We go to our American art museums and dutifully pass the Old Masters paintings, nonchalant about them being on display here rather than in Italy, Spain, Germany, England, France, the Netherlands or the other European countries where those great painters lived centuries ago.
After all, we’re the United States of America, the world’s most powerful country. Why shouldn’t we have our fair share of Rembrandts, Vermeers, Titians, El Grecos, Raphaels, etc.? That’s just natural.
Actually, it isn’t natural at all. It took a revolution and a war — the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century and then World War I — for that to happen. It also took the brute financial strength of some tough-as-nails American industrial barons, such as the violently anti-union Henry Clay Frick of Carnegie Steel, to bring some of these masterpieces to our shores and eventually into our museums.
There were also some very aggressive dealers, especially in Europe, eager to dislodge masterpieces from the homes of various Old World aristocrats and land barons. Invariably, the Americans had the most money to buy them.
In “Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures,” Cynthia Saltzman doggedly uses correspondence and documents to track how specific masterpieces came to America. She also offers portraits of the principals involved in this seismic shift of art wealth — collectors like Frick, Isabella Stewart Gardner and J. Pierpont Morgan, who now have museums named after them.
While Frick ends up dominating this book, other stories are also interesting. Sugar magnate Harry O. Havemeyer and his wife, Louisine, were personally advised by the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt — Louisine’s closest friend. Where other millionaires were more timid in their tastes, Cassatt eagerly encouraged the Havemeyers to buy El Greco paintings in Spain, because his pre-Expressionist sensibilities appealed to her modernist aesthetic.
Gardner was a true art lover who risked her wealthy husband’s disapproval when she stretched her budget to acquire Titian’s erotic “The Rape of Europa” from a British aristocrat. “She has adorers fairly on their knees — men of course,” Saltzman quotes Gardner as saying when the painting arrived at her Boston home.
Saltzman, who previously wrote “Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece,” also reveals details of how the mighty art authority of the period, Bernard Berenson, misrepresented himself in his dealings with Gardner, especially.
There is a drawback to Saltzman’s diligent, dogged approach. Eyes can glaze over trying to absorb the back-and-forth details — which involve ever-changing dollar figures — between collectors and dealers.
That may be due to the fact that these days it doesn’t mean much that Frick paid $225,000 for a Rembrandt self-portrait after testy negotiations. What would it go for now, if one of comparable quality were for sale — $100 million? But the larger story, of how these acquisitions were a symbol of an historic shift in world power, is fascinating. And Saltzman, to her credit, provides plenty of perspective.
Many Old Masters paintings were in British private collections, acquired during the 17th century as the British Empire ascended and its newly wealthy aristocratic class wanted art for their country estates.
By the early 20th century, however, the real money was in industrialization — steel, railroads, factory-made products. Those who had inherited those estates were land rich and cash poor, and the British government was heavily taxing the generational turnover of land. So they sold art to raise cash. As the buying spree drove prices higher, aristocrats on the European continent joined in.
With Europeans, especially the British, desperate for cash in World War I (which started in 1914; the U.S. entered in 1917), prices dropped. Frick, aggressively taking advantage, bought Titian’s “Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap” and Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” which had previously belonged to a British aristocrat named Arthur Grenfell.
Saltzman quotes a letter Grenfell wrote to Frick from the front: “Most of my friends have been killed or wounded . . . One doesn’t see any sign of this Armageddon coming to an end. It has been a terrible war — the most savage & cold-blooded killing machine versus human nerves & endurance.”
It’s good to know the provenance of the art in our museums. As Saltzman shows, the story behind America’s Old Masters isn’t always as pretty as the pictures themselves.
Steven Rosen is a freelance writer in Cincinnati.
Nonfiction
Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures, by Cynthia Saltzman, $27.95
