On October 4, Berenson wrote Duveen again: “You will be not J. D. [Joe Duveen] but D. F. [Damned Fool], if you don’t get the Bellini Bacchanal. From all I hear the price in New York can be almost anything you please and I shall not think it very bold of you if you don’t dare.”
But Duveen didn’t dare. A shrewd assessor of the market, he may have assumed that the canvas with its array of unfamiliar mythological characters was too complicated, remote, and sophisticated for the taste of most American tycoons. But over the past three decades that taste had evolved and expanded.
As Duveen hesitated, Lockett Agnew, Asher Wertheimer, and Arthur Sulley bought the painting together for 65,000 pounds ($325,000). A month later, on November 14, 1916, the art historian Robert Witt alerted the directors of the National Gallery in London about the “possible sale of the famous Bacchanal at Alnwick.” On November 26, Bernard Berenson, knowing The Feast of the Gods would perfectly suit Isabella Stewart Gardner, tried to persuade her to draw on her capital and take the painting, which he only identified as a Renaissance masterpiece: “I am sure [it] is greater than any that has yet gone over to America. I won’t say it is the greatest picture in the world, but I will say that the world has no greater—the only trouble is that even I could not get it for you under half a million dollars.”
Berenson explained that Gardner could spread out the payment over two years. On January 7, he named the painting: “Nothing less than the world-renowned masterpiece, the Bacchanal which was painted for Alfonso d’Este Duke of Ferrara, in 1514 by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. The picture remained for generations at Ferrara, and finally after passing to the Aldobrandini family at Rome, it was bought within a hundred years by the Dukes of Northumberland. I saw it a number of times at Alnwick. Nobody but myself and one or two other outsiders are in on the secret of its present ownership.” That day from Paris, Mary Berenson wrote Gardner a long description of the picture. “The poetry of Bellini’s picture is so profound that you feel you could never exhaust or even entirely understand it; for the interpretation of the theme has an unexpectedness and originality that make you realize it is the result of the brooding and dreaming of a great mind.”
Later in January, photographs were sent to Boston, although Arthur Sulley feared that they would put Gardner off. The varnish was cracking and worn, the background “dark and a little dirty,” Mary Berenson wrote. But she added, “I scarcely know an old picture so well preserved—nor, as I wrote you—so mysterious and beautiful!”
Even before Isabella Gardner had seen a photograph of the painting, she knew she wanted it. Her financial advisers cautioned she could only raise some $300,000. In March, she told Berenson that purchasing the painting was impossible. He refused to give up.
War taxes had reduced Gardner’s income. She had closed down most of the rooms in the museum and was living in one on the top and another on the ground floor. On May 18, she declared, “the Feast is put behind me!”
Isabella Stewart Gardner, ca. 1910. Eventually priced out of the Old Master market, she wrote: “Woe is me! Why am I not Morgan or Frick?” Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department.
About a month before, on April 23, 1917, Arthur Sulley had written Peter Widener’s son Joseph about the Bellini, asking him to “please treat it as an absolutely confidential communication as everyone has been trying to get at or find out about this picture,” which had not been exhibited in “more than fifty years.”
“Alnwick Castle is a long way from London and the Duke is not too fond of strangers, so the picture was overlooked by most people.’It is certainly the rarest picture of that time which can ever come into the market. There is at present a Bill before the House of Lords, here, to prevent masterpieces leaving this country and this is one of the chief pictures aimed at.”
The dealer also attempted to communicate the painting’s particular visual power. “The figures are beautiful, especially the two girls standing and the child with the jug at the barrel. I know nothing anywhere to equal these.’The sleeping woman is wonderful. The fact is the whole of the picture is so wonderful that it is difficult to write about.”
He added that “there are things in the picture which do not show in the reproduction, for instance Titian wanted a spot of light in the middle distance and he has painted a faun holding a silver vase, and so gets his spot of light.” The dealer rightly claimed, “It is a picture that if you sit and look at it absolutely fascinates you.” The price was about 120,000 pounds, or $600,000. Widener made no move.
Throughout the war, The Feast of the Gods remained at Arthur Sulley’s London gallery. Air-raids in 1917 persuaded the National Gallery’s new director, Charles Holmes, that the museum’s cellars would fail to protect the paintings from Germany’s new missiles and he arranged to have an unused tube station turned into a “subterranean fortress,” where, in January 1918, he sent some 900 of Britain’s finest pictures. Later that year, Holmes finally received word that “Bellini’s Bacchanal had been sold and was at Sulley’s in Bond Street.” Wearily he described the futile efforts to try to keep the painting in England. “Having been freshly cleaned it looked brilliant,” he later wrote. “Every detail showed clearly.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer went to examine the picture, but “with the Railway Strike and other signs of unrest about him,” Holmes explained, “he did not feel justified in advancing the reduced, but still considerable, sum, which Mr. Wertheimer and Mr. Sulley had agreed with me to accept.”
Some six months after the armistice in November 1918, Mary Berenson saw Bellini’s Feast of the Gods again. She sent a copy of the letter she had written Isabella Gardner about the picture to Carl Hamilton, a former shoeshine boy now in his thirties who had found his way to Andover and Yale on a scholarship, and had made a quick fortune in oil during the war. An elusive character, Hamilton charmed Mary Berenson into thinking he was “the future source of untold wealth,” and filled a New York apartment with paintings for which he owed Duveen 400,000 pounds. Hamilton agreed to buy The Feast of the Gods, but when he failed to pay for the picture, Arthur Sulley reclaimed it and asked Knoedler to store it in a bank vault in New York.
By September 1921, Sulley again approached Joseph Widener about The Feast of the Gods, and the collector agreed to purchase it. In early October Sulley asked Knoedler to deliver it to Lynnewood Hall. “As the Bellini is a good size when it is framed you might tell your servants where Knoedlers’ people are to place it,” Sulley wrote to Widener. Although Joseph Widener was heir to America’s first Old Master collectors, his acquisition of The Feast of the Gods was the culmination of their ambitions, rivalries, spending, and tastes, and the painting’s title emblematic of their entire collecting enterprise. Although more accessible than it was in a castle near England’s border with Scotland, the canvas remained on Widener’s estate in the Philadelphia suburbs for the next two decades.
Meanwhile, on December 2, 1919, Henry Clay Frick had died, at the age of sixty-nine. After a brief service at his house in New York, his body was taken in his railroad car to Pittsburgh to be buried. Charles Carstairs was among the honorary pallbearers. Frick left his house and his collection (valued at $50 million) to Adelaide Frick for her lifetime and then to the public.
Frick’s death would seem to mark the end of an era, but his friend Andrew W. Mellon jumped into the fray, a dark horse who would end up carrying the collecting ambitions of his generation to a fitting conclusion. In March 1921, the Pittsburgh banker became secretary of the Treasury and moved to Washington. A client of Knoedler’s since the 1890s, Mellon only now with the field largely to himself started piling up major Old Masters (by Gainsborough, Vermeer, van Dyck, Reynolds, and Raphael) of the sort that appealed to his predecessors. “But though he denied the rumors that were circulating in Washington, it is clear that sometime during the mid-1920s Mellon did decide that he wanted to create his own national gallery,” writes David Cannadine.
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br /> To that end, in 1930 and 1931, Andrew Mellon made arguably the twentieth century’s most spectacular art purchase when $7 million persuaded the Soviet government to secretly sell some twenty paintings, including Raphael’s Alba Madonna and Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, from the Hermitage, the Leningrad museum that had been a palace of the czars. Colnaghi’s Gustave Mayer, Knoedler’s Charles Henschel, and a Berlin dealer negotiated the politically charged sale. The crash of the New York stock market in October 1929 had set off a worldwide depression, but financially Mellon remained largely unscathed.
In 1937, Andrew Mellon donated 125 Old Master paintings to launch the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., arranging to give the United States government not only a picture collection but also the funds required to construct and endow the museum. By the time the handsome neoclassical five-acre gallery opened in early 1941, its founder had died and Europe was engulfed in another World War. A year later, the National Gallery received 101 pictures from Joseph Widener. Since Bernard Berenson had winnowed the Lynnewood Hall collection, the Wideners had kept up their pursuit of masterpieces, and to the museum they turned over 14 Rembrandts, 8 van Dycks, 2 Vermeers, Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna, and Bellini and Titian’s Feast of the Gods.
Epilogue
In 1922, John Singer Sargent visited Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston. She was eighty-two and partly paralyzed from a stroke. Nevertheless, Sargent painted her portrait. Once again he created an iconic image—this time in watercolor, capturing her mortality in the delicacy of his colored washes. She posed wrapped in white shawls—her face staring from the swaddling. She died two years later at the age of eighty-four, leaving her museum to the City of Boston. Her will made sure that the museum remain as it was in her lifetime. Frozen in time, Fenway Court with its extraordinary collection of Italian Renaissance paintings is an evocation of late-nineteenth-century taste and of Gardner’s accumulative adventures in Europe.
In 1990, almost exactly a century after Gardner bought Vermeer’s Concert at the Paris auction, thieves stole the canvas from her museum. They also took down the monumental Rembrandts (Portrait of a Lady and a Gentleman in Black and Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee) obtained by Gutekunst from the Hope collection, cutting the canvases out of their frames. Landscape with an Obelisk (a panel painting, which Gardner had bought as a Rembrandt from Colnaghi) was also one of the thirteen works the robbers took. As of 2007, the museum had failed to recover any of them.
The year of Gardner’s death, Jack Morgan established the Morgan Library as a public institution. Its collection of rare books and manuscripts is one of the finest on the globe. In addition to the paintings left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Jack, several other of his father’s canvases, including Fra Filippo Lippi’s Saint Lawrence Enthroned with Saints and Donors, and Lawrence’s Elizabeth Farren (both of which Jack sold in 1935), ended up there. Pierpont Morgan’s daughter, Louisa Satterlee, kept Reynolds’s Lady Delmé and Her Children until 1930 when Duveen bought it. Throughout the twenties, thanks largely to Duveen, the American market for English portraits continued to rise. In 1921, he sold Gainsborough’s Blue Boy to Henry Huntington (Collis Huntington’s nephew and Arabella’s second husband) for $728,000. Fifteen years later, the dealer sold Reynolds’s Lady Delmé to Andrew Mellon, and the portrait went to the National Gallery, as did Morgan’s Vermeer (A Lady Writing) and his Andrea del Castagno Portrait of a Young Man (with the red tunic and the piercing gaze), coveted by Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Central Courtyard, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Gardner took inspiration from the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice in designing Fenway Court, which she completed in 1903.
Louisine Havemeyer died at age seventy-three on January 6, 1929. With characteristic generosity, she bequeathed some two thousand works of art to the Metropolitan Museum as the H. O. Havemeyer collection. Her will named over one hundred paintings that she wanted the museum to have, among them the 8 Rembrandts, the 2 El Grecos, 15 Goyas, and many Impressionist canvases. In a codicil, she stipulated that her children could supplement the gift. Inviting the Metropolitan’s curators to choose what they wanted, the Havemeyers added 111 more paintings, pastels, and drawings. The Havemeyer bequest transformed the Metropolitan, giving New York a collection of late nineteenth-century French canvases that is, according to one of the museum’s curators, second “only to the collection of the French state at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.” Louisine left the house at 1 East Sixty-sixth Street with its Tiffany interior to her son Horace. A year later he tore it down. The contents that the children did not claim (including Cassatt’s canvas Mother and Child) were auctioned in a series of sales, which ran for twelve days in April 1930. The Tiffany chandeliers (then out of fashion) went for no more than about $7 apiece.
The Frick Collection opened as a public museum in 1935, four years after Adelaide Frick’s death. Like Gardner’s Fenway Court, it maintained the character of a private house. In a sense, neither Gardner nor Frick ever relinquished control of their paintings, making certain they were seen forever as private possessions. With its marble floors, Oriental carpets, wood paneling, eighteenth-century furniture, and velvet walls, the Frick set its Old Master paintings in the sort of royal surroundings for which many had been painted. In the tradition of aristocratic collections, the canvases were hung not chronologically or by school but where their owner (and later the collection’s curators) thought they looked best. Frick allowed the trustees who ran the collection to expand it and by the year 2000 they had increased it by almost one-third. Interestingly, they added two more Pierpont Morgan paintings (Rembrandt’s Nicolaes Ruts and Constable’s White Horse). For visitors, the experience of the Frick Collection remains at once formal and intimate; they enter as though invited guests, find themselves in an opulent retreat from the din of Manhattan and momentarily in an American fantasy—where in a corridor they bump into two Vermeers.
Charles Carstairs never saw the Frick as a public collection. He died on July 9, 1928. Earlier that year, with his son Carroll Carstairs, Charles Henschel, and Carman Mesmore, he bought M. Knoedler & Co. from Roland Knoedler. Carstairs was “well known, indeed almost celebrated for his integrity,” editors at Burlington Magazine wrote. “No one ever doubted his word or regretted an association with him, and when it first became known that he was seriously ill, even his keenest rivals in business expressed the deepest and most genuine regret.”
At the start of the Second World War, Otto Gutekunst moved from England to Switzerland. In 1943, he wrote Berenson from the Hotel Montana in Lausanne. Still bitter that his old colleague and friend kept him at a distance, he mentioned that he hadn’t visited I Tatti since 1902. He wondered if he would ever see England again. His house there had been “taken over by the Govt. & emptied of all’belongings, which are now distributed over a number of store houses in London.” He died four years later.
Taking his cue from Isabella Gardner, Bernard Berenson attended to his legacy. For the American audience, he reigned in the field of Italian painting for more than half a century. “Worldwide adulation’marked his ninetieth birthday in 1955,” observed Ernest Samuels. He died four years later, and was buried (beside Mary, who had died in 1945) in the chapel at I Tatti. As he wished, Harvard University turned the villa into a Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Berenson remains controversial. “In writing and conversation he represented Culture as a disinterested striving for perfection, and withheld the fact that his own cultured way of life was made possible by the use of Culture as a commodity,” wrote the art historian Meyer Schapiro. Looking back, Berenson claimed that his mission had been “to send (to the United States) as many Italian works of art (and incidentally others too) as I could persuade collectors to acquire.” By that measure, his life was more than successful.
A century after Henry Gurdon Marquand’s death, Richard Morris Hunt’s magnificent Fifth Av
enue facade draws visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The architecture still speaks of history and permanence, but since its completion, the museum has been in a constant state of expansion and change. It now stretches over eleven acres of Central Park and its encyclopedic collections contain over two million objects—paintings and sculpture, textiles, tombs, prints, drawings, photographs, vases, armor, and amulets.
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Gardner in White, 1922. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Now eighty-two and partially paralyzed, Isabella Gardner posed wrapped in white shawls. “Did I tell you of Sargent’s wonderful sketch in water-colour of me which keeps every one’s tongue busy wagging?” she asked Berenson.
But, immediately on entering the Metropolitan’s great hall, the visitor’s eye is carried across the vast space and up the grand staircase to red and yellow banners against an azure sky in the upper reaches of a fifteen-foot Tiepolo. To see the canvas demands a ceremonial climb up forty-six stone steps to a room of Tiepolos, which serve as prologue to some thirty galleries of Old Masters, including Morgan’s Colonna Madonna, his Elizabeth Farren, Altman’s Dutch and Italian pictures, and the Havemeyers’ El Grecos. The Metropolitan boasts no less than seventeen Rembrandts—among them Herman Doomer and Aristotle with the Bust of Homer. (The museum has also accumulated more than fifteen other canvases reattributed to Rembrandt’s contemporaries, imitators, and followers.) In a long gallery, Henry Marquand’s van Dyck, James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, faces Rubens’s Wolf and Fox Hunt, a large version of the picture that the collector saw over the mantel in the picture gallery at Corsham Court. Since Marquand acquired a Vermeer in Paris in 1887, New York has added seven more, but the very first—Young Woman with a Water Pitcher—has, in its brilliance, yet to be outdone.
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