Old Masters, New World
Page 14
Not long after arriving in Madrid, the Havemeyers went to the Prado and Cassatt showed them the El Grecos. According to Louisine they immediately responded to his art: “its intensity, its individuality, its freedom and its color,” and were struck by the portraits. In the Prado’s Portrait of an Elderly Gentleman, the artist removed all props and pared the image down to the essentials of character: a noble, melancholy face, with nearly black eyes and a graying beard, set against a lushly brushed white ruff and a black torso. “We went to a photographer’s and bought a photograph of every Greco and Goya we could find, and adroitly managed to find out where some of them could be seen,” Louisine wrote. In a private house, they climbed a “narrow staircase” and saw two Goya portraits. Cassatt bid 20,000 pesetas ($4,000) for both; but when the owner countered with a price of 100,000 pesetas, the Havemeyers withdrew. In Madrid, they “learned” of Manuel B. Cossio, a scholar writing an El Greco biography and catalog, and arranged to meet him. Cossio instructed them to see two paintings—the Burial of the Count of Orgaz in Toledo and a canvas he had discovered in the Oñate palace in Madrid, a Portrait of a Cardinal, in which the cardinal is wearing glasses. Harry was skeptical: “Spectacles in a portrait! I would not consider it.”
Harry was a “mighty sightseer,” Louisine wrote, and he grew restless in Madrid, so the couple headed south—to Toledo, Cadiz, Seville, and Granada. In Seville they hoped to acquire one of the two versions of Goya’s famous Majas on the Balcony from the Duke of Montpensier, but failed to get access to the picture. In Toledo, after losing their way, they found the church of Santo Tomé, where their encounter with the Burial of the Count of Orgaz left Harry Havemeyer convinced it was “one of the greatest pictures” he had ever seen.
In the fifteen-foot altarpiece, brimming with life-size figures, El Greco convincingly describes the living and the dead, the real world and the divine. In the foreground, two saints lift the fallen count’s limp body (clad in flint-toned armor) into a tomb. Behind them, paying homage to the count, stand twenty-one Spanish noblemen, dressed in black, their elongated faces set against white ruffled collars. In the sky, the count (now naked) kneels before the Virgin, dressed in blue and red. At the very top floats the figure of Christ enthroned. Anchoring the visionary scene of resurrection are myriad details—from brocade embroidered in gold to a white vestment worn by a priest over a black robe whose transparency is so convincingly rendered in paint that it conveys the miraculous nature of the count’s resurrection. In the center of the canvas is an angel in flight, whose spreading wings and floating gold drapery make the transition from earth to the cloudy realm of heaven. But as part of the high altar, the vast and magnificent Burial was not for sale.
“As to the Havemeyer Collection”
As an adviser on Impressionist painting, Mary Cassatt had impeccable credentials and she played the part not only for the Havemeyers but for other Americans, including her brother Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. She rightly considered herself a connoisseur whose pioneering aesthetics allowed her to discern exactly which contemporary works of art would survive and prove most influential. A member of the Impressionists’ circle, she understood the nature of their art and could judge their pictures; she also knew the Paris art world—the painters, dealers, critics and collectors—and ably managed both the mechanics and politics of the marketplace.
Mary Cassatt had her own, distinctive iconoclastic taste—a taste for difficult art. She disdained the pretty, the conventional, and the picturesque, and this credo (forged as a practicing artist) ran through her likes and dislikes of Old Masters. She argued that authenticity and “truth” were more important in painting than conventional “beauty.” Speaking of the American banker James Stillman, she wrote to Louisine, “I like the way he is learning and subordinating his taste for the agreeable to the quality of Art—he learnt that in your house.” Elsewhere she argued that “Degas’s art is for the very few. I cannot believe that many would care for the nude I have. Those things are for painters and connoisseurs.” Indeed, by conventional standards, Degas’s nude was awkwardly posed—standing in a tub and leaning over to sponge her left foot—and awkwardly viewed, very close up and from the back. Edgar Degas captured Cassatt’s complex identity and paid tribute to the strength and justice of her opinions when he chose to paint his friend, not as an artist, but as a viewer—in a gallery at the Louvre. He shows her from the back as a willowy, fashionable figure in a long black dress and a large black hat, striding along, with a black umbrella that extends the line of her sleeve straight down to the floor.
Not surprisingly, Cassatt had no patience for eighteenth-century English portraits. When she heard that Oliver Payne was thinking of buying a Hoppner she sniffed that the price was “fantastic [for] a third rank painter from a school which had not produced a single painting of absolute first rank! In comparison, the Goyas are a bargain.” Goya had portrayed the Spanish queen with brutal candor, refusing even in an official commission to finesse her awkward face and protruding jaw. (When later the Havemeyers, well-schooled by Cassatt, had a chance to purchase one of these odd royal portraits, they took it.) Cassatt also dismissed the French rococo of François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Jean-Antoine Watteau. “I was rather cut-up,” she wrote, “when Mr. S. [Stillman] told me he had bought one of the Nattiers because I admired it. So I did,” she added, “for a Nattier.”
At heart, Cassatt preferred modernist French painting above even the greatest Old Masters, and she never stopped fighting for the avant-garde cause. “Durand-Ruel has just returned from Vienna, where he saw a ver Meer von Delft, which he says is beautiful,” she wrote to Louisine in 1890. The dealer had seen the Czernin Vermeer, The Art of Painting, perhaps the artist’s greatest picture. “Two million marks was asked or refused for it, I forget which,” she added. “Col. Payne’s Degas is more beautiful than any ver Meer I ever saw. Tell him that.”
Cassatt sought to duplicate the insider position she held in the field of Impressionist painting in the more complicated territory of Old Masters where she assumed she had a unique and privileged pass. As an artist, she looked at Old Masters as models and sources of inspiration, as bearers of brilliance and truth. She had taken the Havemeyers to studios in Paris and she sought a similar experience in the old world, or at least its remnants, from which Old Masters came. Although she accepted commerce as a necessary part of her own artistic enterprise, when it came to Old Masters, her perspective as a professional led her to underestimate the different challenges of the market. Seeking Old Masters in their countries of origin, she hoped to find them as yet untouched by commerce—in a place where dealers and American money hadn’t yet arrived.
If Cassatt’s taste was modern, her approach to buying Old Master pictures was not. She sought out dealers on the margins of the trade whom she hoped would get her directly in touch with owners of pictures. In Florence she recruited Arthur Harnisch, an artist she had known years earlier, as a scout and he took her and the Havemeyers to a private collection. In “a large dark room,” according to Louisine, they found “many pictures, most of them as dark as the room,” including a Veronese portrait of the artist’s wife. Harry was not impressed, but Cassatt insisted he buy it. “In Italy they don’t think her ugly,” she later wrote.
Although Bernard Berenson had by then published three books on Italian Renaissance painting and lived in Florence, Cassatt seemed not yet to know his work. Later she told Louisine that Berenson “boasts he is incorruptible; I was told he took no small commission, but occasionally made a big haul.” In rediscovering El Greco, she and other artists had given new value to his work, and she was reluctant to cede authority to professional connoisseurs or dealers: “I don’t care for Berenson. He is a bit too commercial for me.”
The Havemeyers endorsed Cassatt’s approach. “Our collecting enabled us to penetrate into some vast estates where the d
ealer had not been permitted to apply his trade,” boasted Louisine. The trip to Italy only confirmed the Havemeyers’ doubts about the art trade. In Rome, a dealer made the mistake of showing them a “Moroni,” claiming he had sneaked it out of a private collection, but they recognized the painting as the same one that another dealer had tried to sell only days before in Milan.
Following the “indefatigable Miss Cassatt,” Louisine Havemeyer relished the adventure of traveling to parts of Europe that most Americans overlooked or disdained and the novelty of the “shabby third-class train that jolted along’with a lot of noisy passengers.” She put up with “dirt, dust and discomfort” in the hunt for great works of art. To the American, such experiences in Europe gave the works of art a sense of age and authenticity, disguising the fact that age and authenticity were precisely the qualities they often lacked.
Mary Cassatt
The Cassatt family had prepared their daughter to be an expatriate when they took her to live in Europe at an early age. Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, across the river from Pittsburgh, the fourth of five children of an affluent banker, Robert Cassatt. The Cassatts lived briefly in Philadelphia, but in 1851, when Mary was seven, they moved to Europe for seven years, stopping in London, Paris, and eventually settling in Heidelberg and then in Darmstadt so that their son Alexander could study engineering. Toward the end of their stay, another son, who was only thirteen, died, and soon after, Mary, now eleven and fluent in both German and French, returned with her family to Philadelphia.
By the time she was fifteen, Cassatt decided to become an artist—one of the few careers open to women at the end of the nineteenth century. A dry-eyed realist about her much Romanticized calling, Cassatt knew that to become a painter in the European tradition required steadfast dedication and constant work: “There are two ways for a painter,” she told Louisine. “The broad and easy one and the narrow and hard one.” In 1860, she became a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the leading American art school, where women made up more than 20 percent of the students.
In 1865, Cassatt moved to Paris, whose studios now drew ambitious painters from throughout the Continent as well as the United States. For two centuries, France had been Europe’s foremost patron of the visual arts. Even after the Revolution toppled the monarchy and overturned the system of patronage that artists had enjoyed under the ancien régime, the new French government sought to maintain its traditional and influential role as a champion of the fine arts. In Paris, Cassatt studied with the academic painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Thomas Couture, made copies in the Louvre, painted in the countryside, and succeeded in getting her pictures accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon. Although in 1870, shortly after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, she returned to Philadelphia, four years later she moved permanently to Paris, and her sister and parents joined her there. Within three years, Cassatt had met Edgar Degas, whose wealth and social position paralleled her own, and she looked to the groundbreaking, if difficult, artist as a mentor. “The first sight of Degas[’s] pictures was the turning point in my artistic life,” she later acknowledged.
Like Edgar Degas, Cassatt was a figure painter, and in 1877, he invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. Two years later, in the fourth of their famous group exhibitions, she showed four paintings, including A Corner of the Loge, whose subject was two young women in the balcony of a theater. Cassatt heightened the sense of intimacy and immediacy, with a snapshot composition, cutting off the figures with the frame and placing an upright white-gloved hand (holding opera glasses to a face) and an open Japanese fan in the center of the canvas. Visible brushstrokes weave together the foreground and a distant crowd in balconies on the other side of the theater—four bands of freely worked paint. Cassatt painted women—not only at the theater but also at home, figures who are reading, knitting, or engaged in the ritual of drinking tea. Eventually she concentrated on painting women and children. In 1891, she produced perhaps her greatest works: a series of ten color prints, each a scene with one or two women, in a pared-down style that took its cue from Japanese prints in its flat shapes, sharp contours, and compositions that ignore traditional perspective.
By escaping America, living as a foreigner in France, and remaining single, Cassatt shrewdly extracted herself from the expectations and restrictions imposed on nineteenth-century women and earned herself an extraordinary degree of freedom. Yet living with her parents in Paris, she kept the security of her place in the family and in her American social class while overseas.
Louisine Havemeyer
As Mary Cassatt blazed the trail to the new French painting, Louisine Havemeyer enthusiastically followed. She traced her passion for art to a moment in Paris in 1874 when, at the age of nineteen, she encountered Cassatt. “I felt then that Miss Cassatt was the most intelligent woman I had ever met,” she wrote. The year before, Louisine’s father, George Elder, had died, and soon after, her mother, Mathilda Waldron Elder, decided to take Louisine and her two other marriageable daughters, Anne and Adaline, to Paris, and enroll them in Madame Del Sartre’s boarding school. Her fourteen-year-old son, George, went to school in Switzerland. The Philadelphia artist Emily Sartain also happened to be staying at the Del Sartre’s, and she introduced the Elders to Mary Cassatt. Three years later, again in Paris, Cassatt took Louisine to a paint-seller’s shop to show her some recent pictures by Edgar Degas. Louisine bought a pastel entitled Ballet Rehearsal, becoming one of the first Americans to own one of his pictures.
The small gouache describes a scene at the edge of a stage, where a ballet master is directing a group of dancers—one of them balancing on her toes. Degas sketched in broad strokes of color, setting the white diaphanous triangles of the dancers’ skirts against a scattering of turquoise and green. He heightened the effect of the colors by infusing the scene with a white glow, raking up from the footlights. The ravishing image is charged with a sense of contemporary Paris. In recalling the purchase of a Degas, Louisine characteristically romanticized the event, remembering herself as younger than she was. But she rightly revealed herself an innocent abroad, fascinated by the world and the art to which Cassatt introduced her. Cassatt “left me in no doubt as to the desirability of the purchase and I bought it upon her advice.” The pastel cost Louisine 500 francs, or $100. Although she fretted at spending “half my art balance,” her allowance was substantial enough to afford works of art. By 1879, Louisine had also acquired a Monet canvas (The Drawbridge) and a gouache in the shape of a fan (The Cabbage Gatherers) by Camille Pissarro. Louisine also conveyed her affection and respect for her artist-friend by acquiring a small Self-Portrait, where Cassatt presents herself as a woman of the world, leaning against a sofa, seemingly caught unawares. She is dressed in a narrow-waisted white dress and a black hat with flowers. Her gloved hands, far from ladylike, are a burst of gray and white pigment.
Mary Cassatt, Portrait of the Artist, 1878. Louisine Havemeyer bought the portrait of her friend some five years after Cassatt introduced her to Impressionist painting in Paris.
To Louisine, Cassatt, who was eleven years older, seemed the most remarkable of teachers—at once passionate and authoritative, and she immediately provided a role model. Louisine listened well to Cassatt, and the painter’s modernist convictions became her own. Louisine called Cassatt “my inspiration and my guide,” and credited her for the “the best things” she owned, bought with the artist’s “judgment and advice.” For over three decades, Havemeyer and Cassatt sustained their friendship through transatlantic correspondence. Cassatt’s letters—hundreds of them, addressed “dear Louie,” and signed “heaps of love”—document the intensity of their friendship and its central place in both their lives.
Collecting Impressionist paintings enabled Louisine to support the work of Cassatt and her circle, but also to imitate the artist’s example—by making a
rt the calling to which she devoted herself and through which she fashioned her own identity. She approached art collecting with missionary zeal, a sense of righteous indignation toward what she saw as the benighted and outmoded taste of American private collectors and American museums. Later, when Louisine wrote an autobiography, she titled it Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector. In it, she said little about her parents, her childhood, or her education—as though not much had happened before she met Mary Cassatt in Paris or before she married Harry Havemeyer.
What Louisine chose to skip over in the memoirs is that she had known Harry Havemeyer since childhood. Their two families were part of a sugar merchant clan linked by business and marriage. Her father, an affluent grocer, seems to have met the Havemeyers because he sold their sugar. When Louisine was two years old, her uncle J. Lawrence Elder married Harry’s older sister, Mary Havemeyer. Then, in 1870, when Louisine was fifteen, Harry himself had married Louisine’s twenty-three-year-old aunt Mary Louise Elder. The couple remained married for over a decade, but by 1882, they had separated. Both were living in Stamford, Connecticut, she with her parents and he in a boarding house. In October of that year they were divorced. What happened to the marriage is not clear, but ten months later, on August 22, 1883, Harry married Louisine, and they moved to a brownstone on the East Side of Manhattan, at 34 East Thirty-sixth Street.
Louisine introduced Harry to Mary Cassatt in Paris in 1889. The Havemeyers had been married for six years and had three children—Adaline, who was five, Horace, who was three, and Electra, born the year before. Louisine claimed that what she admired most about both her husband and her closest friend was their independence of mind. But she too was independent, and in bringing the American artist and the tycoon together, she forged a collecting triumvirate in which she was as influential as each of the other members. She used her role as a collector to define herself within the Havemeyer family and its sugar empire, into which she had been swept at an early age. In Louisine, Cassatt found a warm, loyal, generous, and open-minded friend. She prided herself on her frugality, which she viewed as a virtue even for someone who split her time among mansions in Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut, and on Long Island’s South Shore, and owned a $100,000 pearl necklace.