Nevertheless, only a day later, on January 11, Widener decided he would in fact buy the Vermeer. Once again, he did not pay the asking price, but instead only $175,000, a sum still 75 percent higher than what Morgan had paid for his Vermeer only four years before.
Widener’s acquisition of the Vermeer irritated Frick. When Altman told Frick he too had seen the picture, the steel magnate became even more annoyed. Two months later, Frick “repeated” to Roland Knoedler, “that he had not been properly treated.” “All of our dear friends talk among themselves,” Knoedler told Carstairs, “and forget that they have been spoken to confidentially.”
In May 1911, Carstairs and Gutekunst bought a second Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl. This Vermeer had two figures rather than one—an intimate, charged encounter between a soldier and a young woman looking at each other across the corner of a table. The soldier is seated in the foreground, a confident character with his hand on his hip, seen mostly in shadow and in a bold silhouette—formed by the contours of his large black hat and his bright red uniform set against the light coming from a window. Illuminated by the same light are the delicate features and the gold and blue dress of the woman who is the subject of his gaze, and a delicately drawn blue and beige map of Holland and West Friesland, which not only fills the top half of the painting but seems to open up the room.
Again, Carstairs gave Frick first refusal. “HCF was in and saw it. He seemed to like it immensely and asked to have it sent up to Prides,” Tom Robinson informed Carstairs in London. For the summer and early fall, when Frick spent most of his time on the North Shore of Boston, he brought his collection with him. The paintings made the trip in Frick’s private railroad car, the “Westmoreland.” That November, when Wilhelm von Bode returned to the United States, Roland Knoedler accompanied him to Massachusetts to see Frick’s pictures. The German scholar must have praised the Vermeer because immediately after he left, Frick made the decision to buy it for $225,000, close to ten times what he had spent on Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music in 1898. While Frick complained about skyrocketing prices, he no doubt prided himself on the brilliance of his art investments and mentally adjusted the value of his collection upward.
Pouring fortunes into Old Masters, Frick and his rivals now wallowed in a burgeoning supply. Legendary pictures seemed available at every turn, almost glutting the tiny market. Collectors could pick and choose, the surfeit of masterpieces spoiling them. Before the end of 1911, Carstairs and Gutekunst invested in yet a third Vermeer, Girl with a Flute. (Knoedler took half a share in the painting, which Agnew’s had acquired in Brussels.) In the spring of 1913, Carstairs planned to include the painting in an exhibition at Knoedler in London, and when Altman asked to see the painting for a second time in New York, Carstairs reluctantly agreed to send it. “Show it to Altman and bring it back with you on the steamer if he does not take it (which I am sure he will not.’I know Mr. Altman has some very great pictures and will undoubtedly continue to improve his collection, but we have had no hand in the formation of it, and I really almost resent selling him the exquisite little vermeer.” As predicted, Altman decided against buying the canvas, as did Frick. (Finally, at the end of 1916, Gutekunst sold the Vermeer to an Amsterdam industrialist.)
Already in 1911, the $400,000 record price paid by Pierpont Morgan for the Colonna Madonna had been broken after its reign of a decade. Not surprisingly, the painting to eclipse the Raphael was Rembrandt’s The Mill, the legendary landscape that Otto Gutekunst had tried to extract from Lord Lansdowne for Isabella Stewart Gardner in the 1890s. Part of the dark and moody picture’s allure was that its subject, silhouetted against a stormy sky, was supposed to be Rembrandt’s father’s mill. Early in 1911, Lord Lansdowne, a trustee of the National Gallery, announced that he had been offered 100,000 pounds ($500,000) for the Rembrandt. He gave the gallery, where it had been on loan, a chance to buy the painting, for 95,000 pounds, but Holroyd was unable to raise the necessary funds and by early March the Rembrandt had been sold. Soon after, Frick ate lunch with Roland Knoedler twice in one week and both times interrogated him about the celebrated picture. “I haven’t any idea who is buying The Mill, but always imagine it was Altman,” Carstairs told Knoedler from London. The dealer rationalized his failure to get the painting. “It seems to me it would have been foolish to have tied up our money even for so grand an advertisement.”
“Could it be Duveen?” Carstairs asked Frick on April 4. Always the gentleman, he even suggested that his client “might still have a chance to procure it.” His next piece of advice sounded like the standard pitch delivered by dealers to clients, but in fact reflected his knowledge of Frick. “Don’t let price stand in the way for it is priceless.”
As Frick no doubt suspected, the buyer was Peter Widener, who had seen The Mill with his son Joseph at the National Gallery in the summer of 1910 and had asked Arthur Sulley to negotiate its purchase. For the painting, Widener had indeed agreed to pay 100,000 pounds ($500,000).
Widener’s acquisition of The Mill also riled Benjamin Altman and he informed Henry Duveen that he required his own Rembrandt landscape. As Rembrandt had painted very few landscapes, the ever-pragmatic dealer tried to discourage the collector: “I told you that we ourselves did not care overmuch for genre or landscape Rembrandts, but preferred portraits by that master, more saleable and more understandable.” In a letter to Berenson, Gutekunst reported that The Mill was “still at the National Gallery, attracting thousands; not by nature of its merits but through the huge price & sensational press utterances.” He wondered “if it is really by poor Rembrandt himself.”
Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain, 1911
Despite record prices, Charles Carstairs was so skittish of expensive pictures that when he and Gutekunst had the chance to invest in another one of the rarest and most desirable—a Velázquez portrait of King Philip IV of Spain—he balked. Appointed court painter, Velázquez had painted many portraits of the monarch, but this one was unusual—painted when he was camped at Fraga, shortly after a military victory. The Habsburg king was not a handsome man, but his awkward face with its long nose and boxy jaw made him an instantly recognizable character in the painting galleries of Europe. Here his brown eyes stare out with a combination of distance and contempt. And the red military coat in which he is dressed is unforgettable—a wide central passage of the canvas painted by Velázquez with complete mastery and freedom of touch.
On January 17, Carstairs wrote Gutekunst that he was “deeply interested in the Velázquez.” Morland Agnew had bought the picture from a Bourbon prince who lived in Vienna, and hung it in the gallery on Old Bond Street. (He had consulted the Velázquez expert A. Beruete, who had confirmed it was authentic and a masterpiece.) But Agnew seemed not to have a ready client for the Velázquez and showed Gutekunst the painting. The Colnaghi partner was ambivalent. By then, Carstairs was losing his nerve. “I fear you think we are neglecting you,” he had told Gutekunst on January 10. “We have been working like dogs, trying to put some of the big things over the line. Unfortunately we have had many disappointments.” They had sold Frick a pair of Rembrandts, but “only succeeded in getting $175,000 for them.” Now, he cautioned Gutekunst about spending. “Naturally we must be careful on the money end of it as we are hard up and don’t want to carry it. As you say Velázquez are scarce. We might jump in and make something of it, if it is really fine and not prohibitive in price.” Still brooding, he dispatched Tom Robinson to Agnew’s. “It is a striking picture,” Robinson reported back. “The color of the dress is superb & the hands are fine. I didn’t much care about the face’but the dress is almost enough to sell the picture. It is in old rose and white.” Meanwhile, Gutekunst mused that if “supreme, the portrait wd. be worth 100,000–120,000 [pounds].”
Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna, ca. 1505. Descending from the 3rd Earl of Cowper, who bought it in the late eighteenth century, the Raphael was sold in 1913 by Lady Ethel Desboro
ugh to Duveen. Shortly afterward, the Philadelphia traction magnate Peter Widener paid a record $565,000 for it.
Carstairs began to fret that Agnew’s was trying to market the painting in New York. (“Charlie Williams has been here and has unquestionably talked to Widener and Altman.”) Indeed, as he deliberated, Agnew’s sold the Velázquez for $415,000 to Scott & Fowles, and one of the gallery’s partners immediately invited Carstairs to invest in the expensive painting. Carstairs agreed to take half the picture, and sold Gutekunst half of his half. Eight days later, on February 20, Velázquez’s Philip IV appeared at Knoedler in New York.
Frick “is very impressed,” Carstairs wrote Gutekunst. “We are in great hopes of his buying it.” That day the dealer delivered the portrait to the Vanderbilt mansion and gave Frick two days to consider its purchase. In a letter, he spelled out the terms. Straightforward as ever, Carstairs stated that he and his partners hoped to charge $515,000—and make “$100,000 profit,” but confessed they would accept “$475,000 cash (say by March fifteenth).” Frick took no longer than the allotted two days to decide he wanted the Velázquez and would pay $475,000 cash, more than he had ever spent on a single painting and close to the record sum Widener gave for The Mill. Roger Fry had encouraged Frick to buy what he described as “quite the finest portrait of Philip IV which I have ever seen.” That the subject of the painting had ruled Spain when its empire was at its apex no doubt figured into Frick’s own appraisal. The presence of Spain’s absolute monarch enhanced Frick’s already illustrious company of portraits. Carstairs had underestimated Frick’s enthusiasm for the Spanish picture and the opportunity cost was high; he made only $12,000 on the near-record-breaking painting.
No doubt Frick took comfort in watching Old Master prices continue to advance. Only two years after paying $500,000 for The Mill, Widener set the record price again when he procured Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna from Duveen for $565,000. That same year Arabella Huntington gave Duveen $650,000 for Velázquez’s Count-Duke of Olivares. The market was moving fast. By the time Widener paid for his Raphael in 1914, its record had been broken again, this time by Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna. When Berenson confirmed that the painting (brought to Paris from Saint Petersburg by a member of the Benois family) was in fact a Leonardo, Duveen agreed to take it for one million pounds. At that moment, the Russian czar exercised an option he had on the picture, and acquired it for 310,000 pounds, or $1.5 million—a fraction of Duveen’s offer and yet still a record sum. The extravagance of the czar in an art market driven to new heights by American industrialists marked the zenith of the Gilded Age’s Old Master picture trade and was a fitting emblem of the final moments of the old order before the revolution cut down the Russian monarch and Europe was enveloped in the cataclysm of war.
CHAPTER VIII
“Thanks Not in [the] Market at Present”
Bellini’s St. Francis and Falling Prices
In early 1912, Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and Peter Widener’s son George Widener, his daughter-in-law Eleanor Elkins Widener, and his grandson Harry Elkins Widener, who was twenty-seven, booked passage on the maiden voyage of the White Star’s Titanic. But Morgan, a principal investor in the shipping trust (the International Mercantile Marine) that owned the White Star Line, changed his plans. Clay and Adelaide Frick had sailed for France in January, and headed straight to Egypt—traveling from Alexandria to Cairo, and, as Frick wrote Philander Knox, “up the Nile, then to Syracuse on the Island of Sicily.” They returned to Paris in April, still planning to take the Titanic, when Adelaide Frick sprained her ankle, and they postponed the transatlantic voyage home. But the Wideners sailed.
On April 15, news reached North America that in icy waters about four hundred miles south of Newfoundland the ship had gone down. “They say old man Widener was in an awful state, & was at the White Star office all day yesterday & would eat nothing,” Dan Farr, at Knoedler in New York, wrote Charles Carstairs.
Peter Widener would learn that Eleanor and her maid had climbed into one of the lifeboats, but both George and Harry had drowned. Eleanor knew “nothing of the fate of her husband and Harry until informed of it on the dock,” a Philadelphia book dealer told Morgan’s librarian, Belle da Costa Greene. “The Titanic disaster is terrible,” George Davey, at Knoedler in Paris, wrote Carstairs. “We passed icebergs last Saturday afternoon and our captain wired the Titanic that we had seen ice.” About Widener, he wrote: “I hope the old gentleman will not die of grief.” Within months Eleanor Elkins Widener decided to endow a library at Harvard University in memory of her son Harry, who was a collector of books. Erected in the middle of Harvard Yard, Widener would become Harvard’s main library. Off the landing, halfway up the flight of stone stairs leading to the reading room and the stacks, Eleanor placed Harry’s own book-lined study.
In January 1913, Pierpont Morgan traveled to Egypt. In December, the banker had testified at the hearings of the Pujo committee, a House of Representatives subcommittee named for Louisiana congressman Arsene Pujo, which was looking into New York’s “money oligarchy.” Morgan had not been well. In Egypt his condition grew worse, but on March 10, he went to Rome. “The ground floor of the Grand Hotel teemed with art dealers, antiquarians, foppish noblemen, shabby peddlers—all trying to unload a last painting or statue on the dying financier,” writes Ron Chernow. Too sick to leave Rome, the banker died at the hotel on March 31, age seventy-five. Soon Morgan’s legendary art extravagance became absolutely clear, when his collections, which he stored at the Metropolitan, were appraised at $50 million, or close to the value ($68 million) of the rest of his estate.
At one time, Morgan had suggested he would leave the collection to the Metropolitan Museum and hoped the City of New York would finance a new wing to house it. “This was a rich man’s way of asking for a token of respect and gratitude,” Chernow posits. After the press attacked the idea that the city would squander taxpayer money on galleries for Morgan’s collections, the banker changed his mind. In November 1912, he had informed the museum’s director Edward Robinson that he regarded his collections “as much too large an asset to take out of his estate in case it might ever be needed.” In the end, he left his works of art to his son, Jack. Although Morgan’s death did not set off a panic in the Old Master market, it signaled the end of the boom. When, seven months later, Benjamin Altman also died, the market further contracted. (In 1909, Altman had agreed to bequeath his collection to the Metropolitan.)
Another blow struck the Old Master market when on June 10, 1913, Arthur Morton Grenfell stopped in at Knoedler and told Carstairs he “must have 40,000 pounds by Friday” and needed to liquidate his entire collection. Grenfell, thirty-nine, was a London merchant banker who had made a fortune in South Africa and then in Canada, investing in mining and railroads. In the past two years, he had bought over seventy Old Masters—most importantly Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert and Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap, which he hung in a house in Roehampton. If the financier appeared to be copying the Americans in his fast-paced art acquisitions, he was in fact resurrecting the English aristocratic tradition. His uncle George Holford had paintings (“a splendid van Dyck, a magnificent Cuyp landscape, a very fine Rembrandt of an old lady and three others,” Grenfell wrote) at Dorchester House in London and also at his estate in Gloucestershire.
Arthur Grenfell already owed Knoedler 42,500 pounds. Lacking the capital to purchase Grenfell’s pictures, Carstairs immediately made arrangements with Christie’s to auction them and to advance the collector 40,000 pounds. But Carstairs bought three of Grenfell’s pictures on “joint-account” with Agnew’s, all at a deep discount—a Rembrandt, a Hals, and the Bellini St. Francis in the Desert. Carstairs had sold the Bellini for 45,000 pounds ($225,000) and spent only 30,000 pounds ($150,000) to get it back.
Although the subject of the Renaissance picture is Saint Francis, the painting is a landscape, close to
five feet wide, bathed in the intense gold of slanting light. It begins with a blue ledge in the foreground and extends far into the distance, past fields, a shepherd with a flock, a stream, a bridge, the stone walls and towers of a town, and a small yellow castle on a hill, set against an azure sky. Saint Francis is an elongated figure in a brown friar’s robe standing on a ledge, his arms outstretched, his palms open, looking to heaven. A gray cliff rises behind him. On the right, at the entrance to a cave cut into the cliff is a simple wooden desk, on which lie a red book and a skull. The saint seems to have just gotten up from the desk, leaving two wooden sandals beneath it. Bellini has painted rocks, plants, trees, a donkey, a rabbit, and the distant buildings with an exactness and attentive subtlety that suggests the gold sunlight is infusing the saint and his earthly surroundings with a sense of the divine.
The Bellini St. Francis was one of the most beautiful paintings to have emerged in the art market boom, discovered in a London suburb by the connoisseur and dealer R. Langton Douglas, along with a rare fifteenth-century Netherlandish Deposition by Gerard David. Both paintings were owned by Sarah Anne Driver, who inherited them from her brother-in-law, Thomas Holloway, a patent medicine tycoon. “The family had no idea of the importance of some of the pictures,” Douglas later wrote. He began negotiations to buy them, but before he could raise the capital, Driver died. Douglas would have to relinquish his discovery as the trustees of Driver’s estate demanded a price that was beyond his reach and then advertised the pictures by exhibiting them in 1912 at the Royal Academy in London, where Tom Robinson told Carstairs in New York that the Bellini was “creating a sensation.” By the spring of 1912, Carstairs and Gutekunst bought the masterpiece. “I have been so out of things that I have no gossip to give you, even of the art world,” Mary Berenson wrote Isabella Stewart Gardner, on July 27, 1912. “Except that the most beautiful Bellini in existence, the most profound and spiritual picture ever painted in the Renaissance, is now on view (and I believe on sale) at Colnaghi’s—a St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata.”
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