The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  There was a slight hiccup in Berenson’s master-plan when Gutekunst struggled to produce an adequate photograph, but eventually he managed to acquire one by late April, writing triumphantly ‘and now my friend, three cheers, for I’ve got the Europa photo at last’, unaware that Berenson was going to send it to Mrs Warren, not to Mrs Gardner. Fortunately, the late appearance of the photograph saved the day for Berenson. The Duke of Westminster had decided to keep the Blue Boy and Berenson realized that his offer of the Rape of Europa to Mrs Warren risked alienating his best client. Anxious to make amends, he determined to offer the Rape of Europa to Isabella instead. Sitting in the Hotel Hassler in Rome, he composed a long letter to her on 10 May, a masterpiece of the epistolary art. The letter begins with a long preamble, ending with characteristic Berenson flattery: ‘and what sincerely I value most, the opportunity of supremely pleasing you.’

  The failure to acquire the Blue Boy was laid fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the owner: ‘What happened was this. The owner of the Blue Boy seems to have wanted to see what serious offer would be made for his picture, and this having been made – £30,000 – he then firmly said that he had not the remotest intention of selling, and that no price could possibly tempt him. There the matter stands. Do forgive my having excited you in vain. Your disappointment can not be greater than mine. The only consolation is that in our life-time the Blue Boy will not leave its present owner, without its going to you, if you continue to want it. Of that much I trust I can assure you [not true, as it was bought by Joseph Duveen in 1921 who promptly sold it to Henry Huntington for £182,200 ($728,800) – 90,000 people queued up to see it in the National Gallery, where it was put briefly on display before its departure for California].’

  The central part of Berenson’s letter dealt with his near-fatal error in offering the Rape of Europa to Mrs Warren. Having congratulated Isabella on the purchase of Titian’s Portrait of Maria of Austria and her daughter, he continued in his very best style:

  Now, on bended knee I must make a frightful confession. Just a week ago I thought The Blue Boy so certainly yours that I did something stupid in consequence. ’Tis a tale with a preface, and this you must briefly hear. One of the few great Titians in the world is the Europa – which was painted for Philip II of Spain, and as we know from Titian’s own letter to the king, despatched to Madrid in April 1562. Being in every way of the most poetical feeling and of the most gorgeous colouring, that greatest of all the world’s amateurs, the unfortunate Charles I of England had it given to him when he was at Madrid negotiating for the hand of Philip the Fourth’s sister. It was then packed up to await his departure. But the negotiations came to nothing, and Charles left Madrid precipitately. The picture remained carefully packed – this partly accounts for its marvellous preservation – and finally came in the last century into the Orléans collection. When that was sold some hundred years ago, the Europa fell into the hands of a lord whose name I forget, then into Lord Darnley’s, and now it is probably to be bought for the not extraordinary price of £20,000 (twenty thousand pounds). This is my preface. Now listen to my doleful tale. Of all this I became aware just a week ago when I had no doubt I could get you The Blue Boy. I reasoned that you would not likely want to spend £20,000 on top of £38,000. But the Titian Europa is the finest Italian picture ever again to be sold – I hated its going elsewhere than to America, and if possible to Boston. So in my despair I immediately wrote to Mrs S. D. Warren urging her to buy it.

  Berenson’s intention was to excite Isabella with his description of the Titian, and its wonderful history, hoping that she would then overlook the way that he had deceived her by offering it to her society rival Mrs Warren. His attempt to excuse himself by stating that he had done this because he wanted, above all, for the painting to come to Boston was less than honest. Berenson continued by denigrating the Blue Boy (Isbella was never to buy another major British painting) and included a wonderfully effective piece of flattery, linking her surname with Charles I: ‘Now as you can not have The Blue Boy I am dying to have you get the Europa, which in all sincerity, personally I infinitely prefer. It is a far greater picture, great and great tho’ The Blue Boy is. No picture in the world has a more resplendent history, and it would be poetic justice that a picture once intended for a Stewart should at last rest in the hands of a Stewart.’ This flattery was particularly effective and Isabella was to claim a special relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots and was later to commemorate Charles I’s death with a service annually in the chapel of her house.

  Berenson now proceeded to dismiss Mrs Warrren’s claim on the painting, and ended with the code he liked to employ on offering Isabella a work of art:

  Cable, please the one word YEUP=Yes Europa, or NEUP=No Europa, to Fiesole as usual. I am sending a poor photograph which will suffice if you look patiently to give you an idea.

  And now, dear Mrs Gardner, I have told you my doleful tale. Forgive me. Get the Europa, and if you decide to get her – by the way she is on canvas, 5ft 10 high, 6ft 8 broad, signed TITIANUS PINXIT – please do not speak of her to any one until she reaches you, so as to spare me with Mrs Warren. Please address Fiesole until June 3.

  Very sincerely yoursBernard Berenson

  Won over by Berenson’s persuasive skills, Isabella agreed to pay him on 15 June. Isabella had been an avid reader of Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance, and the volume on the Venetian School had only recently appeared in 1894. Berenson’s writing was so eloquent and she, like so many others, had been entranced by his description of the artist’s late style:

  Titian’s real greatness consists in the fact that he was able to produce an impression of greater reality as he was ready to appreciate the need for a firmer hold on life. In painting, as has been said, a greater effect of reality is chiefly a matter of light and shadow, to be obtained only by considering the canvas as an enclosed space, filled with light and air, through which the objects are seen. There is more than one way of getting this effect, but Titian attains it by the almost total suppression of outlines, by the harmonizing of colours, and by the largeness and vigour of his brushwork.

  What makes Berenson so fascinating is that the eloquent and scholarly aesthete, unsurpassed in his ability to write so eloquently about art, was also capable of the most venal skulduggery. With the sale of the Rape of Europa, he managed to hoodwink both the readily susceptible Isabella but also the much more wily Otto Gutekunst. Gutekunst had offered Lord Darnley £14,000 for the Titian, and had recommended his colleague to lower the asking price from £20,000 to £18,000. But Berenson held out for the £20,000 without telling Gutekunst, and when he received the full amount from Isabella, send Gutekunst a cheque for £2,000 i.e. 50 per cent of the balance between the £14,000 Darnley received and the £18,000 that the Colnaghi’s dealer thought Isabella had paid. This sharp practice enabled him to pocket an extra £2,000 as well as the commission he received from Isabella.

  The acquisition of the Rape of Europa gave Isabella a focus for her collection, a confirmation of her lifelong passion for Italian paintings. She was to build her house at Fenway Court on the outskirts of Boston in the Venetian style, strongly influenced by the Palazzo Barbaro, with a room specifically dedicated to her prize. Berenson shared his patron’s desire to promote their home town of Boston as an artistic and intellectual centre. Though Boston’s great days as a political centre were long past, Bostonians still took great pride in the part she had played in the American War of Independence: the Boston Tea Party, and the battles of Lexington and Concord, the first military actions in the Revolutionary War. Her leading citizens included John Adams, second President of the United States.

  This was Boston’s heritage and now Berenson wanted the city to build on this and become a great art centre like the cities of Renaissance Italy, with Isabella filling the role of her namesake Isabella d’Este, Duchess of Ferrara, patron of Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, Giovanni Bellini and, most important of all, Leonardo da Vinci. He
eulogized:

  If we are to build up on American soil cities like Florence, world-renowned for art and science even more so than commerce, we must breed merchant princes, cultured like Rucellai [Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai, a Florentine banker and one of the greatest patrons of the arts in the Quattrocento] and become deeply imbued with his maxim, that it is pleasanter and more honourable to spend money for wise purposes than to make it.

  Isabella had spent her money ‘for wise purposes’ in buying the Rape of Europa. Now she was keen to see her purchase. Berenson sympathized with his patron’s impatience, adding: ‘Why can’t I be with you when the Europa is unpacked?’ and describing how honoured he was to help her in creating a museum which ‘shall not be the least among the kingdoms of the earth’. He described the painting as ‘the finest picture that would ever again be sold’, not the first or last time that he would use this phrase.

  When the picture still failed to appear, Berenson attempted to distract Isabella by tempting her with other paintings: a Van Dyck portrait, the splendid Earl of Arundel by Rubens and a Rembrandt. At the same time he continued to congratulate her on her purchase, writing from North Berwick, on a trip to Scotland, on 2 August: ‘What a beauty … No wonder Rubens went half mad over it. I beseech you look at the dolphin, and at the head of the bull. There is the whole of great painting!’ Berenson even had the luck to come across a ‘splendid atelier [studio] version’ of the Rape of Europa at Rokeby in Yorkshire.

  The original finally arrived in Boston, sailing from England via New York in the ocean liner Lucania, to be greeted ecstatically by its new owner. She cabled Berenson on 26 August: ‘She (Europa) has come! I was just cabling to you to ask what could be the matter, when she arrived safe and sound. She is now in place. I have no words! I feel “all over in one spot,” as we say. I am too excited to talk.’ Isabella was to acquire many great paintings in the following years, but she was never to show the same level of excitement over a purchase. For the first few months after its arrival in Boston, and despite her interest in other works offered by Berenson, notably a Giorgione and a Velázquez, the proud owner continued to wax lyrical over the Titian, eulogizing how ‘every inch of paint in the picture seems full of joy’.

  Isabella was much amused by the reaction of staid Bostonians when they visited her house on Beacon Hill, where the painting hung to the left of the fireplace in the living room: ‘She has adorers fairly on their knees – men of course’. This reaction was as nothing compared with the owner’s, who poured out her feelings to Berenson on 19 September, how she was still breathless about the Europa, describing her emotions as ‘a two days’ orgy. The orgy was drinking myself drunk with Europa and then sitting for hours in my Italian garden at Brookline [her country house outside Boston], thinking and dreaming about her’. She continued with a list of the notable aesthetes and collectors who had ‘wallowed at her feet’, one of whom, Edward William Hooper, a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, described Isabella as ‘the Boston end of the Arabian nights’. The letter ended: ‘Good night. I am very sleepy after my orgy.’

  This outpouring of emotion was characteristic of Isabella. Berenson was very pleased that his fellow Bostonians should be so appreciative, and his letter from Ancona on 7 October was couched in a similar indulgent style to Isabella’s: ‘I rejoice for dear old Boston that it hath people who can appreciate Europa, and your own pleasure in her is like a sweet savour to my nostrils.’ But he was soon back to business, anxious to appease Isabella’s hunger to acquire more masterpieces to hang alongside Europa. Pandering to Isabella’s passion for the Titian, his letters made frequent references to it in the context of other paintings he hoped to acquire for her.

  In Van Dyck’s Lady with a Rose ‘the landscape was as fascinating as a Titian’. Rembrandt’s Mill was ‘the most famous landscape in the world … It is a poem of solemnity and depth that would join in most symphoniously with that gayer gravity of Europa’ (Isabella was not convinced and it was Widener who was to purchase the painting for $500,000 in 1911; it now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington). When drawing Isabella’s attention to a Watteau, Berenson made a well-judged comparison: ‘He [Watteau] is not Titian ’tis true, but Herrick [a minor seventeenth-century poet] is not Shakespeare, yet there are moods, and they come often, when one prefers the magician of sweetness to the enchanter of grandeur.’

  There was more than an element of hyberbole in Berenson’s description of the paintings he was offering Isabella: a Music Lesson by Terborch (a good but certainly not great Dutch seventeenth-century genre painter) who had ‘the strength and simplicity of Manet at his best. In colour he rivals Titian and Giorgione’; a Correggio of a Girl pulling a Thorn out of her Foot (later dismissed as a school picture in poor condition) was ‘the daintiest, most feminine, loveliest nude you ever saw … an astounding masterpiece, by a painter surely ranked with Titian, Giorgione and Raphael among Italian artists’.

  Berenson knew that Raphael ranked alongside Titian in Isabella’s estimation and he was determined to acquire works for her by the artist. When nothing was available, he had warned her: ‘Remember that Raphael is not a great painter in the sense that Titian or Veronese or Velázquez or Reubens are’. This did nothing to dampen Isabella’s desire to acquire a work by Raphael and Berenson’s derogatory verdict changed dramatically when his Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami appeared on the market.

  He described the Raphael portrait, in a letter dated January 1898: ‘Well, if I had been asked what in the whole range of art seemed hardest to acquire I should have said a portrait of any kind by Raphael.’ Isabella was only too willing to oblige, and the portrait was to form the centrepiece of the Raphael Room on the second floor of the museum at Fenway. It was joined by his Pietà, the predella panel to his Colonna altarpiece. Berenson argued: ‘you can get the little gem for £5,000 … There will be no other chance in our life-times if ever to acquire a first-rate Raphael, at such a price.’ He was also happy to boast of his own good judgement, denigrating the Colonna altarpiece (Metropolitan Museum), purchased by the fabulously wealthy John Pierpont Morgan, ‘the one I urged you not to buy – is exhibited in London at the Old Masters, and critics, I am happy to note, are pretty well agreed about its worthlessness’.

  Isabella’s passion for Raphael reflected the artist’s continuing popularity as the most sought after of all Old Masters. The Ansidei Madonna was bought by the National Gallery at the Blenheim Palace sale in 1885 for £70,000 ($350,000), an incredibly large sum at that date. A generation later the Cowper Madonna was sold to Joseph Widener in 1914 for $565,000. But even this price was dwarfed by the sale of the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna to Andrew Mellon in 1928 for $875,000 (both paintings were sold by descendants of the Third Earl Cowper who bought them on the Grand Tour in Florence in the 1770s; they now hang in the National Gallery in Washington). Not content with this, when Mellon agreed to buy 20 paintings from Stalin in 1930–1, Raphael’s Alba Madonna cost $1,166,400 out of a total of $7 million.

  Berenson could now claim that Isabella was the proud possessor of a group of paintings that ‘all the European collections could envy’. The Raphaels were exceptional paintings, but Isabella was, in general, becoming more discriminating in her taste. This was mainly due to financial reasons. As she described it in a letter to Berenson on 8 February 1897 when rejecting a portrait by George Romney: ‘It is a question of money – I am now forced to buy only the Greatest things in the world, because they are the only ones I can afford to go into debt for … Europa and Philip and Van Dyck have drowned me in a Sea of debt.’ In rejecting the Romney, Isabella was going against the trend. Glamorous British portraits were becoming all the rage with American collectors and consequently fetching enormous prices. Morgan paid £30,000 ($150,000) for Gainsborough’s Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire in 1901 but confessed: ‘If the truth [about the price] came out, I might be considered a candidate for the lunatic asylum’. Twenty years later British portraits were still in fashion, Henry Huntington
paying $728,800 for Gainsborough’s Blue Boy in 1921.

  Isabella was unable to compete with these enormous prices; she lamented to Berenson the constrictions placed on her spending power:

  The income of mine was all very well until I began to buy big things. The purchase of Europa and the Bull was the 1st time I had to dip into the capital. And since then those times have steadily multiplied … Probably much of the misunderstanding comes from the way I spend my money. I fancy I am the only living American who puts everything into works of art and music; I mean, instead of into show, and meat and drink.

  She was, however, willing to forego some luxuries, writing in her most flirtatious fashion: ‘You would laugh to see me. I haven’t had one new frock for a year.’

  Isabella was happy to joke about her financial affairs with Berenson but her husband Jack was less amused. He was suspicious of Berenson’s financial probity, and it was under Jack’s influence that she confided to her adviser: ‘They say (there seem to be many) that you have been dishonest in your money dealings with people who have bought pictures.’ The niggling feeling that Jack was right lingered on after her husband’s death in December 1898. When Bernard offered her Holbein’s portraits of Sir William and Lady Butts the next year, she wrote to him: ‘Tell me exactly what you paid for the Holbeins. I have a most singular letter from the owners. I am afraid something is wrong with the transaction … It looks as if it might be a question for the law courts.’

  The sober tone of this letter convinced Berenson that he must be careful in future. When he contacted Isabella with news that another major Titian was coming on to the market, he offered to lower his 5 per cent commission. The painting in question was Sacred and Profane Love, widely considered the most beautiful of Titian’s early works, and a painting worthy to hang alongside the Rape of Europa. When Berenson heard news in July 1899 that the Borghese family in Rome was considering selling it, he hastened to convince Isabella that it would be ‘a title of glory in one’s life-time, and of immortality thereafter’. He then proceeded to tell her that the painting was on sale for ‘about 818,169 dollars’ (the word ‘about’ speaks volumes for Berenson’s financial dealings as a picture dealer).