Old Masters and a New Market

by LEE SIMONSON

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DURING the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, its geographic isolation and the number of its landed and mercantile fortunes made England the picture market of Europe. Pounds sterling were a coveted currency and Continental collectors, particularly those in France, Spain, and Italy, who wanted to realize on their possessions were eager to sell them to English dealers or their agents. A large part of the Duke of Orleans Collection of Flemish and Italian masters was smuggled out of France in 1792 and a few years later was sold by Buchanan, one of the leading picture dealers of the period, who in 1802 bought Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne in Rome for £2000 and managed to get it to London through the English fleet blockading the Italian ports. It was sold to a prosperous jeweler and valued at twice that amount when his collection, which included Poussin’s Bacchanalian Festival, was purchased for the National Gallery in 1826 for £9000. Two of the Orleans Veroneses, Wisdom and Strength and Virtue and Vice, which sold for £510 apiece, are now in the Frick Museum in New York.

Another dealer, Desenfans, who established himself by selling a Claude Lorrain to George III at a reputed profit of £1000, smuggled out of Italy two celebrated paintings by that artist, known as the Altieri Claudes. They were bought by two young English painters acting as his agents, who, after being nearly swamped in a boat jammed with refugees fleeing the French invasion, got the pictures as far as Palermo. They managed to secure an interview with Nelson, and so successfully convinced him of the importance of their cargo that the admiral remarked, “This is a national concern,” and arranged a convoy for the ship that took the paintings on to England.

But art was not recognized as a national concern until the collection formed by a wealthy London merchant, J. J. Angerstein, was purchased in 1824 by the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, for £57,000 to found the National Gallery. Among its thirtyeight paintings were Correggio’s Studies of Heads, two Carraccis, and Scbastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus, — all from the Orleans Collection, — Rembrandt’s Woman Taken in Adultery, Rubens’ Rape of the Sabines, Claude’s Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, and Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode series, appraised at £2500 and originally bought for half that amount. Hogarth had sold them in 1750 for £126; the frames had cost him £25.

The British Museum, when it opened in 1759, required visitors to give notice, in writing, of their name, “condition,” and “place of abode.” Tours were under the guidance of a librarian and limited to ten persons per hour. A few years later the regulations were relaxed so that visitors could spend more than an hour and look at what interested them most, but up to 1804 only thirty-five persons a day were admitted. With the opening of the National Gallery, for the first time in England the public was admitted to an art collection without an admission fee, tickets, or qualifications of any kind. But the event was barely mentioned by the newspapers, and there is no comment on the importance of the occasion in artists’ diaries or letters of the period except Haydon’s.

The present conviction that an art museum is of supremo importance as a public institution and an educational and cultural force is a more recent development in the history of the appreciation of art. Some twelve years after the National Gallery had opened, Grillparzer on a visit to London wrote; “First to the National Gallery in London, which I had difficulty in finding at first, so unknown was it to everybody I asked. At last, at an engraver’s I got the right direction.” People were evidently not so impressed as they are, or pretend to be, today in the presence of masterpieces. The first Keeper of the collection once came upon a group of out-oftown visitors, their chairs drawn up in a circle, eating a basket lunch. He was cordially invited to join them and offered a glass of gin.

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THE increase in value on the international art market of examples of the Old Masters has been even more spectacular than that of Impressionist and Post-impressionist painting. Sales records of Rembrandt’s work provide some of the most dramatic contrasts.

His etching The Phoenix sold at the Verstalk sale in Paris in 1847 for 94 francs, about $20. At the Johnson sale, New York, in 1946 it brought $8100. I know of one copy of the first state of Christ Presented to the People on which its eighteenthcentury owner penciled the fact that he had purchased it for £1, 12s. (about $7.50 at pre-war rates of exchange, $6 today). This same print was sold in London in 1925 for $19,280 (£4000), another for $16,800 in New York in 1919. The rare drypoint The Tholinx, of which only four or five examples are known, was purchased in Amsterdam in 1916 for $39,500 and subsequently resold in New York for $50,000. The drawing of Maurits Hugens brought approximately the same amount at a London auction in 1928.

Among the earlier sales of Rembrandt’s paintings in England, £5250 in 1811 for The Master Shipbuilder and His Wife remained the top auction price, not reached again until 1892 — for Henrika Stoeffels in Bed and for the portrait of Burgomaster Six, but exceeded by the companion portrait of his wife, which brought £7035.

The sharply ascending curve becomes evident at the turn of the century. Durand-Ruel purchased David and Saul in 1869 for 12,500 francs, sold it shortly thereafter for 15,000, repurchased it in 1890 for 140,000, and in 1900 sold it to the Hague Museum for 200,000 francs ($40,000). In 1912 an Old Woman Plucking a Fowl brought 475,000 francs. A year later at the Steengrach sale in Paris, Bathsheba was sold for a million francs ($200,000), and at the Borden sale in New York, $130,000 was paid for Lucretia Stabbing Herself. At the Holford sale in London, 1928, the Portrait of a Woman with a Handkerchief brought $153,000, the Portrait of a Young Man with a Cleft Chin £46,200 ($224,000), and the Young Man Holding the Scabbard of a Short Sword reached £50,400.

The Mill was bought in 1798 by a member of Parliament for £525. In 1911 the American Art News reported its sale to the Widener Collection for £100,000, very nearly half a million pre-war gold dollars. In 1932 the Mellon Trust declared the cost of its Rembrandt Self-Portrait to have been $550,000.

Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, important examples of Renaissance painting changed hands at Christie’s auction rooms at comparatively low prices. Among those bought for or later given to the National Gallery were Correggio’s Vièrge au Panier in 1825 for slightly less than £4000 (it had brought £325 in 1819); Veronese’s Vision of St. Helena for £3450 in 1878 (£283 in 1860); and in 1874 Pinturicchio’s Return of Ulysses for £2100, a price range of approximately $10,000—$20,000. But the trend was steadily upward despite the fact that the general level of prices had been steadily downward. One economist of the eighties estimated the decline to be 145 per cent up to 1850; another that £3 in 1884 would buy as much as £4 in 1784.

In spite of this general decline, resales of the same picture at auction increased anywhere from fifty to several hundred times in market value, demonstrated by the growing appreciation of the British school. To cite a few instances: —

Important examples of almost every school of painting were proving themselves to be among the most secure and profitable forms of investment. In an industrial era, established aesthetic values continued to demonstrate their economic value. Between 1904 and 1912, Boucher’s Les Plaisirs d’Été sold in Paris for the equivalent of $72,000, a Chardin still life for $60,000, Fragonard’s Le Billet Doux for $70,000, Lawrence’s The Countess of Wilton for $87,000. In London, during the same period, Hoppner’s Lady Louisa Manners brought $73,700 and Raeburn’s Portrait of Mrs. Hay $110,000.

But the first sale comparable to the prices reached after 1920 was that of Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna in 1884 for £70,000 ($350,000). Raphael has remained in the eyes of collectors their particular treasure, for which they are willing to pay record sums. Andrew Mellon in 1930 acquired the larger Cowper Madonna, now in our National Gallery, for $800,000. In a hearing before the U.S. Board of Tax Appeals in 1935 his attorney declared that he had paid for the Alba Madonna $1,080,000; the deed establishing the Mellon Trust stated the cost of St. George and the Dragon to have been $747,500 Charles I obtained the picture from the Earl of Pembroke in exchange for Holbein’s Windsor drawings; it was sold by the Commonwealth for £150.

The Alba Madonna was one of the thirty pictures in the Hermitage Museum which Knoedler and Company, the New York picture dealers, purchased from the Soviet government for some $12,000,000. Of these, Mr. Mellon also acquired Titian’s Toilet of Venus for $544,320, Van Eyck’s Annunciation for $503,010, and Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi for $838,350. Prices paid for other pictures in the Mellon Collection were: Vermeer, The Lace Maker, $400,000; Memling, Virgin and Child, $300,000; Titian, Portrait of a Lady, $550,000; Velasquez, Pope Innocent X, $360,000; Hals, Portrait of a Young Man, $350,000; Van Eyck, Marchese Dalbi, $450,000; Holbein, Portrait of Edward VI, $437,400; Rubens, Portrait of His Second Wife, $280,000; Hobbema, A Village Scene, $250,000.

Once American millionaires became rivals in assembling their collections, prices that ranged from a quarter of a million to half a million dollars were no longer unusual. A small panel, The Crucifixion, by Piero della Francesca brought $375,000 at a New York auction in New York in 1929. The art periodical Apollo, in 1935, reported the sale of six pictures from the Morgan Collection: Ghirlandaio’s Giovanni Tornabuoni for $500,000; a triptych by Filippo Lippi and Rubens’ Anne of Austria at $250,000 each; a pair of Hals portraits to a Paris collector for $300,000 and Lawrence’s Miss Farren, Countess of Derby to a New York collection for $200,000. But this scale of prices was not confined to acquisitions by American collectors. In 1940, Van Eyck’s Deposition from the Cook Collection in England was bought by a Dutchman for £225,000 ($900,000).

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ONE of the most astonishing features of this crescendo has been the prices paid for the English portrait painters and landscapists, in many cases equal to or more than those paid for superlative examples of the greatest Flemish and Italian masters. In the Mellon Collection, Reynolds’ Lady Compton cost $500,000; Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire $410,000 and his Mrs. Tatton $225,000; Romney’s Mrs. Davenport $230,000; Hoppner’s The Frankland Sisters $198,000; Lawrence’s Lady Templeton $250,000.

The portrait of Miss Mary Moulton Barrett, known as Pinkie, by Lawrence, now in the Huntington Library, brought $377,600 (£77,700) at the London auction of Lord Michelham’s pictures in 1926. Gainsborough’s Market Cart, in the London National Gallery, was auctioned in 1828 for $1182. His Harvest Wagon brought £4776 in 1894, £20,160 ($97,700) in 1913, and $360,000 in the Gary sale, New York, in 1928. The Blue Boy, according to the Farington Diary, was sold in 1796 for 35 guineas; it was acquired by Hoppner and sold by him in 1802 for 50 guineas ($225). In 1921 Sir Joseph Duveen bought it from the Duke of Westminster for between £160,000 and £170,000. The pound being below par at the time, this was the equivalent, in round figures, of $642,000.

Reynolds’ Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse has also had a sensational sales history. Calonne, Minister of Finance under Louis XVI, bought the painting from the artist in 1784 for 800 guineas ($4000). It was purchased for less than half that amount in 1795 by the English collector who owned Rembrandt’s The Mill. At the sale of his collection in 1823, Reynolds’ melodramatic portrait brought £2000. In 1919 at the Duke of Westminster’s sale it went for £54,600 ($240,000) and was eventually sold to the Huntington Library, presumably for a considerable advance on that sum. Turner was caught in the general upswing — Rockets and Blue Lights in the Yerkes sale, 1916, bringing $129,000, and a View of Venice in the Ross sale in London, 1927, £30,450 ($147,682).

One consequence of this price level is that large collections of Old Masters have become too valuable to be kept in private hands beyond the lifetime of the collector who acquires them. Apart from a laudable desire to perpetuate one’s name as a public benefactor by building a museum around a collection or giving it to an existing one, there is the fact that, because of sharply graduated inheritance taxes, pictures worth a million or more, as part of an estate amounting to several or many millions, would subject the entire estate to a much higher rate of taxation. In some cases it might cost the heirs almost half the value of the paintings to inherit them.

The phenomenal prices paid by American millionaires reflect something more than the fact that they had millions to spare. There were millionaires and even multimillionaires in England at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. What has prompted rich men today to spend a greater share of their fortunes in order to acquire a great or important work of art is our growing veneration for art in general, for the monuments of every period. Like Nelson and the Altieri Claudes, affluent collectors feel that securing and safeguarding a work of art is a national concern and share the widespread belief that an art museum is little short of a modern temple, enlightening and edifying almost every visitor who passes through its portals.

The past one hundred fifty years are commonly considered an era in which our way of life and our habits of thought have been revolutionized by the development of the sciences and the expansion of machine industry. But during that same span most of our authentic knowledge of every epoch of art, whether in Europe, Asia, or Central America, has been accumulated and popularized; virtually every art museum in England and the United States has been founded, dedicated to public use and its collections constantly expanded. In 1938 there were no fewer than 288 art museums in this country, of which 115 were at colleges and universities. Building statistics for the depression year 1933 show $12,977,000 spent for churches of all denominations, $6,265,000 for art museums.

In so far as our more formal efforts in art education are concerned, the supreme value of Italian Renaissance painting registered by the art market also reflects prevailing taste. When the Museum of Modern Art in 1940 exhibited a collection lent by the Italian government, which included Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair, Titian’s Pope Paul III, and Verrocchio’s David, it drew a record attendance of 277,794 — slightly more than twice the attendance at the loan exhibition of Van Gogh, the previous record.

In general, the art market approximates the verdict of critics and historians. The artists who have survived and established their value there are those who have established their permanent value as exponents of a period or a school of painting even if they are not supreme geniuses. Despite certain distortions, — Gainsborough and Lawrence are not the peers of Rembrandt, Rubens, or Velasquez, nor is Raphael “the prince of painters,” — at long enough range acknowledged aesthetic values and market values tend to parallel each other. The international art market has served as a kind of magnifying glass for what, in both senses of the word, the appreciation of art has become.

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THE firm of Knoedler and Company recently celebrated its centennial. The history of this firm provides an interesting perspective on the development of collecting in this country and the taste of a wide and typical section of upper-class patrons of painting. The earlier ledgers show an unexpected number, even during the last years of the Civil War and immediately afterwards, when purchases were payable in gold; sales in 1866, for instance, totaled $162,832. Most of the pictures sold were artistically unimportant and brought $200 to $300 apiece, or less. The predominant demand was for sentimental or anecdotic subject matter, with titles such as “Bone of Contention,” “A Drop on the Sly,” “Teasing the Donkey,” or “Rhymers in the Wood.”

Much of this earlier picture buying seems to have been part of house furnishing, or rather furbishing the new, overstuffed mansions of successful merchants and magnates at the beginning of our industrial era. A picture collection was often made with the purchase of a dozen or more paintings at one time — thirteen for $2000, thirty-eight for $11,850. The names of such patrons rarely reappear in the sales ledgers; presumably, once the mansion was well furnished, their interest in art ended. The practice continued through the seventies and even into the eighties, when there is one sale recorded for twenty-four paintings for $100,000, among them a Corot for $4000.

As early as 1866 a Corot, View of Nantes, sold for $450, and a landscape by Courbet for $500 to the same buyer. But at the time there were a number of collectors who were more interested in American landscapists and paid as much for a landscape by Inness or a view of the White Mountains by William Hart, and twice the amount for F. S. Church’s Morning on the Hudson and W. T. Richards’ View of the Adirondacks. This interest in the interpretation of the American scene then lapsed until it was revived for the water colors of Winslow Homer. For thirty years the higher prices paid were for the work of English, German, and French academicians, which constituted the majority of the sales — Bouguereau, Gérôme, Messonier, Rosa Bonheur, Van Marcke, Von Bremen, and AlmaTadema.

Except for the Barbizon school, principally Rousseau and Diaz, an occasional sale of a Delacroix or a Fromentin, and steadily mounting prices for Corot and Millet, there was no interest shown in the more important contemporary French painters and none in those of the eighteenth century. Until the 1890’s, when the elder Morgan, Altman, and A. M. Byers assembled their collections, American collectors seemed unaware of most of the Old Masters. Knoedler’s first sale of a Rembrandt occurred in 1899 — Saskia with a Black Feather in Her Hair, for $11,750. At the time a Messonier brought $16,000, a Cazin $20,000, and a Daubigny $40,000.

The first decided change in taste, which coincided with a revival of Georgian architecture and interiors for upper-class mansions, was for the English portraitists and landscapists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though at prices that were a fraction of those paid twenty years later. In 1894 a landscape by Gainsborough sold for $5000, Hoppner’s portrait of his children for $11,875, Romney’s Countess of Glencairn for $27,500, a Constable for $8500. Last summer at the sale of Lord Swaythling’s pictures a landscape by Constable brought $170,000.

It was after 1900 that the ambition of American collectors to acquire an important example of Renaissance painting, or of the Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became general, with Mellon, Frick, and Widener making the major acquisitions. Mr. Mellon purchased all but two of the thirty paintings from the Hermitage. In addition Knoedler’s acquired for the Mellon Collection the two Holbein portraits, Greco’s San Ildefonso, Vermeer’s Portrait of a Young Woman, and Memling’s Man with an Arrow; for the Widener Collection the three Van Dyck portraits of the Cattanco Family and Vermeer’s Girl with a Flute; and for the Frick Collection the same painter’s Music Lesson, Van Dyck’s Franz Snyders, two Hals portraits, Greco’s Cardinal Gui-roya, Velasquez’s Philip IV, Goya’s The Forge, Veronese’s two allegories, Titian’s Pietro Arentino, Bellini’s St. Francis, and Piero della Francesca’s St. Andrew.

Mr. Frick by the narrowest margin missed bringing Holbein’s Duchess of Milan to America. It had hung for nearly thirty years in London’s National Gallery as a loan, when its own owner, the Duke of Norfolk, sold it for $300,000 jointly to Knoedler’s and an English picture dealer. Mr. Frick was prepared to purchase it immediately. But the authorities of the gallery, in consternation, asked for a month’s option in order to raise the amount by public subscription. Up to the last day only half the sum had been subscribed, when a check for £30,000 from an Englishwoman, a resident of Bath, saved the picture for England.

The exodus of Old Masters from Europe to this country, comparable to that which took place from the Continent to England a century earlier, is over and it seems unlikely to recur. In the opinion of Mr. Henschel, the present head of Knoedler’s, if a millionaire today were prepared to spend five million dollars or more to assemble a collection of Old Masters, he could not find enough important examples to purchase. The major works remaining in England belong to wealthy families who no longer seem disposed to sell them. The leading French collections are probably destined for the Louvre. No important private collection of Old Masters has come into the market during the last fifteen years, and none is likely to. Almost three quarters of those sold by his firm are already in public galleries, and that trend will undoubtedly continue in this country. American collectors will perforce center their interest on modern art and contemporary painting.