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Certainly one of the most fascinating unsung heroines of the
American scene at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth was Arabella Duval Yarrington.
Born in Alabama in 1853, she married a man named A. D.
Worsham, also unsung; in 1884, a few years after he died,
she married Collis P. Huntington, the biggest of
California's Big Four, the promoters of the Central Pacific
Railroad; and in 1913, after his death, she married his
nephew H. E. Huntington, who was one of his heirs. H. E.
Huntington thus married his aunt, something men don't
ordinarily do unless there is an inescapable fascination.
When the impulse to marry his uncle's widow became
irresistible, H. E. Huntington, who had been divorced by his
first wife some years before, was sixty-three. Arabella
Huntington's early life is obscure. When the newspapers,
with a gasp, reported her marriage to Collis P.
Huntington—they gasped again when she married H. E.—one of
them noted, in lieu of more definite biographical
information—that she was "ambitious." What she was ambitious
for, it let its readers guess. Oscar Lewis, in his book on
the Central Pacific Railroad, "The Big Four," makes it clear
that one thing the multiple Mrs. Huntington was ambitious
for was social recognition. He tells how she induced Collis,
a former Sacramento storekeeper who had always prided
himself on the fact that he spent no more than two hundred
dollars a year on himself, to build a two-million-dollar
mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street (it looked
like a warehouse) and, while he was about it, a
comparatively modest two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar
mausoleum in Woodlawn. Collis never even went to look at his
Woodlawn place; as for the Fifty-seventh Street house, he
hated it. Arabella, on the other hand, was enthusiastic
about the house. Soon after it was completed, she filled it
with tapestries, pictures, and fragile French gilt chairs
(Collis, a giant of a man weighing two hundred and fifty
pounds, couldn't sit on any of them), and invited a lot of
prominent people to a party. Nobody much came. Arabella
transferred her activities to San Francisco, where she
remodelled a house, filled it with gilt chairs, and
gave another party. As Collis was cordially hated in San
Francisco, nobody much came to that party, either. In the
end, Mrs. Huntington was saved from the social isolation
that threatened her by the celebrated art dealer Joseph
Duveen, later Lord Duveen of Millbank.
Whereas the upper stratum of American society turned its
collective back on Arabella Huntington, Duveen received her,
whenever she consulted him, with deference. He introduced
her to the enchanting realm of the aesthetic, and while
doing so treated her, as she herself once said, "like a
queen." It was a sensation that New York and San Francisco
denied her, and one that she enjoyed; Duveen, who knew some
authentic queens personally, was in a peculiar position to
provide it. There was a special essence of authority about
Duveen that eventually made her forsake all others. An
eminent New York antique dealer once showed her some very
expensive Renaissance furniture; she was delighted with it,
and bought it. The furniture was delivered to her New York
home at a moment when Duveen was there, giving her a lesson
in art appreciation. What he said about the furniture is not
known, but her reaction to his criticism is. She telephoned
the furniture dealer and told him to come at once and take
it back. "You'll find it in the back yard," she said. The
same antique dealer had another exacerbating experience
involving Duveen. Andrew Mellon, soon after he became
Secretary of the Treasury, asked the antique dealer to come
to Washington and give him an estimate on furnishing his
apartment. Forehandedly thinking of possible future profits,
the dealer made the estimate as low as he could—thirty
thousand dollars. Mellon mentioned this figure to Duveen,
who pronounced it excessive; he said he could do the job
admirably for twelve thousand. Mr. Mellon then asked the
antique man how it was that Duveen could make an estimate so
much lower. "Because I haven't got expensive pictures to
sell!" the dealer answered bitterly. Oscar Lewis quotes an
unnamed phrase-maker as saying of Collis Huntington that he
was "scrupulously dishonest." He was the epitome of the
ruthless business titan of the period. The contribution of
men like him to the material growth of America in the latter
part of the nineteenth century was incalculable, but it has
often been remarked that by using their unparalleled
economic power without a corresponding sense of public
responsibility they undermined the moral prestige of the
leading capitalist country in the world to an extent that is
also incalculable. The bad odor that still clings to "big
business" can be traced back to them. In their old age,
these men gave out a variety of formulas to those who came
to them for the magic word. Collis Huntington advised such
seekers to look sharp, and boasted that he had never been
out-smarted in business. (He probably listed his
transactions with Duveen under the heading of pleasure.) One
of his three business partners, Charles Crocker, said that
the problem was not to make money but to hold on to it once
you got it. In a San Francisco restaurant one day, Collis
Huntington berated a waiter who had, by accident, made a
twenty-five-cent overcharge in a check. "Young man," said
Collis as he happily pocketed a refund, "you can't follow me
through life by the quarters I drop." And yet, thanks to
Arabella, he dropped many at Duveen's New York gallery, as
well as at his London and Paris galleries. H. E., who had a
mansion in San Marino, California, also dropped many with
Duveen. In fact, on Duveen's last visit to San Marino, just
before H. E. died, the host didn't have enough cash on hand
to pay for the freight-car load of merchandise in the
guest's caravan. Duveen accepted instead some Los Angeles
real estate, a commodity of which H. E. was then the largest
owner.
Although Collis Huntington did not talk much, he once
admitted that he had paid twenty-five thousand dollars for a
certain painting, which he called "a religious scene." He
spent so much time looking at it that he didn't have time to
look at any others. This picture seems to have presented to
him an allegory of his life; he went to the trouble to set
down the reasons for his fascination, as follows:
There are seven figures in it—three cardinals of the
different orders of their religion. There is an old
missionary that has just returned; he is showing his
scars, where his hands are cut all over; he is telling a
story to these cardinals; they are dressed in luxury.
One of them is playing with a dog; one is asleep; there
is only one looking at him—looking at him with that kind
of expression saying what a fool you are that you should
go out and suffer for the human race when we have such a
good time at home. I lose the picture in the story when
I look at it. I sometimes sit half an hour looking at
that picture.
For Collis Huntington, Oscar Lewis suggests, the
luxury-loving cardinals represented two of his
partners—Crocker, constantly running off to Europe, and
Leland Stanford, fiddling with ranches and his university.
Huntington always referred to the university his partner's
money founded as Stanford's Circus. When the Central Pacific
got into financial difficulties, Huntington wired Stanford:
"CLOSE THE CIRCUS."
After Collis's death, in 1900, Arabella Huntington, guided
by Duveen, moved into an artistic realm far above
twenty-five-thousand-dollar religious scenes. She bought
from him paintings by Rembrandt, Velásquez, Hals, van der
Weyden, Bellini, and other ranking masters. Arabella was
often brutally rude to other art dealers, but her
submissiveness to Duveen's authority not only in the
province of art but in clothes, jewels, and coiffures was
abject. If he frowned in criticism of her hairdo, she redid
the hairdo. She had a passion for blue velvet. Many people
offered her blue velvet, but she never took any; she really
liked only blue velvet that had belonged to Duveen. When
shipments of clothes and jewels came from Paris, Duveen had
to see them and pass judgment on them before she changed
their status from "on approval" to ownership. One day, she
went to see Mitchell Samuels, president of the well-known
antiques firm of French & Co., about some minor items that
Duveen didn't mind her buying from him, and in his office
she left her handbag, containing eleven pearl necklaces
worth three and a half million dollars. When Samuels
returned the bag, he admonished her about her carelessness.
She explained the lapse by saying that she had been
irritated with Duveen about something and that her agitation
over this had caused her to forget everything else,
including the handbag. By the time Arabella married H. E.,
in 1913—she relied on Duveen to make all the wedding
arrangements—her taste in art had been considerably refined.
Her new husband developed a whim of his own; he wanted
outstanding English paintings of the eighteenth century.
Duveen was quite prepared to indulge this whim, and in the
course of doing so he bound H. E. to him forever. Always a
Lucullan, and on occasion a companionable, traveller,
Duveen, in the summer of 1921, sailed from New York on the
Aquitania in a suite adjoining the one occupied by his
friends H. E. and Arabella. The Huntingtons were in the
Gainsborough Suite, whose walls were hung with copies of
that master's paintings. In the dining room hung a
reproduction of "The Blue Boy." One evening, the Huntingtons
invited Duveen to dine with them. Looking up, between
courses, at the picture, H. E. became curious about it. In
after years, Duveen enjoyed repeating the conversation that
followed.
"Joe," said H. E., with the confidence of one who knows that
he can get the answer to anything, "who's the boy in the
blue suit?"
Duveen said, "That is a reproduction of the famous 'Blue
Boy.' It is Gainsborough's finest and most famous painting."
"Where's the original?" Huntington went on, with even more
confidence. Duveen did not let his inquirer down. "It
belongs to the Duke of Westminster and hangs in his
collection at Grosvenor House, in London."
"How much is it?" asked H. E.
Duveen was discouraging. "It can probably not be had at any
price," he said.
Huntington, impressed, looked up at the unattainable boy in
the blue suit with fresh awe. "It must be a very great
painting," he said.
Duveen seconded this venture into criticism, and went a step
further. "Indeed," he said, "it is the greatest work of
England's greatest master and would be the crown of any
collection of English pictures."
In Huntington, aesthetic appreciation was glazing into the
enamel of covetousness. "What do you think would be the
price if it ever were sold?" he asked.
After a calculated hesitation, Duveen said it would probably
be about six hundred thousand dollars—far more than
Huntington had ever before paid for a picture.
"I might see my way clear to paying that much," Huntington
said.
Duveen knew many secrets about the owners of fine pictures.
His operatives had informed him that this happened to be a
moment when the Duke of Westminster was definitely hard up.
The Huntingtons, on their way to Paris, got off the
Aquitania at Cherbourg; Duveen continued to Southampton,
with the comfortable feeling of having sold at a neat profit
a picture he didn't yet own. He deferred all his other
engagements and called upon the Duke at Grosvenor House. He
found him extremely receptive to the idea of selling "The
Blue Boy," and anything else in the place. Duveen asked to
see what was in stock. Three pieces fixed his attention—"The
Blue Boy," Reynolds' "Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse," and
Gainsborough's "The Cottage Door." Duveen bought them all,
agreeing to pay cash within a few days. The price for the
three pictures was slightly more than the figure he had
mentioned on the Aquitania for "The Blue Boy" alone. The
moment the deal was set, Duveen made for his London office
and telephoned Huntington in Paris to tell him the good
news. He had acquired "The Blue Boy" and would deliver it
for six hundred and twenty thousand dollars—the twenty
thousand covered the telephone call—but he needed the money
as quickly as possible, because the Duke needed it as
quickly as possible. Huntington asked for forty-eight hours.
Good-naturedly, Duveen let him have that interval. At the
end of it, the Duke had his money.
Duveen went to Paris to deliver "The Blue Boy" in person.
The Huntingtons were thrilled at seeing the original, but
they were upset by the fact that the Duke's blue boy was
more green than blue; the blue boy in their dining room on
the Aquitania, they remembered, was a much bluer blue boy
than the Duke's. Duveen explained that the greenish tinge of
their blue boy was merely the result of a long
accumulation of dust and grime. He promised to have that
removed, so that the youth would he restored to his pristine
azure, and the Huntingtons were appeased. Duveen
congratulated them on being able to take to America this
prime glory of English painting, and, when their jubilation
had begun to subside, mentioned Reynolds' portrait of Mrs.
Siddons, explaining that as "The Blue Boy" was
Gainsborough's greatest, "Sarah Siddons" was Reynolds'
greatest, and adding that he had brought the picture with
him. He quoted a pronouncement by Sir Thomas Lawrence,
Reynolds' admirer and protégé, upon being asked which
portrait he considered the Master's finest. "'Sarah Siddons
as the Tragic Muse' is not only his finest portrait but it
is also the finest portrait ever painted under the canopy of
Heaven," Lawrence had said. Arabella inquired who Sarah
Siddons was. She was, Duveen said, a member of the great
Kemble family and the most famous actress in England during
the latter half of the eighteenth century. The revelation of
Sarah Siddons' profession was unfortunate. Duveen
encountered that opposition, more severe than any other, of
newly acquired social sensitiveness. Arabella, before her
first Huntington marriage, had not only known poverty but
had seen more than her share of the sordid aspects of life,
yet now the idea of hanging in her house the portrait of an
actress shocked her profoundly. Her objections were violent.
Duveen was determined to get "Sarah Siddons" into the
charmed circle of the Huntington Collection, even at the
risk of treading upon a moral code. "You are not buying an
actress," he said patiently. "You are buying a great artist
and his finest example. You are ambitious to build a
collection of English pictures that will be an honor to
America and unique in the world. You cannot afford to
exclude this masterpiece. The subject does not matter. It is
the artist that matters. If you let this go to another
collector, as it inevitably will, you will never forgive
yourself for having let it go." That did it; pride won over
moral sensibility. "Sarah Siddons" went to San Marino. Some
months later, she was followed by "The Cottage Door."
In accordance with his promise, Duveen subjected "The Blue
Boy" to a professional scrubbing. This started a rumpus—the
British newspapers accused him of vandalism—but Duveen
hugely enjoyed rumpuses. It was, as a matter of fact, his
habit to have an Old Master cleaned the moment he bought it.
He felt that a painting should look as nearly as possible
the way it looked when it left the artist's studio; the
years shouldn't be allowed to ravage and disfigure it. He
was often accused of making Old Masters look like new
masters. His answer was that they were new when they left
the Old Master. An American lady once protested that the
Renaissance painting of a girl he was trying to sell her had
obviously been restored. "My dear Madam," he said, "if you
were as old as this young girl, you would have to be
restored, too." Duveen showed the
newly resplendent "Blue Boy" to Sir Charles J. Holmes, then
director of the National Gallery in London. Sir Charles
publicly hailed him as "the savior of this monumental work,"
and went on, "For the first time in over a century, the
world can really see this masterpiece as the master intended
it to be seen."
Duveen emerged from that controversy with honors, but
another one was brewing, over the propriety of selling one
country’s art treasure to the highest bidder in another
country. In his autobiographical "Left Hand, Right Hand!"
published in 1944, Sir Osbert Sitwell wrote:
It is an ironical reflection that while Lord Duveen's
magnificent gifts to the nation stand as a memorial to
his name, much of the money that paid for them was
earned by the sale to the United States of the flower of
the . . . eighteenth-century and early
nineteenth-century English painting. We have the
galleries now, but no pictures to hang in them. He was
the greatest salesman of his time.
Duveen's admirers, when they exult over the immense
additions he made to private and public collections in the
United States, usually end up by pointing out that whereas,
before Duveen, art-thirsty Americans had to cross the ocean
to see the masterpieces of the world's art, they can now see
them at home. That is, of course, an achievement that only
chauvinists can take an undiluted pleasure in. Late in his
career, Duveen seemingly became sensitive on this point. He
acquired—by a stroke of Duveen luck—one of Hogarth's finest
paintings, "The Graham Children." He had a ready customer in
Mellon and he was itching to sell him the Hogarth, but for
once he overcame his guiding impulse. He presented "The
Graham Children" to the British National Gallery.
The departure from England of "The Blue Boy" gave Duveen an
opportunity for advertisement that he did not waste. He
permitted the British public a last look, at a public
exhibition; it was a farewell to a national heirloom. The
lamentation in England over "The Blue Boy" moved the
American composer Cole Porter to elegy. For a Cochran
review, "Mayfair and Montmartre," he wrote a song that
showed that even an American could feel a twinge at the
departure of the cerulean refugee. In the course of his
threnody, Porter characteristically mentioned Duveen by name
and began his chorus:
For I'm the Blue Boy, the beautiful Blue Boy
And I am forced to admit, I'm feeling a bit depressed
A silver dollar took me and my collar
To show the slow cowboys just how boys
In England used to be dressed. . . .
Duveen also permitted himself a sentimental indulgence; he
was in New York at the time of the exhibition, and he cabled
an order to London that his aged mother should be the last
person to see the picture before it was crated. This was in
fulfillment of a vow made many years before. While he was
serving his apprenticeship in his father's antique shop, on
Oxford Street, young Duveen came in one day in a state of
immense excitement. He had bought a canvas that he had been
assured was a Gainsborough. This assurance, as his father
was later only too happy to recall to him from time to time,
turned out to be baseless. His mother, too, had chaffed him
about his naïveté, and Duveen had pledged himself to show
her a genuine Gainsborough, and one that belonged to him.
When "The Blue Boy" reached New York, escorted by two Duveen
employees and triply encased—in a waterproof box, a steel
box, and an iron-bound case—it was welcomed like an
inheritance from an unknown uncle. The arrival was a
headline story from coast to coast. The Metropolitan Museum
begged Duveen for permission to exhibit it there for a
while, but Duveen refused. He didn't think the Metropolitan
Museum was safe enough; after all, the Gainsborough had
become a Duveen, and he couldn't trust a Duveen to a
fragile, jerry-built structure like the Metropolitan. For a
few weeks, he exhibited the Boy at his Fifth Avenue gallery,
which was solid, and then he personally escorted him to
California and to the Huntingtons.
Duveen not only arranged weddings and obtained unobtainable
paintings for his clients but he got them steamship
reservations and invitations to the right places when they
were difficult to get. He couldn't quite insinuate the
Huntingtons into American society, but he did pretty well
for them in England. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First
World War, H. E. was marooned in London, unable to book
passage home. In his distress, he appealed to Duveen, also
in London, and Duveen got accommodations for him on a ship
sailing in two weeks. Meanwhile, an operative had whispered
to Duveen that Lord Spencer, of Althorp House, in
Northampton, found himself in possession of an excessive
number of ancestral portraits. It occurred to Duveen that an
invitation to visit Althorp House might reduce the tedium of
Huntington's enforced stay in London. Besides the sixth
Earl, Althorp House housed the Spencer collection of English
portraits, which had come down from the second Earl, a
contemporary of George III, and which contained some
magnificent eighteenth-century portraits. Duveen got
Huntington the invitation and shortly thereafter conducted
him through the gallery, thus introducing him not only to
the contemporary peerage but to a vanished one. Duveen put
him on particularly familiar terms with a
three-quarter-length Reynolds portrait of Lavinia, the wife
of the second Earl. Huntington fell in love with Lavinia at
first sight, and Duveen promised to do what he could to
further the romance. The gallery also contained a Reynolds
portrait of Lavinia with her son, but H. E.'s infatuation
with her was apparently so intense that, perhaps
unconsciously, he couldn't endure the idea of her having a
son by anyone else. Duveen, while he was about it,
introduced Huntington to two other Reynolds girls—Georgianna,
the Duchess of Devonshire, and Frances, the Marchioness
Camden. Huntington carried on only a mild flirtation with
them. They did not engender in him anything like the fierce
adoration he felt for Lavinia-without-son. It turned out
that the sonless Lavinia was the one ancestor Lord Spencer
would not part with. Duveen could supply Huntington with
Frances and Georgianna and Lavinia-with-son but not
Lavinia-without- son. However, H. E. was stubborn, and he
had a considerable record of conquest behind him. When he
wanted a piece of Los Angeles real estate or a railroad, he
was in the habit of getting it, and when he wanted Lavinia-without-son,
he saw no reason that he shouldn't get that, too. Duveen,
who understood this kind of bullheadedness, cast about for
something to assuage the lover's disappointment. He told
Huntington that Reynolds had done still another Lavinia, who
was just as good and was, happily, sonless. This Lavinia was
owned by the Earl of Bessborough, later Governor General of
Canada, who had inherited her from the Spencer family.
Huntington commissioned Duveen to get her. Duveen approached
the Earl of Bessborough. There must have been something
about a childless Lavinia that was infinitely appealing and
full of solace; Lord Bessborough didn't want to be parted
from his Lavinia, either. Duveen persisted as only he knew
how to persist. After negotiations that went on for months,
Bessborough agreed to sell, on the condition that Duveen
would have an excellent copy made to insure His Lordship
against loneliness. Duveen had the Lavinia copy made and
hung, and sent the original to San Marino.
After Huntington's death, in 1927, Lord Bessborough's
Lavinia was the cause of a complicated lawsuit. The trustees
of H. E.'s estate hired an English expert to catalogue the
great Huntington Collection. He pronounced Huntington's
Lavinia a copy; the original, he said, was the painting
hanging in Althorp House. He also said that certain parts of
the Huntington picture were manifestly not Reynolds' work,
notably parts of the costume and some areas in the
background. Moreover, the Althorp Lavinia wore a white lawn,
the Huntington a white dotted swiss. The expert did not know
what Huntington, if he were alive, could have told him—that
he had known perfectly well he was buying not the Althorp
Lavinia but the Bessborough Lavinia. Unfortunately,
there was no evidence for this beyond Duveen's word. The
trustees demanded that Duveen buy back the Lavinia at what
H. E. had paid for her plus interest. As Huntington had paid
something like a quarter of a million dollars for the
Lavinia twelve years before, the sum asked of Duveen came to
nearly four hundred thousand dollars. The parties to the
dispute agreed to submit it to arbitration, and put the
matter up to Sir Charles J. Holmes, who had just retired as
director of the National Gallery in London.
Sir Charles' first move was to requisition all the private
papers of Sir Joshua Reynolds that were preserved in the
British Museum. Among these were Reynolds' copybooks of his
correspondence and bills, along with letters from his
patrons, and a Sitter's Book, in which he had kept the names
and dates of all his sitters. A letter was found from the
second Earl Spencer, written shortly after his succession to
the title in 1783, requesting that Reynolds paint a portrait
of his wife, Lavinia. There was a copy of Reynolds' answer,
accepting the commission and fixing the date for the first
sitting. The Sitter's Book showed the dates of that sitting
and subsequent ones, as well as Reynolds' charge for the
portrait—a hundred guineas. There was also found in the
correspondence an ecstatic letter from Earl Spencer
acknowledging the receipt of the painting and asking
Reynolds to do another portrait of Lavinia, for the Earl's
mother, the Dowager Countess. Reynolds accepted the second
commission, at the same price, and his Sitter's Book showed
the dates Lavinia sat for the second portrait. For this one,
Lavinia changed her dress, but otherwise the two portraits
were almost identical. Such a duplication of a portrait by
an artist is called in trade circles a replica. When the
Dowager Countess died, the replica passed to her daughter,
and eventually descended to Lord Bessborough. Sir Charles
was so convinced by the documentation and by the similarity
of style and composition in the two pictures that he
pronounced the Huntington painting genuine after studying a
photograph; he did not feel it necessary to see the
original. As for the charge that parts of the portrait were
not by Reynolds, Sir Charles said that it was a common
practice of that busy artist to let lesser hands fill in
what he considered unimportant details. Sir Charles cited a
letter in which the Earl of Bath referred to the famous
portrait of himself by Reynolds, now in the National
Portrait Gallery in London. The Earl wrote a friend to the
effect that he had just had his last sitting with the Master
but did not expect the finished painting for a few days,
owing to a practice that he had discovered and that he
thought the artist would not be pleased to have him know
about; namely, that when the sittings were finished,
Reynolds turned the portraits over to assistants, who filled
in details of landscape and costume he was too busy or too
bored to do himself.
H. E. Huntington strayed from the Duveen fold only once, and
Duveen, in his customary fashion, made him aware that heavy
penalties attached to such a lapse. One day in 1913, while
H. E., then living at the Metropolitan Club in New York, was
taking an innocent stroll down Fifth Avenue, he was pulled
off the street by an English art dealer who had a Fifth
Avenue branch. He wanted H. E. to look at a painting of two
ladies in filmy garments sauntering against a background of
clouds, which was, he asserted, a wonderful Romney of Mrs.
Siddons and her sister, Miss Kemble. H. E., who, unlike his
wife, had no prejudice against actresses, succumbed to the
two sisters on the spot. As Arabella was in California and
couldn't bring her scruples to bear, he had the heavenly
girls sent to the Metropolitan Club and paid the dealer a
hundred thousand dollars for effecting the assignation.
Proud of the coup he had achieved on his own, he invited
Duveen to lunch to show off his new acquisition. Duveen,
whose opinion of paintings he hadn't sold himself was always
candid, gave the two tall, lovely, cloud-framed girls a
penetrating look. "I don't think this is a Romney, H. E.,"
he said. "It looks like Romney, it is very like Romney, it
is Romneyesque, but it is not a Romney."
Duveen's reflection on the legitimacy of the girls ruined
Huntington's lunch. "It must be a Romney," he insisted. "Of
course it's a Romney. It can't possibly not be a
Romney." He told Duveen the name of the respectable firm
from which he had bought it. Moreover, he said, the picture
had been certified by T. Humphry Ward and William Roberts,
two unimpeachable authorities. Ward had been the art editor
of the London Times and was the husband of Mrs.
Humphry Ward, than which unimpeachability could go no
higher. Roberts, a distinguished British art critic, was a
specialist on Romney and the co-author, with Ward, of a book
about him. The elder J. P. Morgan had engaged Roberts to
prepare a catalogue of his English pictures.
"Nevertheless, I do not think it is a Romney," Duveen said.
"However, let us ask Stevenson Scott" Scott, a member of the
art firm of Scott & Fowles, and a friend of Duveen's, had a
little corner on unimpeachability himself.
By this time, Huntington was in a terrible state, and he
waited breathlessly for the arrival of Scott. Scott was
forced to back up Duveen's opinion. He knew Mrs. Siddons'
face intimately, if not personally, he said, and he was
convinced that neither of the ladies sauntering in front of
the clouds was she. This observation only irritated H. E. He
didn't care whether it was Mrs. Siddons or not. The point
was: Was the picture a Romney? Duveen said he recalled that
a picture very like it had, years before, been knocked down
at Christie's auction rooms in London for a few hundred
pounds. This also, cried the unhappy Huntington, was beside
the point. Was the picture ra Romney? Scott
soothingly replied that whoever had painted the picture had
at least turned out a fine work of art. This remark merely
maddened H. E. further. He delivered himself of a summary
statement. "If this picture is a Romney, I won't give it up
at any price," he said. "If it is not a Romney, I won't have
it at any price!"
Duveen was on a spot. Huntington was in no mood for evasion;
he wanted his money back if he had been defrauded. The
seller of the heavenly twins was so firm in his conviction
that the picture was as he represented it that he was
prepared to go to law about it. Should the courts sustain
the dealer, Duveen's influence with his client would suffer
an irreparable setback. But Duveen trusted his eye and
Scott's corroboration. Huntington retained Sir John Simon to
bring suit against the dealer in London, since his
headquarters was there. A number of experts were retained by
one side or the other in this cause célèbre. Duveen
advised Huntington which experts he should hire. All the
dealer's experts stated before the trial that the picture
was by Romney; all Duveen's experts said that it was
close—even hot—but that it was not a Romney. The experts who
had certified the picture—the Messrs. Ward and
Roberts—issued a second, and amplified, certification. In it
they mentioned an entry in Romney's Sitter's Book noting an
appointment with "two ladies sitting;" these two ladies, the
Messrs. Ward and Roberts averred, were Miss Kemble and Mrs.
Siddons.
It is hard to say how this case would have been decided if a
Londoner named Vickers, who was then nearly eighty and who
had spent his life working for art dealers, had not come
forward. He remembered that when he was a young man, he had
worked for a very old London picture dealer who had told him
that in his youth, in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, there had been a famous controversy
between one Ozias Humphry (1742-1810), a miniature-painter,
and Horace Walpole. Humphry had asked Walpole if he might
paint Walpole's two grandnieces, the Misses Maria and
Horatia Waldegrave. Walpole consented but didn't actually
commission the picture. When it was finished and delivered,
he didn't like it, and sent it back. Ozias threatened to sue
for his money. Vickers suggested that it might pay Duveen's
bloodhounds to look this case up in the files of the London
Times. There they found a record of the controversy.
Ozias Humphry proved to be a close friend of Romney's, so
close that Romney once painted him for nothing—and there is
no greater token of friendship between artists. The Duveen
men, now off on what seemed a promising scent, came up with
another helpful antiquarian. This was Algernon Graves, one
more well-known authority on art, who recalled that he had
once seen, in the archives of the Royal Academy, a drawing
very much like the painting of the by-this-time-alleged Mrs.
Siddons and the by-this-time-alleged Miss Kemble. The Duveen
scouts found the drawing, and it turned out to be the sketch
from which Ozias Humphry had made his painting of the Misses
Maria and Horatia Waldegrave. This drawing might equally
well have served for the Huntington picture.
Duveen now moved in for the kill. His men got hold of
Romney's Sitter's Book and found that on the day Romney had
prepared for the "two ladies sitting," the entry
triumphantly referred to by the Messrs. Ward and Roberts,
Mrs. Siddons was playing in Birmingham; the sleuths dug up a
playbill for the performance. As for Miss Kemble, she had
taken it into her pretty head to go to France; they found a
record of her passport visa. When the case came to trial,
Sir John Simon opened for the plaintiff by stating these
facts. A recess was instantly requested by the defense,
which presently announced that it had decided not to make a
fight; it consented to accept a judgment ordering the return
of Huntington's money, plus interest, plus fifty thousand
dollars costs. Counsel for the defense asked, and was
granted, a moratorium on the payment until the war was over.
In the end, the affair was too much for the firm involved;
it went out of business. H. E. had learned his lesson.
Duveen had no more trouble with him.
There are some who say that Duveen was a genius as a
businessman and salesman but no great shakes as a
connoisseur, and there are others who say that those who say
he was no great shakes as a connoisseur are rivals whom he
constantly outplayed; they claim that his ability to judge
pictures was as nearly infallible as his ability to put over
a deal. Some of those who take the first point of view are
among the leading critical minds in the art world. The
layman might wonder, then, how Duveen was able to spot the
fake Romney so readily. There is no conclusive answer, since
even the experts were fooled. It was the theory of Dr.
George C. Williamson, who was one of Morgan's advisers on
art, that a good part of the disputed picture actually was
done by Romney in an effort to help his friend execute
Horace Walpole's commission satisfactorily.
It is quite likely [Williamson writes, in "Stories of an
Expert"] that Romney himself said, "I would stretch the
hand out. Let me show you how I would do it." Again,
with regard to the drapery, I suggest that Romney
pointed out to Humphry the awkwardness of the folds, how
they hung from a kind of angle, and again, he
perhaps suggested how he would like the draperies to
fall, and that the greater part of the foot should be
shown. It seems to me to be possible that Romney himself
was responsible for parts of the picture; the
outstretched arm has a close resemblance to Romney's
work, in fact it was that arm which made me at first
think the picture must be by Romney. The drapery also,
especially that of the left figure, resembles the work
of Romney, and I am inclined to believe that the
better-known painter was really responsible for these
two portions of the picture, and that it was his work
that led the experts astray.
Dr. Williamson, himself a witness at the trial, was one of
those led astray—possibly because of an excess of knowledge.
Duveen, however, conceivably because he was not similarly
burdened, guessed right. If Duveen's detractors are correct,
there is still, of course, another possible explanation.
Perhaps, with the passing of time, he had begun to have
suspicions about the authenticity of any picture that was
not his, and since there were still a lot of pictures in the
world that were not his, he sometimes suspected with a
gratifying accuracy.
In his estimate of pictures that weren't his, Duveen
occasionally made a costly mistake. One of the most painful
occurred in the summer of 1911, when he was taking the cure
at Carlsbad to recover from an intensive wooing of Henry
Clay Frick and to gather strength to continue it. Frick was
then the greatest prospect in the world, and Duveen was, in
his own eyes, the greatest dealer. Duveen was willing to
concede the first distinction to Frick, but Frick was still
not willing to concede the second to Duveen. Frick had dealt
with and liked Duveen's Uncle Henry, who founded the
American branch of the Duveen business, but he had always
been somewhat chary of the nephew. And Frick had close
social and business connections with Knoedler's. He had
bought many paintings of the Barbizon school from them.
Duveen had gradually succeeded in displacing most of them
with Old Masters, but Frick was so fond of some of the
Barbizons that he held on to them to the end, an indulgence
that Duveen, even when he got the upper hand, as he
inevitably did, permitted him. For a long time, Frick played
on the rivalry between Duveen and Knoedler's. He thought
that it kept both firms on their toes, and that this was to
his benefit.
While Duveen was in Carlsbad, a free-lance runner pursued
him with a photograph of a three-quarter-length portrait of
King Philip IV of Spain, by Velásquez, which he said was for
sale. Duveen knew that Velásquez had painted many portraits
of his sovereign. That very year, Duveen had sold one to
Benjamin Altman, and he had earlier sold one to Mary M.
Emery, of Cincinnati. "The original of this particular
painting hangs in the Dulwich Museum, in London," he told
the runner, "and, as that is the acknowledged authentic one,
the Velásquez of your photograph must be a fake." Later, in
the lounge of his hotel, Duveen saw the runner in
conversation with Charles Williams, of the important London
art firm of Agnew's. When a hotel clerk told him that
Williams and the runner had booked reservations to London,
his malaise became acute. Duveen knew that Agnew's was
acting as the London agent of Knoedler's and he figured that
the picture, if after all it was the original, would
certainly go to Frick. Selling pictures to Frick when Frick
liked somebody else better was not an occupation that
allowed one to take it easy in Carlsbad. Duveen got on the
train Williams and the runner were taking, and was no sooner
aboard than he was assailed by an agonizing recollection. He
remembered that Aurelian de Beruete y Moret, a Spanish
expert on Velásquez, had for years clung to the notion, as
persistently and obdurately as Galileo had clung to his
notion, that the Velásquez in the Dulwich Museum was only a
copy. Duveen tried to reopen the discussion with the runner,
but the man told him he needn't bother; the picture had been
sold. Could it be that the fanatical Beruete, like Galileo,
would turn out to be right that the Dulwich Velásquez, which
had been raptly stared at by generations of art-loving
English, was merely a copy? When it came to the point—that
fine point where a collector was willing to pay four hundred
thousand dollars for a painting, provided only that it was
an original—Beruete delivered. He proved to the satisfaction
of other experts that he was right, and Frick bought
the Velásquez. Duveen had not simply lost a sale; he had
lost a prime opportunity to demonstrate to Frick his theorem
that if a great picture was to be had, it could be had only
from Duveen.
A bold move was necessary to capture Frick's attention. In
Paris, in 1913, one of Duveen's runners reported to him that
a Russian noblewoman, the wife of an important general,
owned a painting she believed to be the work of Leonardo da
Vinci. Getting wind of a new da Vinci was like discovering a
new planet; Duveen was aquiver. But, as he had mistaken a
genuine Velásquez for a false one, he could not risk
mistaking a false Leonardo for a genuine one. He invited the
Russian lady to come to Paris with her painting and bring it
to his gallery in the Place Vendôme. Duveen took her and the
painting upstairs to a room where there was sunlight and a
small man with a magnifying glass. The man was Bernard
Berenson, the great art expert—a fact Duveen did not mention
to the lady. Berenson peered at the picture, then looked at
it through a magnifying glass, then took it to the window.
He finally put it down and gave Duveen the high sign. It was
indeed a da Vinci. On the way down to Duveen's office,
Berenson found an opportunity to tell him that it was a
long-lost picture known as the "Benois Madonna." Duveen,
tingling with the realization of what he could do to Frick
and to Knoedler's with this painting, invited its owner to
discuss a deal. She named the highest price ever asked for
any picture in the history of art—one and a half million
dollars. Duveen felt that Frick could afford it. He didn't
see, in fact, how Frick could afford not to afford it. The
lady asked that a million dollars be placed in escrow as a
binder, then explained that, under Russian law, she could
not sell the painting until she had offered it to the Czar
at the price she had quoted Duveen. A contract of sale,
subject to an option to the Czar for a certain period, was
signed, and the million was placed in escrow. Duveen, who
thought it unlikely the Czar would have the effrontery to
compete with Frick, sailed for America in a joyful humor. He
told Frick what he was going to get him. The two men went
through the motions of their daily lives waiting for the
moment when the option would expire. Duveen was an ebullient
man and Frick was a cool one, yet Frick's excitement far
exceeded Duveen's. The man who had taken it in his stride
when the radical Alexander Berkman came into his office and
shot him in the neck, who, with the country clamoring
against him, had refused to negotiate with the Amalgamated
Association of Iron and Steel Workers, who had calmly lost
Benjamin Harrison the Presidency in the campaign of 1892 by
his intractability toward the unions in the Homestead
Strike—the man whom no one could stir and nothing could
move—fumed while the Czar was making up his mind. Just
before the option was to expire, a cable arrived from the
owner of the picture saying that the Czar had met the quoted
price. In the dawn of his bitter disappointment, Duveen
realized that he had been used. The Russian lady had
maneuvered him into providing a Berenson opinion for
nothing. He and Berenson had got the da Vinci into the wrong
gallery. It had bypassed Frick and landed in the Hermitage,
in Leningrad. Still, the incident was not a total loss from
Duveen's point of view, for he had learned how much Frick
was willing to pay for what he wanted, or what Duveen could
convince him he wanted.
Duveen had one advantage over other dealers, even those who
were close friends of his major clients. His rivals offered
only pictures, whereas he had other things to provide, too.
He knew decor and architecture, and could be of great
assistance to a man like Frick. Many a time, when a client
was building or furnishing a house, Duveen had a hand in it.
He had more than a hand in furnishing the Detroit and Palm
Beach homes of Mrs. Horace E. Dodge, the Philadelphia and
Palm Beach homes of Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury, and Mrs. A.
Hamilton Rice's home on Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Dodge spent so
much that her lawyer called her up to find out whether she
had gone crazy. He was told no, that she just liked
furniture—especially Duveen's. The Rice home Duveen
furnished from top to bottom, including the beautiful
eighteenth-century salon that Mrs. Rice later gave to the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. The carpet of this room belonged
to Louis XIV before Duveen got it. When, in 1913, Frick
decided to build a town house at Fifth Avenue and Seventieth
Street, Duveen chose Carrère & Hastings as the architects.
Duveen worked with Hastings on the plans. Hastings was quite
familiar with the exquisite collection of furniture and
tapestries in Duveen's warehouses, and Duveen helped him out
by indicating exactly where certain of these items would
look their best in the projected mansion. When Hastings
submitted the plans, Frick raised his eyebrows at their
unconventional character, but Duveen's extravagant
admiration for Hastings' work persuaded him to lower them.
Included in the blueprints was a room for the famous set of
eleven Fragonard panels Duveen had just bought for Frick.
The four largest panels were commissioned by Louis XV in
1770, as a present for Mme. du Barry. Du Barry refused the
present, because she considered one of the panels, "Storming
the Citadel," too forthright a comment on her relations with
the King. She didn't mind being a citadel, she didn't even
mind being stormed, but she didn't want it suggested to
posterity that the citadel had fallen. Fragonard had to take
his panels back. He kept them for eighteen years and then
sold them to a cousin, Alexandre Maubert, for the equivalent
of seven hundred and twenty dollars. From M. Maubert, they
descended to a grandson, M. Malvilan, and from M. Malvilan
they went, by a more commercial route, to the Duveen firm,
which, eventually, talked them into the possession of
Morgan. While Duveen and Hastings were working on the Frick
plans, Morgan died. As a matter of courtesy, the Morgan
estate offered Duveen first chance to buy the panels, but
they asked more than a million dollars; even Duveen
hesitated. His position was ticklish; Frick, a close friend
of the Morgans, would have no trouble finding out the
difference between what Duveen paid the Morgan estate and
what he was charging him. The estate told Duveen he
must make up his mind quickly; if he didn't want them, it
had another purchaser. He bought the panels and went to see
Frick. "Mr. Frick," he said, "I have just made a marvellous
purchase. I have bought the Fragonard panels from Mr.
Morgan's estate. I paid a high price, but I had to have them
for you. You shall have them at exactly what I paid for
them." Frick bought the panels, and Duveen wrote off the
lost profit as an investment in conditioning.
The eleven Fragonard panels were of various sizes and
shapes. It was not easy to compose them into a harmonious
pattern in a room. There was only one man to do the job,
Duveen advised Frick and Hastings—Sir Charles Allom, of
London, who had received his knighthood after harmonizing
interiors for King George V. Frick and Hastings thought it
was a wonderful idea, and called Allom in. When he arrived,
Frick offered him the job of doing not only the Fragonard
Room but most of the other rooms in the house. Allom, a
prima donna, wanted all or nothing, and sailed back to
England in a huff. Duveen had a harmonizing job of his own
to do. He did it. Frick recalled Allom and put the whole job
in his hands. The Fragonard Room was a transatlantic
collaboration between Duveen and Allom, who had returned to
England again, this time to work on the problem. Frick
agreed that the chamber should be provided with a mantel,
andirons, moldings, candelabra, and whatever else should go
into harmonizing a Fragonard Room. Duveen sent full-size
copies of the panels to Allom, and Allom built a full-size
model room to contain them. For accoutrements, Duveen
concentrated on the eighteenth century. He managed to
acquire for it a marble fireplace that had once graced the
Bagatelle, Marie Antoinette's little château built in 1777
in the Bois de Boulogne by the Comte d'Artois, who reigned
as Charles X from 1824 to 1830. When Allom had arranged the
fireplace and the panels to his satisfaction, Duveen went
abroad to inspect the job, and passed it. Allom disassembled
the room, accompanied it to New York, and set it up again in
a warehouse. Hastings, Allom, and Duveen took Frick down to
have a look. Duveen's enthusiasm for it was overflowing.
Frick apparently thought it wasn't bad, but, as always, he
didn't say much. There was still plenty to be done; when you
decide on an eighteenth-century room, you can't just pick up
the furnishings anywhere. But fortunately, if expensively
for Frick, Duveen had just what the room needed: a Riesener
commode, a Marie Antoinette writing table, some pieces of
Clodion sculpture, chairs covered in Beauvais tapestry, and
other tidbits. After it was finished, Frick was satisfied.
Even Duveen seemed to feel satisfied. True, he had sold the
Fragonard panels at cost, but when he moved in the other
Duveens he was more equitable.
The Fragonard Room was only a start. The Frick house was a
big, one, and it needed paintings and sculptures as well as
furniture. Duveen was able to supply them. In 1916, he built
the Boucher Room around eight panels painted by Boucher for
Mme. de Pompadour and entitled "The Arts and Sciences," and
four Boucher "Seasons." In 1917, he sold Frick
Gainsborough's "Mrs. Peter Baker" and the Hale "Portrait of
a Man;" in 1918, van Dyck's "Sir John Suckling" and two
Paters, "Village Orchestra" and "Procession of Italian
Comedians;" and in 1919, Vermeer's "Mistress and Maid."
Then, still outfitting the Frick establishment, Duveen got a
break that partly made up for his had luck with the
Velásquez and the da Vinci. While he was in Paris, one of
his runners brought him photographs of a set of tapestries
in a château in the Loire District. He wasn't much impressed
by the photographs, and, besides, he was about to sail for
America, but the runner persuaded him to drive down to the
château to look at the tapestries anyway. The château was
unoccupied except for a caretaker. Duveen quickly decided he
didn't want the tapestries, but, being there, he asked the
caretaker if there was anything else in the place. He was
invited to look around and see for himself. In a storeroom
on the top floor stood a dilapidated bookcase, and on top of
it a begrimed bust with a smashed nose. Duveen took the bust
down, gave it a good inspection, and instructed the
caretaker to tell the owner that he would buy the tapestries
if the owner would throw in the bust. The deal went through.
Duveen was sure the bust was by Francesco da Laurana, who
had worked in Italy and southern France in the latter part
of the fifteenth century and was famous for his elegant and
imaginative work, and his quick judgment was confirmed. The
smashed nose was no problem; Duveen had an expert restore it
with marble taken from the base. Duveen's rating with Frick
was boosted by this find; the Laurana became one of the most
esteemed treasures of the Frick Collection.
Duveen's rating with Frick shot up even higher when he was
able to pull two Houdons nonchalantly out of his hat. It was
a fixed policy of Duveen's to establish a high market value
for anything he had a lot of. One thing he had a lot of,
early in the century, was Houdon busts. He had fifteen.
There was a happy time when you could get a Houdon bust for
twenty-five thousand dollars. After buying several at that
price, Duveen began to feel sorry for Houdon. Twenty-five
thousand dollars was a stodgy and humiliating figure, and if
Houdon was worth collecting at all he was worth more than
that. Duveen set about correcting what he now realized was a
scandalous state of affairs. At a public auction, he paid
seventy-five thousand dollars for a Houdon bust—an
unprecedented figure. He then returned to his Fifth Avenue
gallery and looked at his other Houdon busts more
respectfully, and with a righteous feeling of having
vindicated their honor. The world market in Houdons followed
Duveen's lead; presently, you couldn't get one for less than
a hundred and fifty thousand. "If you owned one that had
cost twenty-five thousand dollars," an observer of Duveen's
Houdon operation has said, "you had to apologize." In the
steeply rising market, Duveen held on to his Houdons; he
found their society restful. Besides, his instinct told him
that they might come in handy in an emergency. The emergency
arose when he had to furnish the Frick house.
The sculptor who was invited to America by Thomas Jefferson
to do a statue of George Washington also permitted himself
less austere assignments. He did, for example, a marble
portrait bust of the Comtesse du Cayla. And when a certain
Duke of Saxe-Gotha had an impulse to give Catherine of
Russia a little present, he commissioned Houdon to do a
Diana the Huntress in marble. As a trial flight, Houdon made
a terra-cotta Diana. When he exhibited it, Parisian
moralists objected to this lovely nude as being too
realistic; they forced him to withdraw it. In his hour of
misery, Houdon would have been comforted to know that in
spite of what eighteenth-century Paris was saying, he had
nevertheless created a genuine Duveen; the terra-cotta
Diana, along with the Comtesse du Cayla, ended up in the
Duveen collection. Duveen may have done a good deal for
Houdon, but Houdon did something for Duveen—and,
incidentally, for Frick, too. When it came to deciding what
to put on the mantel in the Fragonard Room, Frick's brain
stopped functioning. Duveen's brain became active; the
Comtesse du Cayla occurred to him. Also, the mansion's Oval
Room needed something; it couldn't go on indefinitely just
being oval. Duveen remembered Diana. No wonder it was hard
for Frick to suppress an impulse of gratitude toward Duveen;
he found himself being rescued from such acute dilemmas
almost hourly, and not by frustrated, undervalued artists
but by perfectly adjusted Duveens.
The technique Duveen had applied to adjusting Houdon he also
applied to Rembrandt. He owned a lot of Rembrandts, and by
paying tremendous prices for additional ones he raised the
value of those he had acquired when Rembrandt was lowly.
There are penalties even for large-scale beneficence, and
the penalty Duveen had to endure was that in the course of
this process Rembrandts and Houdons that belonged to other
people went up in value, too. Duveen forced himself not to
think about that. There came a day when Duveen saw his
labors in behalf of levitating Houdon crowned so
magnificently that he was dazzled by his handiwork. This
happened at the auction of the huge Elbert H. Gary
Collection in 1928. It being always Duveen's aim to prove
that the value of Duveens went up and never down, that all
ownership save his own was ephemeral, and possibly even
irrelevant, Duveen was determined that none of the objects
he had sold Gary should be undervalued just because Gary had
died. Duveen, by bidding the prices up, saw to it that one
Duveen after another went for a price that was far above the
one for which he had sold it to Gary. Then there appeared on
the auction block one of his Houdons—a bust of the
sculptor's daughter Sabine at the age of ten months. Duveen
had bought it in Paris in 1912. His campaign for Houdon had
by then advanced so far that he paid ninety-six thousand
dollars for it. He had sold it to Gary for a hundred and ten
thousand dollars. The bidding for it was sharp, and Duveen
participated in it. It narrowed down to a contest between
Duveen and Knoedler's, which was acting for Edward S.
Harkness. As the bids rose to new heights, Duveen, who had
known Houdon when, became more and more impressed by what he
himself had wrought. Finally, bemused, he allowed Knoedler's
to buy the bust for Harkness, for two hundred and forty-five
thousand dollars. Later, Duveen was a little rueful about
having let his old friend go to somebody else, especially as
that somebody else was Harkness, whom he considered
sufficiently well bred to belong in the Duveen stable but
who would never buy from him, being married to Knoedler's.
Still, when Duveen went home from the sale, he must have
looked back over the long history of his efforts on behalf
of Houdon and remembered incredulously a time when you could
actually buy a Houdon for twenty-five thousand dollars, and
he may have reflected pleasantly that if Houdon had been
alive he would surely have written him a grateful
bread-and-butter letter. Rembrandt, also, might well have
dropped him a line.
A few days before Frick died, in December, 1919, Duveen was
startled to get back from him two million dollars' worth of
paintings he had had on approval. The explanation offered
was that, in his poor physical condition, Frick could not
swing the financing. Frick had always engaged in protracted,
and enjoyable, haggles with Duveen—not over price but over
methods of paying the price—and perhaps he felt that now he
was deprived of them, he might as well be deprived of the
pictures, too. But Frick was not deprived of a certain kind
of immortality—an immortality he can be said to have sought
in collecting his pictures. The art patrons of the
Renaissance had themselves painted into the pictures they
commissioned; because their American counterparts lived too
late to have this service performed for them, they had to
gain their immortality by buying collections and putting
them in public museums. It is human and perhaps touching,
this impulse to project oneself beyond one's mortal span.
The article on Frick in the Encyclopaedia Britannica runs to
twenty-three lines. Ten are devoted to his career as an
industrialist, and thirteen to his collecting of art. In
these thirteen lines, he mingles freely with Titian and
Vermeer, with El Greco and Goya, with Gainsborough and
Velásquez. Steel strikes and Pinkerton guards vanish, and he
basks in another, more felicitous aura. The old boys take
him cozily under their wings; they carry him along. For the
pleasure of their society on the golden shore, Duveen made
Frick pay heavily, but they are earning their keep.
(This is the fifth of a series of six articles on Lord
Duveen.) |
