PROFILES

THE DAYS OF DUVEEN

VI ~ THE SILENT MEN

S. N. Behrman
The New Yorker
 November 3, 1951: 40-88

All his adult life, Joseph Duveen, the most famous art dealer in history, ran a race with his clients' mortality. This race was a close one, for his major clients were well along in years, and from 1934 on it was complicated by his race with his own mortality. In that year, Duveen fell ill with cancer, and he knew from the beginning that he could not recover. For much of his remaining five years, he had to have a nurse with him constantly, and, one by one, he gave up all the little indulgences that for most people relieve the pangs of existence. The only indulgence he did not give up was selling pictures; here his tempo, if anything, accelerated. To many individuals the approach of a deadline has a paralyzing effect; to rarer ones it is a stimulus. In 1926, when Duveen went to San Marino, California, ahead of a freight-car load of his merchandise, to make sure that H. E. Huntington, one of his best clients, would not die without an additional several million dollars' worth of Duveen's taste to leave behind, Huntington's age and physical condition made speed essential. Previously, in similar situations—notably those involving the elder J. P. Morgan and Benjamin Altman and Henry Clay Frick—Duveen had lost out. Death had got there ahead of the .pictures. Having learned his lesson, he worked fast with Huntington, and he did the same with himself. He was like an aging painter who feels he has to complete a masterpiece in the brief time left him. Duveen's masterpiece, and from his point of view his monument, is the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Duveen's career had beautiful composition. Early in the century, as head of the firm of Duveen Brothers, which had galleries not only in New York but in London and Paris, he inherited from his Uncle Henry, the first Duveen to deal in art in this country, three gigantic clients—Morgan, Altman, and P. A. B. Widener—and thereafter time, and the swelling American prosperity, supplied new ones. There were great millionaires who spent little and small millionaires who spent vast sums. Duveen saw fortunes come and go. When they went, Duveen, following his lifelong principle of keeping the market up, usually bought his pictures back for more than he had got for them and sold them—at an increase over the increase he had paid—to clients whose fortunes were still intact. Even depressions were lucky for him, and so, finally, were the rising income and inheritance taxes. The era of big houses was ending, and as the artistic appetites of Duveen's clients increased, a new problem developed for them—a critical shortage of wall space—and that, too, Duveen turned to his advantage. Some collectors met the exigency by providing a building for their paintings and an apartment for themselves and their families. The pressure of space made it inadvisable for Duveen's customers to keep buying pictures for their homes; the pressure of inheritance taxes made it unattractive for them to leave valuable collections of pictures in their estates. Duveen had pegged the art market so high that no man was now rich enough to live with Duveens or to die with them. On the whole, Duveen was not interested in politics or political change—he cared not who wrote his country's laws so long as he could sell its pictures—but he was keenly sensitive to social change, and he saw before most people did that, between them, income taxes and inheritance taxes were going to make it impossible for men of wealth to buy art for themselves or leave collections to their heirs. The public bequest, impervious to taxation, was the way out. Specifically, the public bequest of Duveens was the way out. By earmarking his purchases for museums, a collector could afford to buy art; at least, he could let the art pass through his hands on the way to the museums from Duveen. Gifts to museums offered his clients not merely economy but immortality. Using Duveen's method, an aged American millionaire could, in good conscience, circumvent oblivion and the Collector of Internal Revenue at a single stroke. Under Duveen's spell, one after another of his clients—H. E. Huntington, Frick, Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache, Samuel H. Kress—took up this form of philanthropy. For Duveen the advantage was double; with museums as the terminal for his pictures, he no longer had to worry about the passing of the big houses—the museums were larger than the houses—and he no longer had to worry that the pictures would be dumped on the market at a time when it might be difficult for him to sell them, especially at the prices he would have to charge after buying them back at Duveen prices. Ultimately, in the National Gallery, Duveen provided a place that was big enough to absorb everything any client had bought or could buy. It was Duveen's final solution to the problem of wall space.

Most of the big names in American industry and finance—except those of the benighted millionaires who didn't collect anything and the benighted (and to Duveen snobbish) millionaires who collected first editions instead of works of art—appeared in Duveen's Callers' Book. Throughout his long and fantastic run, there was always someone to relight his torch. When Collis P. Huntington and Altman and Morgan and P. A. B. Widener died, Frick showed up, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and E. T. Stotesbury, Clarence Mackay, Bache, Henry Goldman, H. E. Huntington, Philip Lehman and his son, Robert, Elbert H. Gary, Joseph E. Widener, and a host of lesser collectors. And then, as late in his life as in theirs, Duveen met two men whom he was to help make almost as great collectors as he was; Mellon, the founder of the National Gallery, and Kress, the Gallery's most lavish contributor. In the case of the former, the word "met" is ludicrously inadequate. It is like saying that Napoleon ran into Alexander at Tilsit. Duveen and Mellon moved in different social spheres. They didn't belong to the same clubs; Duveen couldn't encounter him in the bar. For him to meet Mellon, a campaign was necessary. In his management of it, Duveen displayed that scrupulous attention to detail that has distinguished the careers of other celebrated generals.

In a way, Duveen's determination to meet Mellon began with an extraordinary meeting with Henry Ford. For American art dealers, 1920 was a very bad year. The important buyers had been dying off, and their replacements were not yet visible. The year 1920 was one of crisis—of such acute crisis, in fact, that it forced the major dealers, for once, into solidarity. The lone wolves at last decided to pack up. Even Duveen consented to merge his talents with the talents of those he regarded as stumbling pedagogues whose function it was to prepare American art buyers for his finishing school. Looking around for new clients, the purveyors of art were discouraged. Save for one towering monolith, the horizon was blank. That monolith was Ford. The dealers—Duveen, Knoedler's, Wildenstein, Seligman, and Stevenson Scott—decided to make a mass assault on him. Ford was an objective so big that there would be enough for them all, and too big, they felt, for just one of them to tackle and risk fumbling. It was like annexing Texas. The five dealers reconciled themselves to pooling their inventories as well as their aggressiveness. They decided to prepare a list of the Hundred Greatest Paintings in the World and offer them to Ford; thus in one transaction they could convert America's richest man into America's outstanding collector. Like most other collectors, each of the five dealers had persuaded himself that the paintings he owned were better than any owned by his rivals, and the task of selecting the hundred greatest resulted in many acrimonious debates, during which the surf of controversy often rose so high that the scheme was in danger of foundering. But the gravity of the crisis and the grandeur of the objective made for compromise, and finally the hundred paintings were agreed upon.

The pictures, each of which was accompanied by a scholarly text, were reproduced in three magnificent volumes; the dealers were going to present these books to Mr. Ford as an invitation to the dance. Representatives of the five firms and the three magic books went, by appointment, to Dearborn. Representing Duveen Brothers, as always, was Duveen himself. The international worldlings from New York were astonished at the simplicity of Ford's style of living; compared to Duveen's house on Madison Avenue, or even to some of his clients' houses, Ford's house was almost primitive. Mr. Ford was unaffectedly pleased to meet them, and when they displayed the superbly illustrated volumes of the hundred greatest pictures, his delight was immeasurable. He jumped up and called Mrs. Ford in to share his enthusiasm. "Mother, come in and see the lovely pictures these gentlemen have brought," he said, as Duveen later told the story. Mrs. Ford came in and admired the books as much as her husband had. "Yes, Mr. Ford," said Duveen, the spokesman for the delegation, "we thought you would like them. These are the pictures we feel you should have." Ford teetered on the narrow threshold between admiration and possession. "Gentlemen," he said, "beautiful books like these, with beautiful colored pictures like these, must cost an awful lot!" "But, Mr. Ford, we don't expect you to buy these books," Duveen hastened to explain. "We got them up specially for you, to show you the pictures. These books are a present to you." Ford turned to his wife. "Mother, did you hear that?" he said. "These gentlemen are going to give me these beautiful books as a present. Yes, gentlemen," he continued, "it is extremely nice of you, but I really don't see how I can accept a beautiful, expensive present like this from strangers." For perhaps the first time in his life, Duveen was inarticulate. Such innocence was confounding. It was a classic example of the worldling defenseless against the Man from Home. When at last he found speech, he explained that the books had been got up to interest Ford in buying the pictures whose simulacra they contained. At this revelation, Ford's amazement vanished and he became again a man of business. "But, gentlemen," he said, "what would I want with the original pictures when the ones right here in these books are so beautiful?"

The fiasco left the four other dealers in a state of dejection from which they did not recover for some time, but for Duveen it was just a tonic. Attributing his failure with Ford to his having broken his own rule against combining forces with other dealers, he decided to turn his attentions to the biggest potential collector of them all: Mellon. From the defeat of Dearborn, he went on to the conquest of Pittsburgh. Probably no other single episode in Duveen's career illustrates his nonchalance in the face of the impossible as well as his campaign to acquire Mellon. Mellon had never bought anything from Duveen; he was a confirmed client of Duveen's greatest rival, Knoedler's. Mellon had a standing arrangement with Knoedler's under which they acted as his exclusive agent on a fixed commission. Duveen thought the business of selling pictures on a fixed commission was thin, lacking in substance, texture, resiliency, promise—above all, promise. It made a dealer a mere merchant. It divested the game of adventure, of the mystery of the incalculable. Duveen was advised by a friend to give up any idea of selling to Mellon; the advice contained a strong hint that there was something about Duveen that the aristocratic Mellon would find uncongenial. "Not only will Mellon buy from me but he will buy only from me," Du¬veen replied. "And it won't be on commission." In a commemorative article on the Frick Collection written in 1943 for the leading American publication dealing with art matters, Art News, H. G. Dwight, then assistant director of the Frick Collection, spoke of "the stormy human equations of collecting, the gnawing obsessions, stealthy pursuits, crushing disappointments, and intoxicating triumphs that lie in the background of the most beautiful things." The stratagems Duveen used to acquire and hold customers were not unique, but he used them better than anybody else. However little his clients knew about the masterpieces they bought, they did understand competition, but no more clearly than Duveen understood it. Monopoly was his method. Once he had cornered an Old Master, he knew that the "gnawing obsessions" from which his customers suffered would bring them to him.

What proved to be as helpful as anything else in enabling Duveen to gain the coveted entree to Mellon was Duveen's unusual spirit of friendliness. He wore friendliness like a nimbus, and let it shine upon an enormous miscellany of people connected—sometimes directly, sometimes very indirectly—with art: critics, museum directors, restorers, architects, decorators, and servants of all grades, including deck stewards on ships. Accustomed to doing things en prince, he scattered largess, often for no specific purpose but with a touching faith in the emotion of gratitude. Unimpressed himself by sums that were less than colossal, he was continually being pleasurably surprised by the welcome that people who had a different scale of values accorded smaller amounts. Because he couldn't resist a lawsuit even when he didn't care particularly about winning it, he once found himself mixed up in one over a claim made by a young artist who had been engaged to do some special work for him. The artist kept asking for more and more pay, until, at last, Duveen's comptroller gave him a check marked "In final payment." The artist accepted this check and cashed it, and then came back and asked for more money. The comptroller refused to give it to him, the artist brought suit, and Duveen spent several enjoyable days in court. (He said one time that he was sorry he hadn't become a lawyer, because he so loved a fight.) The case was thrown out, and Duveen and his comptroller left the courtroom together, flushed with victory. In the car on the way back, Duveen inquired what the amount involved was. The comptroller told him it was $14,095. This minuscule sum had a quaint sound to Duveen. "Why quibble over fourteen thousand and ninety-five dollars?" he asked. "Send him the money." To a man to whom fourteen thousand and ninety-five was nothing to quibble about, it seemed strange that a deck steward on a liner would be enchanted with a mere hundred dollars in return for putting Duveen's deck chair next to one reserved for an American millionaire, but that is what the deck steward was. Over the years, Duveen became very popular with deck stewards.

Among the American millionaires Duveen met through a deck steward who liked him was the late Alexander Smith Cochran, the Yonkers carpet man. Duveen and Cochran met on a boat going to Europe, and while they were chatting, Cochran happened to mention that he would like someday to see Buckingham Palace and St. James's Palace. Duveen said casually that he would be delighted to take him through both places. When they got to England, Cochran found himself strolling through the two palaces; they seemed as accessible to Duveen as the lobby of Claridge's. While he was showing Cochran the royal pictures, Duveen spoke warmly of Queen Mary and told Cochran what a high regard he had for their absent hostess as a connoisseur of art. He never mentioned that he had things he considered as good as hers in his own galleries. In fact, he never mentioned his galleries at all. When they parted, Cochran felt a certain obligation to Duveen, a healthy respect for his connections, and a sharp curiosity about why a stranger should be so kind. They met again in New York, and Duveen took him to see the wonderful Duveens hanging in the private houses of some of his clients. But he did not tell him they were Duveens; he let them pass under the pseudonyms of Raphael, Botticelli, Donatello, and the rest. Again, he neglected to mention his great New York gallery. This display of benevolence went on for three years, in this country and abroad, until finally Cochran could not stand it any longer, and he broke down. "Lord Duveen," he said, "I would like to see some of your things!" His back to the wall, Duveen took Cochran to his gallery. He could not spare any paintings—they were all on reserve—but he did let Cochran have five million dollars' worth of art objects.

Duveen's generosity toward the household staffs of his clients equalled his generosity toward deck stewards, and it was no less endearing. He was aware that his sales to their masters and mistresses caused the servants a lot of extra work. When he felt that a room needed what he called "lifting," he would refurnish it entirely. The hanging of his pictures was an elaborate and intricate ceremonial, which he supervised in detail. All this meant work for the staffs, and Duveen was not one to allow services to go unrewarded. So he rewarded. He rewarded liberally. The staffs of the great houses hung with Duveens came to realize that he was a man they could rely on to pay time and a half for overtime, even when the shifting and heaving and wiring they had to do took place in their regular working hours. One rather celebrated butler in a Fifth Avenue house that stocked Duveens put in so much overtime that, before he retired, his emoluments from Duveen totalled over a hundred thousand dollars. The gratitude of servants was a fine silt from which burgeoned the flower of remembrance. They developed a feeling that it was only fair to transmit to the generous nobleman any information that might interest him: What rival dealers (who had no comparable sense of the value of a servant's time) had the effrontery to offer works of art to their masters, what purchases the masters were considering, what was said about Duveen's emissaries on the walls—in short, all the minutiae of relevant gossip that in the art world are as pregnant with significance as the secret memoranda exchanged by chancelleries. A rival of Duveen's who was a friend of Frick's found, for example, that he could never see Frick alone. Whenever he dropped in, Duveen was there. Another dealer had the same experience whenever he called on Bache. Duveen's generosity even extended to the household staffs of people who were not clients of his but merely potential clients. Eventually, his circle of friends included almost every valet and butler of any distinction whatever.

In the higher strata—with museum directors, say—Duveen assumed a helpful, avuncular role, and here, too, the emotion of gratitude asserted itself. It often happens that a museum director gets on the trail of some things that he would love to have for his institution but that his budget won't allow. In situations of that kind, Duveen could usually be counted on to help out with a cash gift. He loved the role of benefactor. One of his beneficiaries was the director of a museum in Dijon, France. As a result, the Dijon director, without realizing it, turned himself into an unpaid runner for Duveen. He came upon two early French masterpieces by artists whose names were not known but who were members of the Avignon school. The authenticity and the quality of the pictures were indisputable, but they were altogether beyond the range of the Dijon museum, and the director immediately put Duveen in touch with them; Duveen bought them, and sold them to Rockefeller for three-quarters of a million dollars.

With architects and decorators, Duveen was, of course, completely at home. Once an architect won his affection, there was almost nothing he wouldn't do for him—from his early favorite, Horace Trumbauer, to whom he gave the job of building, at Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, the Duveen Gallery, a small reproduction of a wing of the Ministry of Marine in Paris; through Thomas Hastings, of the firm of Carrère & Hastings, whom he talked Frick into selecting to build Frick's house at Seventieth Street and Fifth Avenue; down to his last, John Russell Pope, for whom he performed a similar service in connection with the job of building the National Gallery, in Washington. Earlier, Duveen had donated to the British Museum a wing to house the Elgin Marbles, and he had given Pope the job of designing that, too. After the death of Mrs. Frick, in 1931, Pope, thanks to Duveen, was chosen to convert the Frick mansion into the Frick Museum. It is said that in the beginning Duveen's regard for Pope was not wholly disinterested. Pope was a stepson-in-law of an important Baltimore collector, Henry Walters, and Duveen hoped to get Walters as a customer. He failed in this but came to like Pope for himself alone. For Hastings, Duveen had a vociferous enthusiasm. Some of Frick's friends were skeptical about Hastings' plans for the partially one-story Frick house; they thought it was too low for a city that went in for altitude. These skeptics Duveen demolished; to Frick he expressed as much satisfaction with Hastings' plans as if they were a Duveen, which, in a sense, they were to become. It was when Duveen, with his exhaustive solicitude, began worrying about the interior of the house that he had his great friend in London, Sir Charles Allom, brought in. Just as Duveen would sometimes furnish an entire room to sell a picture, so, conversely, he would sometimes sell a picture to furnish a room, as happened in the case of the famous Fragonard Room that he got Allom to set up for Frick. Not only did he inspire the emotion of gratitude in others, but he was capable of feeling it strongly himself. He never forgot Allom's appreciation of his taste in furnishing the Fragonard Room, and got him job after job: the Bache house; Mrs. Horace E. Dodge's house, which Duveen furnished entirely; and, for good measure, William Randolph Hearst's castle in Wales, so that at least once Allom wouldn't have to go too far to go to work.

Besides architects and interior decorators, Duveen had a great affection for restorers—those men who perform the nice task of revivifying pictures that have lost their bloom. Restoration evidently has its limits; it stops short of resurrection but, given sufficient skill on the part of the restorer, it can accomplish wonders. To those who suggested that, for instance, a Dürer that Duveen sold to Bache had very little of Dürer left in it, Duveen answered wistfully that anyway it had been by Dürer. Duveen had a pet restorer in Italy for Italian pictures, one in France for French pictures, and one in England for English pictures. Oddly, his pet restorer of all was a man born in New York City, Stephen S. Pichetto. Pichetto, who was of Italian parentage, attended Townsend Harris High School and then went to C.C.N.Y. He had ambitions to be a painter himself, but he gave them up in favor of restoring the works of other men, especially those who flourished in Italy during the Renaissance. Duveen began using him early in his American career; by 1928, Pichetto had an official position as "consultant restorer" to the Metropolitan Museum. As Duveen sold many more Italian pictures in America than anybody else sold, he had many more of them to restore, and Pichetto was kept busy. Duveen's generosity—that is, his conviction that anyone who worked for him, high or low, should be compensated in a manner commensurate with the dignity of the association—paid off marvellously in Pichetto's case. Pichetto became not only restorer but art adviser to Kress. Kress came to rely on Pichetto's judgment, and it was convenient for Duveen that coincidentally Pichetto was (as a friend of both Kress and Pichetto once put it) "extremely Duveen-conscious." This adventitious awareness of Pichetto's came in handy for Duveen when he wanted to sell a picture to Kress, even if it didn't have to be restored. Pichetto, brimful of good will, must have outdone himself when he had to restore a picture that belonged, successively, to Duveen and to Kress. In Duveen's final years, when he was at his height, Pichetto was at his height; he was so busy that he leased an entire floor of the Squibb Building and had twelve men on his staff. When Pichetto died, in 1949, at the age of sixty-one, he was himself a wealthy man. Such was the era and such was the trade, as Duveen practiced it, that even a restorer who worked for Duveen could leave a fortune.

When at last the moment came for Duveen to meet Mellon, he found himself bountifully rewarded for his unremitting and democratic friendliness. For one thing, although Mellon knew very little about Duveen, aside from the fact that he didn't want to deal with him, Duveen was thoroughly informed about Mellon. Duveen was much better prepared to know Mellon than Mellon was to know Duveen. For another thing, the mechanics of the meeting were so much simpler than they would have been had Duveen been an unfriendly man. The meeting was effected by a delicate feat of coordination. Duveen could not depend on coincidence unless he himself created it. In 1921, Mellon, visiting London, occupied a suite on the third floor of Claridge's. Duveen had a permanent suite on the fourth floor of Claridge's. Stirred suddenly by premonitions of intimacy, he had himself moved to the floor below Mellon. Duveen's valet was, inevitably, a friend of Mellon's; the two valets seem to have wished the contagion of their friendship to spread to their masters. One afternoon, Duveen was apprised by his valet that Mellon's valet was helping Mellon on with his overcoat and was about to start down the corridor with him to ring for the lift. Duveen's valet hastily performed the same services for Duveen. The timing of the valets was so exquisite that Duveen stepped into the descending lift that contained Mellon. Duveen was not only surprised, he was charmed. "How do you do, Mr. Mellon:" he said, and introduced himself, adding, as he later recalled, "I am on my way to the National Gallery to look at some pictures. My great refreshment is to look at pictures." Taken unawares, Mellon admitted that he, too, was in need of a little refreshment. They went to the National Gallery together, and after they had been refreshed, Mellon discovered that Duveen had an inventory of Old Masters of his own that, although smaller than the museum's, was, Duveen thought, comparable in quality. He gave Mellon, as he gave all his clients, the sensation of, in H. G. Dwight's words, "intoxicating triumphs" to come. So heady was this sensation that Mellon appears to have forgotten altogether that Duveen did not work on a commission.

The personalities of Duveen and Mellon were widely disparate. Duveen blurted out everything; Mellon was the Apostle of Silence. When Mellon was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Harding, he had to be introduced to the public; his footfall was so light that his name had rarely appeared in the papers, and then most inconspicuously. (At the time of the appointment, Duveen was asked how he felt about it. "I don't care whether Mr. Mellon is Secretary of the Treasury or not, as long as he keeps buying pictures," he replied. Duveen was not interested in what he called his clients' "outside jobs;" he was interested only in their main job, which was buying Duveens.) In 1928, Mellon was the featured speaker on Founder's Day at Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh. Carnegie Institute was hard up, and there was a rumor that Mellon would come through with a donation. The honored guest, reading almost inaudibly from a prepared text, had his audience straining for the news of a bonanza. Presently, the inaudibility became complete. Mellon had lost his place. He made an effort to find it, and then gave up. "That's all," he murmured, and sat down. The audience filed out not knowing whether Carnegie Institute had got anything or not. They didn't find out till the next morning, when the speech was reported in the Pittsburgh papers, and then they were disappointed. Mellon had been describing a monumental plan he had for rebuilding Washington.

In his Cabinet days, Mellon was a small, frail man with silver hair, a narrow, finely molded head, and a well-trimmed mustache. His admirers considered him patrician; one of them has said, "He was princely but not prodigal." A more detached observer of him said, however, that he looked like "a double-entry bookkeeper afraid of losing his job—worn, and tired, tired, tired." To call Mellon laconic was to accuse him of garrulity. Feeling, after he became a public figure, that he should make an effort to be hail-fellow-well-met, he often tried to force a smile. He didn't have to force one, though, when Coolidge succeeded Harding. "Coolidge will become one of our greatest Presidents," he said. The two men saw much of each other, conversing almost entirely in pauses.

Perhaps there is some mysterious relation between the possession of great wealth and parsimony of speech. A characteristic of practically all the Duveen millionaires was the feeling that speech, like money, was to be held on to—or, at any rate, doled out very slowly. If silence was indeed golden, then this was an easy way for them to increase their capital. When Morgan was in Rome, he liked the society of Salvatore Cortesi, an Associated Press correspondent. According to Morgan's biographer, Frederick Lewis Allen, Morgan would drive through the streets of Rome with Cortesi for hours, "without feeling any necessity to say or hear a word." When someone asked Leland Stanford, when he was Governor of California, "How do you feel this morning, Governor?," the Governor threw the questioner an uneasy look, on guard against this dangerously leading question, and countered with another question. "Wouldn't you like to know?" he said. The Governor, who had been, like one of his business partners, Collis P. Huntington, a Sacramento storekeeper, once sold some groceries and hardware to a couple of prospectors who were broke. In exchange, they gave Stanford seventy-six of the ninety-three shares in their mine. On these shares, Stanford subsequently cleared half a million dollars. An inquiring psychologist in search of the connection between money and silence might discover a sound one—a suspicion that talk breeds friendship and that friendship can be expensive. The rich man's intuition is probably right. Once you have achieved some sort of human relationship with a man, it is hard to bring yourself to sell him a few groceries for half a million dollars. In addition to founding his university, Stanford splashed his will with munificent bequests. He called in his wife and another of his partners, Mark Hopkins, to consult with him about it. Despite all his acquisitiveness, his affairs were in bad shape. "Don't you think, Leland, that you are being too liberal to some of these people?" Mrs. Stanford asked. "They won't think I'm so liberal when they come to collect," said Stanford compactly. On the way up, reticence is important; once one is there, it is obligatory. Speech is alive with the germ of commitment. The less you say, the less vulnerable you are.

According to a biography written by his close friend George Harvey, Frick's childish dreams centered about the ambition to have, one day, a million dollars. When he was thirty, he had it and he felt justified in blowing himself to a jaunt in Europe. A cautious and conservative young man, he went to call on another cautious and conservative young man in Pittsburgh, Andrew Mellon, to propose that they join forces on a holiday. Mellon nodded his head, and the trip was on. But that genius for organization that Frick had already begun to apply to his coal-and-coke business and that was to multiply the realization of his modest early dreams by the hundreds he applied instinctively to the organization of his first European trip also. Harvey tells about it as follows:

Naturally, after three years of close and continuous application at his desk, the young banker [Mellon] eagerly welcomed the suggestion of a trip abroad and, having his affairs in perfect order as usual, he readily arranged for an absence of four months. Presently Clay proposed to increase the party by inviting two acquaintances to join them. One of those suggested was a popular young man who wrote poetry, sang gleefully, and told amusing stories. Andrew readily assented to this thoughtful provision of entertainment enhanced by the desirability of having "someone along to do the talking." The other was an older man, no more loquacious than themselves.

As Harvey does not tell us, one can only imagine that this industrial principle of division of labor worked out beautifully on the European jaunt. As Frick and Mellon—except possibly in their relations with Duveen—always got something in excess of value received, it is safe to assume that the fellow they took along to do the talking worked hard and incessantly and made it blissfully unnecessary for his two hosts to open their mouths in speech except in emergencies. On occasion, though, Frick, if sufficiently stimulated by a colleague, permitted himself to be expansive. One day during a stock-market crisis, he was in the office of James Stillman, the president of the National City Bank. The two giants were besieged by a financial reporter, who asked for a statement. The reporter waited a full hour while Frick and Stillman evolved it. Finally, it was sent out by Stillman's secretary. It read:

The U.S.A. is a great and growing country.

(Signed)
JAMES STILLMAN
HENRY C. FRICK.

This is confidential and not for publication unless names are omitted.

Although Duveen got what he wanted that day in the lift in Claridge's, although Mellon became a customer, and his best customer, Duveen had to pay a high price, for Mellon, by not talking, made him suffer acutely. He took forever to decide about a picture, and during these endless periods of indecision gave Duveen no hint of what he was thinking. In an impulsive, indiscreet moment, a rival art dealer once heard himself saying to Mellon, "Duveen tells me you drive him crazy. You drive him crazy because he never knows what you feel about things. He says he can never get a word out of you." At this testimony to his inscrutability, Mellon permitted himself a smile, unaccompanied by speech. Duveen used to cheer Bache up when he was low, and H. E. Huntington used to cheer Duveen up when he was low. But Mellon was simply withdrawn. Not only was he withdrawn; he had to be satisfied that a picture was indisputably authentic and that it was the best the Old Master had to offer. Moreover, he felt that he must like it—without saying so, of course—almost as well as Duveen did. Without speaking a word or even altering his expression, he let Duveen's spirals of ecstasy envelop him. Through all the long and, on Mellon's part, silent struggle, Duveen sought, by all the devices at his disposal, to uncover the wellspring of emotion he was sure lay within. He came nearest to it the day he found Mellon in a mood bordering on irritation. This was promising. He plumbed it, only to discover that Mellon was annoyed because his haberdasher had asked him an exorbitant price for a fourteen-carat-gold collar button. He had left the shop without a word and without the collar button.

During the nineteen-twenties, Duveen moved cautiously with Mellon. He did not regard Mellon as the kind of man who should he rushed. He was satisfied to sell him one or two pictures at a time, and to put up with the fact that Mellon still saw a great deal of Knoedler's. And somewhere along the way Duveen began to plant in Mellon's mind filaments of suggestion—the merest gossamer, at first—that were to lead Mellon to wake up one day with the awesome idea that he would found a national art gallery in Washington. As a close observer of the National Gallery's genesis has said, "It was a gleam in Duveen's eye long before Andrew Mellon ever thought of it." Toward the end of the decade, with a view to making a start toward filling up the gallery of his imagination, Duveen, hearing that the Soviet government was eager to sell some of its famous collection of paintings in the Hermitage Gallery, in Leningrad, went over to have a look at them. The Soviet government proved to be the first seller in his experience whose price he did not care to meet. The outlay was too great, he thought, especially since Mellon was the only potential purchaser, and Mellon had not seen the pictures. Duveen contented himself with telling Mellon about the expensive opportunity. After several years of negotiation, Mellon, in 1930 and 1931, using Knoedler's—still working on a fixed commission—as his agent, took advantage of it. Mellon bought twenty-one of the Hermitage paintings, for seven million dollars. For Raphael's "Alba Madonna" alone he paid over one million one hundred thousand dollars. Mellon's taciturnity about his Hermitage buy equalled his taciturnity about everything else. David E. Finley, who was Mellon's right-hand man and at his request was appointed the Director of the National Gallery, has been quoted in the Saturday Evening Post as saying, "Mr. Mellon wanted to keep the thing a surprise until the right moment. It probably would not have been good politics for the Secretary of the Treasury publicly to spend millions for rare paintings at a time when the government was swamped with unemployment, bank failures, and general distress." To keep quiet about this was no strain on Mellon.

To anybody else, Mellon's purchase of the Hermitage pictures would have been a lethal blow, but to Duveen it was like finding a gusher. After it had been announced, a rival dealer came to offer him some gloating consolation. He was startled to find Duveen radiant. "Mellon has arrived," Duveen said. "He's ready for me." Duveen felt that any man who would spend that much money on pictures he had never seen was a buyer for whom he was prepared to endure any anguish. He knew that Mellon could make no more such purchases except from him; there was no other source of supply. The Hermitage affair showed that Mellon meant business. Duveen meant business, too. In congratulating Mellon on his acquisition, he said, "These pictures are wonderful, but let me remind you, Mr. Mellon, that you paid Duveen prices." Finley recalls that when the paintings finally arrived in Washington, they were secreted in a vault in the Corcoran Gallery. Finley has said that Mellon would retire there to commune with "treasures like Raphael's 'Alba Madonna,' and his 'Saint George and the Dragon,' the second of which cost $745,000; Botticelli's 'The Adoration of the Magi,' which cost $838,350; Jan van Eyck's 'The Annunciation,' which cost $503,010; and Titian's 'Venus with a Mirror'—a very nude painting that Mellon never would have hung in his home—which cost $544,320." That was a lot of money to spend on a picture you couldn't hang in your home, to say nothing of the upkeep on a place where you could hang it. Finley has said that Mellon had strict ideas about what could he hung in one's home; he "did not care for nudes or contemporary paintings, and he was careful not to hang religious pictures in a room where his friends might be smoking and drinking." His private museum must have been governed by the sort of regulations that public museums had late in the nineteenth century, when the hours at which men and women were permitted to look at Greek sculpture were staggered, like the hours at a Turkish bath.

During the early thirties, Duveen, quietly plugging away at his plans for a national gallery, sold Mellon art on a grander and grander scale. Everything was going along rosily for both Mellon and Duveen when, in the spring of 1934, the United States Attorney General sent Mellon a notice claiming that in 1931 he had not paid enough income tax. Bluntly, the government asked Mellon for $3,089,000 for back taxes and penalties. Mellon denounced the government's implied charge of tax evasion as "impertinent, scandalous, and improper," made a counter-claim that in 1931 he had, in fact, overpaid his taxes by $139,000, and, ostensibly to get a refund but actually to clear himself of the Bureau of Internal Revenue's charge of fraud, asked for a hearing before the Board of Tax Appeals in Washington. The government's case against Mellon was enormously complicated; before the hearings were over, ten thousand pages of testimony had been recorded. Mellon had to withstand a terrific barrage from the government's lawyers, and his defenses were sometimes puny. The hearings whipped up a turbulent sea, filled with knobby islands, on which the Mellon lawyers were shown to have erected intricate and diaphanous structures: labyrinths of "shadow security sales" and "coalesced corporations." But, fortunately for Mellon, the stormy sea of this litigation led into a comparatively tranquil and sunny cove, on which the Mellon art collection, bought from Duveen and others, sailed serenely. In this cove—which to Duveen was the sea—the talkative peer thrashed about prodigiously. The nub of Mellon's defense—a nub that the government apparently had not anticipated—was that in 1931 Mellon, without talking about it, without even bothering to mention it to the government, had given more than three million dollars' worth of pictures to the Mellon Trust, a foundation he had set up the year before for charitable purposes. The government answered that the foundation itself was a tax dodge, that the pictures were hanging in his apartment and were inaccessible to the public. (Those that were in a vault in the Corcoran were even less publicly accessible.) Mellon's reply to that was that though these works of art were still privately displayed, it had for years been his intention to turn them over to the nation as soon as he had acquired enough to provide a decent start for a national gallery he was planning to give the American people. To prove that Mellon had had this intention even earlier than 1931, Mellon's counsel called to their aid the man who had shared this intention with him—Duveen. In his testimony, Duveen swept clear of the ingenuities of lawyers, the importunities of tax collectors, the avidities of the over-rich. He was able to slant a shaft of benevolent, lateral light on Mellon: here was the government insisting that Mellon was trying to cheat it out of over three million dollars; Duveen was present to prove that Mellon had spent vastly more than that on a project he had long been preparing to hand over to the government he was supposed to be defrauding. As Mellon's attorney, Frank J. Hogan, put it, "God doesn't place in the hearts and minds of men such diverse and opposite traits as these; it is impossible to conceive of a man planning such benefactions as these and at the same time plotting and scheming to defraud his government." Duveen supported God's and Hogan's view of the eternal homogeneity of human nature.

Duveen's lawyers, who, over the years, had had to pilot him through countless lawsuits, had despaired of him as a witness; he never saw any reason, even in a courtroom, to curb his habit of talking too much. They had seen him off to Washington with sinking hearts. But on this one occasion, even they later admitted, Duveen acquitted himself nobly. That exuberance in Duveen that subtle men like Sir Osbert Sitwell and Sir Kenneth Clark—weary, perhaps, of their own subtleties and grateful for big, colorful splashes of untested generalization and unpremeditated gusto—delighted in overflowed at this trial and captivated everyone in the crowded hearing room except opposing counsel. Duveen entered with the assurance of a popular comedian who knows he is irresistible and knows he is funny. He addressed opposing counsel—headed by Robert H. Jackson, attorney for the Bureau of Internal Revenue—with the condescension of an Olympian talking down to worthy, but fumbling and misinformed, groundlings. Duveen must have quickly sized Jackson up as a man who didn't own any Duveens, and he set about educating him. He made a broad introductory statement, by way of breaking him in, about the Mellon Duveens. "The ex-Secretary's collection," he said concisely, "is the finest in the universe." This gave Jackson little margin, but he tried to maneuver on his narrow shelf. He had evidently peeked into Duveen's income-tax reports as well as into Mellon's, for he replied by asking Duveen whether it was not true that his art firm had lost $2,950,000 in 1930 and 1931. Duveen looked at him pityingly. "I've never asked for the last fifteen years what I've made or what I've lost," he said. "I'm simply not interested." Even for a non-customer, Jackson showed an ignorance about Duveens that shocked the art dealer with its Philistinism. Nevertheless, Duveen took the time to give him some elementary instruction in picture values. Jackson asked about the value of van Eyck's panel "The Annunciation." Duveen looked at him reprovingly, as you could not help looking at a man who would ask a question about a thing like that. "Perhaps you don't realize that there are only three small van Eycks in America," he said. "And they cannot compare with Mr. Mellon's van Eyck." He threw a compliment at Mellon for his shrewdness in getting this panel for a mere $503,010. It was worth a million, he said, and added, "Why, even I would give $750,000 for it now." He was asked about the "Cowper Madonna" of Raphael, which he had sold Mellon. This turned out to be another example of Mellon's shrewdness; he had wrested it from Duveen for $836,000. "I thought it a very low price. Mr. Mellon thought it a very high price. One day after lunch, I gave way," said Duveen, with the candor of a man who was not above admitting defeat. He beamed at Mellon to show that he bore no grudge. Mellon nodded in acknowledgment.

Jackson blindly persisted, and Duveen had to go on lecturing him. The government's counsel tried to get Duveen to admit that there was a great fluctuation in the values of works of art. Duveen tried to lead counsel gently to the plateau on which he himself resided. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Perugino, van Eyck, Titian, and Rembrandt were all great men, said Duveen, "because only great men can become great artists." And, he pointed out, their prices must be commensurate with their greatness. Jackson then asked, bloody but unbowed, "Is it nevertheless true that art works do fluctuate greatly in value?" Duveen, forced from where he dwelt to the lowlands, became paternal. "Really, my dear fellow," he said, "art works don't rise and fall in value like pig iron or sheet copper or tin mines. They have a value and that is all there is to it." He added that he did not have to depend on certificates to assure the authenticity of his pictures. The audience laughed. "I have received certificates from emperors and kings," Duveen continued, "but usually I find that the picture in question is no good. My clients just accept my word, for they have been dealing with me for years." Again he beamed at the defendant, who had been dealing with him for years and who rewarded him with another nod.

When the issue was really joined and Jackson tried to prove that Mellon had formed his foundation to escape taxes and had never intended to let the public enjoy his art collection, Duveen testified that as early as 1928 he had discussed with Mellon the project of a national gallery to house the art treasures he was helping get together for him. He had introduced to Mr. Mellon "a noted architect," who had drawn rough plans for the building, which were still in his possession. Jackson tried to interrupt Duveen's description of his talks with Mellon about the plans for the building, but Duveen in full flight was not an easy man to interrupt. He went on describing the talks and the plans. Not only had he discussed the plans and introduced an architect to Mellon but he had even suggested a site in Washington. Hogan asked him a question about the site. Jackson didn't want to hear any more about it, but Duveen saw to it that he heard more. "Oh, yes, there was a site," Duveen said. "By the obelisk near the pond." At this deft transposition of the Washington Monument to the Sahara, and its reflecting pool to some English county, the spectators howled with laughter, and attendants had to shout for order.

Duveen went on, and the case went on. Commentators on the hearings, which at moments looked very bad for Mellon, have said that Duveen's testimony did much to dispel the sinister atmosphere that surrounded the case. In a dramatic fashion, Duveen's pictures—which he had always told his clients they were getting cheap no matter how much they paid for them—and even Knoedler's pictures, rallied to Mellon in his dark hour. In the end, the Board of Tax Appeals exonerated him of the government's charges of fraud. It came around, at last, to a belief in Mellon's and Duveen's charitable intentions. The Old Masters, it turned out, were useful to have as contemporary pals.

The end of the tax hearings in Washington left Duveen in a handsome position; the idea of the National Gallery was now out in the open, and Mellon could not very gracefully change his mind about it. Duveen's only problem was how to provide Mellon with the works he had testified he needed to give the gallery a decent start. In 1936, for the second time in his dealings with Mellon, Duveen decided to take an apartment directly below his, this time in Washington. As he later recounted, he said to Mellon one day, "You and I are getting on. We don't want to run around. I have some beautiful things for you, things you ought to have. I have gathered them specially for you. You don't want to keep running to New York to see them; I haven't the energy to keep running to Washington. I shall arrange matters so that you can see these things at your convenience and at your leisure." Then, in an allusion to the National Gallery, he added, "Of course, these things don't really belong to us. They belong to the people." Mellon lived in an apartment house near Dupont Circle. Duveen prevailed upon the family living below Mellon to transfer its lease to him, and then moved in the wonderful things that belonged to the people. The result was very beautiful and very expensive. He installed a caretaker, engaged several guards to keep an eye on the apartment, gave Mellon the key, and went back to New York.

In New York, to divert himself while waiting around for the silent potentate to make up his mind and speak, Duveen decided to have some fun at the expense of a potentate who was not silent at all, Adolf Hitler. Duveen thought that except for Holbein and Darer, whom he consented to deal in, German art was gross and tasteless. In speaking of German pictures, he was repeatedly able to employ his favorite epithet for a picture he didn't like—"vulgar." Hitler's preferences in art had a strong nationalist tinge; he deplored the fact that so many early German artists had been displaced, in museums and private collections, by decadent Italians. Duveen went to considerable trouble to see that Hitler's preferences were indulged. Working under cover of an English firm of unblemished Aryan genealogy—a firm that, in turn, employed a similarly impeccable Dutch concern—Duveen furnished the funds for a large and long-term operation that funnelled back into Germany early German art works which came quite cheap, in exchange for the decadent Italians. He thus managed to abduct from the very walls of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, in Berlin, and the Alte Pinakothek, in Munich, among other prominent German museums, some of the finest examples of Italian art—a Duccio di Buoninsegna, a Fra Filippo Lippi, a Raphael, and the like—and transfer them to the walls of the more catholic Duveen clients.

Meanwhile, Duveen kept in touch with his caretaker in Washington. The caretaker confided charming vignettes of the tenant on the upper floor, in dressing gown and carpet slippers, leaving his own apartment to bask in Duveen's more opulent environment. Sometimes, the caretaker reported, Mellon found it more agreeable to entertain guests in Duveen's place than in his own. Gradually, Mellon must have begun to feel that the paintings he showed off to his friends at Duveen's were his own. There came a moment when he felt he couldn't go on living a double life. He sent for Duveen and bought the contents of his apartment, lock, stock, and barrel. This was the largest transaction ever consummated in the world of art. Duveen had easily outdone the Soviets. There were twenty-one items in the Soviet deal, forty-two in Duveen's. Mellon paid the Soviets seven million dollars; he paid Duveen twenty-one million. For once, Mellon found himself short of cash. He paid Duveen in securities. Duveen was able to liquidate a credit of six million dollars his London bank had been extending him for thirty years and to arrange trust funds for his wife and daughter. The deal was a remarkable feat of salesmanship, but it represented an even more remarkable feat of collecting. After all, the Soviet government had inherited the Hermitage collection from a government that had been collecting pictures far longer than Duveen. The agents of Catherine the Great had brought back many of the Hermitage pictures from their tours through England, Flanders, and Holland in the early eighteenth century; Nicholas I and the Alexanders, in the nineteenth century, were responsible for further acquisitions. Since Duveen was able to assemble a large part of the Mellon Collection—and a large part of so many others besides—in one lifetime, it can be argued that he was the greatest collector in history.

A few months after Duveen sold Mellon the apartment in Washington, Mellon wrote President Roosevelt offering to build a national art gallery and give it to the nation, along with his entire art collection and a five-million-dollar endowment fund. As soon as the President and Congress had, in March of 1937, formally accepted the National Gallery in the name of the American people—nineteen million of whom have since visited it—Duveen formally called in John Russell Pope, the architect anonymously referred to during the trial, to draw up more definite plans. After Duveen had passed on them, they were shown to Mellon. Duveen was as fastidious in planning the National Gallery as he had been in planning the apartment he sold to Mellon. He had a prejudice against limestone. His soul revolted against limestone. He thought it was dirty. Mellon, however, had made up his mind to build the Gallery of limestone, for which he had already exhibited a noticeable fondness. President Coolidge had put Mellon in charge of a $190,000,000 District of Columbia architectural program, and Mellon had chosen limestone for one government building after another. "Three Presidents served under Mellon," Senator George Norris once said. Unlike Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, Duveen refused to serve. He didn't want the National Gallery, to which he had given so much thought and which was to house so many of the best Duveens, to look like the Mellon National Bank in Pittsburgh. He arranged a conference with Mellon and Pope, and praised marble. Pope said marble would cost at least five million dollars more. Mellon said that that was much too expensive; limestone was good enough. After all, he had rebuilt the District of Columbia out of limestone. Duveen said that what was good enough for the District of Columbia was not good enough for his and Mellon's pictures. He suggested an automobile ride around town. As they rode, he pointed out to Mellon many examples of his crowning glory. They were of limestone, and they looked shabby and dirty, or Duveen said they did. All the time, Duveen kept selling marble as if he were selling marble. Mellon yielded. "Thanks for the ride," he said. "It has been the most expensive ride of my life."

Once Duveen had persuaded Mellon that marble was the only substance suitable for a building that was to house Duveens, Mellon insisted on choosing the kind of marble, and Duveen let him have his own way. Mellon decided on Tennessee marble because it was, like himself, unostentatious and austere. He chose it because it didn't look like marble. Here, too, perhaps, his choice indicated an expression of his desire for silence; he didn't want the marble to admit that it was marble. He struck a snag, however. It was the middle of the depression, and the marble people were highly inactive. The hibernating marble men woke up, warmed to life by Mellon's big order. They set about turning out the largest amount of Tennessee marble ever ordered at one time. When it arrived in Washington, it was seen to be in a variety of shades, from quite intense pink to quite pale pink. When a sample wall was finally put up, it looked as if it had scarlet fever. What made the operation enormously costly was that it was decided, in order to avoid the hectic look, that all the dark marble should be at the bottom and the light at the top, so that the walls would present a non-pathological gradation of color. This meant that it had to be determined in advance where each block should go. With the passage of a few years, the color differentiations disappeared; the infinite trouble and expense of the elaborate block-matching might have been spared.

"Why did you make such a fuss about the marble?" someone asked Duveen. "What difference does it make to you? Besides, Mellon will have five million less to spend with you."

"I'll have other customers besides Mellon," Duveen said, as if diagramming the obvious. "They'll want their pictures to go into the National Gallery. They'll be impressed by marble." Foremost among the customers Duveen had in mind was Kress.

Relating the history of the National Gallery, John Walker, the Chief Curator of the Gallery, recently wrote:

The building for the National Gallery was designed to provide five and a half acres of exhibition space, and Mr. Mellon's original collection contained a hundred and thirty-two works of art. It goes without saying that he hoped for a greater density than twenty-four to the acre. He was thoroughly confident that the beauty of the new building would have a magnetic effect on other collections.

Duveen, as well as Mellon, was anxious for an increase in density and an intensification of the magnetism. As a friend of Mellon's once said, "Mellon had an art museum six blocks long on his hands and enough paintings to decorate a good-sized duplex apartment." Duveen cooperated loyally. One opportunity arose because Mellon didn't care for sculpture at all; his ambition for the Washington gallery was that it should model itself after the National Gallery of London, which Mellon loved and which contained no sculpture. At the same time, however, Pope, whom Duveen admired as much as Mellon admired the National Gallery of London, had designed the Washington gallery with beautiful and spacious halls intended to receive sculpture. The sculpture halls were almost tenantless; the density, as far as sculpture was concerned, was just about zero. Duveen came to the rescue. Fortunately, in the Gustave Dreyfus Collection, which he had bought in 1930, he had a great many marvellous sculptures. Faced on the one hand by an architectural fait accompli—sculpture halls with no sculpture—and on the other by Duveen, who had plenty of sculpture, Mellon found himself overcoming his prejudice against sculpture, and he allowed Duveen partially to fill the yawning cavities. It was another neat example of Duveen's prefabricated coincidences.

In the delicate art of rivalry-whetting, Duveen was unexcelled. He had practiced it earlier with Morgan, Frick, the Wideners, and Rockefeller; he had made Bache, Goldman, Hearst, and the lesser fry conscious that they were lucky to be dealing with a man who was gracious enough to take time off to see them when he might be dallying with such giants as Mellon. The National Gallery gave him an ideal vantage point for stimulating competition for his favor among the giants themselves. It enabled him to immortalize rivalry, to keep it at fever heat even after the death of one of the rivals. Kress wouldn't consent to deal with Duveen until after Mellon was dead. He felt that it was no use, because Mellon, as far as Duveen was concerned, was No. 1. Mellon died in August of 1937, and immediately afterward Duveen managed to convey to Kress the fact that there was no longer any reason in the world he should deprecate himself; he had the stature to make himself No. 1. There was that agoraphobic ratio of twenty-four to the acre; with Duveen's assistance, Kress could drastically increase the density. Duveen found himself, in a way, the sole administrator of a vast cultural Homestead Act. Everything worked here for Duveen, including Mellon's modest decision not to have his name put on the Gallery. Mellon did not believe in the value of this kind of personal fanfare; he told an intimate that although the Smithsonian Institution was named after James Smithson, not one man in a million could tell you who under the sun Smithson was. Perhaps Mellon's refusal to put his name on the Gallery was, again, an extension of his principle of silence. Whatever the cause, the anonymity was a wonderful help to Duveen. Kress had bought so much art that he had no place to put it all and had planned at one time to build a gallery of his own; he had gone so far as to set aside land for it in New York. But the National Gallery, because it was national, was better. The anonymity of the pink marble building on Constitution Avenue gave Duveen a better chance to offer Kress his chance.

Duveen had known Kress for eight years, and had waited and waited while Kress dabbled around, buying from other dealers. The patience Duveen perfected while waiting for Mellon stood him in good stead. Duveen had an extraordinary sense of timing. "Mr. Kress isn't ready yet to be a customer of mine; he's got to make a few more mistakes," he said. Kress made them. Duveen had come to think that in permitting anyone to deal with him he was bestowing a special accolade, like an invitation to tea at Buckingham Palace, and he waited for Kress's perceptions to ripen. When he felt that they had ripened enough, he moved in. "You're not going to let Mellon have the whole National Gallery to himself, are you. Mr. Kress?" he said. Kress, with a quick sense that Mellon was crowding his immortality, saw the point.

It is an oddity of geography that the three greatest American five-and-ten-cent-store magnates, Kress, S. S. Kresge, and F. W. Woolworth, got their start in eastern Pennsylvania. Woolworth was horn in New York, but he went to Pennsylvania as a young man. Kresge was born in Bald Mount, Pennsylvania. Kress, one of the few clients of Duveen's who has survived him, was born in Cherryville, Pennsylvania, in 1863. His ancestry was Pennsylvania Dutch; he was brought up in modest circumstances, and his fortune is his own handiwork. He has never married; he has devoted his long life to five-and-ten-cent stores, to the acquisition of art treasures, and to the preservation of his health. His stores are so numerous and far-flung that for one period of eleven years, as he made the rounds, he didn't sleep in the same bed for two successive nights. The accommodations he had to accept in small towns and villages may account for the hypochondria from which he has long suffered. His worry about getting hygienic and properly prepared food caused him, during the First World War, to move into three rooms in a New York hospital, where he felt the food would be at least clean, and he stayed on for a year and a half.

Kress has led a singularly lonely life. Now eighty-eight and bedridden, he sees no one except his seventy-four-year-old brother Rush, his doctors and nurses, and specialists in the art field. New York has been his home for over thirty years, but even when he was well he knew almost no one here, and no one knew him. Robert Lehman, whose firm handled many banking transactions for Kress, had never met him; Lehman had to go to one of Kress's art advisers to get an introduction to him. Outside of his art collecting, Kress's passion was travelling, but he did not indulge it directly. When he went abroad, it was to look at pictures, and he saw little else; when he was at home, his chief relaxation was the gratification of his wanderlust offered by Burton Holmes and his travelogues. Kress could never see enough of the Holmes lantern slides, and his appetite for the lectures was insatiable. He had his secretary paste all the programs and even his seat stubs in a scrapbook, so that he would have a permanent log of the voyages. This passion was sometimes a trial to those in his small circle whom he induced to accompany him. "He could have chartered the Olympic and gone anywhere in the world he liked," one of them has said sadly, "but he preferred to do his travelling in Carnegie Hall."

Kress's caution, like that of so many very rich men, seemed to extend to the spending of even small sums of money, but on at least one occasion his instinct for haggling overcame this caution. Taking his ease on the veranda of an Italian watering place, he stopped a Levantine peddler staggering by under a load of tablecloths and mufflers, and asked him what he wanted for a dozen mufflers. The peddler told him. "What do you want for six mufflers and six tablecloths?" Kress asked. The peddler scratched his head and named a figure. Kress became fascinated by the possibilities of permutation, and settled down to a nice, complicated haggle. A gross of tablecloths and more than a gross of mufflers offer the most beguiling vistas in that direction if you care to study them, and Kress studied them. He studied until the poor Levantine was perspiring from his effort to supply figures that wouldn't bankrupt him; he endured agonies of indecision, of quick revision, of abrupt estimates, and finally he lost touch with reality altogether. Kress enjoyed the game. At last, the virtuoso casually asked what the peddler would take for the lot. The peddler gasped out a figure and, suddenly recovering his business sense, dumped his stock in Kress's lap. Kress, not sure how to argue this point, paid him. The peddler, suddenly out of business, walked away. Kress found himself with a gross of tablecloths and an infinity of mufflers on his hands. There is something in Kress's nature that cannot resist a gross of anything. He sent his new stock to his storehouse in downtown New York, where it still reposes.

In his interminable hagglings with Duveen over batches of paintings and miscellaneous art objects, Kress tried to confuse him with swift permutations, as he had the Levantine. ("How much for the Houdon bust without the nine pictures? How much for the nine pictures without the bust?") But Duveen had a firmer grasp than the Levantine, and a firmer grasp than Kress. Kress prepared himself carefully for his sessions with Duveen. Like all the other big clients, he was a slow talker and a slow decider. He had photographs taken of the pictures he was considering, and pondered them endlessly. Year after year, he went to Europe and trudged the galleries. He was eternally asking questions of anyone whose opinion he valued about the pictures he thought he might buy. "Why is this picture so good?" he would ask. "Why is it better than the picture by the same artist that So-and-So has? What makes it worth so much? I'm told it's been repainted. Which part has been repainted? Has that cloud in the upper left-hand corner been repainted or is that the original cloud? What about that flying angel in the upper right-hand corner? Has she been repainted? With all that repainting, should I pay so much?" The interrogation went on continuously, not only in galleries but in his apartment, on walks, and on boats. Duveen put up with that. He also put up with Kress's exceptionally wary nature. One day, to allay any suspicion in Kress's mind that Mellon, though no longer on the scene, was still No. 1 to him, Duveen said to him, "You have the mountains. Mellon has the peaks." Duveen might just as easily have said to Mellon, had Mellon been alive, "Kress has the mountains. You have the peaks." Duveen was the master of the reversible compliment.

Duveen was subjected to his severest strain by Kress when, during the Christmas season of 1938, Kress did violence to one of Duveen's cherished principles. Duveen, a pasha furiously jealous of his pictures, refused ever to unveil them publicly; no Duveen was ever visible in the Duveen windows at the Ministry of Marine during his lifetime, even though the building was a copy of a wing of a building that had been designed by Jacques-Ange Gabriel, the illustrious architect who served Louis XV. If you wanted to see a Duveen, you couldn't do it just by strolling up Fifth Avenue; you had to penetrate the recesses of the harem, and this took some doing. On his walks along the streets of New York—and especially along Fifty-seventh Street—Duveen was always on the lookout for a non-Duveen he could denounce as a fake. As he was walking down Fifth Avenue one day, his eye was caught, at the corner of Thirty-ninth Street, by a picture in a window. He stopped to stare at it incredulously. He felt no impulse to denounce. The picture was a Duveen. It was one of the greatest and most costly—both in price and in emotional tribulation—of all Duvcens. It was, in fact, "The Adoration of the Shepherds," which Bernard Berenson had said was the earliest known Titian but which Duveen had sold to Kress as a Giorgione. This picture had cost Duveen his friendship and his valuable business relationship with Berenson. He had persuaded Kress that by buying it he could take a short cut to immortality and a fast sprint to preeminence in the National Gallery, outdistancing his late rival Mellon. This gift to the National Gallery was still a closely kept secret. And here it was, the lovely thing, quite naked, in the window of a building whose architect not only was not French but was, as far as Duveen was concerned, nonexistent. It was staring at Duveen from behind the plate-glass window of Kress's five-and-ten, set there to lure the Christmas trade, an effulgent replacement for hairnets, pincushions, and soap dishes.

Duveen had to swallow this humiliation, as he had had to swallow so much else in his dealings with Kress. Nevertheless, when, toward the end of his life, he summarized his accomplishments, he said, "I thought that in the Mellon business I had reached the limit of good fortune. The Kress business has made my cup run over." In terms of sheer quantity, Kress was the biggest customer of Duveen's entire career, even though everything he bought was bought, in a fierce cataract of purchases, in the last two years of Duveen's life. Before Duveen died, he had sold Kress more than twenty million dollars' worth of art, had got him well started toward a neck-and-neck position alongside Mellon in the National Gallery, and had let him become, indeed, No. 1.

The purchase by Kress of part of the collection of the banker Henry Goldman, of Goldman, Sachs, offers a compact illustration of how these men who were acknowledged to be the shrewdest financial manipulators in the history of the world and who were so parsimonious by instinct let down their guards in their dealings with Duveen. At seventy-nine, when he was blind, Goldman decided to sell his pictures. He sent for a paid adviser of Kress's and asked whether Kress wanted to buy them. Kress's adviser said that he might, but that he never did things in a hurry. "He'll have to do this in a hurry," said Goldman. "It's got to be decided this afternoon." The adviser went to Kress and told him that Goldman wanted to sell his pictures. "Is he broke?" Kress asked, that being the only situation in which he thought it justifiable to sell a picture. Kress was told that the offer had nothing to do with insolvency. "Hold Goldman off," said Kress, on general principles. Kress's adviser urged him strongly to buy the collection, and to start negotiations at once. "Hold him off," Kress repeated. By the time the adviser got to a telephone to try to hold Goldman off, it was too late. Duveen had bought the pictures back. When this information was relayed to Kress, the effect was electric. A collection that belonged to Duveen was not a collection that belonged to Goldman, even I when it was the same collection. He asked his friend to arrange for him to see the pictures. The adviser promised to do so but begged Kress to be careful about one of them, which had been so restored that he didn't think it was worth anything even if it was authentic, and it might not be. The showing took place in Kress's apartment. Duveen paraded the procession of Goldman's masterpieces, holding out until the end the picture Kress had been warned against. In his enthusiasm for it, the current of Duveen's customary vivacity whirled into panegyric. Of this painting, he related that when he had originally showed it to Goldman (who had probably been sprayed with a strong panegyric himself), Goldman had experienced, merely from being near it, a kind of religious ecstasy. When at last he had bought it, when it was actually in his apartment, his excitement at the thought of his permanent proximity to this masterpiece had been so great that he couldn't sleep. Kress, who already had insomnia, was not impressed. He asked abruptly, "What makes it so wonderful?" At this impertinent query, Duveen was stuck; he was so used to having his assertions accepted that all he could do was reiterate that the picture was, beyond human expression, wonderful. Kress repeated his query: "What makes it so wonderful?" Duveen gave another evasive answer, and there the matter rested while Kress and his adviser went for a walk to hash things over. In the conversation that followed, Kress reversed his attitude. "Why do you say that it's not wonderful?" he demanded. The adviser gave his reason; Whatever the painting might have been once, it was now largely the work of a restorer. But Kress, skeptical in the presence of Duveen, proved himself a true believer in the presence of his adviser, who, by virtue of being a paid adviser, was automatically in a position to be contradicted. Once a collector had set his heart on a picture, it irritated him to have his professional adviser discourage him. In this instance, Kress brought up a heavy battery of argument. "After all," he said, by way of conclusion, "Goldman did own the picture and Duveen did buy it. Duveen has it!" Kress bought the picture and all the others. Had he bought the pictures directly from Goldman, he would have saved millions. But then he wouldn't have had the warm feeling of owning a lot of Duveens.

In the long line of Duveen's clients, beginning early with Morgan, Altman, and Collis and H. E. Huntington and their successive wife, Arabella, and ending grandly with Mellon and Kress, Goldman occupied a special position. He filled in a stage wait between the exit of the former group and the entrance of the latter. After Goldman's retirement from banking, he and Duveen often met for lunch at the St. Regis. The two men were inveterate gossips. "What's new on the Rialto?" Goldman would ask Duveen, and Duveen would tell him. Goldman was hungry to hear everything about Duveen's activities: What had Duveen bought, and to whom was he selling it, and for how much Goldman was entranced with Duveen's stories of his coups; alongside Duveen's great clients, he modestly regarded himself as a minor one, and he delightedly absorbed the detailed stories of how Duveen played the big fish and netted them. He was like a small-town merchant who enjoys hearing how the town's richest and most inaccessible citizen has, by adroit strategy, been made to sign up. Every particular of these maneuvers interested Goldman vastly.

Goldman's blindness had developed gradually, in his later years. It is an instance of Duveen's capacity for disinterested friendship that after Goldman was totally blind and was no longer buying pictures, Duveen continued to see him constantly and supplied him with news of that Rialto that for him, as for the great collector-tycoons of the time, held his deepest desires and was the true center of his being. One Christmas, Duveen gave him two Holbein miniatures that the old collector had long loved. This gift brought Goldman enormous joy, even though he could not see it. Duveen's frequent visits meant much to Goldman in his last days. He would ask, when Duveen was late, "Isn't Joe coming?" But Joe always did come. Sometimes he expounded on the beauty of the two Holbeins with as much enthusiasm as if he were selling them, and the old gentleman revelled in his unseen vision.

Many of the major Duveen clients became either totally blind or very nearly so, among them not only Goldman but Altman, Arabella Huntington, and, in recent years, Kress. The fact that for them the pictures he sold them were invisible or almost invisible did not in the least deter them from buying. An art critic, returning from Washington, where he had just inspected the Kress pictures in the National Gallery, sat by their donor's bedside and praised him for contributing to the nation a beauty he could no longer see. Kress's face lit up with pleasure, perhaps from his memory of a time when he had beheld the beauty. Another collector, less well-known but equally picture-haunted, has, like Kress, been bedridden for some time. He is blind and nearly deaf and paralyzed. His only way of acknowledging even the presence of a rare visitor is to move his bandaged arm in a slight, semicircular gesture. Recently, one of these visitors, sitting by his bedside, looked around the room and noticed that the pictures in it had been changed since his last visit. He remarked upon this, saying that the new pictures were lovely and that the room looked much better with them. In acknowledgment of this compliment, the sick man moved his arm so violently that the nurse became frightened and asked the visitor to leave the room at once.

Philosophers interested in the Duveen Era have engaged in a good deal of subtle speculation on one point, and it is still a tantalizing mystery: How did it come about that the great money men of that era gradually came to accept Duveen's simple, unworldly view that art was more important than money? One theory is that Duveen had inculcated into them the idea that art was priceless and that when you pay for the infinite with the finite, you are indeed getting a bargain. Perhaps it was for this reason that they felt better when they paid a lot. It gave them the assurance of acquiring genuineness, rarity, uniqueness. A lesser dealer had a Rossellino bust for which he had paid twenty-two thousand dollars. Joseph E. Widener went in to look at it. The dealer needed money and offered it for twenty-five thousand, thinking to tempt Widener into a quick purchase. The moderateness of the price was fatal. "Find me a better one," said Widener. Duveen would have asked a quarter of a million, and got it. The same thing happened, with the same bust, when the dealer showed it to Mackay. "Find me a better one," said Mackay. Of one of the most wary and haggling and penny-pinching of his clients, who in his dealings with Duveen penny-pinched himself out of a great many millions of dollars, it has been remarked that only Duveen could have inflated such caution to such abandon. "Oh, well," an intimate of this man has said, "he liked to deal with Duveen because Duveen was at the top. It was like tootling around in a custom-built Rolls-Royce." Duveen's clients preferred to pay huge sums, and Duveen made them happy. A dealer offered a room to Hearst for fifty thousand dollars; Hearst spurned it. Duveen offered it to him later for two hundred thousand and he bought it with gratitude. A man called up a New York dealer one day and asked him if he wanted to buy a rug. The "rug" turned out to be a fine Boucher tapestry. The dealer paid a rug price for it and then offered it to Michael Dreicer, the jeweller, for fifteen thousand dollars. Dreicer, who had once sold a clock for sixty thousand dollars and was accustomed to selling necklaces for a hundred thousand, was suspicious of anything you could get for a mere fifteen thousand. "Get me something better," he said. The New York dealer sold the Boucher to a Paris dealer, who eventually sold it to Dreicer, when the latter was abroad, for seventy thousand dollars. After Dreicer brought it back, the first dealer pointed out to him that it was the same tapestry he himself had offered him for fifteen thousand. Dreicer was a little bewildered at the coincidence, and a little ashamed. "In Paris, you go crazy," he said lamely. Duveen gave his clients a perpetual sense of being in Paris. In his dealings with them, he inspired them with a feeling of release; they could throw their customary business practices to the four winds and go on a kind of jag of prodigality, and in good company; they could go haywire about beauty. He substituted the liberation of reckless spending for the austerities of hoarding. The inherited Puritanism of many of these men made them feel guilty about ordinary spending, but spending for art could be rationalized morally.

The millionaires of the Duveen Era were all dressed up, but they really had no place to go. Duveen supplied a favored few of them with a destination. The private lives of these sad tycoons were often bitter; their children and their family life disappointed them. The fathers had too much to give; the returns were often in inverse ratio to the size of the gifts. They knew that they were ruining their children and yet they didn't know how to stop it. Their children made disastrous marriages, got killed in racing cars, had to pay blackmail to avoid scandal. But with the works of art it was different. They asked for nothing. They were rewarding. They shed their radiance, and it was a lovely, soothing light. You could take them or leave them, and when you had visitors you could bask in the admiration the pictures and sculptures excited, which was directed toward you even more subtly than toward them, as if you yourself had gathered them and, even, created them. The works of art became their children. Toward the end of Joseph E. Widener's life, before his pictures, which he had presented to the National Gallery, were packed and sent off, he made the rounds and had a long, last look at each of them. He had arranged for them to have a good home and he knew that they would be well cared for, but now that they were about to leave him, he was like a father losing his children, and he wept.

But there was more to it than desolation at home, more than the privilege of expensiveness. The ambition of the Duveen millionaires to own famous works of art and to be associated in men's minds with the artists became the controlling obsession of their lives. Frick, Mellon, and Kress practically gave up their business careers to devote their energies to acquiring art. What was behind it? What were the ultimate reasons? Expensiveness helped, the desolation helped, just as acquisitiveness helped, the impulse for conspicuous consumption helped, the social cachet helped, the Medici complex helped, but in their consuming avidity there was something more: a hint of desperation, of loneliness, of futility, even of fear. Was it that these men, whose material conquests were unlimited, felt the need, as they grew older, to ally themselves with reputations that were solid and unassailable and, as far as the mind could project, eternal? The paintings in the National Gallery are Kresses and Melons and Wideners, and before that many of them were Duveens, but if you trace them far enough back, they are Botticellis and Raphaels and Giottos and Fra Filippo Lippis. These old names had lasted a long time. It was reassuring.

The Duveen millionaires had varying degrees of knowledge about the artists with whom they bought partnerships. One of Duveen's clients fixed his partners in his mind by chronological association; of a painter whose dates were 1471-1528 he said with satisfaction, "Well, then, he lived just about the time of the discovery of America," and he felt that he had doubly acquired him—that he could write him off. They knew more or they knew less, but they must have realized that, no matter how many directorships they held, they would forever be only the junior partners in their newly bought associations with these memorialized shadows. Perhaps they were content with the inferior position, content to let Raphael and Bellini and the others have the best of it. It was mainly the forever that they were buying. And they had perhaps become uneasily aware of the fact that the reputations of their new partners were unambiguous in a way that their own were not, and perhaps they hoped that the mergers would be lustral. The painters might have been dissolute, but they had not been furtive; they might have been impecunious, but they had managed, by following their inner vision, to achieve spiritual solvency; they might have led degraded and obscure lives, but they had survived as proud giants. For their latter-day partners, things had begun to become uncomfortable. They were grilled about the machine-gunning of strikers; they were virulently caricatured as exploiters of the poor; they were asked sternly why they did not go and look at the misery that was grinding out their fortunes; the very possession of wealth was beginning to he regarded with suspicion; there had been a sudden shift from idolatry to bitter criticism. Their new partners had miraculously avoided all this; for their moral lapses the world had long since forgiven them. And, above all, they had got what they wanted; they had been themselves, they had enjoyed life, they had been gay. What the rich men had accumulated was slipping away from them. As they aged, as they felt futility and hostility closing in around them, they longed passionately for the happy company, in the even darker regions ahead, of these magical and secure and vivid shades.

Everyone who saw Duveen in the last five years of his life speaks of his extraordinary equanimity in the face of his frightful affliction. Osbert Sitwell has said that it was always Duveen's chief concern that everyone he came in contact with should have a good time. Both Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark have said that he was one of the best storytellers they ever met. All during his illness, Duveen kept up the amiability and the storytelling. He would never admit that he was more than mildly ill. Something of a gourmet, he would account for the fact that at this period he hardly ate anything by saying that the doctor had put him on "a bit of a diet." A chain smoker now forbidden to smoke, he worked out an ingenious device for keeping people from offering him cigarettes, which he would have had to refuse; he had an imitation cigarette made of ivory, with an imitation light at the end of it made of phosphorus, and kept it constantly in his hand or between his lips, so that he would appear to be smoking. Although he needed daily medical attention, he pursued his ordinary activities as if he were only slightly indisposed. There was one exception. In the last years of his life, he was sued by the art collector and dealer Carl W. Hamilton, who had bought three pictures from him—a Fra Angelico "Annunciation," for $50,000; a Fra Filippo Lippi "Madonna and Child," for $50,000; and a Piero della Francesca "Crucifixion," for $65,000. Hamilton decided to sell these pictures. He sold the Fra Angelico to Edsel Ford for $187,000. The two others were then put up at auction (the first art auction, as it happens, to be broadcast on the radio). The Fra Filippo Lippi sold for $125,000, and Duveen bought the Piero della Francesca for $375,000, up to that time the highest price ever paid for a picture at an auction in this country. Hamilton sued Duveen for two million dollars, on the ground that certain remarks Duveen made before the auction caused his pictures to be undervalued. Duveen hired John W. Davis to assist his regular counsel in his defense. As the pictures for which Hamilton had paid Duveen $165,000 had sold for more than half a million, Duveen's lawyers felt that this was a suit he couldn't possibly lose, yet Duveen, who throughout his life had had a zest for litigation, called them up from Nassau, where he had gone for a rest, and implored them not to go through with it—to settle out of court. They implored him to go ahead, for they were sure of their ground. But he insisted, and they had to yield. Duveen was indeed desperately ill.

Unlike the death of many of his clients, Duveen's death was, in characteristic fashion, beautifully timed. When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich, Duveen, believing that he actually had preserved peace in our time, acclaimed him as the greatest man in the world. Four months after Duveen's death, his country was at war. The holiday was over, but Duveen had lived to the last minute of it. In the years that followed, the outstanding collectors were Hitler and Goring, who never had to pay Duveen prices. The American collections went underground, against air raids that never came.

For Duveen to praise Chamberlain required a certain detachment, for the Prime Minister had caused him some of his most poignant grief. This resulted from Chamberlain's decision not to let him continue as a trustee of the London National Gallery. What precipitated this decision was an offer by Duveen to sell the Gallery the eight Sassetta panels that had formed the back of the altar of the Church of St. Francis in Sansepolcro, Italy, and that he had sold to and then bought back from Mackay. Some members of the board felt that Duveen should not be in the position of offering to the Gallery as a seller works that, representing the Gallery, he had to approve as a buyer. Chamberlain was persuaded that this was so. The dismissal hurt Duveen deeply. Then, in Duveen's last year, Kress couldn't make up his mind about a considerable quantity of merchandise he had on consignment. Kress was going through the old routine of having everything photographed and asking questions. This, too, disturbed Duveen.

On May 17, 1939, Duveen sailed for what he called home. The day before, Bache called on him. Afterward, Bache said sadly, "I'm afraid we'll never see Joe again." That same day, Duveen telephoned one of his assistants at the Ministry of Marine and asked him to drive through Central Park with him. At Seventy-second Street, Duveen proposed that they get out of the car and walk, but after a few steps he had to sit down on a bench. He was mortally ill, and looked it. Nevertheless, he asked his associate to help him tackle a new and formidable project. The Widener Collection had been offered to the National Gallery in Washington, and it was Duveen's understanding that the Gallery was going to reject the donation. The Gallery, he had heard, was prepared to accept Widener's paintings and sculptures but did not want the tapestries, armor, and other miscellany, which it felt were outside the Gallery's scope. Widener wanted his immortality intact, and wouldn't agree to split up his collection. Duveen proposed to his associate that the firm buy the entire Widener Collection. He would sell the paintings and the sculptures to the National Gallery at the price he would pay Widener for everything. The rest of the collection, according to his scheme, would cost him nothing; whatever he could sell it for would be velvet. "How much do you think it will take to swing this?" Duveen's associate asked. "Twenty-five million dollars," said Duveen calmly. He instructed his man to get going immediately and to send progress reports to him in London. He also reminded him to keep after Kress about the unsold pictures.

Eight days after Duveen sailed, he died, at Claridge's. His last words, addressed to his nurse, were "Well, I fooled 'em for five years." The funeral services were held in his gallery on Grafton Street. Duveen's last letter, written on shipboard in his own hand, arrived in New York the day after his death. It urged his associates to expedite the Widener deal—a deal that never was to be consummated, for the National Gallery decided to meet Widener's terms on the donation. Two years after Duveen died, Kress bought all the pictures that had been hanging fire. Duveen went right on selling.

(This it the last of a series of articles on Lord Duveen.)