The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [42]
Or, to be precise, price was an object, but only in the upside-down sense that high prices were all to the good. In the eyes of the new tycoons, a gigantic price for a painting was a sign of quality, first of all, and a demonstration of their own status besides. The day of “the millionaire next door” had yet to dawn. This was the era of the great Newport “cottages,” and the explicit goal of the new Medicis was to dazzle and outdo their rivals.
The great art dealers of the day, Colnaghi and Knoedler and Agnew, swarmed the new collectors. The showiest dealer of all, London-based Joseph Duveen, led the way. Early in his life, in the words of one biographer, Duveen had “noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing career was the product of that simple observation.”
Duveen and his rivals ransacked Europe for their eager clients, scooping up paintings and tapestries, suits of armor and ancient manuscripts, canopied beds and stained-glass windows. J. P. Morgan acquired not one but two Gutenberg Bibles. William Randolph Hearst bought in such volume that his trophies outgrew San Simeon, and he had to maintain several ware houses (and a staff of thirty workmen) to store the overflow.
For the tycoons, this was sport, collecting as competition. In Boston, on New Year’s Eve of 1902, for example, Isabella Stewart Gardner unveiled the Italian-style palace she had built to house her fast-growing collection of old masters. She had been so worried that her secret might leak out early that when she needed to test the acoustics of the music room in her new house, she brought in singers from the Perkins Institute for the Blind.
Mrs. Gardner had, of course, acquired a Vermeer. (Her art advisor, the renowned Bernard Berenson, had once been reprimanded by the managing director of Colnaghi, the London dealer, for failing to take full advantage of his position. “It is important for both of us,” the art dealer wrote, “to make hay while Mrs. G. shines.”) Vermeer’s American career had begun only three years before Mrs. Gardner’s purchase, when the understated and lovely Woman with a Water Jug became the first Vermeer in an American museum. The painting was a gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the New York banker Henry Marquand, in 1889. Marquand had bought it a year before, for $800 (roughly $16,000 in today’s dollars), when it was thought to be a De Hooch.
Mrs. Gardner bought The Concert at an auction in Paris in 1892, discreetly signaling her bidding instructions to her agent with a handkerchief clutched in her tense fingers.* That purchase was early; in 1892 the fever for Vermeers had just begun to spike. Soon every millionaire worth knowing had thrown his checkbook into the ring. In 1900, Collis P. Huntington, the railroad tycoon, bequeathed Vermeer’s Woman Playing a Lute to the Met. In 1901, it was Henry Frick’s turn to buy, though the steel magnate kept his Vermeer for himself. This was Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which can be seen at the Frick today.
In 1907, J. P. Morgan got in on the game. Morgan collected art and other valuables on the grandest scale—Rembrandt, Hals, Van Dyck, among countless others—and at such a pace that sometimes he himself lost track. Shortly before the Vermeer purchase, Morgan’s son had worked up his nerve to suggest that his formidable father might rein in his spending on art. “He did not object to my mentioning it,” the son noted with relief, “which surprised me somewhat.” He did not object, but he did not slow down.
At one point the elder Morgan sent a note to his librarian asking the whereabouts of a sculpture of Hercules, supposedly by Michelangelo. “This bronze bust is in your library,” came the reply, “and faces you when sitting in your chair. It has been there for about a year.”
Morgan had evidently paid just as little heed to the art world’s excited chatter