The Holbein was a full-length portrait of a sixteen-year-old princess that demonstrated the artist’s genius in its gleaming, jewel-like realism, the precision of details, and a disarming sense of psychological truth. The German Holbein had served as court painter to Henry VIII, and like most of the pictures he painted in England, Christina of Denmark was an important document of English history. Henry VIII had commissioned it when he was considering taking its subject as a bride. (He had divorced Catherine of Aragon, executed Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour had recently died two weeks after giving birth to Edward, the crown prince.)
Christina, already a widow and officially in mourning, is wearing a long black velvet dress and a long, black silk coat with puffy sleeves and a dark fur lining that forms a collar around her neck and descends the edge of the coat to the floor until it is simply a glimmer of mahogany-colored paint. She has an expression of innocence and self-possession; bowing her head slightly, she glances up warily, as though she might be looking at the king.
Already, the English had taken defensive measures to prevent American millionaires from “stripping us of Art treasures more ruthlessly than Napoleon stripped Italy and Spain,” as George Bernard Shaw put it. In 1903, several critics, connoisseurs, and curators (among them Roger Fry) had organized the National Art Collection Fund (the “Art Fund”) to raise money to purchase works of art for the National Gallery. In 1906, when Velázquez’s only nude, Toilet of Venus (the “Rokeby Venus”), came on the market, the Art Fund spent 40,000 pounds and made its first major purchase.
Even before appealing to the Art Fund, Charles Holroyd shrewdly tried to keep the Holbein’s price down by persuading Wilhelm von Bode and Pierpont Morgan not to go after the portrait. But the Duke of Norfolk “was receiving large offers for the picture,” Holroyd told the National Gallery trustees. And “he might at any moment receive an offer which, in view of the anxious financial future for all landlords, he might feel obliged to accept.” Already, the Duveens had bid 35,000 pounds. “What is your opinion of the picture itself?” Henry Duveen asked Berenson. “We should have your opinion before doing anything definite.” On receiving Berenson’s reply, they raised the offer to 50,000 pounds. But Otto Gutekunst, refusing to let Duveen have one of Holbein’s masterpieces, trumped him on April 21, when the duke agreed to take 61,000 pounds from Colnaghi for the picture.
Holroyd now had to find 61,000 pounds to buy the Holbein for the National Gallery. Gutekunst gave him nine days. “This is, of course, the very worst conceivable moment for the question to have arisen,” argued the London Times, “for a Government with a deficit of 16 million cannot think of buying pictures at this price, and all the rich men are hit so hard by the Budget that to raise £60,000 for the purchase even of a masterpiece will be a very difficult task.” Unbeknownst to the paper, Charles Carstairs had agreed to sell the Holbein to Henry Clay Frick for 72,000 pounds ($360,000)—the sum that the Art Fund would now have to match. In letters to the Times, protesters denounced the Duke of Norfolk, Colnaghi, and the still secret buyer—presumed to be American. The artist Philip Burne-Jones hyperbolically warned that should the Holbein “find a home in America’its days are practically numbered.’No painting,” he cried, “can survive many years in the overheated atmosphere of American rooms or galleries.” The possible loss of the Holbein seemed to signify the threat posed by the United States to England’s place as the frontrunner in the global hierarchy.
Under public pressure, Gutekunst extended Holroyd’s deadline to May 31. Lloyd George promised the treasury would donate 10,000 pounds to the Holbein cause. To show their patriotism, the Colnaghi partners themselves contributed 2,000 pounds. Edward VII threw in 100 guineas and the Prince of Wales 125 pounds. By mid-May Otto Gutekunst was in a good mood. “These Americans are buoyant again,” he told Berenson. “And the Holbein will be decided in 11 days.” By Friday, May 29, the Art Fund had raised no more than 32,000 pounds and when the Bank of England closed that evening, Carstairs assumed Frick had won the painting.
But on Monday, June 1, an irate Frick cabled Knoedler’s in London: “CONSIDER HAVE BEEN TRIFLED WITH. NO AUTHORITY [TO] EXTEND OPTION WHICH EXPIRED YESTERDAY.” That same morning Carstairs responded, reassuring Frick that the Holbein was his, but by that afternoon he learned that on Saturday an anonymous donor had wired the money necessary to match Frick’s price to the bank. “The Holbein Duchess has been saved—by a veiled lady who has bought her off for £40,000,” Henry James wrote his friend Edmund Gosse. “Can you lift the veil?”
Carstairs tried to appease Frick, then acknowledged he appreciated “the nation saving it for the National Gallery where it has hung so long.” Disagreeing, Frick chastised the dealer: “REGRET FAILURE. THOUGHT YOUR PARTNERS MIGHT HAVE TAKEN LIBERTIES. HAVE WRITTEN.” Frick’s loss of the Holbein shook his confidence in Charles Carstairs. By now, dealers and agents of every stripe were proposing pictures to Frick. Most he ignored. But he had long experience as a picture buyer and he began to welcome the new lines of supply. While Carstairs also found new clients, he remained overly dependent upon Frick, whose increasing power in the marketplace made him ever more difficult to deal with.
For Charles Holroyd, the Holbein was a victory, but only a momentary one. By 1907, fifty years after the Old Masters at the Manchester exhibition had dazzled Théophile Thoré, Great Britain had let almost half of the canvases go. In 1910, David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer, proposed “The People’s Budget,” which, he argued, would “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness,” and which he funded in part by increasing taxes on the landed rich, who, as David Cannadine points out, were “its principal target and victim.” The death duties on estates worth over 1 million pounds climbed to 25 percent. In 1913, the government made a sobering count of the paintings England had recently lost: 50 Rembrandts, 21 Rubenses, 4 Velázquezes, 11 Holbeins, and 7 Vermeers.
Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider, 1910
Word of the inflation in Old Masters spread far beyond London and Paris and drew out legendary canvases that experts and dealers had long pursued in vain. Early in 1910, in the hilltop village of Dzikow, in Poland, Count Zadislas Tarnowski received an unsolicited offer of 44,000 pounds for his Rembrandt—The Polish Rider. He reported the news to his brother, who happened to work in the Austrian embassy in London, and who asked Arthur Clifton, a dealer at Carfax gallery, for a second opinion on the Rembrandt’s value. Uncertain what to say, Clifton turned to Roger Fry, who had exhibited his own paintings at Carfax. Fry was no longer working for the Metropolitan, but he still had ties to New York. (Pierpont Morgan had fired him after he had criticized the museum’s president, in an inexplicable absence of tact, for purchasing a Fra Angelico that Fry was trying to buy for the museum.) Fry immediately understood the significance of the Rembrandt, told the Carfax dealers the painting was worth close to 60,000 pounds, and cabled Henry Clay Frick.
Abraham Bredius, director of the Mauritshuis in the Hague described discovering The Polish Rider: “One glance at the whole, an examination of several seconds of the technique was all that was necessary for me to be instantly convinced that here in this remote place one of Rembrandt’s greatest masterpieces had hung for almost one hundred years!” Bredius failed to persuade Tarnowski to sell the painting, but wanted it for the Amsterdam exhibition. “Really, this picture must be among the 85 Rembrandts which Her Majesty, the Queen of England, the English Nobility, and all the great collectors of Europe have promised to send to our exhibition,” he argued, predicting the exhibition would witness “the apotheosis” of the picture. The count agreed to loan the painting to Amsterdam, but after the exhibition he recalled it to Poland.
The Polish Rider was as mysterious and Romantic as its history. A pale gray horse and young male rider trot through the darkness of a rocky landscape—caught at the center of the canvas as if they had just come into view and were about to pass. The rider i
s taut in the saddle and turns sideways toward the viewer, looking out of the canvas as though scanning the horizon for danger. He has an innocent face, but in one hand he holds the reins and in the other, which rests on his hip in a pose of princely confidence, he carries a weapon. Strapped to his back are a bow and a quiver of arrows. Both horse and rider are mostly in shadow, but gold light seems almost to pursue them, illuminating half the rider’s face, the yellow of his quilted sleeve, his red pants, the horse’s neck and haunches.
On April 15, 1910, Fry cabled Frick:
“can secure rembrandts polish cavalier sixty thousand pounds urge acceptance decision must reach me eighteenth.”
The collector was unfamiliar with the painting: “Is it number four sixty-six in Bode volume six and in as fine condition as my Rembrandt?” he asked by wire.
“yes,” Fry replied the following day. “by all accounts condition excellent picture never removed from owners chateau since amsterdam exhibition.”
While ambivalent about serving as picture broker to American millionaires, Fry desperately needed money, in part to pay for medical treatment for his wife, who was mentally ill. The Rembrandt’s owner, he told Frick, “had always thought that if he could get 11⁄2 million francs [60,000 pounds] he would sell.” Fry hadn’t yet seen the picture and proposed that Frick make his purchase dependent upon whether the critic would “approve” the painting’s condition.
“purchase,” Frick cabled, adding characteristically, “but try for lower price.” He had never before spent $300,000 on a painting. So great was Frick’s confidence in Fry that he gave the connoisseur a free hand. “Leave matter of condition of picture with you, payment should be made on delivery here but you have authority to do as you think best in all matters.”
Fry began by offering 55,000 pounds, but by April 19 he raised the bid to 60,000 pounds. “have promised that you will cable sixty thousand to your london bank for transference to vienna,” Fry wired. The count agreed to sell. On April 20, Frick cabled the sum to Fry’s credit at Morgan Grenfell bank in London. He also asked that the Rembrandt “remain in Paris that my family may see it.”
“Sale Concluded,” Fry replied. “I start for Poland to-morrow night,” he wrote Frick. The critic had expected the count to send the painting to Paris, but he had refused, demanding instead that Fry come to Poland. “The Count pays the expenses of my journey, and all expenses of packing, insurance, copying etc.” Fry described Tarnowski to Frick as “a good natured rather rustic country gentleman with the obstinate suspicions of a peasant type quite unused to business and extremely difficult to deal with, especially as he only spoke bad French.”
Fry flattered Frick as a connoisseur and assured him the Rembrandt was a bargain. “I know that you are able to appreciate the extraordinary imaginative intensity of this great picture and that your collection is one where it will find a fitting home, and you will have secured it for at least twenty thousand pounds less than any dealer would have asked you for it.” He already argued that “at present prices” the famous painting was worth “anywhere between £80,000 and £100,000.”
Fry complained to his mother about the trip. “The picture costs £60,000, so it is an important affair,” he wrote. “It’s tiresome and rather hateful work but I couldn’t refuse to do it. I hope Mr Frick will be more decent to me than his fellow millionaire. At all events I ought to get handsomely paid for all I have done, and indeed it comes at a critical time, for I am just at the end of my resources.” He also informed Frick that the trip caused him “extreme inconvenience,” and was “a most agitating and difficult matter to transact.”
By May 3, The Polish Rider arrived in Paris. From there the canvas went to London, where an artist made a copy for Tarnowski. “I am much pleased with the way you have handled this matter; of course, I have been governed entirely by you as to its value, as I have great confidence in your judgment,” Frick wrote Fry on May 12. “I have no doubt that in the future you will be able to secure many other important pictures for me.” For the Rembrandt and a new frame, Frick ended up paying $308,651. As an agent, Fry charged little for his troubles—only $15,000—a commission of only about half the 10 percent dealers customarily made even for buying a picture at auction.
Charles Carstairs happened to be traveling with Adelaide Frick when he got the disturbing news that Frick had bought a major Rembrandt from Roger Fry. Immediately, Carstairs tried to take some advantage of the situation and asked if he could exhibit the Rembrandt at Knoedler’s in London. Frick agreed and tried to console Roland Knoedler. “Would have preferred to have purchased this Rembrandt through you,” he wrote. “But I did not want to lose the opportunity of securing it; while I paid a very high price, yet the picture is unique, being as I am told, one of two equestrian portraits by the artist.” But Fry had promised the Carfax dealers they could display the painting, and ultimately Carstairs did not have the chance to hang it at Knoedler’s. “I have seen the picture again and shown it to some of the leading critics and connoisseurs here,” Fry told Frick from London. “They are all unanimous as to its quite exceptional beauty—that it is the most romantic thing that Rembrandt ever did and stands quite alone.”
By July 6, the copy of The Polish Rider was finished, and handlers at Knoedler packed the canvas and had it shipped to New York. From there, the Rembrandt sped by train to Prides Crossing, where Frick at his house overlooking the ocean saw it for the first time.
On July 22 the taciturn collector sent Roger Fry a telegram, and in one of the very few instances he ever recorded his feelings about a work of art, he summarized them in a single word: “enchanted.”
Basking in Frick’s good graces, Roger Fry quickly squandered them. Ignoring Frick’s charge to show him only “important” pictures, Fry persuaded him to take the inexpensive Rubens, which Bode told Frick looked like a work by Sutermans. It was the last canvas Fry ever sold to Frick.
In the course of 1910, Frick had spent $379,000 on Old Masters from Knoedler’s, but close to twice as much ($647,000) on pictures from Fry and Duveen. Facing a more competitive market, Carstairs and Gutekunst also contended with Agnew’s and Arthur J. Sulley in London, and Wildenstein, Gimpel, Seligmann, and Sedelmeyer in Paris. Wanting to appear as accomplished as his rivals, Knoedler bought the Lotos Club (for $900,000) on Fifth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, tore it down, and constructed a six-story limestone building, which cost some $500,000 more. The gallery occupied the first two floors. “We are drinking your health wishing the Lotos property will treble in value and will never contain any doubtful pictures,” Frick cabled Knoedler in August 1910. By the end of the year, Carstairs fretted about Knoedler’s financial position. “Prospects of business look very poor,” he told Gutekunst. “I am afraid the country is in for a long period of quiet; some people think it will last a couple of years.’We must buy with great caution and utilize our money on obtaining the few things that are most salable to the few rich people that exist.” Knoedler’s troubles seemed to have less to do with the economy than with their expenditures and their most important client. Nevertheless, in 1911 the gallery opened a new Paris branch on the Place VendÔme.
Three Vermeers, 1910–11
In the fall of 1910, Otto Gutekunst bought one of Vermeer’s most ravishing canvases, Woman Holding a Balance. “The Vermeer has come home & looks magnificent,” Gutekunst wrote Knoedler. The subject of the painting is a female figure in a dark blue jacket casting her eyes down at a delicate brass scale she holds up carefully in her right hand, as the long fingers of her left hand pause lightly on the edge of the table. She stands in a darkened room, light coming only from the top of a shuttered window, glimmering on a still life of pearls, a gold chain, and coins on a table in the foreground. On the wall behind her is a painting of the Last Judgment. The Vermeer had been discovered by the Dutch scholar Hofstede de Groot in the collection of Countess de Ségur-Périer in France, and Gutekunst decided to ask 40,000 pounds
for it. To underline the painting’s beauty and significance, Gutekunst had the firm of White Allom design a setting for the picture, which he hung at Colnaghi’s for two weeks. He also lined up photographs of Vermeer’s thirty-four other pictures—“the whole of the known work of Vermeer together.”
The Dutch painting caused a stir in London. “We are having from 100 to 200 people a day to see the Vermeer,” Gutekunst reported to Carstairs on December 7, 1911. Ten days later at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, came to pay homage to the Dutch picture. “I talked to her for 1 ⁄ 2 an hour,” Gutekunst said. “Also the Prince of Wales.” “Nobody has considered 40,000 excessive up to now & everybody admits our picture as one of the finest V. painted,” Gutekunst wrote Carstairs, who was in New York. In early December, the dealer had spent over a week in Prides Crossing with Frick. “He is very much interested in the Vermeer, but seems to think the price frightful, that however was to have been expected.”
Days later, Carstairs asked Gutekunst to send the Vermeer to New York. If Frick wouldn’t take it, Wilhelm Valentiner claimed he had a buyer. Carstairs guessed it was Altman who had “sent for Roland and told him he was very’interested in this artist.” On Christmas Eve, workers at Colnaghi packed the Vermeer “with utmost care” and dispatched the small canvas to the United States.
When in early January Woman Holding a Balance arrived in New York, Carstairs showed the Vermeer first to Frick. Perhaps he still thought the painting too expensive, because he turned it down. Carstairs next invited Altman to inspect it. But the collector sniped that “he would have bought it a month ago if it hadn’t been exhibited but that he wanted to be offered pictures first.” Carstairs was losing patience: “They are a rare lot these picture buyers,” he told Gutekunst. Widener was next in line and the following Sunday, Carstairs and Knoedler carried the Vermeer onto a train bound for Philadelphia. But the excursion did not go as planned. Widener’s daughter-in-law “was ill & the interruptions (she fainted) interfered, & we had to run to catch our train,” Carstairs reported. “I begin to feel tired of the millionaire & wish I could retire and associate with poor but humble folks.”
Old Masters, New World Page 25