Morgans were “a cross between Connecticut Yankees and London aristocrats,” Ron Chernow explains. Pierpont Morgan’s cosmopolitanism began at an early age. He was educated abroad, sent to school in Switzerland, and then to Gottingen University in Germany.
In 1854, when Pierpont was seventeen, Junius moved to London, where with George Peabody he established America’s first international merchant bank. Three years later, Pierpont went to work in New York as an agent for his father and in the 1870s launched Drexel Morgan and Company, which became J. P. Morgan. Pierpont’s American partnership evolved from and followed Junius’s London model, and over the next thirty years, the Morgans fed capital to America’s booming railroads and industries, catapulting their linked New York and London firms into a dominant position in the international financial markets by the turn of the century. The Morgan banks “probably do not fall very far short of the Rothschilds in capital,” a Morgan partner boasted in 1901. They “are immensely more expansive and active, and are in with the great progressive undertakings of the modern world.” By financing America’s explosive industrial growth from New York, Morgan thrust the city into a position where it competed with London as the capital of finance. Just as his style of banking was traditional in its reliance on handshakes and gentleman’s agreements and ye
t modern in its scale, so his art collecting combined the old and new, reflecting traditional taste and industrial-age purchasing power.
“Such Was the Glamour of the Eighteenth Century”
Only weeks before Morgan bought Raphael’s Colonna Madonna in Paris, he had acquired one of the most famous of English portraits in London—a painting that his father had attempted to acquire: Thomas Gainsborough’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The duchess (Georgiana Spencer) was a notorious eighteenth-century beauty, who at seventeen had married William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire. She was “famous for her glamour, and infamous for her love of gambling and her close association with the hard-living opposition politician Charles James Fox,” the art historian Martin Myrone writes. Gainsborough had painted Georgiana as a “full-length,” but at some point the portrait had been cut down, its lower half chopped off—supposedly to make the canvas fit above a mantelpiece. Even diminished, Georgiana fills the canvas with her animated face, abundant cascades of powdered hair, sumptuously clad torso, and a knowing sideways glance. She wears a gray and white dress, and a black hat with plumes and ribbons whose absurdly large proportions and steep angle suggest the risks involved in meeting its wearer in the flesh.
Gainsborough seems to have painted the duchess in the 1780s. For two decades he had flourished as the most popular portrait painter in England—more sought after even than the more prestigious Sir Joshua Reynolds, his archrival and the principal painter to George III. Gainsborough was a master of suggestion, who used brushstrokes to evoke rather than describe. He also infused his portraits with a sense of immediacy, cleverly posing his subjects to appear unposed—catching them in the split second they happened to turn, or to take a step, and engaging them so as to engage the viewer. Like van Dyck, his seventeenth-century forebear, Gainsborough had a father in the textile trade and he was a master at representing various fabrics in paint. Even Reynolds acknowledged the brilliance of Gainsborough’s technique: “This chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a kind of magick [sic], at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places.” Georgiana sat for Gainsborough more than once, also for Reynolds; these portraits hung at Althorp and Chatsworth, the Spencer and Devonshire estates. That Georgiana was not one of Gainsborough’s best portraits, and that some had even questioned its authorship, seemed not to affect its appeal.
Some twenty-five years before, Georgiana had come up for auction at Christie’s in London. “Such was the glamour of the eighteenth century in 1876 that for the sake of a likeness of the famous Georgiana the whole of King Street was blocked with carriages, which overflowed into St. James’s Square,” writes Gerald Reitlinger. Bidding for Georgiana “shot from 1,000 guineas to 3,000 at a single call,” and William Agnew, a flamboyant and frequent auction buyer, competing against both Ferdinand de Rothschild and the Earl of Dudley, won the picture for 10,100 guineas, or over $50,000, making the half-length Gainsborough famous as one of the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction. (The Ansidei Madonna’s $350,000 record price, in a private sale, came a decade later.) Only days after the auction, Junius Morgan bought the painting from Agnew’s, intending to give it to Pierpont as a present. But before Agnew’s delivered the painting to Morgan’s house, thieves broke into the gallery and stole it. No doubt the robbers planned to profit by ransoming or selling their famous beauty, but the painting disappeared.
William Agnew, who had put Agnew’s gallery front and center in London’s art trade, certainly didn’t forget about the Gainsborough, particularly as the popularity of English portraits only increased. Agnew and his brother, Thomas, had joined their father Thomas Agnew in the Manchester gallery in 1851, and in 1860 they opened in London. Although primarily a publisher of prints, the firm had taken an early lead in the Old Master market in 1857 when they helped organize the Manchester exhibition of England’s finest Old Masters, an assignment that put them in touch with picture owners all over the British Isles. In 1875, they opened a new, large, wood-paneled gallery at 43 Old Bond Street, whose layout reflected the changing market. Agnew’s front door gave the public access to a large upstairs gallery where the dealers held exhibitions and a back door allowed clients to go straight to the gallery’s private rooms to see particular works of art and conduct business.
Thomas Gainsborough’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1785–88. Morgan spent $150,000 on the notorious English portrait, which his father had agreed to buy from Agnew’s twenty-five years earlier, just before it was stolen from the gallery.
Finally, early in 1901, Morland Agnew, William’s son, retrieved the kidnapped Georgiana—which the thieves had taken to the United States, paying its ransom at a Chicago hotel. By then Morland and his cousin Lockett Agnew had taken charge of the firm. The dealer brought Georgiana back to London and whisked the canvas to the restorer to repair the damage it had suffered in captivity. When Pierpont Morgan arrived in London, the dealers at first declined to show him the painting, insisting on waiting until the restoration was finished. Even before Morgan saw the canvas, he agreed to buy it for 30,000 pounds ($150,000), three times what Agnew had spent in 1876, and one and a half times what Gardner had paid for Titian’s Europa only five years before. “If the truth [about the price] came out,” he quipped, “I might be considered a candidate for the lunatic asylum.”
Although a far cry from a Raphael Madonna, the come-hither Gainsborough seemed a logical choice for the Anglo-American banker. Lockett Agnew thought Morgan enjoyed the painting’s recent notoriety. “Sentiment played a role as well,” argues Jean Strouse. “Junius had wanted the picture, and Pierpont carried out his father’s wishes without regard to content or cost.”
The prices of English portraits had been rising, thanks to the demand from an international band of bankers and industrialists who sought ancestral images to give the interiors of their newly gotten mansions the look of old money and blue blood. “Just now Gainsboroughs are at the pinnacle of fame and price,” George Boughton told Henry Marquand on September 20, 1888. “The Rothschilds are outbidding the Barings for them just for a whim. I should stand back for a time and wait my chance.” The most voracious buyer of English portraits was the Irish Edward Cecil Guinness, who had taken his family’s brewery public in 1886, and soon after moved to London with a fortune that generated an annual income of £500,000. In the course of only four years, Guinness, later the Earl of Iveagh, purchased (mostly from Agnew’s) a total of 73 English portraits—36 by Reynolds, 22 by Romney, and 15 by Gainsborough. By 1891, Otto Gutekunst called the prices of English pictures idiotic and bewildering, but he hoped to sell one to Isabella Gardner. If “she wants to create a stir, what would more generally do so than such a Gainsborough,” he asked Berenson, “at a time like this when everybody looks at nothing unless it is an English picture and you cannot buy them for love or money.” Portraits of beautiful women (whose appeal remained undiminished through the ages) were generally more expensive than portraits of men. (Not surprisingly, Isabella Stewart Gardner wanted no such competition, and the subject of the one eighteenth-century English picture she really wanted, The Blue Boy, was a young man.)
Morgan placed Gainsborough’s Georgiana over the mantel of the “red drawing room,” a room where he kept his important Old Masters. There he invited her to hold her own against Rembrandt’s life-sized Nicolaes Ruts, van Dyck’s full-length Genoese Portrait of a Woman and Child, and a Velázquez Spanish princess. An elaborate candelabra stood at each end of the mantel—giving a momentarily startling impression that Georgiana was the center of an altarpiece. On either side of her, Morgan hung smaller, half-length Dutch, French, and English portraits. In papering his house with grand manner English portraits, he followed the dynastic tradition of his own family and of the English aristocrats whose patronage of Reynolds and Gainsborough in the eighteenth century had advanced Engli
sh portrait painting into its Golden Age.
Ultimately Morgan hung six English portraits in the library, six in the “oak room,” and three in the dining room, most importantly Joshua Reynolds’s seven-foot Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children. Lady Delmé has a long, elegant face, heavy-lidded eyes, and towering powdered hair. She wears a white dress and a cloak that covers her knees in a cascade of rose-colored satin that speaks both to her beauty and to the luxury at her command. Standing to her left and leaning against her are a small boy and girl. A lively black-and-white dog looks up at them. Borrowing from Raphael, Reynolds set Lady Delmé and the children into the pyramidal arrangement that the Renaissance artist had created for many of his Madonnas, attempting to pass a secular blessing over the English aristocrats. Instead of a throne with a canopy, Lady Delmé sits beneath an enormous beech tree, its trunk dappled with sunlight. In the background, beyond a balustrade, stretches a wooded landscape. Indeed, a Raphael Madonna embodied Reynolds’s notion of “Ideal Beauty,” which he contended was “superior to what is to be found in individual nature.” In Reynolds’s hierarchy of painters, Raphael stood (with Michelangelo) at the very top; they “certainly have not been excelled, nor equaled since.”
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