Old Masters, New World
Page 13
By the time Reynolds was named the first president of the Royal Academy in 1768, he was forty-five, and the most influential painter in London. By the late 1750s he held as many as five or six sittings a day. His clients included Samuel Johnson (a friend) and the Prince of Wales, who became George III. By 1782, he was charging 200 guineas for a full-length. “To paint particulars is not to paint nature, it is only to paint circumstances,” Reynolds contended. “It is very difficult to ennoble the character of a countenance but at the expense of the likeness.” Lady Delmé demonstrated Reynolds’s stated intent not to describe the natural world but to improve it and to raise portraiture to the level of history painting.
Despite the references to Raphael, Lady Delmé was first and foremost a woman of fashion. In Reynolds’s paean to motherhood, virtue came richly clothed in glamour and worldliness. Most of the Americans who admired Lady Delmé in Morgan’s London dining room probably failed to pick up on the Renaissance allusions. Instead, they registered a more secular, material ideal that the British artist invented, and they imitated Morgan by buying English portraits in quantity. English portraits furnished Americans with “ancestors,” but their appeal had much to do with the life they portrayed and the virtuosity and bravura with which they were painted. They flattered their sitters, casting women as beauties, and men as leaders and heroes, and both sexes as members of a glorious, cultivated ruling class—true nobles, comely, genteel, and confident—portrayed as mortal gods who had fashioned profits of the empire into an earthly paradise, as if their very presence, set often against the green of an English garden or the wilder English countryside, could create a better world. Gainsborough’s manner of painting was eloquent and sensual, conjuring glimmering fabrics and a sense of individual character, while passages of pigment in their dash and vibrancy seemed to escape representational obligation and called attention to their own sovereign beauty. The great English portraits enlivened a room with a living, breathing company. In Reynolds’s portrait The Honorable Henry Fane and His Guardians, Inigo Jones and Charles Blair, which Junius Morgan donated to the Metropolitan, one of the young men seems equally ready to jump onto a steed or to converse with his two friends. Gainsborough’s Georgiana appeared more than prepared to respond to the viewer who is the subject of her gaze.
At the start of the twentieth century, with industrialization well advanced and moving at full throttle, Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s keen and elegant canvases of the English aristocracy and a lost, pastoral world particularly appealed to American financiers and industrialists. Although it may seem ironic that Americans were drawn to images of England in the era of George III—the king from whom they had won independence in the Revolution a century before, by taking possession of the portraits, Americans marked a financial and cultural conquest.
In 1906, Morgan added another eighteenth-century female full-length to his collection—Elizabeth Farren, painted in 1790 by Thomas Lawrence, who succeeded Reynolds as painter to George III. Elizabeth Farren was an Irish actress and the lover of the Earl of Derby, who commissioned the portrait. Lawrence painted her as the aristocrat she would become (after Derby married her)—walking in a groomed landscape and turning to look out of the picture, as though the viewer had just caught her attention. She is dressed in a white satin cape trimmed with white fur, which she holds at her neck with a gloved hand. Behind her is a shifting blue gray sky, streaked with pale clouds, which echo the light glimmering on the white fabric descending her back. Lawrence exhibited the portrait at the Royal Academy the year it was painted and it became immediately famous.
The year Morgan acquired Elizabeth Farren, King Edward VII, who had succeeded his mother, Victoria, to the British throne in 1902, visited Princes Gate—a social call inspired by the monarch’s desire to see Morgan’s collection. As he surveyed the English portraits, the king couldn’t help but notice that he had seen some of them before, in the houses of his English friends. They drank iced coffee in the library and Edward eyed the famous Lawrence portrait and thought something didn’t look right. “The ceiling is too low in this room for that picture,” he told Morgan. “Why do you hang it there?”
“Mr. Morgan looked at the portrait steadily for quite a long time,” recalled Herbert Satterlee, “and then said, ‘Because I like it there, sir.’ They were just two friends together and seemed quite content to sit in silence sometimes and not try to entertain each other.” In fact, Morgan would move the alluring Elizabeth Farren from the library of his London house, but not because he was displeased with its placement on the wall. Left unstated between the English monarch and the American banker was the knowledge that the Lawrence portrait, along with the surfeit of other treasures on display at 13 Princes Gate, was on its way to America.
CHAPTER IV
“Greco’s Merit Is That He Was Two Centuries Ahead of His Time”
Mary Cassatt, Harry and Louisine Havemeyer,
Spain, and El Greco
In the spring of 1901, when Morgan bought Raphael’s Colonna Madonna in Paris, the New York sugar magnate Harry Havemeyer, his wife, Louisine, and the artist Mary Cassatt spent some six weeks in Italy and Spain hunting for Old Masters. At fifty-seven, Cassatt was one of America’s most successful painters—the only American to exhibit with the French Impressionists. For close to three decades she had lived and worked in Paris. She was also Louisine Havemeyer’s closest friend. Tall, thin, and sophisticated, Cassatt wore fashionable clothes and spoke fluent French, and in her straight posture conveyed an aristocratic sense of entitlement, confidence, and serious-minded purpose. On January 30, the Havemeyers had sailed from New York on the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria for Genoa. (As they docked, Louisine Havemeyer “could see Miss Cassatt walking impatiently up and down the wharf.”) From Genoa, the three Americans headed to Turin, Milan, Florence, and Rome. After a short stay in Paris in late March, they had made their way to Spain, setting their sights on Spanish paintings—specifically canvases by Francisco Goya and El Greco.
At the turn of the century, Spain was exotic and off the beaten track. Baedeker’s guide gave travelers fair warning: “Hotels with the comfort and international character of the large first-class hotels in the leading European countries do not exist’with a very few exceptions in such towns as Madrid or Seville.” The trains were “generally dirty and neglected,” and crawled along at less than twenty-five miles an hour. Foreigners like the Havemeyers, who spoke no Spanish, were subject to “inconvenience and extortion.” They were advised not to accept silver coins without testing them on stone slabs provided for that purpose and knowing the “true ring” of money.
Decades before, Mary Cassatt had found inspiration in the melodrama of Spanish painting. As part of her training, she had “braved” Seville for six months starting in the fall of 1872 to study Velázquez. “I really feel as if it was intended I should be a Spaniard & quite a mistake that I was born in America,” she told a friend. Madrid boasted one of Europe’s great museums, the Prado, whose collection of Spanish paintings, once owned by the royal family, had no equal. In fact, to introduce the Havemeyers to El Greco, Cassatt realized they had to visit Spain, where the artist had painted the majority of his pictures and where, three centuries later, they remained—in the Prado, in churches (where they served as altarpieces), and in palaces, often passed down through generations of Spanish nobility. In theory, the many El Grecos still in private hands made Spain a gold mine for buyers. Yet thanks in part to the country’s relative isolation, Spanish painting had not yet attracted the same degree of scholarly attention as either the Italian or Dutch school.
Mary Cassatt also knew El Greco firsthand because her friend, the artist Edgar Degas, owned two of his pictures—Saint Ildefonso and Saint Dominic in Prayer, which he kept in his Paris apartment, where she was a frequent visitor. “Oh Greco’the most beautiful of all and how happy I am to know that it bel
ongs to you,” Henri Rouart had written Degas after one of these El Greco purchases. Rouart, an engineer and collector, acquired four El Grecos himself, and the dealer Michel Manzi, another member of Degas’s circle, had two.
Cassatt plainly stated the significance of the sixteenth-century Spanish painter to her avant-garde contemporaries: “Greco’s merit is that he was two centuries ahead of his time. That is why painters Manet amongst others thought so much of him.” Later, she observed, “Cézanne’s nude figures are almost a copy of some of Greco’s.”
Although Cassatt and the Havemeyers could have found Old Masters in the French capital, they had purposefully fled. In contrast to Henry Marquand, Pierpont Morgan, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who shopped for pictures at established dealers in London and Paris, Cassatt and the Havemeyers went in search of Old Master paintings still in the hands of private collectors—before they reached the market. Cassatt steered clear of Old Master dealers and thought the Havemeyers would do better without them. One of the only dealers she did trust (though cautiously) was the Impressionists’ dealer and her own—Paul Durand-Ruel. She believed that her connections would permit her to breach aristocratic residences in Italy and Spain and her expertise enable her to identify authentic paintings. Bypassing the trade, she hoped to buy art at the lowest possible price.
H. O. (Harry) Havemeyer and Louisine Waldron Elder, probably at the time of their marriage in 1883.
At first glance the Havemeyers appeared a conventional enough upper-middle-class couple, but their ordinariness belied their exceptional place among American collectors. That they were scouting for El Grecos and Goyas in Spain with Mary Cassatt suggested the advanced taste and spirit of adventure that propelled their collecting. They had come to Madrid literally and figuratively by way of Paris, their interest in El Greco and Goya evolving from their appetite for modernist French art—the work of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists, most importantly, Edgar Degas.
For seven years, with Mary Cassatt as their adviser, Harry and Louisine Havemeyer had bought Impressionist paintings in quantity. They had jumped into the market in 1894 at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in New York, where they acquired five canvases: Manet’s Ball at the Opera, Alfred Sisley’s Banks of the Seine, and three landscapes by Claude Monet. The following year, when the Havemeyers visited Durand-Ruel in Paris, they shipped eleven pictures back to New York, including six by Degas and Manet’s Boating, a close-up view of a man and a woman seated in a sailboat, surrounded by an aquamarine sea. In 1898 and 1899, they bought seven more Manets, including the Gare Saint-Lazare, a horizontal image of a seated young woman in blue, looking out of the picture, beside a girl in a white dress with a blue sash, whose back faces the viewer. Both the woman and the child have a classic, monumental beauty, set against contemporary Paris and in front of a black iron fence through which white steam is rising from a train. The canvas cost $15,000. The Havemeyers also owned three of Manet’s “Spanish” pictures (including A Matador and Mlle. V’In the Costume of an Espada). In the end, the Havemeyers’ relentless purchasing totaled 64 by Degas (paintings, pastels, and drawings), 45 Courbets, 30 Monets, 25 Manets, 25 Corots, 13 Cézannes, and 17 by Mary Cassatt. Already in 1901 the Havemeyers were well on their way to building one of the greatest collections of Impressionist painting ever assembled.
Later, Cassatt told Frank Gair Macomber, “It has been one of the chief pleasures of my life to help fine things across the Atlantic.” Cassatt saw her advocacy of Impressionism as part of a larger American project—to stock the nation’s museums with European art. “As to the Havemeyer collection,” she told her friend Theodate Pope, “I consider they are doing a great work for the country in spending so much time & money in bringing together such works of art, all the great public collections were formed by private individuals.”
Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer had a handsome, open face and a neoclassical profile. Her eyes were deep set, and from a photograph she gazes out with forthright intensity and a slight smile. She disliked pretension and had a no-nonsense quality about her, perhaps modeled on her mother, whose close friends were suffragettes. Later, she herself campaigned for the suffrage cause and famously was arrested and spent a night in a Washington, D.C., jail. She had three children but motherhood was only one of the roles she played. She came to think of herself first and foremost as a collector.
Harry (Henry Osborne) Havemeyer was fifty-four, stout, and balding, with a prominent nose and a mustache. Dressed in a dark frock coat and a bowler hat, he looked the self-assured tycoon that he was. Although he had been handsome in his youth with curly dark hair and slightly hooded eyes, now he was an easy target for cartoonists whose caricatures had made him a well-known, sometimes despised public figure. “Restless” and “impulsive,” according to Louisine, Havemeyer had for almost two decades run Havemeyers & Elder, the largest sugar refinery in America. The never-say-die industrialist had in 1887 helped engineer the creation of the “Sugar Trust” (officially named the Sugar Refineries Company) by organizing the merger of seventeen sugar refineries and closing twelve, so that only the five most profitable remained. He had managed the Sugar Trust for over a decade.
The Havemeyers lived in a fortresslike neo-Romanesque mansion at 1 East Sixty-sixth Street, off Fifth Avenue, which encased an interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Samuel Colman, who had tied the decoration (including lighting fixtures and furniture) together into a single, exotic design, intended to dazzle and impress. Visitors entered through a round-arched doorway into a vestibule and then a hall lined from floor to ceiling with hundreds of thousands of gleaming glass mosaics in blues, greens, yellow, white, and gold. The staircase was based on the one in the Doge’s palace in Venice. Many of the Havemeyers’ paintings ringed two balconies in a sky-lit gallery. The massive stone house with its finely decorated rooms conveyed the way Havemeyer presented himself—his tough public persona erected to shield a thoughtful, intelligent individual, who collected art, kept a Stradivarius violin on his desk, and organized his social life around his family. “Mr. Havemeyer disliked notoriety more than anyone I ever knew, and believed that a man had a right to the quiet enjoyment of his own home,” Louisine remarked. Yet Havemeyer ran the Sugar Trust as a fiefdom and his name was regularly in the press.
El Greco
In Old Masters, as in contemporary art, Cassatt and the Havemeyers wanted to be on the cutting edge. In contrast to Rembrandt and Raphael, who had enjoyed centuries of adulation and acclaim, El Greco had been seen as an “eccentric” and “even a little mad,” his work largely ignored or forgotten. In 1901, not much had been written about El Greco, but his life conformed to the Romantic notion of the artist as someone who stood apart from the mainstream and never fit in. Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos, the artist became known in Spain as El Greco (“the Greek”) because he was born in Crete in 1541, when the island was a colony of Venice. He started out as a painter of religious icons for the Orthodox church, and then spent a decade in Italy at the time of the High Renaissance—moving first to Venice where he saw the lushly toned paintings of Titian and Tintoretto, and then to Rome, where he encountered the Vatican frescoes of Michelangelo. In Italy, he mastered the skills to carry out major commissions for the Catholic Church and learned to paint pictures filled with animated full-length, flesh-and-blood figures moving in convincingly drawn space. In the Purification of the Temple, he paid tribute to the Italians by including portraits of Titian, Michelangelo, the miniature painter Giulio Clovio and (perhaps) Raphael in the picture’s lower-right-hand corner. In search of more work, the artist had moved to Spain by 1577. He settled in Toledo, the political and ecclesiastical capital of the kingdom of Castile, where the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo immediately commissioned him to create the high altar—an elaborate, two-story structure with six large paintings, including an Assumptio
n of the Virgin, which climbed thirteen feet.
Carrying out Catholic commissions in Counter-Reformation Spain, El Greco veered from the naturalism of the High Renaissance and developed a highly original Mannerist style. He populated his canvases with long, thin, weightless figures set in a world lacking natural atmosphere and light and where linear perspective seems to have collapsed. He exaggerated not only proportions, but colors, and he shot passages of drapery with white highlights. Often his canvases seem to flicker as though in flame. In The Adoration of the Shepherds, which he painted for his own tomb, both the shepherds on the ground and the angels in the sky float in a darkened space, the vibrant yellows, blues, and greens of their clothes illuminated by pale light emanating from the crooked image of the infant Jesus.
El Greco and his large workshop also produced devotional pictures that he sold to clients who placed them in private chapels. Problematically for later collectors, the workshop churned out these religious images, with El Greco himself painting more or less of the canvas depending on the price. There were four versions of The Purification of the Temple, five of St. Jerome as a Cardinal, and five of Christ Carrying the Cross. In 1962, the art historian Harold E. Wethey attributed 285 paintings to El Greco, but identified 458 other canvases as “school works, copies or wrong attributions.”
The rediscovery of El Greco began with the Romantics early in the nineteenth century, and by 1869, the Paris critic Paul Lefort praised him as an “audacious, enthusiastic colorist, perhaps too fond of strange juxtapositions and unusual tones, who, piling boldness on top of boldness, finally managed first to subordinate, then to sacrifice everything in his search for effects.” Lefort argued that “despite his mistakes, El Greco can only be considered as a great painter.” Soon, the Paris avant-garde embraced the Mannerist artist as a radical Old Master who had broken the rules and pointed the way. To a generation “brought up with Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo,” El Greco was “neccessarily unique and of a completely different variety from all other artistic impressions,” explained the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe.