The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting 9780271077864

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The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting

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TH E EVOL U T I O N O F TASTE I N A M ER IC AN COL L EC T I N G René Brimo

Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Kenneth Haltman

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Originally published as L’évolution du goût aux ÉtatsUnis, d’après l’histoire des collections by René Brimo (Paris, 1938). Frontispiece: René Brimo, ca. 1930. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

This publication has been made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Program of the College Art Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brimo, René, 1911–1948, author. | Haltman, Kenneth, 1957– , translator, editor, writer of introduction. | Translation of: Évolution du goût aux États-Unis d’aprés l’histoire des collections. Title: The evolution of taste in American collecting / René Brimo ; translated, edited, and with an introduction by Kenneth Haltman. Other titles: Évolution du goût aux États-Unis d’aprés l’histoire des collections. English. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2016] | “Originally published as L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis d’aprés l’histoire des collections by René Brimo (Paris, 1938).” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A critical translation of René Brimo’s 1938 French study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patronage and art collecting in the United States”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2016030860 | ISBN 9780271073248 (cloth : alk. paper)

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Subjects: LCSH: Art—United States—History. | Art—Collectors and collecting_United States. | Art museums—United States. | Aesthetics. Classification: LCC N6505 .B713 2016 | DDC 709.73-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030860 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Typeset by coghill composition company Printed and bound by thomson-shore Composed in arno pro and didot Printed on huron matte

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Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution to Art History 1 Notes 67 Kenneth Haltman

The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting René Brimo Preface 87 Introduction

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Book 1: Early Developments: From the Colonial Period to the Philadelphia Centennial Part 1: Colonial America Looking Backward 96 Part 2: Science or Sentiment [Historical Introduction, 1776–1840] 1 Encyclopedic Spirit 111 2 The Search for a National Style 121

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Part 3: The Critical Era [Historical Introduction, 1840–1876] 131 1 The Taste for Anecdote and Realism 135 2 The Discovery of History 151

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Book 2: The Triumph of Quality: Major Collections from the Philadelphia Centennial to the Great War

1 2 3 4 5

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[Historical Introduction, 1876–1919] 166 Eclecticism 171 The Notion of the “Old Master” 195 The Vogue for Archaeology and “Pre-History” 226 Staying in Touch with the Contemporary Scene 255 The Modern Art Museum 272

Conclusion 294 Notes 301 Bibliography 344

Index

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Contents

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Illustrations Figures 1 Antoine Brimo, undated 2 2 Joseph Brimo and Jean Brimo, undated 2 3 Nicolas Brimo, undated 3 4 Henri François Daguerre, undated 6 5 René Brimo and Albert Brimo, ca. 1919 7 6 Antoine Brimo on his deathbed, 1919 7 7 Nicolas and Ezilda Brimo, undated 10 8 Letterhead, Brimo de Laroussilhe, ca. 1924 11 9 Léon Gruel, undated 12 10 Sales display, Brimo de Laroussilhe, ca. 1925–26 13 11 René Brimo, ca. 1925 14 12 Louis Grodecki with his father, Pawel, Warsaw, ca. 1926 16 13 Henri Focillon, undated 17 14 Paul J. Sachs, ca. 1945 19 15 Edward W. Forbes, undated 21 16 Divinity Hall, Harvard, ca. 1932 25 17 René Brimo, ca. summer 1934 30 18 Letter from René Brimo to Albert C. Barnes, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 24 March 1935 33 19 René Brimo, Lot Valley, ca. summer 1936 35 20 René Brimo’s handwritten draft of introduction to book 1, “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis,” edited in ink by Henri Focillon, ca.1937 39 21 René Brimo’s notes on “Schneider thesis” following conversation with Henri Focillon, ca. 1937 40

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René Brimo’s notes on “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis” following conversation with Henri Focillon, ca. 1937. First of two pages 41 23 René Brimo’s notes on “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis” following conversation with Henri Focillon, ca. 1937. Second of two pages 42 24 René Brimo’s typewritten draft of conclusion to “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis,” ca. 1937 47 25 René Brimo’s doodled “j’m” with dial logo on draft of “Assier thesis,” ca. April 1932 49 26 Wheel of Fortune motif, Château d’Assier, early thirteenth century 49 27 René Brimo, “j’m fortune” dial design for L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, ca. 1938 49 28 René Brimo, somewhere in south of France, ca. 1940 55 29 René Brimo’s “J’aime Fortune” ex libris, ca. 1940 55 30 René Brimo’s résumé submitted with application for Jesse Isidor Straus Award, ca. spring 1939 56 31 René Brimo’s first page of questionnaire submitted with application for Jesse Isidor Straus Award, ca. spring 1939 57 32 René Brimo, Chaponval, toward end of his life 58 33 First thirty-five notes to book 2, chapter 3, L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis 65

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Plates (following page 164) 1 El Greco, Portrait of a Cardinal, ca.1600. Frontispiece to L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis 2a Seventeenth-century interior combining materials from Browne-Pearl house of West Boxford and Manning house of Ipswich, Massachusetts 2b John Singleton Copley, The Copley Family, ca. 1776–77 3a Façade of [Charles Willson Peale’s] Philadelphia Museum, ca. 1830 3b Benjamin West, The Ambassador from Tunis with his Attendants as He Appeared in England in 1781 4a William H. Vanderbilt collection, New York, ca. 1870. Photo: H. Muller 4 bAntonio Pollaiuolo, Hercules and Deïanira [L’Enlèvement de Déjanire], ca. 1470

5a

Henry Gurdon Marquand collection, New York, ca. 1880 5b Agricultural pavilion, Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1876 6a George and Florence Blumenthal collection, Paris[, ca. 1915] 6b Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, ca. 1514–1529 7a Paul Gauguin, La Orana Maria [Hail Mary], 1891 7b Sacrifice of Cain, capital from Benedictine abbey Moutiers-Saint-Jean0 8a Interior of old Fogg Art Museum, before 1909 8b Greek and Roman sculpture gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, after 1909

Illustrations

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Acknowledgments In preparing this manuscript, over the course of three decades, I have received help from many individuals, but without the generosity of three in particular, nothing of real value would have been possible. Marie-Amélie Carlier at Brimo de Laroussilhe, much like René Brimo an art historian as well as dealer, made all relevant materials in the archives available to me on numerous occasions, along with a comfortable space in which to work, material support, and much good historical insight and advice; Nicolas-René Brimo, René’s nephew, shared with me what he knew regarding both his uncle and the early years of the gallery; and Isabelle BrimoGuillerot, Nicolas-René’s sister, gave me free use of the family photographs and correspondence. I am deeply indebted to all three. In recent years, my research has been supported by a Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), sponsored by the Terra Foundation, in 2008, and another at the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library in 2009, under whose auspices I was able to visit the Harvard Art Museums Archives. My thanks to the Society for the Preservation of Early American Modernists for a grant that helped underwrite the cost of the many reproductions and to the College Art Association and, again, the Terra Foundation for an International Publication Grant. On five occasions (at the SAAM in 2008, the Frick in 2009, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität-Berlin, and the École Normale Supérieure, both in 2013, and the annual meeting of the College Art Association in New York in 2015), I have had the opportunity to talk about this translation and research, and benefited greatly from comments and questions. My thanks to the staffs of the many libraries in which I have been welcomed to work on this project over the years, including the Fine Arts, Sterling Memorial, and Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Libraries at Yale; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art Library, and the Smithsonian Libraries at the American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Museum of American History, and National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.; the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago; the Frick Art Research Library, the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, the Museum of Modern Art Library, the New York Public Library, the New-York

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Historical Society Library, and the Nicholas Murray Butler Library at Columbia University in New York. All of the librarians, curators, and scholars I met with, many of them friends, have played an important role in my research. They include Ellen Alers, Abderrahmane Amri, Susan K. Anderson, Julie Aronson, Susan Augustine, Jim Bakker, Amy Ballmer, Muriel Barbier, Carrie Rebora Barratt, Alexis Black, Ewa Bobrowska, Diana Bockrath, Graham Boettcher, Serafina Boggs, Henri J. Borneuf, Ruth Bowler, Diana Bramham, Paul Breidenbach, Christine E. Brennan, Elizabeth Broman, François Brunet, Peter Buettner, Agathe Cabau, Mary Caldera, Jane Callahan, Janice H. Chadbourne, Anne Claro, Veronica Conkling, Cindy Cormier, Alexander Mann Crawford III, Gina d’Angelo, Adrianna Del Collo, Melody Barnett Deusner, Samantha Deutch, Isabella Donadio, Jennifer Donnelly, Charles Eldredge, Susan C. Faxon, Stuart Feld, Jordan Finkenbinder, Ann Smith Finn, Guillaume Fonkenell, Bill Gerdts, Jennifer Greenhill, Lisa Harms, Erica Hirshler, Annie Hoffman, Mary Margaret Holt, Claude Imbert, Michelle Anna Interrante, Sherri Irvin, Wendy Katz, Frank Kelleter, Lindsay Kenderes, Erin Kinhart, Josh Landis, Evelyn Lannon, Johnny Lapham, Claire Ledoux, Theresa Leininger-Miller, Ségolène Le Men, Ron Maldonado, Crawford Alexander Mann III, Suz Massen, Andrew McClellan, Robin McElheny, Bill McKeown, Amanda McKnight, Maureen Melton, Thomas Micchelli, Angela Miller, Martin Montminy, Yves-Alain Moquay, James Moske, Ken Myers, Alex Nemerov, Niamb O’Sullivan, Alessandro Pezzati, Evelyne Possémé, Jules Prown, Esmée Quodbach, Emily Rafferty, Jean-Louis Raspal, Charlee Redman, Inge Reist, Lucio Riccetti, Pascale Rivial, Jennifer Roberts, Eric Robinson, Elizabeth Rudy, Bart Ryckbosch, Sarah Schroth, Megan Schwenke, Laurie Scrivener, Florian Sedlmeier, Guylène Serin, Jill Shaw, Janice Simon, Marc Simpson, Norma Sindelar, Jeri D. Smalley, Ann Y. Smith, Wale Solano, Hubert Tilliet, Clare Vasquez, Dominique Versavel, Charlotte Vignon, the late Susan von Salis, Elizabeth Vose, Marianne Wardle, Bruce Weber, Sally Webster, Kirsten Wellman, Jeffrey M. Wilhite, Bryan Wolf, and Robert Zinck. I owe a special thanks to Neil Harris, whose original interest back in 1986 helped make this project a reality, but who even more helpfully in 2014 agreed to comment on the manuscript; to Veerla Thielemans at the Terra Foundation office in Paris, who helped to make possible two crucial research trips to Paris in 2014; to Bill Truettner and Alan Wallach, who both read through this material with great care; to Elodie Rodrigues, who, at Brimo de Laroussilhe, took charge of scans and reproductions of often fragile materials with grace and good humor; to Jean and Monique Lancri for their hospitality in Paris; to the late Catherine Grodecki for inviting me into her home; to Priscilla Sonnier, research assistant extraordinaire; to Ellie Goodman and Laura Reed-Morrisson at Penn State University Press; to Jeffrey Lockridge, who did an extraordinary job copyediting a very complicated manuscript, greatly improving it; and to Sarra whose sacrifice made the final year of work on this project possible.

acknowledgments

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Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution to Art History K enn e th Ha l tma n

It explains a great deal that the author of the most substantive account we have of the history of private and public collecting in the United States, René Brimo, was an antiquarian dealer himself and a Parisian, with the good fortune to have studied under a number of the most influential art historians of the interwar period: Paul Vitry and Marcel Aubert at the École du Louvre; Henri Focillon, René Schneider, and Pierre Lavedan at the Sorbonne; and Paul J. Sachs and Edward W. Forbes at Harvard. Having worked in curatorial departments, first at the Louvre and then, in Cambridge, at Harvard’s Fogg, Brimo had hands-on museum world experience as well, on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing upon all these influences, L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections (The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting), his doctoral dissertation, published in Paris in 1938, when he was not yet thirty, traced the history of nearly two centuries of American taste informed by this privileged understanding of the intricacies of an international art market in which dealers (and even, on occasion, scholars) had come to play a role arguably equal to that of private collectors or museums, if perhaps less in the public eye.

Family History As political and economic refugees, Brimo’s paternal grandparents—Armenians from Aleppo probably of Jewish origin and art merchants themselves—had found themselves obliged to relocate first to Damascus and then to the Beşiktaş district of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Though bitterly disappointed at their frequently hostile reception and despite the continuing turmoil there, they raised five sons and two daughters, favoring schools run by French-speaking Maronite Christians. After pogroms proper began in the early 1890s, living and business conditions for non-Ottoman minorities deteriorated to such an extent that each son, as he came of age, was given 30,000 francs and sent out into the world to make his fortune.1 Antoine, the eldest, born around 1871, the first to depart, made the obvious choice

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Fig. 1 | Antoine Brimo, undated. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

Fig. 2 | Joseph Brimo and Jean Brimo, undated. Labeled on verso by Nicolas Brimo “mes frères” and by his son, Albert Brimo, “oncles Joseph le Jeune et Jean le grand.” Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

dictated by language and culture: Paris. When his turn came, Elias, whom everyone called “Joseph,” set out for Kingston in British Jamaica. Jean chose Manila, then under Spanish rule. The fourth boy, Nicolas, René’s father, born on Christmas Day 1887, followed Antoine to Paris shortly after 1900. Their youngest brother, somewhat confusingly also named “Joseph”—known in the family as “Joseph le jeune”—would soon after join Jean in Manila.2 We know nothing of the daughters who stayed behind. Surviving letters suggest that the extended family remained close knit despite the scope of this diaspora.3 They wrote frequently, bickered constantly, visited one another surprisingly often, given the distances involved, and shared business opportunities where possible along with a decidedly cosmopolitan “outsider” outlook upon world events.4 When Nicolas arrived in Paris from Constantinople, Antoine was making a good living there trading in Near Eastern antiques with a specialization in Rhodes and Iznik ceramics. He lived and worked on rue Laffitte, the preferred address in all of Paris for art dealers and appraisers at a time when the city was the most active center of the European art trade and a few blocks from the city’s largest public auction house, the Hôtel Drouot. The quarter had for decades been favored by what historian Olivier Gabet has termed “des marchands d’objets, antiquaires ou brocanThe Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 3 | Nicolas Brimo, undated. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

teurs,” or antiques dealers, as well as by those specializing in the fine arts: Paul Durand-Ruel was at 16 rue Laffitte, Lucien Moline at 20, Nathan Wildenstein at 34, and Ambroise Vollard just down the street at 37. The neighborhood was full of recent immigrants and, following a period of intense anti-Semitism in France that had culminated in the Dreyfus affair, unusually welcoming to Jews.5 Nicolas found work close nearby on rue Cadet but, still in his late teens, restless or ambitious, soon left to join Jean and Joseph le jeune in the Philippines. Things did not go well for him there. Having spent, or perhaps lost, what remained of his Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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stake (though he gained a working knowledge of Spanish), Nicolas returned to Paris, where he found work more suited to his taste, assisting a dealer on rue Navarin. And, after a year or two, once he had secured the means to do so, perhaps in part through a successful marriage in 1906 to Marie-Thérèse (Ezilda) Lascombes de Laroussilhe, he opened an antiques business of his own at 48 rue Laffitte. If not exactly a marriage of convenience, it was one at least motivated for both partners by the business opportunities it represented. Ezilda’s family, having made and lost a small fortune of its own running a prosperous but doomed-to-obsolescence fiacre manufactory (horse-drawn carriages being no longer a growth industry around 1900), operated a small hotel in the neighborhood. The new enterprise offered at least diversification and perhaps a better investment. Nicolas, for his part, gained not just fresh capital but inspiration. The de Laroussilhe homestead, Pratoucy, in the south of France a few kilometers from Latronquière in the Lot Valley, where the Parisian family, Ezilda, her older brother, Lucien, numerous cousins, and now Nicolas, spent their holidays, was surrounded by medieval vestiges—churches, ruins, and châteaux—the spoils from which were shortly destined to become La Fayette Art Gallery’s principal stock in trade, along with similar artifacts from elsewhere in the region. According to the original rental contract, still preserved in the Brimo Archives, Nicolas first set up shop in late June 1909, directly next door to his brother Antoine. The building, which still stands, enjoyed the quarter’s signature dramatic view to the north of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, a seventeenth-century Roman-style basilica rebuilt in the 1830s, above which hovered the white dome of Sacré-Cœur. It shared a narrow corner with 30 rue de Provence, having two entrances, one on each street, though the rue Laffitte provided the better address. In addition to a ground floor, a mezzanine, and two basement levels for storage, there were three sheds in the courtyard (formerly stables) and a back staircase for deliveries. Nicolas and Ezilda moved into a third-floor apartment above the gallery.6 For a year or two, before deciding to specialize in medieval paintings, statuary, reliquary, and architectural fragments from the Quercy region, Nicolas ran what his granddaughter, more than a century later, would term a “bazaar d’Istanbul.” He was himself more a “marchand d’horloge,” trading in bric-a-brac like old clocks, than the higher-end antiquarian dealer he would soon become. Nicolas tried everything, even shipping crates of bottled perfume back to Manila for his brothers to sell. They reported that their customers disliked the smell.7 We get an idea of his general inventory from that of his older brother, who never specialized, as reported in the 56-page catalogue of Antoine’s estate sale some years later, presumably after Nicolas had culled the stock: in addition to antiquities, earthenware, glassware, ivories, and bronzes, there were guns and swords, books and manuscripts, carpets and rugs, plus several categories of even more miscellaneous objects.8 Nicolas’s own turn to medieval art around 1911 was well timed to take advantage of an unprecedented availability of high-quality, not particularly expensive artifacts. The business name he chose, half French and half English, though a play on the The Evolution of Taste

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nearby rue La Fayette (a more major thoroughfare into which he would in fact soon expand), with its casual use of the phrase “Art Gallery” and its invocation of the Marquis de La Fayette (spelled “Lafayette” in the United States), the “French friend” of American Independence, astutely targeted a burgeoning American market for precisely the goods Nicolas would purvey. With newfound confidence and focus, in June 1911, he wrote letters introducing himself and offering his services not just to museums such as the Kaiser Friedrich in Berlin and the Victoria and Albert in London but also much farther afield, describing an Egyptian sculpture of possible interest in his letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.9 His first sales to an American collector date to this period. That client, most auspiciously, was J. P. Morgan, who apparently wandered into the gallery and purchased a plate Nicolas had recently acquired from a Spanish dealer, Pablo Tachard, and who, on a subsequent visit early the following year, also bought an ivory plaque titled The Creation of the Animals and an early twelfth-century champlevé enamel copper chrismatory decorated with angels, used as a receptacle for sacramental oils. Not long after, upon Morgan’s death, all three works would enter the collections of the Met.10 Nicolas would owe his great success over the years in large part to the favor of customers in Baltimore and Philadelphia, Boston and New York, who either visited the gallery in person or purchased its offerings through agents. But he very often found it useful not to handle these relationships himself. Not yet twenty-five and looking and sounding like the recent immigrant he was, in an effort to improve his access to more serious or simply more conservative collectors likely to feel better dealing with a seller who was more in the Parisian mainstream, Nicolas went into fluid partnership very early on with Henri François Daguerre, an otherwise somewhat obscure member of the French nobility and dealer himself, whose title, Marquis de Saint Lever, served Nicolas well with his American clientele. The two men were careful to work together behind the scenes, leaving as little written trace of their business dealings as possible, with Daguerre, as prête-nom, or unacknowledged front, literally lending his name to given transactions for either a fee or a percentage. Such transactions à l’amiable, or unrecorded business dealings, served other ends as well: part and parcel of a calculated vagueness in record keeping characteristic of the period art market, they served to protect valuable proprietary information from competitors, potential buyers, and government regulators alike. Although the exact nature of Nicolas’s partnership with Daguerre, especially in the very early years, is thus difficult to determine, closely read, an unlabeled leatherbound photo album, kept at the gallery perhaps as a discreet aide-mémoire to document items of importance either owned or held, offers some sense of their transactions. The album somewhat fancifully includes a nineteenth-century print rather than a photograph documenting a late fifteenth-century oak doorway and staircase enclosure from the courtyard of a private residence sold directly to the Met in 1913, nominally by Daguerre, in addition to three photo portraits of Daguerre himself, including the one reproduced here (fig. 4).11 The unrecorded back-andforth movement of objects between the two men was facilitated by the closeness of

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Fig. 4 | Henri François Daguerre (Marquis de Saint Lever), undated. Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

their dealings. Because they worked together every day, there was no real need to commit details to paper, making it impossible to know, for instance, whether Nicolas owned most works outright and simply sold them “through” Daguerre, or whether Daguerre also had an ownership interest. The unrecorded nature of their dealings helps to explain the near absence of the name “Nicolas Brimo” from period provenance records. As this approach to doing business gained traction, Nicolas, thought it time to start a family. On 27 March 1911, Ezilda gave birth to their first son, to whom they gave the grand name René Georges Brimo de Laroussilhe, a gesture of calculated if presumptive upward class mobility very much in keeping with Nicolas’s borrowing of the nobiliary status of Daguerre. Ezilda’s family name, de Laroussilhe, was itself merely a bourgeois fiction, having evolved over the course of about a generation from Roussilhe, to la Roussilhe, to de la Roussilhe, to—in the end—de Laroussilhe.12 That first son is the René Brimo, author of L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections, with whom this account will be most concerned (see frontispiece). On 19 December 1914, during the winter holiday, a second son, Albert Antoine Brimo de Laroussilhe, was born in Sénaillac, not far from Pratoucy. In Paris, both boys would attend the École Rocroy Saint-Léon, a traditional Catholic school occupying two seventeenth-century buildings on the nearby rue du FaubourgPoissonière, but, in a real sense, they grew up in the gallery, absorbed by its rhythms

The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 5 | René Brimo and Albert Brimo “en col marin,” ca. 1919. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

Fig. 6 | Antoine Brimo on his deathbed, 1919. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

of purchases and sales, schooled in their father’s connoisseurial and entrepreneurial taste. Despite his increasing prosperity, Nicolas worked both himself and his sons hard. He had what he considered his own seat—front row left—at the Hôtel Drouot, from which he would summarily eject unknowing bidders. Luigi Bellini, an Italian antiquarian dealer who came to know him well, described Nicolas as “a large man with a round face and small intense eyes, his black bowler hat planted amid a shock of disheveled hair,” a clever businessman with a good eye for resale potential as well as quality who made a dramatic first impression, “contentious and intractable, a bully with whom one had always to agree in order not to come to blows.”13 Jacques Seligmann’s son Germain would later describe the Hôtel Drouot of that era as twenty-odd dusty rooms filled, on any given occasion, with a throng of strangers, colleagues, and competitors elbowing their way into the presence of an assortment of random objects without benefit of a catalogue, with little time for preliminary viewing and none for research.14 A dealer had to decide quickly; and, according to Bellini, Nicolas had complete trust in his own judgment, and “[h]e always paid well. If an object pleased him and fell within the range of his expertise, its cost was unimportant. He had to have it at any price. Parisian dealers collectively held him in a certain fearful respect.” At the gallery, surrounded by what Bellini thought “a beautiful, select collection of objects” and even more completely in his element, Nicolas

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“moved about with the relaxed self-assurance of a self-made man, able to hold his own against his major competitors and indeed, frequently, to have his way with them.”15 René quite often accompanied his father to Drouot, where, again in the words of Bellini, who knew the Parisian market well, “one might have taken him [Nicolas] to be the leader of a mysterious, powerful syndicate [banda].”16 Where the family was concerned, Nicolas insisted on frugality. They vacationed “at home,” exploring the rich medieval heritage in the vicinity of Pratoucy, the Château d’Assier in particular, about which, in the year of René’s birth, Ezilda’s paternal uncle Ferdinand had published a brief monograph.17 In the early years, they got to know Nicolas’s mother as well, brought over from Constantinople perhaps following their grandfather’s death to live with Antoine in Boulogne-surSeine, just across the river, southwest of Paris. Over the years, René and Albert would meet many if not all their Brimo uncles when the men passed through the city on business. Joseph le jeune, for instance, then thirty, stayed with the family for several months in the spring of 1915, leaving for Manila via New York and San Francisco in June.18 The Brimos’ reliance on foreign markets was a family practice developed in Ottoman Syria as a method of coping with local instability combined with intolerance. For Nicolas, sales to American buyers in particular offered a solution to the effective control over the French and central European art markets exercised by an informal association of better-established, French-born Parisian dealers, referred to collectively by more recent arrivals ( Jews, Armenians, and other foreigners) as the “bande blanche,” or white syndicate, to which Bellini discreetly alluded. Although révisions, or cartels, were prohibited by law, the bande blanche’s control was a de facto constraint of trade, to which their competitors, the selfstyled “bande noire,” responded in kind, operating an equally unofficial counternetwork, through which goods and information circulated.19 Nicolas’s bande noire confederates between the wars included Joseph Altounian, a cousin from Armenia, Jacques Bacri, Joseph Brummer, André and Pierre Fabius, Jacques Seligmann, Dikran Kelekian, Kirkor Minassian, Charles Ratton, and Nathan Wildenstein. They did business together in response to the bande blanche in an effort to compete. No bank, at least none at first, would lend them money, which made it difficult to raise sufficient capital for important purchases. Where one of them could not, however, two or three together could. In practical terms, this meant collectivizing inventory. One colleague might discover a buyer for a goblet who preferred a set of five and put together a sale involving other goblets from the respective stocks of various other colleagues, take a commission, and distribute the gross accordingly. Each dealership developed its own niche. For Nicolas, this came to mean medieval ivories, enamels, architectural fragments, boxes, crosses, reliquaries; for Ratton, pre-Renaissance paintings (“les primitifs”); for Altounian, stone sculptures; for Bacri frères, paintings and tapestries.20 This collective purchasing of works of art by groups of merchants for sale to foreign—most often American—collectors was not uncommon in this period.21 The Evolution of Taste

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Such insider dealings, another version of Nicolas’s transactions à l’aimable with Daguerre, necessitated a certain laxity of record keeping, with the additional consequence of fictionalizing provenance and, in Nicolas’s case, appreciably lowering his public profile. Dealers were required by law to keep an official log (livre de police) in which purchases and sales were to be recorded, its pages stamped at the local prefecture and consecutively numbered. But there was considerable wiggle room; indeed, in actual practice, there were virtually no restrictions. Thus it was common for dealers to record objects in lots rather than individually with generic rather than specific descriptions (e.g., three sixteenth-century paintings), making particular purchases or sales virtually impossible to trace. A dealer would declare having paid or received a certain price for a certain number of works, leaving the price of any given work uncertain. Moreover, payments were often made in cash, so unrecorded, and, in the case of objects loaned for appraisal or consideration (prêtés pour expertise), because no reported sales took place, no logbook entries were required. The unrecorded transactions (plus 30 percent commissions) could be handled informally in cash, trade, or credit. American collectors often preferred to visit just one or two galleries where they were presented objects owned individually or collectively by any number of dealers for whom this collectivizing of inventory helped to obscure the movements of capital and thus also to avoid taxes.22 At some point in the late 1910s, Nicolas expanded the business, opening a second location a short walk to the north at 34 rue La Fayette, the site of an earlier antiquarian dealership, À la vieille Bretagne, where Jacques Helft, another bande noire confederate and a specialist in ancien régime gold and silver plate, had grown up when it was run by his father, Léon. Later in life, Helft fondly remembered its three large windows that opened on the busy street and a spiral staircase leading to a mezzanine that overlooked the main sales floor, where he and his brother (and future business partner), Yvon, used to sit and watch their father work.23 Also a corner location, having a second entrance at 29 rue de la Victoire, the new space was on a streetcar line and had greater visibility as well as a substantial basement, more suitable for long-term storage than the damp cellars at 48 rue Laffitte.24 Though trade was never bad during the war, it took off dramatically around 1921, about the time René turned ten, when it first became clear that he and not his brother, Albert, was to be groomed for the business and destined to work alongside his father.25 Nicolas had risen in the world but had grown, if anything, more stern, proud, ungenerous, and unforgiving, a bit of a tyrant both at home and at work—in this case, an all but irrelevant distinction. Since Antoine’s death in 1919, he had come to see himself as paterfamilias in a larger sense. Ezilda appears to have suffered meekly this Levantine-style domineering, to which their sons adapted, each in his own way. Very quickly after the end of the war, the art world became an international milieu in which the La Fayette Art Gallery prospered. Nicolas had personal contacts in Spain and Italy in addition to his growing circle of connections in the United States and maintained an extensive correspondence with members of his extended

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Fig. 7 | Nicolas and Ezilda Brimo, undated. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

family. Marie-Amélie Carlier, who runs the gallery today, speaks admiringly of this “system or network of relationships that served to channel opportunities into Nicolas’s reach.”26 In March 1917, he had received a letter from the Interior Ministry revoking his right to travel abroad since he lacked a French passport, not entirely unreasonable given the state of hostilities in Europe. Until this pressure was brought to bear, Nicolas had chosen to remain stateless (apatride) rather than retaining his Ottoman citizenship, the easier alternative, though one he found unpalatable due to the conditions that had forced his exile in the first place, or seeking French citizenship, the more difficult alternative, about which he felt, at best, ambivalent. Though he did in the end file the necessary papers, his application took a full decade to process after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 rendered the Ottoman citizenship option moot.27 The ongoing inconvenience of his statelessness contributed to the decision in 1924 to take on his brother-in-law, Lucien de Laroussilhe (“Lulu”), as a minority partner. In exchange for a 30 percent stake in the business, Lucien offered the legal standing and legitimacy Nicolas lacked. Because a nonnational technically could not run a company, Ezilda’s brother, though something less than a true partner, was put nominally in charge. More publicly, these changes involved renaming the gallery “Brimo de Laroussilhe,” combining—and perhaps redeeming—the foreignness of the Armenian “Brimo” with the aristocratic resonance of the French “de Laroussilhe.”28 Wealthy American collectors were the gallery’s best customers in the boom years of the 1920s. Nicolas, who preferred to employ members of the family rather than spend money on salary, went so far as to hire an English-speaking salesman, a The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 8 | Letterhead, Brimo de Laroussilhe, ca. 1924 (detail). Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

certain “M. Chometon,” whose father was French and mother English, to help take care of his American clientele. (Nicolas could get by, it was said, in seven languages himself, including Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, though not English, a language he made certain both René and Albert studied.) Between 1925 and 1930, the Baltimore collector Henry Walters acquired well over 100 works either directly from Brimo de Laroussilhe or through Daguerre, and another 1,300 items, mostly books, over a slightly longer period through Léon Gruel, the other important third-party prête-nom with whom Nicolas worked in his career, a high-end Parisian bookbinder for whom such dealings proved an attractive sideline.29 Walters spent well over a million dollars on art each year during this period and notoriously bought from just a handful of dealers, Daguerre (28 percent of that sum) and Gruel (15 percent) among them. Because most of the other dealers, including Jacques Seligmann (25 percent), were Nicolas’s bande noire confederates, Brimo de Laroussilhe almost certainly accounted for more than half these total purchases, though it appears nowhere in the Walters Art Museum’s records.30 The photographic evidence is overwhelming, however. To take just a single installation image (taken in 1924 or 1925) from the gallery photo album mentioned above, a display of ivory (see Fig. 10). Although Nicolas sold the three fifth-century panels toward the base of the center arrangement representing Christ’s miracles—the healing of a man possessed, a paralytic, and a bleeding woman—to the Louvre, he sold virtually everything else displayed in the image to Walters: the featured work, a mid-eleventh-century casket, whose lid, facing us, shows Scenes of Adam and Eve and of Joseph; a Dormition of the Virgin, the center panel from a triptych carved around the year 1000; a plaque from Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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Fig. 9 | Léon Gruel, undated. Gift from Paul Gruel to Henry Walters. Walters Art Gallery.

a twelfth-century Byzantine casket representing the Sorrowing Adam; a twelfthcentury queen from a Spanish chess set; an early twelfth-century Anglo-Norman carving of the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel, and on and on. Other American collectors to whom Nicolas sold in these years included Raymond Pitcairn, George Barnard, and Isaac Fletcher, the latter two subsequently bequeathing the major works of art involved to public institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, beginning in the mid-1930s, its medieval subsidiary the Cloisters, most particularly.31 Brimo de Laroussilhe did enormously well at home as well,

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Fig. 10 | Sales display, Brimo de Laroussilhe, ca. 1925–26. Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

selling, for instance, as many as five major works in a given year to the Louvre when typically one such sale would have meant prosperity. A principal development was the Soviet deaccession of select works from the Hermitage, beginning in 1927, and the sale abroad of items newly confiscated from private collections, a lucrative however questionable trade in which Nicolas became involved early on and from which his American clients also benefited.32 In 1919, he had purchased Chaponval, a house with a park (or park with a house) at Auvers-sur-Oise, about 40 kilometers north of Paris. Much nearer Paris than Pratoucy was, this became chez Brimo, and soon the family was spending some of its vacations nearer the gallery, rather than with Ezilda’s Aunt Justine down south. And, in 1928, he acquired Daguerre’s private residence at 58 rue Jouffroy in the much trendier seventeenth arrondissement near the Parc Monceau, both to relocate and to consolidate the business.33 The family occupied a nicely appointed top-floor residence consisting of three full-size bedrooms (René’s, filled with morning light, overlooked the street), a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two much smaller bedrooms intended for servants; Brimo de Laroussilhe occupied the first three floors; and there was also a garden.34 Though they were far from the quartier Drouot, interested passersby could catch a glimpse of objects for sale in a retrofitted streetlevel window.35 In 1925, Nicolas had hired a live-in cook, maid, and governess, Suzanne Marnier, née Poidevin, and she had moved with them to the new place. Her son Marcel, just five at the time, would visit her, a great favorite with both boys. They attended the prestigious Lycée Carnot on the Boulevard Malsherbes, just minutes away, from which René would graduate in the spring of 1928.

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Fig. 11 | René Brimo, ca. 1925, wearing his École Rocroy Saint-Léon pin. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

The École du Louvre and the Institut Turned down for military service due to weak lungs, René enrolled that fall at the École du Louvre, intent on more than broadening his education in art history or working closely with museum curators considered among the finest in the world. He and Nicolas had in mind exposure to another side of the international art market, of great potential value both to his own future prospects and to those of Brimo de Laroussilhe. The École offered a three-year course of study with oral exams at the end of each year, followed by an optional fourth year for those who wished to write a thesis—a program design that dated to the school’s founding in 1884. The approximately one in seven who did so successfully received “le Diplôme de l’École du Louvre.” When René attended, the annual tuition of 100 francs provided students in their second through fourth years free admission to the Louvre and all other national museums. Enrollment figures for his entering class are not known, though two years later, in 1930, more than a thousand students attended classes, including 400 auditors. The curriculum consisted of just fifteen courses on a range of mediumand period-specific topics complemented each January and February by off-site activities (museum visits, archaeological demonstrations in the Tuilleries) as well as “museographic” conférences techniques, classes in museum studies avant la lettre The Evolution of Taste

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required of those who, like René, expected to write a thesis. One of these classes introduced students to “the history and general organization of museums, the cataloguing and caring for collections, and the principal museums and historical monuments.” Another, “The History of Modern Art Collections and Museums,” was offered by Gaston Brière, who specialized in French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting.36 René would do much of his course work at the Louvre among objects he felt at home with under the supervision of Paul Vitry, head of the Department of Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern Sculpture, a curatorial internship for which his previous training admirably suited him. His closest friends were not coincidentally also elder sons of well-known antiquarian dealers. Louis Grodecki (“Grod” to his friends), had grown up in Warsaw and studied in Berlin, where he had studied theater production and stage design before moving to Paris to study art history (see pp. 9, 12). At the École, whose strengths lay in the practical nature and coherence of its course of study, one of Grod’s teachers, Charles Mauricheau-Beaupré, recommended he complete his studies by enrolling at a much more recently established division of the Sorbonne across the river, the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, whose approach was more academic and possibly more theoretical.37 When Grod did so in October 1929, the following fall, he brought René along, who in the meantime, that summer, had traveled through Italy for six weeks by car, scribbling copious notes on loose sheets torn from notebooks that he later preserved, frequently folded, in small, somewhat ad hoc files on this or that artist, city, church, monument, style, or collection, organized alphabetically, with, for instance, his notes from Milan and Rome filed under “I” for Italy. Fresh from the trip, with the same mix of seriousness and ingenuousness these notes suggest, René attended student orientation at the Institut in its new building at the entrance to the Jardin du Luxembourg. The very differently beautiful, much smaller Amphithéâtre Richelieu at the old Sorbonne originally used for orientation had been definitively outgrown. From just a handful of students, its first year’s enrollment had grown to 400. In the largest lecture hall, the faculty was introduced by René Schneider, the Institut’s director. Henri Focillon then introduced his great innovation, history of art study groups all new students were encouraged to sign up for.38 René and Grod, along with about half their classmates, did so immediately and in this way became friends with François-Gérard Seligmann, whom René had long known as the son of his father’s bande noire colleague Jacques Seligmann. Having begun his studies at the Institut but less academic minded than his two friends, Seligmann was easily convinced to enroll at the École. Almost exactly the same age, all three took classes together. They also shared their families’ responses to the stock market crash in October 1929, which occurred just as classes began and which had an immediate impact on their fathers’ businesses, as it did on the Parisian art market in general, with its recent dependency on American buyers, whose patronage almost without warning dried up completely.39 In 1911, the year of René’s birth, the city had counted a total of 130

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Fig. 12 | Louis Grodecki with his father, Pawel, Warsaw, ca. 1926. Collection Cathérine Grodecki.

art dealers of every kind, from antiquarian to modern. By the summer of 1929, their number had grown to more than 200. By year’s end, however, most were near bankruptcy and, by 1933, when things at last began to turn around, more than half had closed their doors for good.40 Nicolas, and he was not alone in this, found himself with a great number of items on hand impossible to sell at a profit. The changing The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 13 | Henri Focillon, undated. Photo: Image Works © Roger-Viollet.

conditions and new challenges only focused René’s ambition to turn education to commercial advantage at a time when Parisian dealers combining business acumen with art historical knowledge were few and far between.41 Though an excellent dealer, Nicolas was not a learned man. He was street smart. Academic training offered René and thus the gallery a roughly complementary credential, a different prestige and a different sort of expertise, enabling a different sort of access to collectors and possibly a better approach to American buyers in particular. Whereas Grodecki would eventually make the decision to abandon commerce for the university, going on to become an influential medievalist and a specialist in stained glass, René set his mind on combining the two ambitions in a single career.42 He chose to work with two men previously mentioned, who in time would become his principal academic advisors: René Schneider, since 1927 lecturer in Modern Art, that is to say, art in Europe from the early Renaissance to the present day; and Henri Focillon, since 1924 lecturer in Medieval Art and Archaeology. From Schneider over the course of three years, he would take “Art in Italy and France, Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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1600–1660” and “Portraiture after Clouet”; from Focillon, “Medieval Murals,” “Gothic Sculpture,” and “Romanesque Architecture.” The young Brimo became a study group organizer, arranging visits to museums all over France. And, at the end of his first year, popular among his classmates, he was chosen to serve on the committee responsible for mentoring new students and, along with Grod, was made a teaching assistant, to both his teachers at various points. By late spring 1932, he had completed his course work at the École including a research paper for Paul Vitry on the architectural and sculptural decoration of four twelfth- and thirteenth-century châteaux in the Lot Valley that he had been visiting since childhood: Haut-Quercy, Castelnau-Bretenoux, Montal, and Assier. Following a trip to London in July 1932 (during which he posed for a playful photo outside the high-end department store Selfridges, recording for posterity much personal information, including his weight at the time, just shy of 9 stone, barely 120 pounds), this course work led in turn to thesis work on the château and church at Assier, which he submitted for his diplôme at the École in December 1932.43 That December, he also published an article based on his research on two wood sculptures from Assier at the Musée de Cahors in Bulletin des Musées de France,44 thus capitalizing on his academic studies. The research itself permitted Brimo de Laroussilhe to identify and obtain from individuals, municipalities, and on the open market similarly displaced objects, which it could resell at a profit, confirming that René’s work in art history could be key to a commercial strategy. With barely a pause, he undertook a related study of the nearby Abbaye Saint-Sauveur de Figeac, and, remarkably ambitious for a twenty-one-year-old, met with Georges Wildenstein, longtime editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, regarding its possible publication.45 When that journal showed no interest, he turned to the Bulletin de la Société des Études du Lot, again without success.46 Undaunted, over the winter of 1932–33, he approached Claude Augé, managing director of the French publisher Larousse, and obtained Augé’s commitment to publish his thesis “Le château et l’église d’Assier” as a monograph in the series “Les plus grands édifices de France” (or so René reported to at least one correspondent from whom he sought the necessary photographs he hoped to reproduce).47 Instead, he was apparently asked by Augé to write for the more widely read encyclopedia-periodical Larousse Mensuel, initiating what would prove a long relationship. His first essay on Castelnau-Bretenoux would appear in June 1933 and his second, concerning the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie itself, that October, calculated if not motivated by a desire to please his teachers there eager to see the fruits of their labors publicly acknowledged. Both were in any case professionally written for the most part and handsomely illustrated.48 Before either essay appeared, in May 1933, René had submitted a second thesis, this time at the Institut, titled “La sculpture de bronze en France au XVIième siècle” (Sixteenth-Century Bronze Sculpture in France), on which he had been working all spring under Schneider’s supervision for an undergraduate degree in history and geography,49 and which he immediately submitted for publication in La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot. The 95-page manuscript appeared in serial form over a six-week The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 14 | Portrait of Paul J. Sachs with drawing of Frédéric Villot by Delacroix, ca. 1945. Fogg History Photographs, Fogg Benefactors, file 2. Harvard Art Museums Archives, Harvard University. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

period from late July through mid-September 1933, every Wednesday and Saturday, among advertising copy and auction results.50 A long academic essay was unusual fare for the Gazette, suggesting Nicolas may have had a hand in its acceptance. And, through it all, René continued an ongoing, long-term collaboration with Focillon on a catalogue of casts of foreign sculpture at the Louvre.51

Life in America: Boston and New York Also in the spring of 1933, and now clearly in pursuit of his doctorate, René embarked upon a plan that combined the history and the business of art with travel to the United States. Though Schneider later would take credit for encouraging it,52 the new plan was certainly inspired by a series of lectures at the Institut that winter and spring by Harvard professor Paul J. Sachs on American art and American museums. In Europe on a year-long sabbatical as “Exchange Professor to France,” Sachs had delivered nine lectures in Paris and sixteen others at various French provincial universities and in Bonn, then reprised the entire series in London at the Courtauld.53 His theme, the role private collectors in America had played in “elevating the cultural milieu” through contributions of capital and collections to the development of Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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public museums, had struck a chord with René. Sachs, recently elected president of the American Association of Museums, had spoken inspirationally of “the necessity for museum leaders to maintain vital connections with a cosmopolitan art world” and of the vital importance to museums of collecting “original works of art of the highest visual quality.”54 He had made a point of promoting opportunities for international exchange that included fellowships from Harvard. René immediately recognized the opportunity this represented, as did his father. Regardless of the economic downturn and market conditions at that time, American collectors clearly held the key to future commercial success, and travel to America promised new contacts with them. Without question, René, who had turned twenty-two in March 1933, also found international travel personally appealing. He was, after all, still living at home, constrained to do his father’s bidding. But the pursuit of gallery business seems to have been always on his mind. When a bout of influenza had ended plans to travel to Berlin with Grod that spring, as if in compensation, seeking both opportunities to widen his horizons and new outlets for his research, he had initiated a collaboration with Gazetta Antiquaria, a scholarly trade journal published in Florence by the Associazione Antiquari d’Italia. But Harvard and Boston had a particular professional appeal. Although medallions from the Sainte-Chapelle had been brought home by William Poyntell to Philadelphia in 1803, American collecting of medieval art had known its first true efflorescence in late nineteenth-century Boston, promoted by Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard’s first professor of Art History, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, with Isabella Stewart Gardner very prominently the first major collector.55 Harvard’s art museum, the Fogg, which began in 1899 strictly as a teaching collection borrowed from Edward W. Forbes (class of 1895), had by 1911 acquired thirty-five socalled Primitives or pre-Renaissance paintings by Italian artists. Sachs had taken over in 1915 as assistant director and after the war made it a mission to acquire medieval art. Harvard’s medievalist Arthur Kingsley Porter, first hired in 1920, changed the museum’s focus from Italian Primitives to Romanesque sculpture beginning almost immediately with a twelfth-century head from the basilica cathedral of Saint-Denis. Two years later, the museum acquired a number of major works, including capitals from the abbey church of Moutiers- Saint-Jean from Nicolas’s confederate, Georges Demotte. Porter and Sachs each donated medieval stained glass to the museum from their own collections in 1924 and 1925. Their efforts to make the Fogg’s the foremost university collection of medieval art in the country had its complement in the seriousness of Porter’s scholarship and that of his fellow medievalist Kenneth Conant.56 In his application for a fellowship, René described an ambitious program of research into the evolution of taste in the United States, for which his own background at the École and the Institut, on the one hand, and at Brimo de Laroussilhe, on the other, had well prepared him, yet that absolutely required research in America and more particularly at Harvard. There is no question as to the nature of the “gallery logic” behind this proposal: the gathering of intelligence. The opening of The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 15 | Portrait of Edward W. Forbes, undated. Photographs of the Harvard Art Museum (HC 22), file 3.185. Harvard Art Museums Archives, Harvard University. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Mrs. Gardner’s “Fenway Park” had been followed a decade later by that of George Grey Barnard’s “Cloisters” in New York, sparking new interest in medieval art, recently heightened by John D. Rockefeller’s public purchase of the Barnard collection for the Met in 1927, a fashion affecting private collectors as well as public institutions.57 Nicolas considered such collectors, who for decades had contributed to his own prosperity, not merely as past or future customers for particular works but as current owners likely at some point to resell works previously acquired. What Brimo de Laroussilhe stood to gain was knowledge concerning who owned what, acquired at what price. Discovering the whereabouts of objects, then as now, involved a particular sort of detective work in which Sachs, best known for his “Museum Course” (first taught in 1921 and from which, by 1927, already virtually Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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every museum curator and director in the country had “graduated”), promised to be an important guide. Such research involved winning the confidence of collectors, a mode of networking in which René specialized. As both Brimos well knew, public records were enormously unhelpful in this regard, often intentionally so. The scholarly, and in another way diplomatic, logic behind René’s proposal to study the history of American collecting was equally strong. It was a historical ambition without precedent, something true even of the least ambitious version he came up with, simply to catalogue Romanesque sculpture in American collections. It was also a Franco-American project very much in keeping with the purpose of his fellowship from Harvard: to, in Brimo’s own words, “make . . . some slight contribution to relations between sister civilizations that, as is so often the case between close relatives, think to know one another even too well, at the expense of possibly misunderstanding one another altogether!”58 He enlisted the support of his mentors and applied for additional funding. The letters of recommendation composed on his behalf, preserved at Harvard, endorsed both project and its author in the strongest possible terms. Vitry described him as one of the finest students to have graduated from the École in years, praising not just his “capacity for individual research” but his “extremely pure artistic sensibility.” Schneider testified to his effort, erudition, and, perhaps fittingly, taste. Pierre Lavedan, whom he had gotten to know at the Institut, thought him “a hardworking student of the greatest interest.” Charles Picard, a prominent Classical archaeologist and historian of the arts of ancient Greece, described his “lively intelligence and fresh curiosity [as] remarkable” and thought him “well-prepared for the task ahead.” Jacques Vanuxem, a specialist in Gothic art, considered René’s analytic rigor (“sa science”) and clear thinking certain to represent French methods and culture well in America. Marcel Aubert, writing as a curator at the Louvre, singled out René’s thesis on the Château d’Assier for particular praise.59 Focillon was already in America teaching a six-week course at Yale in the spring of 1933, the first in an ongoing, biennial exchange, as René had noted in his essay on the Institut in Larousse Mensuel, directly after reporting “the pleasure of hearing Harvard professor Sachs share his research on American print collections.”60 The exchange of professors between European and American universities had been formalized earlier in the century when Germany in 1905 and France in 1911 had signed bilateral agreements with the most important American universities, hoping to demonstrate the superiority of their respective approaches to higher education and making exchange professors something like cultural ambassadors. Aubert, who had been a prisoner of war in Germany, proudly patriotic, did a stint at Harvard in 1928 and lectured at other campuses, including Yale, which expressed an interest in formalizing the relationship. Then, in 1932, to minimize his absences from the École, Aubert had proposed to alternate semesters with Focillon. Together, they had organized a two-year program in New Haven in medieval archaeology.61

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When René asked Focillon to write a letter of recommendation in April 1933, his mentor did so with pleasure, making clear to Sachs that his young protégé was “one of the best students ever to have come out of the Institut.” His teaching at Yale had given him a good idea of the qualities necessary for success at Harvard, Focillon wrote, and here was “an original thinker, an entirely first rate candidate.”62 To René himself, he effused, “My dear friend, I should hope this letter makes clear my affectionate esteem for you. I’m quite sure you’re the man for the job.”63 There appears to have been general agreement on this point. In May, René received word that he had been awarded a Fiske fellowship from Harvard for the coming year, renewable, plus a Victor Chapman scholarship from the Office National des Universités et Écoles Françaises. In June, he learned that he had received, in addition, 10,000 francs from the Sorbonne for study abroad, drawn from a fund established in honor of two former professors, David Weill and Ernest Lavisse. In July, he reported this success to Sachs, who had been newly appointed chair of Harvard’s Department of Fine Arts. René planned to arrive that fall and wondered “whether, in order to make the most of my time in the States, it might be possible for me to sit for exams and return home with a degree, and if so what exams might be available to me.”64 The response he received some three weeks later is worth quoting in its entirety:

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My dear Mr. Brimo: I beg to acknowledge with thanks receipt of your interesting communication of the 19th ult., and note with pleasure that you are coming to us for the academic year 1933–34 as a student and specialist in the history of art. We shall be very pleased to receive you here, and I wish you would say to your teachers and my friends, M. Schneider and M. Focillon, that we shall do everything that we can here at Harvard to make your year a pleasant and profitable one, so that you may continue your studies in your chosen field, and may be helped in the development of your interesting thesis on “The Evolution of Taste in the Formation of American Collections in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” As Chairman of the Division of Fine Arts at Harvard University I shall be very glad, on your arrival, to discuss with you the details of your program, and also whether it is wise for you to carry out your laudable purpose to secure some sort of a diploma or degree while you are here. It may be possible for you to do this, but I cannot promise it, since so much depends upon the character of your earlier training. Furthermore, it has always seemed to me exceedingly difficult for any scholar who is transplanted from one country to another to secure in one year a higher degree. I do not say that it is impossible, but I believe it to be difficult, and in any case it seems to me wise to postpone a discussion of this question until we can do so by word of mouth. In the meantime I understand that your friend and countryman, M. [Marcel] Françon, who knows conditions intimately both in

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France and in America (since he is a teacher at this University), is also writing to you on this subject. I look forward, then, to greeting you here, and I repeat that I shall do all that I can to make your year just as profitable and enjoyable as possible. Will you be good enough to present my very friendly greetings to Messrs. Schneider and Focillon, and believe me to be, dear Sir, Very truly yours, Paul J. Sachs65

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That summer, René also traveled again to London, an opportunity to visit collections and to meet with dealers there with whom Brimo de Laroussilhe did business. He very likely had it in mind to work on his English as well. In August 1933, after a pleasant crossing, he arrived in the States as an exchange student under the auspices of the Institute of International Education in New York, whose offices he visited upon his arrival.66 But he met with other contacts in New York as well—business associates of his father’s. He met first with Joseph Brummer, an old family friend and specialist in both medieval and modern art. A Hungarian Jew, Brummer had come to Paris penniless in 1912, at first sleeping in doorways. Through informal apprenticeships with various antiquarian dealers he had learned the trade and made a name for himself, reputedly the first to sell works of African sculpture to Picasso and his circle. By 1920, Brummer had relocated to New York, where, by the end of the decade, annual exhibitions of modern sculpture at his dealership on 57th Street—along with his “eccentric and rough-hewn ways”—had made him “a revered figure” in the New York art world, a key player. Each winter or early spring on his way through Paris from summers spent in Greece, Egypt, or the Middle East in search of antiquities, he would stop by Brimo de Laroussilhe for an extended visit.67 Their long history of doing business had warmed into a friendship that led Nicolas to rely on Brummer to take care of his son during his stay in America, passing along money and professional guidance.68 In late September, René took the train to Boston from Grand Central Station and settled in at Harvard, sharing a room in Divinity Hall, where foreign students were housed. Despite the scholarship support, Ezilda worried about the cost of living. What was René doing for meals, at what expense? A care package she prepared for hand delivery by one Mademoiselle Rousseau contained a blue velours bedspread, two embroidered runners for his dresser, and a pair of wool socks from his Aunt Mina, along with personal and professional calling cards.69 His father reported that René’s cat, Daïna, looked for him every morning and, in a subsequent letter, enclosed a lottery ticket (“Hope you have better luck than I do!”) and reminded him of his devotions.70 Nicolas’s other advice was more secular. René should write once a week, study hard, and be wary of American women, who represented a double danger. Laws regarding sexual relations with college-age women were, he was to keep in mind, particularly severe in the United States.71 In an undated letter René received shortly The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 16 | Divinity Hall, Harvard, ca. 1932. Harvard University Archives, HUV 308 (3–4).

after his arrival, his younger brother, Albert, inquired whether Radcliffe girls were “voluptueuses ou jolies.” (The conjunction makes little sense unless he means “sexually available” or “lovely and refined.”) There was the risk of entrapment, his father wrote. René should be careful what company he fell into, be cautious of “flirtatious American women” prone to disrupt his ambitions, and, in any case, “attempt to aim as high as possible. If fate would have it that you marry in America, don’t forget that a successful union involves the mind as much as the heart.” René’s father derided romance as suitable only for “popular fiction.”72 Where the business of art was concerned, Nicolas advised his son to make as many connections as possible, especially among the upper middle classes (“dans le milieu haut bourgeois”). After all, René would be “selling eventually to them.” Because he would be working at the Fogg, he should meet its curators and use those connections to meet curators elsewhere, even at smaller, lesser-known regional museums. Even such “out of the way places” were not to be overlooked, for every contact was “extremely valuable” to someone “in the business of buying and selling art.” It was a lesson the vicissitudes of his own career had taught him. “Relationships are everything in life. You should get to know as many people as possible.”73 The principal class René enrolled in that fall was Sachs’s “Museum Work and Museum Problems” (Fine Arts 15a), known simply as the “Museum Course.” The role of museums in the postwar market for art cannot be overestimated despite the dominance of wealthy private collectors in fact and public imagination both. Museum connections were of obvious use to Brimo de Laroussilhe, but the conMaking Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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verse was clearly true as well, and not just in Paris, “friendly relations with the trade” being, in Germain Seligmann’s words, “of considerable benefit to a museum. A dealer often has advance information about collections which are to be sold, or knows of a collector who is in the mood to make a donation, or, more practically, is himself willing to assist in making possible an expensive [museum] purchase.”74 Nicolas was always on the lookout for opportunities to do business with American museums. Such sales were particularly advantageous: they brought prestige, and payment could be counted on. He had developed a good working relationship with Wilhelm Valentiner at the Detroit Institute of Art75 and been asked to handle a Yale Art Gallery purchase of sculpture from a private collection, both around 1925. He had worked with Blake-More Godwin, director of the Toledo Art Museum, who was interested in acquiring a Romanesque or Gothic cloister around which to develop a new wing, proposing to sell him elements from the Abbaye de Grandselves including thirty-two columns with capitals and twenty-one bases.76 But, though rich in objects, he lacked direct access to the American institutions that most interested him. Nicolas had been selling to the Louvre for a decade and would always credit the museum’s 200,000-franc purchase of a twelfth-century, champlevé enamel armilla, a ceremonial armlet representing the Resurrection of Christ from the Basilevsky collection, in the fall of 1934 with getting Brimo de Laroussilhe out of the Depression.77 He lost money on that sale, as Lucien (Lulu) would remind him, but gained something more essential: liquidity and renown: due to its provenance, it was among the most important pieces the gallery had ever handled. But when it came to selling a twelfth-century silver chalice from the same collection to the Met a few months later, Nicolas, who had been involved in moving objects deaccessioned from the Hermitage from the beginning, had felt the need to call on his old friend Joseph Brummer.78 Much of the medieval art that entered American collections in these years was sold by Nicolas (or by his bande noire colleague Joseph Altounian) through Brummer, who enjoyed the necessary access to the graduates of Sachs’s Museum Course that Nicolas lacked, but that his son would not. “To buy is easy; finding a buyer much more difficult” became Nicolas’s mantra; he would repeat this phrase years later to his grandchildren.79 Forbes took René on at the Fogg as his curatorial assistant, profiting from and also flattering his expertise. We know he found time to socialize as well, dining and visiting with a circle of mostly well-born, generally far wealthier classmates who referred to him affectionately as “Brimo de Laroussilhe.”80 He became close friends with Forbes’s research assistant, Agnes Mongan, a connoisseur of Old Master drawings then in the midst of preparing a catalogue of works on paper in the Fogg collection, who was to remain a lifelong friend.81 And despite his father’s warning, or perhaps with it in mind, René kept busy grading the papers of Radcliffe undergraduates as a teaching assistant to Marcel Françon, whom Sachs had mentioned in his letter of acceptance (and with whom René s collaborating on an article) while amusing a “coterie of attractive young women” at the Fogg and keeping company The Evolution of Taste

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with a “certain blonde waitress” in Harvard Square.82 On the other hand, he decorated his dormitory walls with male nudes by William Littlefield, the openly gay son of wealthy Bostonians whom he knew personally, much to the dismay of the Irish housekeeper in charge of the floor, who must have recognized their homoerotic suggestion, no doubt ironically only enhanced by the blue velours bedspread Ezilda had chosen as a homey touch.83 For René, who was never to marry, Littlefield, who had trained at and still frequented the Fogg, was but one of a number of men involved professionally in the arts—painters, curators, and collectors—with whom he forged close relationships that appear to have sustained him throughout his adult life.84 René did well at Harvard. In their letters of evaluation at year’s end, his advisors praised his active curiosity, work ethic, and erudition; the liveliness, indeed the freshness of his approach to art history; and his ability to get along well with both classmates and teachers. His confident self-assurance, essential to success in the social milieus in which he hoped to circulate, ingratiated him with his mentors in Cambridge from the first. Paul Sachs, the eldest son of Samuel Sachs, a partner in the international banking firm of Goldman, Sachs & Company, and Louisa Goldman Sachs, the daughter of partner Marcus Goldman, made respect for this threshold of acceptable decorum a matter of Museum Course pedagogy. His own “happy childhood,” according to Sally Anne Duncan, his granddaughter and biographer, had included frequent visits to the great art museums of Europe, as a result of which he liked to play the genteel part of old school connoisseur. While attending Harvard as an undergraduate, Sachs had spent his summers in New York working for his father and had joined the firm upon graduating in 1900. “With his vivid memory for people,” Duncan writes, “he would later regale his Museum Course students with stories and sketches” featuring the many collectors, curators, and dealers, in Paris as well as in New York, whom he had first met during his banking years.85 Edward Forbes, who as a maternal grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was equally though differently well connected, had offered Sachs the assistant directorship at the Fogg as much for his connections to New York money as for his art world expertise, though Sachs would only accept the position if it came with real administrative and teaching responsibilities.86 He had immediately established a presence in Cambridge by purchasing Shady Hill, the ancestral home of Charles Eliot Norton.87 As Forbes’s protégé, Sachs had come to know members of Boston’s cultural elite such as Denman Waldo Ross, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Bernard Berenson and had developed his own skills as a connoisseur through the acquisition of the large collection of prints about which René would later hear him lecture in Paris.88 Sachs had climbed the academic ranks at Harvard in the Department of Fine Arts: assistant professor in 1917, associate professor in 1922, and full professor in 1927. As Duncan persuasively argues, however, Sachs imagined the Museum Course “from the point of view of a businessman, a museum director, and a connoisseur, not an art historian or scholar; his emphasis was practical, problem-solving, and objectoriented.”89 Friday classes at Shady Hill frequently featured guest lectures by

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museum professionals and visiting scholars.90 He spent “as much time discussing the personalities and backgrounds of dealers as he did collectors.”91 In a November 1933 letter to his son, Nicolas shared his sense of the fragility of the gallery’s prospects. The turnaround was in sight; the sale of the twelfth-century armilla to the Louvre was a clear sign. And yet, he wrote, “[h]ere everyone’s whispering that Russia and America are going in together against Japan, that war is fatally close. Given the nature of the American economy, the United States might well see an upsurge in business opportunities, in the domestic market especially. Not to get carried away, but it seems certain (if it does come to war) that our profession will know greater prosperity. Let us prepare ourselves for that eventuality by securing all possible advantages. Make a study of the American art market in preparation for future operations.”92 This was the project with which love interests might interfere. Even René’s other thesis idea, to make a study of medieval sculpture in American collections, was just a variation on the same project of immersion in the American market by academic means.93 During that first year at Harvard, René appears to have followed his father’s advice to do whatever was necessary for Sachs to consider him an obedient student. “The better impression he has of you, the more helpful he’ll be to you when it comes to business affairs later on.”94 Sachs, somewhat of a generalist himself, liked to encourage the same breadth in his students. American collectors and museums were increasingly catholic in their taste. Not only should René study hard, Nicolas advised, he should do what he could to broaden his knowledge of ancient art— Greek, Egyptian, Chaldean, and Assyrian—as well as the arts of Persia and the Levant. Brummer, with whom Nicolas apparently had recently spoken, agreed— especially if he planned to buy and sell works from those traditions in the future.95 For the same reason, Nicolas thought René should always include “de Laroussilhe” in his name: not only was doing so “his right,” but, given the American “infatuation with such things,” a calculated use of the nobiliary particle and classically French family name could hardly hurt his prospects.96 Nicolas urged him to pay “courtesy calls” on other key New York dealers of his acquaintance besides Brummer at René’s earliest convenience, Nicolas’s maternal cousin Kirkor Minassian, a specialist in Islamic and Near Eastern antiquities, first and foremost.97 La Fayette Art Gallery and later Brimo de Laroussilhe had done business with Minassian ever since he had relocated his antiquarian dealership from Constantinople to Paris in 1916. Following the success a decade later of a sales exhibitions of Coptic tapestries, Persian pottery, antique rugs and textiles, Roman glass from Syria, Indo-Persian and Rajput miniatures, and Persian and Indian jewelry from his personal collection in New York, Minassian had permanently relocated there. He provided René a place to stay when in the city and an old typewriter on which to write his papers. In October 1933, he reported to Nicolas having received two letters from René, and reassured him that he would give the boy both “good advice” and, if it should prove necessary, assistance. Minassian went so far as to take the train to Boston the following month to pay him a visit.98 The Evolution of Taste

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Minassian helped put young Brimo in touch with the other New York dealers his father had recommended he see, including Arnold Seligmann, his friend François-Gérard’s uncle, whose firm specialized in contemporary European art with, since 1904, galleries in Paris and on Fifth Avenue in New York; Lucien Demotte, a Belgian-born specialist in medieval French art, who also owned a gallery in Paris and another on New York’s East 57th Street; and Joseph Duveen, a Dutch Jew knighted for philanthropy in 1919, who since 1927 had made a fortune buying up works of art from European aristocrats hard up for cash and selling them to American multimillionaires like Henry Clay Frick, William Randolph Hearst, Henry E. Huntington, J. P. Morgan, Samuel H. Kress, Andrew Mellon, and John D. Rockefeller. In November 1933, René met with Duveen’s nephew and junior partner, Armand Lowengard, and with James J. Rorimer, the new, Harvard-educated director of the Department of Medieval Art at the Met responsible for the Cloisters, with whom Nicolas had been doing business through Daguerre.99 Observing this activity, Minassian took pains to reassure Nicolas that he had no reason to worry about his son. “He’s much better off here than in France,” Minassian wrote, not to mention “much more resourceful [débrouillard]” than his “stoic reserve” might suggest.100 Joseph Brummer agreed with this assessment, reporting early in 1934: “I saw your son, and had luncheon and dinner with him. He also came here [Brummer’s own gallery on East 57th Street] a couple of times, and I showed him some of our objects. Perhaps he mentioned it to you. I liked him very much. He’s an intelligent boy, and I am certain he’ll make good in life.”101 Indeed, in his time in Cambridge, René would do what he could to pursue Brimo de Laroussilhe’s interests, showing around photos of objects his father hoped to sell. These included a painting by Gauguin, an early thirteenth-century copper goblet worth 75,000 francs being held by Daguerre,102 a large sculpted stone baptismal font from around the same period (though with seventeenth-century elements), earlier sold by another bande noire dealer, Raoul Heilbronner, to a client who wanted 100,000 francs “but might be willing to bargain,”103 and a late fifteenthcentury triptych by Bernard van Orley with whose price, according to Nicolas, René was already familiar.104 In the fall of 1934, he mailed his father the list, updated annually, of some 2,000 European and American dealers and collectors that Sachs passed out to students in the Museum Course;105 that spring, he had found a buyer for a Daumier that his friend Jacques Bacri had asked him to help sell for 100,000 francs.106 When Nicolas wrote from Spain, where works of art were less expensive, aware that Porter had made trips there recently himself for the same reason, to request that his son go through the accession records at the Fogg to learn what he could about prices and availabilities, René did so immediately.107 The heightened seriousness of René’s role in the business occasioned even more specific instructions from his father, who attempted to share what the art world had taught him since leaving Constantinople. He begged his son “never to declare a work of art a fake, even if it belongs to your worst enemy. ‘Fake’ is one term an antiquarian dealer must never utter.” René should, when asked his opinion,

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always “be as positive as possible” and take pains to keep his private feelings to himself, “where they belong.” If the conversation turned to individuals they knew, the same principle obtained, especially where Brummer was concerned : “[K] nowing how close we are, be sure to sing his praises, insisting on the range and breadth of his expertise.”108 René apparently had described in a letter his disagreement in class over an attribution presented as true and certain, to which Nicolas responded: “Sachs and Miss [Gisela Marie Augusta] Richter are exactly right— that head of Apollo is exceptionally rare and its authenticity beyond question! Don’t get a reputation as always having something negative to say. That’s never popular, and it makes enemies.”109 There is a certain ironic symmetry—or perhaps merely Franco-Armenian pragmatism, American-style—in Nicolas’s advice to be false oneself by never calling attention to error or falseness in others. In the same letter in which he had advised his son to be cautious in managing relationships with women, Nicolas had warned

Fig. 17 | René Brimo, ca. summer 1934. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

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him to be always friendly, kind, and helpful to the Jews he would be certain to encounter among his classmates. As he well knew, the art world in which they made their living (“notre métier”) was largely a Jewish affair. Maintaining extremely good relations only made good sense and should prove easy because, in Nicolas’s experience, Jews generally got along well with the French.110 That the Brimo family’s origins were almost certainly Jewish was perhaps a case in point. Nicolas, himself the product of a Catholic education, had sent his own sons to Catholic school; he gave money conspicuously and proudly to Maronite causes, a wise calculation, as we will see. But René’s brother, Albert, maintained an active interest in Judaism throughout his life and was quite knowledgeable about the subject. Even Ezilda, writing in October 1934, asked whether René had yet paid a call on Rabbi Maurice Harris, one of the Jewish diaspora’s most visible figures, when in New York.111 This careful image management reflected Nicolas’s astute recognition that Brimo de Laroussilhe could not yet compete based solely on inventory with betterestablished international dealers. Sachs, after a visit to the gallery in September 1935, would report to Forbes that he had found “the place” a disappointment, indeed “full of ‘tripe.’ . . . [B]ut for our young friend Brimo[, one] would find it a waste of time to spend many hours there. Of course some good or fair things—but so much that’s second rate[,] & elsewhere there is so much that is ‘must have.’ What disturbed me (all the more credit of course to young Brimo) is that his family is so very common.”112 Although Sachs could well afford this attitude, the gallery could not. As Nicolas had reminded his son upon his arrival in America: “You know the precariousness of our situation. With that ever in our minds, your Mother and I are convinced you’ll do whatever necessary to become a member of the elite and to succeed in life.”113 In the spring of 1934, during his second semester at Harvard, René kept busy establishing a creditable reputation, studying for his comprehensive exams in Art History and American Museography. Over the spring holidays, he and his Museum Course classmates visited New York and Philadelphia, where Sachs introduced them to dealers and collectors. That March, he was invited to attend a prestigious Signet Alumni Association dinner to hear Harvard’s newly appointed president, James Bryant Conant, address (according to notes he took on the occasion) “the importance of developing one’s personality.”114 The brief thesis he had prepared for Forbes on French Romanesque sculpture at the Fogg earned him the Harvard M.A. René had been seeking since his first letter to Sachs.115 Perhaps his most important professional experience that spring involved Henri Focillon, who took the train up from New Haven to spend the weekend in Cambridge; though entertained by the Sachses, he was accompanied by his Parisian student throughout his visit. He and René spent long hours discussing and sharing Focillon’s love of form, the subject of his most recent and most influential publication, a treatise on the history of art based on his medieval lectures at the Sorbonne.116 On his return to Yale, Focillon wrote his young protégé an exceptionally warm note of thanks: “Never before” had he “sensed a man’s spiritual brilliance with such

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clarity, nor felt so strong an interest in pursuing his friendship. We from time to time in life encounter another who loves the same things that we do,” he declared; “how extremely rare to discover that they love them in the same fashion, with the same deep passion to stir that love into the poetry of their lives. . . . Already from our conversations in Paris and our magnificent classes together, that gave everyone involved a sure sense of your ‘mastery’ of the material, I sensed this. But it seems to me this magical weekend together portends years of good friendship between us.”117 Heady stuff for a young man under any circumstances, this more intimate contact with Focillon only heightened René’s ambitions that were, in any case, encouraged by the general agreement among his Harvard professors that he should extend his fellowship and return the following year after a summer back home. All went according to plan, and in October 1934, he once again set sail for America, on the S.S. President Roosevelt out of Le Havre, in the company of two fellow French medievalists, his teacher Marcel Aubert, on his way to New Haven in alternation with Focillon, and Paul Jarnot.118 René conveyed a new letter from Focillon, this one addressed to Sachs: This year once again I am able to send to you this charming, trustworthy young man, so attached to Harvard that it makes me a little jealous. He has taken your counsel to heart and hopes to continue reaping its honor and benefit. He will continue to pursue his studies in the history of Romanesque art but, sensing how much there is to learn at Harvard regarding American cultural history, is determined to take advantage of the possibility. For the chapter he proposes to write on the “History of American Taste and American Collections”—a modest contribution to an area of study that, in its ensemble, could only be treated by a tested scholar (and I well know by whom)—what better guide could he have than you, my dear Professor and Friend? But there is little point in “introducing” to you one with whom you are already well acquainted, nor in requesting your kindness to a young man for whom you have already done so much. I plan simply to be a third set of ears listening in on your conversations.119 René arrived back in Cambridge by early November and took up residence, this time in a place of his own, at 29 Hammond Street. A letter awaiting him from Schneider supported his decision to write his dissertation on the history of collecting in America but warned him to avoid any temptation to limit his study to mere inventory, names and dates. “Keep an eye on the big picture,” Schneider advised, but, at the same time, “be precise, pay attention to details. In short, I think it’s a rich topic. But you’re going to need to cover a lot of ground.”120 René set to work in this spirit, combing the art historical literature and auction catalogues, conducting interviews, and traveling as much as he could within his means. At Sachs’s invitation, he continued to attend Museum Course events. Shortly after his arrival, he attended a lecture on Mont Saint-Michel by his teacher and advisor Aubert at the Fogg. And, The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 18 | Letter from René Brimo to Albert C. Barnes, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 24 March 1935. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, Pennsylvania. Reprinted with permission.

from his notes, it would appear he also audited Alan Burroughs’s undergraduate course “Critical Summary of American Painting,” a test run for the highly influential Limners and Likenesses: Three Centuries of American Painting (published by Harvard University Press in 1936).121 René spent much of his time at the Fogg, publishing a brief essay on a work in the museum’s collection in its Bulletin.122 Over the winter months, he completed drafts of several chapters of his doctoral dissertation and, beginning in late March of 1935, did some further traveling in the region by train. He spent, for instance, from 31 March to 4 April in New York interviewing, among others, George Grey Barnard, whose collection of medieval architectural fragments was of interest to him on the usual two counts. Successive visits to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., followed. His note to Albert Barnes, Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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who lived just outside Philadelphia, typified René’s approach to prospective informants, to some of whom he had been introduced by Sachs the year before: “Currently preparing a book on the evolution of taste and its role in the history of American collections and, aware of the important role you have played in that evolution in the United States, I would be most grateful for an opportunity to visit your collection, and ask several minutes of your time to discuss with you the history of its formation.123 On his return to Cambridge, excited at the progress he had made, René requested that his fellowship funding be extended to permit him to continue his research even farther afield. Sachs supported the application: “[I]t seems to me of the utmost importance” that his French student be given the opportunity “to travel widely throughout the United States during the summer recess.”124 With a friend from the Institut, Jacques Rémy, René chipped in on a used Ford and, as soon as the academic year ended in May, “headed West.”125 We know from his notes that René (and perhaps also Rémy and an otherwise unidentified young woman named “Marie”) made it at least as far as Chicago, where he visited the Art Institute and met with the owner of Roulier’s Art Gallery, a specialist in prints, and with Harold Stark, historian of American art and contributor to Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr’s just-published Art in America: A Complete Survey. On the way, he stopped off to visit the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy (since 1962, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) and Detroit Institute of Arts, where he met with Alfred V. LaPointe, its longtime registrar.126

Return to Paris: Becoming Brimo René’s last business before heading home to Paris was to arrange the Brimo de Laroussilhe loan of a “Sculptured stone head from Parthenay” to the Fogg and to pack up his notes.127 By October 1935, back in his room overlooking the rue Jouffroy, he returned to work as a graduate assistant at the Institut under Schneider. His brother, Albert, was just starting law school. According to René’s later notes, his responsibilities included occasional lecturing, leading review sections, advising undergraduates, and, as a senior member of the Art History Students Committee, helping to organize lecture series and field trips.128 He attended lectures at the Institut by Harvard professor Kenneth J. Conant, in Paris as part of the ongoing exchange “Monuments of Romanesque Art.” And, in fairly short order, René completed and published two scholarly essays bridging his French and American commitments in interesting ways. The first, which drew on his thesis, offered an analysis of the punning phrase “J’aime fortune” (or “J’aime fort une”) carved into the staircase of the Château d’A ssier and was written in collaboration with Marcel Françon.129 The second, which treated a fragment of twelfth-century church architecture from the south of France, a gift to the Fogg from Sachs, appeared in the museum’s Bulletin, his second contribution to do so, but, this time, René dropped “de Laroussilhe” from his name, a symbolic assertion of independence certain to be noticed.130 When, in late January 1937, he stopped by the Faculté des Lettres to register the title The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 19 | René Brimo, in the Lot Valley, ca. summer 1936. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

of his dissertation-in-progress, “L’évolution du goût dans la formation des collections américaines” (The Evolution of Taste in the Formation of American Collections), he did so with clear intent, one way or another, to make a career of American interest in art. Completing the dissertation took some time. His papers contain sheaves of call slips from the library of the École du Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and Archives Photographiques d’Art et d’Histoire at the Palais Royale, many pages of scrawled notes, and numerous drafts. He kept in touch with Forbes and, indirectly, with Sachs as he worked, becoming involved that spring in a controversy back at Harvard over the attribution to Bernini of a bust of Descartes, a gift to the Fogg from Gabriel Wells. He agreed to consult with his Parisian contacts (referred to by Forbes as “the Trustees of the Louvre”) and to write a report in which he presented his own conclusion that the work was not what its donor had purported. Presumably, he would have avoided the term “fake” in this assessment (of which no trace remains, as far as I have been able to discover); however, his opinion in the matter inevitably called into question either the judgment or integrity of the dealer, Karl Freund, who had sold the bust to Wells and who insisted on the accuracy of his own attribution. In a letter to Sachs describing this situation, Forbes worries that, because René was himself “the son of a dealer,” mention of his name in correspondence with Freund might enmesh him in an “ugly lawsuit” as well. “Young Brimo,” Forbes reports, had given them permission to use his name if they wished, but Forbes feared Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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he might not understand all “the sinister possibilities” their doing so might entail.131 The issue appears to have been resolved, if not amicably, at least without further repercussions. While serving as a graduate assistant for Schneider (along with Grod), René spent much of that first academic year back working with Lavedan on his required “minor thesis,” or what we would term a “master’s thesis,” on a comfortably familiar subject, Romanesque architectural and sculptural decoration at the principal châteaux of the Lot Valley. He continued working, to be sure, on American taste and American collecting. Preparing two major papers at one time must have posed numerous logistical challenges. He referred to the former project as his “Lavedan thesis” and to the latter as his “Schneider thesis.”132 (Focillon was away much of that spring, again at Yale.) And these were not his only projects. There was much discussion of his returning to America to open a Brimo de Laroussilhe affiliate in New York. The move, well prepared by his efforts over three years to establish contacts there, had, as we have noted, ample precedent in the practices of the Brimo gallery’s competitors. The timing, however, proved unfortunate. In the short term, the investment seemed to Nicolas far too risky given the economic uncertainty and fear of the next war, which might have made the opportunity appealing in the longer term. It was November 1936 before René submitted his minor thesis, “Les châteaux de Haut-Quercy, Castelnau-Bretenoux, Montal, [et] Assier,” which he defended in December. After submitting final revisions in January 1937 and being inducted into the Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français, he was free at last to turn full attention to his major thesis—his dissertation and the project of most concern to us—on which he had now been working for the better part of three years, though with productive interruptions. All the while, he continued to develop new ways to capitalize on that study indirectly, seeking to deepen his involvement with, as he would later write, “a country I have come to consider my second home, the United States.”133 He wrote a letter of recommendation for a student of Harvard professor of Fine Arts Chandler Post who wanted to study in Paris.134 But it occurred to him that he might capitalize on his training by translating Suzanne La Follette’s Art in America: From Colonial Times to the Present Day, published in 1929, on which his own research relied. He wrote to La Follette directly, and she responded with great interest, recommending that he work from the more recent, revised edition of her book and offering both to update the French edition with a discussion of the WPA and to write a brief introduction.135 With the agreement of W. W. Norton & Co., La Follette’s American publisher,136 René sent a letter of inquiry to Librairie Armand Colin, a likely French publisher, enclosing a sample translation. Armand Colin found La Follette’s text too long, even without a new introduction, and its many illustrations too costly to publish;137 many other America-related works competed for his attention. Meanwhile, Brimo de Laroussilhe’s presence in America had continued to grow. The lengthy lead article in Art Bulletin, the official journal of the American College Art Association, in the spring of 1937 offered a close stylistic and iconographic reading of a late thirteenth-century deposition from the The Evolution of Taste

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vicinity of Arezzo that had “recently passed into the possession of M. Brimo de Laroussilhe of Paris,” whose cooperation the article’s author described as essential, acknowledging the gallery some seventeen times.138 American visitors to the gallery were numerous, some on their way to the Institut, others in the market for art. Gordon Washburn, director of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, arrived on a collecting trip with a letter of introduction recollecting René’s research swing through upstate New York two years earlier.139 René spent time with Henry R. Hope, a classmate from the Institut and fellow medievalist, who planned to study at Harvard and went on to do so.140 Business had improved, and that spring René purchased from a private collection in France a painting by the eighteenth-century American expatriate Benjamin West, The Ambassador from Tunis with His Attendants as He Appeared in England in 1781.141 More than business may have been involved in René’s interest in the West painting, also known by its alternative title, The Armenians.142 Drawing upon his mostly Sachs-derived contacts at museums and galleries, he attempted to place the work in an American collection.143 When Boston dealer Robert Vose, his most likely prospect, expressed no interest in it, René hung the work at Pratoucy, having decided not to sell it or, as a means to that end, to reproduce it in his dissertation (see plate 6); truth be told, he did so somewhat randomly, perhaps for the painting’s dim recollection of the family diaspora.144 René, in fact, began to amass a considerable personal collection, attending openings on a regular basis with his close friend François-Gerard Seligmann and buying works by the same artists.145 And he befriended the Surrealists André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Henri Michaux, all artists themselves. In a sense, like René’s American interests, these were means to create a world for himself distinct from Brimo de Laroussilhe, the orbit of his father. On the other hand, René increasingly put his mark on the business. His father had eclectic taste and had taken to intermixing medieval with non-European primitive art, including masks from Benin. With René’s influence and connections, the gallery would become a silent backer of landmark events such as the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at Wildenstein’s Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938. At the École du Louvre, René had become friends with Charles Ratton, whose exhibitions were transforming objects from Polynesia, Africa, and Native America into works of art.146 Although Ratton liked to keep things simple, buying and selling one piece at a time, Nicolas was able to intercede on his behalf in obtaining loans from banks for larger acquisitions.147

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“L’évolution du goût aux États- Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections” René’s work on the dissertation itself involved a series of outlines and multiple drafts that reflect his changing understanding of the project in response to input from various advisors, reflected in repeatedly modified tables of contents.148 In many Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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cases, the exact place of given drafts in this development can only be guessed at. These papers include an early detailed outline on four large index cards and two subsequent revisions (each a “Nouveau Plan”), one two pages long that includes brief synoptic descriptions, section by section, composed on 25 February 1937 after a meeting at Focillon’s home on rue des Fossés Saint-Jacques. A 7-page version produced around Easter adds a summary conclusion, “Conceptions américaines du goût dans la formation des collections” (American Conceptions of Taste in the Forming of Collections), designed to “[d]emonstrate the various influences that combined to form an American taste that reflected—though was often a step ahead of—European taste (for instance in its attention to the arts of East Asia, to the European art of the 1830s), &c.” In his going beyond the details of what was collected, where and by whom, to a consideration of “[t]he role of American taste in American civilization”—what we might today term “American culture”—we see a clear sign of Focillon’s influence. Pierre Lavedan had been a great help to René as he prepared his minor thesis, and they remained close collaborators both in the classroom and in the field, but he had little of a substantive nature to contribute to the dissertation project. Charles Picard apparently read through a draft as well, noting points of factual error.149 Of course, René Schneider’s particular expertise in modern art was of no more direct relevance to the history of American collecting than was Lavedan’s in medieval art or Picard’s in Greek archaeology, although Schneider’s interests in contemporary taste were. Unfortunately, his health was failing; he would retire even before Brimo could complete his dissertation, and he would die in the summer of 1938, just months after its publication.150 As a consequence of Schneider’s growing frailty, Focillon came to play an ever more dominant role in the project, and perhaps also to show even greater enthusiasm for it.151 Focillon’s responses to an early abstract fill an entire page, though he preferred to leave copyediting proper to others. In the words of George Kubler, who worked with him at Yale: “When students had proven their vocations, Focillon tacitly awarded them wide freedom, never jealously maneuvering their restriction to the territories of his own interest. Whatever their choices of field, Focillon’s rich experience of scholarship and letters, of museography and public life was available to them.”152 René came to rely on the spirit of his mentor’s advice, as restated or anticipated in some cases by other readers, rather than on direct counsels.153 According to René’s very careful notes, however, when they met again in July 1937 to discuss the introduction, Focillon did directly advise him: since the project’s fundamental ambition was historical, not philosophical, he should begin with the ways specifically American patterns of taste had found expression, not with a general definition of taste. René took this suggestion to heart, as he made clear in his final revision of the passage in question: “It was not my intention here to write a history of taste. The variety of its manifestations and the diversity of activities involved need must be far too great for that.”154 Unlike Schneider, Focillon took social history seriously, and his impact on the project was in this regard considerable. How had Americans, indeed various groups of Americans, felt about art? What social and cultural roles The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 20 | René Brimo, handwritten draft of introduction to book 1, “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis,” edited in ink by Henri Focillon, ca.1937. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

had art and their collecting of art played in their lives and in that of others? Focillon advised René always to keep four journalistic questions in mind: what? why? when? and how? Specificity was everything.155 The organization of the text should be clearly justified in every respect—from chapter divisions and topical arrangement to periodization—with relevant changes in cultural conditions and atmosphere clearly established. The brief but very helpful historical introductions René came up with to this end are testaments to his heeding this advice. Focillon was at times Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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Fig. 21 | René Brimo’s notes on “Schneider thesis” following conversation with Henri Focillon, ca. 1937. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

still more incisive and specific in his comments, writing in the margin, for example, “très discutable” (highly debatable) in response to a passing claim that the American colonists who commissioned portraits were moved by nostalgia. René’s mentor’s most important contribution, however, seems to have been the concept of evolution itself. Focillon had been thinking and writing about evolution at the moment of his arguably greatest influence on the manuscript, his visit to Cambridge during the spring of René’s first year at Harvard, when the project was taking shape and when the phrase “la vie des formes,” the title of Focillon’s newest and most influential book, a near synonym for evolution, was on everyone’s lips.156 In the words of a later Yale medievalist, Walter Cahn, Focillon was “uncomfortable with iron laws of history of any kind.”157 Where the history of art was concerned, in the realms of production and collection alike, evolution was in Focillon’s view “subject to all sorts of exceptions and disruptions,” the latter a geologic metaphor suggesting change not just over time but, in Cahn’s words, “at different sites and levels of a complex historical reality.” Change was influenced by “a triple set of forces consisting of traditions, influences, and experiences . . . variously combined.” But, for Focillon, such evolution would not be expected to occur “in the different strata” at a uniform pace; moreover, he posited a special category of artist—and, as René would persuasively argue, collector—that comprised visionaries willing to depart from the norm of sensibility.158 In employing the phrases “la vie des formes” and “la vie du goût” side by side in a discursive climax almost lyrical in tone, René would pay a silent tribute to Focillon’s theoretical influence in the final paragraphs of his dissertation.159 The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 22 | René Brimo’s notes on “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis” following conversation with Henri Focillon, ca. 1937. First of two pages. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

René struggled to make the best historical sense of all the data he had collected, and his drafts document a considerable processing of ideas to that end. Claims move back and forth from one part of the text to another. He considered but eventually abandoned the idea of addressing directly the “Question des Juifs,” perhaps in light of grim events elsewhere in Europe at the time. The increasing sophistication of his analysis is at any rate suggested by his revisions. Through multiple variations, the title of a chapter treating American collections of Old Master paintings adopted an Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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Fig. 23 | René Brimo’s notes on “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis” following conversation with Henri Focillon, ca. 1937. Second of two pages. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

ever greater distance from that term, first through the use of quotation marks (“ ‘grands maîtres’ ”), then through a qualifying phrase as well, “La notion des ‘grands maîtres.’ ” His maintaining a similar analytic distance from the normative use of the term “Primitive” to refer not just to non-European art but also to the art of medieval Europe is another example of the way in these succeeding drafts the art dealer can be seen gently yielding to the language of art historical analysis. The Evolution of Taste

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One trending term that did not interest him, however, was “class.” He scribbled a reminder to himself and kept it in a file entitled “Political Thoughts,” subtitled “X-rayed America,” declaring: “Let the term ‘class’ never appear in my thesis [dissertation]. It’s a Marxist invention, born of hatred. In my opinion, class exists due to the foolhardiness of those who recognize it: humanity is not a butcher shop window display with different qualities differently valued.” The tone here is strikingly similar to that employed by Nicolas in warning his son of the dangers in declaring a work of art a “fake,” “one term an antiquarian dealer must never utter.”160 Both father and son knew perfectly well that works of art were sometimes not what they were claimed to be, just as René was certainly aware of the existence of class and class difference as defining social conditions in the America about which he wrote. His hall mate N. Lambertin at the Divinity School that first year at Harvard turned over his Coop dividend on the condition René use it to drink to his health at the Wurst Haus “with Littlefield & Co.” or to at least buy and send him a copy of Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons, that Depression year’s best-selling, muckraking indictment of the class responsible for much of the late nineteenth-century collecting his friend proposed to study in his dissertation.161 The have-nots simply played no role in the story René had to tell. He chose, in the end, to divide his account in two, treating in book 1 what he considered the “ ‘pre-history’ ” (“ ‘primitivisme’ ”) of American collecting, from the first founding of the colonies through the Philadelphia Centennial, and in book 2 the period of concentrated collecting on a major scale that followed, ending his account with the end of the Great War, not long after his own birth. The framing histories with which sections of the book begin address the needs of his French readers (who were, of course, his principal intended audience, although one senses that he always imagined also being read by his American Museum Course classmates as well) and thus are somewhat broadly generalized, as is much of part 1, devoted to Colonial America. Although these passages seem dated and, in that sense, no longer fulfill their Focillonian mission, the analyses they serve to introduce have aged far better. For book 2, he adopted more a thematic than a strictly chronologic approach, tracing the operations of three different types or “styles” of taste in as many chapters. In their titles, he settled on the use of scare quotes to suggest lexical outmodedness: “La notion des ‘grands maîtres’ ” (The Notion of the “Old Master”), “Vogue de l’archéologie et ‘primitivisme’ ” (The Vogue for Archaeology and “Pre-History”). He concluded book 2 and his larger work with two chapters on questions informed directly by his personal experience: “Contact avec le moment” (Staying in Touch with the Contemporary Scene) and “La réalisation du Musée Moderne” (The Modern Art Museum). There was no direct precedent in France for a study of this kind. Although in Germany and Holland scholars had broached the subject of American art, they had essentially paid no attention to collectors or collecting.162 Despite his lack of models and his having never before written anything of this length or complexity, René maintains a confident narrative control throughout. The authority of that account

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results in part from his success in keeping his at times extensive lists, almost litanies, of artists and objects from ever seeming arbitrary. The sound of the descriptions of collections throughout suggests a rhythm of acquisition nicely attuned to the operations of taste they describe. These descriptions themselves constitute one of the two principal contributions the book makes: on the one hand, a recovery of lost history and a vast trove of information gleaned from curatorial records and a literature of secondary sources surprising in its breadth; and, on the other, the gathering and organizing of that information into an analysis of that history, the book’s crowning achievement. René reveals his personal investments in this material only sparingly. Nicolas and Albert, his father and brother, make only passing appearances, though he seems unable to avoid showing off where his special expertise proves of relevance. It is his dissertation, after all. So he quibbles over the point of production of a twelfth-century sculpture of a prophet owned by Michael Dreicer, the provenance of another twelfthcentury sculpture in another collection, or the attribution of a fifth-century portrait belonging to Henry Walters.163 Of greater interest are occasional insightful comments regarding the art market. He notes, for instance, that high prices in contemporary art, like those paid for Realist paintings in the 1880s, are often “a warning of proximate collapse.”164 And he rejects what he sees as a typical French misunderstanding of American collectors, who had been viewed at least since the late nineteenth century as motivated by the “crass materialism” understood to be typical of American culture more generally.165 His conclusion, far subtler than this, was that a number of those responsible, though not all, might be considered something very like artists themselves and their achievements measured by the integrity as well as cultural impact and significance of what they collected—a position more impassioned than polemical. Perhaps because he had come to consider the United States his “second home,” he defended its “genius” as arising “out of a profound idealism” often not perceived because hidden behind a “mirage of materialism.”166 René’s overtly sympathetic treatment of James Jackson Jarves, who appears early in his account, and of Isabella Stewart Gardner, who appears later, only serves to makes more visible the evenhandedness of his handling of the seemingly insatiable acquisitiveness of other American collectors, and it seems relevant that both Gardner and Jarves were Bostonians. Jarves he describes as a man after his own heart, who “retained throughout his life a passion for understanding art based on the evolution of style over time, accompanied . . . by a fine sensibility and a remarkable independence of judgment” uncelebrated in his day that had “paved the way for twentieth-century collectors, museum directors, and intellectuals.”167 And while living in Cambridge, René had spent many hours lingering in “Mrs. Gardner’s museum-demeure.” His culminating chapter on museums seems in this respect both a tribute and a response to the Museum Course, described as “the model in its genre.”168 René at one point refers to European art as “our art,” aligning his point of view with that of his probable readers while acknowledging a shared investment in the The Evolution of Taste

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cultural history he recounts.169 Even though his personal correspondence is filled with foreboding, he comments only obliquely on the gathering Nazi threat to that shared culture to invoke something hopefully resistant to it in the American character.170 “Certain philosophers,” he offers by way of introduction, “have demoted art collecting to the status of mere sport or speculation; others have seen it as but the result of economic privilege.” He begs to disagree. “Although material conditions certainly are capable . . . of splintering collections or dispersing them, they are insufficient to explain things more essential still such as the criteria collectors use, their taste itself, and variations in the quality of works they assemble. Although art collecting might appear to be no more than a sophisticated game,” he goes on, “it is one heavy in consequences both for collectors themselves and for the periods and social classes to which they belong. It is for this reason that it seems more accurate to view collecting as a creative act, part and parcel of artistic creativity itself.” He continues: “It would be possible to conceive this subject as the history of collections; and yet an assemblage of brief monographic treatments devoted to individual collectors accompanied by inventories of their holdings seems more properly suited to catalogues and biographical dictionaries. The approach that I should like to take is different. Taste, by virtue of the role it plays in giving rise to collectors and museums alike, appears to me of fundamental importance to the evolution of art. I have attempted therefore to work out the relationship between art in general and the formation of collections to determine if there is not some reciprocity of influence between the two, one in which collectors play an active role. Like art itself, taste somehow is ever changing and ephemeral, perhaps more so. Every collection belongs to its period and milieu.”171 “Every collection belongs to its period and milieu.” Whether a conclusion based on research or a defining premise or both, the claim seems unexceptionable, even self-evident, though also subtle and astute, derivative only in the way a thesis ought to be attuned to currents of contemporary thought. “There are, for example,” he noted, “numerous Middle Ages depending on the century and place from which that past is viewed. The Middle Ages of the English eighteenth century differ from those of the French Romantics, as they do from those of twentieth-century American archaeologists.”172 By extending this analysis of underlying patterns to the collecting of art, to its consumption, he conceived the possibility of understanding the history of American taste in historical terms.173 Taste itself emerges from his account as at once ineffable and socially determined in the manner later elucidated by Pierre Bourdieu, as the result of a number of explicable factors (a colonialist hankering after tradition, a bourgeois desire for verisimilitude, a mercantile appreciation for fine materials, a materialist fondness for anecdote and illustration) “reinforced by certain religious persuasions, moral and social dispositions, cultural contexts, and snobbish tendencies.”174 There was much to praise in what he accomplished and much that is praiseworthy still. The range of collecting practices elucidated—from a taste for colonial

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portraits to that for the arts of Japan, China, India, Greco-Roman Antiquity, Egypt, Assyria, Islam, and Persia; from the Salem East India Marine Society, charged with collecting “natural and artificial curiosities to be found between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn,” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its core collection of Dutch Old Master painting and subsequent global reach; from amateurs smitten with French Impressionism to those more Modernist collectors and patrons like Arthur Jerome Eddy, Lillie Bliss, Gertrude Stein, and John Quinn. Large names and small. One is struck throughout by the aptness of the categories elucidated and the cogency of the examples. There is much information here concerning antebellum collectors in particular still available nowhere else, but the biographical sketches of key figures in all periods ( James Jackson Jarves, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson, Charles Eliot Norton, Thomas B. Clarke, Henry Marquand, Benjamin Altman, J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, Joseph Widener, Alfred Barnes, Paul Mellon), about whom arguably more is known today, remain uniquely focused on patterns in the works they bought. Where he does consider motivations as opposed to acquisitions, he is, in the words of Alan Wallach, “sharp and undeluded” in his judgments, offering a compelling account of late-century changes in American taste, and “indefatigable” in tracking the fashion for the Primitive through every variation.175 His treatment of the evolution of the American museum remains again unparalleled in the scholarly literature. If not quite dialectical in spirit, his work is always historically dynamic, ever attentive to divergent influences, inconsistencies in period styles of collecting, incomprehensions. He has at the same time succeeded in accumulating a sort of metacollection of facts and anecdotes that reflects the style of the collectors whom he most admires, their accumulations logical yet impassioned. That is the style of the dealers whom he most admired as well, and one he hoped himself to emulate. In fact, the only dealers or collectors ever faulted in his study pay that price for their vulgarity or crass conformity, for their failures to cultivate and pursue a truly independent sensibility, an aspiration even more admirable in light of the sweeping patterns of shifting taste discernible with the distance of time. The process had taken a full year, but, in late January 1938, René could report to Sachs that the work he had begun in Cambridge was nearing its end. He had decided not just to submit but also to publish the dissertation that spring; for his concluding chapter, “La réalisation du Musée Moderne,” he wondered whether Sachs might provide a photograph that he remembered from the Museum Course of an exhibition space at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts prior to its prewar reinstallation. A few weeks later, Sachs replied that René must in fact have in mind a view of the old Fogg Art Museum (now Hunt Hall) back in the days when “sky lighting” fell into the middle of the room, leaving the pictures on the wall “in darkness,” which he and Forbes would be happy to provide.176 While making his final revisions with the help of two friends locally and Agnes Mongan at the Fogg,177 who undertook to gather the other images to appear in the text, René worked as graduate assistant for Lavedan, who had agreed to take the The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 24 | René Brimo’s typewritten draft of conclusion to “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis,” edited in ink, ca. 1937. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

now-retired Schneider’s place on his committee. He affixed an amusing color sticker of a runner reaching the finish line to the first sheet of the completed typescript of book 2, chapter 5, with “Réalisation du Musée Moderne” replacing first “La conception Moderne du Musée aux États-Unis” and then “La réalisation du Musée Moderne aux États-Unis,” though none of these variants would make it into the final text precisely as written. He saved the dissertation instructions he received from the Sorbonne with a typo asking that “95 copies” of the finished text be submitted. They specified that published versions, whether or not for sale, should not be priced.178 The manuscript itself was to be prepared to certain specifications, and for this René Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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turned to his cousin, Jeannette, a professional typist. She would have done it as a favor (“entre cousins”) but graciously accepted modest payment.179 He turned in the finished dissertation on 26 April 1938 at the office of the dean.180 With it, he earned the degree docteur ès Lettres from the University of Paris with the mention “très honorable” and the approval of the university rector to publish. Lavedan considered it the finest thesis work defended before the faculty in years.181 48

Publication, Distribution, Reception Two weeks later, in May 1938, René—whom we should henceforth refer to as “Brimo” now that he was both a graduate of the École du Louvre and a recipient of master’s degrees from Harvard and the Sorbonne as well as a docteur ès Lettres from the University of Paris—thanked Sachs for all his help and announced that the dissertation, with an index compiled for the purpose, would appear in book form by the end of the month.182 It would be privately printed by Jean Belmont, with tipped-in plates handled by another Parisian firm, Vizzavona. Though there is no surviving record of the number of copies printed, Brimo’s study of American collecting has become something of a collector’s item itself. Both the front cover and frontispiece feature a logo of its author’s own design, a rotary telephone dial with letters and an apostrophe filling the circular finger stops, spelling out “j’m fortune,” a leaping antelope (or mythological, antelope-like creature) at its center.183 The symbolism of the motif involved a number of significant allusions perhaps obvious to close friends and to members of his family but presumably to few others, including most readers. The emblematic creature, for instance, captured in flight, all four hooves off the ground, is derived from a fifteenthcentury Valencian ceramic design chosen by René’s father almost thirty years earlier to represent the business (see fig. 8),184 perhaps taken from a work Nicolas then owned. Its recurrence here suggests both continuity with a family tradition of commercial interest in medieval art and a shared personal identification with a totem originally resonant with his father’s state of stateless exile, now with René’s own aspirations for professional freedom. The phrase “j’m fortune”—from the Latin “sicut erat jem fortune”—was, of course, derived from the “motto” carved into the main staircase of the Château d’Assier, previous discussed, on which Brimo had written his minor thesis some six years earlier (and that he later selected for his ex libris) in partial tribute to a maternal ancestor who had written a small book on the subject in 1911, the year of Brimo’s birth. Galiot de Genouillac, who built the château, had chosen the devise half a millennium earlier, inspired by love for his first wife, Catherine d’Archiac, or for a lover, the Duchesse d’Angoulême, or both—or perhaps simply by his love of good fortune or luck, which he both needed and for a time enjoyed. Galiot in the early sixteenth century had given that motto richly visual form by combining it with

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Fig. 25 | René Brimo, doodled “j’m” with dial logo on draft of “Assier thesis,” ca. April 1932. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

Fig. 26 | Wheel of Fortune motif, Château d’Assier, early thirteenth century. Photo: René Brimo. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

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Fig. 27 | René Brimo, “j’m fortune” dial design for L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, ca. 1938, now lost, from a photocopy. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

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various wheels of fortune, a reference to the fickleness of Fate, for which, in Brimo’s eyes apparently, the telephone dial offered a delightful modern equivalent.185 Brimo, at twenty, had described Galiot as an “insistent” man, “busy with projects” and “full of energy,” who yet retained a “dreamy, sentimental side” expressed in his devise, and this subsequent symbolic borrowing of the motif suggests he saw himself similarly. For Galiot, the phrase “j’m fortune” had proclaimed “an eternal devotion” yet disguised its object.186 For Brimo, just as cryptically, it described but also ironized an ambiguous lifelong devotion. His uncle Antoine, as it happens, lost his own small fortune gambling; Nicolas gambled at casinos on the Côte d’Azur, as he perhaps had in Manila as a young man—one recalls the lottery ticket he had bought for his son, newly arrived in Cambridge, in the fall of 1934; and René himself enjoyed gambling back in Paris, betting on rugby but preferring the horse track at Auteuil.187 These layers of personal association multiply almost without end. René had written that earlier thesis on the backs of more than a hundred outdated sheets of the old art gallery letterhead, so that what we may take to be his original doodles of Galiot’s “j’m” and wheel of fortune were in a way superimposed upon the leaping antelope on the verso of the sheet. Such playful references to Fortune, described by Marcel Françon as “that reliably unreliable goddess,” about which Brimo had written previously on more than one occasion,188 culminate in “James Fortune,” the entirely invented name of the book’s publisher. That this fanciful firm’s address, 58 rue Jouffroy, was shared by Brimo de Laroussilhe seems to have escaped the attention of most readers, especially abroad. This humor served to lighten what was also very serious business designed to promote Brimo de Laroussilhe by announcing an important new credential, the youngest partner’s receipt of a docteur ès Lettres in Art History.189 Such private publication of doctoral dissertations was not unusual between the wars for French scholars of sufficient affluence. Certainly, some expense was involved in the publication of L’évolution du goût—the copy obtained for Helen Clay Frick by her agent, Clotilde Brière-Misme, cost 60 francs190—but the text was mostly intended as a gift to be offered friends, customers, and colleagues. Self-published, the book enjoyed no distribution in the traditional sense. Brimo and his two helpers mailed and delivered dozens of copies that we know of and possibly many more,191 many whose inscriptions expressed the author’s gratitude with great sincerity. One reads: “To Jean-François Prinet, Master of the Taste for Small Stones, in warm friendship.”192 Another, more tied to Brimo’s research, reads: “To Monsieur Edward W. Forbes, in gratitude to one of the creators of American taste.”193 On 20 July 1938, René sent an inscribed copy to Sachs accompanied by a letter. “This book,” he wrote, “better than these poor words, will express my gratitude to Harvard University and to you. I learned a great deal during my stay in Cambridge and especially in the Museum Course. I hope this book will prove some use to my former and future camarades in partial repayment of all you and they were so generous in providing me.”194 Sachs had his secretary send off a note of thanks and added the book to his already considerable pile of summer reading. When he got The Evolution of Taste

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to it more than a year later, he was shocked by what he discovered and wrote immediately to Alfred TenEyck Gardner, with whom he was, in principle, working on an edited compilation of Museum Course materials. Doubling as Sachs’s private librarian, Gardner had taken the class in 1931, two years before René, but the young men had known each other in Cambridge, and Gardner apparently had been sent a copy of his own. He had been working starter jobs around the country, first at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City as acting curator of Oriental Art, then at the Palace of Fine Arts at the San Francisco Exposition as assistant to the director, where Gardner “set up a guard system and a complaint desk,”195 but had just returned to Philadelphia to work on the Museum Course book, which had been on hold for some time. Sachs complained to Gardner that “a very large part of ” L’évolution du goût seemed “directly traceable” to Brimo’s participation in the Museum Course, to conversations that they had had, to introductions he had made possible.196 Gardner, who on 29 February “had not yet received a copy of Brimo’s book,” but a week later had, declared himself simply unable to understand “how Mr. Brimo [had] gained access to all my material on American Museum History on which he bases the large part of his book. How this could have happened without my knowledge I am at a loss to explain. It seems very strange that he mentioned no word of the use to which he was putting my research material when he was in Cambridge. I would appreciate an explanation of this.”197 To which Sachs responded, somewhat wearily: “I see that you are quite as surprised as I was when I read Brimo’s book and found that he had used so much of my material. How he got your material I do not know. However, I have not the time, and I am sure you have not the time or inclination to get into a controversy when we have so much to do that is important. We certainly may feel entirely free to use any of your material and any of my material in our book whether he has used it or not. I hope you agree.” That pragmatic position did not succeed in venting Sachs’s spleen and so required an addendum scribbled in pencil at the bottom of the sheet: “PS. Neither Ruth not Mary [his secretary-assistants] can imagine how he got your material or mine!—except of course, through our ‘talks.’ The thing is a d—m outrage!! However, let’s proceed on our own.”198 When Gardner introduced the possibility of legal action, arguing that Brimo had “subverted your material and my material to his own uses,”199 Sachs would have none of it. “I do not want to go into the Brimo matter any further. I am at a loss to understand, as you are, just how all this has happened unless it be, to use your own words, ‘that the material can be found easily by anyone with time to spend in a good library.’ We can talk further of this, if need be, when we meet.”200 Unmollified, and discouraged perhaps by other matters as well, Gardner withdrew from the collaboration and asked to be paid for his efforts to date. Sachs refused. Gardner would eventually rise to the position of archivist and eventually associate curator of American Art at the Met. Displeasing Sachs had for Brimo more unfortunate consequences, at least in the short term. I have been unable to locate any further

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correspondence between them. More significantly, perhaps, no review of L’évolution du goût was ever published after 1940 by those in Sachs’s inner circle, many of whom would have received copies as gifts directly from the author and who, being most familiar with the Museum Course, were best able to discuss the book’s relationship to or reliance on Sachs’s teaching. We might note that this contention over intellectual property was easily predictable. Focillon, after all, had anticipated it already in October 1934 in attempting to “preassuage” Sachs’s anxiety on that score, presenting the then, of course, much younger René as an acolyte, neither usurper nor rival.201 In a “Talk of the Town” interview in the New Yorker years later, Gardner recalled with greater humor that he had stayed busy collecting old prints “for a book about museum history, which I didn’t write, and then I helped Professor Sachs organize his notes and get things indexed for a book that he didn’t write.”202 We can infer the extent of Brimo’s indebtedness to Gardner and Sachs from what we know of the Museum Course curriculum,203 for indeed most of what he learned was easily available to “anyone with time to spend in a good library,” which Brimo had had and so had done. His ideas were most certainly influenced by theirs, but his debt to Focillon, though more theoretical, seems far greater.204 In short, although there was calculation perhaps in René’s decisions where to study and what research to undertake there, I see none in his intellectual relationships with Gardner or with Sachs, whose influence he freely acknowledges.205 He was young—very young—at the time; and, though immersed in academic protocol since first enrolling at the École, not necessarily accustomed to the academic style that he encountered in America. Harvard, in any case, operated by its own rules, combining Boston Brahmin restraint with receptiveness to innovation, an elitism to which it took time to adjust.206 And although some of the syntheses and general lines of analysis Brimo relies on might be “directly traceable” to those of Gardner or Sachs, the research they inspired (and perhaps determined) was his own. Despite the inauspicious timing of its publication—having just recovered from the insolvencies of the early 1930s, the international art market, the museum world, and the academy were threatened once again by war;207 despite the mistargeting of its most likely audience (art historians, dealers, and collectors all over America, who typically read in English, not French); and despite the lack of commercial distribution, copies of L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections circulated widely and were well received. Philip McMahon, writing in Parnassus, found it a “very important work” for art historians in general “and especially for the student of American interest in art,” insisting on the volume’s “notable, intrinsic worth”—regardless of its occasional misspellings and idiosyncracies of design. “This is nothing less than a detailed, completely documented history of collectors and collecting in the United States, intimately related to the other cultural changes which constitute the context of that activity. . . . The importance of this work to American students,” McMahon concluded, “cannot be over-estimated, and the surprising thing is that no scholar in this country has previously realized the need for such a book and filled it”; he went on The Evolution of Taste

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to express his hope that some “responsible American publisher” might soon bring out an English translation.208 E. K. Waterhouse, in Burlington Magazine, largely agreed with this assessment. He even considered it “encouraging to find an inhabitant of Europe writing the first book on Collecting and Collectors and Museum Taste in the United States,” which offered not just “an extremely useful compilation of facts” but “an embryo philosophy of collecting,” and which, as such, was the first “large treatment” of a subject of “great interest” to art historians and social historians alike. And Georges Wildenstein in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, barely a month following its appearance, noted that the book offered an argument at once “nuanced, intelligent, and well-documented.”209 Jacques Combe, in L’Amour de l’Art that December, celebrated the book as offering the first full-length treatment to make intelligible sense of the “extraordinary abundance and importance of American collections.”210 L. Maurice, in L’Intransigeant, called it “an important study.”211 Frances Fenwick Hills, in the New York Herald Tribune, declared that lovers of American art would find in it “much that is new and interesting.”212 In Revue Historique, Louis Hautecœur described the book as “richly, even perhaps too richly documented” but successful, as a result, in demonstrating the role of collectors in changes of taste and, reciprocally, the impact of such changes on their collections.213 Equally positive briefer reviews appeared within a year or two in Art Bulletin, La Mercure de France, Oud Holland, the Poly Biblion, Marianne (Paul Chadowine), L’Amour de l’Art, Beaux-Arts (Pierre du Colombier), Le Temps (Émile Henriot), the Revue des Auteurs et des Livres (Charles Dury), and perhaps elsewhere. That judgment remained widely shared even two decades later, when art critic and historian Aline Bernstein Saarinen pronounced the book the “only comprehensive” account of its subject available, a work “of special merit.”214 It was described in 1952 as “essential reading” in the field, in 1964 as an “encyclopaedic” account whose influence was “far too great for detailed acknowledgement,” in 1982 as offering the “standard” description of Gilded Age collecting, and in 1992 as “a remarkable account” of its subject.215 L’évolution du goût has since fallen somewhat out of favor—in France, because it was considered marginal to mainstream academic discourse, undertheorized on the one hand and devoted to the pre–Abstract Expressionist “pre-history” of American involvement in the arts on the other and, in America, not least because it was hard to find and written in French. Though overlooked, its contribution has never been equaled, let alone surpassed.

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Later Life Completing the book had left Brimo in the throes of what he termed in a letter to a friend “an acute case of laziness.” In August 1938, hoping to walk off a few of the impressive forty or more pounds he had gained in the process, Brimo spent ten days with Lavedan in the eastern Pyrenees, a region he considered, after the Lot Valley, Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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home to the most beautiful surviving vestiges of Romanesque art. Planning for a course they would teach in the fall, he and Lavedan took their time, visiting widely and, on the way home, discovering a previously undocumented Visigoth chapel outside Carcassonne. Brimo had decided to remain at the Sorbonne for the coming year, teaching sections in Medieval Art History, while helping his Museum Course classmate Henry Hope prepare a translation of L’évolution du goût.216 Hope’s 19-page Englishing of the preface has survived their ultimately fruitless search for an American publisher.217 Earlier that summer, Brimo had written William Norton (with whom he had last corresponded two years before with regard to Suzanne La Follette) in an attempt to interest him in the translation project, providing, under separate cover, a copy of the published dissertation.218 Norton had been encouraging: “There is of course always the question of whether such a book as you have now written will lend itself to translation, but the subject is of interest to me personally and I am therefore very glad that you have sent me a copy. . . . When it arrives we will be very happy to read and consider it for publication, consulting with your friend, Mr. Hope, if the occasion arises.”219 In September 1938, already impatient, Brimo suggested to Hope that they also approach the Riverside Press, a division of Houghton Mifflin, and Harvard University Press in the meantime, although nothing was to come of any of it.220 In March 1939, he published an essay in Marianne urging that museums of art be opened in France in places other than Paris and noting that “the challenges facing their young curators would be immense, but nothing compared with those surmounted by their young American counterparts who, freshly graduated from East Coast universities, found themselves one day getting off the train in some small western city to discover that the museum there consisted of nothing beyond the four walls of a building and a handful of supporters, but today find themselves at the head of important, world-renowned collections that they built up essentially from scratch.”221 The year before, while still working on the book, he had taken the time to publish a spin-off essay from its final chapter in La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité (supplement to Beaux-Arts) titled “Réalisation pratique pour une renaissance du sentiment esthétique” (Practical Things to Be Done to Revive Public Interest in Things Aesthetic). Here he had argued much the same point, singing the praises of American curators for their ambition (in contrast to their French counterparts) to make great works of art more readily accessible to a wider public.222 Brimo’s essays document his continuing interest in the American scene. Indeed, in May 1939, a story in Le Temps announcing a $2,500 scholarship in honor of Jesse Isidor Straus (American ambassador to France between 1933 and his death in 1936 and art collector himself) to fund six months of research and travel in the United States prompted him immediately to apply.223 In his application essay, Brimo wrote that he hoped to work on two projects. The first was a sequel to L’évolution du goût that would bring its analysis forward from 1919 to the present, taking into closer consideration collections west (and presumably south) of Chicago, provisionally titled “Les collections américaines actuelles” (American Collections The Evolution of Taste

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Today). And the second project, “La sculpture romane française dans les collections américaines” (French Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections), was an account he described as essentially complete, requiring only visits to the Cloisters in New York and Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, to study recent reinstallations of both collections. He further proposed to lecture on both subjects over the course of his travels.224 Brimo listed his now considerable past accomplishments and, on the form provided, declared himself unmarried and without children. He solicited letters of recommendation from four men with whom he had worked for years: Louis Réau, editor-in-chief of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, for whom he had taught classes at the Institut, Charles Picard, Henri Focillon, and Pierre Lavedan, who endorsed his candidacy in glowing terms, noting that the large number of American graduate students and professors seeking Brimo’s advice since his return from Cambridge offered ample testimony to the positive impression the candidate had made during his previous periods of study in America.225 Nothing would come of this opportunity, however, due to the turbulent international situation. As early as September 1938 in a letter to Hope, Brimo had described plans to come to America the following summer as necessarily tentative given the military-diplomatic drama playing out around them. Among other projects, he had hoped to catch a loan exhibition, “Arts of the Middle Ages, 1000–1400,” opening in February 1940 at Boston’s Museum

Fig. 28 | René Brimo, somewhere in south of France, ca. 1940. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

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Fig. 29 | René Brimo’s “J’aime Fortune” ex libris, ca. 1940. Brimo de Laroussihle Archives.

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Fig. 30 | René Brimo’s résumé submitted with his application for Jesse Isidor Straus Award, ca. spring 1939. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

of Fine Arts. But he would come, he wrote, only “if permitted to do so [si on nous y laisse aller],” referring to the difficulty of obtaining travel visas at that time.226 Brimo de Laroussilhe and other bande noire dealerships found themselves in increasingly perilous straits; business slowed to a standstill.227 On the very day the Germans entered Paris, 14 June 1940, Lucien married one Elza Schidlof, daughter of Viennese antiquarian dealer Leo Schidlof, an accomplished scholar,228 in Toulouse. Albert, who was teaching at the law school there, stood as their witness. Though a Jew herself, identified as such on her passport, Elza was conveniently considered by the convoluted German race laws to be Aryan, enabling her to obtain a German passport and thus take nominal charge of the business, which was, as a result, spared the plundering to which many bande noire dealerships, such as those of Seligmann and Bacri, immediately fell victim.229 Because she was the last of that generation to survive, Elza’s stories are the source of much of what we know of Brimo’s later years. The other best witness, Marcel Marnier, son of the family’s maid Suzanne, who had lived with the family on and off virtually all his life, was just seventeen at the start of the war. When Nicolas and Ezilda had fled Paris, they had taken Marcel’s mother with them, first to Pratoucy, where they had stashed what they could of the gallery’s most precious objects, then on to Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a village on the MedThe Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 31 | René Brimo’s first page of questionnaire submitted with his application for Jesse Isidor Straus Award, ca. spring 1939. René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives.

iterranean coast between Nice and Monaco very close to the Italian border, where Italians, more easily corrupted than Germans, were in charge. René and Lulu stayed on in Paris minding the shop. In fairly short order, Elza gave birth to a son, Claude, and the new de Laroussilhes moved in almost next door, at 64 rue Jouffroy. Suzanne returned from Beaulieu to take care of both households.230 As a French citizen, René was able to remain in Paris for a time and even, at first, to continue his teaching at the Institut. Thanks to his connections (and years of charitable giving), Nicolas was able to obtain precious certificates attesting to the non-Jewishness of the entire family from the Frères Maronites.231 Under Vichy law, they would otherwise have been prohibited from owning property or engaging in business of any kind. Such certificates, writes one historian, “had a near-magical effect, allowing the bearer to avoid the special curfews and travel restrictions imposed on Jews; to fend off Aryan administrators all too eager to take over businesses and real property; to engage in various professions and trades otherwise prohibited to Jews; to avoid, finally, deportation.”232 Marcel would take the train to Paris on the weekend from Soissons, his suitcase packed with fresh produce, and René, whom he described as generous to a fault (“il avait le cœur sur la main et la main sur le portefeuille”), made sure that, while he was at Auteuil betting on the horses, Marcel could afford to attend and bet on the soccer matches at the ill-fated Vélodrome d’Hiver.233 Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution

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Fig. 32 | René Brimo, Chaponval, toward end of his life. Collection Isabelle Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo.

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Eventually, however, sometime in 1943, Brimo chose to rejoin his parents. Active in the Resistance, he was arrested later that year in Auvergne, not far from Pratoucy, but managed to toss a note from a truck in which he was being transported that got back to Elza, who intervened and somehow saved him. He was arrested a second time, not by careless French conscripts but by a German patrol, and yet somehow escaped again. Albert in Toulouse was active in the Resistance as well.234 By war’s end, both brothers had contracted tuberculosis, a condition Brimo preferred to describe in his letters as “pleurosis.” Though Albert recovered, his older brother’s prognosis was poor. According to Henry Hope’s poignant obituary in the College Art Journal, René’s underlying lung condition made recovery unlikely. Still, he remained “warm-hearted, gentle and jovial” to the end, returning to the Institut, where his surviving colleagues and students were attempting to resume things where they had left off.235 At Beaulieu during the war, Nicolas had established what proved under the circumstances an extremely lucrative combination: Brimo de Laroussilhe provincial affiliate, workshop (“atelier”), and warehouse, moving collectibles across the border into Italy for resale. After the war, he kept that business going, hiring one Robouchinsky (known to the family as “Rabu”), a colorful Russian noble fallen on hard times, skilled at refurbishing the modest-quality antique furniture that Nicolas would purchase at Drouot by the truckload. Since the retail operation was entirely secondary, Nicolas was unconcerned by the Beaulieu venture’s poor location, initially chosen in haste, on a curve in the road with a narrow sidewalk that discouraged customers from dropping in. His grandchildren would remember the space as “une ancienne usine à gas” (disorganized as well as unwelcoming), just as they made fun of Chaponval because the house, in addition to being, like Pratoucy though on a grander scale, undistinguished architecturally, was also cut off from the ample gardens that were its best feature by a busy road.236 For more than a year beginning in February 1945, Brimo published a series of essays that amounted to a regular column in Arts, Beaux-Arts, Spectacles, a Paris journal he had helped found at the start of the war, which had relocated to Lyon during the Occupation.237 These included a comment on the situation facing French museums during the war and discussions of Focillon’s teaching, the continued importance of Paris in the art world, and the presence of American GIs studying art history there.238 In Les Amis de l’Art in early 1946, he published a second series of short essays on topics such as the role of the museum in the life of the city and the role of art history in secondary school education in France. And in March of that year, he signed a letter preserved among his papers “René Brimo, Président du Groupe des Étudiants d’Histoire de l’Art.”239 His spirit and ambitions undiminished, when Brimo de Laroussilhe reopened at its old Paris location, René showed a renewed interest in contemporary painting and began to organize exhibitions of the work of younger artists. In July 1947, he met with Paul Augé at Larousse and signed a contract to produce a book-length

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history of American Art, L’art aux États-Unis.240 And that December, wrapping up old business, he finally published “Les châteaux de Haut-Quercy, CastelnauBretenoux, Montal, [et] Assier,” based on work he had done for Lavedan his first year at the Institut.241 His annual summer visit to Pratoucy the following July would be his last. Once back in Paris in late September, he took to his bed in the room above the gallery, from which he could still enjoy the view overlooking the rue Jouffroy. He died on 24 November 1948, at the age of thirty-seven. Three days later, following a family funeral at Saint-François-de- Sales, he was interred at PèreLachaise. His old friend Agnes Mongan gave a chalk drawing by Francis Gruber to the Fogg in his memory. She chose carefully. Gruber, René’s almost exact contemporary, had been born just a year before him and had died barely a week after he did, also of tuberculosis.242 The poet and artist Henri Michaux sent Nicolas and Ezilda a book as an offering, accompanied by a black-bordered calling card expressing his “sincere condolences.” He “would always remember their son,” Henri wrote, “one of the rare men [he] had known to be considered a friend by everyone who knew him.”

Aftermath Brimo, who left at his death an undated typescript, “Le rôle du musée dans la vie moderne aux États-Unis et en France” (The Role of the Museum in Modern Life in the United States and France), had continued to receive American museum bulletins at the gallery. In his last months he had published reviews of several of them.243 L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections, his magnum opus, despite having first appeared in France, marked a turning point in American art history, essentially inventing a new field of academic inquiry seamlessly integrating what he had learned from his father and his own hands-on experience at Brimo de Laroussilhe with what he had learned from his teachers at the École du Louvre, the Institut, and Sachs’s Museum Course, informed by Focillon’s phenomenological approach to aesthetics, with a result so comprehensive as to be indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the subject. Copies of L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis made their way slowly into libraries across the United States. The copy that Brimo had given Forbes made its way from Cambridge to New Haven in the hands of Jules David Prown, who had been assistant director of the Fogg. Prown cannot recall under what circumstances he donated the book to the Fine Arts Library sometime after being hired in 1961 to teach American Art History at Yale, but before doing so he added his own signature beneath Brimo’s inscription to Forbes. It was this distinguished provenance that first caught my eye when I came across the volume in the stacks in 1988 as a graduate student in American Studies searching for a work of art history to translate as an enjoyable way to fulfill a language requirement. As it happened, at the time I was already editing and translating a twentieth-century French monograph, a posthumous work The Evolution of Taste

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by the phenomenologist of the imagination Gaston Bachelard.244 Brimo, even though I was able to learn nothing about him, offered lighter fare, delightfully transparent by comparison. Rendering the first fifty or so pages into passable English took little more than a week. Not only did doing so succeed in satisfying my obligation to the university; it made apparent the importance of the contribution the text might make to American Art History were it more readily available. When I gauged the interest of likely university presses, I received half a dozen positive responses from editors persuaded, a least in part I would imagine, by generous support from cultural historian Neil Harris, reprising his own earlier positive assessments of the work’s importance first in American Quarterly in 1962, where he had described the text as responsible for the “most thoughtful analysis” available of the role of influential critic and collector James Jackson Jarves, then in 1966 in his own classic study The Artist in American Society. “I continue to find René Brimo’s history of American art patronage of great use,” he wrote in his letter to me. While a great deal of additional research had been done over the course of subsequent decades, still the literature boasted “no history as broad and sustained as his.”245 I had proposed not simply to translate the text but, as I had in the case Bachelard, to produce a critical translation, first verifying and, where necessary, correcting its scholarly apparatus, and then, in a substantial introduction, “situating” the text biographically and historically insofar as possible. In the end, however, persuaded by my committee, I came to consider it more prudent first to complete my dissertation on an unrelated topic. A number of unanswered questions about the book, its author, and even its publisher seemed too time-consuming to sort out given the resources then available. The project would, in fact, remain dormant for decades until, on a visit to Paris in 2007, I found my way to Brimo’s papers, essentially undisturbed since his death, in the Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives, where it had at long last occurred to me to look for them. My timing, as it turned out, could not have been better. At Nicolas’s death in 1953, Ezilda, with Lulu’s help and that of Albert, otherwise quite busy with his own career, had kept the gallery going, more or less. At Albert’s death in 1990, it had come into the hands of his own elder son, the perhaps fatefully named NicolasRené Brimo, a collector of books and manuscripts devoted to Surrealism on the one hand and to the French Resistance on the other, but by vocation a journalist and publisher at the important French satiric weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. Although Nicolas-René had sold the business to Philippe Carlier in 1995, he held on to a number of paintings and drawings that had belonged to his uncle, along with the family’s personal papers. When I arrived at the gallery unannounced at its new quarters on the quai Voltaire, just opposite the Louvre, Carlier’s daughter, Marie-Amélie, like René a trained art historian, who had just completed a thesis on an eighteenth-century collector, came down to meet me. She was hoping to publish a history of Brimo de Laroussilhe in time to celebrate the firm’s centennial the following year and was arguably the only person in the world who knew the book I hoped to translate

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better than I did. Unexpectedly pleased to be disturbed at her labors, she proved delighted to collaborate. The gallery’s business papers, along with many, though not all, of René’s academic and personal papers, had been gathered with his nephew Nicolas-René’s help in more than one hundred archival boxes, which lined the walls of an annex in the nearby rue des Saints-Pères. There I discovered many faded, often crumbling notes from René’s years at the École, Institut, and Harvard; an original handwritten manuscript of L’évolution du goût; several heavily marked up typescripts, revised outlines, equally marked up galley proofs, and extensive editorial responses in a number of hands, plus a virtual treasure trove of miscellaneous documents including applications and award letters, otherwise undocumented reviews, published and unpublished manuscripts on a variety of topics, and correspondence, both personal and professional. There was no time to go through all this material with any care. In any case, I was unprepared to do so. But a year later, inspired by what I had seen, having completed a draft translation of the entire book, I arranged to spend a week at Brimo de Laroussilhe seeking answers to the many questions that had arisen. What I discovered exceeded even my most optimistic expectations, prompting further research in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, thanks to a Senior Research Fellowship; in New York, at the Frick Art Reference Library thanks to another; and, in Cambridge, at the Harvard Art Museums Archives, where many of the relevant papers of both Sachs and Forbes are held, including the “other half ” of their extended academic correspondence with Brimo. In 2013, on two follow-up visits to Paris that July and December, I was first able to visit with Nicolas-René himself, who showed great enthusiasm for the project, invited me into his home, gave me a tour of Le Canard Enchaîné on a Sunday afternoon, when the newsroom was quiet, and, on my second visit, introduced me to his sister Isabelle, who brought along the family photograph album from which a number of the images reproduced in these pages are taken. Back in grad school, when I first thought to publish the translation that follows, I promoted the project as appropriate because it was almost in time for the text’s fiftieth anniversary in print. Present circumstances permit me the rare pleasure of now promoting the same project, vastly improved, as appropriate because almost in time for its seventy-fifth anniversary in print. There seems only one appropriate response: “J’aime fortune.”

Notes on the Text Preparing a critical translation of L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections has taken many years, though simplified enormously both by the confidence and clarity of its author’s thought and a methodological selfconsciousness suggested in the title phrase d’après l’histoire des collections (Based on

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the Study of Collections). Brimo’s prose, unpretentious and direct, flowery only on occasion and even then only in elaborating historical claims, develops clearly from paragraph to paragraph, from point to point. He traces the history of American collecting chronologically for the most part. On those few occasions when backtracking proves necessary to develop a parallel claim, he points out and explains the breaks in continuity himself. My goal from the first has been to present a readable narrative that stays close to the original while correcting errors and fleshing out a rather skeletal scholarly apparatus. In the interest of minimizing scholarly intervention to the extent possible, certain errors and lapses in both text and notes have been corrected without editorial comment. Parenthetical dates of birth and death following the names of figures, major and minor, provided somewhat randomly in any case, have been suppressed throughout, and inadvertent factual errors and misspellings rectified: “El Saleo” is now properly “El Jaleo”; “Rembrandt,” “Michelangelo”; “Smith,” “Smithson”; “Sir Richard,” “Sir Robert”; “abbey,” “convent”; “catalogue raisonné,” “collection catalogue”; “Henry,” “Henri”; “Wilde,” “Childe”; “Macomber,” “Severance”; “Metz,” “Le Mans”; and so on. Edward Carey rather than his brother is now properly said to have married the sister of Charles Leslie. Titles and dates of misidentified scholarly texts have been brought into conformity with current American academic usage. A confusing reference to “le roi de France” turned out to result from a casual misreading of a reference by Quesnay de Beaurepaire to David le Roi, a member of the American Philosophical Society, an example easily multiplied, typically the result of a nonnative reader taking notes by hand.246 Certain among these local errors proved more delightfully challenging than others to correct. It took hours, for instance, to identify one particularly mysterious source whose author is given first as “A. Traveller” and then, in a subsequent citation, “A. R. Traveller,” who turned out to be Anne Newport Royall, the title of whose Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (1826) continues with the words by a Traveller. Discrepancies of this kind could only be cleared up by pulling actual books from library shelves, as I did for every text cited or mentioned. Most have been rectified, though a painting, Patriotism and the Century, apparently misattributed to Thomas Sully, remains unidentified.247 I discovered in the process several instances of inadvertent plagiarism of little consequence, for instance, a phrase cribbed from a source not cited regarding the previously mentioned marriage of Edward to Leslie Carey. That source, Helen Weston Henderson’s The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Other Collections of Philadelphia, and others like it are included in the current bibliography. The “Bibliographie générale” was divided into an odd miscellany of idiosyncratic categories and turned out to be composed entirely of sources on which René specifically did not rely in writing it—a general bibliography, indeed; a sort of guide to the literature for those interested in additional reading. The far more comprehensive current version lists every work the young Brimo demonstrably consulted in preparing the text or directly cited in his notes and should be

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considered a historiographic contribution in its own right, making visible the existence of a perhaps surprisingly robust literature on American collecting and American museums in the late 1930s, from which a very few references that remain stubbornly unidentifiable have been eliminated. All translations from foreignlanguage sources are my own unless otherwise indicated. On occasion, I have felt it necessary to interpolate one or more words into an otherwise ambiguous or incomplete passage to preserve what I believe to be its intended meaning. Thus I have added the phrase “‘the discovery of the Hudson River by Henry Hudson in 1609 and . . . the first successful application of steam to navigation upon that river by Robert Fulton in 1807,’ ” as quoted from the introduction to the celebration catalogue (and cited in an endnote), after “two important dates in American history” to correct a clearly unintended omission. Interpolated text (set within square brackets) has in all cases been borrowed directly or in careful paraphrase from the source Brimo originally consulted. Such instances are extremely rare. Where collectors are identified collectively, according to accepted period convention omitting the wife’s name (e.g., Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Rockefeller), I have, insofar as possible, revised and completed the identification to include the full names of both parties (e.g., John David and Laura Spelman Rockefeller). In particularly obvious instances where not material to specific claims, attributions that have changed since 1938 have been updated. Occasionally, French phrases in square brackets follow their translations (e.g., “period worship [la culte de la date]”) in order to capture some particular flavor or nuance—here a trendy appreciation for particular moments in art history tied to recent archaeological discoveries. The vagueness of certain seemingly specific source references, extremely misleading by current academic standards, has been qualified with introductory phrases like “See . . .” and “See, for instance . . .” to generalize them. The general quality of the research these references serve to record is sufficiently high throughout that such usage arguably more accurately translates Brimo’s intent. The problem is greatest in the early period, where the French author found himself reduced to generalizing about American political and cultural history, and almost disappears around the time of the Philadelphia Centennial. Some original notes have been moved from where they obviously do not belong to where they better belong; some have been combined; many others have been silently completed. On two occasions, brief sequences of redundant note numbers resulted in missing notes, some of which were possible to reconstruct; others not. The many months of patient effort involved in this work can be effectively gauged by comparing a section of notes as originally published (Fig. 33) with their revised version. So that the French and English editions remain usefully complementary, the original note numbers, where superseded, are provided in square brackets (see pp. 326–28). Occasional editorial comments interpolated into these notes in square brackets are clearly identified as such. The Evolution of Taste

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Fig. 33 | First thirty-five notes to book 2, chapter 3, L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, p. 151.

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66

Victorian-style subject headers in the table of contents insufficiently systematic to be of much use to contemporary readers have been eliminated. The black-and-white illustrations tipped into the French edition have been retained as originally published to provide a sense of their original impact and strangeness.248 Finally, to allow interested readers to consult this translation and the French edition side by side, the original page numbers have been inserted in square brackets into the translation text except where they occur at chapter breaks or on note pages.

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Notes All translations from foreign-language sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. The following abbreviations are used below: ALS APCS DQ HAMA HC

autograph letter signed autograph postcard signed (filing code, Paris Archives) Harvard Art Museums Archives (filing code, Harvard Art Museums Archives) PJSP Paul J. Sachs Papers RBPBLA René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives, 7 quai Voltaire, Paris 75007. TLS typed letter signed 1. A very considerable sum, 30,000 francs was the equivalent in 1900 of more than 8,700 grams of gold or almost $6,000. Descriptions of the history of the Brimo family and gallery here and in the paragraphs that follow are derived from conversations with Nicolas Brimo’s grandchildren Isabelle Brimo-Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo and with MarieAmélie Carlier, director of the gallery since 1995. Nicolas-René made a preliminary effort to gather and organize his uncle René’s papers during the years he owned the gallery, but they remain in too rough a state for particular items to be located more specifically than in the René Brimo Papers, Brimo de Laroussilhe Archives (RBPBLA). 2. We know the date on which Nicolas Brimo was born from Preuve de la nation-

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alité: Liste alphabétique des personnes ayant acquis ou perdu la nationalité française par décret (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1949), vol. 4 (1921–1930). 3. The widespread massacres of Armenians in Constantinople and elsewhere in Turkey in 1915 led many, including those who had lived in the city for generations, to emigrate despite the expense and difficulty of doing so; see Denise Aghanian, The Armenian Diaspora: Cohesion and Fracture (New York: University Press of America, 2007), 84; see also Richard G. Hovannisian, “The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914,” in The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 2:203–38. Indeed, large numbers of Armenian professionals and intellectuals had been fleeing Constantinople, whether for Europe or for America, already for decades; see Robert O. Krikorian, “The Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Intelligentsia in Constantinople, 1908–1915,” in Armenian Constantinople, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 2010), 358. 4. Written in what has been described as a nearly indecipherable dialect of Turkish, that extensive correspondence, which I have not had the opportunity to consult, awaits transcription and translation. Conversation with Isabelle Brimo-Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014.

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5. Olivier Gabet, Un marchand entre deux Empires: Elie Fabius et le monde de l’art (Paris: Skira, 2011), 13–23. There was a synagogue around the corner from 48 rue Laffitte on the rue de la Victoire, founded in 1875. The Rothchilds founded their bank on the rue Laffitte. Conversation with Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014. 6. See the map of the ninth and tenth arrondissements in Atlas municipal des vingt arrondissements de Paris, 1920, plate 6; and the more detailed (1/500) Plan parcellaire de Paris, prepared by the Service Technique du Plan de Paris, January 1926, parcel 113b, both consulted in the Département des Cartes et Plans at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where a 1908 photograph in the Département des Estampes et de la Photographie (Va 285, folio, tome 10: 99 B 157170) shows what the building at 48 rue Laffitte looked like shortly before Nicolas moved in. Details about the building’s interior are from the relevant real estate tax records in the Paris Archives: DQ 18 1386–87. 7. Conversation with Isabelle BrimoGuillerot, 6 July 2014. 8. See Henri Leman, Catalogue des antiquités égyptiennes, assyriennes, grecques et romaines; terres cuites, verrerie, vases peints, bronzes, sculptures, etc.; objets d’art et curiosité européens et orientaux, céramiques, ivoires, bronzes, cuivres, fers, objets variés, armes, bois sculptés, sculptures diverses, manuscrits, miniatures, livres, tableaux, meubles, tapisseries, étoffes, tapis, etc., dépendant de la succession de M. Antoine Brimo, Hôtel Drouot, 19 and 21 February 1920. 9. N. Brimo to director of Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17 June 1911, file copy, RBPBLA. 10. Though all three works appear in pre-1912 installation photographs in the Brimo archives, neither Nicolas’s name nor that of the gallery is listed in the Met’s provenance records, nor, for that matter, is there

11.

12.

13. 14.

any direct record of these sales among Nicolas’s own surviving papers. Morgan, until his death in 1913, purchased a great deal of medieval art but, after 1901, almost exclusively through another Parisian dealer, Jacques Seligmann; see R. Aaron Rottner, “J. P. Morgan and the Middle Ages,” in the exhibition catalogue Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940, ed. Elizabeth Bradford Smith (University Park, Pa.: Palmer Museum of Art; distributed by Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 119. For a generally reliable assessment of the materials involved in these transactions à l’aimable, see Étienne Bertrand, “Archives des sociétés Altounian-Lorbet et Brimo de Laroussilhe depuis leur création jusque vers 1960 concernant les objets du Moyen Âge” (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Paris I–Panthéon-Sorbonne, September 1996), 43–46. The unlabeled photo album originally belonged to Henri Daguerre; it came into Nicolas Brimo’s possession with his purchase of 58 rue Jouffroy in 1928 and remains in the gallery library at 7 quai Voltaire in Paris. I owe my access to it to the generosity of Marie-Amélie Carlier, on whose insights into its original use I have largely relied. The de Laroussilhe family tomb at the Parisian cemetery Père Lachaise, which dates from the family’s first taste of mercantile success, bears the inscription “La Chapelle Roussilhe.” Luigi Bellini, Nel mondo degli antiquari (Florence: Arnaud Editore, 1947), 263. See Germain Seligman, Merchants of Art: 1880–1960: Eighty Years of Professional Collecting (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1961), 1–2 (Germain changed the spelling of his surname to “Seligman” in 1943, when he became a U.S. citizen); see also Jacques Helft, Vive la Chine! Mémoires d’un antiquaire (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1955), 112.

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15. Bellini, Nel mondo degli antiquari, 264. 16. Ibid., 263. 17. F[erdinand] de Laroussilhe [Marius Pracy, pseud.], Le secret d’amour de Galiot de Genouillac: j’aime.fort.une (Cahors: J. Girma, 1911). 18. Ellis Island, transit records, 30 June 1915. 19. The bande blanche cannot be considered a cartel for technical reasons since there was no price fixing involved, whereas the collective purchasing practiced by their bande noire competitors, however illicit where tax payments were concerned, was more like the partnering work of a consortium. 20. Conversations with Nicolas-René Brimo, 12 May 2013, and with Marie-Amélie Carlier, 8 July 2014. 21. One thinks immediately of the consortium of German Jewish dealers in Frankfurt—Saemy Rosenberg, Isaak Rosenbaum, Julius Falk, Arthur Goldschmidt, and Zacharias Hackenbroch— who managed the purchase of works of medieval ecclesiastical art (“The Guelph Treasure”) from Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, and who organized their sale to American museums between 1929 and 1931; see Heather McCune Bruhn, “The Guelph Treasure: The Traveling Exhibition and Purchase by Major American Museums,” in Smith, Medieval Art in America, 199–202. 22. Conversations with Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014, and with Marie-Amélie Carlier, 14 May 2013 and 8 July 2014. 23. See Helft, Mémoires d’un antiquaire, 11–14. 24. Details about the interior of the building at 34 rue de La Fayette are from the relevant real estate tax records in the Paris Archives: DQ 18 1375 and DQ 18 1390. 25. Albert Brimo went on to a distinguished career in France as a legal historian whose doctoral dissertation, Pascal et le droit (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1942), was followed by many other works includ-

26. 27.

28.

29.

ing De l’unité des doctrines phénoménologiques, existentialistes, et axiologiques dans la théorie générale du Droit (Toulouse: M. Espic, 1964), Les grands courants de la philosophie du droit et de l’État (Paris: A. Pedone, 1967), and, near the end of his life, in a return to the Lot Valley, Les paysans de la Chataigneraie devant la vie quotidienne à l’aube du XXe siècle ([Aurillac]: Éditions de la Butte aux Cailles, 1988). Like his brother, Albert remained all his life something of an art historian as well, publishing, for example, “Le couvent des Jacobins de Toulouse et l’essor de la miniature languedocienne” in the Revue Historique et Littéraire du Languedoc in 1944. Brimo family and gallery information here and in the paragraphs to follow is derived from conversation with Isabelle Brimo-Guillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014. Conversation with Marie-Amélie Carlier, 8 July 2014. Nicolas would receive his French citizenship on 17 July 1929; see Preuve de la nationalité, vol. 4 (1921–30). On the new letterhead, though “Brimo de Laroussilhe” is clearly featured, “La Fayette Art Gallery” appears as well, establishing a necessary continuity (see fig. 8). In 1891, Gruel took over a bookbinding establishment founded by his father and, with his stepbrother, Edmond Engelmann, a printer-lithographer, expanded a business that, following Gruel’s death in 1923, his son Paul took over in turn. E-mail exchanges with Diane Bockrath, librarian and archivist, Walters Art Museum, 9 July 2013 and 22 June 2015. Walters was first introduced to Gruel in Paris in 1895 by George Lucas; see George A. Lucas, The Diary of George A. Lucas: An American Art Agent in Paris, 1857–1909, ed. Lillian M. C. Randall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 154n1.

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30. The sales percentages are taken from Marshall Price, “Henry Walters: Elusive Collector,” in Smith, Medieval Art in America, 129. 31. My thanks to Christine E. Brennan, senior research associate in the Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Met, for a checklist of these materials. 32. Brimo family and gallery information here and in the paragraphs that follow is derived from conversations with NicolasRené Brimo, 12 May 2013, and with MarieAmélie Carlier, 14 May 2013 and 17 December 2014. 33. Daguerre, who had acquired 58 rue Jouffroy on 30 July 1926, sold it to “Nicolas Brimo and Lucien Alexandre Lascombes de Laroussilhe” a year and a half later, on 28 February 1928, for a bit less than he had paid. Lucien provided half the funds used for the purchase, though Nicolas was careful to insist that this 50 percent stake apply only to the real estate, not to the business. 34. The interior space of the building at 58 rue Jouffroy measured about 2,000 square feet; the garden another 350; see the relevant real estate tax records in the Paris Archives: DQ 18 1977. 35. For a balanced discussion of the upsides and downsides of Helft’s own move from the quartier Drouot to a private residence at about this time, see Helft, Mémoires d’un antiquaire, 45–46. The principal upside was the more limited number of serious collectors whose desires could be catered to without interruption, the principal downside being the considerable reduction in the number of walk-in visitors with something to sell, “for as paradoxical as it might sound, it was in buying that a dealer made money, not in selling.” Ibid. 36. See also Monique Laurent, “L’École du Louvre (1932–1962): Ses méthodes, ses résultats,” 1967, 3-volume bound typescript, 1:5–46.

37. See Madeline Caviness, “Louis Grodecki (1910–1982),” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1995–2000), vol. 3, Philosophy and the Arts, 307–21. On the differences between the École and the Institut at about that time, see Laurent, “L’École du Louvre,” 1:12. 38. Focillon organized the first “groupe des étudiants” at the Sorbonne and later brought the idea to Yale; see George Kubler, “L’enseignement d’Henri Focillon” [1981], in Relire Focillon, ed. Matthias Waschek (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts, 1998), 15–16. 39. Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Art: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981), 283. 40. Ibid., 37. 41. Even counting this new generation, perhaps just Wildenstein, Seligmann, Ratton, and René Brimo. 42. Grodecki, prominently acknowledged in L’évolution du goût, dedicated several of his own books to René. 43. For a handwritten draft of his minor thesis and typescript corrected in ink, see RBPBLA. An abstract of the thesis itself appeared in “Résumés des thèses de l’année 1932–1933: Le château et l’église d’A ssier (Lot),” Bulletin des Musées de France 4, no. 8 (October 1932): 128–30. Research into these and many other details of Brimo’s life and career has been importantly shaped by Henry R. Hope’s admiring obituary, “René Brimo, 1911–1948,” College Art Journal 8 (Winter 1948): 151, long the only information available. 44. René Brimo, “Musée de Cahors: Deux statues d’esclaves en bois provenant d’Assier,” Bulletin des Musées de France 4, no. 10 (December 1932): 171–73. Regarding the trade in architectural and sculptural works

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45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

and fragments from Assier, see Bertrand, “Archives des sociétés,” 14–15. René preserved among his papers Wildenstein’s response to his query dated 1 March 1933, inviting him to stop by the offices of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. RBPBLA. Editor, Bulletin de la Société des Études du Lot, to R. Brimo, 26 April 1933, RBPBLA. See [name illegible], librarian, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ville de Cahors, to R. Brimo, Cahors, 26 April 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. René Brimo de Laroussilhe, “CastelnauBretenoux,” Larousse Mensuel 316 ( June 1933): 420; and Brimo de Laroussilhe, “L’Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie,” Larousse Mensuel 320 (October 1933): 528–29. See also Claude Augé to R. Brimo, Paris, 7 April 1933, TLS, requesting, for the latter essay, 150–200 lines of text plus whatever photographs he preferred. RBPBLA. René de L. Brimo, “La sculpture de bronze en France au XVIième siècle,” Thèse pour le Diplôme d’Études Supérieures d’Histoire et de Géographie, May 1933. For the original typescript with twenty-five black and white plates, see RBPBLA. Brimo’s minor thesis was published under the same title in La Gazette de 1’Hôtel Drouot 42 (26 July–13 September 1933), in thirteen installments. Other graduate students were involved in Focillon’s catalogue project; indeed, such collaboration was the hallmark of Focillon’s pedagogy, from his early days at the University of Lyon in 1914 until his death in New Haven some thirty years later. René Schneider to R. Brimo, Bayonne, 20 August 1933, APCS, RBPBLA. Sachs sailed for Europe in October 1932 and arrived back home the following June; see Sally Anne Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs and the Institutionalization of Museum Culture Between the World Wars” (unpub-

54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

lished Ph.D. dissertation, Tufts University, 2001), 188n8, 236–37. Sachs’s exchange professorship was sponsored by the French Ministry of Education, with funding provided by the Hyde Foundation at Harvard; see Comité français pour la célébration du troisième centenaire de Harvard, Harvard et la France: Recueil d’études (Paris: Revue d’Histoire Moderne, 1936), appendix 1, 229–34. Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs,” 175, 3. In a letter to Sachs that July, René invoked the “knowledge of American museums we all came to appreciate from your lectures in Paris,” R. Brimo to Paul J. Sachs, Paris, 19 July 1933, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. Elizabeth Bradford Smith, “The Nineteenth Century: Overview of the Period,” in Smith, Medieval Art in America, 22. See Kathryn McClintock, “Academic Collecting at Harvard,” in Smith, Medieval Art in America, part 3: “1920–1940: The Era of Art Historians and Curators,” 173–80; and, on the activities of Arthur Kingsley Porter (whose ten-volume Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads appeared in 1923) and Kenneth Conant (known principally for his excavations at Cluny), see Louis Bréhier, “L’Université Harvard et l’art français du Moyen Âge,” in Comité français, Harvard et la France, 139–48. On 17 December 1930, Nicolas had written to Forbes—with lots of misspellings that included “Descente” but also “Haward”— hoping to interest the Fogg in a twelfthcentury sculpted polychrome Descent from the Cross from the collection of Count Gnoli, for which he was asking $35,000. Forbes had responded positively on 31 December; he and Sachs would see if they might “interest some friend on our behalf.” Edward W. Forbes Papers, folder 2419, HAMA. See Price, “Henry Walters,” 136. The Evolution of Taste, [6].

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59. Paul Vitry, Paris, 29 April 1933, ALS; Schneider, Paris, [April 1933], TLS; Pierre Lavedan, Paris, 26 April 1933, ALS; Charles Picard, Paris, 6 April 1933, ALS; Jacques Vanuxem, Paris, 25 April 1933, ALS; Marcel Aubert, Paris, 9 June 1933, ALS—all in RBPBLA. 60. Brimo de Laroussilhe, “L’Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie,” 529. 61. See Pascal Schandel, “L’expérience américaine, 1933–1943,” in La vie des formes: Henri Focillon et les arts (Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2004), 168. 62. Henri Focillon to Sachs, New Haven, 15 April 1933, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. In July, Focillon reminded Sachs: “One more thing we have in common: one of our better students, having taken your fine lectures to heart, will shortly arrive to study with you at Harvard; even better, he has qualities that you’ll admire.” Focillon to Sachs, 15 July 1933, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 572, HAMA. That same day, he wrote a similarly warm letter to Porter, in Ireland for the summer, stressing his future student’s “personal distinction,” though Porter almost certainly died before receiving it. Focillon to Arthur Kingsley Porter, 15 July 1933, Henri Focillon Papers, Box 29, folder 572, HAMA. 63. Focillon to R. Brimo, 4 April 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. Focillon then added in a tone of coy complicity, “Let me tell you how I spend my days here: ‘telling tales’ to delicious creatures and showing them the lovely images you and I chose together.” 64. R. Brimo to Sachs, Paris, 19 July 1933, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. 65. Sachs to R. Brimo, Cambridge, 8 August 1933, TLS, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA; copy in RBPBLA. 66. A travel brochure from the Institute of International Education, located at 2 West 45th Street, is preserved among René’s papers. RBPBLA.

67. See Ossip Zadkine, Le maillet et le ciseau: Souvenirs de ma vie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1968); see also Michel Dewachter, “Les artistes collectionneurs et un témoigage sur les débuts de l’antiquaire Joseph Brummer: Les ‘Souvenirs’ de Zadkine,” Revue d’Égyptologie 40 (1989): 218–20. For the phrases “eccentric and rough-hewn ways” and “a revered figure,” see Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs,” 218. 68. Nicolas cabled money to Brummer for his son on numerous occasions, sometimes as little as $40 at a time; see, for example, Joseph Brummer to N. Brimo, New York, 4 December 1934, TLS, RBPBLA. 69. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 9 October 1934, ALS, RBPBLA. 70. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 14 September and 2 November 1933, ALS. It was, for the record, a losing ticket, as reported in N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 22 November 1933, ALS—all in RBPBLA. 71. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 14 September 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. 72. Albert Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, [October 1933], ALS; N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 19 October 1933, ALS, both in RBPBLA. 73. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 28 November 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. 74. Seligman, Merchants of Art, chapter 17: “The Thirties, Paris,” 190. 75. Valentiner had been curator of Decorative Arts at the Met from 1907–17 at the time the Morgan collection was on view there—“Medieval Art” would remain “Decorative Arts” at the Met until 1933— before moving to Detroit in 1924. 76. Godwin had first approached the gallery on 23 March 1929; see Bertrand, “Archives des sociétés,” 26–27. 77. Alexander Petrovich Basilevsky’s collection of medieval and Renaissance art, purchased in 1885 in Paris by the Tsar Alexander III for the Hermitage Museum, evacuated to Moscow in September 1917 to escape the advance of the German

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army, was later sold abroad by the Soviet government, quietly, through dealers in Amsterdam rather than at auction. Brimo family and gallery information here and in the paragraphs that follow is derived from conversations with Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014, and with Marie-Amélie Carlier, 8 July and 17 December 2014. 78. Nicolas, of course, had the chalice in Paris, and a rare surviving exchange of cables and letters documents his and Brummer’s negotiations. Having first declared Nicolas’s price too high, Brummer then asked that the vessel be sent to him directly “not on consignment” and “not for resale” but for his own collection, closing the deal chez Brimo de Laroussilhe on Brummer’s annual early spring visit, in person, without paperwork. In one letter that forms part of this exchange, Brummer mentions having just seen René; see Brummer to N. Brimo, February 1934, RBPBLA. Brummer did eventually sell the chalice to the Met, as originally planned, but only some years later. 79. “Acheter c’est facile; trouver un client beaucoup plus complexe.” Conversation with Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014. 80. These classmates included William Butler Fagg and Hermione Waterfield (both later with Christie’s), Charles Ratton, and Jacqueline Loudmer; see Hermione Waterfield, “Working with William Fagg as Consultant to Christie’s, 1966–1991,” African Arts 27 ( July 1994): 31. The class status this full name as nickname, Brimo de Laroussilhe, suggested seems to have been fraught with a certain irony. (One of his European friends at Harvard, N. Delambertin, addressed René in letters as “Mon vieux Marquis.”) The letterhead René used for formal correspondence featured the firm’s name again—“Brimo, de Laroussilhe”—with a comma we can imagine his friends imagining as they teased him. These experiments and variants seem evi-

81.

82.

83.

84.

dence of his process of self-reinvention, working out a professional identity in a new and less formal American context. When, in November 1934, he prepared an essay for publication in the Fogg Museum Bulletin simply as “René Brimo,” without the matronymic, his father, misconstruing the gesture, angrily responded: “but why have you cut off [estropié] your name?” N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 21 December 1934, TLS. The variants were numerous, the transformations confusing for all concerned. The winter before, Nicolas had addressed one postcard to “René G. Brimo,” the only acknowledgment of his middle name “Georges” that I have discovered. See N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 6 January 1934, APCS—both in RBPBLA. See Agnes Mongan and Paul J. Sachs, Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940). Mongan, just twenty-eight when she and René met, was almost of his generation, as opposed to Sachs, then 56, and Forbes, then 60. See N. Delambertin to R. Brimo, 10 October 1934, TLS, and 6 November 1934, ALS, both in RBPBLA. Radcliffe undergraduates were, of course, all female. Delambertin to R. Brimo, 10 October 1934, ALS, RBPBLA. Though these Littlefield works themselves probably survive, it has not been possible to identify them. See James R. Bakker, William H. Littlefield, 1902–1969: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (Dennis, Mass.: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 2006). Littlefield signed his letters “with love, Bill”; thinly disguised gay references elsewhere in René’s papers, which he carefully preserved, abound. One acquaintance, Antonio Bonnini, inquired, “but why should I like Frenchmen, anyway! My chief Mussolini would not approve it.” Antonio Bonnini to R. Brimo, London, 13 July 1933, ALS. A letter

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74

from an unidentified correspondent on Japanese paper, detailed with small watercolors, notes: “quand on est P.D. on n’est pas comme tout le monde” (when you’re a P.D. you’re not like everyone else),”P.D.” (pédé), or, as the letter’s author wittily prefers, “Peintre Décorateur,” being an offensive slang term for homosexual. Unknown to R. Brimo, [ca. 1934], ALS. Henry Plumer McIlhenny, the openly gay son of John D. McIlhenny—an American collector with a significant presence in L’évolution du goût—hoping to spend his summer vacation with René at Pratoucy, wrote: “Hope nothing I did was upsetting to you; if when I see you you’ve not married I have a proposition for you.” Henry Plumer McIlhenny to R. Brimo, Philadelphia, [ca. June 1937], APCS. (In the last year of his life, René wrote to McIlhenny, then a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in English: “I am still a bachelor, are you married?” R. Brimo to Henry Plumer McIlhenny, Pratoucy, 22 July [1948], ALS—all in RBPBLA. René had, it would appear, a number of “girlfriends” over the years, who served as needed at official or ceremonial functions. According to his brother, Albert, René and Yvette Chaviré, a principal dancer in the Ballet Russe, were lovers; perhaps true, or a convenient cover. 85. Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs,” 126–27, 138. Duncan devotes a chapter (184–231) to a close look at one year in the course, 1931–32. 86. See Janet Tassel, “Reverence for the Object: Art Museums in a Changed World,” Harvard Magazine (September– October 2002): 48–58, 98–99. 87. In his obituary of Charles Eliot Norton, Henry James described the house, with its wide porches and fine library, as embodying “civilization itself.” There, he wrote, “Europe . . . was always round about one”; see “An American Scholar: Charles Eliot

88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Norton,” Burlington Magazine 14 (October 1908-March 1909): 202–4, cited in Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs,” 147. Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs,” 160. Ibid., 175. There were guest lecturers in 14 of the 38 Friday classes in 1932–33, the year before René arrived. Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs,” 217. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 28 November 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. Lavedan, letter of recommendation for R. Brimo, Paris, 26 April 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 19 October 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 14 September 1933, ALS. Two months later Nicolas recommended that, in his spare time, René also enroll in a business course or two and a course in accounting! N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 28 November 1933, ALS—both in RBPBLA. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 19 October 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. Ibid. Nicolas suggested that René take Minassian’s frugality to heart: “Like many Orientals he may take this a bit far, but given current conditions he’s not entirely wrong.” N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 2 November 1933, ALS—both in RBPBLA. See Kirkor Minassian to N. Brimo, 6 October 1933, ALS; and N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 28 November 1933, ALS, both in RBPBLA. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 19 October 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. Minassian to N. Brimo, 16 November 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. Brummer to N. Brimo, , New York, 23 January 1934, TLS, RBPBLA. See N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 18 November 1933, TLS, RBPBLA. See N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 28 November 1933, TLS, RBPBLA. See N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 4 November 1933, ALS, RBPBLA.

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105. See N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 16 November 1934, ALS, RBPBLA; see also Duncan, “Paul J. Sachs,” 162n103. 106. See Jacques Bacri to R. Brimo, 2 May 1934, RBPBLA. 107. See N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Hotel Inglés, Valencia, 19 September 1934, ALS, RBPBLA. Porter had died in July 1933, mere months before René arrived in Cambridge. 108. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 22 November 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. 109. The head of Apollo in question was very possibly the late sixth-century bronze at the Met discussed and reproduced in Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Bronzes (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1915), 41 [cat. 60], and again in Richter, Handbook of the Classical Collections (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1930), 66. 110. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 14 September 1933, ALS; and N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 22 November 1933, ALS, both in RBPBLA. 111. Ezilda Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 31 October 1934, ALS, RBPBLA. Harris had in fact died in 1930. 112. Sachs to Edward W. Forbes, Paris, 19 September 1935, Edward Waldo Forbes Papers (HC 2), file 1822, HAMA. 113. N. Brimo to R. Brimo, Paris, 14 September 1933, ALS, RBPBLA. 114. René Brimo, manuscript notes, 17 March 1934, RBPBLA. 115. René Brimo, “La sculpture française de l’époque romane au Fogg Art Museum,” 24 pages, typescript, 17 plates, RBPBLA; regarding the degree itself, see Sachs to Jerome Greene, University Hall [Cambridge], 28 May 1935, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. Although Harvard preserves no record of Brimo’s graduation, according to Henri J. Bourneuf, reference librarian there, the university did in those years award master’s degrees to those who had completed “substantial work” toward a doctorate but

116. 117.

118. 119.

120.

121.

122.

123.

had left “without completing the full program.” Henri J. Bouneuf to Kenneth Haltman, Cambridge, 11 March 1986, TLS. Henri Focillon, La vie des formes (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1934). Focillon to R. Brimo, New Haven, 27 April 1934, ALS, RBPBLA. These are the sort of intuitively fine-tuned remarks that inspired George Kubler’s later observation that Focillon “endowed his writing with the charm of his conversation [even as] in conversation he spoke with the order and discipline of considered writing.” George Kubler, “Henri Focillon, 1881–1943,” College Art Journal 4 ( January 1945): 72. See William Littlefield to R. Brimo, [ca. 13 October 1934], ALS, RBPBLA. Focillon to Sachs, Maranville [HauteMarne], 3 October 1934, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 572, HAMA. Schneider to R. Brimo, Paris, 24 October 1934, ALS, RBPBLA. Schneider had his own theories on American collecting. He wondered, for instance, whether the recent American interest in preColumbian art was not in compensation for a lack of ancient traditions. Burroughs’s course ran from September 1934 through May 1935—René arrived shortly after the start of classes. René Brimo, “A Byzantine Column from Toulouse,” Bulletin of the Fogg Art Museum 4 (November 1934): 15–17. R. Brimo to Albert C. Barnes, Cambridge, 24 March 1935, ALS, Barnes Foundation; see also R. Brimo to George Grey Barnard, Cambridge, 24 March 1935, ALS, George Grey Barnard Papers, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Handwritten in somewhat faulty French (with a few curiously missing diacriticals) and signed in yet a new way, René de L. Brimo, making no mention of Harvard (or, for that matter Sachs) but describing himself as a doctoral student at the Sorbonne and the project as his dissertation (see fig. 21), these two letters betray

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124.

76

125. 126.

127. 128. 129.

130.

131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

a youthful inexperience and confusion about identity that make perfect sense when we remember—as it is easy to forget—that their author was but twenty-four years old. Sachs to Jerome Greene, 28 May 1935, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. Jacques Rémy to R. Brimo, [November 1934], ALS, RBPBLA. René Brimo, miscellaneous manuscript notes, [undated]; see also Beatrice [third party in Illinois; no surname given] to R. Brimo, 13 January 1937, ALS, both in RBPBLA. See Edward W. Forbes, Annual Report of the Fogg Art Museum (1935–36): 21. René Brimo, curriculum vitae, [ca. 1939], RBPBLA (see fig. 30). See René Brimo, de Laroussilhe, with Marcel Françon, “Un rondeau sur la devise de Galiot de Genouillac,” Bulletin de la Société des Études du Lot 56 (1935): 339–42. René’s contribution to this collaboration derived almost verbatim from his earlier thesis, a corrected typescript of which (“Le château et l’église d’A ssier,” 11–16) is among his papers; see RBPBLA. René Brimo, “A Second Capital from Notre-Dame-des-Doms at Avignon,” Bulletin of the Fogg Art Museum 5 (1935–36): 9–11. Forbes to Sachs, 26 June 1936, TLS. Edward Waldo Forbes Papers (HC 2), file 1820, HAMA. René Brimo, miscellaneous notes, [undated], RBPBLA. The Evolution of Taste, preface, [6]. See Chandler R. Post to R. Brimo, Cambridge, 25 May 1937, APCS, RBPBLA. Suzanne La Follette to R. Brimo, New York, 19 October 1936, ALS, RBPBLA. William Warder Norton to R. Brimo, 26 October 1936, TLS, RBPBLA. Armand Colin to R. Brimo, 17 February 1937, TLS, RBPBLA.

138. Géza De Francovich, “A Romanesque School of Wood Carvers in Central Italy,” Art Bulletin 19 (March 1937): 4–57. 139. See Bob Davis to R. Brimo, Buffalo, 19 April 1937, ALS, RBPBLA. 140. In September 1938, Henry Hope would become the first American to attempt an English translation of L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis and, barely a decade later, would write its author’s obituary. 141. See Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 572 [cat. 729]. 142. René bought The Armenians from a seller who had acquired it in 1896 from Georges Julien Sortais, a specialist in Renaissance and eighteenth-century Old Master paintings. 143. A note René saved suggests he showed The Armenians to Jerry [Churchhill Pierce] Lathrop, professor of Art History at Dartmouth and director of its Art Gallery; see Dot and Henry [no surname given], 10 August 1937, ALS, RBPBLA. 144. See Robert C. Vose to R. Brimo, Boston, 22 November 1937, TLS, RBPBLA. 145. François-Gérard would eventually donate his purchases from these outings to the Musée Carnavalet, where they filled three rooms. Because he and René had made it a point to acquire similar works at each opening, this gives us a good idea of René’s taste beyond Littlefield. Artists in the Seligmann donation included Louise Abbéma, Mariano Alonzo-Pérez, AmauryDuval, A. Andréas, Raoul-Robert Belliani, Jean Béraud, Max Berthelin, Albert Besnard, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Frank Boggs, Léon Bonnat, Édouard Boutibonne, Carlo Brancaccio, Charles V. Brown, Charles Camino, Leonetto Cappiello, Carolus-Duran, F. A. Cazals, Charles Chaplin, Théobald Chatran, Paul Colin, Pierre-Auguste Cot, Georges Croegaert, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Lucien Darpy,

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Léon Dax, Emmanuel de CoulangeLautrec, Jean Dédina, Auguste de la Brély, Ernest-Jean Delahaye, Paul Delance, Élie Delaunay, Gustave Dennery, Dick, JeanGabriel Domergue, Ernest Duez, Denis Etcheverry, Julien-Hippolyte Féron, Joseph-Prosper Florence, A. Floa, Eugène Fromentin, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Gervex, Eugène-Louis Gillot, Léon Goupil, Eugène Grasset, Albert Guillaume, William Hart, Ferdinand Heilbuth, Roger Jourdain, Max Francis Klepper, Edmond Lapeyre, René Lelong, JulesEugène Lenepveu, Maurice Lévis, Luigi Loir, Ricardo Loppez-Cabrera, Henry Malfroy, Paul Marny, Luc-Olivier Merson, Henri Michel-Lévy, Edgar de Montzaigle, Jean-Baptiste Augustin Némoz, Henry Nocq, Alfred Palmer, Alexis Joseph Pérignon, Jean-François Portaels, JeanFrançois Raffaëlli, Georges Redon, Pierre Ribera, Philippe Rousseau, Louis Sabattier, Henri Saintin, E. Saulnier, Hippolyte Sébron, Paul Sinibaldi, Henry Somm, Alfred Stevens, Abel Truchet, Léon Tzeytline, Otto von Thoren, Freddy Wittop, and José de Zamora. See Au temps de Marcel Proust: La collection François-Gérard Seligmann au Musée Carnavalet (Paris Musées, 2001), 187. Some of the paintings and drawings in René’s collection remain in the family. 146. Charles Ratton, another of those rare dealers in the period who was also a trained art historian, went into business at 39 rue Laffitte in 1927 at a peak in Surrealist activity, acquiring objects for and selling objects to André Breton and Paul Éluard; see Philippe Dagen, “Ratton, objets sauvages,” in Charles Ratton: L’invention des arts “primitifs,” ed. Philippe Dagen and Maureen Murphy (Paris: Musée du quai Branly, 2013), 118–46. 147. See Philippe Dagen, “Conversation avec Guy Ladrière,” in Dagen and Murphy, Charles Ratton, 176.

148. All these materials are in RBPBLA. René took advantage of this meeting to share with Focillon a copy of his most recent medieval art publication on the ongoing restoration of the collections of the parish church of Sainte-Élisabeth in Paris; see René Brimo, “Le musée de SainteÉlisabeth,” Cahiers de l’Art Sacré (February 1937): 56–58. 149. Picard considered a “head from Chios” mentioned in the text a recent forgery; see The Evolution of Taste, [133]. 150. Schneider’s remarkably detailed comments on René’s first complete draft of the dissertation, written in a minute hand on the backs of recycled fliers for recitals of classical music (e.g., Georges Enesco at the Grande Salle Pleyel, 14 December 1937) that help to date them, evidence both interest in the subject and respect for the author. RBPBLA. 151. In a later tribute to Focillon, René would begin by praising his collaborative approach to learning but end by noting that Focillon was much loved by his students because he so loved them in return; René Brimo, “Henri Focillon en Amérique,” Arts, Beaux-Arts, Spectacles (15 March 1946): 1–2, RBPBLA. 152. Kubler, “Henri Focillon,” 73. 153. See, for instance, Brimo’s apparently unpublished review of Mélanges Henri Focillon (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Art, 1944), written that July, in RBPBLA. 154. The Evolution of Taste, [7]. 155. Focillon, in blue pencil, wrote simply “non” in the margin of one outline to René’s proposal to provide a general history of (presumably European) collecting because, like his proposed pocket history of (presumably European) taste, unnecessary to the historical project to hand. RBPBLA. 156. See, for example, Focillon, La vie des formes, 13–14 157. Walter Cahn, “Henri Focillon (1881–1943),” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies

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78

158. 159. 160.

161.

162.

163. 164. 165.

166. 167. 168. 169. 170.

on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1995–2000), vol. 3: Philosophy and the Arts, 263. Cahn has (as Focillon had) in mind the more deterministic doctrines of Alois Riegl around 1900 and those of Heinrich Wölfflin more recently. Cahn, “Henri Focillon,” 263–65. The Evolution of Taste, [194–95]. René Brimo, miscellaneous notes, [undated]; N. Brimo to R. Brimo, 22 November 1933, ALS, both in RBPBLA. Delambertin to R. Brimo, 10 October 1934, TLS, and 6 November 1934, ALS, both in RBPBLA. See Rebecca Zurier, “Newness, Flatness, and Other Myths: Looking for National Identity in European (and a Few British) Histories of American Art,” in Internationalizing the History of American Art: Views, ed. Barbara Groseclose and Jochen Wierich (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 19–29. See The Evolution of Taste, [91]—two references—and [88]. Ibid., [158]. For a recent discussion of the mainstream French and European view that American art was still “in its incubation stage,” see Veerla Thielemans, “Looking at American Art in French Nineteenth-Century Criticism,” in Groseclose and Wierich, Internationalizing the History of American Art, 117. The Evolution of Taste, [79]. Ibid., [66–67]. Ibid., [183n72]. Ibid., [168]. Ibid., [193]. “The astonishing human mosaic of races, nationalities, and religions introduced by immigration threw the initial [social] order into disarray,” René notes in a discussion of the early national experience, “so that traditional Protestants lived side by side with Catholics and Jews just as the nation was being swept by crises of ecstatic belief due to social unrest.”

171. 172.

173.

174.

175. 176.

177.

He left the task of developing the parallel between past American struggle with the forces of cultural dissolution and a “circumstance” he describes as “similarly acute today” to others, preferring to address instead equally fraught though more elevated questions. Ibid. Ibid., “Introduction,” [7]. Ibid. We find a close variant of this claim in an early draft of the manuscript, earmarked for its conclusion rather than its introduction: “Chaque période a son idée particulière, son goût des précédents[;] il y a plusieurs Moyen[s] Âge[s]—plusieurs XVIIIième siècles.” RBPBLA. In this respect, Brimo’s dissertation might be seen as following Edward Shinn’s lavish, celebratory, three-volume The Art Treasures of America (1879–83), cited in the dissertation’s bibliography, sharing its reliance on inventory, which Brimo mined for data, and as anticipating the more scholarly, American Studies–style thematic analysis of Neil Harris’s The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), however inattentive it would be to how the fortunes behind collections were made and thus to the social consequences of the taste they embodied. The Evolution of Taste, [190–91]; see Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979), esp. chapter 5, “Le sens de la distinction,” 293–364. Alan Wallach, personal communication, summer 2014. See R. Brimo to Sachs, Paris, 28 January 1938, ALS, and Sachs to R. Brimo, Cambridge, 15 February 1938, TLS, both PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. The photograph is reproduced in the book as plate 8a. In his request, René writes “following” but clearly means “prior to” the war. Of the two friends, we know little of H. Muller, who receives two photo credits in

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178.

179. 180. 181. 182. 183.

184.

185.

the text (for plates 3a, 4a, 5a, and 5b), other than that Muller was at the time seeking work translating German into French, though with neither a telephone nor typewriter of his own his prospects seemed dim; see Jeannette [surname unknown] to R. Brimo, Paris, [Saturday, ca. March 1938], TLS, RBPBLA. About E. Essayan, we know even less, though he may have been the son of Armenian activist Zabel Essayan who married a French painter in Paris around 1900, wrote about the Armenian genocide, and lived in Paris on and off through the 1930s. Both are acknowledged by René; perhaps they needed money as he needed help. “Instructions générales concernant les thèses ou les mémoires presentées à la faculté,” February 1938, RBPBLA. See Jeannette to R. Brimo, Paris, [Saturday, ca. March 1938], TLS, RBPBLA. The Evolution of Taste, [208]. Lavedan, 8 June 1939, TLS, RBPBLA. R. Brimo to Sachs, Paris, 9 May 1938, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. The “j’m fortune” logo was ready for the publisher by Easter week 1938. Some copies have alternate covers: one with no bottom line and a bigger off-center dial; another with a simplified title, bigger dial, and an empty bottom half. See, for example, Balbina Martínez Caviró, Cerámica Hispanumusulmana: Andalusí y Mudéjar (Madrid: Ediciones El Viso, 1991), 154, plate 149 [ca. 1420–40]. My thanks to Marie-Amélie Carlier for this reference. See Sabine Baring-Gould, The Deserts of Southern France: An Introduction to the Limestone and Chalk Plateaux of Ancient Aquitaine (London: Methuen, 1894), chapter 20: “The Castles,” 2:131–33; see also Florence Buttay-Jutier, Fortuna: Usages politiques d’une allégorie morale à la Renaissance (Paris: Maison de recherche de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2008).

186. 187.

188.

189.

190.

191.

192.

The same device appears carved into the wall of the church Notre-Dame de Lonzac, also built by Galiot around 1525. René Brimo, dissertation abstract, 129, RBPBLA. On René’s gambling, see Marcel Marnier to Nicolas-René Brimo, 22 May 2006, RBPBLA. See Marcel Françon, “Rondeau du MS. 402 de Lille,” PMLA 52 ( June 1937): 330– 31. These occasions included Brimo’s École du Louvre thesis (1932), his collaboration with Françon (1935), L’évolution du goût (1938), and much later “Les châteaux de Haut-Quercy, Castelnau-Bretenoux, Montal, [et] Assier,” Revue Historique et Littéraire du Languedoc 16 (December 1947): 331. For another doodled version of the “j’m fortune” logo, see the top of the draft of his “Nouveau Plan” dated 1 March 1937 in RBPBLA. The humor extended to the book’s frontispiece, a strange portrait by El Greco with more than a passing resemblance to Focillon and perhaps also Vitry (see p. 84). Clotilde Brière-Misme, who also worked in the Department of Prints and Photographs at the Louvre, was married to Gaston Brière, whose “The History of Modern Art Collections and Museums” René had taken at the École du Louvre, where Clotilde herself had taught until the fall of 1938. The copy of L’évolution du goût she purchased (or that she and her husband received as a gift from the author) bears the pencil inscription: “Brière Jan[vier] 1939 60 fr.” It was immediately accessioned into the collections of the Frick Art Reference Library, where it remains to this day. At least one of these copies was lost in transit; see R. Brimo to Henry Radford Hope, Paris, 14 September 1938, ALS, Indiana University Archives. Prinet, a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, would later assist Grodecki in compiling a Focillon bibliography; see

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193.

80 194. 195.

196.

197.

198.

“Entretien avec Jean Prinet,” propos recueillis par Yves Guillauma, Presse Actualité: La Revue de l’Information Écrite, Parlée, Televisée 19 (May 1979): 34–41. Forbes acknowledged receipt of the book in a none-too-personal letter that opens “Dear Monsieur Brimo”; see Forbes to R. Brimo, Cambridge, 27 July 1938, TLS [carbon copy], Edward Waldo Forbes Papers (HC 2), file 144, HAMA. R. Brimo to Sachs, Paris, 20 July 1938, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 199, HAMA. Alfred TenEyck Gardner, as quoted in Geoffrey T. Hellman, “Culler of Copleys,” New Yorker, 21 June 1958, 22. Sachs to Albert TenEyck Gardner, Cambridge, 6 March 1940, TLS, PJSP (HC 3), file 709, HAMA. Duncan discusses this contretemps, though briefly, in “Paul J. Sachs,” 296. Gardner to Sachs, Germantown [Pennsylvania], 7 March 1940, TLS, PJSP (HC 3), file 709, HAMA. That access to Gardner’s materials may well be accounted for by an otherwise mysterious entry in the “Bibliographie générale” of L’évolution du goût: “A. T. E. Gardner, ‘Syntagma on American Art Mus[eums]’ (Unpublished manuscript by a student at Harvard University)”—“syntagma” meaning compendium or arrangement. Gardner’s materials, if they survived the trauma, have not been located, although his papers at Harvard include an extended outline for The Museum in America, the volume he was working on with Sachs, identified as a “compilation on American Art Museums.” Albert TenEyck Gardner Papers, Box 36, folders 708–9, HAMA. Sachs to Gardner, Cambridge, 11 March 1940, TLS, PJSP (HC 3), file 709, HAMA. Ruth E. Boothby and Mary J. Wadsworth were longtime secretaries at the Fogg. My thanks to Andrew McClellan for a very helpful correspondence.

199. Gardner to Sachs, Germantown [Pennsylvania], 13 March 1940, TLS, PJSP (HC 3), file 709, HAMA. 200. Sachs to Gardner, Cambridge, 20 March 1940, TLS, PJSP (HC 3), file 709, HAMA. 201. See Focillon to Sachs, Maranville [HauteMarne], 3 October 1934, ALS, PJSP (HC 3), file 572, HAMA. 202. Alfred TenEyck Gardner, as quoted in Hellman, “Culler of Copleys,” 22. 203. Interested readers are referred to Sally Duncan’s splendid dissertation, “Paul J. Sachs.” 204. Marcel Aubert would also have had some influence on René’s early thinking about museums through his public lectures on their general organization, day-to-day operations (“la vie des musées”), and role in society. 205. René wrote that, “through both his teaching and advice,” Sachs had proved “a most precious guide.” The Evolution of Taste, [6]. Elsewhere, he pays homage to Sachs at greater length: “It is necessary, however, to make mention of the magnificent ensemble of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century engravings, Italian engravings in particular, and drawings from every period but particularly the Renaissance and nineteenth century assembled by [Charles Eliot] Norton’s student Paul J. Sachs, himself a professor at Harvard and leading proponent of the didactic use of prints and drawings.” Ibid., [119]. 206. See, for instance, Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1980); and Hugh Hawkins, Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 207. Brimo rather coolly alludes to the gathering Nazi threat in his conclusion as having potentially “very interesting consequences” for the art world. The Evolution of Taste, [124].

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208. A. Philip McMahon, as quoted in Parnassus 11 (February 1939): 29. 209. Ellis K. Waterhouse, Burlington Magazine; 75 (August 1939): 86; Georges Wildenstein, as quoted in Gazette des Beaux-Arts 20 ( July–August 1938): 71–72. 210. Jacques Combe, as quoted in L’Amour de l’Art 19 (10 December 1938): unpaginated. 211. L. Maurice, “Le flair et l’œil du collectionneur,” L’Intransigeant, 29 December 1938, page run unidentified. 212. Frances Fenwick Hills, as quoted in the New York Herald Tribune, 27 March 1939, page run unidentified. 213. Louis Hautecœur, as quoted in Revue Historique 187 (April–June 1939): 147–48. Hautecœur takes issue, however, with the contention that amateurs who collect with speculation in mind tell us nothing about expressions of taste. This might be true of individual taste, he concedes, but not of collective taste. 214. Aline Bernstein Saarinen, “Sources and Obligations,” in The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times, and Tastes of Some Adventurous American Art Collectors (New York: Random House, 1958), 398. 215. See Denys Sutton, review of several books on collecting, Burlington Magazine 94 (April 1952): 121–22; W. G. Constable, Art Collecting in the United States of America: An Outline of a History (London: Nelson, 1964), xi; Madeleine Beaufort and Jeanne Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying in New York in the 1870s and 1880s,” Oxford Art Journal 5 (1982): 55; and Maurice Rheims, Apollon à Wall Street (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 312–16. 216. R. Brimo to Hope, Paris, 14 September 1938, ALS, Indiana University Archives. One could easily learn a good deal at Harvard, Brimo wrote—particularly with Focillon’s intellectual “gymnastics” under one’s belt. 217. Henry R. Hope, English translation of preface to René Brimo, L’évolution du goût

218. 219. 220. 221.

222.

223. 224.

225. 226.

227.

aux États-Unis, Indiana University Archives. R. Brimo to Norton, Paris, 28 July 1938, unlocated. Norton to R. Brimo, New York, 8 August 1938, TLS, RBPBLA. R. Brimo to Hope, Paris, 14 September 1938, ALS, Indiana University Archives. René Brimo, “À propos des musées de province,” Marianne 7 (15 March 1939): 11. The passage cited is one Brimo himself underlined in blue pencil on his copy of the print version. RBPBLA. René Brimo, “Réalisation pratique pour une renaissance du sentiment esthétique,” Beaux-Arts: Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, n.s. 11 (17 September 1937): 2; see The Evolution of Taste, [171–87]. The Chronique was an occasional supplement issued by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. See Le Temps, 19 May 1939, 3. “Bourse de Voyage aux États-Unis Jesse Isidor Straus,” draft of completed application with notes, May 1939, RBPBLA. See The Evolution of Taste, [182]. See Louis Réau, Paris, 10 June 1939, ALS; Picard, Paris, 9 June 1939, ALS; Focillon, Paris, 12 June 1939, ALS; and Lavedan, Paris, 8 June 1939, TLS—all in RBPBLA. R. Brimo to Hope, Paris, 14 September 1938, ALS, Indiana University Archives. The bande noire dealers had been watching the Nazis for years. A dealer like Nicolas had in fact a privileged sense of world events through his constant contacts with colleagues in Syria, Turkey, Spain, and Germany, and so had a keen sense of events unfolding on the ground in sites key to the coming war. As early as 1931 or 1932, he was aware of Hitler’s rise to power and began to pull back from doing business in Germany, writing sardonically that the Nazis would surely think him a Syrian (and kill him); see N. Brimo to illegible, [ca. 1931–32], ALS, RBPBLA.

81

Notes

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228. See Leo R. Schidlof, The Miniature in Europe in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, 4 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1964), revising and completing work begun much earlier with Die Bildnisminiatur in Frankreich im XVII, XVIII, und XIX Jahrhundert (Vienna: E. Beyers Nachfolger, 1911), including “Allgemeines Lexikon de Miniaturisten aller Länder.” After the Anschluss, in March 1938, Schidlof relocated his business to London. 229. An order from Hitler on 30 June 1940 stipulated that all works of art belonging to private individuals, especially Jews, were to be secured, followed a week later by a list of fifteen dealers whose stock was to be confiscated outright. The collections of the Société Bacri Frères, for instance, were seized on 8 July, and the gallery itself, on the Boulevard Haussman, later turned over to the German munitions manufacturer Krupp to serve as its Paris headquarters; see Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’art de la défaite (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 24. Only rarely were Jewish dealers able to keep their property and businesses. Georges Wildenstein was able to save his own collection only because, seized en route to the United States, it could be successfully “Aryanized” through the intercession of a Berlin gallery owner; see Bertrand Dorléac, Art of the Defeat: France, 1940– 1944, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 40n54. 230. Marnier to N. Brimo, 22 May 2006, Collection Nicolas-René Brimo. 231. Conversation with Isabelle BrimoGuillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014. 232. Richard H. Weisberg, Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 151. 233. Marnier to N. Brimo, 22 May 2006, Collection Nicolas-René Brimo. In common

234.

235. 236.

237.

238.

239.

240.

parlance “Vel’ d’Hiv,” the Vélodrome d’Hiver was the infamous site where the collaborationist Vichy authorities had rounded up more than 13,000 Parisian Jews in July 1942. See Olivier Wieviorka, Histoire de la Résistance, 1940–1945 (Paris: Perrin, 2013); and Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). See Hope, “René Brimo, 1911–1948,” 151. Conversation with Isabelle BrimoGuillerot and Nicolas-René Brimo, 6 July 2014. Nicolas held on to the Brimo de Laroussilhe affiliate, workshop, and warehouse in Beaulieu and continued the same thriving business well into the 1950s. See, for example, René Brimo, “La nouvelle Salle Bosio au Musée National de Beaux-Arts de Monaco” (February 1945) and “Pierres précieuses de Paris: Demeures historiques” (November 1945), a review of an exhibition by that name that opened “last Tuesday” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, both unlocated, dated typescripts in RBPBLA. René Brimo, “Les musées et la guerre” (16 February 1945), “Au revoir, Étudiants G.I.” (8 March 1945), “Henri Focillon et ses élèves” (16 March 1945), and “Tous les chemins ne conduisent plus à Rome” (1 March 1946) Arts, Beaux-Arts, Spectacles, all unlocated, page runs unknown, typescripts and related correspondence in RBPBLA. René Brimo, “Le musée dans la ville” and “Pour un enseignement adéquat de l’histoire de l’art dans nos lycées et écoles,” Amis de l’Art (February 1946): unlocated, page runs unknown, typescripts and related correspondence in RBPBLA; R. Brimo to Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, March 1946, also in RBPBLA. The Larousse contract, dated 11 July 1947, countersigned and returned to him by

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Augé accompanied by a letter dated 23 July 1947, is in RBPBLA; see also R. Brimo to Henry Plumer McIlhenny, Pratoucy, 22 July [1948], ALS, Philadelphia Museum of Art, for an account of Brimo’s stalled progress on L’art aux États-Unis due to illness. 241. René Brimo, “Les châteaux de HautQuercy, Castelnau-Bretenoux, Montal, [et] Assier,” Revue Historique et Littéraire du Languedoc 16 (December 1947): 324–35. 242. Mongan’s gift to the Fogg—Gruber’s Portrait of Francis Tailleux (1937)—is reported in John Coolidge, Annual Report of the Fogg Art Museum (1948–49): 17. 243. See René Brimo, “Revues étrangères: États-Unis,” Arts, Beaux-Arts, Spectacles (30 January 1948): 3. 244. Kenneth Haltman, critical translation of Gaston Bachelard, Fragments d’une poétique du feu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), published as Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1991). 245. Neil Harris, “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,” American Quarterly 14 (Winter 1962): 556; Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 332; and Neil Harris to Kenneth Haltman, Chicago, 3 March 1986, TLS. 246. Brimo held on to a 30-page list of similar errata compiled by Schneider, who prefaces it by describing the text as “interesting to read . . . due to the originality of the

subject matter” and goes on to note: “The method seems quite good, the ideas wellorganized, the style simple and clear.” Brimo should, however, be careful when describing engravings with regard to which “Focillon is unforgiving [impitoyable].” And he should for the same reasons avoid local repetitions, “cacaphonic” expressions, Anglicisms (such as cocktail, a usage “unacceptable at the Sorbonne”), and words of empty praise (for instance, formidable). Schneider called for better explanation of the differences between nineteenth-century French and American auction catalogues and cautioned against the tendency “to enumerate”—for instance, names of artists—“that quickly becomes monotonous.” These comments largely reiterate Schneider’s written response to René’s thesis prospectus: Schneider to R. Brimo, Paris, 24 October 1934—all in RBPBLA. An anonymous reader of a copy of the book at the New York Public Library (accessioned on 28 November 1938) penciled other helpful corrections in its margins: reversing the order of two notes, for instance; indicating that an exhibition organized by DurandRuel took place in March 1886 rather than 1885, and so on. 247. See Evolution of Taste, [39]. 248. Other images were being considered for inclusion up until the last minute, Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Moonlit Landscape from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider from the Frick among them.

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Plate 1 El Greco, Portrait of a Cardinal [Don Fernando Niño de Guevara], ca.1600, oil on canvas. Frontispiece to L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis. H. O. Havemeyer collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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THE EVOLU T I O N OF TAS TE I N AM ER IC A N COL L EC T I N G René Brimo

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For my parents

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Preface

Be not like the empiric ant which merely collects; nor like the cobweb-weaving theorists who do but spin webs; but imitate the bees which both collect and fashion.

—Francis Bacon, The Refutation of Philosophy

The thought of collectors ordinarily brings terms such as “odd,” “peculiar,” “amateurish,” “parasitic,” “out of touch with present-day reality” to mind. Though such judgments hardly account for all of the facts and seem largely misplaced, collectors do frequently vary from the norm. The highly irregular, self-involved world they occupy has disheartened novelists, philosophers, and historians alike. American amateurs in particular have been enveloped in an aura of legend as tenacious as it is unfounded. Their collections have been the subject of numerous articles and catalogue essays, yet still await comprehensive treatment. My work in museum studies in both France and the United States has convinced me of the value in preparing a full-scale treatment of the evolution of American taste. Two years spent at Harvard, visits to numerous American public and private collections, and continuing research since my return to France have enabled me to gather the materials necessary to do so. I have taken the current territorial boundaries of the United States as the geographic limit of this study to give geographic coherence to evolving taste from its modest beginnings in a cultural realm swept by incessant change. How large a factor were geographic expansion and the march of civilization in the appearance and subsequent growth of collections? The United States, less constrained by a national sensibility, receptive to aesthetic currents flowing from Europe and the rest of the world, offers a privileged case study for testing the impact of a range of influences upon a particular population of passionate, unusual perhaps, but very human and appealing individuals: collectors. If the final decades of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876, marked the nation’s unification, the end of the Great War in 1919 marked its intellectual, not just political and economic, maturity. Despite the number and importance of American collections undertaken or completed since that time, the paucity of new developments (along with other more practical considerations) has led me to exclude the subsequent period from this study. The year 1919 marked the high point of a generation of collectors who have

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themselves largely faded from view but whose ideas and personal taste have been carried on by amateurs since. That end date thus marks the end of an investigation that in its scope already risks wearing on the reader’s patience. [6] My goal has not been to write a history of American collections like that prepared by Gustav Waagen with regard to nineteenth-century England, nor have I attempted to compile an inventory of their holdings. Books by Paul Réau on the French art, Lionello Venturi on the Italian art, and, more recently, Charles Lewis Kuhn on works of German Primitivism collected in the United States offer inexhaustible sources of documentation that should inspire others. I have been stirred instead by the prospect of taking these collections—inseparable from the milieus in which they were formed, understood as one mode of expression of American culture among many—as an opportunity to explore the innovations, the impact, the creative originality of those responsible for their creation. My task has been a pleasant one thanks to the ease of access I have been provided to most, if not all, private collections and the unvaryingly warm hospitality of their curators and collectors. Thus, feeling in harmony with a country I have come to consider my second home, the United States, I have thought it possible to make in this way some slight contribution to relations between sister civilizations that, as is so often the case between close relatives, think to know one another even too well, at the expense of possibly misunderstanding one another altogether! I hope I will be permitted at this point to offer a very warm thanks to my teachers at the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie at the University of Paris: René Schneider, who first approved this project, Henri Focillon, Charles Picard, and Pierre Lavedan. In the United States, where Professor Focillon and I again crossed paths, enabling me to benefit from his continued guidance, Paul J. Sachs at Harvard, through both his teaching and counsel, proved likewise a most precious guide. My research has been made possible by generous support from the David-Weill endowment and the family of Lieutenant Charles Henry Fiske III, to whom I am most grateful. I thank as well the museum curators, the teachers at Harvard and the École du Louvre, and the many friends who have offered their assistance as I have carried out this work. Finally, I want to single out for appreciation Louis Grodecki, my first companion in the history of art, and E. Essayan and H. Muller, whose help time and time again has proven invaluable in times of need.

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Introduction

Although it is as difficult to define “taste” in the abstract as “beauty,” we may nevertheless trace its changing expressions throughout history. To this end, the study of art collecting is among the most interesting possible. Certain philosophers have demoted art collecting to the status of mere sport or speculation; others have seen it as but the result of economic privilege. Although material conditions certainly are capable, in however limited a fashion, of splintering collections or dispersing them, they are insufficient to explain things more essential still, such as the criteria collectors use, their taste itself, and variations in the quality of the works they assemble. And although art collecting might appear to be no more than a sophisticated game, it is one heavy in consequences both for collectors themselves and for the periods and social classes to which they belong. It is for this reason that it seems more accurate to view collecting as a creative act, part and parcel of artistic creativity itself. It was not my intention here to write a history of taste. The variety of its manifestations and the diversity of activities involved must be far too great for that. Such work would properly include cultural considerations such as lifestyle, dress, fashion, social role models, public behaviors, reading habits, even political ideas—in short, all the observable dimensions of a time, a nation, and a social milieu. My intentions must remain more limited and more precise. It would be possible to conceive this subject as the history of collections; and yet an assemblage of brief monographic treatments devoted to individual collectors accompanied by inventories of their holdings seems more properly suited to catalogues and biographical dictionaries. The approach that I should like to take is different. Taste, by virtue of the role it plays in giving rise to collectors and museums alike, appears to me of fundamental importance to the evolution of art. I have attempted therefore to work out the relationship between art in general and the formation of collections to determine if there is not some reciprocity of influence between the two, one in which collectors play an active role. Like art itself, taste is ever changing and ephemeral, perhaps more so. Every collection belongs to its

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period and milieu. There are, for example, numerous Middle Ages depending on the century and place from which that past is viewed. The Middle Ages of the English eighteenth century differ from those of the French Romantics, as they do from those of twentieth-century American archaeologists. And yet, despite these shifts in mode, taste remains constant in its search for quality. A collector can maintain a level of consistent quality only by virtue of a rigor of choice and a creative discretionary judgment comparable to that involved in the process through which a work of art forms in an artist’s imagination. Collectors, in this view, are artists themselves in search of works of art commensurate with their personal ideals that enable them to bring their own oeuvre—the collection—to perfection. One might take this one step further to claim that, in matters of taste, collectors are the only true artists, for they enjoy the magnificent advantage of not being at once judge and judged. How else, if not as the result of individual creative acts, can we explain the emergence of veritable prodigy-collectors in places and societies otherwise entirely devoid of “taste”? [8] In their choices, collectors often give voice to completely hidden, previously unsuspected facets of their inner selves. They may discover in this way their own affinity for some artistic movement or personality or type. Again, a physiological dimension to the question of taste sometimes reveals itself in tendencies to purchase only certain media, materials, or colors, depending on the degree to which an individual enjoys a given visual or tactile sensibility. The color blind, for instance, are as a general rule little attracted to painting, and even in sculpture more moved by contour than volume. Epicureans, for example, Philippe II, the Duc d’Orléans, or August II of Saxony, were most strongly motivated in their preferences by sensual appeal. In these ways “taste” enables us to reconstruct an individual’s sensibilities, especially where they express themselves and flourish only in that act of acquisition by which art collectors seek the purest and, indeed, most faithful image of their own desires, products of both dream and instinct. The compulsion to own, the almost carnal passion for possession that appeared in Europe along with private collections late in the eighteenth century, alone explains the seemingly innate ability of certain persons to “sniff out” the one object of worth amid a mass of mediocre works and imitations. That this sixth sense, this collector’s (or merchant’s) instinct, is often termed a “good nose” or a “good eye” demonstrates to what extent taste always has been felt to be a facet of human sensibility. Collections, like works of art themselves, potentially express a love of country or nostalgia for a past age or for nature. Similarly, a collection may be born of the desire to live on after one’s death. A person’s name may be attached to a collection as [it may] to an institution, monument, tomb, hospital, or church. Sometimes, in fact, though well known otherwise in their own time, officials, politicians, merchants, or industrialists are remembered by posterity only in their reputation as collectors, their names intimately linked with some great work of art or artistic bequest. The Evolution of Taste

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Each piece in a collection, then, be it a painting, a work of sculpture, or an objet d’art, bespeaks the personality of its collector. Some trace of the collector may in fact be found in a collection’s every object, each a tangible, living document more objective in a sense and just as certain as anything we might learn from his or her personal relations or appearance. The collection itself rounds off our portrait of its owner and, as the concrete expression of the taste of an individual, can provide us the means to further our understanding of a people in general. Although factors such as these must be kept constantly in mind if we wish to arrive at an accurate and thorough understanding of taste as a phenomenon, it is necessary that we consider various external factors as well. Collections may express the flowering of sensibility and instinct in collectors who seek some connection with what lies beyond themselves. This may be the desire for moral uplift, a religious, spiritual magic that sometimes lies at the heart of (or at least helps to explain) a collector’s deepest-held convictions. In some eras, moral or religious habit may dampen or even extinguish the taste for collecting, whereas, at other times, spiritual tendencies may favor or actually promote the development and refinement of artistic taste. Sometimes taste is dictated more or less directly by historical events. While retaining a life of its own, public taste is intimately responsive to social and political interests associated, for instance, with the life of a nation or a monarch’s reign. Geographic situation and commercial and economic relations similarly affect modalities of taste. Contact between sufficiently different cultures may encourage the flowering of new developments. Though times of peace and social equilibrium typically foster the birth of new collections, war and revolution have always provoked important changes as well, often involving massive migrations of works of art, [9] at times impoverishing or even dispersing entirely private as well as public collections. Travel and the lure of distant lands have often led to a cultivation of exotic styles, as visible in art collecting as in art itself. During periods more patriotic or conventional, on the other hand, a powerful longing to connect with history may find expression in nostalgia, in the search for precedent or for continuity with previous epochs. It is important to acknowledge here, as well, the role of education in instilling in some the desire to collect works of a given period or genre and so to materialize the image of a time and place. Books, specialized journals, newspapers, engravings, photoreproductions, and gallery and museum exhibitions help collectors keep in touch with the world of art in all its various aspects and aware of the range of taste possible. A collector’s preferences, leading to the purchase of this or that object, may be aligned or, on the contrary, radically at odds with the work and taste of contemporary artists. A divorce is possible between the art of a period and the taste of contemporary collectors, each existing and functioning independently of the other.

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Quite often, one collects much as one dresses, for both acts are expressions of social decorum, signifiers of status. Taste for comfort, for adornment of the sort an art collection represents, is a need arising from personal proclivity and from nurture as well. One’s era and city or country of origin, like the social class into which one has been born, are all factors that may lead one to collect. But it is equally true that oftentimes individuals will turn to collecting to escape the here and now, in order to discover in objects what is unavailable elsewhere. Elites form in this way on the basis of shared sentiments and taste. Some may collect for no purpose other than to join the ranks of the enlightened, yet one must first cultivate one’s personal taste. Fashion trends and snob appeal offer standards insufficiently reliable and too contingent to alone explain larger shifts in taste but may enable us better to grasp certain aspects of the taste of individual collectors, exemplifying as they do the amateur’s dependence on popular ideas. The attitudes of collectors toward society can vary greatly. First of all, there are eccentrics who amass works of art of a rather specialized nature, not unlike children who collect baseball cards or postage stamps. Their purpose may be well enough defined, but because the search for beauty is foreign to it, their collecting, motivated simply by the desire to possess, is little related to society as a whole. Alternatively, works of art may be considered uniquely as objects of value, as potentially lucrative investments. Though collections amassed on this basis have been particularly numerous in certain periods, they reveal little about taste per se and so, like the collections of eccentrics, remain beyond the scope of this study. Other collectors have merely sought to heighten their own sense of material well-being. Focusing on the decorative aspects of objects has always enjoyed wide appeal among art lovers everywhere. Many, on the other hand, see in works of art mere illustrations of the past, historical records documenting the life of a period, nation, or artist. They tend, as a result, to be drawn by the dating of a work, its signature or origins. Interest in particular periods or styles leads to specialization. Such sharpening of focus may suggest a collector’s heightened sensibility, a style of creativity that functions by elimination, but, more frequently, an obvious deficiency in judgment liable to become excessive. [10] Another category of collecting is concerned uniquely with the object itself, unconcerned with whether it forms part of a series, whether its price might rise or fall, whether it would harmonize well with an interior, whether it has been signed or once belonged to someone famous, whether it is a bit of enamel, a sculpture, or a painting. Collectors of this sort, attracted more by an object’s intrinsic worth than by variable, artificial considerations, comprise a rarer and exalted breed: that of the true amateur. Though this outline of differing attitudes toward collecting might appear somewhat schematic, these types do occasionally correspond to actual instances. More often, however, we encounter them in composite form, all mixed up together. The human complexity of most collectors, reflecting the richness of their lives, is rarely The Evolution of Taste

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reducible to such strict categories. Neither do these differing attitudes evolve in any logical or continuous fashion but frequently in still distinguishable combinations. One may find it impossible, in fact, even when considering a single time or place, to note the predominance of any single type of collecting. Two principal attitudes toward art may, however, be discerned among collectors: some seeking to preserve the art of the past; others, in the image of Mycaenas, seeking instead to foster contemporary innovation. Yet even these two tendencies, not mutually exclusive, coexist in individuals, evidencing equally their interest in keeping up with the times. Many have found some higher purpose in collecting, having come to understand the opportunity to admire, to love, to contemplate, and to study works of art as crucial to the future of the city or nation in which they live, even that of their culture more broadly defined. Rather than jealously safeguarding their collections by hiding them, many have seen fit to share what they have gathered with the largest number possible. This philanthropic side to art collecting, this desire to share one’s enthusiasm and contentment with one’s fellows, has led to the founding of museums, gifts to public collections, and loans to exhibitions. The personalities of collectors have thus played an important role in stimulating the intellect and improving the quality of life in certain periods and places. Historians of art collecting and of taste should bear in mind the variety of general types of amateurs and attitudes here enumerated. Where the infinitely more than ordinarily complex development of art collecting in the United States is concerned, however, this enumeration remains inadequate to frame discussion of historical change or to explain shifts in taste or fashion that seem as crucial to our understanding as do more properly sociological or psychological factors common to the origins of collections everywhere. Although certain of the factors involved are material ones, a closer look at taste suggests that the availability of capital alone is insufficient to account for changes in collecting. On the contrary, often individuals of relatively modest means with faith in the works of art that they defend impel shifts in taste. The poverty of means of such amateurs is often compensated by a certain visibility and magnetism, rendering the influence of their taste more expansive. An active interest taken even by few persons can prove more propitious for the propagation of new attitudes than too great a popularity or rapid a success, which often tends to wear down, wear out, or dissolve new taste completely. It is in circles such as these, large or small, more or less sophisticated or refined, that decisive shifts in taste take place, among them those I wish to study. As in all things, in developments in taste one finds precursors and apostles, faithful followers and doubters; and the adversarial position of these last is often of more value to innovation than the support of those who would defend it. The worth of a movement [11] can be gauged by its detractors; nothing is more fatal to artistic innovation than complete indifference, harbinger of decadence. The art world itself often plays a large, even a primary role in the history of taste. The work artists do makes them collectors first and only then creators of form. They almost always will

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have sought inspiration and example in works of art, whether ancient or contemporary, and been led by some affinity of temperament, way of life, or style to surround themselves with examples they consider true to their own sensibility though quite often at odds with their own style. They thus find it possible to influence changing taste while often in their own work adhering to contemporary usages. Evolution in art may at times run parallel with developments in taste, as occurs in classical periods where the two go hand in hand, whereas, at other times, we see a clear divergence between artists and their cultural moment, as in the cases of Rembrandt, the Romantics, and the Impressionists, who had to struggle to impose their new ways of seeing, that is to say, their taste, on others. At the beginnings of all movements, we find individuals with strong personalities, beholden, like everyone else, to tradition, to the artistic milieus to which they have been exposed, for such is the condition of all acts of human creativity. What matters to us here is the something new that results. Responsive and creative energies tend to impose themselves. Creative individuals—be they artists or collectors, dealers, critics, or teachers—attempt to expand their “following” through their art work, collections, courses, writings, speeches and activities. Such individual responses to the public life of a culture may be observed and studied as crystallized in collections. And new collections, by virtue of both their links with others of long standing and their own innovations, become influential in turn. We can discover a variety of patterns in this movement of taste from individuals to the public sphere, from private holdings to museums and vice versa. The desire to achieve an absolute originality, like other snobbish, fashion-following infatuations, is but one monstrous, factitious expression of this tendency that all too often disrupts the search for quality, which is, or ought to be, the true collector’s only purpose. Let us take the opportunity therefore once again to acknowledge the range of human activities intimately associated with fluctuations in taste. And yet the many factors—material, social, intellectual, artistic; even historical discontinuities caused by the intervention of powerful personalities—remain insufficient to explain such shifts in taste entirely. They leave unanswered the key question concerning not just collections but the art world more generally: why do shifts occur in one direction and not another? We may pose the problem in the following fashion: does taste operate autonomously, evolving in the way that form evolves, in response to internal pressures? Having posed the question, shedding all preconceived notions, we shall see what responses are afforded by the study of American collections. [12]

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BOOK

1

E AR LY DE V E LOP M E NT S From the Colonial Period to the Philadelphia Centennial

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Part 1

COLONIAL AMERICA

Looking Backward

The history of European colonies in the present-day United States from the seventeenth through the late eighteenth centuries reveals two clear, though at first glance opposite, tendencies. Largely populated by persons fleeing their lands of origin for religious or political reasons, early settlements in general were anti-European in their attitudes regarding institutions, lifestyle, and taste. Certain individuals, on the other hand, immigrants still tied to European interests, tended instead to follow the example of the Old World. In matters of taste, however, things were never quite so simple, nor can they be quite so neatly characterized. Often in life one imitates those whom one perceives to be one’s adversaries while attempting to differentiate oneself from one’s own masters. Such is the certainly the case here, for whether we consider New England Puritans or “gentlemen farmers” in Virginia, similar patterns of behavior recur. These involve, first of all, a principle of spiritual and social revolution common to most colonies, a reaction against Old World political regimes and religious antagonisms combined with hopes of rediscovering a lost age and a better way of life. Quakers in Pennsylvania, like debtors in Georgia, came to the New World to get a new start in a new land, strongly optimistic about improvement. English settlers dominated in the Northeast, in New England; the Dutch along the Hudson, fol-

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lowed by the English; Germans in Pennsylvania, to the south; and in New Orleans, the French. This same diversity existed where religion was concerned. There were Quakers in Pennsylvania, Puritans in New England, Huguenots along the Hudson, and Anglicans in Virginia, yet all equally and determinedly hostile to Roman Catholics and Jews.1 They shared in addition a style of religious observation stressing simplicity, avoidance of both representational images and worship of the Virgin and the saints, and an interest in impassioned theological debate—in short, a desire for severity, austerity, and reform. The English gradually managed to impose their language and their military and economic hegemony over all the others.2 [15] These colonies, later consolidated into the United States, owed their beginnings variously to chartered companies in Virginia and Massachusetts, to a council of trustees in Georgia, and to private interests in, among other places, Pennsylvania. Such differences in governance in the various colonies were naturally reflected in differences in lifestyle. Dates of earliest settlement varied widely as well. Virginia was founded in 1606, the Dutch company in 1621, and Massachusetts Bay in 1629. Rhode Island received its charter in 1669, but Georgia not until 1732.3 These disparities were reflected in turn in an unevenness of intellectual and administrative development. Even prior to any westward territorial expansion, variations in geography, geology, and climate led to a certain heterogeneity in conditions. The climates of North and South, though temperate and almost European, differ substantially, the one fairly cold; the other relatively warm even in winter. Northern fishing, transportation, industry, and commerce were the only possibilities afforded by a somewhat inhospitable soil; in the South, on the other hand, plantation agriculture, the cultivation of tobacco in particular, yielded enormous revenues. As a result, a commercial and industrial society, nomadic and urban in spirit, developed in the North, whereas planters in the South lived somewhat isolated, sedentary lives. Struggling in either case against adversities of climate and terrain, obliged to clear the land to feed themselves, colonists everywhere faced a hard beginning. There were numerous failures, and the struggle against Indians, whose lands and goods the whites proceeded to appropriate, was bitter, occasionally unpitying, and uneven. The social order as transplanted into the New World was less than absolute in its definition, involving persons from a range of backgrounds whose interrelations were worked out only slowly. A long period of realignment preceded the emergence of elites.4 Conditions of peril and risk, leading to the rapid accumulation of wealth for some and misfortune for others, did not favor the formation of an intellectual elite. Colonists who were starting from scratch, building new homes in a newly settled land, sought to assure rather than embellish the short-term futures of their families. Escape from material, day-to-day concerns took the form of scriptural debate and discussion of the hereafter. Life was sober and austere, though grand in its simplicity. Permanent contact with nature and the practical difficulty of making

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ends meet served to counterbalance tendencies to religious dogmatism. The spirit of enterprise and organization, always admired in the colonies, also worked to this end. Nonetheless, with the development of commerce in the Northeast and the constitution of a sort of landed Southern aristocracy, new cultural imperatives began to make themselves felt. The example of the Bible no longer sufficed, and the education of the young was increasingly entrusted to tutors from abroad, followed by time spent at Oxford or Cambridge. The British influence, dominant throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imposed its view of education upon all the colonies. At the same time, the authority of the clergy, in the Northeast especially, yielded progressively to that of science, though never to the point of secularizing education altogether. The early colleges—Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (1746), and King’s College (1754) [later Columbia College, then University]—were explicitly religious institutions. Study of the Bible was the principal if not unique concern of their early student bodies. The study of history, for example, was first taken up at Yale only in the Revolutionary era. Meanwhile, however, as early as 1637, and in Massachusetts, a law was passed mandating the establishment of a school in every town with more than fifty homes. Little by little, science per se, natural history first and foremost, made its conquest of America. Learned societies were set up in large numbers over the course of the eighteenth century, modeled on the Royal Society of London (1600) or the French Académie [16] des Sciences (1666), founded by [ Jean-Baptiste] Colbert. In 1743, Benjamin Franklin was named a member of the Royal Society himself after founding the Junto, a literary and scientific club in Philadelphia, which in 1769 became the American Philosophical Society, with Buffon, Linnaeus, Condorcet, Raynal, and Lavoisier among its European correspondents. Books either published in the colonies or brought there from abroad permitted colonists to keep abreast of intellectual developments in the Old World. The great European savants of the period, Bacon, Swift, Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists, were well known to the intelligentsias of Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. As early as 1653, a public collection of books was available in Boston, the gift of Robert Keayne. Franklin organized a subscription library in Philadelphia associated with the Junto in 1731. Others were founded in Charleston in 1748 and in New York in 1754.5 The appearance of widely circulated newspapers at about this time facilitated communication among colonies and the general diffusion of news. These changes toward the end of the colonial period marked the emergence of new attitudes, not to bear fruit for some years, that were nonetheless determining factors in defining an American character liable to rebel. The earliest historical writings, dating to the middle decades of the eighteenth century, took part in this vast cultural transformation. They served to provide the colonies an idea of their own past, upon which foundations a new nation would be built. Great Britain’s influence at this point was eclipsed by that of France, doubtless early developments

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facilitated by political ties between the French and colonists, who would soon be fighting, to different ends but in a common cause, a common enemy. The Bible and a British, Protestant theocracy were soon supplanted by an overwhelming confidence in science. At the same time, there arose a new conception of society itself and the notion that the colonies might be politically united. From the time of its “discovery,” the New World had been the subject of European study and admiration. Numerous artists, Jacques Lemoyne de Morgues among them,6 participated in scientific expeditions that aroused the curiosity of Europeans through published accounts and illustrations. In the colonies themselves, however, the arts were somewhat limited. Early settlers in general arrived with only rudimentary pieces of furniture and household items. Some among them, the wealthiest perhaps, brought portraits as well, souvenirs of an extended family, now left behind in disagreement with its values but to which attachments still remained. In this virgin world of America, the first artistic expressions were utilitarian in spirit—simply designed houses constructed of the raw materials at hand, most often wood. Interior decoration, for all intents and purposes nonexistent, was limited at best to rather rustic furnishings. The church, either erected first or along with the earliest houses, was similarly simple in design, no sculpture complicating its austerity. Nevertheless, it is far from my intent to denigrate this early art. The first colonial houses and furnishings, perhaps because answering to basic material necessity, possessed an admirable vigor and proportionality.7 Brick houses in Virginia, like wooden churches in New England, reflected either the most simple Georgian architecture or the Palladian style of Inigo Jones, neither of which could tolerate painted or sculpted decor.8 Furniture was often imported, especially in the South, with its rich colonists and aristocratic governors. In New England and along the Hudson, local workshops sprung up producing simplified versions of either the English (William and Mary or Queen Anne) or Dutch styles of the period. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, walls were covered with painted paper representing Chinese landscapes with birds and pagodas, either foreign imports or occasionally executed on site.9 Dutch homes, more comfortable and elegant, were frequently decorated with paintings and displays of porcelain and Delftware;10 but, generally speaking, it was [17] in simple, carefully maintained interiors that early collections, arrangements of woodcuts and paintings, first appeared.11 The entire colonial period was dominated by a vogue for portraiture; more ambitious work was rarely seen. Portraits were preferred as serving either to preserve memory of a world left behind or to establish and thus commemorate new lines of tradition. Many colonists, similarly uprooted, separated from their ancestral homes, shared this thirst for history, for a sense of lineage and human precedent the future they were busy building could be built upon.12 This meant, most prominently, portraits that colonists carried over with them from Europe: family portraits, for instance, of French Huguenots in North Carolina, Dutch families in New Netherland.13 In the English colonies, the same phenomenon

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[obtained]: a portrait of Sir Richard Saltonstall in Boston (still today in the possession of his descendants) attributed to the school of Rembrandt, believed to have been painted in 1644; portraits of a Colonel Abraham and wife, attributed to the de Peysters, painted in Europe around 1700.14 The portrait of John Winthrop today in the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, like that of Nicholas Roberts at the Massachusetts Historical Society, was also painted, so it would appear, in Europe. Other such works today in local historical society collections might be cited, European imports that once decorated the homes of early colonists. Beginning at about this time, we encounter a certain number of portrait collectors. A Colonel Mosely, Virginian and onetime Rotterdam merchant, owned four family groups by a Dutch artist. Legend would credit him with even vaster holdings dating to the time of Henri II. Another Virginian, William Fitz Hugh, in 1701 left in his will portraits of himself, of his wife, and of six more members of the family. Nothing at all can be known now of the paintings owned in these years by a Mrs. Digger, another Virginian, appraised at 5 schillings.15 Important officials, among them, for example, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, governor of Virginia, this in 1705, presented portraits of themselves executed abroad as gifts to their respective colonies. The King and Queen presented their own portraits as gifts to their subjects in the New World on several occasions. George II and Queen Caroline, for instance, sent their full-length portraits to decorate the chambers of the Boston City Council.16 It was the colony itself, however, that commissioned portraits of William and Mary shortly following their deaths. Governors, too, had their portraits painted abroad. In 1767, Boston’s Faneuil Hall was decorated in this manner with the portraits of Colonel Isaac Barre and H. S. Conway. Thomas Belcher, governor of Massachusetts, sat for [ Jean-Étienne] Liotard.17 Yale University in 1718 owned a portrait of George I, the work of Kneller’s studio. Around this time, there also appeared portraits executed in the colonies, either by foreigners or by Americans. Recently well-to-do families of humble origins did not hesitate to commission work from major English painters, for example, [Sir Joshua] Reynolds, who executed portraits of the Farmer family of Perth Amboy and of one Charles Carroll. The Galloways, at Tulip Hill, their family estate, owned several Lawrence portraits purchased by Virgil Rexey late in the seventeenth century.18 New England, New Netherland, the Southern colonies, Virginia especially, all employed Old World artists. Henry Couturier in New Amsterdam, Joseph Allen in New England, the Duyckincks in New York, Gustavus Hesselius in Charleston, Jeremiah Theus in South Carolina brought to these regions what they knew of portraiture. They together painted a considerable number of these family commemorations. Already portraits of the great men of the age, John Winthrop, Edward Winslow, George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, and both Increase and Cotton Mather, were in demand, circulating in reproductions.19 [18] In addition to this full-scale portraiture in oil, the art of the miniature was widespread in the colonies, following the same pattern. First, there were imports from England, for instance, miniature portraits of Winthrop and Calvert. But, early developments

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shortly, work was being done at home. [Gustavus] Hesselius, Charles Willson Peale, John Watson, [ Jeremiah] Theus, Matthew Pratt, John Singleton Copley, Henry Pelham all soon earned the lion’s share of their income from miniatures.20 Though mere keepsakes, these works demonstrated, in the larger colonies at least, an appreciable progress in the arts by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century beyond portraits of the well-known and beyond patronage. Already a cultural elite was busily collecting works by unknown artists with the sole purpose of appreciating and enjoying them. For this, the ground had been prepared not just by earlier painters, pioneers of taste, itinerants going from town to town in search of work, but also by a few enlightened governors and other notables, who brought art from Europe over with them and cultivated and supported local artists.21 [ John] Watson, a Scottish painter, was one of those who caught wind of this change. Perhaps as early as 1725, he traveled back to Europe and returned to his adopted land with a large collection of paintings, mostly of kings and heroes, with which he filled his house at Perth Amboy.22 His skills as a painter were improved by the company of this heroic entourage and by a collection of historical costumes that proved a help to him in marketing his own portraits. Another artist, John Smibert, who set up shop in Boston that same year, sold painting supplies including frames but also first-rate portfolios of prints after Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, and Rubens accumulated in his travels on the Continent.23 His collection went beyond engravings. Several copies after works by Old Masters crossed the ocean with him as well, among them one after Van Dyke’s portrait of Cardinal Bentivoglio, today in Widener Library at Harvard, admired at the time by painters like [ John] Trumbull and [Washington] Allston, who considered it, as did period collectors, “perfection” itself in painting. Smibert also owned a famous nude, Venus with Cupid after Titian, that had belonged to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and a Scipio after Poussin.24 The nude must have been a provocation in Boston at the time, something only the veneration Titian’s name inspired could excuse. [Henry] Pelham, another Boston painter, also owned a copy after Titian, a small head of John the Baptist taken from a Holy Family. Others beside the artists whom they served as models and for inspiration owned such copies. An amateur in Philadelphia, Judge William Allen, owned a Venus after Titian, a large Holy Family after Correggio, and four more paintings: a Saint Cecilia, a Herodius with John the Baptist, a Venus and Adonis, and a Niobe. A friend of artists and of the arts, Allen encouraged the development of painting through his hospitality. His collection, though not large, was greatly admired by Copley, who thought the Titian “fine in Colouring.”25 A painting of three figures surrounding a fourth at the harpsichord, after the Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, completed the collection.26 A man by the name of Powell returned to Philadelphia from his tour in Europe with a marked enthusiasm for the arts. His home was richly decorated with engravings and copies after the great Italian masters.27 Yet not everything was a copy. Governor John Penn of Pennsylvania possessed a collection of paintings that Pelham, in a letter to his mother, described as “very

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great and Eligant,” though he said no more about them.28 James Hamilton, another governor of the state, lived in Bush Hill, surrounded by original paintings including a Murillo, Saint Ignatius Captured by A Spanish Vessel, copied by Benjamin West, who executed Hamilton’s own portrait as well. [The nephew of t]his man of taste, [William Hamilton], built a mansion known as “Woodlands” [near Philadelphia], the last word in collectors’ homes in the American colonies around midcentury.29 Churchmen also collected, [19] or at least sought to preserve, the memory of days gone by. Henry Carver, minister at King’s Chapel in Boston from 1747 until the Revolution, boasted of owning a Christ with Apostles by da Vinci he claimed had been described by Peter Paul Rubens and Daniel Webb, though undoubtedly but a copy of The Last Supper.30 The great collection of the period, however, one whose stay in America was all too brief, belonged to a man by the name of Stier from Antwerp, who emigrated when the French invaded Holland, bringing with him to Annapolis two works by his forebear, The Spanish Hat and Roman Charity, several Titians, and several portraits by Van Dyke, all of which he made available for artists to copy and admire.31 Stier, who could be considered—if we compare American to European holdings— the sole great collector of the colonial era, returned home after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens. His daughter, who had married George Calvert, held on to two or three Flemish paintings but, according to [William] Dunlap, uninteresting ones.32 This collection, something of an exception because transient and foreign, arguably had some influence on the artists who viewed it and served, as well, as both inspiration and example for all those attracted to the arts. According to an inventory unfortunately lacking in detail, Jonas Bronck, the namesake of the Bronx, possessed [for his part] a collection of eleven paintings, a library, and even an object described as a Japanese cutlass.33 A number of artistic centers are to be noted dating to the early seventeenth century. It was possible in Boston to view works ostensibly by Kneller and Van Dyke, copies often taken for originals by the artists and collectors previously mentioned. Boston was to remain throughout the eighteenth century the great artistic center of New England. A taste for art had grown up there despite religious opposition and an attitude toward life little given to the luxury of painted images, considered almost diabolical by Puritan ideologues.34 New York, ever since its Dutch beginnings more amenable to art, was an important center also, as were both Perth Amboy and Annapolis, where small elites had formed, enjoying in the peace and quiet of prosperity the pleasures of collecting and of patronage. Philadelphia, not yet the new nation’s capital, had already become the place where freer and more scientific attitudes toward taste would emerge, driven by enlightened individuals like Benjamin Franklin. Before becoming the young Republic’s chief diplomat, Franklin had served unofficially as Philadelphia’s self-appointed educational advisor, counseling that the young be taught “the History . . . of the Invention of [the] Arts.”35 He articulated then a theory that subsequently made its way in the United States, that one could early developments

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learn to draw by copying prints. Important journalist that he was, and occasional engraver, Franklin never lost his interest in typography and printmaking. He himself owned several collectors’ editions, a complete set of Hogarth prints, as well as reproductions of famous paintings—Domenichino’s Coronation of Saint Agnes, Guido’s Venus Attired by the Graces, Poussin’s The Judgment of Hercules—by the great English printmaker Robert Strange.36 In Maryland, Lord Baltimore and his associates had brought with them from England a keen interest in the arts and a characteristic penchant for pleasant homes surrounded by gardens and decorated with portraits by Hesselius or Blackburn and with English or French porcelain.37 Further south, aristocratic Charleston counted among its inhabitants a considerable number of patrons eager to follow the latest European styles. Thanks to the printing press, news reached the New World quickly. In Boston and other major cities,38 libraries like the one founded in Newport by Abraham Redwood in 1750 in conjunction with the learned societies previously mentioned helped to promote the life of the mind. As a result of travels undertaken through the colonies (such as one made by Copley for his own instruction), steady exchanges were possible between and among these major centers during the eighteenth century. [20] Artists traveled from city to city, searching for a clientele still hard to come by. There were as yet no schools of art; nevertheless, certain cities, their inhabitants being more appreciative or more cultivated than those elsewhere, made artists feel at home. In these various ways, the colonies kept in touch with the Old World. Foreign artists also served as valuable promoters of taste, encouraging as they did, even stylistically, relations between the colonies and England, Sweden, Holland, or France according to their lands of origin. American artists were attracted to Europe, too, and made the “grand tour” through France and Italy following the English fashion.39 Some, like Copley and West, showed their work in London regularly, even settling there for good. The London studio of Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy and favorite of George III, came to serve the New World as a sort of clearinghouse of European influences.40 Most of the important American artists of the federal period—Trumbull, the Peales, Dunlap, and Copley among them—stayed with this anglicized Quaker when in London and experienced the influence of his style and contacts. West received others besides artists; no one even vaguely interested in the arts who passed through London failed to call. The colonial elite, often educated at Oxford or Cambridge or their New World counterparts, Harvard and Yale, began to travel through Europe more frequently. In Italy, they admired works by Titian, Veronese, Raphael, Correggio, and Guido; in France, they visited the Poussins at the Palais Royale, the Rubens in the Luxembourg, and the Coypels in Notre-Dame.41 Copley, from whose notes these details are taken, was not by any means the only artist of his stature to visit Europe. West had begun his career with such a voyage, his way paid by sponsors in Philadelphia. Dunlap followed their example later, in 1782.

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In addition to these voyages, contacts between artists, and exchanges of letters, one must not forget the art books easily acquired in the colonies. Sir Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England, Reynolds’s Discourses, and Daniel Webb’s An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting all provided sustenance.42 There was a general awareness, as well, of the profit in consulting Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus; Philadelphians in the know shared an enthusiasm for James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens, recently issued in London. These would remain the guidebooks of record throughout the eighteenth century. The artists most admired were the great Venetians: the sixteenth-century masters Titian, Veronese, Raphael, and Correggio; and, for the seventeenth century, Rubens, Guido, Domenichino, Poussin, and Van Dyke—in short, the classical models of drawing and coloring as synthesized by Reynolds in his teachings and his art. Both originals and copies after these Old Masters were available in the colonies, where the taste of the English eighteenth century was closely followed.43 Patrons, for their part, sought to emulate the great art collectors of France, principally Cardinal Richelieu, the Duc d’Orléans, and Pierre-Jean Mariette. This was the ambition of numerous Englishmen as well who, in ever-increasing numbers, made the grand tour of the Continent themselves, bringing home works of generally good quality but invariably attributed to one Old Master or another. Eighteenth-century America had no collectors of the stature of Sir Robert Walpole—whose son, in 1779, would sell the entirety of his collection to Catherine the Great of Russia.44 For so major a collection, one would have to wait a century.45 Walpole’s Gothic folly Strawberry Hill would find no imitators during the colonial period.46 It is the history of eighteenth-century art sales that permits us some idea of those early collections that did exist. Copies and prints were often bought domestically from artists who had opened shops or who sold directly out of their studios. Watson, who had settled in Perth Amboy with a collection brought from England, marketed its holdings along with his own portraits. Around 1752, Peter Pelham, Copley’s father-in-law, a painter and sometimes dance instructor, also began selling mezzotints and engravings. He executed some of these himself, of local subjects, [21] as did Paul Revere.47 At about this same time, in 1735, John Smibert advertised in the Boston Gazette a sale of prints after Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, and Rubens. In the South, in Charleston around 1743, Alexander Gorton perfectly exemplified this class of artist merchants. There were public sales of art as well, dating in Boston to the public auction in 1712 of pictures taken from the cargo of the British sloop San Francisco, captured at sea.48 Another collection of paintings, “fit for any Gentleman’s dining room or staircase,” was sold at auction, again in Boston, some years later in 1720. Prints and paintings came to be listed with some frequency in estate inventories, for example, that of Governor [William] Burnet in 1729, or the sale of paintings from the library of Boston’s Reverend John Checkley in 1757. The catalogue of another sale, which took place in the same city in 1769, anticipated things to come with its inclusion of Dutch paintings and “Chinese-style” ceramics.49 For the inhabitants of various early developments

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cities, all these sales, by virtue of the publicity surrounding them and the buying opportunities they represented, responded to a still quite modest desire for art-filled surroundings that had made its first appearance early in the seventeenth century and would, with economic and cultural growth, only increase in strength. Sculpture, that poor cousin of painting, made its colonial debut in the person of Patience Lowell Wright of Bordentown, New Jersey, who specialized in small wax busts before leaving for London in 1769.50 Another woman, Abigail Hiller, exhibited busts of kings and queens in her home. Although there later developed a certain taste for figures done in wax, the demand for sculpture in general remained modest; the cult of national heroes and commemorative monuments was yet to be born. Enormously competent though formally simple work in gold and silver was produced nevertheless by men like [Paul] Revere and John Coney in Boston and Joseph Richardson in Philadelphia.51 This increase in artistic production created its own demand. The irresistible tide of science tied to philanthropic and humanitarian tendencies typical of the American colonies led logically to the creation of public collections with the purpose of instructing not just artists but the public as well. The first collections of this kind, really just accumulated objects of value to a community, were without doubt the galleries of portraits of clergymen, professors, and college presidents commissioned by universities seeking to preserve their memories and that sense of tradition on which all institutions of higher learning rely. Harvard and William and Mary boasted portrait galleries as early as 1705; in 1756, Princeton placed portraits of George II and of Governor Belcher, among the school’s first patrons, in its Nassau Hall.52 Brown inaugurated its own collection in 1764. The intent in each instance was entirely historical; the idea of collecting works of art for their own sake, independent of their documentary value, was still to come. Nevertheless, the rector of King’s College in New York, Myles Cooper, purchased Copley’s Nun Before a Candle directly from the artist in 1768, a purchase Copley himself applauded as the beginning of public art collecting in North America.53 Earlier on, scientific studies and research into the natural history of the New World, well advanced in Philadelphia especially, had led to the creation in 1732 of the deceptively named Schuylkill Fishing Company, a private organization whose membership included every local citizen of note that sponsored a fine museum of indigenous American products.54 This was not the only such cabinet de curiosité (to employ the proper eighteenth-century phrase) that one could visit in the city. A Swiss painter from Geneva, Pierre Eugène du Simitière, who came to Philadelphia in 1766, had brought together an enormously popular collection of books, watercolors, prints, Indian curios, and fossils.55 His American Museum was well attended, and he had asked the public to assist him in enlarging its collections, thus stimulating interest in the study of the region. This idea of an encyclopedic museum combining natural history, [22] history, and art, an idea in the spirit of the French philosophers then fashionable, was realized fully in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1773 under the auspices of the municipal

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library[—the Charleston Museum]. Historical mementos took their place beside displays of science, history, and art. The purpose of this, the first great museum in the New World, was to bring together all the knowledge of the age for public pleasure, entertainment, and instruction. The collection included fossils discovered when digging the Santee Canal, minerals elegantly arranged under glass, other natural curiosities and Indian artifacts, as well as painting and prints, domestic and foreign. Unfortunately, fires at the time were frequent and the collection was destroyed in 1778. Only twenty years after the British Museum opened its doors, and even before the creation of the Louvre, the New World could boast an important collection of its own, begun at public initiative and increased through gifts.56 In its encyclopedic mix of art and science, this museum marked a new stage in the history of American collections. A social order still in the process of coalescing, its leadership still closely tied to the Old World, had given rise to a generation vastly more intellectual in its habits and nourished by French philosophy and science. This new elite came to oppose both England and the English influence, in art as well as politics. Struggle with the mother country caused large numbers of aristocrats to leave the colonies, making way for a new society with a different conception of the arts. Worship of family and of the past soon yielded to that of Revolutionary heroes instrumental in transforming insular colonies into a nation or at least a nation-state, joined in a spirit of unity. If some American artists like Copley left the New World at this time, others like John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, [Charles Willson] Peale, and William Dunlap stayed or returned soon after the war in the hopes of lending glory, each after his own fashion, to the leaders of the new nation. Those who made the revolution or collaborated in the writing of the Constitution, men like Jefferson and Franklin, were among the most enthusiastic votaries of the encyclopedic spirit. Admirers of the French philosophers or those of Antiquity, they worked to ensure that these examples were followed in all the states of the new nation. The societies and circles they organized in Philadelphia and in Virginia were imitated everywhere, and their influence spread. Where art was concerned, the triumph of Enlightenment ideas gave rise, on the one hand, to museums and collections in the style of the cabinet of curiosity, one example of which we saw in the late colonial period. On the other hand, the historical spirit proper to the commissioned portrait was perpetuated in the execution of artistic monuments to the glory of the new nation and its founders. The colonial period had cleared the way for future collections, furnishing models and examples for colonial artists. Early collections had furthered the careers of several serious professional painters in the British tradition. It was with legitimate pride that Franklin could declare: “In England at present, the best History Painter, West; the best Portrait Painter, Copley; and the best Landscape Painter, Taylor, at Bath, are all Americans.”57 It was in this fashion, more than in the quality of objects preserved, that colonial era collections played their most important role.

early developments

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Part 2

SCIENCE OR SENTIMENT

[Historical Introduction, 1776–1840]

The War of Independence represented more than merely a political or economic event, more than merely the victory of the united colonies over Great Britain and the creation of an independent state. It also marked the triumph of a new set of ideas. Territorial and economic liberty was accompanied by intellectual and moral freedom that amounted to a wholly new conception of society. In its egalitarian and democratic ideals, the Revolutionary War was revolutionary indeed, born of the ongoing influence of works by Diderot, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Condorcet, and others that were widely known and read in eighteenth-century America. An age of sectarian dogmatism gave way to the worship of logic and reason, exemplified by Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man.1 The finest minds of the age were preoccupied with the question of public betterment and education, as suggested by a competition sponsored by the American Philosophical Society for an essay on the system of liberal education best suited to the spirit of the Constitution. Even luminaries such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, and James Sullivan participated. Their concern to make quality education as widely available as possible and to secure the public good led them to argue for freedom of expression and for a system of comprehensive education at once more widely accessible and, in the universities, more

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fully achieved. They sought to replace an overly rigid system of parochial instruction based on study of the Bible with more practically oriented programs stressing science, history, and modern languages. The influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on primary education as interpreted through Swiss and German models was quite marked. Religious instruction was eliminated slowly in favor of the sciences. These scientific and artistic reforms quite possibly grew out of the Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire’s plans for an American Academy in Richmond, modeled on the French Academies of Arts and of Sciences, for which he had gone so far as to obtain the approval of the Royal Academy in London as well as the American Philosophical Society.2 The academy building itself, constructed in 1788 with funds raised among Virginia’s first families, was unhappily destroyed by fire, and when French participation in the project ceased with the fall of the Bastille [in 1789], the inauguration of an institution intended to become the center of intellectual life in the United States was forestalled.3 [25] Public libraries nevertheless multiplied. Books were for the first time available in large numbers, no longer luxuries available only to the few. Tales of travel, novels, and collections of short stories were avidly consumed for their entertainment over and above their pedagogic value. Comforts were sought after increasingly.4 Numerous journals and reviews appeared. In Boston, for example, the Anthology Club was first published in 1803, followed by the Monthly Anthology and North American Review (subtitled Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Pleasure) in 1817. The Columbian Magazine and American Universal Magazine shared a concern to combine general instruction with reading pleasure. In every case, an encyclopedic sensibility allowed for increased exposure to literature, science, and the arts. A great many newspapers, first published for political ends, having played a major role in the struggle for Independence, now turned to the dissemination of nationalist ideals, fostering new feelings and attitudes. In their number and breadth of circulation, these newspapers, in whose pages the political parties of the young Republic debated the issues of the day, served to strengthen ties among the states, facilitating a broad exchange of ideas. After 1811, their illustrations and drawings showcased certain artistic tendencies as well, introducing an element of excitement much in contrast with the simplicity and calm of colonial days. Between 1776 and 1840, the United States underwent an extraordinary economic and territorial expansion.5 The thirteen original colonies stretched along the Atlantic were joined by eight new states carved out of the Mississippi Valley, plus Michigan in 1837. These new, theretofore uncultivated territories drew an evergrowing flood of immigrants. Cities expanded with incredible rapidity. Chicago, for example, a simple frontier post in 1830, was by 1840 already a city of importance. The movement west grew more pronounced, though not unattended by difficulties. Major economic crises alternated with periods of prosperity. The steamboat and the railroad facilitated a rapid development and exploitation of the continent’s resources. The nation’s population increased dramatically, concentrated in major

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cities—Boston, Philadelphia, and especially New York—which set the tone in matters of culture. During the colonial era, smaller urban settlements had often constituted cultural centers in their own right, thanks to individuals of talent. Little by little, these were supplanted by cities that, though larger, lacked somewhat in intimacy. In 1776, Philadelphia was both the nation’s political capital and, as previously noted, its principal cultural melting pot. The city’s preeminence was assured by the presence of men such as Franklin, West, Stuart, and Peale. Its numerous museums attracted the learned and the curious, while its philosophical, scientific, and artistic institutions made the city an intellectual capital as well, a veritable torchbearer of the encyclopedic spirit.6 Baltimore, where an aristocratic tradition was more deeply rooted, nonetheless adapted quickly to the new age. Boston with its surroundings, including Salem and, in Cambridge, Harvard University, remained a center of activity of great importance that, by the end of this period, as a result of contacts with the Orient and even closer contacts with Europe, began to assume the role of intellectual capital.7 In the midst of the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution, out of a strong tradition and that spirit of independence long its hallmark, the region produced a thinker of great stature in Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, through the vigor of his critique, dramatized the possibilities for personal integrity and strength still possible in contemporary America. New York, though in the full flush of mercantile expansion, still lacked, [26] by comparison with Philadelphia or Boston, a “high society” in the American sense of the term, but the city’s commercial wealth and that of its inhabitants, combined with its geographic location, slowly transformed New York by midcentury into the commercial center of the American art world. Changing attitudes and profound transformations in the country’s general economy led to radical changes in mores.8 Alongside a colonial elite powerfully shaken already by the Revolutionary War, there arose a class of newcomers with little to lose, who created new markets by dint of their raw energy and enterprising spirit. These pioneers, many of whom achieved rapid success, lacked education and refinement. Women, whose role in the colonial period had already been considerable, rose mightily to this challenge.9 Having obtained economic independence and more equal rights, many would achieve celebrity as well. Their civility and sensibility reformed the rough-and-tumble manners of the New World, preparing the way for developments in theater, music, and the graphic arts. These several factors contributed greatly to the spread of two new tendencies in taste, encyclopedic on the one hand and nationalistic on the other, both latent in the colonial seventeenth century, as we have seen, and registered in the twin phenomena of the family portrait and the cabinet of curiosities. Heir to the late eighteenth century, the new Republic spawned collections and scientific museums at the same time that it honored patriotic heroes with commemorative monuments

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and statuary. Very often the age took Antiquity as its model, attempting in its institutions to restore the social mores, customs, and lifestyles of the ancient world. This echo of Antiquity in the United States was notably expressed in the style of monuments but also in painting and sculpture.10 At the same time, there arose a new conception of the role of both the arts patron and the collector.11

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chapter 1

Encyclopedic Spirit

The collections of science and art imagined by the French Encyclopedists were not established in the United States right from the start. Although their ideal had first made an appearance in Charleston under colonial rule, it achieved full expression only in 1840 with the founding of the National Museum. But the twin goals of the Enlightenment, scientific development and encouragement of the arts, inspired most American collecting throughout this period. Natural history exhibits, scientific museums, and collections of Old Masters were projects born of a single impulse, which, despite their apparent dissimilarity, were often undertaken by the same individuals. Apart from whatever differences in taste, collectors in this period were aligned in their ambitions. One of the earliest extensive collections of natural history, consisting for the most part of [mounted] insects and stuffed birds, was gathered around 1780 by a certain Arnold in Norwalk, Connecticut, whose home, according to John Adams, future president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was frequented and admired by many.12 The rigorously scientific principles informing this ensemble would be taken up again by Charles Willson Peale, who, in his Philadelphia Museum, thought to combine scientific exhibits with works of art. Peale was an extraordinary character, overflowing with energy, at various points in his life apprentice harness maker, soldier, painter, museum director, doctor, and dentist. He adopted the philosophy expressed by [Pierre Eugène] du Simitière in his scientific museum, culminating in a collection of his own portraits of Revolutionary heroes.13 In an 1822 self-portrait, he pictures himself lifting a curtain upon the museum interior, revealing his renowned collection of minerals and animals indigenous to the United States including a set of mammoth bones discovered in Ohio and donated by John Morgan, a physician. Franklin himself had encouraged [Charles Willson] Peale to organize a natural history museum, even offering as his own contribution, a [stuffed] Angora cat from France. Jefferson sat on the museum’s board of trustees and was at one time its president.14 Peale’s collections grew rapidly, and he was soon able to exchange duplicates with the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and the British

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Museum. His Museum of Natural Science and Art, with its elegant displays and labels in several languages, became an indispensable resource for visiting researchers, local scholars, and Philadelphia’s already numerous amateurs.15 Peale’s principal concern, public education, informed his use of informational diagrams and descriptive labels, an innovation that would have a tremendous influence on future museums. His manner of placing animals in simulated habitats was another proof of Peale’s [28] modernity, for, even in Europe, the exhibition of objects had not reached this level of sophistication.16 Late in the century, Peale’s son Rembrandt would open a museum like his father’s in Baltimore, though with less success, and another in New York in 1820 with similarly disappointing results. His mistake was to abandon science in favor of attractions more or less artistic in nature in an effort to draw a larger public. Philadelphia boasted a second museum of natural history, housed in Carpenter’s Hall, which included a collection of mechanical displays and architectural models of all sorts. “Carpenter’s Cabinet,” as it was known, boasted among its glories an outstanding library affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. The importance of this museum’s architectural exhibits cannot be exaggerated; they were instrumental in inspiring the classical revival that would sweep the nation later in the century. No longer was it necessary to rely on rulebooks and ambiguous engravings, for here was opportunity to study actual scale models, the very image of Antiquity. In Boston, similarly, there was Bowen’s Museum, founded by a rival of Peale’s who had moved his collections north from Philadelphia in 1791. Renamed the “Columbian Museum” four years later, Bowdoin’s holdings were decimated by a fire in 1803, whereupon the surviving fragments passed into the hands of the New England Museum, opened to the public in 1812.17 Here could be seen an excellent assortment of natural curiosities and portraits, including one of a French princess by Jean-Marc Nattier. The Boston Museum, founded in 1804, combined natural history with [physical] science. Birds and fossils kept company there with a perfectly functioning glass steam engine that every afternoon drew the curious in droves. When the public wearied of this, a theater was added; and when the museum fell out of favor entirely, as did so many others, it was bought out by the New England Museum.18 In 1808, the inhabitants of Philadelphia were invited to attend an odd performance combining elements of theater, music hall, and vaudeville by Jesse Sharpless, whose wax museum, populated by no fewer than forty-seven figures, featured an organ and electric apparatus.19 The point here patently was to amuse, not to instruct. Scudder’s Museum in New York, “a prodigy of absurdity and bad taste,” apparently shared the same goal.20 The list of “popular” museums of this kind goes on and on. Often an outward show of science and a pseudoscientific name were used to pass off curiosities of neither scientific nor artistic interest. Sadly, the very term “museum” itself fell slowly into disrepute, due mainly to the rise of wax museums competing among themselves for the most spectacular display, with Beauty Museums in both Boston and New York and Boston’s Columbian among their number.21 In Philadelphia, Albany, and Hartford, too, a public early developments

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thirsty more for emotional catharsis than beauty or knowledge was served up entertainments at a few cents a person.22 That great flatterer of crowds and psychologist of the masses, P. T. Barnum, understood this well.23 Although his American Museum in New York contained some paintings as well as oddments of natural history, crowds flocked to his Palace of Humbug, New York’s must-see attraction of 1840, more to gape at the collection of monstrosities and horrors.24 Even excellent portraits and scientific exhibits resurrected from the ruins of the Peale family museums were but second-rank attractions in the eyes of crowds who preferred the master impresario’s original montages. Such museums, the earliest to exist in the North, often owned by individuals, for the most part commercial ventures, belong more properly to the category of the music hall and circus sideshow. For them to survive, their owners, like other entrepreneurs, were obliged to pander to the whims of [29] the public, and though these organizational principles doomed such ventures from the start, their very failures must be seen as accurate reflections of the taste of the age. One sees, if not success, at least an unmistakable consistent desire to educate the public making use of science as a promotional tool. Although this generation of public museums, products of Enlightenment ideals, went out of style, the cause was taken up with greater scientific rigor by the universities. Harvard with a collection of minerals donated by [E. K.] Waterhouse in 1784, Yale with its natural history collections, and Brown set the tone.25 Princeton inherited an important cabinet purchased in Europe in 1791 by David Hosack, a scientist with a good eye for paintings, himself owner of a Virgin and Child by Correggio, another by Van Dyke, a copy of Raphael’s La Belle Jardinière, and even several landscapes, unusual for the time.26 Both this catholicity of interests and Dr. Hosack himself were products of the encyclopedic spirit; the Reverend Joseph Stewart of Hartford possessed an only slightly less diverse collection.27 But university museums, as a result of overspecialization, came to abandon the popularizing encyclopedic mission at the movement’s origin. Already a new modern era of specialization was dawning, with disciplines increasingly isolated each from the next. Curators frequently demonstrated an inability to think about science outside the narrow focus determined by their training. Minerals and stuffed birds neatly labeled and arranged in long glass cases, neither for their own sakes nor to point out their relations to a larger world outside but merely organized by genus and species, lost the public’s interest. For the specialist, an overly hermetic rigor replaced a concern for teaching and appreciation of the picturesque. Human understanding had become fragmented, increasingly complex and increasingly obscure. Simple curiosity and picturesque appreciation were not altogether lost, however. The museum of the Salem East India Marine Society, for example, founded in 1799, was charged with collecting “natural and artificial curiosities to be found between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn,” which came to include weapons, costumes, and domestic articles, calligraphy from Borneo, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as fragments of pottery from the digs at Herculaneum. This made for what was arguably the most original collection in the New World. The museum’s

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tremendous variety and its early hints at Orientalism and ethnology (disguised beneath the blanket label cabinet de curiosité) should not let us forget the equal presence there of busts of Cicero and Shakespeare, the society’s guiding lights. On the walls were to be seen portraits of the museum’s benefactors, unpolished Salem merchants proud to bring home objects useful in disseminating knowledge of the cultures of the East while at the same time promoting trade.28 Once initial contact had been made, connections between the United States and the Far East continued to increase in scope. Here, perhaps, is one origin of the Boston region’s marked appreciation for Oriental art, though such was not yet the purpose of the museum’s founders. It was with encyclopedic vision, as well, that John Pintard, then secretary of the American Academy [of Fine Arts], founded the New-York Historical Society, the city’s first major museum, in 1804. Its official purpose was to gather and preserve material of all sorts to do with civic, natural, and religious history. Although influenced by the ideas of David Hosack discussed earlier, the institution focused principally on history per se.29 Despite the period’s political unrest and scientific torpor, art [30] was not entirely neglected. Painters continued to return from travel in Europe with copies and occasionally originals. Between 1804 and 1805, John Trumbull, for instance, exhibited a collection of Old Masters he had bought in France during the Revolution there. It is hard to assess the quality of these works, however—perhaps mere copies or [works] of second rank.30 William H. Vernon of Newport, Rhode Island, similarly purchased a number of paintings during his stay in France, including works by Luini, Salvator Rosa, Van der Meulen, Mignard, Canaletto, and Vernet. This collection, first exhibited at the Boston Atheneum in 1830, was sold by Vernon five years later but would have been known in the United States since late in the previous century.31 It was also in Europe that James Bowdoin, formerly minister to France, later minister plenipotentiary to Spain, assembled his own collection. This descendant of an early governor of Massachusetts willed his paintings, drawings, and library to Bowdoin College in Maine. Many of the older works were by major artists and included a work known as The Governor of Gibraltar, a bust portrait of John Montfort by Van Dyke, a Holy Family attributed to the school of Raphael, Poussin’s The Continence of Scipio, a number of works by Jacques Courtois, and others after Guido and Titian32—the same names most highly esteemed at the Louvre’s Imperial Museum at that very moment. Although somewhat mediocre in quality, these paintings accurately reflected contemporary European taste. What is important to note here is that an American, though lacking both the means and education necessary to acquire the particular works of art then being scrambled for in Europe, was nevertheless moving in the same direction. It would appear that Bowdoin understood this, for, in addition to his relatively few paintings, he accumulated quite a good portfolio of drawings by the likes of Rembrandt, Domenichino, Salvator Rosa, Correggio, Claude [Lorrain], Titian, and Tintoretto. This remarkable collecearly developments

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tion seems not, however, to have had much influence on work produced in the United States. When Bowdoin died in 1811, two years after his return from Europe, its existence was quickly forgotten, tucked away as it was in a small Maine village far from the nation’s urban centers, where it might have been seen and appreciated. The collection’s importance lay especially in these drawings, evidence of an eclecticism that also characterized a number of minor collections in France amassed during the eighteenth century. Baltimore’s Robert Gilmor Jr., both in the breadth of his collection and the reputation of the works that it contained, was the most prominent American amateur of his day. Among the paintings he owned were a Raphael, Poussin’s Moses Plucked from the Rushes [The Finding of Moses], several Bourguignons, Dutch works by Frans Hals and Cuyp, two Van Dykes, a Rosa, a Velázquez, a Pillement, a Canaletto, and 150 other works all obtained directly from excellent collections, purchased for the most part from French refugees and in Spain, though not all of equal quality.33 Along with many other collectors of the period, Europeans among them, Gilmor surrounded himself with pseudoexperts and took much bad advice. His taste for the Old Masters was common enough, but matched in his case by an interest in the eighteenth century, in works by Pillement and Canaletto in particular, unusual in the United States and a sufficient proof of the personal nature of his predilection. His purchase of a portrait by Holbein, already thoroughly disdained as “Gothic” in contemporary Europe, similarly indicates the independence of his judgment. Titian’s Lucretia, a Velázquez, a Murillo, a Guido, and four Vernets were the centerpieces of the collection of Napoleon’s older brother Joseph Bonaparte, a refugee who resettled in Bordentown, New Jersey, around 1826. This ensemble was visited frequently by artists, including Thomas Sully, who admired it greatly.34 Bonaparte’s personality no doubt played a role in its renown, though the collection nonetheless exerted an important influence throughout the region, long a stronghold of artistic practice. The Pennsylvania Academy, founded in 1805, in addition to promoting American art, two years later, in 1807, accepted a major donation of Old Master paintings gathered in Europe by Joseph Allen Smith. [31] Additional purchases were made later, when first Bonaparte’s and then George Meade’s collections were sold at auction.35 Meade, who had collected mostly in Spain, had been obliged to relinquish his holdings of sculpture and painting to Gouverneur Kemble of Pennsylvania, who resold them in 1845.36 The masterpiece in the collection, a painting by Murillo representing Roman Charity, had belonged to Charles IV of Spain. In New York, the Abraham collection was a favorite among artists. It contained, among other works, a copy of Correggio’s Mary Magdalen, a portrait by Velázquez, a Hobbema, a Claude, and a [painting by] Murillo, the popular favorite, he being after all the painter most in fashion on the Continent, in France as in England.37 Works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were at that time almost universally

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admired. A Miss Douglass, in New York, for instance, owned both a Rubens and a Reynolds.38 The European influence on the American collections we have looked at in this chapter is quite clear. It was on their travels in the Old World that collectors such as Bowdoin and Powell got their start. Transatlantic travel only increased in frequency, favored by political as well as diplomatic developments. The Republicans in Franklin’s entourage, and Jefferson’s, were ardent Francophiles.39 The early years of the Republic coincided in general with a taste for things French, making Bowdoin’s collection, those of early museums, and others encyclopedic in their tendencies, highly representative of the spirit of the age. Richmond’s first museum was even founded by a Frenchman, Quesnay de Beaurepaire. As we have seen, however, American artists, with the exception of John Vanderlyn, though they visited France, did not choose to live there, nor were the teachers they chose generally French. Vanderlyn was an admirer of classicism; his Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, today in the Pennsylvania Academy, made him infamous throughout America. Although the work inspired many sermons, it served the cause of artistic liberty as well with its introduction of the nude, “carefully veiled.”40 Rembrandt Peale also spent some years in Paris, where he studied with [ Jacques-Louis] David and [Dominique] Vivant Denon. Those artists who managed to make their way to Europe had an opportunity to contemplate the grandiose collections that Napoleon had gathered in the Louvre. West, Allston, Vanderlyn, and Peale were powerfully influenced by this experience.41 British collections were being much enriched at this point by works of art taken abroad by French emigrants,42 and a number of Americans similarly found themselves in a position to profit from the excellent opportunities afforded by the Continent’s political unrest. The source of Bowdoin’s collection appears to have been one of many cabinets de dessins popular in eighteenth-century France; Gilmor’s likewise. The Franco-American connection was also strong in the area of science, and frequently philosophers and other intellectuals in France kept up a correspondence with their counterparts in the United States. Scientific institutions in America likewise counted it an honor to include French Encyclopedists among their members. There were even French artists who emigrated to America to live and to work, including, for example, the miniaturist Jean-Pierre-Henri Elouis, a student of [ Jean-Bernard] Restout, who arrived in Maryland in 1791. Like Houdon before them, French architects Étienne Hallet, Joseph Mangin, and Pierre-Charles L’Enfant lived for a time in the United States. There were also families of French refugees from Europe and Santo Domingo who relocated to Philadelphia. And transatlantic ties were not the only ones thus strengthened. Contact even between American cities grew easier as ties established under colonial rule grew inevitably closer with the founding of the Republic. Artists journeyed from city to city, visiting the collections of amateurs like Dunlap, Sully, Stuart, and Trumbull in search of models for their work, exchanging ideas and encouraging acquaintances to start their own collections.43 The Pennsylearly developments

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vania Academy of the Fine Arts (1790), Charles Willson Peale’s Museum School (1791), and New York’s [American] Academy of Fine Arts (1802) are proof that academicism, whose triumph in Europe had been marked by a return to the Antique in the studios of Benjamin West and [ Jacques-Louis] David, was making its way in the United States as well.44 Instruction in the fine arts, supported by the collections of these various institutions and by the exhibitions they organized, for a certain time generated a tremendous public interest. But this enthusiasm [32] was fleeting, sapped by a thirst for material possessions and by a Puritan mindset not yet prepared for represented nudes, let alone live artistic models.45 The history of art academies in the United States is marked by a long series of generous efforts met with successes alternating with reversals, their survival always precarious. [William] Dunlap reports many collections of European art brought to America for public viewing.46 Such was apparently the case, for instance, with the group of paintings and engravings given New York’s Columbian Gallery by the painter Edward Savage in 1802, in which works by Bourdon, Lebrun, Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Reynolds, Correggio, Regnault hung alongside paintings by Copley, West, Charles Willson Peale, and Stuart as well as his own. All were for sale, although the catalogue, listing only painters and subjects, made no distinction between copies and originals. This was, nonetheless, very possibly the first exhibition catalogue published in the United States.47 Those with a real interest in art could even obtain for two dollars a pass good for the complete run of the exhibition. Another, smaller show took place on New York’s Barclay Street around 1830 that included a Rubens family portrait, a figure by Reynolds, and a Carlo Dolci among [works by] other Old Masters. In 1834, the Boston Atheneum organized an exhibition of four views of ancient and modern Rome by Giovanni Pannini belonging to the Duc de Choiseul.48 Unrest on the Iberian Peninsula earlier in the decade sparked a craze for Spanish art in America, much as it did in Europe. We have already heard mention of the names Murillo and Velázquez; more strangely, a collection of Segovian arms and armor was on view in Boston in 1841.49 Other works in the exhibition, by Zurbarán, Luca Giordano, and Salvator Rosa, plus a number of copies, were Spanish in origin as well. Even though not all private collections exhibited were of this quality, an interesting provenance never failed to excite curiosity. Despite the fact that the public’s art sense was, at this point, hardly subtle, and works as a result not consistently appreciated, a keen curiosity was nonetheless manifest. For those unable to visit Europe and thus unacquainted with its art collections and museums, exhibitions like these were inspirational, providing models of culture and refinement worthy of aspiration. It was the coincidence of two political events that provided Americans an opportunity to own works of European art seen as imbued with the prestige of age and ancient history. The Revolution in France, first of all, flooded the market with the property of those fleeing the country. Don Carlos’s rebellion in Spain led similarly

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to the sale of many collections. In neither case, however, did Americans profit from these opportunities as much as one might think. Although, where science was concerned, the French encyclopedic spirit had enormous influence, in matters of aesthetic taste, the advice of critics like Diderot was more or less ignored. Greuze and Fragonard were no more highly regarded than were Lancret and Watteau. Where a purely American sensibility was concerned, the French eighteenth century lay and would remain in a world apart.50 The wild and tragic mood of certain Spanish paintings was equally hard to appreciate by an age in search of calmer, simpler, more accessible ideals of beauty. Furthermore, in each instance, Americans ran into competition from the British, who accounted for the near totality of French sales,51 whereas, under the First Empire and later, it was the French themselves who built up their own collections through numerous purchases in Spain.52 Still, Bowdoin, American ambassador first to France and then to Spain, Meade, as American consul in Cadiz, and Trumbull (to name but several of the period’s most influential [33] collectors) purchased in Europe what they could.53 American law made these acquisitions possible, for art imports were not taxed by the United States until 1861.54 In this respect, artistic exchanges between America and Europe could hardly have been easier. But American collectors were not wealthy enough as yet to acquire masterpieces on the European market; what is more, few were for sale. And even had they had the means, most would-be buyers did not know enough to spend the sums required, nor would they necessarily have recognized the opportunity. Most purchases were made back home, at first by artist-merchants, then by dealers in antiques. It was principally this commerce along with a few public sales and a few gifts that made American collections possible and enabled their growth. Painters, unable to live by their art alone, traded on their reputation and their expertise in helping others to acquire older works. The English painter Robert Edge Pine, for instance, had organized in Philadelphia in 1786 an exhibition and sale of magnificent engravings and copies after Reynolds sent to him from England by John Boydell. Although the sale was well attended, the Quaker elite proved unresponsive and little was purchased. Similarly, when Charles Willson Peale was charged with finding a buyer for the Stanwick [Hall] collection, his efforts met with similar disinterest, and the public auction that followed was a near disaster.55 Regardless of these efforts by Pine and Peale, despite sweeping changes in science and literature, its flourishing economy notwithstanding, Philadelphia was simply not yet ready. Among the city’s inhabitants here and there could be found lovers of the arts who had traveled and were openly curious, yet collecting, with all that word comports of passion and selfconfidence, was not yet the fashion in the city of brotherly love. There was, from time to time, tremendous interest shown in art, but the public came to look, not to buy. Trumbull, apparently, had no better time of it in New York, and found himself obliged to send an assortment of Old Masters brought home with him from Europe early developments

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back again, having found no interested buyers.56 There is no way of knowing for sure whether Savage had better luck, only that several of the works he had for sale were purchased by Robert Gilmor in Baltimore.57 Around 1820, painter Thomas Sully went into business with frame maker James Earle, and together they opened a gallery on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, showing and selling works by Charles Robert Leslie, Edward Matthew Ward, even Gainsborough.58 In 1824, more curiously, the gallery exhibited a set of Gobelin tapestries probably obtained from French immigrants. Most of the artwork it carried originated in London ; engravings from Boydell’s edition of Shakespeare sold especially well. The shop as a result served as a vital source of English influence that once again outshone the French. Although commerce did take place among collectors themselves—portions of Meade’s collection, for instance, passed through the hands of either Kemble or Gilmor—a new class of intermediaries now appeared on the scene as active popularizers and propagators of taste: art dealers. I. C. Bell was among the first to exercise this new profession, opening a gallery in Philadelphia in 1820, where he exhibited more than three hundred prints after the most important sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters: Rubens, Van Dyke, Fyt, Jordaens, Wouwerman, Snyders, and others. Not quite able yet to count on sales, Bell charged visitors twelve cents to gaze upon the work of those “whose names have been immortalized by their talent and genius beyond all praise,” this according to the rather quaint notices he ran in all the papers.59 New York’s Michael Paff was probably the most important art merchant of his day. The “Old Paff ’s” shop on the ground floor of the Astor Mansion was in 1830 the meeting spot of all the city’s collectors. Who could say if among the paintings Paff carried, works in fairly good condition, one might not discover a Titian, a Correggio, or a Raphael? Though getting on in years, barely educated and comically eccentric, Paff had [34] an enthusiasm for art that proved contagious. The circle of collectors that gathered in his Wall Street studio was ready to appreciate the few choice works that revolution, immigration, and economic circumstance landed within reach.60 The importance of the role played by artist-merchants and dealers as loci of diffusion in developing the taste of these enthusiasts is beyond question. But far more numerous were those individuals merely interested in home decoration, in hanging their interiors with a few paintings by reputed artists chosen with greater or lesser discernment. Public auctions made this possible, all in diffusing work not always of the highest quality. Although, as we have noted, Peale’s attempt to place the Stanwick collection met with little success, after 1820 sales of this kind grew more and more frequent. Showrooms were opened by Blake & Cunningham in Boston and by Aaron Levy in New York. In their catalogues, one discovers works by all the important sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters: da Vinci, Albani, Poussin, Rubens, Jordaens, Domenichino, Paul Brill, Guido, Titian, Claude, Bassano, Potter, van Goyen, and the Carraccis, both father and son. Probably these were, for the most part, copies after well-known paintings; nonetheless, these sales would indicate a growing interest in art. So, too, would the auctions taking place on

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Wall Street, by 1840 almost a daily occurrence. There was something for every taste, including occasionally works of authentic importance. In Philadelphia during this period, the auctions of Paul Beck’s collection in 1840 and of Joseph Bonaparte’s in 1845 were major events. On both occasions, the Pennsylvania Academy made purchases, with private buyers following its lead.61 The few art museums that came into existence during this period relied on gifts, not purchases. Bowdoin bequeathed his entire collection to the college in Maine that bears his name; most major ensembles of portraits found homes in the period in the same way. One might have expected an increase in the number of public museums in this era of open-mindedness and belief in public education. Much to the contrary, however, between 1776 and 1840, private collections proliferated, whereas only the Bowdoin Museum and two or three other bequests by individuals to private institutions, like the gift to Princeton of David Hosack’s extensive scientific collection and that begun by Waterhouse at Harvard, were encyclopedic in nature [and open to the public]. The very few public collections besides these were nationalistic in purpose. Neither the spirit of the eighteenth-century cabinet so well illustrated by Bowdoin nor the encyclopedic spirit best exemplified by Peale was able to withstand the pressures of the ever-quickening pace of economic growth.62 Early colonial collectors and individuals of the stature of Jefferson and Franklin were succeeded by a throng of others more interested in the accumulation of material goods. Intellectually as well as politically, certain aspects of the Declaration of Independence were forgotten, and the French example of a flowering of museums and royal academies not just in Paris but throughout the country was left unfollowed. As in France, all too often the very purpose and importance of museums were lost sight of; forgetfulness followed neglect. It would be necessary to await a time when civic leaders would again embrace the importance of public education. Enlightenment ideals had fallen by the wayside, culturally speaking, with no attempt made to replace them. In the 1830s, the United States was preoccupied with a tremendous territorial and economic expansion that, drawing all the nation’s energies, was not without a deleterious effect upon its moral, intellectual, and artistic growth.

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chapter 2

The Search for a National Style

Although the early years of the American Republic are easily characterized as encyclopedic in attitude, tremendous popular curiosity developed concurrently, rooted in a burgeoning nationalism. How, indeed, could it have been otherwise? Had not the Revolution been the birth cry of a new nation? The struggle for liberty had provided the United States its share of martyrs, soldiers, and heroes, whose numbers and acclaim grew year by year. Nor was this an isolated phenomenon. In Europe, as well, the study of history and desire to strengthen ties among the disparate regions of nation-states in times of struggle gave rise to an obsessive interest in better understanding that past in whose name a nation’s energies might be galvanized. Franklin, along with revolutionaries in France, replaced the regional and transnational alliances, admiration for great men, and political terror that had characterized the late years of the eighteenth century with the idea of the nation and the exaltation of its history. In France, under first the Revolution and later the Empire, infatuation with history encouraged the development of nationalist sentiment, most often taking as its models heroes of Antiquity painted or sculpted by the finest contemporary artists. One took pride in the scientific and military accomplishments evident around one and contemplated the expansion of human knowledge. It was an age of self-betterment.1 This feverish euphoria was hardly lost on the United States, still in its first flush of youth. Dramatists, poets, and historians all turned to singing the glory of the nation’s liberators. Some like Joel Barlow, who penned his famous Columbiad in 1787, looked even farther into the past. John Trumbull and Philippe Deveau participated also in this intellectual response to the Enlightenment and to Voltaire, as did, more notably still, Timothy Dwight. [William] Dunlap, in his plays, chose to celebrate the Republic’s virtues through the glorification of Greece. Only as the attention of poets and artists was more and more claimed by political debate between the major parties was this unanimity of nationalist fervor broken by demands for social change.

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The graphic arts had played their part in forging this consensus. Portraits, history paintings, statues of great men, and commemorative monuments were undertaken in a nationalist spirit by the artists of the day. Portraiture, however, remained patriotism’s principal expression. Art in the United States was obliged to do without church patronage or public commissions. Painters needed to rely for their clientele on individuals refined enough to pay attention to the arts. The disappearance of much of the colonial aristocracy meant that a certain time had to pass before a suitable class of patrons arose to replace it. This is why so many artists, [37] among them Trumbull, Peale, and Stuart, who returned to the United States after the Revolution in the hopes that the triumph of the Republic would provide them marvelous new opportunities, were if not unrecognized then misunderstood [during their lives]. Theirs was the disappointment neither to have realized their ambitions nor to have exerted any measurable influence. Architects fared little better. Even L’Enfant, who had drawn the plans selected for Washington City, died in obscurity, the same fate that befell Étienne Hallet, whose design had been rejected. Nationalism and this classical revival were of a moment. When Jefferson, writing to L’Enfant on the subject of the Capitol, declared that he preferred “the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity, which have had the approbation of thousands of years,” he spoke for an entire era.2 Greek or Roman were the styles considered most appropriate for the expression of the New World’s grandeur. Amid the columns, the pilasters, and the capitals resurrected from civilizations dead for millennia, the country’s builders felt themselves secure from accusations of bad taste. Jefferson echoed the Maison Carrée in Nîmes in his plans for Virginia’s Capitol. Joseph Mangin built the New York City Hall in the Roman style. Charles Bullfinch, architect of the Massachusetts State House, was yet another adept of classicism. Throughout the country, but especially in the South, where the influence of Jefferson’s Monticello was enormous, a classical design was chosen for even the most ordinary buildings. With its colonnades, its pediments and porticos, it was a style of architecture extremely simple in its beauty, if a touch cold. Painting knew this taste for the Antique as well. Benjamin West, who was considered, even in London, where he came to reside, the leading figure of the new American school of painting, was among its leading advocates.3 His students [Gilbert] Stuart, [William] Dunlap, Samuel Waldo, [ John] Trumbull, Robert Fulton, Samuel F. B. Morse, Rembrandt Peale, and [Washington] Allston acquired from him a taste for large historical compositions. Allston returned to America in 1818 to paint oversized tableaux, both religious and secular, in the antique style.4 [ JacquesLouis] David, that other major European influence, instructed [ John] Vanderlyn and Rembrandt Peale in artistic principles so similar to these they came to consider portraiture beneath their dignity, producing large-scale canvases almost exclusively. Neither of the two major American sculptors of the day, Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, escaped this neoclassical influence. Greenough’s Washington (which stands in the Capitol Rotunda) is Olympian in proportion. Likewise, Powers’s famous Greek Slave seems like something out of the atelier of Canova.5 Taste for early developments

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portraiture did not disappear entirely; it took on new forms.6 One might, in fact, consider these heroic and historical concerns themselves survivals of the tendency among early colonists to display ancestral portraits in their homes. The United States, having found its sense of unity, held fast to the images of those who had penned the finest pages of its history. As sense of family gave way to sense of civic pride, a nationalist spirit spread across the land. There were some who still preferred to live surrounded by reminders of the regional affiliations of a bygone era. Franklin, for instance, displayed in his home a portrait of Admiral William Penn, a gift from Lord Kames.7 Artists, for their part, all too often lacking public commissions and finding their work unappreciated by private patrons, produced large numbers of historical canvases and portraits. The British painter James Sharples, for example, set up shop in Philadelphia in 1794 and again in 1809, executed an extensive series of such portraits in pastel, afterward sold to a collector in Virginia, and which today are in Independence Hall.8 His compatriot Robert Edge Pine, an even earlier arrival, had set up a studio in Philadelphia in 1784, in which he exhibited a number of his own portraits in addition to others he had carried with him from England. But the great portrait painter of the Revolutionary era was Charles Willson Peale, who had enlisted in the Colonial Army in the winter of 1777, seen action in the battles of Germantown, Trenton, and Princeton, and taken care to have the principal officers in these engagements sit for him. Thus came into being the first “national portrait gallery.” At war’s end, Peale settled in Philadelphia and opened his famous museum there, in which portraiture played as central a role [38] as natural history.9 When he retired in 1808, the federal government rejected his proposal that it purchase his collections outright; the City of Philadelphia likewise. It was dispersed at auction in 1846. The branch museums operated by his sons in Baltimore and New York featured similar displays of portraits, of which they executed numerous copies, such was the high demand for images of national heroes, in the early years of the Republic at least. [Gilbert] Stuart, Thomas Sully, and more than a few other painters returning from Europe also on occasion recorded the features of Washington and those who had fought with him, though never were these portraits exhibited as an ensemble.10 It was Trumbull who imagined himself the grand historian of that American epic, the Revolution and its aftermath. Despite a struggle against odds, he would successfully complete a project begun in France in 1786 with portraits of Jefferson and French officers who had participated in the War of Independence. Three years later, upon his return to the United States, he would execute portraits of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the leaders of the Revolutionary Army. Though he did receive a number of private commissions, much to his disappointment, Congress declined to acquire the full collection, which remained for the time being in New York, a circumstance that pained Trumbull until the day he died. The ensemble of these works was purchased in 1827 by Yale, where a special gallery built for their display was inaugurated five years later.11 The fifty-three paintings in the series included Revolutionary War scenes and numerous portraits,

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a full-length of George Washington among them, but Trumbull’s best work was almost certainly his smaller compositions. Acquainted personally with the leaders of the Revolution, he was himself well known, his advice sought after [not only] in New York but [also] throughout the country. He had done much to cultivate the new nationalist spirit. And even though he barely managed to market his collection, Trumbull produced a great many individual portraits held and cherished by his sitters and their admirers. Such ensembles, assembled by artists for public viewing, compensated for the National Museum some would have wished to see established. Despite efforts in this direction made in the interest of honoring the leaders of the Revolution, no museum of the like would see the light of day—at least not in the form its proponents would have chosen.12 They had to content themselves with the contributions of individual collectors and a handful of private institutions. Among amateurs, the name James Bowdoin deserves special mention. In addition to Old Masters, his collection included portraits by Gilbert Stuart of both Jefferson and Madison, the two great leaders of the age.13 Nor did David Hosack in New York limit his admiration to European masters but owned portraits by Vanderlyn, Sully, Stuart, Trumbull, John Wesley Jarvis, and Dunlap as well.14 Yet another New Yorker, Philip Hone, had by 1834 assembled a collection of American paintings that included canvases by Peale, Stuart, Doughty, Thomas Cole, and Morse—and not just portraits, genre scenes as well. George P. Morris, editor of the New York Mirror and a friend to artists and collectors, exemplified these same new tendencies.15 New York in the 1830s boasted a developed art world that included patrons such as Gulian Verplank, Luman Reed, [David] Hosack, [Philip] Hone, and George P. Morris, who, though faithful to American works generally, turned away from large-scale historical compositions and portraits in favor of images of daily life and landscapes.16 Of them all, Reed was perhaps most typical. A wealthy New York merchant and personal friend of many of the artists he collected, Reed covered the walls of his Greenwich Street apartment with works by Asher B. Durand, [Thomas] Cole, [Samuel F. B.] Morse, and George W. Flagg. At [Reed’s] death in 1836, the New-York Historical Society acquired a portion of his collection.17 Even as late as 1845, however, some amateurs continued to prefer historical themes. James Lenox, for example, bequeathed to the New York Public Library no fewer than three portraits of Washington by James Peale, Rembrandt Peale, and [Gilbert] Stuart, respectively, and another of Lafayette by Morse.18 [39] It was private institutions, however, that did the most to gather and preserve artistic work done in America along with documents related to state histories. New York’s Tammany Society, which owed its existence to the influence of John Pintard, was founded in 1791, its declared purpose that of “collecting and preserving everything relating to the history of America.”19 A number of interesting portraits were on view there before the collection fell into the hands of the likes of John Scudder and P. T. Barnum, who transformed them into a sort of carnival display. New York’s American Academy of Fine Arts owned Sully’s Patriotism and the Century, a painting early developments

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quite typical of the period, a fine portrait of West by Thomas Lawrence, and a few works by Trumbull. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the first of its kind in the United States, opened its doors in 1805 and, little by little, expanded its collections. Exhibiting the work of American artists contributed to the academy’s popularity.20 We see the same phenomenon in Boston, where the Atheneum, sponsored by the city’s eminent and wealthy, began acquiring and exhibiting major portraits in 1807. The owners of private museums, numerous in the period, took advantage of the popularity of American heroes to lure in crowds. Philadelphia’s Washington Museum, founded in 1816, featuring a gallery of battle scenes and no fewer than 125 wax figures, offers a good example of this phenomenon. The museum stayed open evenings, and exhibitions were accompanied by music.21 A second Washington Museum in Boston presented a historical extravaganza in similar style. A dozen more museums of this kind were to be found in Philadelphia alone.22 Albany had its own wax museum modeled after the Columbian Museum in Boston. Its central attraction was a life-sized statue of John Adams flanked by Liberty and Justice.23 Little by little, however, the Beauty Queens of Boston and New York, those Potiphar’s wives, dethroned the public personalities of the Republic. Came the time of oddity and of sensation. Museums, much like written histories, were quite amenable to meeting public taste on its own terms and pandered to the new demand for melodrama and diversion. Peale’s sons, and Scudder and Barnum in particular, outdid themselves in this regard. Wax as a medium lent itself only too well to facile and theatrical montage, more often than not lacking both historical exactitude and much artistic interest. Happily, alongside these increasingly commercial private ventures, a small number of public foundations and associations appeared that would hold to a higher standard. It was Yale’s Gallery of Fine Arts that in 1832 had purchased the Trumbull collection. Ten years later, thanks to the dedicated resolve of Joel Poinsett of South Carolina, a National Gallery of Art saw the light of day as a department within Washington’s National Institute.24 The original collection included portraits by Charles Willson Peale, George Peter Alexander Healy, [ John Singleton] Copley, [Gilbert] Stuart, [Thomas] Sully, and Ralph Earl, as well as a series of Indian figures painted for the government by Charles Bird King. No longer satisfied with exhibitions merely honoring the nation’s founders, crowds showed new interest in the continent’s original inhabitants whose numbers were diminishing from year to year. The addition of another Indian Gallery, the work of George Catlin, would soon complete what amounted to the nation’s first Indian Museum.25 Still, it would be necessary to wait until 1849 for funding to be appropriated by Congress for a building to house these collections. Washington proved far too occupied with politics for art collecting to be much of a priority. But thanks to the initiative of the National Institute, which had inherited the better part of the collections of John Varden, and,

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more especially, to a munificent bequest by James Smithson, the United States found itself at midcentury in possession of an important public institution.26 Art remained somewhat neglected, however, in comparison to science or ethnography, and the museum’s holdings in that area grew less rapidly than might [40] have been wished for. Other institutions, however, such as Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, founded in 1844, devoted themselves primarily to art. There the visitor could gaze upon paintings by Frederic Church, Trumbull, Cole, and J. Merritt Ives, a portrait of West by Lawrence, and of course a series of portrait miniatures of Washington by Sharples.27 The history of public and private collections we have now considered stretches from the founding of the new Republic to approximately 1840. Nationalist attitudes did not, of course, disappear completely over these years. Although no longer dominant, this current of thinking would survive to play central role in the development of genre painting and much later of an American Nativism. A defining principle coincident with the popularity of Encyclopedism, nationalism would have more or less the same geographic reach. More accessible to a broader audience, catering to the popular imagination, it spread most rapidly perhaps along the western frontier. The features of George Washington and his successors would have been familiar even to pioneers in the remotest settlements from newspaper drawings and engravings. In the new federal capital, which came to bear Washington’s name, a series of monuments were built to glorify the nation and its heroes. Washington, in the District of Columbia, which owed its very existence to the Republic, was permeated with its memory and attracted enthusiasts of the new national history. Art, too, would play its part in representing this feeling of national consensus and unity. In the image of the American Philosophical Society, more or less specialized scientific associations began springing up across the country, each taking as its object of study some aspect of the United States: its geography, natural resources, industries. The South, though more conservative, paved the way with the creation of the Maryland Historical Society in 1796; the New-York Historical Society first opened its doors in 1804.28 The American Antiquarian Society was founded in Worcester in 1812, followed by the Massachusetts Historical Society a few years later in 1829. Farther north, in Portland, the Maine Historical Society was organized in 1822, followed four years later by a Pilgrim Society dedicated to the study of the early years of settlement. Also in 1826, in Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania received its charter. Even newer states sought to preserve the traces of their history. The Minnesota Historical Society dates to 1849; that of Wisconsin to 1854. In their bringing together of like-minded individuals, in the ideas debated in their halls, as in the national or state allegiances they demonstrated, these societies contributed importantly to the creation and dissemination of nationalist sentiment. But alongside whatever intellectual or scientific role they may have played, organizations such as these worked to safeguard the vestiges of a history they brought to public attention by means of exhibitions. Their often considerable collections additionally made Americans more confident of the value of their own national early developments

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artistic production, giving rise eventually to the collections of “Americana” so popular early in the next century. The most important contribution made to the development of a national art in the United States, however, was undoubtedly the founding of schools of fine art dedicated to more systematic and more scientific teaching. As early as 1789, Charles Willson Peale with William Rush and Giuseppe Ceracchi had founded such a school in Philadelphia. When that venture failed, Peale formed the Columbianum in 1795, going so far as to pose for students himself. The school made use of a collection of plaster casts that he had gathered for his own instruction. Yet such individual initiatives seemed doomed to fail. Only in 1805, still clinging tenaciously to his idea and with the help of Charles Hopkinson, did Peale manage to convince a number of Philadelphia’s leading citizens to join in organizing the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The United States minister plenipotentiary to France was commissioned to secure a set of casts to be chosen with advice from [ Jean-Antoine] Houdon.29 In 1810, the young academy would receive a library and additional casts as a gift from Napoleon himself. Annual art exhibitions were held beginning in 1811, helping to further certain artists’ careers. The permanent collection [41] grew continuously. The nation’s first academy of art thrived from the first day. At about the same time, in 1792, the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and Useful Arts was founded to promote industrial design.30 Prizes were offered for the finest innovations in ceramics and other manufactures, an incentive to artists calculated to increase domestic productivity. It was Robert R. Livingston, in 1802 America’s ambassador to France, who first conceived the idea of an American Academy of Fine Arts. The project’s success was such that the academy, in 1808, its first year in existence, counted no fewer than one thousand members. For John Pintard, among its founders, the academy would be “the means of perpetuating whatever may be useful, virtuous and laudable to society.”31 It was only natural, then, that its collection came to include works by Trumbull, West, and other American artists to complement a few casts and paintings of Napoleon. Due largely to disagreements among its members, however, the academy slowly declined. The sale of its collections at auction in 1841 was met with general indifference. The artistic methods of painters like Trumbull, like their art itself, had been under increasing attack in these years from a new direction. Full-scale academic history painting and portraiture and the academy itself were giving way before the work of younger, independent artists like Morse and Durand. In 1825, they founded the New York Drawing Association, with Morse its first president. The curriculum combined drawing classes with lectures and the study of perspective. New York’s thriving middle class responded favorably to this freer, less academic approach. The age of distinguished amateurs like Livingston, Pintard, and DeWitt Clinton—all products of colonial-era schooling concerned with fixing for posterity the grandeur of their time and class—had passed. Their academy had, on the whole, served the cause of American art rather well; the vehemence of the attack against it is good

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evidence of the influence it had enjoyed. Its mere existence had a provocative impact, even in artistic circles in New York, on the way collections were formed. A writer in Analect Magazine noted in 1815 that “[t]he collections of plaster casts, drawings, copies of celebrated pictures, good engravings, &c, which have been formed by the Academies of Philadelphia and New York, together with the commencement of similar institutions elsewhere . . . [,] are admirably calculated to form public taste.”32 These lines nicely capture the effort to create broadly focused urban centers of creative activity. The Boston Atheneum, with its collections of original artwork and plaster casts, might be added to this list. Unfortunately, the public at large did not always respond well to these initiatives. The refinement of popular taste had been too slow and uneven. The nationalist feeling to which the emergence of these artistic and historical associations contributed was powerfully impelled by the renown of a few individual works by artists who somehow became associated with the reputations of the public figures whom they represented, the prestige of each augmenting that of the other. The French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon was among the first artists to ennoble the American Republic. He had exhibited a marble bust of Franklin as early as the French Salon of 1779 and had brought the work with him to the United States six years later.33 So much admired was Houdon’s bust of the American naval hero John Paul Jones that he was commissioned to execute no fewer than eight plaster copies during his stay. The original is in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy. Not to be outdone, the state of Virginia in 1781 commissioned a likeness of Lafayette.34 Houdon, as Jefferson famously explained to Washington in a letter, had arrived in America “for the purpose of lending the aid of his art to transmit you to posterity.” The life-size sculpture he produced has become the defining image of the general as farmer-statesman.35 Despite the efforts of both Franklin [42] and Jefferson, however, Houdon failed to receive a commission for his grandest project, an equestrian statue of Washington for the Capitol. Houdon’s ambition to produce busts of Nathanael Green and Horatio Gates, other Revolutionary-era generals, got no further than the planning stages, either. Jefferson, however, did commission a bust of himself (today at Monticello), and Houdon for his own pleasure executed another (since lost) of the governor of Virginia. Nor was he satisfied with sculpting political and military figures alone. Those who sat for him included his friend, the artist and inventor Robert Fulton,36 and Joel Barlow, the poet.37 Of all European artists, Houdon did the most to make the features of these celebrated men known to the American public. His reputation was so high, in fact, that he was made an honorary member of the American Academy, and, as previously noted, it was to Houdon that the Pennsylvania Academy turned when selecting the casts from which its students would work.38 Though Jean-Jacques Caffieri had sculpted a bust of Franklin in 1777 and Canova a statue of Washington for North Carolina’s Capitol in 1816, these works were never as popular as Houdon’s.39 Caffieri’s commemorative tomb of Richard de Montgomery, erected in 1789 beneath the portico of New York’s St. Paul’s Church, was better known. Other artists, French early developments

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immigrants like [Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de] Saint-Mémin, father of the physiognotrace, or Charles Boulanger de Boisfremont, who completed paintings roughed out by Peale, count among the finest portraitists at work in an America where the engravings of Pierre-Simon Duvivier and the medals of Augustin Dupré were also widely appreciated.40 At the same time, France experienced an American vogue of its own in which numerous artists took part. A French public full of admiration for heroic Americans who had struggled for freedom responded warmly, but such developments also helped to make these figures better known at home.41 English artists showed less interest in the American market. The great portraitists found work enough at home. Patriotic feeling no doubt lessened the appeal in images of rebel leaders. Nonetheless, American history painting owes a smaller debt to David than to West. For obvious political reasons, as president of the British Royal Academy, West did few portraits of celebrated Americans himself—he could hardly be expected to serve as historiographer to both King George III and the king’s enemies. West’s influence on the period’s taste was nonetheless enormous. It was the works of his students, with the exception of Vanderlyn, both in portraiture and history painting that would bring about the turn to nationalism in American art-or, at the very least, serve as its principal expressions. West exemplified the American art of his day. His reputation was so assured that, in 1816, a special gallery was built in Philadelphia to house his Christ Healing the Sick. Its exhibition, to benefit the Pennsylvania Hospital, remained open from 1817 to 1843, over the course of which period receipts totaled more than $25,000. West’s son would later tour America with another of his father’s major paintings, Christ Rejected. Traveling exhibitions of particularly striking works capable of drawing large crowds and thereby increasing public interest in the arts caught on. It is unfortunate only that the quality of paintings thus exhibited was not always of the highest. Subject was the main thing. If David’s Le Sacre de Napoléon and Rembrandt Peale’s The Court of Death both met with acclaim, Dunlap’s Christ Rejected and Morse’s The House of Representatives did not.42 The public wanted novelty, and certain artists turned to painting panoramas. Vanderlyn, who had noted the fashion for immense views of the like in France, produced a series to line the walls of his own New York Rotunda, built in 1817. Traveling exhibitions and a taste for historical narrative thus joined forces with the wax museum in cultivating a taste for the bizarre, [43] indulging the passing, soon outmoded pleasures of the moment. Heroes were forgotten and artistic standards along with them. Can artists themselves be blamed? True, there had been patrons ready to support them, moved by shared eagerness to benefit the greatest number [of the public] with exposure to the arts. Academies, societies, and private museums had been founded. But the public commissions that might have been expected from a nation in the full stride of development never materialized. An imposing Capitol had been constructed, true, but even Trumbull had been hard put to obtain commissions to paint four rotunda panels, and his rival Vanderlyn, despite long delays and repeated protests, had to settle for [painting] far less, a single work, The Landing

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of Columbus.43 Some states, North Carolina and Virginia, for instance, took interest in the arts, and some few private institutions did as well. But, on the whole, the public failed to respond to the dramatic changes that a national organization and artists of merit had sought in vain to bring about. What remained? A handful of museums still in their infancy; learned societies here and there; and portrait galleries at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It was here that the spirit of nationalism, soon to reappear in other forms, was kept alive. Some of the explanation for this partial failure should properly be sought in the overwhelming worldliness and materialism that swept the nation after Jefferson’s defeat. But more than economics were involved. Even in matters of taste, artists had never received adequate support. A true milieu had never been achieved, for want of organizers, theorists, and critics. The colonial aristocracy—well educated, liberal, and refined—had yet to be replaced. Public taste had been neglected, [as had] the architectural “models for study and imitation” Jefferson called for in a letter home from Paris in 1789 by an America only dimly aware of their interest.44 As one observer noted in 1815, although “taste has been widely diffused among the mass of the community[,] this taste may not be very enlightened and critical.”45 Somewhere along the line, a wrong turn had been taken. Where, and why? Too much progress had been made too quickly. Walls had been hung with imposing portraits, and academies filled with collections, all recently obtained, yet, for the most part, art still meant engravings, plaster casts, and copies. These may have helped to create an illusory sense of learning but not a true sensibility. The need to gaze upon past masterpieces had to be satisfied with their mere shadows. The originals in private collections were too few and far between to engender that thick sense of tradition necessary to all artistic creativity; nor did there yet exist that inspirational communion between artist and public, past and present, only original works of art can provide. The United States, a new nation, its cities and monuments still unmarked by the passage of time, was as yet incapable of conjuring that sense of history, however contrived, that somehow art museums and collections alone can succeed in producing. Quality was neglected, the taste for criticism yet unborn, the absence of discriminating judgment too apparent. One encountered, “[s]ide by side with the most interesting and valuable specimens, . . . the greatest puerilities and absurdities in the world”;46 fine portraits hung beside much weaker compositions. Patriotism itself had opened the door to vulgar imagery with an appeal to baser instincts. “Famous Criminals at Work” and “Sleeping Beauties” were surpassed in popularity only by [views of] General Andrew Jackson against a backdrop of the Battle of New Orleans.47 Such examples, though perhaps extreme, exemplify the superficial nature of certain American collections of the period. Intellectually, economically, and scientifically, the country had come rather far. The same could not yet be said with respect to its art.

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Part 3

THE CRITICAL ERA

[Historical Introduction, 1840–1876]

As we have seen, the young Republic found itself in the throes of a rapidly accelerating geographic and economic expansion. There were differences nonetheless between the world of wagon trains and frontier settlements and that of the smelting furnace, cotton mill, and steamboat. Between 1840 and 1876, territorial conquest came to an end. The nation, its mood improved with political stability, emerged from the growth pangs of the Civil War with renewed vigor. Major industrial development in the North, one of the principal precipitators of the war, led to considerable population growth in the major industrial and commercial centers. This transition did not always go smoothly, and there were moments of crisis marked by strikes and internecine struggle. In the cities, high school and college training grew more specialized. Education itself became more technical. State universities were founded, permitting an increasing number to receive a higher education. In these years, intellectual ties with Europe, with Germany in particular, grew ever closer, especially late in this period, when many traveled abroad to complete their studies in the German universities. Around midcentury, women in many states won the political, economic, and intellectual freedoms they had rightfully been demanding. The ever more common incidence of modest wealth favored education, permitting a considerable number

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of women opportunities to improve themselves, to participate in cultural activities and intellectual, literary, and artistic movements. It was an age marked by the development of major scientific institutions. The Smithsonian was first established in Washington in 1846; the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston in 1847. It was an age of positivist thinking and the life of the mind; in the realm of religion, the Unitarian and Methodist Churches grew in influence. Secularism and free thinking were noticeably widespread; Puritanism, embattled. Despite laws that refused to acknowledge copyright and thus promoted the pillaging of European literature, the number of purely American [literary] works published increased from year to year. An ever-larger number of people read more and more. Numerous new publishers appeared on the scene. At the same time, literary magazines like the North American Review, Harper’s Weekly, and Atlantic Monthly gained large audiences and played a role in training public taste. In addition, in the mid-nineteenth century, New York became a major center of frequently trend-setting artistic activity. Taking advantage of its magnificent geographic location, the city expanded economically at a very rapid rate throughout the nineteenth century. A newly wealthy mercantile class turned its attention slowly to the arts. New York, with its writers, merchants, and collectors, came to constitute a genuine art world with an influence felt throughout the country. An increasingly necessary center of business activity and port of embarkation for Europe, New York became the nation’s linchpin, a growing site of communication and exchange between North and South, New World and Old. New York fashion became fashionable [46]; great fortunes were made there, and the names of those who made them were known all over America, their collections woven into the fabric of increasingly legendary reputations. The new museums that opened at this time drew curious visitors even from distant states; art dealers grew in number and exhibitions became increasingly common. Boston, despite being a bit out of the mainstream of commercial and industrial expansion, retained its importance. Thanks to the numerous universities, intellectuals, and artists that called the city home, Boston’s cultural activity continued unabated. Its artists and writers offered advice to inexperienced collectors whose family fortunes had been made in industry or out west. Several generations of young people educated in Europe or in the European style gave Boston a reputation it still enjoys for intellectual and artistic dilettantism combined with stubborn common sense.1 The city’s role in a widening appreciation for Millet and the Barbizon school was important from the first, and it was here that Corot and Courbet found their first American admirers. The Old Masters enjoyed a certain following as well. Quincy A[dams] Shaw, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams, Peter C. Brooks Jr., Thomas Wigglesworth, and Martin Brimmer formed a school of opinion whose taste and advice were respected throughout the United States. Providence, though smaller than Boston, was very nearly as active a center in this regard; perhaps less wealthy and refined in its taste, the city showed its appreciation for the Barbizon painters very early on. early developments

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Philadelphia, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the intellectual heart of the American Republic with its societies and museums, writers and intellectuals, lost its standing as capital of the arts. Washington, having dethroned Philadelphia as symbol of the nation, grew increasingly important, though it would remain an administrative center with a largely transient population too much in flux to play any major cultural role. It was rather due to its important public collections that, among the earliest nineteenth-century cities thus endowed, this tourist destination would have its greatest impact. Baltimore evidenced a similar concern for fostering public awareness of the arts thanks to Henry [Thompson] Walters, well known in the world of industry but who enjoyed a much wider reputation. Development in the South, locked in economic struggle with the North, was interrupted, indeed neared the point of suffocation. With all its vital energy focused in a dire competition with Northern commerce and industry, the landed aristocracy lost its intellectual edge; Charleston and Richmond, overwhelmed by the war, saw their roles as artistic centers slowly fade. Rather selfcontained and closed upon itself, the region could at this point participate only distantly in changes in the arts. New centers sprang into existence as the result of an enormous westward demographic movement. These cities, only yesterday small towns of wood-plank houses where the sole preoccupations were material ones, found themselves subject, little by little, to cravings for greater intellectual stimulation. Some hardy pioneers who had grown up with the invigorating pleasure and opportunities for relaxation and escape that only the contemplation of works of art can bring became patrons of the arts themselves. These men of action eagerly filled their homes with what were said to be masterpieces of contemporary art. The richest citizens of Chicago, a city expanding economically by leaps and bounds, acquired works by the artists most highly esteemed “back east.” This development of artistic sensibility proceeded with an astonishing rapidity and intensity, not just in the East, where history and social hierarchies [47] made such an evolution seemingly inevitable, but in more recently established centers of intellectual activity as well, outposts of culture and taste that came to enjoy their own spheres of influence. Philosophers, however, and poets, those great diviners, like Edgar Allan Poe of “The Philosophy of Furniture,” recognized the weakness and false glamour in this uniformity of taste.2 Another great thinker, Emerson, for his part, thought the answer might lie in a heightened nationalism. He called upon the personality of the new age to declare itself. No more slavish copying of the outmoded fashions of a past unsuited to America today!3 Some, on the other hand, preferred to escape the utilitarian world surrounding them through immersion in the study of ancient, more poetic times past. William Hickling Prescott, for example, achieved renown for his work on the conquests of Mexico and Peru, as did George Ticknor for his literary history of Spain.

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[historical introduction,1840–1876]

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Period collections reflected this ambivalence: on the one hand, a taste for Old Masters and Italian Primitives, escapes into a past of poetry and romance; on the other, a preference for scenes of everyday life and views of a familiar landscape. These attitudes expressed twin tendencies dividing an era at once terribly grounded in demonstrable realities yet nevertheless in many respects quite romantic, tendencies often combined with touchingly human illogic and complexity. Fortunes were spent by some on paintings by Meissonier or Gérôme; others collected works by the fifteenth-century Florentine masters and Sienese Primitives. Poets sang of sweeping western vistas while the skies of the East darkened with factory smoke. It was the age of the gold rush but also one that, in a burst of altruism, abolished slavery. This dualism can be seen in American art as well. In the realm of painting, Winslow Homer and the Romantic antique revivalist John La Farge were exact contemporaries. In architecture, the Gothic revival and all the sentimentality sometimes associated with it coincided with the first great wave of utilitarian construction.4 Furniture, silver, and porcelain grew cumbrous and overly ornate, although none of this was unique to the New World. Nineteenth-century England and France went through similarly painful periods marked by styles known as mid-Victorian or Second Empire. In the United States more than elsewhere, however, a lack of faith in stable artistic traditions and the absence of secure foundations and leadership in the arts were sorely felt. Of only recent origin and not yet entirely sure of itself, the new ruling elite was not without its shortcomings and prejudices, which plagued numerous collections. Merchants and industrialists turned into nouveau riche snobs. Often drunk on the rapidity of their own rise, they spent money with little discernment, less out of love than for the glory attached to the price and possession of given objects. This excess cried out for redress. Although it came slowly, and in the face of great difficulties, the Word according to Ruskin made its conquest of America. Led by this great apostle, the United States would at last discover the arts of the past and take its first steps on the road to more systematic collecting. By late in this period, a few collectors would begin to exhibit styles of taste characteristic of the great collections of the age. It was a period of innovation and experimentation in art just as in politics.5

early developments

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chapter 1

The Taste for Anecdote and Realism

In the New York of the 1830s, we have already encountered the spectacle of a class of collectors, like David Hosack and Luman Reed, more interested in scenes of everyday life and figural landscapes than in large-scale historical compositions or works by the Old Masters. This should come as no surprise. We see a similar taste for genre scenes and precisely rendered landscapes in contemporary France and England. During these same years, painters of the English and Düsseldorf schools along with second-tier French Romantics flattered the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie with images of its own daily activities. History was reduced to amorous intrigue, picturesque assassination, anecdote. Actors took the place of great personalities; palaces imagined by painters were filled with pretentious furnishings, all show. A sense of the past commensurate with the intellectual standards of the day was pieced together out of fragments. Grand portraits of American heroes were a thing of the past, gone to join the mammoth bones in the dusty rooms of natural history museums as the relics of a dead age. The American middle class made up of hardworking merchants and industrialists had little interest in such outsized figures. Theirs was a world still open to emotional response but diminished in scope. The goal was tears without suffering, comprehension, or reflection; delight was taken in the broadest forms of comedy. Such interest in sentimental affectation and facile humor can be seen in the collection of Edward L. Carey, fourth president of the Pennsylvania Academy and among the major patrons and amateurs of the day. Carey had married the sister of Charles Robert Leslie and with his help acquired an ensemble of representative paintings of the English school. The several American works he added to this collection demonstrate a similar penchant. Philadelphia was at this point much taken with the famous mime and ventriloquist Valtimaire, who, in 1848, had arrived in town with his own collection. Laughing and crying at his contortions, Philadelphia’s elite at the same time embraced his paintings by [ Jonathan] Richardson, Sir Edwin Landseer, Sir David Wilkie, and [Peter] de Wint.1 By midcentury, however, a considerable number of new collectors had appeared on the scene. Seemingly every available work by the Parisian Realists and painters

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of the Düsseldorf school made its way to New York. Edward Strahan’s three-volume survey The Art Treasures of America (1879–80) only hints at the enormous number of works of this genre then amassed.2 Knaus, Schreyer, Gérôme, Rosa Bonheur, Fortuny, Munkácsy, and Bouguereau were the artists of varying talent and unequal value whose names recur [49] in period catalogues and reviews. Only occasionally do those of the great Romantics or of one of a handful of American painters appear. All these collections display an astonishing monotony, varying often only in the number of works involved. Some privileged French painters; others, German, if not their Dutch, Belgian, or Czech contemporaries. Scenes set in interiors, landscapes, images of flocks and herds, representations of minor historical events, all treated with equal exactitude: such were the subjects and the style that American collectors delighted in. There would be little point in considering all these collections carefully. Analysis of the best known among them will suffice to give us a sense of this taste for anecdote. One of the most celebrated ensembles was that assembled by John Jacob Astor in his much spoken of “Astor House” in New York. Paintings by Meissonier, Gérôme, Zamacoïs, Vibert, Bonnat, and Frère shared space with sculpture by Clésinger and Rosetti.3 William Astor also possessed works by Gérôme, Delaroche, Heilbuth, Leroux, Fromentin, Troyon, Detaille, and Meissonier. Another collector, Auguste Belmont, had a large gallery constructed in which to hang his paintings, whose hall featured a series of busts of Roman emperors. The paintings themselves were an artistic “cocktail” of works by German, Belgian, French, and Dutch artists such as Knaus, Meissonier, Gérôme, Rosa Bonheur, Detaille, Hébert, Delaroche, Alfred Stevens, Bouguereau, and Clays, plus a few Barbizon painters like [Théodore] Rousseau and [Augustin] Dupré.4 When the William T. Blodgett collection was sold at auction, with ninety-three paintings by [Adolf] Schreyer taking in $887,145, a Rosa Bonheur landscape and Meissonier’s Le Fumeur went for very high prices as well. This collection, in 1870 among the most highly visible in New York, included only a few American works, by [Frederic] Church, William Morris Hunt, and William Dana. The presence of a handful of Romantic painters like [Narcisse Virgilio] Díaz, [Théodore] Géricault, and [ Joseph] DeCamp suggests already a certain more exacting standard of appreciation. For the rest, just the usual names: Meissonier, Troyon, Madrazo.5 R. L. Cutting of New York owned two important works by Fortuny, a Madrazo, and a Zamacoïs.6 In Cincinnati, the Henry Probasco collection represented the height of Midwestern taste. Works by Andreas Achenbach, [Barend Cornelis] Koekkoek, Fromentin, Gérôme, Jules Breton, Kaulbach, and Rosa Bonheur hung alongside paintings by Cole and Inness.7 We see the same mélange of German and French artists, occasionally joined, as here, by a few representatives of the new American school. Such collectors favored scenes familiar to them from childhood or illustrated magazines. Disregarding for the moment the city’s museums and collections of antiquities, Philadelphia’s middle class, hardly immune to current fashion, became equally early developments

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caught up in it. One of the most remarkable new collections was that of Henry C. Gibson, who had built a gallery comprising a series of little chapels to ensure that his paintings were clearly illuminated and harmoniously displayed. He sought out works by painters he considered most representative of contemporary European art: Kaulbach, Cabanel, Schreyer, Pasini, Meissonier, Bonheur, Madrazo, Fortuny, Detaille, Alphonse de Neuville, Zamacoïs, Munkácsy, Gérôme. In addition, however, we see appear already [works by artists] like Corot, Couture, Daubigny, Dupré, and Millet, proof of a broader, more reliable taste.8 Gibson’s collection was among the most celebrated at the time. In large part still undispersed, today at the Pennsylvania Academy, these works give us some idea of what a major collection in this period looked like.9 The selection could be at times less rigorous, the presentation more garish, as in the home of yet another New Yorker, Samuel Hawk, with its gilt and painted ceilings in the style of the Alhambra and works by Kaulbach, Meyer von Bremen, Detaille, Cabanel, Bouguereau, and Jacquet proudly [50] displayed.10 Another important industrialist, Collis P. Huntington, filled his home with paintings by Bierstadt, Bouguereau, Jules Goupil, Merle, von Bremen, Vibert, and Zamacoïs, but also Couture. His compatriot Darius O’Mills of California, who kept some of his collection in his home on Fifth Avenue and some in San Francisco, admired many of the same artists, though with the addition of Díaz and [Émile] van Marcke. These same names recur in the collections of Raymond B. Livermore of Manhattan and John T. Martin of Brooklyn as well.11 Trendsetters in these years between 1860 and 1880, the leading lights of New York society like Marietta Reed Stevens [Mrs. Paran Stevens] and Anna Breck Aspinwall [Mrs. William Henry Aspinwall] also owned works by Meissonier, Gérôme, Tryon, and Vibert, which their friends were welcomed to admire during the course of numerous sumptuous receptions.12 Catherine Wolfe, who was not married, had a special gallery constructed to house her own collection of paintings by, among others, Cabanel, Knaus, Jules Breton, Meissonier, Gérôme, Munkácsy, Vibert, Merle, and Fortuny, considered the finest artists currently exhibiting in Europe. The truly calming simplicity of her home décor was set off by an ensemble of enormous painted Limoges enamels, gigantic porcelain and enameled cloisonné vases, which seem unimaginable to us today but which were at the time the height of fashion.13 Susan Endicott Roberts [the third Mrs. Marshall Owen Roberts] in Philadelphia had a vast collection that evidenced more or less the same taste as that of her friends in New York, though, in addition to Knaus and Leutze, she owned American paintings by Cole and Mount, and sculpture by Erastus Dow Palmer and Thomas Waldo Story. One of the largest collections of the period was perhaps that owned by George T. Seney of New York, comprising no fewer than four Achenbachs, four Clayses, four Corots, five Daubignys, fifteen Díazes, nine Duprés, and two Gérômes, in addition to works by Schreyer, de Neuville, van Marcke, Munkácsy, Roybet, Breton, and Bouguereau, worth $214,655 at the time of its sale at auction in 1885, with a

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Breton going for $18,000 and a Bouguereau for $9,500.14 Speaking of popularity! Snobbishness had come to dominate the scene. Those with an interest in the arts dreamed only of owning a Rosa Bonheur, a Bouguereau, or a Meissonier, if not a Jules Breton. The New York collection of James H. Stebbins, though somewhat smaller, nonetheless enjoyed a strong reputation, counting half a dozen major works: Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise, Meissonier’s The Game Lost, Bouguereau’s Hesitation Between Love and Riches, and Rosa Bonheur’s Ready for the Market, along with others by Fortuny, Vibert, Zamacoïs, and Alma-Tadema, with only a single Romantic work in the bunch, a Boulanger at that. Stebbins owned a few pieces of sculpture as well, but nothing of great interest, for example, a copy of Canova’s Cupid and Psyche by Tadolini. The ensemble—having, as it happens, appreciated considerably—was sold off in 1889 with great success, Meissonier’s The Game Lost going for $162,550, demonstrating the continued interest in this genre of painting even at a time when its status was already much in decline.15 The collection of the era, however, had to be that of William H. Vanderbilt. As a result of the publications it gave rise to, the renown by which it was surrounded, the aura of admiration and mystery that emanated from the personality of its owner, this collection was the marvel of marvels in the eyes of the world, epitomizing the vulgar, ostentatious display of wealth so characteristic of the period. Indeed, the Vanderbilt mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 51st Street was compared with the homes of wealthy Romans in Pompeii, Venetian merchant princes, and Flemish bankers. Unfortunately, this version, its doors copied from those of Ghiberti, was largely devoid of originality. The atrium, in the style of Germain Pilon, with its enameled cloisonné furnishings, the whole covered in gold leaf and faïence in a style derived from the arts of Persia, may well have flattered its owner’s vanity but, where his taste was concerned, augured [51] ill. The gallery that completed the domestic ensemble was crowded three rows deep with no fewer than 208 paintings. Alma-Tadema, Knaus, Boldini, Rosa Bonheur, Bouguereau, Jules Breton, Cabanel, Bonnat, Clays, de Neuville, Detaille, Detti, Fortuny, Gérôme, [ Jules Joseph] Lefèvre, Leloir, Leighton, Roybet, and Bracquemond formed the heart of this collection. But a number of Romantics made an appearance as well: Corot, Daubigny, Díaz, Decamps, Millet, Troyon, and, oddly enough, Turner and Delacroix, whose Sultan of Morocco, with His Officers and Guard of Honour must have felt a bit out of place in this company. When it came down to it, as he liked to remind friends, this transportation magnate, one of the wealthiest men in America in the 1870s, enjoyed paintings “with a story to tell.” Unsettling subjects pleased him best of all. He paid as much as 850,000 francs [about $165,000] for a battle scene by Meissonier. Vanderbilt enjoyed a reputation as a great connoisseur; nevertheless, of all the paintings in his collection only a few are still appreciated today, the Romantics above all. And, in fact, he only purchased a Corot because he had gotten tired of people telling him he simply had to have one. He embraced certain of the old puritanical principles as well, refusing to have nudes in his collection. Like many of his contemporaries, what early developments

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he looked for, above all else, was exactitude. Vanderbilt enjoyed the works in his collection but, at the same time, took pleasure in them as a good investment because, as he also sometimes liked to say, “Prices go up when the artist dies”—although this appreciation also depends on the artists whose paintings one selects.16 John Wolfe, for his part, found the courage to form two collections one after another. On his return from a stay in Germany in 1848, he bought works by Hasenclever, Meyerheim, [Nicaise] de Keyser, [August] Riedel, Knaus, Carl Becker, and Everard, to which he added others by Leslie, Frère, Meissonier, and Hunt. But he sold them all in 1863 to buy works by Bonnat, Stevens, Lefèvre, [Raimundo de] Madrazo, Munkácsy, Cabanel, Breton, Bouguereau, Bonnat, Vibert, Chaplin, Gérôme, Frère, Fortuny, Gustave Doré, de Keyser, Riefstahl, Grützer, Schenck, as well as two Corots.17 Only prices that were seriously too high prevented him from also acquiring works by Henner, Baudry, and Bastien-Lepage, whom he greatly admired. Was the exchange worth the effort? This second collection, which seemed to his contemporaries so different from the first, seems to us of very little interest.18 But we see more or less the same turnover occurring at the Musée du Luxembourg, while the Paris salons overflowed with work by these same artists; for in France, too, Romantic painting met with little appreciation. The much-beleaguered Barbizon painters found only a small circle of admirers. And the Impressionists incited only outrage among those who pretended to good taste.19 The “Salon Spirit” that dominated French art between 1850 and 1880 exercised over certain artists a sort of vexatious, dictatorial power. A great movement of resistance arose, and the first to understand the Barbizon painters were Americans. Around 1850, Martin Brimmer of Boston, a friend of William Morris Hunt, had acquired a number of canvases by Millet including Washerwomen and The Knitting Shepherdess, which, along with works by Michel, Díaz, Constable, Zuccarelli, and Perrino del Vaga, demonstrate the breadth of taste of an amateur who would become one of the first directors of the Museum of Fine Arts.20 A cultivated man, Brimmer was open to the latest artistic developments. It is in this Boston milieu that the taste for Barbizon and Romantic painting would first develop, and, thanks to [Charles Eliot] Norton, the city would play a preponderant role in a gathering appreciation of early European Modernism. If Hunt and Brimmer are to be considered the precursors of this movement, Quincy Adams Shaw, another intellectual dilettante well known in Parisian circles, assembled the most considerable American collection of the work of Millet around 1870 with the help of Hunt, an ensemble that included no fewer than twenty-five paintings and twenty-seven drawings. Shaw and his wife, though both friends of Hunt, insisted on complete independence of judgment, which was altogether necessary to purchase work by Millet in 1850. [52] They had previously owned The Angelus, but it is perhaps by the paintings today at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts— the 1850 version of The Sower, Cliffs at Gruchy, and Village de Gréville—that these great idealists deserve to be judged.21 Several paintings by Rousseau and a Michel rounded out their collection. These two amateurs best illustrated the sensibilities

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their Boston milieu had inherited from several generations of culture and refinement. Their divinatory instincts led them to collect fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian sculpture as well, though not of the quality of their selection of works by Millet. Other Boston collectors were influenced by their example, and Barbizon school paintings soon appeared in the homes of H. P. Kidder, Thomas Wigglesworth, and Peter C. Brooks Jr., to name only the most important instances.22 Nevertheless, in the same city, we see Alvin Adams among others continue to collect works by Bierstadt, [ J. G. Meyer] von Bremen, Hildebrandt, Madrazo, Schenck, and Verboeckhoven, though this was more the exception than the rule. The influence of this local cultural milieu would, little by little, spread throughout the United States. Former Secretary of the Navy Adolf E. Borie, for example, grew fond of Millet, Daubigny, and Rousseau around 1867 and, through their work, arrived at Delacroix, Decamps, and Géricault.23 Delacroix’s Lion Hunt and Millet’s Naïade were among his finest acquisitions. William P. and Anna H. Wilstach, other major Philadelphian collectors, pursued similar ends.24 The ensemble they would donate to the Philadelphia Museum had been formed with advice from Parisian dealer Adolphe Goupil as well as American expatriate painter Robert Wyle, the breadth of whose selections well reflects the diversity of taste around the time of the Philadelphia Centennial: a mix of Realism, French and American genre painting, Romanticism, and the Barbizon school. Dipping into the considerable endowment the Wilstachs had provided, the museum trustees would augment their bequest around 1900 with examples of seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish paintings together with a few Primitive and Impressionist works, so that, alongside Rosa Bonheur, Bouguereau, Jules Breton, Gérôme, Bastien-Lepage, Meissonier, and Munkácsy hung Bonington, Constable, Corot, John Crome, Daubigny, Decamps, Delacroix, Díaz, Géricault, Isabey, Georges Michel, and [Henri] Rousseau. To this lineage of amateurs, we might add George Drummond of Montreal, greatly influenced by Princess Louise-Caroline-Alberta, sixth child of Queen Victoria, wife of the governor of Canada and a devotee of Corot. Following the example of his friends in Boston, apart from Corot, Drummond owned multiple works by Millet, Díaz, and Troyon. These same painters were also represented in the collection of New Yorker John C. Runkle, who nonetheless intermixed Michel, Rousseau, and Fromentin with Roybet, Detaille, Gérôme, and Munkácsy.25 I have reserved mention until this point of four collectors who would become quite famous later on but whose early efforts are worth considering. The suddenness of the changes in their collecting will make it easier for us to grasp the different stages in the development of American taste between 1870 and 1900. One of the largest and best-known collections in the New York of 1875 was that of Alexander T. Stewart, displayed in a special gallery constructed for the purpose. On the one hand, paintings by Americans; on the other, works by Gérôme, Boulanger, Knaus, Detaille, Fortuny, Boldini, Zamacoïs, Madrazo, Kaulbach, Ferdinand Sohn, Achenbach, von Bremen, Dubufe, Benjamin Constant, [and] Hildebrandt, early developments

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[as well as] four Meissoniers and several sculptural groups by Randolph Rogers and Thomas Crawford just as insipid as the paintings. But the three masterpieces in the collection were Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bouguereau’s Return from the Harvest, and Meissonier’s 1807, purchased for $80,000 at the Vienna Exhibition of 1875.26 These three titles [53] sum up the colorpostcard history and false peasant sentimentality of the entire era. Nevertheless, late in life, like so many other collectors, Stewart apparently grew weary of contemporary painting and began to buy works by Murillo, Rembrandt, and Titian—in short, those of the classical tradition.27 Had he only shown the same discernment in collecting modern art! The interior [of his gallery], with its enormous gilt Sèvres and Worcester vases, Japanese porcelain, and Chinese enameled cloisonné, remained unchanged through it all. J. P. Morgan, who was to become perhaps the greatest collector America would know, owned only a handful of paintings in 1880, when the final volume of Strahan’s The Art Treasures of America appeared, among them works by [Luis] Álvarez, Villegas, Kaulbach, and H. Leroux—a rather modest start, suggesting neither his breadth of taste nor the amplitude of his future collecting.28 As for the Havemeyers, the story is the same. Their collection amounted to a large number of works by little-known artists. Though the family would go on to accumulate one of the most celebrated collections of Impressionist paintings, at this point, only an Alfred Stevens and a Meissonier stood out in an ensemble of outright mediocrities. William T[hompson] Walters, for his part, had begun collecting in 1860, from which time until the death of his son, Henry, his collection, among the most remarkable in America, grew continuously. Walters had begun with Gérôme, Jalabert, Gleyre, Jules Breton, de Neuville, and the likes of Fortuny and George H. Boughton of the Royal Academy. Under the influence perhaps of his Boston milieu, he bought Couture, Decamps, and Millet before turning to Old Masters like van der Elst, and the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. But it was Walters’s very important pre–fin de siècle collection of Barye that demonstrated real independence of judgment. These sculptural works by the great Romantic master, most of them unique artist proof versions obtained from the Duc d’Orléans, constituted a truly first rate ensemble. Walters’s admiration for Barye was so great that he commissioned four large bronze sculptures for the public square in Baltimore adjoining his home.29 Better than any other example, this evolution in personal taste sums up the evolution in American taste more generally during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Beginning with virtuoso minor masters of French Realism to become one of the premier adepts of Barbizon school painting, accumulating works by Bayre that form the heart of his collection, side by side with rare oriental faïence and Old Masters, [William] Walters paved the way for his son [Henry] and other collectors of the next generation. His affinity for the Romantics had led him to a love for the Middle Ages and for so-called Primitive painting that so characterizes the Walters Gallery today. The role he played was always distinctive, and he hoped

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to encourage the development of an active artistic milieu in Baltimore. His concern that the population at large benefit from his collections led him to open the Walters Art Gallery to the public in 1873, earlier than most larger museums. His example would inspire numerous, generous private gifts that lay at the origin of important public institutions founded later in the century. Another collector, William W. Corcoran, had preceded [Walters] in this course by founding in Washington the Corcoran Gallery of Art, comprising an art school as well as a collection of paintings. In broad terms, the latter included little that distinguished it from the other major collections of the period. Works by Bierstadt, Schreyer, Detaille, Gérôme, Cabanel, Ziem, Édouard Frère, Church, and Durand formed in 1874 the core of an ensemble consisting of no fewer than 165 paintings. Curiously, however, Walters also acquired a Raphael Mengs Adoration of the Shepherds from the Joseph Bonaparte sale and a portrait of James Madison by [Thomas] Sully, vestiges of a previous era of taste, whether for study purposes or out of admiration who can say, but one finds it also a bit strange to see listed in the collection catalogue electrolytic reproductions of treasures from the German town of Hildesheim.30 Perhaps the influence of the Victoria and Albert Museum? The revival of interest in the decorative arts [54] under way in Europe would seem to have reached all the way to Washington. But these were only timid first stirrings. Three versions of Venus by John Gibson, Canova, and Bertel Thorvaldsen would provide a rather poor showing of sculpture if not for the lovely collection Corcoran assembled of 115 lost wax bronze sculptures by Bayre, one of the most remarkable sets of its kind, including large-scale models of Theseus and the Centaur and Theseus and the Minotaur. Though not as rare or as well chosen as those owned by Walters, these works demonstrate a similar sensibility. The Corcoran Gallery opened to the public in 1869 and, thanks to the ever-growing importance of the city as the nation’s much-visited capitol, its influence throughout the country was widespread. The idea of attaching an art school to a museum would be taken up and developed by most major museums by the end of the century. We see here the first stirrings of concern to turn public collections into centers of creative expression. Designed to preserve vestiges of the past principally as a contribution to contemporary art, such centers were at once museums at the service of amateurs with an interest in contemplating works of art and museum schools. Almost all American museums would thenceforth exhibit this dual character and so, like the Corcoran, play an active role in local artistic life. It was to this end that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in New York in 1871. The first collection exhibited included works by Charles Jacque and a few French Realists but also familiar scenes of middle-class or peasant life by various Old Masters. William T. Blodgett, a trustee of the museum and collector in his own right,31 had traveled to Europe to acquire examples of older works worthy of public display and had immediately been drawn to the Dutch seventeenth century. In this, he would seem to have been following at once the penchants of his era and his own taste for nineteenth-century anecdotal painting. In the eyes of many collectors, the early developments

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only difference between certain Dutch seventeenth-century masters and nineteenthcentury genre painters was the passage of time since they seemed to express more or less the same attitudes. The Golden Age paintings offered up to the admiration of New York in 1870 included Jan Steen’s A Dutch Kermesse and works by Ruysdael, among others. One might wonder at Blodgett’s acquisition of two Tiepolos and two Guardis, a demonstration of a certain independence of judgment at the time, though it is true that, of the 174 paintings he brought home from Europe, 100 came from a single collection, that of Comte Cornet de Ways Ruart, the Guardis (though not the Tiepolos) among them. As the trustees understood it, the purpose of this collecting was “the education of the public and the cultivation of a high standard of artistic taste.”32 The tremendous importance of the museum and the possible role that it might play were clearly of the moment, and in this the Metropolitan Museum’s origins reflect the tastes of an era from which it took its inspiration and so helped to shape. Ruskin’s influence was of less importance than one might expect. Here we find no Italian Primitives, no sixteenth-century Venetian masters, or at least not at first. For Blodgett and his fellow trustees, Old Masters meant nineteenth-century painters of landscapes and interiors through whose work an appreciation of Dutch painting from an earlier century emerged. Another city institution, the New York Public Library, founded by John Jacob Astor, James Lenox, and Samuel J. Tilden, had an art collection of its own, open to the public, which also included paintings by Delaroche, Munkácsy, Detaille, Troyon, Bouguereau, Gérôme, Madrazo, Meissonier, and Rosa Bonheur, following much the same agenda we have seen characterize the private collections of the period. These specific works, in fact, were for the most part purchased and donated to the library by Lenox. Those acquired by the institution itself were more or less similar and, as a consequence, represent one of the few intact expressions of 1850s New York. The same trend in favor of genre painting had affected other urban [55] centers. Even in a highly traditionalist city like Philadelphia, we see major collectors like Judge Henry Hilton filling their homes with paintings by Meissonier, Nittis, Boldini, and Jean-François Raffaëlli.33 His collection expressed more or less the same taste, as did that of John D. Lankenau.34 Joseph Harrison, on the other hand, was more interested in American school paintings by Leighton and Leutze, interspersed with undistinguished works by German and British unknowns. But he owned a large collection of Peales as well, vestiges of an earlier age that should come as no surprise in this conservative milieu, along with a bust of Comte d’Estaing by Houdon,35 just as Hilton held on to a bust of Washington by the same sculptor. In the Middle West, Cincinnati was the home already to numerous collections; that of Henry Probasco, considered the best in the region, included works by Kaulbach, Breton, Bonheur, and Gérôme, but also many of the Romantics: Delacroix, Isabey, Théodore Rousseau, Díaz.36 This was proof of taste both personal and refined. The presence of other Cincinnati collectors with an appreciation for

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nineteenth-century Realism—Reuben Springer, George K. Schoenberger, William Woolsey Scarborough, Larz and Isabel Anderson, Andrew Gano Burt, William Karrman, and George Fisher Baker—suggests the dynamism of this milieu. Not only was French painting admired but German and American painting as well.37 A Cleveland collector, Hinman B. Hurlbut, was interested in similar paintings.38 Among modern cities like Cincinnati located in the Ohio Valley, Louisville had its own retinue of collectors. H. Victor Newcombe, for example, in addition to works by Alma-Tadema, Madrazo, Frère, Bouguereau, Jimenez, Ziem, and Leutze, owned a Courbet and a Millet.39 St. Louis, where Northern enterprise met Southern taste for luxury, had in Samuel A. Coale Jr., a fairly well informed amateur with an interest in French painting. His collection included works by Regnault, Jules Lefèvre, and Gustave Doré along with others by local artists of merit working under their influence. Fellow St. Louis collectors like Daniel Catlin and H. Louis Dousman followed Coale’s example.40 In Chicago, already the capital of the Midwest, Henry Field owned works by Boldoni, Schreyer, and Fortuny; and Marshall Field III, works by Meissonier, Detaille, and Schreyer, as well as Millet’s Le Retour de la Fontaine. If Chauncey J. Blair collected paintings by Nittis and César de Cock before becoming interested in the Middle Ages, J. Russell Jones focused overwhelmingly on nineteenth-century Belgian [and Dutch] artists like Clays, [Richard] Burnier, Louis Roppe, and Verboeckhoven, much less frequently encountered in period collections.41 This manner of taste, dominant in eastern states before penetrating the Midwest, extended even to Canada, influencing for instance the early collecting of George A. Drummond in Montreal, and through the American West as far as distant San Francisco. That city, soon the principal port on the Pacific Coast and terminus of the transcontinental railroad, knew the birth and growth of numerous large fortunes. Susan and Cyrus Mills, Charles Crocker, and David and Ellen Colton owned works by Bouguereau, Kaulbach, Lenoir, Cabanel, Gérôme, and so on, just like their eastern contemporaries. More independent in his judgment, state governor Leland Stanford supported American artists, acquiring genre paintings and landscapes first in the Düsseldorf, later the Barbizon style. But it was, above all, in New York and Boston that this major shift toward an interest in contemporary painting, narrative and Realist in style, took off and spread in various directions. The attitude found its principal source in the longstanding affinity of Americans for subject paintings with well-drawn and well-executed compositions, for stories clearly told. Easy recognition of the subject of a portrait was of course what colonial era viewers sought from the first in the work of Copley and his contemporaries. One admired in Houdon’s sculptures of Washington resemblance above all else. Later on, Winslow Homer and [Edgar] Degas, would be [56] praised for the same effect. American taste for Flemish Primitives or for the Delft painter Vermeer illustrates a similar attitude: a great admiration for signs of scientific exactitude, order, and organization similar in every period. This seems, in other words, less a passing tendency characteristic of the late nineteenth century than a deep-seated American early developments

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trait, with more distant sources informed by religion, racial and social origins, and economics. Thus, even in the midst of a Romantic and post-Romantic era that might logically have favored visions of escape and reverie, we see Americans drawn instead to modes of art given to narrative realism. The great Romantics—Géricault, Delacroix, Ingres, Chassériau—were rarely collected in this period and, if so, rather late. On the other hand, “well-painted” domestic genre scenes, topographic landscapes, the work of the Paris Salon and Düsseldorf and Munich schools, all immediately found their, as it were, predestined clientele in nineteenth-century America among its wealthy merchants and industrialists. We might trace the institutional origin of this fashion to the 1838 founding in New York of the American Art-Union and Apollo Association.42 For a five-dollar annual fee, members received an engraving after an original work of art commissioned for the purpose, which was then distributed by lottery. The Art-Union published a Bulletin in which contemporary art was critiqued with a good degree of discernment. The association’s Apollo Gallery took charge of organizing exhibitions. The venture, a great popular success, raised more than $100,000 before a law banning lotteries cut its momentum short. The gathering preference for modern art was also encouraged by the War Tariff of 1861, which discouraged the importation of older works.43 The tariff on such objects was high enough to protect the interests of contemporary American artists, while favoring the diffusion of modern European paintings as well. The Art-Union idea was taken up by the Cosmopolitan Art Association, founded in June 1854 in Sandusky, Ohio, though with a few changes. There each member received a subscription to one of the major American magazines of the period as well as a chance at the annual distribution of paintings and sculptures. The association published a journal, at once literary and artistic, with the goal of shaping and promoting interest in American art, amounting in effect to an indirect patronage of American taste.44 These two associations did a great deal to create a sympathetic milieu for local collectors with an interest in contemporary American art. That area of collecting had experienced an eclipse of sorts with the opening in New York of the Düsseldorf Gallery under the direction of John G. Baker in 1849.45 Baker, before being named Prussian consul there, had lived in Düsseldorf for many years. The gallery’s exhibition of foreign paintings was one of the finest in the country. There one could view works by Hasenclever, Schrödler, Camphausen, Oswald Achenbach, and Leutze, a native of Düsseldorf who had emigrated to America. Opened in part for commercial reasons, this “museum collection” proved a great success, even issuing a catalogue. Steinbrück’s The Adoration of the Magi soon became the best-known painting in the United States. In 1857, the Cosmopolitan Art Association purchased the collection outright and, three years later, moved it and its own headquarters to New York. Until 1862, when the ensemble was sold at public auction, members had access to the collection at the Institute of Fine Arts at 625 Broadway.46

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Beginning in 1853, the city’s own Crystal Palace Exhibition, housed in a building designed to imitate the original [1851] version in London, though modest in importance, demonstrated this same interest in foreign art. Amid an unbelievable bric-abrac of Sèvres porcelain, Gobelin tapestries, Indian curiosities, and musical instruments, one encountered no fewer than 675 paintings and sculptures of every kind, foreign and American. Its contents, however, represented hardly the most popular aspect [57] of an international exhibition better known for the triumph of steel and glass architecture.47 For the inaugural exhibition of the Brooklyn Atheneum in 1856, recourse was had to works by British and German artists, accompanied for some reason by two drawings by Ingres.48 But the great artistic event of the period was the Metropolitan Fair Picture Gallery Exhibition, organized on 14th Street in 1864 in collaboration with a number of the period’s greatest collectors, which included no fewer than 360 paintings, a third of them European: works by Bouguereau, Breton, Couture, Gérôme, Meissonier, Rousseau, and Troyon that were for some and would become for most Americans the great paintings of the era. The exhibition served to consecrate and at the same time propagate a taste for modern French painting. Its enormous demonstration of artistic talent stirred up and energized collectors, convincing many of the need for a permanent exhibition of art more in keeping with contemporary taste. In this, the New-York Historical Society was shortly joined by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose influence touched an ever-greater number of collectors. That museum’s early holdings reprised the Realist bias of the Metropolitan Gallery Exhibition of 1864. Other museums—the Corcoran in Washington, the Walters in Baltimore, the Boston Atheneum—would exercise a similar influence upon other urban centers. Exhibitions and museums played a role in fashioning public taste by impacting the population at large, creating widespread interest in this or that new approach to art; but, of course, this phenomenon presupposed as well as expressed attitudes widely shared among members of the mercantile elite around midcentury. These are the beginnings of the longstanding rivalry between proponents, respectively, of American and European art still discernible today. Up until around 1850, admirers of American art had been legion.49 To better resist the European invasion, they had founded the Century Club and workspace galleries such as the 10th Street Studio Building and the Benedick. Later, around 1870, New York dealer Newman Montross made it his mission to champion the American school. But greater wealth led to more frequent foreign travel and, with it, a greater admiration for foreign art—admiration cultivated by numerous dealers newly arrived in the city: the Düsseldorf Gallery; the Belgian Gallery at 547 Broadway, founded in 1853; but especially the International Art Union, founded four years earlier by the firm Goupil et Vibert “to disseminate in America knowledge of and taste for superior works of art.”50 It, along with its close cousin, Knoedler & Co., which opened its doors for business a few years later, sold most of the Meissoniers, Gérômes, and numerous pseudo–Old Masters of the period. Adolph Kohn, Frederick Keppel, early developments

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Samuel P. Avery, and Williams and Company specialized in prints, especially engraved reproductions. Most are still in business today; others, more ephemeral, like Francesco Bianchi, William Schaus at 61 West 55th Street (founded in 1825), and the Somerville Gallery at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, have disappeared. The influence of a few French dealers like Georges Petit and Ferdinand Barbedienne, a friend of Boston dealer Seth Morton Vose, was also felt.51 Vose, first in Providence, then Boston, did much to promote Corot and other Barbizon painters. In 1852, he organized the first Corot exhibition in the United States, which, though well attended, was far from a financial success. Vose, in fact, failed to sell a single painting!52 Success, however, would not be long in coming. The great Boston collectors would soon enough learn to appreciate Barbizon painting, a victory due not just to this exhibition and to Vose’s indefatigable efforts but to support from others in New England as well. Two artists did a great deal for the cause of French art. The first, William Morris Hunt, had studied with [Thomas] Couture in France, where he developed an admiration for and friendship with Millet. On his return [58] to America in 1855, he came to play so important a role in Boston art circles that one cannot speak of Boston without speaking of Hunt. He lectured to packed houses, tirelessly promoting not just Millet and Barye but the whole Barbizon school. Quincy Adams Shaw, Martin Brimmer, Thomas G. Appleton, and other Boston collectors and admirers of Hunt’s own art were among the friends who followed his advice. Beginning in 1859, one of his students, John La Farge, would begin to promote an appreciation of Romantic painting. A wide circle of artists and intellectuals that included Charles Eliot Norton, Henry and William James, Henry Adams, and Henry Hobson Richardson took up the call. Boston artists who had studied in France went so far as to organize the Allston Club, with Hunt as its president; members included Albion Harris Bickwell, James Foxcroft Cole, Walter Gay, La Farge, and Elihu Vedder. Even Thomas Robinson, something of a secondary leader of the Boston art world in 1870, belonged. A student and admirer of Courbet, Robinson did a great deal to further the artist’s reputation in America. The Allston Club purchased The Quarry, a painting Courbet had exhibited at the Salon of 1857, one of his first major works to be acquired by an American. All these artists played a vital role in promoting at once the Barbizon school, Romantic painting, and Courbet. It is in large part owing to their influence that the great midcentury French painters became known in the United States. They either themselves bought or encouraged the purchase of works by Millet and Courbet at a time when the work of these artists was still poorly received and misunderstood in France. Hunt, also among the first in America to purchase bronzes by Barye, had played an important role in the formation of the Boston Art Club as well, then in its heyday.53 In this way, exhibitions and museums, artists and dealers worked together to encourage the progress of the arts in the United States, the former working the larger public, and the latter a circle of initiates with an interest in collecting. Nonetheless, it is impossible to understand period developments in the world of art without

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taking into account the considerable number of illustrated books and magazines that had begun to appear, attracting a large readership. Volumes like James Herring and James Barton Longacre’s The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans and Harper’s Family Bible were filled entirely with illustrations. Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ballou’s Monthly, and later Harper’s Weekly fanned widespread demand for illustrations, and, little by little, this taste would ignite in many a passion for collecting them.54 The years between 1850 and 1870 constituted an era of engraving par excellence. Magazines were filled with illustrations of recent exhibitions and commentary that tell us a great deal about the painters preferred at the time. In addition, a major literary and artistic review, the Atlantic Monthly, made its debut in 1857, with James Russell Lowell as managing editor. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William H. Prescott assured the journal’s great renown and helped to elevate the level of American thought. Even specialized art publications such as the Crayon appeared, in whose pages poets and essayists sang the virtues of the American landscape while keeping readers abreast of the latest artistic developments in Europe.55 All that was missing was a great art critic of the stature of Diderot or Baudelaire, perhaps one more cause among many of the weakness of an American art that had no one who deigned to believe in its worth able to communicate this enthusiasm to others. In the realm of philosophy, we see a personality like Emerson choose to rely on his own resources to the point of refusing all foreign contact and travel abroad, constructing in this fashion theories derived from his own reflections and examples drawn from American life. But he touched only lightly upon the subject of American art. Emerson’s contemporaries—Shaw, Walters, Brimmer, Wolfe, to cite only a few—passed long months in Europe. It was over the course of these travels that they came to recognize what America was not able to offer them. Artists during this period, most of them, made their way to study in the ateliers of the Old World. Düsseldorf and the École de Paris gained distinguished disciples. Artistic exchanges—Leutze relocating to the United States, for instance—took place [59] constantly. These factors, separately and together, favored the immense enthusiasm for the arts of Realism and anecdote that Strahan’s monumental three-volume digest served at once to consecrate and to perpetuate.56 [American a]mateurs acquired work in these genres and styles in Europe but also at home, most often from dealers like Goupil and Baker, who were charged with selling off the [ John] Wolfe collection in New York.57 Potential buyers from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and points west attended such sales to advance their commercial interests as well as to acquire works of art considered masterpieces at the time. The only dealers then operating in New York specialized in work of the Realist and genre schools most reflecting the temper of the times. Things were hardly different in Europe, where the few antiquarian dealers true to that definition were too preoccupied with meeting the needs of their Continental clientele to relocate to a far distant land with little taste as yet for reminders of days gone by. New York dealers thus played a primary role in the formation of certain, if not all, early developments

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collections. The Düsseldorf Art Gallery, Knoedler & Co., William Schaus, Samuel P. Avery, and A. Kohn played a role in advising even collectors from the distant interior like S. A. Coale Jr. of St. Louis. Those in amateur circles in Boston and Providence tended to be clients of Vose, who nonetheless sold to Chicago and other western cities as well. American collectors made numerous additional purchases during the course of travel in Europe from dealers such as Goupil, Georges Petit, and Ferdinand Barbedienne. This period also saw a number of important public sales such as the first Wolfe auction, held in 1863. The collections of the Düsseldorf Gallery were sold off in 1862, the Blodgett collection in 1876, but most sales of major ensembles of art came later, so that, before 1876, purchases at such sales by amateurs of importance were rather infrequent. There were, nonetheless, already a number of auction houses in operation, among them the Somerville Gallery and George A. Leavitt in New York and Harding’s Gallery in Boston. While spending time and traveling in Europe, amateurs like Brimmer, Walters, and Corcoran purchased works at Salons and other major exhibitions. Only once, and by Blodgett, was a European collection purchased outright, that of Comte Cornet de Ways, managed through the intervention of Étienne Leroy in Brussels on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum. Up until this point, the majority of American buyers exercised their own judgment, whether personally or through artists of their acquaintance acting as intermediaries. And a number of American artists like Hunt and Richardson, collectors themselves, offered works they owned for resale. Purchases directly from artists were fairly important early in this period and marked the return to a system of patronage largely undone by competition from Europe, the advent of photography, and the shift of interest from portraiture and full-blown history painting to genre and landscape. In sculpture, an occasional bust or Venus commissioned by private individuals from the likes of [Horatio] Greenough or Hiram Powers were exceptions that proved the rule. The Republic proved no more generous, commissioning at most a sculptural portrait of Washington from Greenough and, from Thomas Crawford, one of Liberty for the dome of the Capitol. The City of New York similarly hired Mills to execute no more than a single figure of Andrew Jackson for Union Square; and Boston, William Rimmer to produce a painting of [Alexander] Hamilton.58 On the whole, though these were difficult times for American artists, little by little, an elite did reconstitute itself; public taste grew more refined. The need for access to examples of past art and for museums in which to exhibit them made itself increasingly felt. The Metropolitan Museum arranged for the acquisition of Old Master paintings to hang beside those of the Realist masters of the nineteenth century, showing little interest in contemporary pseudo–grand master painting, an art of virtuosity, pastiche, and affectation with little to say. Already the [60] Romantics, Barbizon painting, and Courbet were much in vogue. But schools are necessary to the education of artists, those schools require models, and contemporary artists proved incapable of conjuring a sense of pastness they yet sought to convey in their

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paintings regardless of subject. Such a historical bent had precedent in the work of certain seventeenth-century Dutch artists—perhaps the origin of the anecdotal tendency we have been considering. Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition of 1876 exemplified this “archaeologism.” The agriculture pavilion was in a style described as “Victorian Gothic”;59 others were inspired by the arts of Spain, Egypt, or Switzerland. Architectural eclecticism reigned, a veritable triumph, to which all America succumbed. Renaissance homes and Spanish palaces sprang up everywhere. The imitation of past styles dominated American architecture, as it did the Centennial Exposition. Up through 1893, when the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago, this period might be termed the age of pastiche. It was also, for many, that of the discovery of the past. By copying, one acknowledged one’s inferiority but, at the same time, one’s predecessors. The style of 1876 led directly to museums. The past so many sought so diligently to bring back to life without always succeeding suffered from insufficient understanding. To better penetrate its secrets would involve rediscovering its true image.

early developments

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chapter 2

The Discovery of History

Pre-nineteenth-century works by European artists in American collections around 1850 amounted to little more than numerous copies after famous paintings by artists of renown, a few originals among them, though even these important works were largely forgotten. The decline of the encyclopedic spirit and the rise of American nationalism earlier in the century had proven fatal. In the end, the plethora of socalled historical museums with their clever displays and wax amusements had grown tiresome. Little by little, a new cultural elite emerged, rather modest at first, abandoning the more generalizing perspective of the Encyclopedists and the more purely scientific predilections of those who came after in favor of the study of history and the arts, encouraged by foreign travel and not out of concern to appear fashionable or simple snobbishness, as was so often the case in the age of great collections of contemporary painting we have just considered. This elite showed scant interest in factitious narrative, castle settings, and theatrical décor so dear to the period’s lesser Romantics. Nor was it much moved by the sentimental contrivance of scenes of everyday life and spectacles of life in the country that so many contemporary collectors so admired. American art, having failed to live up to its promise, and somewhat in crisis, failed to hold this elite’s attention either.1 Indeed, this state of decline itself was perhaps a principal cause of the return to the art of the past. The need for solid examples of use in constructing a new art upon new foundations was keenly felt. Europe was home to more and more museums, where the great artists of the day increasingly sought inspiration. The turn to the study of history made of the past a sort of present engaged in fashioning the future. The broadest minded recognized this need to heighten their awareness and deepen their knowledge of—even to possess—original works of art from past centuries. But Americans believed themselves too poor to buy much and still lacked the base of knowledge indispensible to choosing intelligently what to buy. This was a base of knowledge that neither the collections already in existence in the United States nor copies, even ones executed by leading American painters, would permit them to acquire. Travel in Europe might contribute to the develop-

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ment of taste or serve as inspiration but too often amounted to little more than a series of rapid impressions. One sensed the need to make the images of masterpieces encountered in the course of one’s travels available in the New World, no longer merely as souvenirs but the better to study their history, penetrate their sensibilities, make sense of their style. Photography not yet available, attention initially turned to engravings. This was the response, for instance, of a man like Francis C. Gray, who upon his death in 1856 bequeathed to Harvard, his alma mater, a print collection from which he had constructed a general outline of art history.2 Gray’s engravings served to illustrate that history and to round out a remarkable library. But, as his understanding deepened, he had grown more and more interested in engraving as an art form in its own right. He came to appreciate engravings for their graphic qualities beyond their quality as documents or illustrations, though he [63] retained a weakness for prints produced by painters of great renown who worked with the burin or etched with aqua fortis themselves in reproducing their own work. Open minded and cultivated, Gray was much admired by his contemporaries. His collection, comprising no fewer than five thousand engravings, most of excellent quality, ran from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, its value would not be appreciated for some time, other than by an enlightened few who knew to consult it at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where it ended up.3 At about the same time, in 1849, George Perkins Marsh, in selling his own collection of engravings to the National Gallery of Art, pursued a similar end.4 He had acquired engravings by the great masters, Albrecht Dürer, Marc Antoine, and Rembrandt; no fewer than two hundred eaux-fortes [etchings] by Claude Lorrain, works by Longhi, a whole series of Italian engravings; portraits by Nanteuil, Edelinck, and Wille. In addition to high-quality Old Master prints, Marsh collected, for documentary purposes, volumes of engraved reproductions of artwork from the principal museums of Europe. Having been raised in an intellectual milieu, fascinated with historical studies, Dr. John Witt Randall, another Harvard graduate, amassed a very important collection of 20,000 engravings and drawings between 1834 and 1892. He bought engravings in large numbers, often entire collections at a time, setting aside those not responding to his interest in compiling a “History of Engraving.”5 If certain of his sixteenth-century examples are of reasonably good quality, most are merely copies after paintings. His few drawings are of no particular interest but demonstrate the same desire to illustrate historical studies, a passion otherwise pursued in the silence of libraries and in lecture halls. Since there were no museums yet to house complete collections, the work of those whom Focillon has termed “Master printmakers” offered a helpful substitute. Prints, the easiest means to preserve the memory of celebrated works of art, offered at once accuracy and emotional charge. Though not often collected for their intrinsic value, they nonetheless played an initiatory role, however indirectly. Given the range of prints available, collecting involved choosing. The search for printer’s proofs, rare and welcome finds, was perhaps at the origin of the concern with “quality” that began to dawn in American collecting and that early developments

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would only intensify. These were the earliest steps taken in the study of the history of art without which no just appreciation of contemporary art was possible. The inadequate state of American collections around midcentury was widely denounced in the press. Critics decried the excessive number of copies in circulation, the fortunes being spent on “interior decoration” by artists of little talent, and collectors’ lack of confidence in their own taste.6 These are, of course, familiar complaints, but particularly acute in this period of American collecting, oft repeated.7 The names of the great collectors like Charles I of England and Phillip IV of Spain were cited as precursors to be emulated.8 According to William Stillman, writing in the Crayon, the development of taste required access to “all the art treasures of the past.”9 To justify the campaign against cheap art—plaster casts, unglazed ceramic reproductions, paintings on glass, industrial engravings—writers invoked the authority of the great English critic John Ruskin, whose ideas had begun to percolate throughout the country. But the purification of taste and thus collections preached by Ruskin and his disciples took off more slowly than one might think in a new land eager for direction. Certain habits of mind, certain penchants, perceptible already, would only slowly be transformed—for instance, an infatuation with important names and a weakness for celebrated works discernible already in 1855 at the New York auction of the collection of the Reverend Samuel Jarvis.10 The sales catalogue is filled with the familiar names of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Masters like Dolci, Salvator Rosa, Domenichino, Luca [64] Giordano, Poussin, Albani, Rubens, Il Baroccio [Frederico Barocci], Guido Reni, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Rosso. Despite their distinguished provenance—certain paintings were said to have belonged to the Medicis, Angelo Bonviso, or Louis Bonaparte—most were copies, and though some were surely old enough to be authentic, from this distance in time, their quality cannot be judged. The collection constituted by Dr. Isaac Lea of Philadelphia in 1852, at more or less the same time, included, however, in addition to copies after Veronese and works misattributed to Callot, a number of very good paintings like Matteo Rosselli’s David and Goliath plus works by [Cristofano] Allori, Beccafumi, Paul Bril, Suttermans, Lucatelli, Zuccarelli, Bourguignon, and Salviati.11 This ensemble of chiaroscuro Mannerist paintings comes as a bit of a shock in this American context; the taste for the Baroque was not much in style even in Europe in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. But Lea’s collection was not uniformly of this quality, and we encounter once again the great classics or, more accurately, their dim reflections. Similarly, in the collection of William Beebe of New York, sold in Boston in 1852, we find paintings by Veronese, Zuccarelli, Sassoferrato, Murillo, Perugino, and Van Dyke keeping company with works by Wilson, Cox, Crome, and Bonington.12 A collection of this kind signals a return of interest in the British school, in landscape especially, a tendency that would only accelerate under the influence of Ruskin, the first art critic who might be said to have had an influence. The echo of his polemics about and his enthusiasm for Turner were felt in the United States

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almost as quickly as in England. Dr. Thomas Munroe owned an entire collection of Turner drawings;13 Judge George Hoadley of Cincinnati, besides a Corot and a Murillo, [owned] Turner’s View of Scarborough.14 The great New York print dealer Samuel P. Avery possessed the complete Liber Studiorum of J. M. W. Turner.15 Other collectors of drawings or prints shared this admiration of Ruskin’s for the great landscape painter. But the English aesthete did not rest with Modern Painters, his book-length defense of Turner; he was soon gushing over the Pre-Raphaelites, a direction in which few Americans were willing to follow him: a single Pre-Raphaelite exhibition was mounted in New York around 1860, with little success. Goupil and his anecdotal painters had already made deep inroads upon the habits of the age. The collection of Samuel Bancroft of Wilmington, Delaware, offers the single trace of Pre-Raphaelitism I have been able to discover. American museums hold few examples of the work of a school that, when all is said and done, was never truly appreciated outside of England, yet, obsession with the past its very essence, remained ever both present and passé. Paralleling this turn back to England, no longer to the England of the great portraitists but to the far more Romantic England of the landscape painters, America was becoming more and more open to historical research. World travelers and missionaries seeking escape from their moment and place in history began to take interest in the history of the lands through which they traveled or in which they now lived. Henry B. Haskell, physician and missionary to Mosul, donated five large sculptures bearing cuneiform inscriptions and decorated with human figures to Bowdoin College.16 Nor was this the only evidence of interest in Assyrian art. This period saw the arrival of other reliefs taken from the Palace of Assurbanipal, of which James Lenox purchased thirteen, offered to the New-York Historical Society in 1858.17 The Yale University Art Gallery holds five additional fragments also from Nimrud obtained by Reverend Leonard Bacon from one of his former students, a missionary in Mosul, Reverend William F. William.18 These first acquisitions of ancient Assyrian sculpture by American collectors were absolutely first rate at a time when few museums in Europe held any works of importance in this area. Won over by the ruins of Nineveh much like Elgin, Haskell had hoped to preserve for America these bare remnants of past splendors that so moved him. [65] The attitude of Henry Abbott, by contrast, was more that of a curiosity seeker, up to date on developments in Egyptology and passionate about digs under way. His collection of antiquities, patiently assembled over the course of twenty years in Egypt, for him a sort of hobby and passion combined, was acquired by a group of New Yorkers for the New-York Historical Society.19 The collection itself included a little bit of everything, but also a number of very nice sculptural miniatures in the mix. A short time later, in 1864, the society received a gift from Dr. Henry Anderson of objects for the most part acquired by purchase in Thebes, among them a fine mummy and numerous smaller objects.20 [Anderson’s] point of view was a curious one since he was not principally concerned with beauty but rather with artifacts early developments

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illustrative of ancient religion and civilization, much like Richard K. Haight, who would offer his Egyptology collection to the same society.21 Americans were too attached to the Classical origins of Europe not to be drawn to Greece and to Rome. Beginning in 1865, the Italian-American Luigi Palma di Cesnola, American consul in Cyprus, had assembled a rather vast collection of Cyprian antiquities, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought outright in its early days.22 An archaeologist and organizer of digs, Cesnola, who specialized in Cyprian studies, published Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples (1877), later serving as the museum’s secretary and then its first director. The many objects, all of excellent quality, of this first important collection of Classical antiquities in the United States, included a number of beautiful bronze statuettes.23 It also represented one of the first examples of the purchase by an American of a collection in its entirety, a habit continued later in grand style by certain museums and by J. P. Morgan. This pattern suggests the urgency of the desire among the founders of this great New York museum to amass collections worthy of the city, responsive to the artistic needs of a population thirsting for knowledge. One might improve one’s knowledge of history, especially that of painting, by visiting the collection that Thomas Jefferson Bryan presented the New-York Historical Society in 1867.24 Bryan had amassed some 250 paintings, the fruit of numerous purchases followed by careful culling, to the end of tracing the origin and progress of various schools. An amateur enthralled by each new discovery, a “Cousin Pons” American style, who cleaned his paintings himself, sporting a great red velvet cape, he shocked his contemporaries by both his activities and his demeanor. Devoted to his collections, his life in truth could not have been further out of step with the feverish activity characteristic of New York at the time.25 At first, he had exhibited the paintings he acquired in Europe and America at the corner of Broadway and 13th Street: admission twenty-five cents. The paintings to which he introduced his fellow citizens in this way demonstrated the refinement of his taste, running from the trecento to seventeenth-century Old Masters. Dutch and Italian Primitives hung side by side with works by Rembrandt, Van Dyke, and Velázquez—a handsome ensemble.26 Poorly attended, however, the exhibition failed to exercise the influence one might have expected of a choice of works remarkable for the period, arguably the equal of many a private collection in Europe. An attunement to history and the desire to illustrate the origins of the art of painting—probably more than a deep understanding of painting itself—had led Bryan to early European art. The same sustained goals were shared by the great collector James Jackson Jarves, descendant of French Huguenots, a dominant presence in the period, who must be considered the harbinger of an entire era in American taste.27 Having studied history as a young man, Jarves retained throughout his life a passion for understanding art based on the evolution of style over time, accompanied in his case by a fine sensibility and a remarkable independence [66] of judgment.28 His father[, Deming Jarves,] had founded the [Boston and] Sandwich Glass Company,

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a renowned manufacturer of beautiful early nineteenth-century glass. To these artistic origins, Jarves added a love of incessant travel, visiting California, Mexico, South America, and, in 1884, the Hawaiian Islands. For a time, he even edited a newspaper in Hawaii before taking up service as a diplomat in Europe, negotiating commercial treaties between the United States, Great Britain, and France. He lived in Italy, in Florence in particular, for more than thirty years, though he made frequent visits home to the United States. There, as a friend of George Eliot, Ruskin, Rossetti, and Hawthorne, Jarves could always count on the support of Charles Eliot Norton. Diplomat, author on occasion, Jarves nonetheless devoted his life to his passion for art, Italian art in particular, and Italian Primitives above all. He crisscrossed Italy, buying entire collections in consultation with his Greek advisor, Giorgio Mignaty. By dint of traveling and frequent contact with the experts and finest connoisseurs of the period, this great amateur cultivated a deep historical understanding in an area he himself defined. His numerous careful catalogue entries and published articles demonstrate how closely he followed the latest discoveries in art history and the nascent science of attribution. After trying in vain to find a venue in Boston, Jarves exhibited the first collection he brought home from Europe in 1859 at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, publishing a catalogue the following year.29 Apart from Italian Primitives, today prized possessions of the Yale University Art Gallery, the ensemble included a portrait of Charles V, Holbein’s Head of the Dead Christ, and a Procession to Calvary by [Pieter] Brueghel the younger, proof of his interest in Dutch art. Raphael, Velázquez, Murillo, and Rubens (represented by a Crucifixion) were the only Old Masters Jarves considered worthy of inclusion as marking the pinnacle of painting’s evolution. The history of Italian painting was his chief interest, and the Italian-Byzantine school is better represented in his than in any European collections aside from those in Florence or Siena. As for the trecento, though Jarves may have mistaken a Taddeo Gaddi for a Giotto or an Orcagna for a Simone Martini, he did manage to acquire no fewer than twenty-three choice paintings from the period. His Saint Anthony Tempted by the Devil in the Shape of a Woman by Sassetta, his Annunciation by Nerrocio, his Madonna and Child by Gentile da Fabriano, and especially his Hercules and Deïanira [L’Énlèvement de Déjanire] by [Antonio] Pollaiuolo are today the admiration of the world. There were few questionable choices among the 145 paintings in that first exhibition. His attitude resembled that of Prince Consort Albert, who also collected Italian Primitives, but even more that of another, lesser-known figure, Giampietro Campana, whose truly grandiose holdings are sadly today dispersed throughout France in branch museums. Jarves made the mistake of being born fifty years too soon. His collection, despite its fame, found no buyers in New York or Boston or Cambridge despite Norton’s efforts.30 Disappointed by this incomprehension, Jarves accepted the $20,000 Yale agreed to advance him in 1868 against 119 of his paintings with the right to acquire the ensemble for $50,000. However, at a public sale held in 1871, the university became definitive owner of these works for just $22,000 since the amateurs and New York dealers in attendance early developments

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judged their valuations too high.31 It would be to misunderstand a noble figure to imagine Jarves discouraged definitively by his failure in this first great battle in defense of the Italian Primitives. With limited means, he returned to Europe and bought more, along with a number of antique and Renaissance sculptures, which he then exhibited at the American Exhibition of the Products, Arts, and Manufactures of Foreign Nations in Boston in 1883. This time, he found a fellow collector, [67], Liberty E. Holden, from Cleveland, who became a friend, willing to buy. This ensemble, though less impressive than the first, was nevertheless of very good quality, today the pride of the Cleveland Museum of Art.32 Jarves had hoped to document the historical development of certain religious themes from Byzantium through Tiepolo in early Italy. Most of these paintings dated to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they also included a landscape by Claude Lorrain and works by Jordaens, Spranger, Teniers, and Wouwerman. Others, by Neri di Bicci, Botticini, Francesco Fiorentino, Berruguete, Moroni, and Salviati, were noteworthy as well, alongside a number of second-rate paintings that Jarves had collected purely for their iconographic interest. These two collections would suffice to suggest Jarves’s breadth of understanding and taste, but his tireless activity and passion for collecting extended into other areas suffering equal neglect. In 1881, he donated to the Metropolitan Museum a remarkable collection of Venetian glass that surely moved him greatly as the son of a glass manufacturer. Around the same time, in 1880, he sold a collection of drawings by Cambiaso, the Carraccis, Domenichino, Guercino, Zuccaro, and Niccolò dell’Abbate, along with architectural drawings by Fontana and Jouvenet, to Cornelius Vanderbilt for the same museum.33 This ensemble had been formed by combining the cabinet collections of a number of Italian amateurs (identified in his records only as Count Maggiori de Bologna, Marietta, Professor Tito Angelini, and Dr. Guastella) acquired during Jarves’s years as vice consul in Florence. His influence can be discerned in the sale catalogue, whose production he must have supervised, with biographical information regarding each artist, classified by school, in an attempt to suggest the evolution of Italian art. Jarves’s final collection, of textiles and lace, embroidered church vestments and costumes, when sold at public auction in New York was purchased almost in its entirety by Wellesley College, where it remains today.34 Just as his collections exceed the limits of this chapter, Jarves himself transcended his time in history. In his own day, he was an innovator; in the fearlessness of his views, he belonged to another age, precursor of a new generation, at once great collector, historian, passionate amateur, and admirer of the arts of industry and of the Orient. In this he paved the way for twentieth-century collectors, museum directors, and intellectuals. Nevertheless, the great lesson, the fruit of Jarves’s personal experience and disappointed efforts, was one postbellum Americans were not yet prepared to hear. If the arts of the past had begun to attract the attention even of those dealing in modern art like Samuel B. Fales, director of the Pennsylvania Academy, [William

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T.] Blodgett, and others, it was not the Italian Primitives they found most of interest but northern painters. Fales owned an important collection of works by Munich and Düsseldorf painters including van Goyen, Brouwer, and Pourbus. A cultivated man already in possession of a fine library, he filled his home with glass, Chinese ceramics, bronzes, engravings and walking sticks, a collection of uneven quality and in some cases of questionable attribution yet the sign of a promising eclecticism.35 Thomas Barlow Walker of Minneapolis collected a little bit of everything as well, not always with discernment or with any plan in mind. He purchased a considerable number of objects, no fewer than 420 paintings representing every school, intermixed with Chinese lacquer, ceramics from Persia and the Far East, and Roman and Egyptian jewelry, a sort of résumé of much of the history of art. We may note among his paintings works by the artists habitually of interest to midcentury collectors, though the French Romantics also make an appearance, as a lovely series by Corot and Harpignies attests. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Master paintings by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Poussin, Lebrun, Lorrain, Rembrandt, Rubens, Murillo, Ruysdael, and Frans Hals hung alongside works by Hogarth, Gainsborough, Romney, Lawrence, David, and Gros. One may note [68] nevertheless Ruskin’s influence in Walker’s choice of a number of Turners and [works by] early Italians like Ghirlandaio, a tribute to his range. Unfortunately, he often purchased in large lots so that his collection came to include a certain number of second-rate paintings and works by studio assistants and followers. Walker was more interested in quantity than quality. He demonstrated a real eclecticism in matters of taste, going so far as to collect portraits of Indian chiefs by Henry H. Cross, one of the masters of the genre. He “amalgamated” the tastes of his era more than innovating new ones. His collection, donated to the Minneapolis Museum in 1875, remained more or less marginal, little known beyond the Midwest and thus without great influence. A catalogue was published, though quite a bit later, in 1927.36 Another collection, formed by the son of a German antiquarian dealer, Louis Durr, though donated to the New-York Historical Society only in 1882, was nevertheless well known as early as 1870. Durr’s 150 paintings were dominated by seventeenth-century Dutch along with a few works by seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury French artists, the ensemble reminiscent of eighteenth-century French cabinet collections like that acquired by Blodgett in Belgium for the Metropolitan Museum, augmented by a few Flemish Primitives and eighteenth-century works. Ultimately, Durr’s taste represented simply another version of the familiar preference for narrative and domestic genre painting with Meissonier, Gérôme, and Munkácsy replaced by Jan de Bray, Netscher, Steen, van Ostade, van Goyen, and de Witte.37 Durr offers a perfect example of a general tendency among the principal amateurs of the period to favor the art of past centuries. This attraction to history, much in the air at the time, led to the abandonment of nineteenth-century virtuoso painting and pastiche previously so much in vogue. The taste for anecdote as seen in the art of seventeenth-century Holland took on a poetic aura associated with centuries past. early developments

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The same development from initial curiosity to ethnological interest to the study of history held true with regard to Oriental art.38 Commodore Perry in 1850 returned from his expedition to Japan with an ethnological collection that opened the door to the study of Japanese culture more broadly.39 At about the same time, Americans living in China, like Anson Burlingame, United States minister [resident] there, followed the example of Chinese amateurs and began to collect porcelain and lacquer. Burlingame’s contemporary S. Wells Williams was the first to do so with aesthetic quality in mind. His small collection included only fifty pieces, but he had a good eye for artistry. Here all trace of souvenir hunting, of interest in objects found amusing or picturesque, ends, paving the way for the marvelous collections of Oriental art to come, thanks to two great figures, E[dward] S[ylvester] Morse and Ernest [Francisco] Fenollosa. The former, professor of zoology at the University of Tokyo, initiated around 1870 two major collections, one ethnological;40 the other consisting of ceramic objects,41 but [Morse’s] influence would not really be felt until he began publishing his findings.42 The great age of taste for Chinese ceramics and Japanese painting and prints would come later. These were but American collectors’ stumbling first steps into areas of specialization in which their efforts would be so notable, contributing nevertheless to American exposure to two civilizations, Jarves yet again having divined the rich interest of and value in Oriental art. It was especially in eastern intellectual circles that this historical turn developed though outside the university. Those instructed were shaped by what they learned. This concern with history informed the way most contemporary amateurs understood the arts of the past. So it should come as no surprise to discover that they lived [69] principally in eastern states where more intellectually driven, more openminded, more knowledgeable circles pursued a combined study of the history and artistic traditions of various regions of the world. Research and travel had made this new knowledge and appreciation of the art of other times possible, enabling those thus affected to resist the snobbery and winds of fashion of the day. In their embrace of historical studies, the universities came to recognize works of art as constituting illustrations of historical findings, an approach that grew increasingly popular. Indeed, we see universities that previously had collected little more than faculty portraits accumulate more impressive ensembles, which served to advance their renown. Harvard was given a number of print collections; Yale, Jarves’s collection and one of Assyrian reliefs. Bowdoin College, more remote, accepted a number of gifts that completed the collection left it by its founder. Beyond these university centers, in a sense their emanation, men in Cambridge, Boston, Salem, and New York, by their example, their writings, and their collections, attempted to propagate a love and taste for history. Their example was not much welcomed by their fellow citizens and contemporaries. Fashion in American taste tended to spread slowly westward with a delay of several years, from an East always more in touch with Europe and, as we have seen, Asia. Yet Jarves found a friend in Cleveland who shared his tastes; Walker in Minneapolis also found a means to

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penetrate the thorniest reaches of the art of the past. (On the far Pacific Coast, San Franciscans showed only passing interest in the history of previous eras.) This passion for precontemporary art that took hold of certain Americans at midcentury was largely owed to their frequent contacts with the lands of origin of objects they collected. The advent of steam-powered navigation facilitated these exchanges. Travel to Europe and to Asia grew more frequent. It became almost as easy to travel from New York to London or Paris as from New York to San Francisco. Collectors frequently spent time abroad. Gray, Quincy [Adams] Shaw, Jarves, Bryan, and Norton made their way frequently to London, Paris, Florence; most American intellectuals did so as well. But it was no longer the classical grand tour in eighteenth-century British style. One was freer in one’s movements, following one’s whims or one’s friends. One saw less perhaps, but penetrated more deeply the atmosphere of the countries one visited, remaining for a longer time. Living among the works of art preserved in these places, it was difficult not to fall under the spell of past civilizations. Nineveh, Tokyo, Florence, the cities where Americans found themselves, still overflowed with the vestiges of history, often neglected and for the most part poorly understood by local inhabitants. The inspiration behind these voyages, their cause, was the possibility of better understanding not just the history of religions but also history proper, ancient and modern, after the fashion of the times informed by a nostalgia, stronger in America than anywhere else, for anything connected with past civilizations. In the realm of art, two great prophets served these collectors as guides, Horace Walpole and [ John] Ruskin, the former already somewhat forgotten today, though the latter’s influence was to grow ever stronger, his gospel preached every day in period newspapers and reviews.43 A core group of faithful closely followed [Ruskin’s] campaigns; the apostle of Primitivism and Norton maintained a steady correspondence.44 Emerson, too, counted among Ruskin’s friends. Reading his words was not enough; one paid the man a visit to converse with him. These friendships, and others like them, enabled exchanges of ideas that led to new enthusiasms that of course frequently led in turn to new developments in taste. If [Charles Eliot] Norton proved the most faithful friend and representative of Ruskinian thought in America, [ James Jackson] Jarves was its personification in practice, more scientific, less poetic perhaps but more constructive—something characteristically [70] American, as we have seen. Through his collections and writings, Jarves was Ruskin’s misunderstood precursor and great realizer.45 Supported only by Norton and, later, a few friends like [Liberty E.] Holden, who shared his passion for Italian Primitives, Jarves, along with Bryan, was among those rare collectors who dared abandon the easy paths that led toward modern or American art, on the one hand, and unfaithful images copied after Old Masters, on the other, to return to the very source of European painting. These efforts did not bear fruit immediately. They would be picked up later and truly penetrate society at large only with the rise of instruction in art history, most notably in courses offered by Norton at Harvard beginning in 1873, with an influence early developments

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we shall come to shortly. But the earliest realizations of this new taste in America date to the third quarter of the century. Collecting in other areas was similarly marked by individual efforts, which always underlie the formation of a milieu but take time to bear fruit. The prints and Egyptian, Assyrian, Classical, and Oriental objects collected tended to vanish into the storerooms of the museums responsible, only to reemerge early in the twentieth century. Though it boasted a number of fine collections, America lacked museums in which to exhibit them and curators able to make them known to a larger public. The culture was too caught up in the day to day, still under the sway of the same snobbishness and materialism Ruskin himself struggled against unrelentingly in the various editions of Modern Painters between 1843 and 1860, at which point, he took on the foundations of society itself, vehemently deriding “plutocratic asceticism,” the refusal of pleasure and understanding in the name of an insatiable quest for material wealth, preaching the gospel of Primitivism.46 These theories had their echoes in intellectual circles in Boston and New York, but few Americans were yet prepared to carry the torch. There was Norton, who owed such influence as he had to his professorship at Harvard. One may cite in addition Russell Sturges, a scholar and respected critic (though his opinions were not often popular) who understood Jarves’s importance,47 and John La Farge, who, following his exposure to the Romantics and Delacroix, became much taken with “the Venetians” and later the Orient.48 Their articles and lectures made a real impression upon those contemporaries sympathetic to their position. In many instances, the origins of the great American collections to come were owed to the vivid sensibilities and divinatory powers of poets and artists and the critics and dealers who befriended them. In 1863, La Farge first admired and began purchasing Japanese prints; a new world opening before his eyes, he would do his part to reveal it to his compatriots. Alongside these individual promoters of taste who preached mostly by example, museums in Europe and Asia played a role as well. Italian collections were growing ever more organized. The Louvre, though deprived of much of the spoils of the Napoleonic conquests, still retained a number of Italian Primitives brought back by Denon. In London, the National Gallery had begun to collect in this area as well, but England already was home to many private collections. The wealth of art accumulated over the course of many grand tours was put on public display by the Art Treasures Exhibition, mounted in Manchester in 1857, where La Farge, following a stint in the atelier of Thomas Couture, hurried to make copies. Grand universal exhibitions held in Paris, London, and Munich attracted crowds from several continents and familiarized them with new collections and museums. At home in America, at the New York Exhibition of 1853, among a diverse array of contemporary products from around the globe, much older works of art by Ruysdael, Teniers, Carlo Maratta, and Andrea del Sarto, from the collection of a certain Joseph Cristadoro, were also on display.49 In 1855, a copy of Titian’s Danaë and a Claude Lorrain could be seen at the Boston [71] Atheneum, site of numerous

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other exhibitions as well,50 among them that of a series of chromolithographs belonging to the Arundel Society and another, of greater importance, of paintings from the collection of the Duc de Montpensier.51 The [Museum of Fine Arts] held in its permanent collection works by Velázquez, Murillo, El Greco, and Zurbarán acquired from the Spanish Gallery of Louis Philippe.52 In New York in 1860 at the Institute of Fine Arts, and again in 1863 at the NewYork Historical Society, Jarves exhibited his first collection before its permanent reinstallation in New Haven. That of Francis Gray was only really accessible to the public after Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts moved into its new quarters in 1877. Little matter; their styles of collecting exerted an impact upon their moment in history and upon their friends. Such collectors, frequently considered eccentric, living life at a slower pace, though no less intensely than their fellows, for the most part knew how to attract attention. Even where they failed to create an active and influential artistic milieu, they cut a figure in local society. Certain such collections did enter the public domain: that of [Henry] Abbott in 1860; that of [Thomas Jefferson] Bryan in 1867; that of [Thomas Barlow] Walker in 1874. At around this time, the Flemish paintings with which Blodgett had returned from Europe and the Cesnola collection were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum for the first time. But the challenge of luring in the public remained. True, a number of enthusiasts in the United States made a point of collecting the art of bygone days, but there were too few objects, too few interested parties, for a coherent movement to take hold. In New York at the time, what were dealers offering for sale? Copies of Old Masters, of which men like Michael Paff, grossing some $50,000 in 1833,53 had made a regular industry; paintings by the likes of Teniers, Rubens, and Correggio, listed for public sale on Wall Street almost every day of the week. Works of this same sort were listed in the sales catalogues of supposedly renowned collections such as those of Samuel Jarvis in New York and or of William Beebe, there and elsewhere, in 1851.54 Countless copies of Old Masters were in circulation; but a single example, a sale we know to have taken place in Albany in 1855 from an announcement in the Crayon, demonstrates that this practice, an unfortunate fixture of the American scene well past the turn of the century, was rampant at a much earlier date even in the smaller cities.55 The refinement of taste was delayed as a consequence, no true understanding of painting or accurate conception of quality being possible unsupported by solid experience. This explains, at least in part, the new popularity of contemporary art, seen as more comprehensible. In America at this point, there were too few authentic older works of art in circulation for new collections to be formed. Randall had made a few purchases at the Gilmor sale [10 November 1863], to be sure, but Gray had had to build up his own holdings in Europe. There were already a few print dealers of importance, like Avery, who imported older works, but most sold only modern prints, reproductions after Old Masters or, at New York’s Ruskin House, after works by Ruskin himself or the Pre-Raphaelites.56 Collectors thus had to travel to acquire objects in their places of origin. Europe overflowed with just the works of quality Americans sought. A early developments

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combination of insufficient appreciation, neglect, the lure of profit, fluctuations in taste, and the financial difficulties caused by war and economic crisis led to the breakup of numerous European collections. Bryant and Durr gathered up some of the debris left behind at the sale of collections associated with the names Vien, [ Jean-François] Perregaux, Silvestre, Forbin-Janson, Turenne, [Prosper] d’Épinay, Fesch, Soult, Sébastiani, and Louis Philippe—the glories of nineteenth-century France.57 The exodus of collections to the United States dates to this moment. Competing neither with the British, who nonetheless continued to purchase in quantity, nor with the Germans, who were beginning to amass collections of their own, Americans showed a preference for early Italian and Oriental art, periods still little appreciated by European collectors. [72] Ever-increasing wealth permitted them to take possession of entire collections like that of Cesnola, a move to which Jarves also on occasion had recourse to obtain paintings he particularly coveted.58 The increase in customs duties after 1861 would slow somewhat the importation of the art of past centuries into the United States. By 1870, the rate would rise to as high as 10 percent, a considerable figure, despite protestations from Harvard President Charles William Eliot, who would declare with good reason: “A tax on works of art is a tax on the education and development of the sense of beauty and of the enjoyment of the beautiful.”59 To secure the education of a nation just emerging from a fratricidal war that had only made a general intellectual insufficiency all too apparent, the Beautiful, beneficial beyond dispute, required the shelter of museums. Previously the province of the few, art had not fully penetrated the moral life of the nation; now, attracting the interest of the public at large was felt to be essential.60 Not just major cities but also places of lesser importance deserved to profit from the benefits museums could bring. Just as in Europe, the applied arts and even industry might well put the lessons of the past to use. Nonetheless, if there was general agreement that the life of the arts and the formation of public collections were necessary, opinions differed as to how this vision might be realized. The indifference of the state and most of the population to art in general made the founding of a museum of the stature of the Louvre or National Gallery unlikely. Some, in the hopes of attracting the general public, called for the procurement of plaster casts and models of various monuments, copies and scale models, for instructional purposes until a sufficient body of original works of art could be assembled.61 Jarves called for individuals to donate their collections, but also for new buildings in which original works of art chosen by men of taste might be gathered. He lauded the examples of Corcoran in Washington and George Peabody in Baltimore, who bequeathed funds for museum buildings. “We need,” he wrote, “masterpieces to educate the eye, but also teachers.”62 The connoisseurs he had in mind would emerge little by little, thanks to the interest in art history soon shown by American universities. But the role of Norton and others would be inhibited by the absence of great museums.63 The Metropolitan

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Museum of Art first opened its doors to the public in 1872; the Walters [Art Gallery] in 1873; Boston’s new Museum of Fine Arts, plans for which had been finalized four years earlier, in 1876—an important turning point in American taste as well as history marked not just by the opening of these major American museums but also by the Centennial Exposition.64 The art of past eras, often misunderstood if not actively resisted by an ultramaterialist generation, came to claim the limelight nonetheless. The Centennial marked the close of a first era of American history. Visitors to the exposition had their eyes opened to a tradition that was theirs perhaps by birth and yet one they had forgotten or had never had the time or the occasion to consider. This first contact of the American public with contemporary European culture provoked considerable changes in taste.

early developments

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Plate 2a | Seventeenth-century interior combining materials from Browne-Pearl house of West Boxford and Manning house of Ipswich, both in Essex County, Massachusetts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Plate 2b | John Singleton Copley, The Copley Family, ca. 1776–77, oil on canvas. As shown in 1938 in the Armory Copley collection on loan to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; acquired in 1961 by the National Gallery of Art.

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Plate 3a | Façade of [Charles Willson Peale’s] Philadelphia Museum, ca. 1830. Photo: H. Muller.

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Plate 3b | Benjamin West, The Ambassador from Tunis with his Attendants as He Appeared in England in 1781, oil on canvas. As shown in 1938 in René Brimo collection, Paris; acquired in 1955 by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: René Brimo.

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Plate 4a | View of the William H. Vanderbilt collection, New York, ca. 1870. Photo: H. Muller.

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Plate 4b | Antonio Pollaiuolo, Hercules and Deianira [L’Enlèvement de Déjanire], ca. 1470, oil on canvas transferred from panel. James Jackson Jarves collection, Yale University Art Gallery.

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Plate 5a | View of the Henry Gurdon Marquand collection, New York, ca. 1880. Photo: H. Muller.

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Plate 5b | Agricultural pavilion, Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1876. Photo by H. Muller.

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Plate 6a | View of the George and Florence Blumenthal collection, Paris[, ca. 1915]. Photo: Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, Paris.

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Plate 6b | Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, ca. 1514–1529, oil on canvas. As shown in 1938 in Widener collection, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Briefly held on credit in 1920 and exhibited by Cyrus W. Hamilton; acquired in 1942 by the National Gallery of Art.

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Plate 7a | Paul Gauguin, La Orana Maria [Hail Mary], 1891, oil on canvas. As shown in 1938 in Adolph Lewisohn collection, New York; acquired in 1951 by Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Vizzavona.

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Plate 7b | Sacrifice of Cain, capital from Benedictine abbey Moutiers-Saint-Jean, twelfth century, carved limestone. Fogg Art Museum. Photo: René Brimo.

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Plate 8a | View of the interior of old Fogg Art Museum, before 1909. Photo: Fogg Art Museum.

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Plate 8b | View of the Greek and Roman sculpture gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, after 1909. Photo: Office International des Musées.

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BOOK

2

T HE T R I UMP H OF Q UAL I TY: Major Collections from the Philadelphia Centennial to the Great War

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[Historical Introduction, 1876–1919]

The United States had concluded its territorial expansion in North America and reconstituted its moral unity during the hard trials of the Civil War. With the end of this tragic episode, relations among the various states had been restored, ratifying one of the finest moments in the nation’s history. The year 1876 marked the culmination of a process of political and moral reconstruction that served to reunify the United States, the very expression of a community of ideas.1 The United States in the period we are about to consider experienced considerable growth. The population increased from 38 million in 1870 to 50 million in 1880 and 91 million in 1910.2 Westerners, as pioneers in the true sense, little by little faded away with the development of industrialized modes of agricultural production. It was the era of growth in transportation, of the concentration of population in already large cities that continued to grow by leaps and bounds. These developments posed numerous new problems in the areas of education and urban planning.3 Higher density of population went hand in hand with formidable economic development. Industry and commerce knew moments of great prosperity followed by crises as terrible as they were sudden. The Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Carnegies, Jay Cooke, the Huntingtons, Philip P. Armour, William Clark, J. P. Morgan, and the Rockefellers presided over the expansion of the American banking system

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and industries and markets in oil, iron, steel, copper, coal, sugar, and basic agriculture. The ramifications flowing from these economic developments impacted not just the United States but South America, China, even Europe. The Centennial Exposition marked for the United States an emphatic return to an internationalist conception of its place in the world.4 Renewed contact with Europe offered ordinary Americans a first opportunity to contemplate the creative achievements of the Old World. The first generations to enjoy these bourgeois, industrial-era comforts were initially at the mercy of outrageous snobbery, exemplified by the famous list of New York families—the Four Hundred—drawn up by Mrs. William Astor, whose sumptuous soirées made headlines in America just before the turn of the century. The Southern landed aristocracy had in large part disappeared, but in the West important new cultural centers arose where the nouveau riche who spent time living and cultivating alliances there soon experienced nostalgia for Europe and its history. Even those whose visits were brief attempted to re-create an Old World ambiance back home in the New World. A considerable number of Americans of even relatively modest means had homes built in the European style, which they decorated no longer with copies after Raphael or pastiches of Old Masters but with original works of art.5 It was the era of Buffalo Bill and cinema, but also symphonies and operas. The psychology of the commercial traveler, of the merchant, dominated the age, but a sort of intellectual aristocracy arose as well, men like [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, William James, and [Charles Eliot] Norton, who countered with an attempt to cultivate the dynamic powers of the individual.6 A certain standardization and mechanization of human life became increasingly apparent nonetheless, and [77] “Do as others do” remained all too prevalent an American attitude even in academic and artistic circles.7 Be that as it may, perhaps no period has been more concerned with the common good, with public education and the commonweal. Given the entire lack of governmental policy in this regard, in its place, so-called plutocrats, perhaps less materialist than most [Americans], founded churches, hospitals, universities, and museums.8 To their generosity, the causes of Art, Religion, Peace, Health, Higher Standards of Living, and Science owed a great deal. In the midst of the overriding materialism of the day, they saw to it that public museum collections were made available to their communities. This age of scientists, methodological men bent on practical discoveries, believers in Taylorism, in progress, was one in which some portion of the privileged few sought both to preserve the awe-inspiring beauty of America’s natural wonders and to make important works of world art publicly available.9 Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore continued as the great artistic centers, but, with western economic expansion, the towns of yesterday became cities of importance. Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo challenged the East’s long-standing leadership in matters intellectual. These newly formed centers also came to feel the need for culture. Although we shall continue

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to pay attention to developments in the East, especially in New York and Boston (which maintained strong ties to the interior), the Atlantic Seaboard was no longer the only area of the United States to take an active interest in the arts. With less rigid traditions and fewer preconceived notions to adhere to, western collectors, as we shall see, were often the first to embrace the latest developments in taste. Collectors generally had the education of the public in mind. Chicago, Detroit, and Toledo, like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, had the good fortune to see large numbers of individuals take an active interest in local museums. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which travel contributed to the exposure of these new collectors to Europe, inspiring emulation, facilitating discussions and exchanges of views. Little by little, these visits bore fruit; the eye of American viewers grew more refined. To such visits abroad must be added the imitative impulse provoked by books and the importance of Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, the Mercury, and Atlantic Monthly, all richly illustrated, highly successful American magazines. The role of engraving and later photography was essential to this success. University courses created their own demand. Popular lectures led to the appearance of introductory texts and scholarly articles, making this period rather eclectic thanks to an educational system still based on exposure to the classics. That intellectually or simply humanistically monstrous, misshapen creature, the Specialist, had not yet taken charge in the United States. Interest in art tended to mean interest in art in general, whose evolution over time had not yet been disguised by the more limited horizons and dulled perceptions affecting those specializing in the ultramodern. The décor of American life at this time betrayed a fixation on the past, though eclectic in the extreme. The Gothic style predominated in church architecture, while, before the advent of the colonial revival, mansions and private dwellings followed the triumphant styles of the Italian Renaissance or of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.10 The primary goal of these imposing structures, reflecting the style of the châteaux of the Loire Valley or the Italian Renaissance, was to achieve a decorative effect, rather eye catching at first but less and less remarkable, soon normative. The desired end was atmosphere; painting, sculpture, and furniture were all chosen to harmonize well with textiles and wood. America knew at last its true Romantic period: not the Romanticism of Horace Walpole writing about Fountains Abbey nor that [78] of Madame Pompadour in France, but a higher, broader Romanticism involving architects, decorators, and archaeologists working to bring back the splendors of the past in interiors that were themselves interpretations of that past, [though] excessively imitative perhaps. The Gothic dining room, Louis XIII study, and Louis XV salon became signs of that sense of decorum by which every American who had attained the requisite degree of education might expect to be surrounded. The year 1900 would signal the triumph of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Henri II dining rooms, and eighteenth-century salons[, although] the collective taste remained fairly undeveloped.11 But, little by little, a generation of collectors worthy of the name, who saw in art something beside simple décor, The triumph of Quality

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made their own taste felt. Many would prove real enthusiasts when it came to refining [the taste] of the populace by contributing to public education. Note should be taken of the primary role played by women in this renaissance of interest in the arts. Isabella Stewart Gardner, Louisine Havemeyer, Mary Cassatt, Frances P. Blair, Florence Blumenthal, Eleanor Elkins Rice, Kate Seney Simpson, Kate Buckingham, Berenice McIlhenny, Mildred Barnes Bliss, and Laura Celestia Spelman Rockefeller, to cite only the names of the better-known personalities, proved skillful and tireless propagators of the faith. By supporting artists, sponsoring concerts and exhibitions for the diffusion of music and the plastic arts, and, most of all, collecting art themselves, they contributed greatly to the penetration of art into the fabric of American life. Contemporary artists proved helpful, especially when it came to understanding so-called Primitives. The shared sensibility that attracted so many to the art of earlier periods led them to admire and praise what they saw as familiar forms. This taste for the historical would only be furthered and disseminated by the period’s great world expositions, from the one held in Philadelphia in 1876 to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 [in San Francisco] by way of [those held in] Chicago (1893), London (1899), Paris (1900), Buffalo (1901), and St. Louis (1904). In most of these “World’s Fairs,” vast retrospectives of the art of the past accompanied installations of modern art, generally comprising out-and-out copies, excessively derivative. Magnificent, ephemeral museums of this sort, along with frequent humbler exhibitions devoted to an epoch, an artist, or a collection brought unknown works of art to light, encouraging a taste for collecting. Not only did the numbers of collectors increase but those of art historians, critics, and antiquarian dealers as well.12 These last crisscrossed the ocean from Europe to America and back, facilitating the exchange of goods and ideas. Collectively, they would discover and make known a considerable number of lost or unappreciated objects and artists fallen into oblivion. Major international dealers would set up shop in the United States during the last quarter of the nineteenth and early decades of the new century, but a good many American collectors during this period preferred the joy of making their own discoveries in Europe. They collected a little bit of everything, though not without discernment and forethought. The diversity of American collections can be seen in the area of American art as well, with attention to work ranging from the exactitude of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer to the grandiose designs of John La Farge and George Barnard to the brio of John Singer Sargent and John Marin.13 The year 1876 had also marked the beginnings of a sea change in American art, especially visible in architecture. Henry Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright also abandoned the making of rote copies in an effort to give new expression to the American character.14 Admired for their individuality, artists in modern times have gone out of their way to cultivate a sense of independence, exceptionality, ingeniousness. As the divide separating them from the public grew, so did their status; they became gods,

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for whom temples were built in which their work could be worshipped; the ranks of their admirers grew as a result. Museums became pilgrimage sites; paintings [79] and other works of art, objects of devotion. An era marked by the attempt to reduce human beings to the role of machines also knew its quite ardent defenders of all things individualistic and artistic. Most amateurs sought to escape the overly worldly, mechanistic ambiance of their time and place through travel, purchases of works of art, and the formation of collections and museums. The instability, restlessness, and transience of that life dissolved in the sense of eternal relevance that any work of art of worth possesses. Rapid change and ephemerality found compensation and remedy in the wisely slower rhythms and joys of an intense interior life, in the monumental stability of the Primitives. The great bankers and captains of industry and commerce took pleasure in the magnificent balance of works by Giotto or Piero della Francesca. These same men who all day long worshipped at the grim altar of the god Dollar could lose themselves come evening in the abstraction of an Irish miniature or a Braque, in the meandering lines of interlacing figures in a Romanesque design. Such contrast epitomized the familiar contradictions of a period crossed with frenetic and everincreasing intensity by currents of thought formalized at the conclusion of the Great War. Few periods in history, with the exception of the late eighteenth century in England or the [era of] Napoleonic conquests, saw such rapid growth in collections, measured not just in the number but, more important, in the quality of objects involved. These collections and magnificent museums were the accomplishments of a privileged few. The genius of the United States arose out of a profound idealism of which too many in Europe remain unaware, misled regarding American society by the mirage of materialism that might initially appear to govern the years between 1876 and 1919.

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chapter 1

Eclecticism

The Centennial Exposition marked the triumph of the past but also that of stylistic diversity. In its vast retrospective of the various arts, no period was privileged; everything was mixed up together in a spirit of general admiration. The critical sensibility that we have already seen clearly evidenced in a man like [ James Jackson] Jarves had not yet affected the general public or even the cultural elites. If snobbery and the embrace of passing fashion characterized cultural life in America in the 1870s, as an immoderate taste for pastiche on the one hand and virtuoso European painting on the other would suggest, this shift was a great blow struck not against snobbery itself, that parasite always and everywhere feeding upon the world of art, but at the very least against the pseudomodernism so admired at the time. In general, the art and especially architecture that so impressed crowds throughout the exposition was unmistakably derivative, tending to the archaeological. What these works captured above all was surface quality, that is to say, the decorative aspects of styles rather than the points of view or philosophy animating them. This may explain the impression that period illustrations of the exposition give of pastiche. The images are powerfully evocative nevertheless, for misprisions of this kind informed the thinking of an entire influential generation of amateurs little concerned with differences among periods or styles but already better attuned to questions of quality, and who would shortly amass very important collections. When the artificial atmosphere of their Gothic- and Renaissance-style houses, filled with reproductions, ample proof of their admiration for past art, grew tiresome, they turned to the original works of art from which these imitations derived. Often with considerable financial resources at their disposal, benefiting now and again from good advice, and able to move much faster than museums with their complicated machinery of trustees and advisory boards, these amateurs managed to amass impressive collections.1 Some had little in mind beyond creating a pleasant ambiance in which to live among the vestiges of history, but most hoped to endow the nation with collections comparable to those in Europe.

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Frequently such collections had strengths in particular areas, but specialization was seldom in evidence. Fashion, or fads, did account for certain acquisitions, though it had little lasting effect; often, in fact, shifts in taste resulted from the strong personal inclinations of individual collectors themselves. Some were more attracted by this or that period or technique, and yet sight was never lost of the history of art more broadly defined. Others made certain that contemporary art was not forgotten either, combining the role of patron with that of collector. Born to a country and an age permitting large expenditures, these wide-ranging, princely collectors of a kind only before seen among actual royalty were [81] responsible for the astonishing growth of American private collections, and thus [also] museums, between 1876 and 1919. This progress was not without its false starts. Early such collections often included little more than souvenirs of travel, a few fine pieces among them, purchased without a larger plan in mind and without a great deal of discrimination. Filled with good intentions, though hardly connoisseurs, those responsible, when making difficult choices about art, had not known to turn to those more knowledgeable for advice. Typifying this attitude, the M. P. Stevens collection, sold at auction in 1887, contained a good deal of bric-a-brac: Oriental as well as European paintings, a manuscript from the Abbaye de Jumièges, Louis XVI miniatures, tapestries, Empire furniture, Spanish and Oriental arms and armor, Wedgewood and Viennese porcelain, faïence from Persia and Damascus, ivories from China and Japan, Japanese earthenware, Barye bronzes—visible evidence of the collector’s extensive travels and interest in a variety of periods not always well understood.2 Another collection, that of Robert Hoe, considerably larger in size, when also sold at auction a number of years later, comprised no fewer than 4,801 individual objects. An indefatigable amateur and frequent sojourner in Europe, Hoe found no branch of artistic activity without interest, whether oil paintings, aquarelles, prints, sculpture, or objets d’art. He was as quick to collect contemporary American artists like Frederick Arthur Bridgman, William Sidney Mount, William Lamb Picknell, and [ John] La Farge as those of nineteenth-century France: Michel, Couture, Isabey, Daubigny, Díaz, Gérôme, and Jacque. The seventeenth-century French, Poussin and Rigaud, hung cheek by jowl in his collection with Boucher, Drouais, Chardin, Vigée Le Brun, and the English, Hogarth and Reynolds. Northern artists included [Gerbier] Honthorst, Jacob van Ruysdael, Gerard Dou, Rembrandt, and Ambrosius Benson, but also a number of Flemish and Italian Primitives, Pesellino among them. Sixteenth-century German silver, Italian faïence from Faenza, Urbino, and Castelli, Hispano-Moresque earthenware, and works by Bernard Palissy were displayed side by side with Chinese enamels and blue and white porcelain. In the realm of furniture, Hoe’s focus was eighteenth-century France, but he owned a number of Sormani or Jansen reproductions of cabinetry by Charles Boulle, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tapestries, and an impressive set of French clocks from the same period. Somewhat of a throwback to the previous era, Hoe had a keen sense of history; his print collection included works by America’s most famous The triumph of Quality

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artists as well as, with touching historical sentimentality, portraits of artists and of the best-known lovers and patrons of the arts. His collection sums up the various phases through which American taste had passed up to this point. Not everything was of the highest quality or equally well selected, but the somewhat disparate ensemble was impressive nonetheless. It was in his choice of objects from the Middle Ages, including two small Limoges champlevé enameled reliquaries, a Eucharistic vessel in the shape of a dove, a lovely leather-bound Book of the Gospels, and a reliquary bust that Hoe’s personal taste stood revealed. This part of the collection is of better quality and evidences a greater discernment. All in all, the ensemble remains one of the most important of the prewar period.3 Michael Henry de Young had begun by collecting stuffed birds, and then, through his work in organizing expositions in Chicago and California, amassed a considerable number of objects of all kinds. He, for instance, held on to whatever was left behind from the White City Exhibition [at the World’s Columbian Exposition] of 1893 and, over the course of numerous trips to Europe, purchased bronzes, knives, forks; pottery from the Orient, Sèvres, Worcester, and Dresden; Egyptian artifacts, English miniatures, and a set of Napoleonic souvenirs. The best works in his collection were an ensemble of fifteen fifteenth- and sixteenth-century suits of armor from the celebrated Zschille collection. A set of clocks and Chinese ceramics from the former Carleton House collection also reveal a reasonable discernment. [82] De Young promised all these works to the San Francisco museum that came to bear his name.4 Like Hoe, fanciful and highly independent, he bought a little bit of everything according to whim or chance opportunity, which explains the eccentric nature and variable quality of what he collected. Henry G[urdon] Marquand, whose interests were just as broad ranging, attempted always to secure works of the highest visibility, whether a Van Dyke portrait or a Persian vase.5 He assembled, in a mauve-colored room, fragments of Persian and Hispano-Moresque ceramics and rugs from Persia and Asia Minor. Painted enamels, cassoni, and examples of Italian embroidery were displayed alongside Chinese porcelains, ancient Greek vases, Tanagra figurines, and bits of iridescent glass in an interior at once grandiose and incoherent in classic late nineteenth-century period style.6 The collection was especially known for its paintings, fifty-three of which Marquand donated to the Metropolitan in 1888, several Van Dykes, three Frans Halses, a Rembrandt, Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Jug, a Lucas de Leyde, a period imitation of van Eyck’s Virgin and Child, and Turner’s Saltash among them, making the Marquand donation one of the museum’s core holdings.7 His example would be followed by many New York collectors. Marquand also owned English portraits by Romney, Raeburn, Hoppner, and Reynolds. That he was not indifferent to modern art is suggested by a number of nineteenthcentury paintings by Constable, Troyon, Decamps, Rousseau, Henry Martin, Madrazo, and Alma-Tadema. Something of a celebrity in New York society, Marquand, whose collection defined an entire era, exercised influence as a man of taste,

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his advice sought after and often followed. His was one of the first collections of the art of past centuries to which people responded, noting immediately the clear attention that had been paid to quality. Measured by the number and variety of his collections, Thomas B. Clarke might remind us somewhat of Jarves, also given to selling off portions of his holdings in order to branch out in new directions. A friend to American artists, [Clarke] began by collecting their work. On studio visits he proved a skillful counselor as well. The sale of that first collection, which included works by Inness, Wyant, Tryon, Homer Martin, Blakelock, Church, George Fuller, and [Winslow] Homer, was a great success. Total sales amounting to $235,000 demonstrated the growing interest in contemporary American art. At the same time, somewhat forgotten portraits by various members of the Peale family, Gilbert Stuart, Benjamin West, Thomas Sully, and Samuel Lovett Waldo were returned to public view.8 Men like Clarke were key players in the colonial revival of the mid-1890s. In fact, coming back to this idea later on, Clarke would form a vast collection of precontemporary American painting, one of the finest in the United States in quality and selection.9 But Clarke’s interest in the arts did not stop there. He also had been the first to collect Greek vases, statuary, and glass, Tanagra earthenware and figurines, all of high quality.10 His collection of English seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture was equally noteworthy, one of the finest in the United States in an area of specialization whose heyday would not come for some time.11 Oriental ceramics next caught Clarke’s eye, thus he collected Han, Tang, and Ming along with Rakka, Rhages, and Sultanabad pottery and Hispano-Moresque faïence. The selection of ceramics from Asia Minor and Damascus and pseudo–Rhodes ware is especially remarkable.12 Clarke’s home was greatly admired at the turn of the century. Much of his collection was installed there, but, despite a striking absence of paintings, it was, according to a period account, “what may be literally described as an art home.”13 For more than thirty years, Clarke exercised a profound influence on the New York art world. Though frequently an instigator of new trends in collecting earlier art, he remained deeply involved in the world of modern art as well. [83] A member of the American Fine Arts Society, he was once named president of the New York School of Applied Arts. One of the best-known collections toward the end of the century was that formed both in Chicago and New York by Charles T. Yerkes, the sale of which in 1910 grossed over two million dollars. If the paintings, despite their high prices, were not all of the same quality, the same was not true of the Oriental rugs, which included the famous set of carpets from the Ardebil Mosque and a magnificent ensemble no Oriental prince or museum anywhere could match in grandeur or completeness.14 Unfortunately, the remainder of the collection, and especially the furnishings that filled the Yerkes mansion in New York, a veritable palace built much earlier in the century, did not reflect the same refinement.15 The music room, designed by The triumph of Quality

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Zwimer in garish gold-leaf Louis XV style, and the Japanese salon that Yerkes commissioned in Asia, transport us to a world that seems almost shocking today but that was very much in fashion in certain European and American circles at the time. A fine Empire bedroom with antique woodwork is worthier of consideration, reaching for an original effect, neither a simple copy nor imitation. The choice of very handsome thirteenth-century Gobelin tapestries and a Belgian set produced in Brussels after cartoons by Teniers, along with Falconet’s Bacchante, a 1782 bronze Diana by Houdon, and Rodin’s Cupid and Psyche and Orpheus and Eurydice help us to forget certain [lesser] works by Gérôme, Lombard, and d’Épinay, souvenirs of this or that salon. During his stays in Europe and Asia, Yerkes had also acquired medals, keys, locks, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century armaments, eighteenth-century miniatures and gold boxes, and Japanese ivories, all of mediocre quality. The contradiction seems shocking in a collector otherwise so much in the know, perhaps the result of youthful indiscretion or just ordinary snobbishness. Benjamin Altman started out around 1882 by purchasing American paintings, as had Clarke, but soon sold off that first collection to acquire a number of Barbizon and a few English works, which he then traded for Chinese porcelain and lacquerware. After 1893, following a purchase of rock crystals at the [Frédéric] Spitzer sale [April–June 1893], Altman’s taste turned to the art of the Renaissance, Middle Ages, and Old Masters. His collection, to which he added until his death in 1913, today still in New York at the Metropolitan, is best known for works he acquired after 1905: Van Dyke’s Marchesa Durazzo and Lucas van Uffel; Vermeer’s Young Girl Asleep; Frans Hals’s Merrymakers at Shrovetide; Rembrandt’s Lady with a Pink, Pilate Washing His Hands, and a Self-Portrait, with works by Pieter de Hooch, [Gerard] ter Borch, and Gerard Dou completing the northern school. He owned a number of Primitives as well: Gerard David, [Hans] Memling, Dirk Bouts. Among the Italians, paintings by Mantegna, Botticelli, Cosimo Tura, Mainardi, Francia, and Titian were interspersed among sculpture by Luca della Robbia, Andrea Sansovino, and Bernardo Rossellino, not to forget several handsome bronzes by [Alessandro] Vittoria and Adriaen de Vries. The French eighteenth century was represented by a terra cotta Mercury after Pigalle, a marble bust of Louise Brongniat by Houdon, and a Boucher tapestry, Vertumne and Pomone. A number of lovely painted enamels and Oriental carpets, most purchased at auction from the finest European collections, completed the ensemble.16 Thanks to these great private collectors, the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum rapidly grew, but it was thanks in particular to the truly princely gifts of J. P. Morgan that the museum became one of the finest in the world. A great banker and man of action, Morgan elevated his passion to collect into an absolute national duty, applying the same rational approach that had assured the success of his commercial [84] enterprises, tackling the various periods of art history logically and without hesitation.17 After 1900, he employed a veritable army of agents, who, under the direction of a Mrs. McIlvaine in London, scoured all of Europe for possible

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acquisitions, but Morgan took care to safeguard his independence and freedom of choice. In Paris, for example, every morning he received supplicants bearing objects he might wish to acquire. The artistic riches he piled up in London as a result amounted to more than one museum in waiting. Wishing to provide his relatively past-poor fellow countrymen a share of the artistic treasures of the world, he made certain his largesse would benefit them. Four institutions—the Metropolitan, Morgan Library, and Cooper Union in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford—shared portions of a personal collection he had gathered at his home on Princes Gate in London beginning in 1912. Morgan had inherited the taste for collecting from his father, Junius, who had owned a number of modern paintings and who, late in life, dabbled in the English eighteenth century. His son instead chose to collect one or two examples from every major school, although French and British works did predominate. Alongside Raphael’s Virgin and Child, Enthroned, with Saints, four Frans Halses, and Rembrandt’s Portrait of Nicholas Ruts, we find works by Gainsborough, Hogarth, Hoppner, Lawrence, Reynolds, Romney, Turner, and Constable competing for attention with a parallel set of works by Boucher, Drouais, Greuze, Lancret, La Tour, Nattier, Pater, [Carle] Van Loo, Fragonard, and Vigée Le Brun.18 Unfortunately, these modern paintings were inconsistent in quality; only later would Morgan purchase van der Weyden’s Annunciation, today at the Metropolitan, and other Primitives: a Nativity Scene by the Master of Flémalle [Robert Campin]; Memling’s Saint Anne with the Virgin; and Ghirlandaio’s Giovanni Tornabuoni, today in the collection of Edsel Ford in Detroit. Morgan disliked prolonged research and difficult conquests; he preferred buying entire collections, completing them himself, then publishing the results in one sumptuous catalogue after another. His love of books was of long standing, and his library one of the finest in the world, the only one in the United States apart from that of [Henry] Walters to include old and rare manuscripts comparable to those in the great libraries of Europe.19 But in this magnificent ensemble, one that only continued to grow after his death, the rare editions, drawings, prints, and graphic arts miscellanies were all of equal quality.20 Libraries [once] belonging to William Morris, Richard Bennett, Bertram IV, the Earl of Ashburnham, and James Toovey had all been absorbed into Morgan’s own. And Morgan proceeded in the same manner in every area of specialized collecting in which he took an interest. His silver plate, most of it German, came largely from the Gutman collection in Berlin.21 Turning his attention to progressively earlier and earlier periods, Morgan’s interest in European archaeology led him to purchase the German antiquities in the [Stanislas] Baron and Queckenberg collections, the Merovingian jewelry in that of Jumel d’Amiens, followed by an array of Gallo-Roman objects discovered in France.22 This rare intrusion into the Classical period was owed to his penchant for bronzes acquired, for the most part, from the Gréau collection.

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Indeed, it was especially in the realm of the so-called minor arts that Morgan worked most tirelessly. Leaving the great masters of painting and sculpture to collectors invincibly attracted to big name artists, he concentrated instead on the simple yet so very monumental, somber formal beauty of the art of anonymous medieval artisans. Morgan’s collection more than any other in America drew attention to this period. As early as 1906, he had acquired the justly celebrated [Georges] Hoentschel collection, one of the best-known and most important ensembles of Middle Ages gold and silver jewelry and enamels, including the principal objects formerly in the [Sigismond] Bardac collection.23 With this [85] purchase, Morgan opened a new chapter in American taste, following in the footsteps of great French collectors from Sommerard to Martin Le Roy, calling attention to a period of art history still little known in the United States. To these objects Morgan added sculpture, woodcarvings, silver, ceramics, and furniture from the medieval period through the eighteenth century, [which became] the core of the Met’s remarkable applied arts collection, opened to the public in 1916.24 Owed principally to Morgan’s personal generosity, this collection, [on a par with that] of the Victoria and Albert Museum or the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, included not just his famous Gréau bronzes but also a set of particularly fine Renaissance tapestries.25 The inventory of his interests goes on and on. The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, for instance, received an important set of Spanish textiles. Like many of his contemporaries, Morgan collected Chinese porcelain.26 His European miniatures remain among the most important and remarkable ever assembled.27 He was also among the first to take an interest in American art, and provided his home state’s museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, fine sets of furniture and ceramics.28 Death came unexpectedly, just as Morgan was beginning to take passionate interest in the art of the Near East. All in broadening the range of his own acquisitions, his thought was to enrich those of the Metropolitan. In his mind the ideal museum was eclectic. He collected not for the mere pleasure of owning more and more, to see his name associated with great works of art, but because philanthropy and the future of the fine arts in the United States were always his guiding principles. He often first loaned works of art to museums in England and France, then offered them as gifts to the American public.29 His son proved no less generous, increasing his contributions to and supervising plans for the Morgan Library, whose collections he wisely continued to develop, thus constituting one of the great centers of intellectual life in the United States his father had played a determinative role in creating. The case could well be made that, in every area in which J. P. Morgan collected, his results stand up well to comparison with the best collections so-called specialists ever assembled. It was a woman, Isabella Stewart Gardner, who gave Morgan a run for his money as most famous American collector of the day. Her charm, broad-mindedness, and whimsical nature had long won her the sympathy of proponents of the pleasure in

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good taste. Her Boston home was a sort of court to which important personalities were drawn, including virtually every important visiting musician, artist, or writer. Music was the first art for which Gardner felt an attraction. In 1880, she set up a music room in her home; her first purchases, a Corot landscape and three Gobelin tapestries, date to the same time. Over the course of a protracted trip around the world, she stopped in Venice and appears to have been won over by Venetian painting. With [Charles Eliot] Norton’s help, she began to collect rare books and a few manuscripts. She made the acquaintance of Whistler and Sargent and bought a number of paintings by each; in 1888, she had Sargent paint her portrait. Earlier that same year, she had traveled in Spain, bringing home a Zurbarán Madonna.30 Gardner became increasingly interested in the plastic arts, taking up the study of painting herself, visiting museums, and supporting a circle of artists and young art historians at Harvard under Norton’s direction. Among their number, Bernard Berenson, much in her debt, became her personal advisor in 1894. A number of paintings in her Fenway Court collection were acquired on his recommendation. A first inheritance, in 1892, had permitted Gardner to make a few acquisitions during a trip through Europe: armchairs from the Villa Borghese; a pastel by Albert Besnard; a fifteenth-century Gothic tapestry; [86] two works by Rossetti and a Filippino Lippi Madonna. These purchases betray the influence of Ruskin, whom she knew through Norton and whose lectures she had attended. Little by little, however, Gardner’s taste grew more independent. She purchased Vermeer’s The Concert, Courbet’s The Beach at Trouville, and Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Silver. The work of Anders Zorn, whom she had met in Chicago, appealed to her, and she contributed a great deal to his renown in the United States, commissioning her portrait and offering her patronage. Her collection grew rapidly. In 1894, on the advice of Berenson, she bought Botticelli’s The Death of Lucretius; then, in 1895, a View of Venice by Guardi, a portrait by Mabuse, another by Clouet. Nor did she neglect modern art as a consequence, buying, for instance, directly from Antonio Mancini, to whom she had been introduced in Rome, The Young Groom, a pastel. In Italy and Spain, she acquired bolts of splendid velvets, a painted enamel, and candelabras meant for use in her home, then a set of portraits by Moroni, Tintoretto’s Venetian Senator, a Rembrandt Self-Portrait. In 1896, Gardner hit upon the idea of building a museum she might leave to the people of Boston. This led to a change in the way she thought about acquisitions; henceforth she would consider nothing but masterpieces worthy of the ensemble she envisioned. That same year, she acquired what is without question the jewel of the collection, Titian’s The Rape of Europa, which thus slipped through the hands of [Wilhelm von] Bode and Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum both. Unfortunately, this quest for one-of-a-kind works led to a number of missteps, for instance, the purchase of a Velázquez portrait of Philip IV—errors, however, compensated by the purchase of Van Dyke’s Lady with a Rose and Cima da Conegliano’s Virgin and Child. She began to take an interest in sculpture, acquiring a Virgin and Child by Jacopo della Quercia and, from the Gavet sale, a bas-relief by Andrea della Robbia. The triumph of Quality

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In 1897, with her new home in mind, a palace she was building in the middle of England, she acquired in Venice an assortment of architectural fragments: columns, capitals, reliefs, mirrors, cassoni, fountains, balconies, frescoes, and ceilings. Its courtyard was meant to rekindle in foggy Boston memories of the exuberant, gaily colored life of Venice. Her collection of paintings also continued to grow through the acquisition of remarkable works like Crivelli’s Saint George and the Dragon, two cassoni by Pesellino, portraits by Raphael (Tommaso Inghirami), Rubens (Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel), Bronzino (Baccio Bandinelli), and Masaccio, along with Fra Angelico’s Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin, polyptics by Simone Martini and, again by Raphael, a well-known fragment of the predella of the altarpiece of the Church of Sant’Antonio di Padua at Perugia.31 In 1899, on her return to Boston, the press, ever attentive to this national celebrity’s least doings, announced to all America her intention to construct a Venetian palace, a project brought to fruition the following year with the founding of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for the “purpose of art education, especially by the public exhibition of works of art.”32 By late 1901, work on her Fenway Court had been completed and, until her death in 1924, its collection only continued to grow. The most important acquisitions included a bas-relief by Mino da Fiesole, a portrait of Marie Tudor by Antonio Moro, a Pinturicchio Madonna and Child, Dürer’s portrait of Lazarus Ravensburger, the famous Hercules by Piero della Francesca, Bermejo’s Santa Engracia, a portrait of a student at the University of Salamanca (A Doctor at Law) by Zurbarán, a Pollaiuolo portrait of a woman, a Madonna and Child by Gentile Bellini, and a series of Gothic and Renaissance tapestries.33 Gardner was too involved in Boston society to be unmoved by the art of the Far East, and examples of lacquer- and earthenware and a very handsome [87] bronze bear attest to her taste for the classical tradition. Modern art did not suffer, however, as a consequence. Her collection came to include Manet’s Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, Degas’s Portrait of Josephine Gaujelin, and works by Monet and especially Sargent, to show off whose El Jaleo she even had a Spanish cloister constructed, replacing the old music room. For, in her home, every object had its place, enhanced by its surroundings. The museum was her personal handiwork, and she wished it to remain forever unchanged. Some saw and continue today to see in this either capriciousness or grandstanding, both judgments facile and unfair. The story of this woman, fawned over by her husband and every intimate who tried to understand her, is far deeper and more tragic. Greatly fortunate, much honored, criticized by some, supported by others, her life filled to overflowing with activities (though largely contrived ones), Gardner remained inwardly unfulfilled. She seems to have taken real pleasure only in the works of art surrounding her, the living embodiment of a crisis through which America and the culture of materialism in general were then passing. Her fine sensibility found expression in and through this need to escape both her moment in history and an entourage whose pleasures were too commonplace, too fugitive.

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Her oeuvre, one that she as no one else managed to create, powerfully marked the era, giving definition to the social milieu against which she struggled. Her home has an air of sadness about it, as do all such palaces absent the great personalities that once brought them to life. The collection, though great, has lost its soul. Even as Morgan and Gardner were building up their collections in full public view, Henry Walters in Baltimore, more or less completely unnoticed by his contemporaries, put together a collection less familiar than theirs, though nearly as important. The son of [William Thompson Walters,] an amateur well known in his day, whose activities we have already considered, this great industrial magnate, raised in France, worked to expand at once his Atlantic Coast Line Company and his museum.34 The younger Walters spent his vacations crisscrossing Europe, calling on antiquarian dealers he had known in his youth and others who managed to gain his confidence. Following only his own judgment, as a passionate collector, he amassed no fewer than twenty thousand works (illuminated manuscripts, paintings, sculpture, and miscellaneous objets d’art from every age, from all over the world), though it has as yet been possible to display only one-third this number in the museum that bears his name.35 At the death of his father, the collection had been composed principally of nineteenth-century French paintings and Barye bronzes. Unlike so many other American collectors of this period, Henry Walters held on to these works, but, somewhat randomly, as opportunities presented themselves, following his own inclinations, he so augmented their number as to be obliged, in 1907, to build a new gallery. It, too, proved insufficient [to house them].36 Personal preference led him to privilege the early stages in the histories of given styles, although his interest was never purely archaeological, and he responded to the art of subsequent periods when something struck him as original. It was perhaps in his admiration for the calm simplicity of the art of earlier times that Walters was most attuned to his own, though retaining a perfect independence in the choice of objects. In Egyptian art, he always most appreciated sculpture, and objects like the Old Kingdom wood figurine, lovely head of a king, sparrow hawk, and bust in his collection would not have seemed out of place in any great museum. A handsome bas-relief representing a winged spirit from the Palace of Nimrod is his finest work of Assyrian art. A few pieces of Mycenaean pottery represent the early stages of the art of Greece, as do a number of beautiful ceramic and bronze pieces from the seventh and sixth centuries. Nor did Walters neglect later periods, acquiring from the fourth and subsequent centuries terra cottas, a very fine Roman marble after Praxiteles’s Young Satyr, a bronze Greco-Roman figure of a child, a portrait of Augustus, and a few ancient sarcophagi discovered in Rome in 1884 beneath the Villa Bonaparte, the most remarkable of which representing the Triumph of Bacchus. [88] Art from the eastern basin of the Mediterranean caught his interest, from the time of the Sassanids through the Persian embroidery and miniatures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jewelry from the south of Russia, a silver platter The triumph of Quality

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representing King Yazdegerd [I], manuscripts, and carpets made a proper appreciation of the art of these regions possible. Coptic art, another of the great sources of the arts of the West, was represented in Walter’s collection by ivories, textiles, and a bas-relief with a decorative border of animals. Where Byzantine art was concerned, Walters chose to focus on two areas, each of considerable interest, acquiring on the one hand jewelry, including a great cache of silver discovered near Antioch and a set of cloisonné enamels, and on the other pieces of worked ivory, including a coffer decorated with putti and a plaque representing The Dormition of the Virgin. Visigoth fibulae, Carolingian, Roman, and Gothic ivories, Gospel covers, ewers, and Rhineland and Limoges enamels make this the most important collection of medieval objects in the United States after the Metropolitan’s. Roman and Gothic sculpture are each also represented by a number of examples, all of very fine quality, especially a set of Roman capitals from twelfth-century Spain. The collection makes possible the study of medieval painting as well, thanks to its stained glass, embroidery, tapestries, and, above all, manuscripts of every variety: Byzantine, Armenian, Carolingian, Ottonian, and Italian, [all] worthy of study in their own right. Those dating from the late medieval period and early Renaissance, for example, are superior in quality to comparable works at the Morgan Library. Ceramics, bronzes, arms and armor, works of sculpture by the likes of [Luca] della Robbia, Pietro Francavilla, and Zanobi Lastricati, jewelry, tapestries, and an impressive assortment of woodcarvings represent the splendors of the decorative arts of the Renaissance. The evolution of Italian painting could be studied from thirteenth-century Byzantine-Italian frescoes through the sixteenth-century Venetians, represented by a number of important works: a Crucifixion by Barna da Siena, Giovanni di Paolo’s The Entombment, an Annunciation by Bicci di Lorenzo, a Madonna and Child by [Carlo] Crivelli and another by Fra Filippo Lippi, Raphael’s Madonna of the Candelabra, and a portrait of a woman by Veronese. On the other hand, Walters was among the first to recognize the interest in the Spanish Primitives; his Catalan altar screen and school of Valencia Madonna and Child attest to the soundness of his taste in an area still today greatly underappreciated outside Spain. Among works by northern artists, one must single out a splendid fifteenth-century portrait of a man pictured at prayer with Saint John the Baptist by a northern French master, mistakenly attributed to Hugo van der Goes; among the masterpieces of the collection [are] Bartholomeus Zeitblom’s Christ on the Mount of Olives, a portrait of Margaret Roper by Antonio Moro, Pieter Brueghel the younger’s The Wedding Feast, and a portrait of a young woman by Lucas Cranach. Walters followed in the footsteps of other great nineteenth-century collectors with his acquisitions of seventeenth-century Old Masters, Murillo represented by an Immaculate Conception, Ribera by a Saint Jerome, and Rembrandt by a portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels. Walters’s view of the eighteenth century was also traditional. He was drawn to the image of Venetian splendor in the work of those masters of color, Canaletto and Tiepolo, to the psychological intensity of a portrait by Goya,

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much more than to the art of the French eighteenth century, here represented by Nattier (The Marquise d’Argenson), Pater (Fête Champêtre), British portrait painters Romney and Hogarth, and various miniaturists. The notables among British painters, like those of nineteenth-century France, worked a splendid landscape tradition from Gainsborough to Bonington by way of Turner and Constable. Walters, a friend of the Parisian dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, always deeply admired the French nineteenth century. Aside from Barye, however, it was not the nineteenth century collected by his father that he found of interest, but that of Ingres, Géricault, Delacroix, Corot, Manet, Degas, and Daumier, [89] by whom he owned The Prison Choir and three astonishing drawings, “The Third Class Wagon,” among them. The art of the Far East had a place in Walters’s collection as well, from Zhou bronzes and Tang sculpture to eighteenth-century ceramics. His acquisitions of gold jewelry from Central America demonstrate the breadth of interest and taste of a man extremely involved in the life of his time but able to escape the strictures of snobbish obedience to fashion in a universe of his own creation. Like the brothers Eugène and Auguste Dutuit or George Salting, Walters was a sort of Cousin Pons with millions to spend, like Balzac’s hero combining an extreme passion for collecting of works of art with great delicacy and rare modesty. Childless, he spent his money in this way on works of art with the unique goal of bequeathing his collections to his native city; at his death in 1931, many of these objects had never been unpacked. Similar to Walters in many respects, Grenville Winthrop shared his desire to remain unnoticed, his simplicity of lifestyle and bearing, his enthusiasm and breadth of taste. The love of medieval art that was Walters’s specialty translated in Winthrop’s case into a love of Italian painting and works from the Far East, sculpture and jade at first, then nineteenth-century drawings. Though little known, his collection, one of the finest in the United States in quality, has been promised to a fine university [Harvard] as a complement to its already considerable holdings.37 Various periods and techniques are represented therein by examples of great finesse. The French also dominate a nineteenth century defined by painters of importance from [ Jacques-Louis] David, Prud’hon, Ingres, Chassériau, and Delacroix through the Impressionists, with Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Degas each represented by both fine paintings and drawings. The quite personal art of a figure like William Blake and the entire Pre-Raphaelite movement found in Winthrop one of their greatest American admirers, this quite in keeping with his taste for Primitives. Given his love of drawings and watercolors, Winthrop was also attracted by the graphic precision of an artist like [Adolph] Menzel, just as he was won over by the delicate mannerism of Pietro Lorenzetti and Giovanni di Paolo, the gracefulness of Francesco Fiorentino, the silhouetted forms of Ambrogio da Predis, the tactile values of Giovanni Bellini and Cima da Cornegliano. A beautiful El Greco and works by [ Jean-Baptiste] Perronneau serve to remind us of the diversity of an amateur sensibility touched by the charm of Gothic sculpture (a lovely thirteenthcentury bust, a fourteenth-century Virgin) and of more recent artistic movements The triumph of Quality

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equally: Central American jewelry and pottery; American portraits from the colonial period. Winthrop was, if one dare say so, the most American of collectors. In the home of this aesthete, a descendant of one of the oldest families of Massachusetts, as in his person, heritage and solid tradition were perceptible: nothing was shocking, ostentatious, or particularly public; nothing was there to be admired anecdotally or superficially; everything [was] of fine quality, revealing the finesse of the amateur whose choices and affections the collection embodied. Nothing could be more instructive when it comes to assessing the evolution of taste in the United States than to compare the collections amassed by the first generation of a family of means with those formed by its descendants. This is possible in the case of the Walterses or Wideners, but the differences are even easier to discern among the Havemeyers. In the collection of T. A. Havemeyer, we see nothing but pastiche, work by forgotten artists, their celebrity fleeting (apart from that by Alfred Stevens and Meissonier). Henry Osborne and Louisine Havemeyer, by contrast, collected work of the first order. The influence of Mary Cassatt, who lavished advice upon her friends, is much in evidence, to be sure, and her taste largely favored Degas; however, Mrs. Havemeyer had lived for years in Paris as a young woman and, for the most part, made her own decisions.38 Along with beautiful paintings by Cézanne, [90] Corot, Courbet, Degas, Manet, and Monet, all of the highest quality, appear works by earlier artists that “master of taste” Degas admired: El Greco’s unforgettable Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara and View of Toledo, Goya’s Majas on a Balcony and A City on a Rock, Ingres’s Portrait of a Gentleman, Poussin’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and Rembrandt’s Portrait of the Guilder Herman Doomer are a few of the most famous among the 140 paintings the Havemeyers would bequeath to the Metropolitan. Admirable drawings by Ingres (“Lady and Boy”), Daumier (“Corot Sketching at Ville d’Avray”), Millet, Rembrandt, Manet, and Degas reveal the extent to which these two collectors, Louisine in particular, were receptive to the immediacy of that medium.39 Their remarkable collections of engravings and sculpture (a French thirteenthcentury head of a king; a sixteenth-century Virgin and Child; a German fourteenthcentury bust of the Virgin Beside Herself) are also worthy of note. Oriental, Spanish, and Italian ceramics, especially Deruta ware, pages from the Koran, and Hindu sculptures hold their own in the company of lovely Chinese paintings and screens, Japanese prints, Chinese sculptures and ceramics, and jeweled saber sheaths. Antiquity was represented by ceramics, Greek and Roman glass, and a few works of Egyptian sculpture. Of this considerable ensemble, some two thousand pieces were left to the Met by the collectors themselves and their heirs. If the ensemble remains famous, above all, for its nineteenth-century paintings, the taste and interests of its collectors went further. Following Cassatt’s advice, they had hoped to discover the “modernists” of earlier periods.40 Mary and Isaac D. Fletcher were intimately involved in the archaeological movement in general and Islamic archaeology most particularly, shaping an aspect

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of their collection we shall return to.41 But they also owned important paintings, for instance, a luminous [ Jacques-Louis] David portrait of Mademoiselle Charlotte du Val d’Ognes and a number of eighteenth-century French works by Drouais and Boucher. Their choice of nineteenth-century paintings by Corot, Millet, Troyon, Bastien-Lepage, Díaz, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Raffaëlli remained true to fin de siècle taste.42 The same accent marked not just their collection of British paintings, which included works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Constable, and [George] Morland, but, more especially, their collection of works by the German painters Franz von Lenbach and Fritz von Uhde. The ensemble was rounded off by two seventeenth-century Old Masters: Rembrandt’s Head of Christ and Rubens’s Portrait of a Man. In the realm of sculpture, two fine Gothic figures, a Clodion terra cotta, and a Rodin demonstrate the eclecticism of the Fletchers’ taste, seen also in their sixteenth-century Flemish stained glass, Renaissance tapestry, Pénicaud enamels, and Gubbio majolica, an ensemble today also at the Metropolitan. Theodore M. Davis was not simply an ardent amateur Egyptologist; his passion for and knowledge about art had led him to take interest in other important realms of artistic production. Coins, jewels, and antique glass had drawn his interest as well; but he also possessed a very good collection of paintings. His Bellini, The Virgin and the Sleeping Child, and a second Madonna and Child by Bartolomeo Vivarini were among the finest examples of Venetian art in the United States. Works by Mariotto Albertinelli, Gentile da Fabriano, Francesco del Cossa, and Garofalo acquired early on, along with Michelangelo’s The Sibyl, two Moronis, a Bartolomeo Veneto, an Andrea Solari, and four very good Guardis, represented the diversity of Italian painting.43 Davis’s northern works included Dirk Bouts’s Virgin and Child and Cuyp’s A Dutch Family in a Garden. A portrait by Goya, Don Tiburcio Perez, represented the earliest stages of modern painting, followed by later works by Corot, Monet, [Théodore] Rousseau, and Puvis de Chavannes. Davis also liked European objets d’art, for instance, Byzantine jewels and Italian Renaissance bronzes and textiles; but his Gothic ivories, a number of fourteenth-century diptychs, and two Virgins, one in the form of a [91] tabernacle, were particularly remarkable, happily complementing a set of ivories already at the Met.44 Michael Dreicer shared this passion for all things medieval and Renaissance. Much like Davis, he owned a number of Italian paintings by Piero di Cosimo (The Young Saint John) and Domenico Morone, but the best works in the collection, again later donated to the Met, were products of the northern schools. His Rogier van der Weyden, Christ Appearing to His Mother, is particularly noteworthy. Another, Portrait of a Monk, by the same artist, along with other paintings by Hans Memling, Simon Marmion, François Clouet, Corneille de Lyon, and Martin Schongauer, all of equally fine quality, hung alongside two Spanish works, a Catalan panel from the fifteenth century and a Holy Family by El Greco. Dreicer’s highly developed taste in the area of decorative arts is suggested by a lovely tapestry produced in Brussels around 1500 depicting the Passion of Christ, a thirteenth-century stained glass window, an enameled Limoges goblet dating from The triumph of Quality

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the same period, and a handsome set of Renaissance bronzes. Among his medieval sculpture, we might take special note of a twelfth-century figure of a prophet holding a banner, said to have come from Chartres Cathedral (though in my view originating farther east) and a figure of Saint Bavon dating to the late fifteenth century.45 An amateur like Dreicer was extremely involved in the development of a new taste for both the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, in particular, that was especially pronounced first during and then following the Great War. In abandoning the welltrodden path leading to paintings and objets d’art, he demonstrated a strength of character as a result of which he was able to provide his city museum [the Met] a number of important three-dimensional works for its collections. Though rather eclectic in his taste, Michael Friedsam nonetheless shared this pronounced penchant for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art, for painting above all.46 Like so many others, he, too, collected with communities in mind and would, upon his death in 1932, bequeath different parts of his collection to the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Louvre. The ensemble destined to remain in Manhattan, the most remarkable, included Rogier van der Weyden’s magnificent Portrait of Lionello d’Este, an Annunciation by either Jan van Eyck or Petrus Christus, Gerard David’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, Dirk Bouts’s Portrait of a Man, Vermeer’s An Allegory of the New Testament, and works by Joos van Cleve, Mabuse, Pieter de Hooch, Rembrandt, and Rubens. The Italian school, though represented by fewer paintings, nonetheless included Giovanni di Paolo’s very fine Miraculous Communion of Saint Catherine of Siena and works by Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Antonello da Messina, and Titian. Finally, as in the Ryerson collection in Chicago, the French Primitives are nicely represented as well in one of the finest American collections of early French painting, with a Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Catherine and Jerome from the south of France, Clouet’s series Charles IX as a Boy and Charles III, Duke of Savoy, Corneille de Lyon’s Jean de Rieux, and, best of all, a magnificent triptych by Jean Bellegambe from the Cistercian convent of Flines near Douai.47 A collector with variable taste, Friedsam also owned a number of Renaissance tapestries, textiles, and bronzes, Limoges enamels, assorted jewelry, and Urbino ceramics that he put on display in his home. Although no fewer than four hundred of the nine hundred objects given the Brooklyn Museum were Chinese ceramics, the disparate nature of the ensemble is suggested by the equal presence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century furniture, miscellaneous sculpture, and tapestries from different periods with varying provenance.48 Among Friedsam’s paintings, Neri di Bicci’s lovely Virgin and Child with Saints Paul, Peter, Sigismund, Francis, Archangel Raphael and Tobias [The Virgin Enthroned] and works by Fra Angelico, Bastiano Mainardi, and Giovanni Bellini were the principal examples of Italian art. But French painting made a strong showing as well, with an Adoration of the Magi from the Avignon school, a Martyrdom of Four Saints attributed to the Master of Moulins, a Saint Marguerite and Saint Catherine

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of Alexandria from the north of France, five works by Clouet, eleven by Corneille de Lyon, and a Falconer attributed to Jean Bourdichon. Many of the paintings, including a portrait of Louis XI from the Gaignières [92] collection, attributed in the catalogue to [ Jean] Fouquet, are of little more than documentary interest. However, Friedsam left to the Louvre two very fine paintings: a Circumcision by Bartolomeo Veneto, and a Landscape at Dusk by [now considered after] Adriaen Brouwer. Of course not everything in the collection was of equal quality; alongside incontestable masterpieces, mediocrities do appear, this something of a surprise given Friedsam’s general acuity. William A. Clark, senator from Montana, was a major supporter of the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 1907 on and, upon his death, left the museum an important, unjustly maligned collection featuring a remarkable and beautiful series by Monticelli. Of equal quality were paintings by Corot, Delacroix, Millet, Fantin-Latour, Cazin, Degas, Inness, and Blakelock, four very fine Gothic tapestries from workshops in Arras representing the Duc de Bourgogne [Duke of Burgundy] engaged in various hunts, five Isfahan and two Aubusson rugs, along with others described as “Polonaise.” To this must be added Italian ceramics from Faenza, Deruta, Castel Durante, Urbino, and Siena, and Palissy faïence. Greek figurines from Attica and Asia Minor rounded out an ensemble that also included wood carvings, eighteenthcentury furniture, a few Old Master paintings, and sculpture by Canova, Falconet, Frémiet, and Rodin, all of which decorated the interior of Clark’s home.49 [Clark] sought out in all genres representative examples suitable for museum display, even though the decorative arts most appealed to him personally. But his choice of rugs and works by Monticelli attests to a heightened sensibility. During the same period, the Art Institute of Chicago saw rapid growth in its various departments, that of painting in particular, thanks to the efforts of two collectors, Charles L. Hutchinson and Martin A. Ryerson, board president and vice president, respectively.50 These two men, both very liberal in their taste, took an interest in different periods of art. In the Hutchinson collection, bequeathed to the museum in 1925, we see works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Frederic Watts but also by Corot, Daubigny, Dupré, Díaz, Fromentin, the Dutch painters Frans Hals and Teniers, and a number of Italian Primitives. Hutchinson contributed in similar fashion to the museum’s collections of Classical antiquities and Egyptology.51 Ryerson, another great traveler devoted to art, had formed a collection of paintings from the Primitives through the present day that included works by Perugino, Memling, and Ghirlandaio as well as the Master of Moulins, the school of Amiens, Spinello Aretino, Jacopo del Sellaio, Tiepolo, Neroccio, Giovanni di Paolo, Magnasco, Guardi, Colijn de Coter, ter Borch, [Pieter] Brueghel the younger, van Goyen, Ruysdael, Teniers, van der Weyden, Lucas de Leyde, and Goya, in addition to nineteenthcentury works by Monet, Renoir, and the American Winslow Homer.52 Ryerson, who enjoyed intimate familiarity with such objects, also possessed painted enamels, French and Italian ceramics, and assorted textiles. The triumph of Quality

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Charles Deering, a friend of Zorn, Sargent, and Saint-Gaudens, began by assembling a collection of prints that would make the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago among the finest in the country, second only to those at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. His Chinese bronzes were equally notable. But Deering knew something about paintings as well, acquiring a Pedro Berruguete, Catalan works, among them Saint George Killing the Dragon, a remarkable panel by the Master of Saint George [today reattributed to Bernat Martorell], plus works by Huguet, Jacomart, the Master of Albatárrech, Mazo, Zurbarán, and Goya that, after the war, would round out the museum’s collections of paintings, drawings, and prints.53 The Art Institute owed much to Kate Buckingham as well, from whom it received in memory of her brother Clarence a superb collection of Japanese prints and European engravings.54 Working closely with the museum’s curators, Buckingham helped over the years to make possible numerous additional acquisitions.55 John D. and Frances P. McIlhenny played a similar role in supporting [93] the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, of which he was president and to which they would bequeath their collections.56 These two amateurs, like their friend Charles F. Williams, conceived a passion for Persian rugs and acquired several that were quite lovely.57 The furnishings in each room of their home offered fine examples from the best periods of woodworking in various times and places, whether medieval France, Renaissance Italy, or seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America. A few works of medieval and Renaissance sculpture and beautiful objets d’art—Persian faïence; a thirteenth-century Limoges enamel—suggest how variously they collected. Their paintings are characterized by this same eclecticism that would play a role in forming the sensibility and taste of subsequent generations, with Rembrandt and Ruysdael and Chardin (Still Life with a Hare) keeping company with the Spanish and Italian Primitives Alunno di Domenico, Master of the Bambino Vispo, and Master of San Miniato. A certain number of Americans collected solely for the purpose of augmenting the artistic wealth of their national patrimony; others, living in Europe, came to feel affection for adoptive countries to which they left their collections instead. France had the good fortune to receive in this way the collection of Edward Tuck, today at the Petit Palais.58 That ensemble is best known for its wood carvings and tapestries, its eighteenth-century sculpture and furniture, but, most of all, for its Saxon, Sèvres, and Chinese porcelain. Older periods of art were not neglected, however, and a Cima Madonna, a portrait by Mostaert, and works by Jacques Daret, Lucas Cranach, and the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece broaden the coverage of a collection otherwise focused on Oriental ceramics and eighteenthcentury France. James Hyde, long established in Europe and a proponent of strengthening Franco-American relations, took an interest in representations of the Four Parts of the World in various media, tapestry in particular. The ensemble of such works in his possession was entirely unique, proof of a persistence of historical ambition that we have previously encountered in a number of American collectors.59

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Others purchased works of art not to leave to a museum but in an effort to surround themselves with an agreeable décor and often with a clear concern for quality. The home collection of Clarence H. Mackay, despite its particular accent on the Middle Ages and Renaissance, encompassed works in media and from periods too varied not to be considered eclectic, though his, we might say, was an eclecticism of a high order. Arms and armor undoubtedly form the centerpiece of this ensemble, but its Italian paintings and sculptures are worthy of any museum in the world.60 Pisanello’s Portrait of a Young Lady, Alesso Baldovinetti’s Madonna and Child, Matteo di Giovanni’s Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, works by Verrochio and Francia, Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man, and a Raphael representing Christ on the Mount of Olives (known as Agony in the Garden)61 find worthy company in works of sculpture by Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Antonio Rossellino, [Antonio] Pollaiuolo (Bust of a Young Warrior), Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano.62 Bronzes, including fine examples from the ateliers of Padua and Venice, demonstrate the same rigor of selection, every piece unique yet representative of the art of its era. The collection of Mortimer L. Schiff reveals a similar variety in choice of objects: in addition to a fine library, sculpture both medieval (from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) and eighteenth-century, all of equally high quality, the latter including works by Houdon and Falconet, a terra cotta Psyche by Pajou and a Clodion Satyr and Nymph.63 The most celebrated part of this collection, however, was its Italian majolica, featuring pieces from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with extremely rare examples of the earliest ceramic arts of Siena, Florence, and Faenza making comprehensive study of this tradition possible.64 This magnificent ensemble, uniting pieces from [94] several European private collections, stands up to comparison with the holdings of Old World museums in Paris, London, and Italy. Elbert H. Gary made no pretense of being a connoisseur but bought on the advice of dealers and other amateurs simply to decorate his home, accumulating a fine collection in the process.65 Rembrandt’s The Marquis d’Andelot Putting on his Armor and works by Tintoretto, Frans Hals, Raeburn, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Romney, and Lawrence represented older paintings; but Gary also owned works by Dutch nineteenth-century masters such as Mauve, Israëls, Neuhuys, Blommers, and Maris, and French paintings by Corot, Daubigny, Cazin, Millet, Rousseau, Díaz, and Jacque, plus a number of Barye bronzes. These works were enhanced by the company of a very handsome set of seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury English furniture and work by among the finest cabinetmakers of eighteenth-century France. The ensemble was completed by a very important collection of rugs, many from the highly regarded Yerkes collection. Such were the holdings of a man of means who enjoyed being surrounded by beautiful objects, though without, for all that, cutting the figure of a true amateur. The imposing palace inhabited by William Salomon was filled with “historic” woodwork—eighteenth-century in the salons and Renaissance-style in the bedThe triumph of Quality

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rooms—some of which employed period materials, in the dining room, for instance. This home, characteristic of upscale New York before the war, was decorated with objects from a variety of periods accumulated with a decorative purpose in mind.66 Sixteenth-century German and eighteenth-century British silver shared visitors’ attention with Italian ceramics and fine sixteenth-century Italian and nineteenthcentury French bronzes by the likes of Barye, Frémiet, and Gérôme. Salomon’s collection was dominated by the French eighteenth century: Augustin Pajou, Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. In the area of painting, his few Italian and Flemish Primitives could hardly compete with a very beautiful series of French eighteenth-century drawings by Watteau, Boucher, Nattier, Coypel, Lancret, Vigée Le Brun, and Fragonard. Rugs with animal motifs and seventeenth-century Brussels tapestries representing the Triumphs of Scipio completed the [Salomon] house’s Renaissance and eighteenth-century furnishings, with decorative intent and high standards of quality always going hand in hand. Thomas Fortune and Ida Barry Ryan had a Fifth Avenue mansion of their own, where one could see objects from every era, from Hellenistic Greece through the age of Rodin. Alongside very lovely champlevé enamels, three superb reliquaries among them, one discovered painted enamels by Monvaerni, Pénicaud, and Léonard Limosin, and first-rate Italian majolica. Tapestries, like a sixteenth-century Pietà from Brussels, a Triumph of Mars after van Orley, and Les Amours de Gombaud et Macé were as important in their genre as the Ryans’ famous animal-theme rugs, some from the Yerkes sale, were in theirs.67 In the area of furniture, work from the French and Italian Renaissance predominated, harmonizing well with sculpture by Laurana, Rossellino, and [Luca] della Robbia, and Florentine and Venetian bronzes. The nineteenth century was represented by several Rodin sculptures and two or three compositions by [ Joaquín] Sorolla [y Bastida]. Etruscan bronzes, stained glass, and Chinese pottery in shades of green and rose suggest Ida Ryan’s breadth of taste and decorative sensibility. The collections of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney [Mrs. Harry Payne] were similarly on display in a home originally built for William C. Whitney, its walls now lined with portraits by Van Dyke, Lawrence, Hoppner, Lorenzo Costa, Moroni, Murillo, Fortuny, and Millet; with Flemish tapestries representing the Life of Titus, French sixteenth-century tapestries representing The Rape of the Sabine Women, and others by Boucher; the whole complemented by ceramics in green, blue, pink, and deep red arranged in the Venetian style typical of American taste after the turn of the century. She collected modern paintings as well, equally varied in style. We find works by Manet, [95] La Touche, Lawson, Luks, Bellows, Henri, Sloan, Lucien Simon, Randall Davey, Ettore Tito, Mancini, Jules Guérin, Madeleine Zorach, Edmund Dulac, James E. Fraser, Rodin, and Paul Manship, bearing witness to her breadth of taste and penchant for modern art.68 Europeans also traveled to the United States on business, among the most famous Enrico Caruso, who had a reputation as not just a great artist but [also] a

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man of taste. His collection, sold at auction in New York, included medals, bronzes, painted Renaissance enamels, faïence, and Persian miniatures. It was the decorative aspects of such works, their patina and color, that struck a chord with Caruso’s artistic sensibilities, rather than their only incidentally high quality as objects.69 My goal is not to cite every American collector lacking an area of specialization— their numbers were considerable—but simply the most characteristic ones encountered in the course of my research. The list might easily be extended, but should certainly include Samuel P. Avery, Isaac Delgado, James A. Garland, Rita Lydig, and Arthur Gellatly.70 Nevertheless, this survey of eclecticism would remain incomplete were we to fail to consider two important examples of collections still being added to today but which had their origins earlier in the century. George and Florence Blumenthal and William Randolph Hearst were worthy emulators, during and following the war, of Isabella Stewart Gardner and J. P. Morgan. In their homes in New York and Paris, the Blumenthals assembled various collections representative of different tendencies in taste. The same interest in the past informed the construction of their eighteenth-century mansion in New York and Gothic dwelling on the Boulevard Montmorency; a few years and a change in fashion separate them, nothing more. Their architect and medieval archaeologist-decorator made use of period materials, where less scrupulous imitators would have been satisfied with copies accurate in form alone. In both interiors, a broad array of works of art cohabited harmoniously in an atmospheric setting. The six-volume catalogue of their collections inventories the Blumenthals’ paintings, sculpture, bronzes, objets d’art, tapestries, drawings, and furniture, which date from the Byzantine period through the late eighteenth century.71 All the great names in the history of [European] art are here represented, undifferentiated by country of origin but with a marked preference for moments of artistic brilliance. Even to list the principal works would be tedious. Because this spectacular collection continued to grow through acquisitions following the war, we must content ourselves with this simple summary of its highlights. In painting, Italian Primitives, works of the Sienese school in particular, dominated, along with others by Venetian, Flemish, French, and Spanish painters. Of the seventeenth century, only a single master need be mentioned, El Greco, represented by three works. We pass immediately to the eighteenth century, where the choice is typical of French taste: Lancret, Schall, Hubert Robert, Baudouin, Huet, Debucourt, Hoin, Moreau, [Nicolas Antoine] Taunay, Guardi. A number of drawings by Boucher, Saint-Aubin, Portail, David, and furniture by the finest master cabinetmakers remind one of the collectors’ long residence in Paris.72 Nevertheless, the heart of the collection consists of work from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. An impressive series of twelfth- and thirteenth-century representations of the Madonna and Child, comparable to those in any world-class museum, fifteenth-century wood sculpture, and sixteenth-century busts invite study of the finest achievements in the history of European art. Of the collection of objets d’art—enamels, ivories, and The triumph of Quality

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ceramics—the least one can say is that it compares well with those of Morgan and Walters.73 The Blumenthals’ fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tapestries included only works of the first order, produced in French or Flemish workshops: Setting Out for the Hunt, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Pastoral, The Life of Charlemagne, Esther and Ahasuerus, a Pietà, and much else. This brief summary can give only a faint idea of [96] the considerable importance of a collection that includes many of the finest European objects on the market shortly before and immediately following the war. Without wishing to establish any parallels between the Blumenthal collections and those of William Randolph Hearst nor to judge their relative qualities, one may nevertheless recognize the former’s relative modesty, representing as it were but a single “department,” as compared with the almost unimaginable scope of the latter, the achievement of America’s acknowledged premier collector.74 Hearst, who set out to make his fortune at the age of eighteen, experienced every aspect of American life, inventing some. Yet at the height of his powers, this apostle of Pan-Americanism found himself nostalgic for Europe and its history. Master of much of the American press, publisher of newspapers exerting daily influence over the thoughts and lifestyles of millions, kept constantly up to date by thousands of informants, a legendary personality, Hearst came to exert an absolute dictatorial control over a vast network with a truly global reach. Despite annual pronouncements of his decline, he survived every crisis, the last great American romantic hero of the rough-andtumble frontier period, unafraid to speak his mind, little concerned with the subtler yet impersonal politeness that so characterizes our far more murderous world today. Upon the death of his father [George, in 1891], Hearst had inherited an already considerable fortune, and his mother, Phoebe, later left him an important collection and appreciable endowment on the condition that he spend the revenue on art.75 But Hearst had not awaited this material encouragement to begin acquiring masterpieces. Beginning late in the [nineteenth] century, he had traveled the globe in search of architectural vestiges, works of sculpture, paintings, furniture, arms, and objets d’art, taking an interest in many different periods but always with a marked penchant for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What all does he own? In truth, Hearst himself may be the only one to know; possessed of an astonishing memory, he keeps careful track of his least acquisitions. His collections remain in perpetual motion, traveling the world from one of his numerous homes to another. Proprietor of considerable land holdings in California, Hearst built [Hearst Castle,] a medieval château in San Simeon. And there is also “Wyntoon,” his Bavarian village [in Northern California],76 [as well as] a residence in New York, Saint Donat’s Castle [in Wales], and a ranch in Mexico. In the various places he has lived, he and his architect, Julia Morgan, at the center of an army of builders and gardeners, have constructed, demolished, and transformed, redoing buildings and gardens, adding here an Egyptian mausoleum, there Roman monuments, along with mosaics, ceilings, chimneys, and medieval sculpture and tapestries selected from his enormous furniture warehouse in the Bronx.77 The ensemble of Hearst’s collections, if ever brought together in one place, would

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constitute a museum perhaps almost as important as the Victoria and Albert in South Kensington. Apart from the collection originally belonging to his mother (which included a considerable number of tapestries dating from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, furniture from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, rugs from Asia Minor and China, Persian manuscripts, but also paintings by Corot and [Henri] Rousseau), the taste of the late nineteenth century is easily recognizable here. Nevertheless, the presence of works by Monet, Lancret, and a few Spanish Primitives suggest the son’s greater breadth. Hearst, as it happens, always enjoyed Spanish art; his Hispano-Moresque ceramics, for example, are possibly superior to those at the Guillermo de Osma Institute in Madrid. His collection of armor includes later examples as well but, focused on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, is remarkable in every respect, enabling one to follow completely the evolution of the armorer’s art, just as his other collections make it possible to follow [the evolution] of embroidery, rug making, or German stoneware. Hearst was involved in every turn taken in American taste but not simply as a follower of fashion; quite the opposite, for instance, he was one of [97] the very first in the United States to express a passionate interest in the First Empire and even before the war owned extremely handsome furniture from this period and an immense painting by Antoine-Jean Gros. In his collection of medieval sculpture, similarly, he was far ahead of many in the know. For, beneath his obvious passion to possess, this great man of a thousand masks, who, for coming on fifty years has kept all America in thrall, hides a rare sensibility. Hearst’s collections have not escaped the acerbic criticism to which his own least actions are subject, although the full extent and quality [of these collections] would astonish even his detractors themselves. Heir to the great American tradition of collectors known for their eclecticism, Hearst, who was, of course, the contemporary and principal competitor of most [of these detractors], survived and largely surpassed them all. For, indeed, the United States in the period we have been considering knew an impressive number of adepts of this approach to collecting, which, between the Philadelphia Centennial and 1920, might be considered the defining style. Though in this book, for the sake of clarity, I have thought it proper to distinguish a number of different types of American collectors, [all] have been and remain eclectic, every last one of them. Despite occasional concentrations of objects, highly developed, exclusive specializations have been all but unknown. The causes of this eclecticism can be easily divined if we consider the three attitudes that have most defined American collectors: desire for a more direct connection with the past and with history in general; a love of palatial homes; but also, and more important, a determination to furnish the nation with collections of art comparable to those available abroad. Although, throughout this period, Americans traveled a great deal, these were no longer simple grand tours through England, Italy, or France but more thorough The triumph of Quality

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visits to Europe and other global destinations, monuments and collections included, resulting in a surer sense of history. With a certain sentimentality, deeply felt by numerous writers and artists, Americans became attached to the sites of older civilizations, where they were affected by the patina of timeworn objects, the atmosphere of old neighborhoods, and a gentler rhythm of life. Mary Cassatt, George Barnard, Henry Golden Dearth, Walter Gay, and James Hyde lived for years in France; Henry Walters attended a lycée in Paris; Morgan installed his collections in London; other amateurs lived in Italy, England, Germany, or Japan. Almost all the world’s monuments, great civilizations, and artistic treasures were known to and frequented by them. These visits, this history relived in situ, gave rise to a certain nostalgia that they sought to keep alive by collecting works of art from these various places. Over the course of periods spent living abroad, beyond these visits to public monuments, Americans here and there became acquainted with families, gaining entrée into European homes. The art they encountered in these interiors was nothing if not eclectic. Most often, the great European collections were held in historic buildings or more recent ones in which an atmosphere redolent of history was cultivated, true, for instance, of the homes of the Duc d’Aumale in Chantilly and of Alexandre du Sommerard, owner of the Hôtel de Cluny and the Jacquemart-André, in Paris; or that of Sir Richard Wallace in London, Prince Demidoff in Florence, Gian Giacomo Poldi-Pezzoli in Milan, or Don José Lazaro [Galdiano] in Madrid. In American collections, just as in European, the accent was usually on periods in art history considered great: Classical Antiquity, the French Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance; but[, in America,] there was not yet much serious specialization or focus on a single medium or technique, as was often the case in France. And, in fact, this same eclecticism in taste was characteristic of the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European collections as well. The Duc d’Aumale, the brothers Detuit, Émile Peyre, George Salting, Édouard Aynard, Comte de ChabrièreArlès, Martin Le Roy, Octave Homberg père, Robert Stayner Holford, [98] the Poldi-Pezzolis, Édouard André and Nélie Jacquemart-André, the Rothschilds, Oscar Hainauer, Léontine Lippman, and José Lazaro Galdiano similarly took interest in every branch of artistic activity. Americans living abroad, familiar with these great amateurs by reputation, sometimes managed to encounter their collections. The great ensembles associated with the names Demidoff, Spitzer, Gavet, Sedelmeyer, and Rodolphe Kann auctioned off during these years provided even better examples and permitted the acquisition of a variety of first-rate objects. To these contacts with Europe, one must add the influence of the great European art historians like Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Berlin Museum, who twice on visits to the United States offered advice to collectors. Such scholars were proponents of a didactic approach to collecting, as were [ James Jackson] Jarves and many American curators, favoring museums that attempted to put the evolution of the history of art on display as a means to illustrate human history and human thought. This same didacticism left its mark on the textbooks and histories of art published in this period in France and Germany.

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From time to time during their frequent stays in Europe, Americans like [Isabella Stewart] Gardner, [ J. P.] Morgan, and [Henry] Walters purchased works of art directly from collectors. On occasion, entire collections were bought outright. Those of Bardac, Hoenstchel, [Charles] Mannheim, Bardini, and [Gertude and Leo] Stein passed through Morgan’s hands; Walters, like Jarves, acquired an entire collection in Italy, as did Gardner (on more than one occasion). More often, recourse was had to antiquarian dealers who were not yet at this point specialists themselves, obliged by the difficulty of discovering works of art and the demands of their clients to limit their focus. Dealers like Frédéric Spitzer, Charles Sedelmeyer, the Duveens, Armand Lowengard, Léon Gruel, Jacques Seligmann, Ernest and René Gimpel, Tomas Harris, Samuel Bing, Georges Joseph Demotte, Joseph Brummer, Jacques Bacri, Emil Parès, Paul Rosenberg, Julius Böhler, Edward and Margaret Drey, Theodor Fischer, Raphael Stora, Charles Vignier, and Nicolas Brimo worked with almost every period of art and so disseminated strongly eclectic taste both in Europe and [in the United States,] through branch offices that some among their number opened in New York. [American a]mateurs dismissed the thought of specializing, liberated by the ease with which they could acquire beautiful objects from every time and place. This attitude comes as no surprise in individuals who sought to cultivate a similar inclusiveness in their lives and businesses and whose activities largely defined American cultural life at a time that owed its great public works and vast public collections to their largesse. Thanks to this generation of collectors, the simple souvenirs of travel and penchant for bric-a-brac that had characterized the early years of American eclecticism had yielded to an active embrace of quality and a clearer sense of history. Quite a number of lowly articles once sold by peddlers became works of art in the process.

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chapter 2

The Notion of the “Old Master”

Willingness to buy up everything the market had to offer, with every development in previous and contemporary art weighted equally, suggests an open-mindedness not to be confused with superior taste, but, rather, a certain passivity on the part of collectors, whose lack of defined preference was only rarely, [as] in the style of the brothers Goncourt, the sign of superior refinement.1 [There is n]othing more legitimate than to wish to live in an art-filled atmosphere, surrounded by diverse objects acquired to suit one’s pleasure. But this attitude could sometimes result in an impersonal accumulation of bric-a-brac defined more by the vicissitudes of the art market than by the desire to possess works carefully selected to recount the story—to complete the picture—of the history of art. Such eclecticism takes its own toll on the average quality of objects acquired, for it is evident that even the most informed amateur will be unable to appreciate to the same degree works of art from every era, widely differing in genre and technique. Viewed in this way, specialization might appear superior to eclecticism because more likely to give voice to an amateur’s personal preference. The interest in certain civilizations, periods, and techniques made collecting as a search for objects of superior quality possible but presupposed advanced knowledge in particular areas of chosen focus. Indeed, the passion to collect seems to increase in strength as its objects diminish in scope, a circumstance attended by risks. Apart from the fact that the filtering out of vast domains of artistic creativity in this fashion suggests somewhat limited sensibilities, the taste for a single sort of object tends to give rise to a philatelist-style enthusiasm. Desire to possess a complete run or examples of great rarity, so common among collectors of stamps and coins, encourages the amateur to think about the work of art in a manner foreign to its nature: as a specimen with its proper place in a series. A certain number of those who collected works by the “Old Masters” (to whom it seems reasonable to devote a chapter) operated in that realm where specialization and eclecticism intersect. They tended to choose among the range of works available those they found most beautiful or most significant, not to follow some artistic

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development or to complete a series but more abstractly, for the sake of their artistry and loveliness according to standards shared by similarly enlightened contemporary amateurs and connoisseurs who held education and the broadest possible enjoyment of art equally in mind. They sought only the best of the best in the hopes of communing with the masterpieces of artistic creativity. This, no doubt, involved an overinvestment in what was most exceptional, most precious, and most rare; but it was also an expression of personal taste because, in practical terms, the available choices were limited to a relatively few periods and artists. [102] It seems unnecessary to underscore the role of snobbery in the formation of collections of this kind. Though here the effect may be more dramatically obvious and frequent, we must not forget that, regardless of what one collects, beyond one’s personal taste, one’s choices are topically influenced by fashion, imitation, vanity, and the opinion of others. Most often, probably, the collector acts out of an indeterminate stew of differently weighted inner motives impossible to sort out but involving personal taste, fashion, the will to possess, and the desire to impress both one’s inner circle and society at large. This range of factors is easier to observe in the collections based on artistic importance, featuring objects worthy of the highest admiration. The celebrity of an artist and the occasionally unwavering admiration afforded the artist’s work here can be seen to underlie judgments of value. Such collectors merely follow and adopt the opinions of art writers, critics, artists, and dealers. The vanity of owning masterpieces, works by artists unanimously acclaimed for their particular accomplishment, tends to greatly influence a buyer, giving greater satisfaction than mere pleasure in a work of art to which the buyer feels some personal affinity. Nothing tells us more about the reasoning behind the purchase of a work of art by a “great master” than the changing definition of this category itself, the continual realignments in the hierarchies of relative worth. It might prove curious indeed to examine the way attitudes toward contemporary art have been informed by the scale of values governing this appreciation for older works, considering, for example, the play of influences connecting the fashion for Primitives with that for Nazarene or Pre-Raphaelite art; the vogue for Gothic Mannerism—or, say, the art of El Greco—with that for Fauvism or Expressionism. This, however, would too much distract us from our present purpose. The following descriptions of American collections of this variety are connected by variant notions of the “master” artist over time, though we cannot pretend to trace any continuous, unbroken thread of evolution. If the beginnings of trends are fairly easy to identify—the “discovery” of a great master; the “marketing” of a new genre—their disappearances are harder to discern. Once artists have been proclaimed great, taste for their art resists change; the same is true for entire periods. Secondary artists working in periods of greatness may be struck from the list, or, on occasion, a single Old Master from one or another period may be culled as “outmoded.” The variations, however, are almost imperceptible; the rhythm of change, slow. Numerous collectors, somewhat behind the current trend of contemporary fashion, continue to buy works of art already less admired. But the onsets of The triumph of Quality

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successive waves of taste are clear enough that the diverse tendencies characterizing one or another grand master collection are easily distinguished.2 The Old Masters whose works were most sought in the United States at the time of the Philadelphia Centennial were seventeenth-century Dutch, eighteenthcentury British, and an assortment of minor nineteenth-century anecdotal, Realist, and Romantic painters, along with a handful of figures from the Italian Renaissance. In earlier American collections, as we have seen, earlier periods were often represented by copies of celebrated masterpieces, only rarely by originals, and such was especially the case with Italian painting, for the tendency to purchase Flemish and Dutch art was more widespread, and the English landscape and portrait painters [were] always highly admired. A distinct group of American collections in the final third of the nineteenth century shared this strong, stubborn taste at once for northern painting and nineteenth-century Realism, which would only slowly weaken. Take, for example, the collection of William. L. Elkins of Philadelphia, formed roughly between 1887 and 1900.3 A clear preference is easily discerned for Dutch portraitists like Frans Hals, van Mierevelt, Bol, and de Bray, Dutch landscapists like van der Meer and Albert Cuyp (represented by four paintings), and, of course, the most important British masters in these same genres: Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Romney, on the one hand, and Richard Wilson, John Crome, Constable, and Turner, on the other. [George] Morland, with three paintings, held a place of [103] particular importance. The area of nineteenth-century Continental painting was represented by three works by Díaz, two by Daubigny, two by Corot, two by Millet, two by Jongkind, three by Jozef Israëls, two by Raffaëlli, two by Jean-Charles Cazin, and three by Frits Thaulow. But Detaille, de Neuville, and J. P. Laurens were not forgotten, nor curiously, at this early date, were artists like Carrière and Monet. Of this ensemble, we might note the following: no Italian painting to speak of apart from Venetian landscapes by Canaletto and Guardi and a single Bronzino; no Rembrandts; no work by chiaroscuro painters apart from a single Aert van Gelder; absolutely nothing of the French seventeenth century; and very little in the way of Romantic painting beyond the work of minor figures like Isabey or epigones like Regnault. Representative images were thinly painted, more or less virtuoso Continental portraits and landscapes “after nature” and English portraits and Romantic landscapes, all rather coherent. Similar criteria informed another period collection, that of Charles H. Senff of New York, one of the richest and best appointed in the genre. Senff made his purchases from Knoedler and Durand-Ruel between 1889 and the end of the century.4 Italian art was represented by a single work, a Madonna by Luini, considered by critics at the time one of the great Renaissance painters. The tendency to solid color dear to the northern school, aligned with the period taste for pictorial realism, characterize two works by Hals and others by van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Hobbema, and van der Meer. A Vermeer portrait nicely suited this company; another by Rembrandt was added in 1900. A Turner found its companion piece in a Claude [Lorrain]. Along with a Rubens, these works accounted for premodern painting. The

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nineteenth century reigned triumphant, and the works chosen supplemented the romantic Realism of the Barbizon school with a few “poetical” landscapes by Harpignies, Díaz (six paintings), Félix Ziem, and Monticelli (five). The principal originality of Senff ’s collection was that here works of Romanticism have been included not for their connection with the anecdotal Realism of the northern (Dutch or English) schools but because [they were] valued in their own right. Two paintings by Delacroix, two by Courbet, and several by Monticelli kept company with an impressive number of works by Dupré, Daubigny, Corot (eight paintings), and [Théodore] Rousseau—and, in recognition of more recent tendencies in taste, widely divergent from the general lines of previous American collections, a Degas landscape and a Puvis de Chavannes as well. Romanticism and the new classicism of these latter painters had gained admission to the gallery of masterpieces in what amounted to a sort of breakdown of the “Realist” aesthetic of the previous era. Between 1890 and 1900, and especially early in the new century, relative appreciation of the work of modern artists underwent considerable change.5 Even tidier in composition was the Chicago collection of James McCormick. If the art of the French nineteenth century predominates, with works by Georges Michel, Corot, Jacque, Troyon, Díaz, Dupré, Daubigny, Lhermitte, [ÉdouardLouis] Dubufe, Roybet, and Gérôme sharing space with others by Manet, Boudin, and Courbet—proof of a sure, albeit wandering, eye—an important place was made for the Italian painters Corregio, Zuccarelli, and Canaletto. The great English portraitists Gainsborough, Lawrence, and Reynolds, along with Hogarth and Constable, redress the balance in favor of the mode of taste that we have been considering.6 These examples suffice to bring out the movement’s chief characteristics. Throughout, we might note the preference for eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury English painting, with works by Constable and Turner that lacked significantly in atmospheric, coloristic magic and romance, in skies aflame, in drama heightened by painterly effect. Of the works by these artists available to them, Americans chose what they found most recognizable: the Dutch landscape in Constable; the Claude- and Wilson- and Venetian-style classicism in Turner and Crome. [104] Yet affinities between English painting and the most typical expressions of period taste—works by Ruysdael and Hobbema, Millet and Troyon—do not in themselves explain the defining presence of English painting in late nineteenthcentury collections. The vogue for British and British-style portraiture in a United States strongly tied to the former mother country by origin, language, literature, and travel never diminished, heightened by such powerful influences as that of Ruskin. The United States never fully dissociated itself from English culture; over the course of the nineteenth century, English art never completely lost the prestige it had enjoyed back in the day of Benjamin West and Copley. In Chicago, the Reverend Frank Wakely Gunsaulus, a passionate lover of the arts, did much to foster their spread and, between 1895 and roughly 1900, amassed The triumph of Quality

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a magnificent collection of Wedgwood porcelain, the largest in the world, left upon his death to the Art Institute.7 The same admiration for English art is evident in the collection of R. Hall McCormick, where the great eighteenth-century portraitists Hogarth, Reynolds, and Gainsborough are joined by Benjamin West, Lawrence, Etty, Bonington, and, something of a surprise, George Frederic Watts. Holbein and Van Dyke here count as Englishmen, but the presence of Watts suggests that American contacts with England did transcend the habitual criteria of period appreciation.8 A beautiful set of English paintings, a gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by George A. Hearn, is interesting from more than one standpoint. We know Hearn hoped to create a gallery of masterpieces in the image of the Louvre’s Salon Carré and the Uffizi’s Tribuna.9 But of the fifty or more paintings he chose with that project in mind, the largest number (thirty-four) were English and only a few were French, a Claude and a Blanchard among them, the latter quite handsome. An equally small number of Dutch works by Pieter de Hooch, Eeckhout, Jongkind, and Flemish-born Van Dyke were overshadowed by a dozen works by nineteenthcentury Americans. The English collection, quite remarkable, included landscapes by Bonington, Raeburn, and Hogarth, portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Lely, Raeburn, and Hogarth, and genre paintings by Cotman and Morland. Among the Americans, only Homer and Inness could be thought worthy of this illustrious company. Few collections at the time were considered as important or as valuable as an example of good taste. Edward R. Bacon, for his part, formed a collection with a much less ambitious program [but] with no less varied or important result. His acquisitions began with the moderns: [Luis] Álvarez [Catalá], Domingo, Madrazo, Daubigny, Benlliure y Gil, Schreyer, Leloir, Charlemont, Lucas, Tamburini. After a number of visits to Paris, he took interest in the French eighteenth century: Largillière, Drouais, Pater, Boucher, Nattier, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, Vigée Le Brun. But the English school appealed to him: Van Dyke, seven works by Reynolds, four by Gainsborough, four by Romney, twelve by Hoppner, six by Lawrence, two by Raeburn, one by Turner. To this, he added a considerable ensemble of Dutch masters. Finally, late in life, Bacon turned to the Italian Primitives, purchasing a painting by a follower of Giotto, one by Filippo Lippi, another by Ghirlandaio. He embraced the arts of Spain as well, acquiring works by Moro, Coello, Carreño de Miranda, and Goya. Independent minded as a collector, Bacon enjoyed making personal discoveries; improving his collection, which came to comprise no fewer than 290 paintings of varying quality, though some very fine, was his principal and constant concern.10 Other amateurs of lesser reach are still worthy of mention. Herbert L. Terrell in New York owned a fine Gainsborough and a Reynolds;11 Ralph Cross Johnson in Washington, an assortment of works by Gainsborough, Raeburn, Hogarth, Lawrence, Romney, Reynolds, Wilson, and a very fine Turner, along with Italian paintings by Francia, Titian, and Guardi, and Dutch works by Rembrandt, Maes, and Govaert Flinck.12

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What all this points to incrementally in the end is less an exclusive preference for English [105] art than an English bias discernible in broader collections, two important examples of which remain to be considered. The first, that of Morris Ketchum and Maria DeWitt Jesup, bequeathed to the Metropolitan in 1915, included very pretty northern school paintings, two by Salomon van Ruysdael and a third attributed to Frans Hals. Basically, everything else— apart from a Nattier and several nineteenth-century landscapes by Daubigny, Díaz, and Cazin, and a tiny painting by Corot—was the work of English landscape painters such as Wilson, Constable, Bonington, and, in particular, the Norwich artists John Crome and George Vincent.13 Portraits were more numerous: a famous Reynolds, two Romneys, a Gainsborough; others by Hoppner, Lawrence, Wilkie, and [George] Morland. Significantly, something we have already noted of the collection of George Hearn, works by an important number of early to mid-nineteenthcentury American painters like Church and Durand, landscapes for the most part, had attained “Old Master” status. In the collection of William Wallace Kimball, a gift to the Art Institute in 1921 from his widow, Eveline, Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley found their respective places in an ensemble dominated by the Barbizon school but which included works by Reynolds, Constable, Wilson, Gainsborough, Lawrence, and Romney, along with a few fine Dutch works by Hobbema, Ruysdael, and Rembrandt.14 For two collectors, John Howard McFadden and Henry E. Huntington, English art came to represent what we might term an “exclusive passion.” The McFadden collection rightly counts as one of the best known. First attracted to the agreeable aspect of English painting, McFadden subsequently made up his mind to document that school’s development from [William] Hogarth to David Cox. His collection includes two gorgeous genre scenes (The Assembly at Wanstead House; The Fountaine Family) but mostly portraits, Reynolds’s Master Bunbury and eight Romneys, a remarkable portrait of Dorothy de Crespigny among them. We might also make mention, of McFadden’s eight Raeburns (including Master John Campbell of Saddell), Sir Thomas Lawrence’s unforgettable full-length [portrait] of Harriott West as “Rose of Kent,” and works by George Henry Harlow, John Hoppner, and Watson Gordon.15 Somewhat later, McFadden came to appreciate the English landscape tradition and rounded off his collection with the purchase of a number of fine examples of the work of Crome, Constable, and Bonington, the last represented by a view of the Normandy coast.16 These works, now at the Pennsylvania Museum, are among the finest British paintings in the United States. The most complete collection of this sort, however, if only thanks to the renown of one or two pictures, would have to be that of the Henry E. Huntington Foundation of San Marino, California, an art museum adjoined to a magnificent library, founded in 1920, the principal center of British literary and historical studies in America, with no fewer than 200,000 volumes, 4,000 manuscripts, and 80,000 autographs.17 Huntington began to accumulate these materials around the turn of the century but organized the trust charged with managing them only in The triumph of Quality

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1919. Among his English paintings, the best known is certainly Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, but Raeburn’s Lord Stanley and other portraits by Hoppner, Reynolds, Lawrence, and Cotes must not be forgotten. The landscapes in the collection differed appreciably from those Americans generally admired: dramatic and rather romantic works by Gainsborough, Turner, and Constable. What is more, Huntington’s collections in San Marino included not just English works but eighteenthcentury French tapestries after Boucher, Chinese ceramics, an important collection of sixteenth-century Italian bronzes, some eighteenth-century furniture, and a number of famous sculptures by Pigalle (Boy Seated, Holding a Bird Cage; Boy Eating an Apple), Falconet (Venus and Cupid), and two large marble vases by Clodion. Nonetheless, the non-English art in the collection is largely decorative, adding ambiance and atmosphere but not essential to the magnificent synthesis of English genius the great American railroad baron created in memory of his wife, Arabella. Such admiration for English art drew upon various sources. [106] Compounding affection for a shared culture that went back to the colonial period, an expression of interdependence still active well into the nineteenth century, a more superficial, more recent enthusiasm swept the United States following the [Great War]. Snooty, pro-English sentiment found expression in the acquisition of English silver,18 English furniture, and even, for some, an English refinement in pronunciation, seen also in a vogue for English painting of which Huntington remained the noblest, most refined exemplar. This is a far cry from the admiration of English art by many collectors for its qualities of mimetic exactitude and truth to life combined with a technical and coloristic brilliance also typical of seventeenth-century Dutch and mid-nineteenth-century French landscapes. We have to go back a certain number of years to find examples of such refined taste in a collection specializing in work by northern masters. One recalls that the first purchases made for the Metropolitan Museum by William T. Blodgett in Europe in 1871 comprised Dutch and Flemish paintings almost exclusively.19 The [Henry Gurdon] Marquand donation in 1888 would complete the series with fine paintings by Van Dyke, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer, along with a Turner and a Lucas de Leyde. The museum’s ambitions in this area continued and, after 1876, intensified. Throughout the 1880s, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts had on exhibit a fine grouping of ten paintings purchased by Stanton White at the Prince Demidoff sale in San Donato that included landscapes and genre paintings: two works by Ruysdael and others by Metsu, Netscher, Nicolaes Maes, and Teniers, along with still lifes by van Huysum and Willem Kalf.20 Another selection from San Donato was purchased from Princess Demidoff herself in 1890 by the Art Institute of Chicago, in whose 1896 collection catalogue consequently appear paintings by Ruysdaels and Hobbema, van der Neer, Goyen, and van de Velde in addition to Teniers, Steen, [Gerard] ter Borch, and [Willem] van Mieris. A portrait of a girl by Rembrandt and others by Hals, Rubens, and Van Dyke represented a tradition much admired by the eighteenth-century English.21

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The paintings collection of the Detroit Institute of Art evolved in much the same way, thanks to an important gift from James E. Scripps in 1889. His was an extremely coherent collection into which nevertheless a number of Primitive works had slipped: a beautiful triptych by Allegretto di Nuzio, a Last Judgment by Jean Provost, a few Italian paintings by Guido Reni and Pannini, French paintings by Claude, and Spanish paintings by Murillo. However, northern works made up the core of the collection: two paintings each by Rubens, van der Neer, and Wouwermann, the first pair of extremely fine quality; a predominance of genre paintings by Karel Dujardin, de Hooch, Steen, Teniers, Wynants, and de Witte; a few solid landscapes by Berckheyde, Albert Cuyp, Hobbema, Salomon van Ruysdael, and van der Velde. Portraits, with the exception of a Van Dyke and a Rubens, were few and far between.22 It seems remarkable that, apart from these four collections, Dutch art rarely stood on its own [in American collections] and, apart from a few exceptional cases, had grown less fashionable, and that, beginning in the 1890s, second- as well as first-tier Dutch painting had lost its Old Master status. A few amateurs did continue to own a large number of typical Dutch paintings, although this became increasingly rare to judge by those artists considered worthy of inclusion in the rigorously vetted Hudson-Fulton Exhibition organized by the Met in 1909.23 It was a standard of taste preserved in the collections of Henry C[lay] Frick and Joseph Widener. To the residence of the former, only Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Hals, Rubens, Hobbema, Ruysdael, Vermeer, Albert Cuyp, ter Borch, and [Adriaen] van Ostade would gain admission. Widener concentrated his efforts on Rembrandt, by whom he came to own some fourteen paintings in all, a few of them beautiful ones, notably The Mill,24 along with eight Van Dykes, almost all of excellent quality. Among the other northern school painters, he would admit only Cuyp, Hobbema [107], Hals, Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Adriaen and Isaac van Ostades, Ruysdael, Steen, and Rubens. A selection of this kind makes the shift in taste where Dutch painting was concerned readily apparent, especially if we consider that Widener’s Van Dykes are in the artist’s loveliest Italian style, and that certain among his Rembrandts depict religious subjects. We shall return to these two important collectors; for the moment, it has been useful to note their place in a broader pattern. The same observation can be made with regard to increasing recognition of the fundamentally pictorial qualities of Old Masters in the much less important collection amassed by Edgar B. Whitcomb in Detroit at the very end of the period in question. It included, in addition to portraits by Tintoretto and Guardi, a Van Dyke, Rembrandt’s portrait of his son, Titus, a Rubens mythological subject (Briseis Given Back to Achilles), a Hobbema, and a Ruysdael, along with several English landscapes, a family portrait by Gainsborough, and a Hoppner.25 This marked the final stage in developments otherwise brought to an end in 1914 by the outbreak of war. After having enjoyed a moment of almost exclusive fashionability, Dutch, English, and nineteenth-century French painting fell out of The triumph of Quality

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favor; the new, more expansive taste embraced many fewer artists and those with the biggest names. The fates of these three schools [English, Dutch. and Barbizon] were not the same. Although English portraits retained their prestige, sometimes even gaining in prestige like those in the Huntington collection, and Dutch painting tended to be defined by a number of artists far removed from the Realist aesthetics of the nineteenth century like Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyke, and Hals, the Barbizon school fell into disgrace more or less in its entirety. Attention turned instead to figures like Courbet, Delacroix, Daumier, and the Impressionists. So many works by the likes of Millet, Troyon, Rousseau, and Dupré had been acquired during the second half of the century that these artists lost all their attraction for American collectors. The same, in fact, was true in Europe, where, with the vogue for Dutch painting, as exemplified in the critical writings of Théophile Thoré-Bürger and Eugène Fromentin [and in] the great fashion for landscapes purchased at great cost and in large numbers by men like Alfred Chauchard and Tommy Thierry in France, [the] prestige [of the Barbizon artists] collapsed by the end of the century. However, the parallels between Europe and the United States did not hold entirely. Whereas, in Europe, more and more amateurs were smitten by the vogue for the eighteenth century even as the Impressionists gained favor, in America, Italian painting was in fashion, the Italian Primitives especially. American interest in the Italian sixteenth century came late but at a time when a good number of important works were on the market. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, European collectors had fought over Raphael, Titian, Corregio, and Veronese tooth and nail.26 The creation of museums early in the nineteenth century led to a permanent transfer of masterpieces from swollen eighteenth-century collections into the public domain.27 These artists were the Old Masters esteemed by amateurs with an interest in the seventeenth century. Dutch painters, Rembrandt in particular, gained ground, though Raphael would remain more highly celebrated. The establishment of important public collections had, of course, thinned the ranks of first-order works available; during the first half of the nineteenth century, curators at the National Gallery in London and the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and individual buyers like the Duc d’Aumale, spent fortunes snapping up the few pieces still on the market. Up until 1876, American collectors could not compete with their European counterparts. Works of sixteenth-century Italian art were extremely rare and, among Americans, the understanding necessary to appreciate even fine examples at their full worth was still lacking. As a matter of personal taste, [ James Jackson] Jarves focused on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century painting, but to obtain significant examples of the art of the sixteenth century was for him impossible. During the Gilded Age, conditions were entirely different; and, after the turn of the century, the principal collectors of Italian Renaissance paintings were all Americans.28 What Americans had possessed in 1876 in the way of Renaissance painting [108] was minor indeed, with no collections of any importance, aside from those of Jarves and Bryant. We have a good grasp of this situation thanks to a series of articles

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published by Berenson late in the century.29 In 1896, the best collection in New York was that of the New-York Historical Society, which included a tondo attributed to Piero della Francesca, a somewhat dubious Mantegna, a work possibly by Giorgione, and another after Paris Bordone,30 though the Metropolitan did hold two Piero di Cosimo hunting scenes, the gift of Robert Gordon in 1875.31 Marquand owned two Tiepolos and a Florentine fresco probably by Piero del Pollaiuolo; Theodore Davis in Newport, two very good Moronis and a Tintoretto; the Carnegie Institute, a Holy Family by Costa. The wealth was better shared in Boston, with a small Pietà by Basaiti at the Museum of Fine Arts, Botticelli’s Death of Lucretia at the Gardner [Museum], and works by Vivarini and Mainardi in the collection of Quincy Shaw. The only major collection of real interest in Cambridge, in both quality and influence, belonged to Charles Eliot Norton, who taught at Harvard. It included two Tintorettos, a Pietro Longhi, and, most significantly at this point in time, El Greco’s Marriage at Cana. Not only was there little sustained interest in Italian painting, [but also,] without proponents, this circumstance seemed unlikely to change, perhaps due in part to public aversion to religious and mythological subjects and nudes. After 1900, Italian paintings began to cross the Atlantic in large numbers. Collections made up of fine and rare works were assembled in just a few years, and things were just getting started. We must note, however, that preferences ran not to the period between Raphael and the Carraccis but to works from the late fifteenth century. And where the sixteenth century was concerned, most collectors showed a preference for the Venetians, perhaps with that of Ruskin still in mind. Very few collectors focused their attention on the sixteenth century exclusively.32 Ralph Cross Johnson, for instance, owned, in addition to a lovely Titian and works by Francia, Mainardi, and Lotto, Dutch, Flemish, and English paintings of very high quality. Though eclectic in taste, he was not yet willing to make room for earlier European or so-called Primitive painting in his gallery of Old Masters.33 This was equally true of even of Frick, who, attracted first to the Dutch seventeenth and then to the French eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, owned no Italian paintings to speak of, apart from an extremely fine Giovanni Bellini, two large allegorical compositions by Veronese, a Bronzino, two portraits by Titian, and a Tiepolo.34 As we shall soon see, the [ Joseph] Widener collection, in addition to its northern works, held a number of Italian paintings of good quality. Such sixteenth-century Italian paintings, [in] a tradition considered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century [European] amateurs the most glorious in the history of art, never provoked an exclusive or even a very considerable enthusiasm among American collectors, whose taste ran more to the art of earlier eras still. As the medieval period itself became better known thanks to advances in historical understanding and research, appreciation of undervalued collections like those of Jarves and Bryant increased little by little, as did taste for those artists mistakenly referred to as “Primitives,” who were greatly promoted in scholarly accounts devoted to their work, a process to which the example of a Europe newly The triumph of Quality

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interested in its own past also contributed. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century masters little by little took their place beside sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists of greater fame. The term “masterpiece” and the high praise that accompanied it, until then reserved for [painting from] the Renaissance, was newly employed to describe medieval painting. Giotto was saluted as a genius equal to Michelangelo or Raphael; little by little, the standards of evaluation themselves became modified as the notion of progress fell out of favor, no more justified in art than in any other arena of civilized pursuit. Change came rather slowly, however. Taste for early European painting took hold only with difficulty, and long remained the province of a small few. The shift in national taste when it did occur resulted in large part from a particular sentimental and symbolic value attached in the United States to the remotest periods of history. [109] New scholarship opened the floodgates to a critical literature in a more or less romantic vein characteristic of the early stages of art history in the United States as in Europe. Appeals to the imagination and calls for a more poetic sensibility contributed to this passion for “Primitives,” more discernible in American collections than others. The role of contemporary artists in promoting this new admiration must again be noted. We have seen eclectic collectors show greater and greater interest in “high” art before. American amateurs were at first drawn to the most ponderous, least naturalistic work in a style we might describe in apparently contradictory fashion as “classically primitive,” produced in Italy. Their success in collecting such work after the turn of the century was astonishing. Most examples discovered found their way, sooner or later, into American collections. Only a few major museums (and minor collectors) in the Old World managed to keep anything of significance.35 Nothing could be more instructive in this regard than comparing Berenson’s 1896 article on Italian painting held in American collections, previously cited, with a more recent work by Lionello Venturi devoted to the same subject.36 If numerous masterpieces have continued to arrive in the United States since 1919, the close of the period we are considering, it is nonetheless true that a considerable number had already done so much earlier in the century. The role of [Charles Eliot] Norton and [Bernard] Berenson in this realignment of fin de siècle American taste cannot be exaggerated. Berenson’s essay and others equally important that followed inspired numerous amateurs, showing the way, inspiring their involvement in a still relatively new arena in which discoveries were still possible. There was a veritable stampede into fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian art, and, little by little, interest spread to the “Primitive” painters of the northern schools as well. The influence of these early art historians and [that of] American dealers, principally Joseph Duveen, who opened for business in 1900 and, by 1913, Franz Kleinberger, but also [of] numerous antiquarian firms in Italy, Germany, and France, was instrumental in cultivating this taste. A number of specialists in pre-Renaissance Italian art emerged, and journals and books devoted to the subject proliferated. Important studies by [Bernard] Berenson, Adolfo Venturi, [Wilhelm von] Bode,

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Charles Loeser, Mason Perkins, and, somewhat later, Osvald Sirén, [Lionello] Venturi, Raimond van Marle, and Roger Fry contributed to this period’s ascendance. The personal contributions of Norton and Berenson are easily seen in the history of the Italian collections at the Fogg. The [ James Jackson] Jarves collection had been at Yale since 1871, although little known and underappreciated. Norton, a friend of Jarves and proponent of Ruskin’s ideas at Harvard, where he taught art history, created as it were out of thin air a circle of brilliant minds sharing a passion for the arts of early Europe: his own son, Richard Norton, Berenson, Edward W. Forbes, Chandler Post, Paul J. Sachs—all of them his students.37 Bit by bit, a collection of Italian Primitives, gathered at Harvard under Forbes’s direction, served to refurbish the honor of the Jarves collection at Yale, first catalogued by Osvald Sirén in 1916, more than forty years following its acquisition, followed just three years later by a catalogue of works at the Fogg.38 Of the great eclectic collectors who responded to this call to discover the Italian Primitives, we have already considered Isabella Stewart Gardner, noting her purchase of fifteenth-century Italian paintings even before 1900 on Berenson’s advice. J. P. Morgan in New York, Martin A. Ryerson in Chicago, and Henry Walters in Baltimore belong to this company as well. Additional familiar examples could easily be cited, but it seems useless at this point to revisit collections touched on previously when we might more logically describe others with Primitive painting their particular focus. We must note at the outset that Italy did not continue to enjoy the privileged status afforded it by Ruskin as the only birthplace of great painters following the Renaissance, classically defined. In the eyes of collectors like John G[raver] Johnson and the Lehmans [Philip and Carrie Laurer], Ryerson and Friedsam, [110] Charles Deering and the Hispanic Society of America, Flemish, French, and even Spanish Primitives gave the Italian Primitives a run for their money.39 Among the oldest as well as most distinguished collections of early European painting, [the one] given the Pennsylvania Museum of Art by [ John Graver] Johnson deserves first mention. The magnificent catalogue of that collection compiled by [Bernard] Berenson and Wilhem Reinhold Valentiner lists no fewer than 800 paintings, most dating to the fifteenth century. We can give only a very incomplete account of this collection: its Italian masterpieces would include a four-part predella depicting the legend of Saint Mary Magdalen by Botticelli, a Madonna and Child by Gentile da Fabriano, a Signorelli Annunciation, a Crivelli, Victor Carpaccio’s Story of Alcione (one of the best works in the collection), a Cima da Conegliano, and a Paris Bordone. Johnson’s Flemish works, also of extremely high quality, included Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata by van Eyck, a well-known van der Weyden, Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and Saint John, a Campin, a well-known Dirk Bouts, Moses Before the Burning Bush, a Gerard David, and a number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Isenbrandt, Matsys, and Pieter Brueghel [the elder].40 Johnson owned later works as well, including The Rescue of Philemon and Baucis from the Flood and a precious set of sketches by Rubens. Like a number of his American contemporaries, he had begun as a collector of the BarThe triumph of Quality

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bizon school but also of Puvis de Chavannes. The art of the latter led him to the Primitives.41 A smaller but perhaps even better selection could be seen among the works assembled by Henry Goldman, a collector of the first order, broad minded, always seeking out the finest-quality object possible, whether a Greek head by a follower of Praxiteles, a Donatello terra cotta, an Andrea della Robbia bas-relief, or a Jean de Boulogne bronze. Goldman began with the purchase of a Rembrandt, and his Hals, his Teniers, his Titian, his Holbein, his Jean Clouet, his Rubens, and his Van Dyke could hold their own in any great museum. The best known among his paintings were by artists who personified new tendencies: Bernardo Daddi, Petrus Christus, Masolino, Bartolomeo Veneto. The highly developed personality and highly refined taste of the individual responsible for this selection are worth underlining.42 The interior of the home of Philip and Carrie Lauer Lehman transported one with a unity of conception and carefully orchestrated atmosphere, where one breathed perhaps better than anywhere else in America, every object of exceptional quality. The Lehmans’ acquisitions offer a broad window on the evolution of taste in the United States during the period in question. In 1911, they purchased Hoppner’s Portrait of the Countess of Darnley and Lady Elizabeth Bligh, a number of works by Rembrandt, ter Borch’s pendant portraits of Margaretha van Haexbergen and burgomaster Jan van Duren, but also a Cossa. In 1912, this “Primitivist” orientation grew stronger with their acquisition of a Madonna and Child by Crivelli and two panels by Gerard David; yet again, a Raeburn, but also Saint Jerome as Cardinal, the first appearance of El Greco in an American collection. After 1913, despite the purchase of a portrait of Maria Theresa by Velázquez, Primitives predominated: a Giovanni di Paolo and portrait of a woman by Uccello in 1913; a portrait and an Annunciation by Memling and Petrus Christus in 1916; and, after the war, works by French Primitives, the Master of Moulins and Corneille de Lyon. But the principal originality of the collection was the Lehmans’ purchase between 1916 and 1920 of Italian paintings from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the end of documenting the school’s earliest origins.43 All in appreciating the affected style and striking expressions of these Madonnas and Saints, the Lehmans remained keenly aware of their decorative value, covering the walls of their home with a splendid Gothic tapestry [111] à fleurette and beautiful Italian Renaissance velvets; their tables with first-quality objets d’art: ewers and Limoges enamels. Glass display cases holding an important collection of Italian ceramics and furniture chosen with the effect of the ensemble in mind attest to the Lehmans’ fine sensibilities. Everything here was chosen, not for the name of its maker or to represent some celebrated epoch in the history of art, but for its individual beauty alone, for striking a particular note. The eclectic nature of his choices aside, the paintings assembled and recently left to the City of New York by Jules S. Bache should be counted among these great collections. The importance of the works Bache selected was high, especially where Primitives were concerned; that he aspired to collect masterpieces can readily be

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seen. Despite this high ambition and the diverse origins of his paintings themselves, the disparate areas of his collection work well together. Bache began collecting Italian Primitives with the fifteenth century; objects from before 1400 seem to have held no interest for him. At the core of the collection were works by Bellini, Crivelli, Mantegna, Domenico Veneziano, Girolamo da Cremona, Tura, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Signorelli. From the sixteenth century, Raphael and Titian must be added to this list. Nor were the works of northern art inferior to these in quality. Dirk Bouts, Petrus Christus, van der Weyden, Memling, Gerard David, Dürer, and Holbein represent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in dignified fashion. For the seventeenth, the choice of works by Van Dyke, Hals, Rembrandt, ter Borch, and Vermeer, though restrained, was nonetheless significant. The art of Spain was represented only by Velázquez and Goya; that of England, by a handful of portraits by Gainsborough, Raeburn, Romney, and Reynolds; and that of France, by the eighteenth-century painters Watteau, Boucher, Drouais, Fragonard, Pater, Hubert Robert, and Vigée Le Brun. The governing idea was to choose the most representative art of every period, a questionable concept here too rigidly applied. One senses the touch of professionals, experts and art historians. This absence of discernible individual preferences renders the result somewhat monotonous, more a museum collection chosen with discernment than a private collection lovingly chosen in response to personal taste.44 The second ensemble, less eclectic, devoted almost entirely to the art of the Italian Primitives was owed to the enthusiasm of a highly independent collector who lived surrounded by his paintings in Englewood, New Jersey, Dan Fellows Platt. His was, numerically speaking, one of the most considerable collections of its kind ever gathered by an individual. Platt also collected drawings. Despite the absence of [works by] the most important, universally recognized names, the well-chosen ensemble features works of great value characteristic of American taste in early European painting. Fourteenth-century Tuscany is represented by Daddi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Segna, Tiberio di Assisi, Taddeo di Bartolo, and Guido da Siena; Florentine painting by a considerable number of secondary works. Sienese painters Giovanni di Paolo, Sassetta, Sano di Pietro, and Vecchietta offer a quattrocento sequence as complete as it is important. Umbria and Le Marche in central Italy are represented by Jacobello del Fiore, Antonio da Fabriano, Mazzola, and Palmezzano. Works from the Veneto by Giovanni Bellini, Crivelli, Mantegna, Antonio and Bartolomeo Vivarini are numerous as well. Where fifteenth-century Florence is concerned, the collection’s coverage, though thinner, includes works by Neri di Bicci, Ghirlandaio, and Pier Francesco Fiorentino. Foppa, Luini, and Solario from neighboring Lombardy are not forgotten either. From the sixteenth century, Platt chose fewer paintings: a Beccafumi, a Brescianino, a Fra Bartolomeo. To acquire these works required erudition and open-mindedness well beyond the shift in fashion that elevated Primitives to the status of Old Masters. Here we clearly see the hand of the specialist in a particular, preferred period.45 The triumph of Quality

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Something similar can be said with regard to a number of smaller collections with focus on the trecento or quattrocento: those, for example, of Frank C. Smith of Worcester, who owned two paintings each by Sano di Pietro and Bernardo Daddi and works by Giovanni dal Ponte, the Master of San Miniato [112], and Lorenzo Monaco,46 or of Arthur Sachs, who displayed in his homes in France and America works by Agnolo Gaddi, Segna, Neroccio, a well-known late fourteenth-century Annunciation, and sixteenth- century works by Titian and Tintoretto. The collection that Platt’s close friend Frank Lusk Babbott recently left to the Brooklyn Museum is again similar in style [and], though less rigorous and even incomplete, worthy of a major museum. It includes a mosaic by a follower of Cavallini, the portrait of a saint by an Adriatic painter, and works by Andrea di Bartolo, Giovanni Franceso da Rimini, and Lorenzo Monaco. The late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are [still] less complete, including only works by Vivarini, Carlo Crivelli, Palma Vecchio, and Pontormo.47 A striking example of an “early Renaissance” focus of this kind is furnished by the fine collection of Cyrus W. Hamilton, a limited but altogether judicious selection of exclusively Italian paintings, a number of which might be counted among the masterpieces of European art in the United States: Domenico Veneziano’s Saint John in the Desert; a Piero della Francesca Crucifixion; a Fra Filippo Lippi Madonna and Child. Hamilton’s remaining paintings, though less exceptional, include works by Perugino, Botticelli, Luini, and a well-known Bellini, today in the Widener collection. Paintings by Saint Roch de Francia, Melzi, and Bernardino de’ Conti are also worthy of mention. Only a portrait by Titian and Ribera’s The Monk breach the chronological limits this collector set himself.48 Another collection of this kind, formed around 1914, at the very end of our period of concern, was that of Samuel H. Kress.49 Here we observe again the tendency [of the collector,] seen, for instance, in Platt and Smith, to begin with fourteenth-century Italian painting,50 in this instance, works of considerable importance. Ugolino da Siena’s The Passion of Christ, a Duccio, an Agnolo Gaddi, along with a number of fine workshop paintings were the collection’s principal attractions. But one also encountered paintings by Sano di Pietro and Matteo di Giovanni, by well-known Florentines such as Neri di Bicci, Cosimo Rosselli, and Piero di Cosimo and by sixteenth-century figures such as Fra Bartolomeo and Franciabigio. In his disinterest in Venetian painting, Kress stood out among his contemporaries, though what did interest him was the art of Tuscany. It would do an injustice to the Kress collection not to note its extensive holdings of drawings and prints acquired in an extremely eclectic spirit, including works by American, Italian Renaissance, English Romantic, French, and even German artists. To this group of collectors must be added Frank J. Mather, professor of Art History at Princeton. Like Kress, Mather had a deep interest in early drawing, with a predilection for the work of Italian artists. Where painting was concerned, he shared a taste for the High Primitives fashionable in the late 1910s, thanks in part to his own efforts and those of specialists like him. A fine series of Byzantine paintings

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constituted the core of a collection that also included works by Pietro Lorenzetti, Mariotto di Nardo, and Masolino; Venetian cassoni; and a number of fine examples of Umbrian and Venetian painting. Mather’s American Modernist paintings constituted a collection within the collection. Edward Forbes, as director of the Fogg, had long taken an interest in Italian painting and personally owned, among a highly diverse collection of other objects, a Domenico Veneziano fresco. His Harvard colleague Paul J. Sachs shared this attraction to Italian paintings and eventually to drawings.51 More specialized than this, the collection of Henry W. Cannon, who resided in Italy, was devoted exclusively to the art of Verona. Its thirty fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paintings, among them two works by Altichiero and others by Domenico, Francesco Morone, and Liberale da Verona, were described in a catalogue that he published in Florence in 1907.52 In 1936, Princeton would receive the entire collection as a precious gift. Here we have arrived at a point where extreme specialization and an archaeological spirit derived directly from museums and universities [113] were having a direct impact on the way collections were being formed. This was the prevailing approach at the outbreak of the Great War. The concept of Old Master painting had declined in importance. If, by 1905, Primitives had attained a grand master status on a par with that of modern painters, an appetite for works of great rarity oftentimes had a great deal to do with it. The “discovery” of the French eighteenth century as worthy of being considered one of the great periods of European art was but the last of many [such “discoveries”]. Before 1900, the occasional individual French painting [from the eighteenth century] was purchased as if by chance by some second-rank collector, though the era was tainted by an air of discredit and suspicion. Strangely enough, at just this moment, the fashionability of English art from the same period was in its ascendancy; and even though a certain number of paintings by Guardi, Canaletto, and Tiepolo could be found in important American collections, works by Watteau, La Tour, Chardin, and Hubert Robert could not. Even as French architects, winners of the Grand Prix de Rome, were being offered professorships at American universities, Americans themselves, driven by a deeply rooted sentimental attachment to the nation’s past, exalted the work of Houdon—relics of a heroic age that, though ill serving the cause of French art, represented everything they loved: exactitude, calm, a certain severity.53 It was difficult to see any relation between Houdon and the “frivolousness” and—yet another charge—“falsity” of contemporary French painting. The former reproach was a serious one, arising out of old Puritan and Quaker attitudes toward art and beauty. The nudes that were indeed quite prevalent in these [contemporary French] paintings rendered them anathema. It seems also probable that American taste was little drawn to nervous, rapid handling, to work at once elegant and flashy, an orgy of color unredeemed by economical restraint in presentation—not to mention perhaps somewhat lacking in range and intensity of effect. It seems relevant in this regard to note that, even after 1920, when, in Europe The triumph of Quality

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and particularly in France, the vogue for Rococo was at its height, Americans proved resistant to its charms. The decorative qualities of eighteenth-century French style were sooner recognized [by them], however. French gardens and private homes designed in imitation of the Petit Trianon set the style for French interiors it seemed only natural to furnish with period tapestries, vases, candelabras, wood paneling, and wallpaper. This fashion was familiar from the fin de siècle. Here again, a tapestry after Boucher, a piece of furniture signed by one of the great cabinetmakers, or a decorative sculpture by Clodion or Pigalle sufficed to satisfy a snobbish fixation on reputable names.54 This eighteenth-century atmosphere may have been reserved for the most part to the salon and the boudoir, but certain homes, like Whitemarsh Hall, the mansion Edward Townsend Stotesbury built for his second wife, Eva, outside Philadelphia, were decorated entirely in this style.55 We have already encountered collectors with an interest in English painting or Italian Primitives who also possessed precious, rare examples of the French decorative arts. This was not true of [Charles T.] Yerkes, who, like many of his contemporaries, preferred to commission sumptuous copies of chairs and other furnishings from workshops in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. But, by 1910, it became fashionable to collect woodwork and above-door panels by the best-known eighteenth-century artisans. The first important collectors to consider decorative art objects high art, thus granting their makers Old Master status, were [Henry] Walters (when furnishing his wife’s quarters in New York), [ Joseph] Widener (who came to own several fine tapestries, and works of sculpture by Falconet, Lemoyne, Vassé, and Houdon), and [Henry E.] Huntington (who bought decorative vases by Clodion, sculpture by Pigalle, and magnificent tapestries after Boucher). We might add others to this list, like Eleanor Elkins Widener [Mrs. Hamilton Rice], a key collector of the work of Houdon, including the bust of a woman but, more important, a bronze Diana cast for [wealthy Paris merchant] Girardot de Marigny.56 Edward Townsend and Eva Roberts Cromwell Stotesbury possessed a magnificent set of period [114] furniture as well as sculpture by Pajou and Tassaert. More important still was the ensemble belonging to William and Helen Forbes Salomon in New York, who seemed bent on imitating European collectors like John Jones and Moïse de Camondo in buying a great deal of furniture signed by important artists with impressive provenance, such as a chaise longue by Jacob-Desmalter that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, Flemish tapestries from workshops in Brussels and Oudenaarde, and works of fine quality by Watteau (Jupiter and Antiope), Pater, [and] La Tour, [as well as] three lovely paintings by Boucher, intended simply as home décor.57 Collections of French painting had first appeared around 1890 but remained unusual. [Among American collectors, o]nly Edward Berwind, harbinger of things to come, showed any real enthusiasm for high-priced French eighteenth-century art in the days before major dealers launched a promotional campaign in its favor.58 [The first] gallery exhibitions [of such art] were followed by others at New York’s

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Museum of French Art, founded in 1911 by McDougal Hawkes, who served as its president.59 Puritanical aversion to frivolousness in art and the sense that eighteenthcentury painting was simply “decorative” had to be overcome. But, despite a slow start, works of capital importance came little by little to join the store of treasures already in the hands of private collectors. The role played by Americans living in Paris like Ogden Mills, James Stillman, James Hyde, and especially Edward Tuck deserves mention as setting an example for their compatriots.60 Berwind’s collection in New York had been the first. The works it contained were few in number but of great beauty: a small sculpture of five-year-old Louise Brongniart by Houdon, a terra cotta bust portrait of Vigée Le Brun by Pajou, a Fête Galante by Pater, a Fragonard, two works by Drouais, a Vigée Le Brun portrait of Marie Antoinette, and a major group portrait by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, The Atelier of an Artist, considered her masterpiece. The importance of the collection owed principally to its early date (1890) and the high quality of the French art it contained.61 [The collection] assembled by Kate Seney Simpson [Mrs. John W. Simpson], also in New York, was even more impressive in its extent and perhaps in quality as well. Work from the French eighteenth century appeared not alone but in the company of contemporary English portraits by Raeburn and Gainsborough, Dutch and Flemish paintings by Ruysdael, Rubens, and Van Dyke, and a series of modern paintings passing from Goya to Degas by way of Millet, Rousseau, Daubigny, Decamps, Corot (represented by four paintings), and Manet. Mrs. Simpson was also a great admirer of Rodin, by whom she owned a considerable number of works, which included her own bust portrait, a head of Balzac, three marble groups, and a number of bronzes. The eighteenth-century paintings were easily the most striking in the collection: a Watteau, two Lancrets, a very fine Pater, a Nattier, two lovely Chardins, and four Fragonards: Girl with a Marmot, L’Amour et la Folie, and two portraits, Mademoiselle Guimard and Mademoiselle Duthé. This magnificent ensemble, bringing together so many capital works by key artists, almost all acquired before the war, harmonized well with Simpson’s rich furnishings and interior décor.62 We have already made mention of other prominent proponents of French art: J. P. Morgan, Benjamin Altman, Mortimer Schiff, Jules S. Bache, and Edward R. Bacon. Bache owned busts by Pigalle and Lemoyne and paintings by Watteau, Greuze, Boucher, and Fragonard; Bacon, works by the principal names in French painting from Largillière to Vigée Le Brun, though of less than equal quality. The importance of French painting to these two collections is entirely relative, overshadowed somewhat by the beauty and quality of works from other schools and periods. The same is true of the busts and decorative sculpture by Houdon, Lemoyne, and Falconet owned by [ Joseph] Widener and [115] of similar works in numerous other collections of lesser importance. Although French sculptural portraits, especially the work of Houdon, enjoyed great success before the war, this was most likely due to the realism of their likenesses combined with a certain gravitas The triumph of Quality

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and elegant reserve, a preference probably similar to that for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and English painted portraits over work produced in France or Italy. A second observation concerns the choice of painters: Chardin was popular, as were Watteau and his followers. But the artist most preferred and most highly valued, by whom Americans purchased the most important works, was Fragonard. It would be hard to specify just why, although the phenomenon was certainly no coincidence. It is possible that Americans enjoyed Fragonard’s affinities with certain technical aspects of English portraiture, with the style of Gainsborough, for instance; or perhaps they related to the undeniable though hardly frequent or decisive influence of Rembrandt on his style. In addition to works by Fragonard in the Simpson, Berwind, and Bache collections, we might note the presence in the United States of his great masterpiece, a series of decorative panels representing The Progress of Love acquired by J. P. Morgan and, shortly following his death, by Henry Clay Frick. These, along with works by Boucher, Pater, and Chardin, surrounded by fine, museum-quality Dutch and English paintings, are the only examples of French art in the Frick collection today.63 Real taste for eighteenth-century French art began to develop only during the war, and, as has already been noted, its hold even then was far from exclusive. Though provisionally granted Old Master status, reservations remained. In 1926, Louis Réau’s L’art français aux Etats-Unis offered a place of much greater importance to Romantic, Realist, and Impressionist painting than to the arts of the eighteenth century, the most recent French artistic realm to benefit from expansion of the canon but with fewer adherents, apparently, than those earlier beneficiaries. More eclectic American collectors in particular much preferred French sixteenth-century portraits and, rarer still, even earlier paintings shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair that, little appreciated in France, found their way into American collections.64 Discussion of the admission of French eighteenth-century painters and sculptors into the Old Master pantheon brings us up to and slightly beyond the year 1919, thus beyond the scope of this investigation. It is possible to note, however, that no new changes in direction are in evidence since that time, from 1920 to the present, but rather a deepening of purpose. Collectors have become more and more demanding; their sense of quality, increasingly acute. [The works of a] number of painters have particularly benefited from these changing conditions: [those of] Tintoretto, El Greco, Magnasco, and Goya; a few Primitives, for instance, Giotto and Piero della Francesca; and a few moderns, among them, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. But the essential preferences of American collectors were clearly in place by 1920, with tendencies exemplified, their best features distilled, in the works assembled by a few great amateurs with a range unique in our time. The first of these acclaimed collections, that of Henry Clay Frick, since bequeathed to the City of New York, opened recently to the public. Frick’s attitude deserves careful attention. We know that, early on, he hoped to achieve a collection comparable to that of [Sir] Richard Wallace in London; that, desiring above all to

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surpass anything of the kind yet attempted in America, he resolved to stop at no expense in wresting desired works from other collectors, his rivals. He sought for his collection examples from every period that included masterpieces by every important European painter, which explains his place in this chapter.65 Frick’s approach defies the system of classification we have been relying on, combining, indeed summing up, all the more or less discrete tendencies we have encountered. He would seem to have preferred “modern” art, [116] beginning with the Renaissance, to earlier European painting, represented in the collection catalogue only by a Pietà attributed to the school of Avignon and works by Giovanni Bellini and Gerard David, though, since her father’s death, Helen Clay Frick has acquired for the collection a number of Italian Primitives, among them, a Duccio, a Gentile Bellini, and a famous Piero della Francesca. The sixteenth century, by contrast, is richly represented by a Bronzino, two Holbeins (portraits of Cromwell and Thomas More), two magnificent Titians (Pietro Aretino and Portrait of a Man in a Red Cape), two large Veronese allegories, and three El Grecos, including the widely known Saint Jerome, acquired in 1905. In the area of seventeenth-century art, Dutch paintings predominate, arguably the highlight of the collection: four Hals portraits, three Rembrandts, which include the well-known Polish Rider from the Tarnowski collection and a self-portrait, a Rubens, several Van Dykes, all of very fine quality, three Vermeers, two Cuyps, two Ruysdaels, [along with] notable portraits by Velázquez and Murillo, and a large number of works of lesser importance. Where the eighteenth century was concerned, English paintings were Frick’s clear preference. Though he collected works by Guardi, Tiepolo, Pater, Nattier, Boucher, the Fragonard panels previously mentioned, and two Goyas, a portrait and The Forge, the English reign supreme: a Hogarth, four Reynolds, numerous Gainsborough portraits, most representing women, and others by Raeburn, Romney, Hoppner, and Lawrence. Works of nineteenth-century art, featuring a Constable and five Turners, are fewer in number, but the choices are significant: a Millet, four Corots, five Whistlers, a Manet, and a Renoir. If we add to this extraordinary concentration of masterpieces Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century sculpture including works by Laurana and Sansovino, Houdon, Falconet, Pajou, and Clodion, and exceptionally fine enamels and bronzes, we begin to have some idea of the extent of Frick’s ambition, the eclecticism of his taste, and the considerable importance of private collections of this sort at the time.66 Another example of an eclectic Old Master collection composed entirely of masterpieces was brought together by Joseph Widener at Lynnewood Hall outside Philadelphia. Frick’s exact contemporary, Widener built upon an earlier collection of nineteenth-century Realist painting and [works by] Dutch masters that had belonged to Peter Arrell Brown Widener, his father, retaining a certain number of works acquired before the turn of the century, including three Corots, one of them, The Atelier, quite well known.67 To these, he added numerous equally famous seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings: fourteen Rembrandts, four The triumph of Quality

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Hobbemas, two each by Vermeer, van Ostade, Hals, Pieter de Hooch, and Cuyp, a Rubens, and six Van Dykes—an admirable collection, the Rembrandts and Van Dyke portraits especially, the latter, from the artist’s Genoa period, characterized by rich warm tones and virtuoso handling. Widener’s English paintings were no less remarkable: four Reynoldses, the artist’s celebrated portrait of Nelly O’Brien among them, a copy of the version in the Wallace collection, four Romneys, four crucial Gainsboroughs, three Turners, among them a late vaporous sunset, two Constables, one of them extremely handsome, plus works by Hoppner, Raeburn, Cotes—the list goes on and on, every tendency represented with equal brilliance. Widener’s paintings from the Italian Renaissance constituted one of the richest and loveliest ensembles in North America: three Titians, two admirable portraits of women and a Venus and Adonis; a Paris Bordone; Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna; works by Bronzino and Pontormo. He also admired the earlier Primitives. Though, of northern school painting he purchased only a triptych by Gerard David, his Italian Old Masters were more numerous: Mantegna’s Judith and Holofernes, a Morone, two large mythological subjects by Bellini, including the artist’s celebrated Bacchanalia, works by Pier Francesco Fiorentino, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Benozzo Gozzoli, [117] a very handsome Andrea del Castagno, a Benvenuto di Giovanni, along with a number of unattributed works. The French seventeenth century found no place in this magnificent ensemble, but a quite beautiful array of works by Degas, two [by] Puvis de Chavannes, a Renoir, two Manets (The Dead Toreador and the astonishing At the Races), and [one by] Whistler did.68 The most recent Old Master, El Greco, whose work had become newly fashionable in Europe around 1900 and who enjoyed a tremendous popularity in the United States beginning around 1920, was represented by two fine examples, Saint Martin and the Beggar and Virgin with Santa Inés and Santa Tecla,69 accompanied by Murillo’s famous Galician Women. Another seventeenth-century painting that reveals a trendsetting side to Widener’s personality, The Satyr and the Peasant by Johann Liss, is also worth noting. The Renaissance sculptures, bronzes, and objets d’art in the collection, including a vermiculated enamel goblet, the Morosini Helmet, and a visored burgonet, were all chosen with the same attention to quality.70 These two collections, it must be said, are in a class of their own, especially today, when the prodigious expansion of museums throughout the world has so greatly diminished the number of available works of this quality. We must not forget, however, that to accumulate ensembles so vast and rich requires more than mere wealth. Tremendous perseverance and real effort are necessary to arrive at results of this kind; only true passion is capable of fueling such an enterprise, in every way comparable to those undertaken at far more favorable moments of history by the great amateurs of the past like Archduke Leopold Wilhelm or Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans. Only one American collector truly belongs in this refined company, although his inclusion in this study is not possible for chronological reasons: secretary of the Treasury, diplomat, banker, and art collector, Andrew W. Mellon. His purchase of

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works from the Hermitage and great European private collections enriched the United States with acclaimed masterpieces by Van Eyck (The Annunciation), Fra Angelico, Botticelli (The Adoration of the Magi), Pisanello (Isotta degli Atti da Rimini), and Titian (Venus with a Mirror); three works by Raphael (The Alba Madonna, The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, Saint George and the Dragon), two by Holbein (including Edward VI as a Child), three by Van Dyke, and six by Rembrandt (including A Polish Nobleman). At his death not long ago [in 1937], [Mellon] left many of the treasures he had accumulated over the span of twenty years to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.71 In addition to this worthy successor to Widener and Frick, a number of likeminded contemporaries collected with similar ambition to gather masterpieces by the most celebrated names in art history. This was true, for instance, of Max Epstein in Chicago, who made his first purchases in 1910. A number of well-known Primitives, two Botticellis, a Bellini, and a Filippino Lippi hung in his home alongside works by Gerard David and Memling and a fifteenth-century French Our Lady of Sorrows. Epstein’s Renaissance works included a Clouet, an Antonio Moro, two Titian portraits, and a fine El Greco; his seventeenth-century holdings, paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals, Van Dyke, Jacob Cuyp, Raeburn, and Reynolds, all in all, not a particularly vast collection but nicely composed and of very high quality.72 To judge by the impressive catalogue of her collection, the intentions of Mary Muhlenberg Emery [Mrs. Thomas J. Emery] in Cincinnati appear altogether similar, with [artists] ranging from Bouts, Fouquet, Simon Marmion, and Dürer up through the nineteenth-century “Realists” by way of great Italian Primitives like Mantegna, seventeenth-century masters like Titian and Tintoretto, and non-Italian painters like Rembrandt, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya, Reynolds, Hoppner, Lawrence, and Gainsborough, not to mention Ingres.73 We should perhaps approach this collection with a certain caution. Here respect for the fame of artists, a taste for acquiring masterpieces, has probably been taken to its logical extreme. We might otherwise note that the considerable number of portraits of famous individuals and the historical and genealogical preoccupations clearly discernible in the catalogue reveal this collector’s rather conflicted tendencies in matters of taste. [118] This is why some Old Master collections contain works by artists of renown but nevertheless not of extraordinary quality together with works of art occasionally misattributed or only secondary works by famous artists. Such collections are driven less by a genuine taste for quality than by a desire to possess celebrity, explained perhaps by snobbishness and the incomprehensible appeal of a [wellknown] artist’s signature, of which we have striking corroborations still today, for example, in the mad quest for name-brand furniture! That such snobbishness was far from usual becomes clear from a look at collections of drawings and prints, which suggest that Americans often possessed a very real grasp of quality. Here the prices of works, their fame, the spectacular aspects of purchase and presentation play much less of a role. Such collections tend to be more The triumph of Quality

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intimate, accumulated more for a collector’s personal pleasure than as displays of wealth or invitations to acclaim. We also frequently see [in Europe] great connoisseurs like Pierre-Jean Mariette and Jean-Baptiste Wicar, and collectors of great refinement like the brothers Goncourt turn to drawings or to drawings and engravings by Old Masters as a matter of preference, seeking more immediate and intimate contact with artistic greatness. [Indeed, t]here was a vogue for such collecting in [late] eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, one in which, just after the turn of the century, at least one American found himself caught up, James Bowdoin, whose cabinet of drawings was acquired in France, as we have seen. In studying such collections in America, as I propose we do, one discovers that often the same amateurs collected both drawings and engravings and for similar reasons, both media being associated with the “didactic” approach recommended by [Charles Eliot] Norton and Paul J. Sachs, of which we shall have more to say. As previously noted, the three most important mid-nineteenth-century collections of engravings, those of Francis C. Gray, George Perkins Marsh, and John Witt Randall, already contained a certain number of fine examples of prints by famous engravers. Attention to artistic quality was already a factor, especially for Gray, whose cabinet would come to constitute the original core of the Harvard collections. But the defining idea, even here, was to value such prints as documentary evidence, as reproductions for use in the study of art history. All these collections were largely devoted to engraved reproductions, some executed by skilled artists. It seems worth mentioning that this taste for engraved reproductions would remain alive in the United States for quite some time. Not content to purchase the work of the great European copperplate engravers available from the Louvre or the Viennese firm Albertina, Americans either bought or commissioned numerous plates from French and English engravers directly. The Norton collection, for instance, came to include fine sets of prints by Charles Albert Waltner, Jules Jacquemart, ThéophileNarcisse Chauvel, and [Alexandre Achille Alphonse] Cailloux. It was in this spirit of engravings considered as veristic reproductions that the great American ensembles around the time of the Philadelphia Centennial were formed. The extremely rich print collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts [was made available to the public when the museum] opened its doors [the] year of the Centennial] in fact, 1876. By 1897, [the museum’s] holdings comprised almost 42,000 prints, some 30,000 of which, thanks to bequests from Gray and Randall, belonged to Harvard on long-term loan. At this point, however, Harvard reclaimed them. Reduced to exactly 12,127 sheets around 1900, the museum received in partial compensation, through the generosity of Harvey D. Parker, an ensemble of prints that had belonged to Henry F. Sewall of New York.74 The [George Perkins] Marsh collection, as we have seen, had already by this time been absorbed into the National Gallery in Washington.75 The great conceptual shift in the way Americans thought about prints occurred in the 1890s just as [119] important collections of drawings were also starting to appear. Here two well-defined tendencies are to be noted, the first exemplified by

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the cabinets of Marsden J. Perry and [Charles Eliot] Norton, respectively[, where] drawings and prints are seen as works of art, some of them masterpieces; for such collectors, the notion of the Old Master artist applies to estimable printers and celebrated painters equally. In the second, drawings and prints are considered less because they are beautiful in and of themselves, as accomplished artistic expressions, than as documentary evidence particularly instructive for those with an interest in studying the different stages in artistic creativity. Drawings and prints in this view offer up the possibility of grasping the essential character of form and technique more easily and more completely. The movement of the hand, the role of marks, lines, and masses in creating a visual effect, are here more clearly seen than in more complex and less spontaneous painted work. Nowhere does one find oneself closer to the artist or closer to the problems that art poses, whence the great educational value of drawings and prints, as much for artists as for historians of art—an intellectual position if ever there was one! [Charles Eliot] Norton was the great innovator of this [position] in the United States, inspiring a pleiad of historians of art. His influence on the development of art history and collections and taste in the United States was fundamental, his name already mentioned in this book quite often. The catalogue of his print collection includes every famous engraver in history, Italians from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century and fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Germans alike, along with a considerable set of works by Dürer, seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters including Rembrandt and Van Dyke, and every French engraver from the Renaissance through Legros, Gaillard, and Raffaëlli, not to mention Claude, Delacroix, and Méryon. Works by English engravers appear as well, including a handsome set of Turner prints and Turner and Blake drawings previously owned by [ John] Ruskin, whom Norton, of course, greatly admired. American engravers were represented by a fine set of Whistler lithographs and a number of prints by Anders Zorn, who had enjoyed a great success in the United States.76 There is no need to belabor the point by considering every collection of this kind in the United States through 1919. It is necessary, however, to make mention of the magnificent ensemble of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century engravings, Italian engravings in particular, and drawings from every period but particularly the Renaissance and nineteenth century assembled by Norton’s student Paul J. Sachs, himself a professor at Harvard and a leading proponent of the didactic use of prints and drawings. That Daumier drawings and lithographs occupy a prominent place in Sachs’s portfolio is of interest because, as we shall see, in the United States, Daumier had come to be considered, where drawing was concerned, the great master, deservedly so, yet his work was not represented in Norton’s collection, for it was only in the years leading up to the war that he was admitted to the ranks at all, whereupon he immediately rose to become a contender for top honors.77 A more detailed study of collections of drawings and prints in the United States would need to take the holdings of major museums into account: in Boston [and Cambridge], the Museum of Fine Arts and the Fogg; in Chicago, the Art Institute; The triumph of Quality

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in New York, the Met. The first of these, the Museum of Fine Arts, owes much to the perseverance of its curators, Sylvester R. Koehler and Henry P. Rossiter, both highly knowledgeable connoisseurs of historic prints and authors of Rembrandt and Dürer print exhibition catalogues, respectively. Since 1900, the museum has either purchased or received as gifts a number of additional print collections of importance including those of William Perkins Babcock, Francis Bullard,78 and Russell Allen, about whom more in a moment. The Art Institute in 1920 held more than 35,000 prints from the collections of Howard Mansfield, Wallace L. DeWolf, Elizabeth Hammond Stickney, Joseph Brooks Fair, and Joseph Pennell.79 At Harvard, similar gifts from Sachs have proven most beneficial. The new willingness to consider prints and drawings works of importance [120] left a dramatic mark upon the collection of Marsden J. Perry of Providence, which, in 1908, included thirteen Rembrandt drawings and a certain number of Dürer prints. These two artists, to be sure, remained among the most sought after; they make an appearance in every subsequent collection, although not in the one amassed beginning in 1877 by Howard Mansfield, whose interest was limited to drawings and prints by Charles Méryon, works he sold to the Art Institute in 1911.80 Regarding collections formed between 1900 and 1920, my intention is not to provide a detailed description of each in turn; the style and peculiarity of a collection matters more for our purposes than its range or extent. But it is important to recognize that almost all these collections were built around the work of one or more Old Masters. Norton had initiated—or, one might say, “launched”—vogues for Turner, Whistler, and Zorn as well as Italian Primitives and German prints. Dan Fellows Platt, though mostly collecting such “Primitives,” would become interested in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Old Masters as well, figures like Guercino and others working in England and France.81 But most other collectors followed in Norton’s footsteps. Bullard bought works by sixteenth-century Italians, Dürer, and Turner.82 Another important private collector in New York who specialized in prints, Felix Warburg, relative [younger brother] of the well-known art historian [Abraham Moritz Warburg] and friend of Sachs, managed to accumulate a magnificent set of Rembrandts, an abundance of precious rare editions among them. Russell Allen, whose collection was more varied, thus more considerable, owned works by Rembrandt and Dürer but also a large number of nineteenthcentury drawings and lithographs by Daumier, Goya, and Delacroix, as well as more modern artists like Gauguin, Degas, and Bonnard.83 The collections of Wallace DeWolf, [Edward S.] Stickney, and [ Joseph Brooks] Fair, today at the Art Institute of Chicago, featured the work of [Anders] Zorn, B. Bernard McGeorge, Méryon, Joseph Pennell, and the great American-born painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, of whom [Pennell] was a close friend as well as the historiographer of record—but works by Whistler could be found in every collection of any importance. Daumier was accepted relatively late; nonetheless, in addition to Sachs, who had assembled a complete set of the artist’s work, William Perkins Babcock had accumulated some 3,000 Daumier lithographs as part of a collection

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of 10,000 prints purchased in Paris, which he would eventually donate to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.84 These collections can also be considered from another point of view, comparing American cabinets to European. It is informative, for example, to contrast the ensemble of works accumulated in Paris by the painter Walter Gay, later left by him to the French national museums,85 with those accumulated by J. Pierpont Morgan for the great Morgan Library. Morgan preferred to buy entire collections, for instance, the important English cabinet of Fairfax Murray, composed almost exclusively of fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century Italian drawings with a few works from later periods thrown in for good measure.86 Gay, on the other hand, collected in the European style. His taste was eclectic, but he was, above all, drawn to landscapes by artists like Hubert Robert, Saint-Aubin, Boucher, Watteau, and Guardi. Gay also happily purchased Italian Primitives and seventeenth-century drawings, works by Rembrandt among them. The few paintings he owned were from all different periods. These two collectors remained out of the mainstream, unaffected by conditions in America and certainly free from the influence of Norton’s doctrine of didactic intent. Private collectors in fact avoided that influence more easily than we might think, and this despite the notable efforts of major print dealers, who soon arrived to set up shop in the United States like Samuel P. Avery, one of the first; Léon Goupil, whose influence in the years before 1876 was already considerable; Frederick Keppel, active principally around the turn of the century, organizing exhibitions of German and Italian prints in 1907 [121] and 1908, respectively; Knoedler & Company, long interested in prints; and Colnaghi, a British firm specializing in Old Master drawings. More recently, newcomers like Jacques Seligmann and Nathan Wildenstein have drawn the attention of collectors to French eighteenth-century drawings with a number of exhibitions, that of the Heseltine collection among others,87 which may help to explain a slight resurgence of taste for French art from this period among American collectors. It is interesting to note that [ James Jackson] Jarves, the first great American amateur and original proponent of teaching collections, focused his efforts on Italian art in particular, a direction pursued by Norton at Harvard beginning in 1876 and by Marquand at Princeton in 1882. Ruskinian thought played an important but easily exaggerated role in Norton’s development. This was the age when the first fundamental studies of the Italian Renaissance appeared: works like Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, first published in 1860, and others by Eugène Müntz, Gustave Gruyer, Giovanni Morelli, Sir Joseph Archer Crowe, and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. It was quite natural that their ideas gained a certain following in the United States. In addition to the role played by universities, we should add that, of professors who also collected, Norton and Marquand both had cabinets of drawings, paintings, and sculpture; but it was Norton’s students, men like Bernard Berenson, Edward Forbes, Paul Sachs, and Chandler Post, not to mention Kingsley Porter, who exercised the greatest influence, often not least as collectors themselves. We are already familiar with the ensembles assembled by Sachs and The triumph of Quality

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Forbes. Porter owned a number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Sano di Pietro, Guariento, and Fungai, Spanish Primitives, and a few Roman sculptures. Berenson’s collections, installed at Settignano, where the great scholar had permanently relocated, offered perhaps the finest and most beautiful selection of Primitive painting owned by any American and included paintings by Giotto, fourteenth-century masterpieces by Simone Martini, and works by Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti along with every other artist of importance: Daddi, Matteo di Giovanni, Memmi, Nardo di Cione, Barna, Taddeo di Bartolo. Paintings by Gentile da Fabriano, Giovanni di Paolo, Guido di Pietro, and Stefano da Zevio represented the first half of the fifteenth century; those by Giovanni Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, Domenico Veneziano, Morone, Francesco di Giorgio, Pesellino, Borgognone, and Foppa, the middle and late quattrocento. Though his sixteenth-century collection was smaller, Berenson’s two Lorenzo Lottos, and works by Brescianino, Paris Bordone, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Bacchiacca, were all of good quality.88 Although this collection was visited and imitated by many of the period’s most important collectors, the influence of Berenson’s writings, especially his cumulative Italian Painters of the Renaissance, published beginning in the 1890s, was more considerable still.89 And Berenson played an even more practical role as art expert and advisor to numerous American collectors, museums, and dealers. The impact of his taste and expertise is visible, above all, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection. Through imitation and emulation, this influence spread even further, although that of Berenson’s Harvard colleagues was also considerable. Other art historians, European and American, deserve mention as well. If the impact of scholars has been strongest in the area of Italian art, we should not forget that, following his trip to the United States in 1904, Wilhelm von Bode had worked to promote Italian art but also Rembrandt, just as his protégé Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, beginning in 1908, had promoted the northern schools as well as Italian sculpture. Their scholarly influence was even more widespread. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, monograph series with titles like The Great Masters, Les grandes artistes, Künstlermonographien, and Klassiker der Kunst did much to advance Old Master status and prestige. These cumulative factors had an unmistakable effect, for instance, in the case of El Greco, whose “rediscovery” in Spain by Manuel Cossio [122] and Maurice Barrès between 1905 and 1910 was followed by major art historical studies by scholars like August Mayer.90 Before about 1912, almost no one was buying the artist’s work; in the wake of these publications, El Greco became one of America’s most collectable historical painters. As we have seen, drawing and print collections in the United States were based at first on a view of such works as having a principally documentary value, which eventually evolved into a view of drawings and prints as potential masterpieces produced by “great” artists and so worthy of admiration in and of themselves.91 This change went hand in hand with the redefining and gradual expansion of the category of the Old Master in the realm of painting. It remains for us to consider what factors

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played a role in this evolution, the changes in thinking, and the concerted efforts involved in bringing different artists, eras, and styles to the fore. The multiple raisons d’être of such collections have already been suggested at the beginning of this chapter. To the desire to collect works of exceptional beauty was added the desire to possess works by artists of renown, whether to impress other amateurs, and thus gain recognition and even fame, or sometimes, pleasure in art combining with this former ambition, to attempt to outdo them in the magnificence and renown of one’s own collection. Such emulation led to the purchase of enormously expensive works of art in greater and greater numbers. Although enabled by very large fortunes, this development is not fully explained by wealth alone. The part played by each of these several factors is hard to measure because they differ so much in nature. Along with the character of American taste proper, we need to take into account the influence of ideas imported from Europe and criteria of judgment imposed by art historians and artists, not to mention, last but not least, the efforts of dealers—and, as in all such matters, material constraints. We can at the very least affirm that the first stages in this transformation after 1876—the vogues for French nineteenth-century landscapes and the works of Millet; for seventeenth-century Realist painting from Holland, with a marked preference for landscape and genre; for eighteenth-century English portraiture—can be explained by certain unchanging patterns in American taste. But if we look closer at these preferences, two very different tendencies emerge. Where English art is concerned, portraiture in particular, shared tradition and memory of the colonial past continued to operate. Without such an explanation, it would remain surprising that French and Italian portraits from the same period, often very close to English art in style, did not enjoy a similar success in the United States until much more recently. We might also note that the virtuosity of painters like Gainsborough and Lawrence was hardly in keeping with the taste for ponderous exactitude that motivated enthusiasts for Dutch art. If these painters’ work was eagerly embraced despite this, as was that of Reynolds and landscape painters like Constable and Turner, Americans nonetheless would always prefer the least romantic landscapes possible, not much taken by dramatic lighting, coloristic richness, or fiery, passionate handling. Taste for an art based on “resemblance to nature” in this way compensated for the costs of faithfulness to what shared heritage remained. The second lasting characteristic of American taste, a fondness for realism or, more exactly, for exactitude in representation, for naturalistic and vaguely anecdotal subjects, for paintings with atmospheric effects based on contrasts between light and shadow on which such precision often relies, has been sufficiently treated already and need not be described in greater detail here. At the very most, we might shed further light on such preferences by associating them with a sort of artistic Puritanism, shunning the nude, mythological motifs, and religious subjects. This is probably why the art of the Italian Baroque, examples of which would often seem to fit the aforementioned criteria, found few collectors in the United States, apart

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from John Ringling and [123] the University of Notre Dame. Religious subjects were avoided even by buyers of Dutch painting despite its frequently Puritan origins, even if by Rembrandt; Van Dyke and Rubens were appreciated only as portraitists. Only at the very end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of a new generation of amateurs perhaps immersed in a more recent American tradition, would these exclusions disappear. To the natural Puritanism of the American people should be added their love of rustic simplicity in Barbizon painting, evangelical intimacy in Millet, the serious-mindedness of peasants in Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon, and bourgeois self-absorption in the paintings of the Düsseldorf school. The same culture that gave the world Edgar Allan Poe regarded any true Romanticism with profound horror. These dominant characteristics define more than a single moment of the history of American taste but persisted even beyond the turn of the century, despite an acceptance of Italian and later French painting. It was again the expressive precision of Primitive art—the naive simplicity much exaggerated by the critics of Sienese and thirteenth-century Florentine painters, and the qualities of spiritual truthfulness so exalted by adepts of the writings of Ruskin—that seduced American collectors. French taste for the gracefulness and lightness of artists like Fragonard and Watteau was long in gaining recognition and has perhaps not yet succeeded in doing so entirely.92 In any case, it must be strongly insisted that these important changes in favor of Italian Old Masters in the late nineteenth and French painting in the early twentieth century occurred not spontaneously but as a result of concerted efforts and foreign influences. A third factor affecting the evolution of taste was the at times underappreciated role of American antiquarian dealers, whose efforts were decisive where introducing collectors to eighteenth-century French painting was concerned. It is true that the contribution of certain dealers began only once a fairly pronounced attraction for the era or artists they promoted already existed, however latently, and indeed such was the case with French painting, already accepted by rich amateurs for their salons and boudoirs. The principal sellers of such work in the United States had simply to convince collectors to accept works by Fragonard or Boucher as Old Master paintings rather than elements of home décor. Only then, and slowly at that, did the American public show any interest. This is not an isolated case. Almost invariably, regardless of the period of art or taste involved, we can discover sometimes forgotten commercial agents at work in various ways, spreading, consolidating, and directing the process. The names Durand-Ruel and Vose are attached to Barbizon painting; Duveen and Knoedler, to Dutch art; Duveen again and a number of Italian dealers, to Italian art; Franz Kleinberger, to the northern Primitives. This is not to suggest that dealers specialized from the first or that their efforts all tended in the same direction. This would be untrue of Knoedler and equally of Duveen, who preferred to deal in exceptional, famous, though preferably Italian objects from important collections. It was

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[Duveen], in fact, who most strikingly defined the predilection, previously described, for paintings with celebrated past ownership. This is why the names of these American dealers in paintings are useful to mention, especially where Old Master collections are concerned, for their influence was [direct and personal] in the extreme. Often they befriended the collectors they advised; their personal influence on occasion convinced this or that important American amateur to sell or abandon paintings they no longer liked in order to buy others of a different variety. Such interventions, the personal preferences of amateurs and dealers, like the opinions of critics and art historians, do not in themselves suffice to explain every nuance of the developments we have been [124] tracing. The material possibilities presented by the art market played a major role as well: dealers could only procure for collectors what they were themselves able to acquire. This produced a discontinuity previously described between the makeup of collections and the judgments of art history. Artists exalted beyond all others like Michelangelo or da Vinci were represented in American collections only by secondary works or drawings because it was not materially possible to acquire examples of their [principal] work even in Europe, where more or less everything of interest was already held in public collections. Around the turn of the century, the art market was dominated for the most part by works from English and French collections, whether sold all at once at auction or piecemeal. The sale of a few important Italian collections, like those of Guidi and Caltiana, might be added to this list, as might a number of eastern European collections, from Poland or Russia, far rarer and mostly of lesser importance. What did such collections contain? On the Continent, a good many Dutch and Flemish paintings, almost all from collections formed during the nineteenth century; in England, a considerable number of English portraits and, thanks to a taste of long standing there, Italian fifteenth-century and a few Italian Renaissance paintings. Locating trecento paintings meant travel to Italy, where interest in this period was not yet highly developed, as it would later become following the publication of studies by [Bernard] Berenson, Lionello Venturi, and [Osvald] Sirén.93 Italian Renaissance works of great importance were rare, having been gathered up by princely buyers in Paris, Dresden, and Saint Petersburg. Those the sale of the Gallery of the Duc d’Orléans put back into circulation were quickly snapped up, again by English collectors. We can make sense of this situation if we think about partial reversals in the possibilities offered by the art market in recent years with the sale of the Russian Imperial collections, the slowdown in exports from Italy, and losses in England and France, all with very interesting consequences: the movement to the United States of a number of important works from the Hermitage, an intensification of buying in Spain, and the dispersal of Austrian and German collections. Highly particularized private collections elsewhere have in this way influenced the taste of American antiquarians and amateurs alike. The triumph of Quality

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The various factors governing these developments overlap and intermix; all must be taken into account if we hope to explain the full range of phenomena here described. We must nonetheless not lose sight of this period’s essential characteristics: a continuous enlarging of the category of the Old Master, accompanied by a crescendo of taste for objects of quality that, by 1919, neared its climax.

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chapter 3

The Vogue for Archaeology and “Pre-History”

The lack of curiosity or special interest among Americans regarding ancient and foreign civilizations prior to 1876 gave way to a passionate interest, increasingly intense, and curiosity impossible to satisfy. Travel accounts, memoirs, and novels of adventure set in foreign lands at once created and helped to foster a widespread fascination with the new and the unknown. Investigation into the origins of religion was also all the rage in the United States.1 This initial attitude, mere curiosity, attended the birth of a parallel enthusiasm among the scientific minded for historical research of every kind. Young people barely out of college took an interest in art history and published popularizing texts that reached a small but select audience. Mere curiosity and a taste for the exotic led to more certain, though no less impassioned, expertise, a knowledge of the world often at the origin of important collections. Every few years, Americans made a new discovery: Asian art, Classical art, Egyptian and Assyrian art, Islamic art, the art of the Middle Ages, Americana. Despite the intervals between them, each followed a parallel trajectory, passing through similar if not identical phases. Many different factors and influences informed the formation of collections in these various realms, the work of individuals whose areas of focus were equally diverse and indeed often at odds, inspired by schools of thought of many different sorts. Each of these periods of specialized interest peaked after a few years, marked unvaryingly, however, by the quest for older and older examples. As historical studies devoted to past civilizations were published and collections formed, the tendency was to travel back through history toward points of origin in quest of the oldest possible specimens, often the most difficult to find. The idea of the collection as an ensemble of objects attended by a mode of appreciation perhaps less well informed but possibly more sensitive and more artistic gave way to more scientific and, though enthusiastic, less “creative” approaches. Archaeologists and museologists alike seized upon the growing number of artifacts all too often considered works of art, though at times historical

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interest or the search for rarity displaced concern with beauty or quality or both. Inscriptions, signatures, and dates in such cases took on greater importance than the objects themselves. “Archaeologitis” was a malady that struck many scholars and museum curators and, at times, more than a few collectors. Rare sensibility or the luck to have been brought up in an artistic milieu—[128] something far from usual in the United States—alone served as protection from the narrow focus of the specialist. The poetic power that emanates from works of art remains indispensible and not to be ignored, especially by the amateur hoping to form a fine collection or the artist or critic hoping to appreciate given objects in a creatively attuned and thoroughgoing fashion, a lesson frequently forgotten. The western European Middle Ages interested very few American collectors at first; medieval traditions never fully abandoned by Anglo-Saxon culture seemed far too familiar in the adventurous 1870s to be attractive. [Most collectors] thought the Middle Ages a known quantity, whereas the Far East remained mysterious due to its very distance. The first encounters with the arts of Asia had taken place a century earlier.2 Across the commercial bridge newly connecting New England and Japan, a steady stream of images of a new New World reached the United States. Simple curiosity regarding somewhat late-date Chinese ceramics, examples of which by 1850 could already be found in certain collections, a characteristic antebellum taste, gave way by the end of the century to a growing interest in the arts of Japan. The Chinese Revolution of 1911 led to the dispersal of important collections, facilitating the acquisition by Americans of new genres of Asian art. Collectors like James Jackson Jarves and William T. Walters had proven sensitive already to the art and cultural refinement of the Far East, but an artistic milieu as active as that in Boston between 1870 and 1900 was needed before these closer contacts with Chinese and Japanese civilization could lead to the formation of important collections. Europeans played a lesser role in these developments. Academics like Edward Sylvester Morse and Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, not content with drawing merely academic comparisons between civilizations, preached by example, inaugurating collections of their own that they then studied and promoted back in Boston as trendsetting amateurs. Morse collected Chinese ceramics; Fenollosa, Japanese prints and especially paintings. In addition, there was John La Farge, who had seen and admired Japanese prints while living in France. The three principal directions that would be taken by collectors of Asian art in America can be traced to these three men until around 1910, when archaeological finds drew attention to earlier periods.3 The example of Morse was widely imitated, even by collectors not exclusively interested in Asian art. Magnificent porcelains were acquired by John P. Lyman, F[rank] G[air] Macomber, and George Washington Wales in Boston; Benjamin Altman, Samuel T. Peters, Charles A. Dana, Elbert H. Gary, J. P. Morgan, and Deming Jarves [father of James Jackson Jarves] in New York; P[eter] A[rrell B[rown] Widener in Philadelphia; and Edward Tuck in Paris.4 “Clair de lune” and “sang de

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bœuf ” ceramics purchased through Duveen or Parish-Watson decorated many stylish American interiors between 1900 and 1914. Chinese cloisonné with its gaudy polychrome and overelaborate designs appealed to those used to Modernist furniture and decorative pastiche from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The Ming and especially Kang Shi pieces in the Samuel P. Avery collection, now at the Brooklyn Museum, though today no longer fashionable, were and remain among the most remarkable of their kind.5 But along with these decorative qualities of Asian ceramics, pleasant principally to the eye, Fenollosa attempted to introduce to Western collectors the charm and poetry of Oriental painting. A professor of political economy and philosophy at Tokyo University as well as the great apostle of Asian art, Fenollosa devoted much of his efforts to preserving the artistic treasures of Japan before moving to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts [the MFA] as curator in 1890, where he remained until 1896. Through lectures, books, and catalogues, he succeeded in sharing his enthusiasm with Boston’s cultural elite.6 His persuasive eloquence [129] secured new adepts to the cause of Japanese art. At a time when Europe had just begun to take the arts of the Far East seriously, the MFA already possessed some 5,000 exhibition-worthy ceramic objects from the Morse collection as well as Asian paintings assembled by Fenollosa from the most celebrated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese collections and acquired for the museum by Charles Weld in 1912, an ensemble unequaled [elsewhere] in the West.7 William Sturgis Bigelow, who knew Fenollosa well, and Charles Goddard Weld, his travel companion in Japan, helped underwrite the earliest activities of the museum’s Department of Oriental Art, founded in 1898, as did Henry Lee Higginson, who also collected Asian painting. This particular attraction was shared by two New Yorkers, John B. Trevor and Charles S. Smith, whose collections of Chinese painting, though smaller, were extremely well chosen.8 Fenollosa took great interest in Japanese prints as well, an enthusiasm shared by another trendsetter in American taste, John La Farge, like Whistler influenced by the example of nineteenth-century French collectors such as Edmond de Goncourt, Louis Gonse, and Samuel [Siegfried] Bing, though possibly it was French art that helped these two Americans better appreciate the coloristic richness and compositional novelty of a branch of artistic creativity fairly neglected even in Japan itself.9 Whistler, in voluntary exile in Europe, was paid little attention in the United States except by those close to him; the influence of La Farge, on the other hand, was tremendous.10 He voyaged twice to Japan, in 1886 and 1890, inspired by a love for the arts of Asia that, upon his return, his writing, lectures, and collections helped the public at large better enjoy and appreciate.11 His saber sheaths, kimonos, and handful of sculptural figures could not match the quality of his remarkable collection of Harunobu, Koriusai, Utamoro, Hokusai, and Kuniyoshi prints.12 Numerous admirers and friends profited from his deep understanding of these traditions and the justness of his taste. The triumph of Quality

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La Farge was indirectly responsible for the wave of Orientalism that swept the United States around 1900, a time when snobbish Japanophilia reigned supreme. The “Japanese salon,” with its assembled curios and all the coloristic excess such indulgence allowed, was much in style in a certain milieu. Some collectors, like Clarence Buckingham in Chicago,13 John Chandler Bancroft in Worcester,14 and William S. Spaulding in Boston kept their eyes peeled for fine Japanese prints. Spaulding’s collection, for instance, featured a unique complete set of Surimono prints executed during major festivals by Hokusai, Hokkei, Seiko, Shiussi, and Sakutei, the Old Masters of Japanese engraving.15 This refined sensibility on the part of artists and aesthetes, responsible for bringing a number of outstanding collections to the United States, took on occasion a more scientific turn. Research into the history of China led some to undertake archaeological digs there. Berthold Laufer of Chicago’s Field Museum, beginning in 1890 through his studies of Han Dynasty ceramics and, between 1908 and 1910, his own collections, pioneered an interest in earlier periods. China opened, little by little, to Westerners; the economic development of the country made this initially slow penetration possible. Foundations, universities, and museums organized archaeological expeditions that, thanks to the dispersal of a number of important Chinese collections, allowed Americans to enrich their own with more archaic pieces.16 What archaeologists and ethnological museums initially [130] considered mere cultural artifacts proved the delight of amateurs and an inspiration to artists.17 Laufer’s Han period research introduced collectors not just to the ceramic objects in question but also to worked jade and bronze from the same period. Key collectors soon became enthralled with the simpler, more expressive forms and skillful manufacture of such objects to be admired, for instance, in the home of Grenville Winthrop.18 Not everyone could make it all the way to China; but Chinese collections, like that of Prince Kung, were available for purchase even in New York.19 This quest for a calmer, simpler beauty not much in evidence on the road to “archaism” was yet evidenced as well in the two greatest collections of Asian art, those of Charles L. Freer and Denman W. Ross. Both men lived through, participated in, and more or less personified every aspect of this vogue for the arts of the Far East. Each in his fashion, with very different means, pursued the goal of bringing back to America important collections of Asian art. Freer was “the King of the Steel Car Construction Company,” whereas Ross inhabited a more cultivated milieu with older inherited traditions, but they shared the same passion for art and trust in their own intuition. Freer was like some hero in a novel, enthusiastic, prophetic, his acquisitions in China and Japan embroidered with tales of fantastic adventure, but, benefiting from his contacts with [Ernest] Fenollosa, not to mention [ James] Whistler, he had the courage to remain true to his own taste.20 Recognizing that he could not hope to compete in the realm of European art, he had the wisdom to part with a number of modern paintings purchased early on. Between 1890 and 1895, he bought Chinese works instead.

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Well aware of what was going on in Asia from numerous extended visits there, Freer assembled a collection that was a rare fusion of Eastern and Western sensibilities, remarkable for its variety—portraits, a Buddhist series, landscapes—but also for its quality. In 1907, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, Freer organized an expedition of his own into the Chinese interior, accompanied by Chinese troops, and brought back a large number of paintings and works of sculpture.21 His acquaintance with Asia and with Asians, along with his diplomatic contacts, facilitated the growth of a collection that passed from 2,250 to 6,000 objects, give or take a few, between 1905 and 1912, at which point, having loaned paintings and other articles to numerous exhibitions for years, he opened a museum of his own in Washington.22 Having access to considerable funds during the last twenty years of his life, Freer single-handedly created a magnificent ensemble. Toward the end, his greatest interests lay in bronzes, jades, and sculpture. Restless and full of energy, he was indifferent to nothing: not to Chinese, Cambodian, or Egyptian sculpture; not to Greek or Byzantine manuscripts or objects—all collected with the magisterial idea in mind of connecting modern art with certain periods of high civilization. At his death in 1919, it fell to John E. Lodge, his collaborator at the last, to catalogue these collections and extend them. With the same total engagement and personal touch, Ross pursued similar goals, supporting Departments of Oriental Art at both the MFA and Harvard University [the Fogg]. He was a great admirer of the earliest periods of Chinese ceramics, bronzes, and paintings, and more recent painting and sculpture from India. Ross, whose activities were strongly identified with the two museums he supported, collected not for his own sake but for others, offering almost everything he acquired to the MFA or the Fogg. His collections [131] were possibly less important than Freer’s, but his selection of objects as remarkable, his taste as refined. Amateur, painter, aesthete, and professor by turns, a frequent visitor to Asia, where he kept in touch with Asian art and artists, Ross developed his own personal theory of artistic creativity.23 A man of developed personal sensibilities, an artist himself, Ross fell under the sway of scientific theories based on a rigorous discipline not at all in keeping with his own character[, a discipline] that, lacking in emotion, failed to provide the creative traction he sought. His influence, if not on artists, then on certain critics, collectors, and curators, was nonetheless considerable. Ross’s fine taste would survive, above all, through his collections. His gifts to various departments of the MFA totaled more than 11,000 objects.24 Although he knew the most about Asian and European textiles, Asian painting held no secrets for him. An indefatigable traveler, he always returned from his voyages around the world with a bountiful harvest.25 The arts of Japan, China, India, Persia, Egypt, and South and Central America drew him, one after another. Often he was among the first to take an interest in periods and objects entirely neglected by his contemporaries, divining what they missed thanks to an acute sensibility.26 His direct influence was perhaps greater than that of Freer due to his care in exhibiting the objects The triumph of Quality

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he collected and the enthusiasm he sought to share through [his] lectures and books. Thanks to the considerable acquisitions by these two collectors in particular, by the end of the war, America possessed Asian collections superior to any in Europe and perhaps to any in Asia. Specialists in Asian art in Tokyo, London, or Paris could no longer afford not to visit Boston and Washington. Beginning with souvenirs brought back to Salem by sailors in the late eighteenth century, the Asian collections in America had become the most important in the world. Museums, collections, and libraries there, more than anywhere else, contributed to this interpenetration of the world’s two great civilizations, a grand process in which art once again played a part. In this instance, the evolution of taste in the United States remained largely independent of Europe. Although antiquarian dealers like Samuel [Siegfried] Bing, Florine Langweil, Ching Tsai Loo, Charles Vignier, Edgar Worch, and Sadajiro Yamanaka probably contributed to the diffusion of certain kinds of Asian art, for example, contemporary ceramics and prints, developments in America ran independent of, though parallel to, those experienced by German, English, and French archaeologists in Europe, where they had a certain influence on collecting practices.27 As far as museums are concerned, the efforts of the MFA in Boston, where, beginning in 1909, visitors could experience a Buddhist Room and Japanese Court, deserve special recognition.28 The museum played a similarly innovative role where the display of Indian art was concerned, but here the viewpoint taken was historical from the outset. Thanks to encouragement and support from Ross, Boston first acquired a number of very fine Gandhara sculptures,29 then a collection assembled by museum archaeologist and aesthete Ananda Coomaraswamy with educational purposes in mind, possibly the finest [one] in the nation given the early date as well as quality of the donation.30 [Coomaraswamy’s] example was quickly taken up; private collectors like Freer and Forbes as well as museums like the Metropolitan in New York set out to acquire important Buddhist Indian sculptural fragments, bronzes, and paintings, frequently of later date than examples from China but nevertheless of great historical and artistic interest.31 This trend, which began in the museums, developed in large part through the influence of dealers.32 Thanks to archaeological exhibitions and a more permanent contact with India, Europe, in this case well in advance of [132] the United States, already boasted important collections such as those of the India Museum in London and Musée Guimet in Paris.

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Where the history of taste is concerned, it must be considered significant that the United States, like Europe, had experienced a classical revival; [indeed,] from Benjamin West and [Thomas] Jefferson through Washington Allston, in both painting and the so-called museum style in architecture, one might say that American art had returned to the wellspring of Western art. The study of Greek and Latin had, until well into the nineteenth century, formed the basis for American higher education.33 The Vogue of Archaeology

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Knowledge of the classics rendered Americans as familiar as Europeans with the masterpieces of Antiquity. Indeed, Classical archaeology was taught at Princeton beginning in 1831, although it was not until Norton began teaching at Harvard in 1873 and a Department of Art and Archaeology saw the light of day at Princeton in 1882 under the direction of Allan Marquand that the field became infused with creativity.34 New organizations like the Archaeological Institute of America (1879) prepared the way for American Schools of Classical Studies to open in Athens in 1881 and Rome in 1895. The American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, among the country’s first important scholarly periodicals devoted principally to Classical archaeology, began publication in Baltimore in 1885.35 The importance of the arts of Antiquity was not lost on museums motivated to assemble important collections of plaster casts on which to base didactic installations. The Metropolitan in New York, the MFA in Boston, and the Art Institute in Chicago already possessed by the end of the century (as they still do) replicas and models of all the great monuments and sculptures of Antiquity, along with details.36 The same held true of most of the museums created in their image, even those more specialized.37 But this was but a phase. The flagrant insufficiency of such reproductions for the development of taste and sensibility was soon recognized, and, as a result, often works from Antiquity were among the first original objects museums acquired. The Cesnola collection (1872–76) provided the Met its core holdings of ceramics, statuettes, and bronzes, soon completed by sets of gemstones, the gift of James Taylor Johnson in 1881, and ancient glass from the grottos at Chauvet-Pontd’Arc, the gift of [Henry Gurdon] Marquand in 1897.38 The role of scientific expeditions in this [Classical] realm was much less important than in Egyptology. Digs in 1888 furnished the Boston museum only a few antique objects: two sculptural fragments from Naukratis; three from Assos. Public collections grew largely through gifts and purchases. But we should not overlook the contributions of archaeologists like Edward Robinson, who, as curator at the MFA and later director of the Met, developed their Departments of Ancient Art and had a major, direct influence upon certain collectors.39 Edward Perry Warren, John Marshall, and Lacey Davis Caskey in Boston, and Arthur L. Frotingham Jr. and David Robinson in Baltimore, not satisfied with immersion in scholarly research, preferring to live lives more fully engaged with the art that interested them, managed to assemble collections of their own in the field.40 Some less specialized collectors like J. P. Morgan, William T. Walters, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Thomas B. Clarke, Henry Goldman, and William Randolph Hearst owned ancient objects of importance, works of sculpture or ceramics; it seems fair to say, however, that the arts of Antiquity did not yet enjoy any particular following in the United States. Despite the efforts of personages such as Charles Eliot Norton, Richard Norton, George H. Chase, and later Gisele Richter, the Classical world remained the province of universities and museums.41 Private collectors focused largely on ceramics; [133] Joseph Clark Hoppin was one of the first to acquire fine examples of ancient vases, in Athens between 1893 The triumph of Quality

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and 1898, then in Rome in 1898, [a collection] today at the Fogg. His friend Albert Eugene Gallatin of New York began collecting abroad at about the same time but later turned to larger and more varied acquisitions made at auction.42 Eliza Radeke would leave her own such purchases, constituting a very fine and nearly complete collection of black- and red-figure vases, to the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design.43 David Robinson, whose personal finds enabled his students at Johns Hopkins to study the earliest stages of Hellenistic ceramics from original works rather than from less evocative, often misleading slide projections and photographs, shared that preference for works of the greatest antiquity we have recognized elsewhere. At Yale, the vases one encountered were mostly Etruscan and Roman instead, thanks to a collection assembled in Munich by Paul Arndt and donated to the university in 1914 by Rebecca Darling Stoddard.44 Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley, like Bowdoin, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton,45 possessed smaller collections that nonetheless demonstrated the interest of university educators in Classical archaeology in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.46 The major museums amassed important collections, comparable to those in Europe, in this period as well, especially Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, whose sets of red-figure vases and Arretine pottery were among the finest in the world,47 and the Met, where red- and white-ground Attic vases predominated.48 The art museums of Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco held a few interesting pieces but still have a long way to go if they hope [to assemble] Departments of Ancient Art comparable to these. In the plastic arts, the role of private collectors was limited to a few rare examples found in some of the eclectic collections previously discussed. The flamboyant, Baroque-style private homes after the turn of the century featured an overloaded interior décor little suited to the noble materials, elegant simplicity, and monumentality of works of ancient sculpture that Europeans had been collecting since the fifteenth century. The principal works had long since come to rest in important public collections. Modern digs organized by major institutions left little room for amateurs, who had to content themselves with making purchases at occasional sales of private European collections at which they had to contend with fierce competition from German and, increasingly, American museums. The growth of the latter during the period we have been studying was considerable, a development easily followed in contemporary monographs like Adolf Furtwängler’s Antiken in den Museen von Amerika and George Henry Chase’s Greek and Roman Sculpture in American Collections.49 Aside from a few individual works of quality, like a statue of Meleager at the Fogg and similar examples at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Hispanic Society of America in New York,50 the most complete collections were at the Metropolitan and, in Boston, at the MFA, which until 1894 held only a few marble sculptures. During the following decade, with the help of Edward P. Warren and John Marshall, acting as agents in Europe, the [Boston] museum undertook a systematic

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acquisitions campaign. Its Department of Ancient Art was particularly well supported by donors, who added more than ninety works to the collection, mostly Roman copies making possible the study of stylistic changes over time. The plan beginning in 1904 was to acquire Greek originals, which involved either attempting the impossible or selling the museum’s soul to the devil. The tripartite bas-relief acquired in this way, purportedly discovered in Rome, and the head of a young goddess said to have come from the island of Chios have caused much spilling of ink. It is true that another of the museum’s most acclaimed acquisitions, a head of [134] Aphrodite claimed to date from the fourth century, indisputably does reflect the hand of Praxiteles in its languor of expression and supple fullness of modeling, equal in quality to another from the same era, a head of Zeus from Mylasa.51 The Classical sculpture held by the Met at the point our analysis comes to an end, though not truly exceptional, enabled study of Greek and Roman plastic arts from every era. The most remarkable objects in the collection were a set of Etruscan hammered bronze relief decorative panels from a sixth-century [BC] chariot discovered in Monteleone, Italy. Two male torsos and a lion represented the fifth century; several heads of athletes, a colossal statue discovered in Rome in 1903, and a stele decorated with a rider on horseback, the fourth. This ensemble was rounded off by a number of fine works of Hellenistic and Roman sculpture: a fragment from the celebrated Fighting Gaul, statues of an elderly peasant woman and fisherman, and busts, among them a remarkable head of Augustus. Beginning in 1917, a special wing devoted to Antiquity attempted to create an “evocative” atmosphere through the installation of works of art around a Roman courtyard, the cubiculum from a villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, decorated with period paintings. If vases in a certain sense permitted study of developments in Greek painting, the [Met]’s sculpture collection, completed by a set of bronzes assembled in the years leading up to the turn of the century by J. J. Baxter, Arthur Frotingham, and Henry G[urdon] Marquand (and developed without interruption in the years since), was of similarly didactic importance.52 Most major museums from Boston and Washington to Cleveland and Rochester held similarly good collections of antique gemstones and especially jewelry and glass.53 The considerable growth in American collections of ancient art after 1876 coincided with a clear refinement of taste. If, at first, collections came together somewhat by chance as objects appeared on the market, by about 1905, one notes a more systematic search for quality both by museums, as we have seen was the case in Boston, and by individuals, Albert Gallatin and Eliza Radeke among them. This more refined sensibility found expression in the acquisition of a better selection of objects—of Greek originals, for instance, instead of late Roman copies. But the influence of archaeology led as well to a familiar desire to obtain much more ancient examples, which led in turn to the purchase of works of lesser beauty or of uniquely historical interest to [only] a small number of initiates. As a result, it became necessary at times to divide up exhibition space, with major works arranged in large The triumph of Quality

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rooms designed for general viewing and smaller more esoteric works relegated to side galleries. Very occasionally, an effort was made to encourage taste for ancient art by organizing exhibitions of foreign private collections like that of Alessandro Castellani, shown at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876, or of Arretine ceramics belonging to James Loeb shown in Boston in 1908.54 Such efforts were in vain, however; the art of the ancient world was not yet able to escape either the grasp of archaeologists or the confines of museums. Though long appreciated, the field [of ancient art] nevertheless never knew the popular success enjoyed by Egyptian art, nor did it have as discernible an influence on American culture as that of the Western Middle Ages. The history and beauty of ancient art had been recognized, but no transformations of consciousness had occurred. For many Americans, Egypt and Assyria were not unfamiliar places; even before 1876, the very ancientness of these civilizations had lured a select number of tourists. The monumentality of Egyptian architecture had been much admired by the public at the Centennial Exposition, where an “Egyptian-style” courtyard was on display. Certain nineteenth-century travelers had even [135] managed to visit Thebes or the ruins of Nineveh. The collections of Henry Abbott, Henry Anderson, Richard Haight, Henry Haskell, and William F. William, previously discussed, were precursors to the great archaeological ensembles of the early twentieth century.55 Curiosity about and interest in questions of religion led to widespread, growing admiration for ancient faiths. As a result of the at once more artistically and more historically attuned perspectives informing the organization of museum collections, Egyptian and Assyrian art began to be seen as sources of [the art] of the Mediterranean basin. The examples of the British Museum, the Louvre, and other public collections elsewhere in Europe, for instance, the Berlin Museum, whose Egyptian and Assyrian Departments grew enormously during the nineteenth century, were not without their influence on the politics governing American museums as well. By 1872, museums in Boston, New York, and Chicago had come into possession of their first ancient artifacts, small objects and plaster casts. It was a time when inquiries into the origins of religion were being widely read. In 1880 in Boston, some interested parties went so far as to found an Egyptian Society. The Museum of Fine Arts, newly formed, had recently acquired a collection of mummies as well as smaller items from an English amateur, Robert Way.56 The museum’s holdings grew, especially under the guidance of Theodore M. Davis, who in 1903 donated from his own collection of porcelain, pottery, and wood sculpture excavated from the tombs of Thutmose I and Thutmose IV in the Valley of the Kings. The museum’s willingness to accept these gifts was transformed that same year into an active participation in the excavations themselves. A special fund was set up to support explorations at Assuet in collaboration with Émile Gaston Chassinat of the Department of Egyptology at the Louvre. In 1905, George Andrew Reisener was put in charge of the project, now being conducted in partnership with Harvard. Digs at Giza, Mesheikh, Kerma, and then in Ethiopia attracted public attention to Egyptian art thousands

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of years old, an antiquity the museum made much of in promoting the program.57 In this area of specialization as in all others, however, taste for beauty, the purist’s best and most reasonable motivation, came to take something of a back seat to scientific research. Works of great loveliness came into the museum’s possession as a result of these digs nonetheless, including an alabaster bust of Mycerinus and a group sculpture, King Menkaure [Mycerinus], the Goddess Hathor, and the Deified Hare Nome. Davis next offered his assistance to the Met and, each year upon his return from Egypt, donated several objects of importance. In 1907, the government of Egypt awarded the museum the concession for digs at Lisht, the Kharga oasis, and Thebes. Under the direction of Ambroise Lansing, between 1913 and 1917, these campaigns yielded numerous major discoveries. A twentieth-dynasty temple and the Palace of Amenhotep III brought the Met an assortment of everyday objects, jewels, and important bas-reliefs, as did work at the North Pyramid of Sesostris I at Lisht.58 By the end of the Great War, though both Boston and New York possessed major collections, the one at the Met has only continued to grow, thanks to a bequest from Davis. Subsequent expeditions beyond the period with which we are concerned have rendered its Egyptological holdings among the most complete in the world. Private collectors like Isaac Fletcher, William T. Walters, Charles L. Freer, M[ichael] H[enry] de Young, Charles L. Hutchinson, and Martin A. Ryerson, though none concentrated on Egyptian art, nevertheless also procured major works of quality.59 Others, like Garrett Chatfield Pier and Walter A. Roselle, collected smaller objects.60 But, where Egyptian art was concerned, Davis was the amateur’s amateur, an almost single-minded enthusiast eclectic in taste. Up until 1913, Davis spent every winter along the Nile. Increasingly interested in archaeology, he had first obtained [136] the concession to dig in the Valley of Kings in 1902, making discoveries there of capital importance. The Cairo Museum owes a number of its treasures to his efforts, and the directors of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities gave him permission to keep a number of choice pieces: an alabaster head of Akhenaten inset with glass eyes; several figures of Yuya, the father of Queen Teye; and numerous vases, amulets, and other jewelry. Davis, however, was not satisfied with digging around in Egypt. Though an archaeologist, he was also, and indeed first and foremost, a collector, a passion that seems not to have been quelled by scientific research as is typically the case. He succeeded in acquiring a statuette of Amenhotep III, another from the thirteenth dynasty, and a collection of glass, a range that demonstrates the breadth and variety of his personal taste.61 His was a rare balance between archaeological understanding and sensibility. Leaving behind the simple curiosity and interest in religions that had motivated American collectors during the previous century, Davis had managed to show both American museums and archaeologists a new way to proceed by dint of his own example. As for Assyrian art, we have already noted the importance of the fragments that had made their way to the United States even before the Philadelphia Centennial, The triumph of Quality

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although the collections [of these fragments] had known very little in the way of subsequent growth given the rarity of truly exceptional artifacts. New excavation offered the only real prospects, but the best sites had already been claimed by the British and French. American collectors turned their attention as a consequence to smaller objects such as seals, cylinders, tablets, which, in the absence of loftier examples, still offered opportunities for historical research.62 A certain number of eclectic collectors like J. P. Morgan, William Walters, and Isaac Fletcher nonetheless managed to acquire very fine fragments of Assyrian sculpture. And Walter Roselle, long interested in the remotest reaches of Antiquity, owned two magnificent steatite sacred bulls.63 Because American scholars and curators had no particular expertise in this area, one relegated in most museums to the Departments of Antiquities, Assyrian art was never much in favor with museum audiences or the wider public. Only following the war, with the creation at the University of Chicago of an Oriental Institute funded by the John D. Rockefeller Foundation, would American archaeologists turn their attention eastward.64

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Where the art of the Near East was concerned, nineteenth-century Americans retained only the memory of very ancient civilizations rekindled by fragments of monuments and small trinkets brought home by missionaries.65 Islam and its more contemplative art remained utterly unknown in the United States. It is true that the country had had little contact with the eastern Mediterranean. Neither the Turkish craze of the eighteenth century nor the Orientalism of the French nineteenthcentury Romantics had crossed the Atlantic. Everything Middle Eastern and African was mixed up together and equally disdained. A certain amount of travel, commercial relations, and a Levantine exodus first to Europe and then America in the late nineteenth century brought these various cultures into contact for the first time. Syrian and Armenian merchants from Constantinople’s Beşiktaş district like Antoine Brimo, Hakkim Bey, Irène Kalebjian, Hagop Kevorkian, the Kouchakji family, and Tabbagh Frères, along with Jacques Bacri, Vitall Benguiat, Samuel [Siegfried] Bing, Raphael Stora, and Charles Vignier, attempted to set up shop in the United States after having first introduced the art of Islam to the Goupils [ Jules and Léon], Octave Homberg père, Joanny Peytel, Émile Molinier, and Gaston Migeon in Paris.66 The Kelekian collection was among the great eye-openers in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Thereafter, the art of Islam, [137] whose stylistic qualities, charm, delicate coloring, and eminently decorative character were immediately recognized, was all the fashion. For many, it was a great awakening.67 Collectors acquired sheets of calligraphy, miniatures, and rugs. Not just dealers but certain American artists did what they could for the cause of Persian art. Mary Cassatt and Henry Golden Dearth, among others, exerted an important influence on collectors, the former on Louisine Havemeyer in particular. In Chicago, Frank Wakely Gunsaulus, a popular lecturer [and] himself a collector, did much to encourage the diffusion of Islamic art both there and farther west, as did others. The Vogue of Archaeology

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The art of Islam was first appreciated for its usefulness in interior decoration. Even eyes not yet accustomed to the comforting luxury of Oriental rugs, the coloristic mosaic of ceramics and miniatures, and the meanders of the calligraphic line could find much to appreciate in them. This earliest response was soon replaced by a tendency to collect such articles as objets d’art with an intrinsic value all their own. Later, as a result of museum gifts and bequests, the creation of Departments of Islamic art, and the advent of new approaches borrowed from other areas of specialization, there arose the now familiar pursuit of the archaic, both of artifacts discovered through excavation and of the remote periods they served to represent. For many collectors, this new taste could be traced to an exhibition of Islamic art held in Munich in 1910. The earliest collectors of the arts of the Near East were not specialists. Though drawn more powerfully to other branches of artistic expression, collectors like Henry [Gurdon] Marquand, Benjamin Altman, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Jacob S. Rogers, Clarence H. Mackay, William H. and Ethel Sperry Crocker, and Joseph Widener nonetheless each possessed in their homes important Islamic objects and Oriental rugs acquired following the World’s Columbian Exposition. Very quickly, however, other amateurs were drawn to the field by its open possibilities, although an exclusive focus on Islamic art lay beyond the comfort zone of most Anglo-Saxon collectors, who tended to see it instead as décor, a delight to the eye. There were two differing approaches to such collecting, which often played out simultaneously, even in a single individual: a focus on rugs, on the one hand, and on miniatures, ceramics, and objets d’art, on the other, motivated by a eye for color and design and governed by desire to achieve a decorative ensemble effect. The usual preference for older and older objects played a role as well. Some among the more important collectors of Islamic objects proved eclectic in their taste. [Henry] Walters, the Havemeyers, Mary and Isaac Fletcher, John D. and Frances P. McIlhenny, and William Randolph Hearst showed a particular interest in Oriental art.68 Walters followed his personal predilection for archaic objects all the way back to the art of the Sassanid dynasty in Persia, buying up Caucassian bronzes.69 The same sort of early Rhages and Kashan ceramics filled the Havemeyer collection, along with very lovely twelfth- and fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts.70 The Rakka, Rhages, and Sultanabad earthenware in these collections rivaled that belonging to the Fletchers, whose Ispahan, Ghiordes, and Polonaise rugs were, however, far superior to [the Havemeyers’] in quality. Of the twenty examples that the Fletchers owned, since donated to the Metropolitan, we might single out for special mention a magnificent prayer rug embroidered with inscriptions.71 The museum-quality rugs belonging to John and Frances McIlhenny, friends of Charles F. Williams in Philadelphia, reveal the excellence of these collectors’ taste. A rug with an avian design was the main attraction, but the collection included a number of “Holbein” and handsome Kuba rugs as well.72

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Hearst, a great decorative arts enthusiast, could hardly leave [138] the art of the rug untouched. Of his complete set of Caucassian rugs from Asia Minor, we might single out a very fine Tabriz with an animal design.73 Such rugs—virtual paintings, colored labyrinths, symbols of the genius of the East—have always attracted American collectors, even nonspecialists like William A. Clark, whose Ispahan and “Polonaise” rugs included the finest sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples known.74 However much they may have admired them, most of these amateurs considered their Oriental art and rugs mere complements to much larger collections. The interior of the New York home of Charles T. Yerkes was an exception to this rule, expressly designed to show off his collection of rugs. He did own paintings, grandly displayed, but the jewel at their center was a set of sixteenth-century floor coverings, the effort of a lifetime, an ensemble unequaled by any in the West before or since or, for that matter, in any Persian court.75 Among his masterpieces, produced in workshops during the fifteenth century at the height of the Persian tradition, were a magnificent silk rug from the Ardebil Mosque representing trees against a red background, an inscribed carpet, and numerous others featuring animal designs. Rugs of woven silver, “Polonaise” rugs, and in particular a medallion-covered rug from the Château de Bagatelle that had once belonged to Lord Hertsford give some idea of the unique quality of this splendid ensemble. Most of the fifty pieces acquired by private collectors from the Yerkes estate sale [22 January 1910] have ended up in American museums. But individual collectors were drawn to the art of the rug in large numbers: Charles Deering, Yerkes’s fellow Chicagoan, discovered in Islamic floor coverings a taste of what he admired in Spanish art; and Edith Rockefeller McCormick possessed a few fine examples as well, among them the famous “Emperor carpet.”76 The trend toward specialization led some collectors to focus on rugs almost exclusively. Among those deserving mention [are] C[harles] F. Williams of Norristown, Pennsylvania, who possessed an ensemble remarkable for its ancient rugs from workshops in Asia Minor;77 William H. Crocker, who also collected fifteenthand sixteenth-century rugs manufactured in the north of Persia; W. B. Bowrer, a specialist in Herat rugs; and George and Mary Kennedy, who assembled their own rather varied collection in Europe.78 This should suggest something of the incredible vogue for Oriental rugs immediately before and during the Great War. Rugs had been given the keys to the city, as highly considered as nineteenth-century or even quattrocento painting, admirable in their own right. One of the best examples of this enthusiasm was the gift given the City Art Museum of St. Louis by James F. Ballard tracing the evolution of the Oriental rug from the sixteenth century onward, a veritable ten-piece symphony of decorative design striking a personal note with its mix of Feraghan, Oushak, Caucassian, Ghiordes, Polonaise, Indian, and Indian-Persian styles. Rarer still, the collection included a Spanish rug featuring an octagonal design, proof of Ballard’s knowledgeability and breadth of taste.79

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Among collectors of ceramics and textiles, we see this same attention to tracing evolutions in technique through the acquisition of older and older specimens, the rarest possible. Indeed, if the highly specialized collection of T. B. Whitney, an American amateur living in Paris, featured more recent pseudofaïence from Rhodes, Damascus, and Kubachi, this seems a reflection of the taste of the great Orientalist collectors of fin de siècle Paris: the Marquise Costanza Arconati-Visconti, the Comtesse de Behague, Raoul Deveaux, Claude Ferdinand Gaillard, Octave Homberg [père], Raymond Koechlin, and the Rothschilds.80 Little by little, however, as advances in archaeology, German expeditions to Asia Minor, and discoveries by Persians themselves brought even older pieces [139] to light, collectors abandoned Damascus and pseudo–Rhodes ware for the art of Rhages and Sultanabad, losing interest in more modern faïence entirely. Some art critics, like Arthur Upman Pope and [Rudolf] Meyer Riefstahl, helped to popularize the ceramics and textiles of Asia Minor in the United States with the assistance of Oriental dealers and enthusiasts like Gunsaulus and Dearth, who personally owned excellent examples, and Cornelia Van Rensselaer [Mrs. Henry Golden Dearth], who has kept up her late husband’s collection in Héricy. Though somewhat reduced in size, it still includes illuminated manuscripts and ceramics of the highest quality. The collection Gunsaulus eventually bequeathed to the Art Institute included very lovely Persian ceramics,81 as did that of Thomas B. Clarke, more considerable when measured in number of pieces, though perhaps not so well chosen.82 We find this same passion for Oriental art in V. Everit Macy, though even more exclusively. An important New York businessman, Macy worshipped the textiles of Persia and Asia Minor. His most famous piece was a magnificent length of velours decorated with characters and shrubbery from a tent taken at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, fragments of which are at both the MFA and Metropolitan. The supreme delicateness of one panel representing a falconer makes apparent the subtlety and refinement of this art form and its collectors both. Macy was much tempted by cut and silver-laced velvets and brocaded silks; he took pleasure in both their visual and their sensual delight. His collection of miniatures included many by Behzad painter Riza Abbasi, along with much older examples. A similar breadth marked his choice of ceramics.83 Despite a change in overall focus to privilege the archaic, some amateurs continued to think about Islamic art more comprehensively. Denman Ross, like Macy, sought out objects for their beauty as ends in themselves, without too much concern for precise dating or rarity. An eclectic amateur of Asian art, Ross played the same leadership role in Boston for the arts of Persia as he had for those of the Far East. Though his lead in this instance was not followed by his fellow Bostonians to the same degree, he nonetheless provided the MFA one of its most important collections comprising an enormous number of textiles documenting their stylistic evolution.84 The rooms in which these carpet fragments, ceramics, and velvets were made available for amateurs to admire, historians to study, and artists to find inspiThe triumph of Quality

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ration in were owed to the efforts of a man of taste attempting to reconcile in one collection these three often incompatible aims. Ross was very much involved in the museum’s decision to acquire the collection of Persian miniatures assembled by Russian archaeologist, historian, and scholar Victor Goloubew.85 Here one can admire the simplicity and calligraphic qualities of a first-century [AD] Pedanius Dioscorides manuscript or thirteenth-century Traité des apothicaires, paralleling the linear clarity and focus [l’intensité d’analyse] of fourteenth- and sixteenth-century portraits. Little by little in this way, Islamic artifacts penetrated the world of the museum and won over the public. Certain collectors had had the audacity to admire and appreciate what were considered at first agreeable ornaments, harmonious in color, just as they would works of high quality in any tradition, an important lesson. For did not such artifacts occupy the same place in the classical age of Oriental art as a Raphael fresco or Nicolas Bataille tapestry did in Europe? Could not the same be said of those marvelous small paintings, Arabic, Persian, and Indian miniatures? The little-explored or unexplored riches waiting below ground in Asia Minor would tempt archaeologists with fresh discoveries in the aftermath of the war, profiting from the relative freedom brought about by the end of hostilities across the eastern Mediterranean basin. This most recent age of archaeology was born with help from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, [140] founded in 1919.86 Other universities and museums have organized scientific expeditions and new excavations as well, inspired by a growing excitement at the thought of previously unknown civilizations. However, the impact of this change in attitude upon Islamic art collections in the United States lies beyond the range of our study.

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Medieval style has always played a role in America. Most nineteenth-century religious architecture was Gothic, a shared legacy of Anglo- Saxon culture that has managed to survive every change in taste.87 If the United States never passed through a phase of medieval decorative arts or Gothic ruins, Romantic conceits so dear to Walpole and the late eighteenth-century French, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Romanesque and Gothic architecture became increasingly fashionable.88 A man like Henry Hobson Richardson, endowed with a deep understanding of the Romanesque, created architecture of an originality Europeans could only aspire to, inspired by stylistic principles rather than decorative details. Richardson’s contemporary, Richard Morris Hunt, [in] more eclectic and less personal [ways], managed successfully to adapt both Flamboyant Gothic and early French Renaissance style, the former especially. The majority of their students, inheritors of the movement, lapsed into uninspired imitation. The “Gothic” and “Roman Fireplace” styles practiced by unimaginative disciples played havoc with American architectural taste, especially following the triumph of Gothic décor at the Philadelphia Centennial. The medieval tendency was significant, nevertheless, demonstrating that nostalgia for the art of the Middle Ages was as deeply felt in the United States as ever before.89 Where Jarves had been drawn to medieval painting alone, Morgan, Walters, The Vogue of Archaeology

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Dreicer, MacKay, and Hearst had organized their own important collections around medieval manuscripts and objets d’art as well. There has always been a consonance, a shared sensibility, linking American culture and the art of the Middle Ages. Simplicity, immediacy, monumentality, all essential features of early Western art, proved well suited to a young nation sharing these same straightforward, vital impulses. A sort of dual Middle Ages—at once romantic and precise, chimerical and factual, imaginary and historical—found culminating expression in turn-of-thecentury America. Collectors of arms and armor were drawn to [medieval] culture’s most picturesque and chivalric aspects: in the age of the machine, valiant knights, mercenary armies, and suits of armor quickly won their way into the popular imagination, shaping sensibilities. In medieval décor, suits of arms provided a reliably picturesque effect, so primary a Romantic trope that for many years conjuring the Middle Ages brought chivalry immediately to mind. Post-Romantic architecture, large homes in medieval or early Renaissance style, vast halls decked out with monumental fireplaces, all so characteristic of the late nineteenth century, seemed to cry out for features such as arms and armor and enormous tapestries. The principally decorative role played by arms and especially suits of armor in domestic interiors is of interest only because it exemplifies a general tendency. Beginning around 1870, private collectors like John Stoneacre Ellis of Westchester, New York, and, somewhat later, William Cruger Pell of New York City, acquired the first few such objects.90 But the field of American arms collecting was soon dominated by two other men distinguished by both knowledge and taste: Rutherford Stuyvesant, for forty years [141] a Metropolitan Museum trustee; and Bashford Dean, until 1928 in charge of the arms and armor in its collections.91 The two men together created a splendid ensemble, of which the museum could well be proud, but their efforts did not end there. Thanks to their activities and expertise, private collectors and other museums followed their example. Another important factor in the evolution in the collecting of arms and armor in the United States was the famous ensemble belonging to a German, Richard Zschille, that proved one of the biggest draws at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the first opportunity most ordinary Americans had to experience an impressive medieval collection in person.92 Already by this point, Stuyvesant had been wandering through Europe for a quarter century attending sales of important collections, those, for example, of the Baron de Cosson, Lord Stafford, Lord Londesborough, and Frédéric Spitzer, transforming “Tranquility,” his home in Allamuchy, New Jersey, into a veritable museum. Among its best known works were a half suit of armor that had once belonged to the Emperor Mathias from the Spitzer sale, a half suit with arms from the Duc de Savoie [Duke of Savoy], and a set of casks from the Cosson collection. Glass cases filled with daggers, swords, sabers, and full suits of armor evidenced a concern for quality not at all surprising in a deeply knowledgeable man in possession of one of the best libraries on the subject. Though a private collector, Stuyvesant often would loan pieces to the Met and was in fact remained actively involved in the museum,

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facilitating acquisitions, for example in 1904 that of an important collection purchased from the Duc de Dino. The United States was additionally fortunate that important collections assembled by two Parisian arms enthusiasts made their way to that same museum. William H. Riggs found his inspiration in a brilliant late nineteenth-century circle of Parisian amateurs that included Baron Davillers, Edmond Bonnaffré, Edmond Foulc, and the Comte de Chabrière-Arlès, who gathered every day at one or another of their respective homes. A friend and student of the celebrated Louis Carrand [père], whose collection was among the jewels of the [Palazzo del] Bargello, Riggs spent fifty years of his life crisscrossing Europe, buying not just arms and armor but paintings representing knights in armor from antiquarian dealers and major sales such as those of the collections of Ambrogio Uboldo, Samuel Rush Meyrick, Sir Andrew Fountaine, Louis Carrand père, Spitzer, the Comte de Pourtalès, Hollingworth Magniac, and the Marquis de Belleval. Rigg’s collection, which included rarities such as the parade armor of Galiot de Genouilhac, numbered no fewer than 3,000 items. Following the example of his friend J. P. Morgan, Riggs would donate the entirety of his holdings to the Met in 1913.93 The collection of Jean-Jacques Reubell, another adoptive Parisian, rivaled that of Riggs, though on a much more modest scale, and—this is the best part—both would eventually end up in the same place! Reubell’s idea was to focus on highquality medieval and Renaissance daggers. His collection, though it never grew to the size of Riggs’s, demonstrated similar interest in following the weapon as its style evolved through these periods. Both men were amateurs but also art historians, much like their student, friend, and standard-bearer, Bashford Dean.94 For his part, Dean, both as curator and private collector, worked to fill in gaps in the museum’s holdings. In his area of focus, Gothic arms, what he owned was without peer, including an entire collection from Chalcis and Rhodes, a set of eight full suits of armor, and casks of all kinds, an ensemble impossible to duplicate today.95 Dean kept his eye on fifteenth-century arms as well and possessed the famous gold-incrusted suit of armor that once had belonged to Johann Wilhelm, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, along with examples from sixteenth-century Italy and Germany. To round off these self-consciously didactic materials, Dean amassed a parallel collection of related artifacts: alabasters, medals, manuscripts, paintings (including portraits), seals, wood and stone sculpture, and stained glass representing types of arms or armor, some only thus known in reproduction. In this way, little by little, the Met’s collections grew to rival [142] those of the Armories of Turin and Madrid, Innsbruck’s Ambras Castle, and the Artillery Museum in Paris. This, however, does not yet mark the full extent of Dean’s accomplishments. Not content simply to develop a collection, like Stuyvesant, he organized a movement, in his case, by establishing a Fellowship of Arms and Armor made up of enlightened collectors directly involved in the museum’s affairs. The influence of the man’s personality was extensive: amateur acquaintances like William Randolph Hearst, George F.

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Harding in Chicago, and later John Woodman Higgins in Worcester went on to form important collections of their own, especially following the war.96 Special mention must be made of the Boston collection of Frank Gair Macomber, who, around 1880, like Stuyvesant, began traveling to Europe, where he accumulated an important ensemble of some 500 objects, including fifteen suits of armor and thirty-three casks, most from the sixteenth century.97 Later purchased by John Long and Elisabeth Severance and donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1916, it featured works by the great Milanese master craftsmen Antonio and Tommaso Missaglia, Hieronymo Spacini, and Lucio Picinino, others of importance from Germany and Spain, and a number of fine examples of Gothic arms.98 This quest for older and older examples in an effort to document historical developments was true of Dean and Macomber, whose collections of tapestries followed the same pattern, as well. Tapestries had long played a role in furnishing the great American mansions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Collectors like the Vanderbilts and [Edith Rockefeller] McCormick had appreciated this art form’s coloristic richness and decorative designs. Certain amateurs like Isabella Stewart Gardner, J. P. Morgan, Philip and Carrie Lauer Lehman, Thomas Fortune and Ida Barry Ryan, George and Florence Blumenthal, George Dupont, and Herbert Lee Pratt, Felix Moritz Warburg, [William Randolph] Hearst, Michael Dreicer, and later Andrew W. Mellon and Laura and John D. Rockefeller possessed in their interiors important examples and even full sets of medieval tapestries.99 Some, like Morgan, assembled full-blown collections. Macomber, for his part, did for tapestries what others had sought to do for art in general and for painting in particular, attempting to document an evolution in technique. As a result, we find in his collection the products of eighteenth-century Flemish, French, and Italian workshops but also much earlier examples from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. His tapestries—which included sets of Apostles and coats of arms, a Crucifixion, a Pietà, and narratives and allegories such as The History of Joseph, The Three Virtues, A Knight and a Lady, and The Portuguese in India—came from ateliers in the North of France, Tournai, and Brussels, though mid- to late sixteenth-century Flemish work from both Brussels and Oudenaarde was also very well represented.100 These two aspects of medieval art [arms and tapestries] could be seen as well in the home of Clarence Mackay, whose vast residence was designed to showcase his collections. One room was devoted specifically to suits of armor including major examples produced by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century armorers in Italy and Germany. The rest of the house was decorated with splendid Gobelins and with Beauvais tapestries, including a set by Antoine Coypel and Jean Berain; a rare ensemble of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works (three Gothic country life tapestries from the Château de Chaumont; The Life of Christ; David and Bathsheba); and a fourteenth-century King Arthur.101 Eighteenth-century furniture and Renaissance sculpture harmonized well with this in many respects eclectic ensemble, though one in which medieval art nonetheless predominated, as true of Mackay’s paintings The triumph of Quality

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(for example, a Simon Marmion altarpiece and a number of Italian Primitives) as of his decorative arts.102 American intellectuals, philosophers, historians of art, archaeologists, and even artists soon developed a new appreciation for the medieval period, the best known among them taken first [143] by Gothic architecture. Charles Herbert Moore, friend of Ruskin and colleague of Norton at Harvard, was in on the beginnings of this important late nineteenth-century development.103 A second generation brought talented writers such as Henry Adams and broad-minded, well-informed scholars such as Arthur Kingsley Porter on board.104 As a result, Ruskin’s ideas survived in the United States better than anywhere else, evolving little by little into a mode of medieval archaeology more precise and better reasoned, though perhaps less poetic and inventive, than that practiced in Germany and France, but fundamentally similar. American architects, writers, and historians together invented a new Middle Ages. Isabella Stewart Gardner must have had her experience of conversations and lectures in Boston and Cambridge in mind in 1892, when she purchased three Roman capitals and several Gothic sculptures and tapestries. It is true that, in 1879, she had already visited most of the great English and French cathedrals.105 Her interest in medieval art would only grow from this point on. It was a Gothic Venetian palace courtyard that she had reconstructed in her [Boston] museum, complete with blind-arcaded windows and balconies. In her late years, she would convert the Music Room into a chapel decorated with Gothic sculpture and a little later, in 1917, acquire two large fragments of Roman sculpture from Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre in Parthenay and a magnificent twelfth-century wood Deposition from the Cross. In these same years, the Louvre and Cluny Museum in Paris had to content themselves with little beyond fragments of Roman sculpture that had survived the ravages of time, and the medieval collections of the Altes Museum in Berlin remained in a similarly embryonic state. Only a few European collectors like Martin Le Roy and Octave Homberg père who took a special interest in the late Middle Ages had acquired Roman sculptures, at that point fairly easy to come by. But the most important medieval collection of the period had been assembled by a northerner, a far too little known Dutch collector, J. B. van Stolk, who filled his “collectionmuseum” in Haarlem with works of medieval sculpture and painting of very high quality at a time when few paid such objects any but token interest.106 In the United States, another precursor of [the] spreading taste [for medieval] was the talented artist and eminent collector George Grey Barnard, whose goal, similar to that of Rodin, was to benefit modern art and American sculpture in particular by facilitating access to the lessons of the past. In medieval sculpture, he was especially attentive to choice of materials, volumetric expanse, and quality of modeling, features indispensible to all good sculpture in his eyes and difficult for American sculptors to master without examples of originals before their eyes to study, measure, and handle as they wished. A student for many years at the École des Beaux-Arts, Barnard had traveled throughout France in the hopes of unlocking the

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secrets of Romanesque art in particular, visiting a considerable number of monuments discovered in old Romantic-era guidebooks. [Because he had] witnessed the state of abandonment and neglect into which so many otherwise splendid structures had fallen, his thought in collecting these works was to preserve them for the benefit of his less fortunate colleagues and compatriots unable to travel to Europe. Barnard’s extensive knowledge of the “monumental topography” of France facilitated these purchases, funded through the sale of his own work. Barnard acquired in this way important fragments from the cloisters of SaintMichel de Cuxa in the eastern Pyrenees and nearby Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert and capitals and sculpture from various [other] sites, all of which he brought together not far from his Fort Washington Road studio in New York, arranging the sculpture in a sort of brick chapel. This ensemble, which he called “The Cloisters,” would become in 1926 the centerpiece of the Metropolitan’s Department of Medieval Art.107 Though Barnard was especially interested in Romanesque sculpture, [144] he possessed as well a number of fine Gothic works: thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century Madonnas, Angels, and Saints. His idea to reconstitute a medieval environment on American soil would enjoy a great success, and, like Gardner’s Fenway Park, inspire medieval rooms in museums in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Toledo—all this, however, after 1919. Barnard’s role was considerable, due as much to his example as to his extensive influence. The explosive upsurge in the taste for medieval and especially Romanesque art immediately following the war owed much to him. Another artist, Henry Golden Dearth, played a role in spreading the taste for “Primitive” and particularly medieval art in the United States. Living most of the year in France, he was also very familiar with the masterpieces of French art[, a familiarity] he liked to share with his compatriots.108 Dearth assembled a fine collection of his own, made up of good-quality medieval sculptures, stained glass windows, and objets d’art. But it was his enthusiasm for medieval art that most influenced his numerous American acquaintances. One of the greatest enthusiasts of the arts of the High Middle Ages was Mary A. I. Mitchell Blair [Mrs. Chauncey Blair] of Chicago, who owned sculptures ranging in origin from ancient Assyria to sixteenth-century France. All, unfortunately, were not of equally good quality, but we might single out for mention a very beautiful fourteenth-century Virgin and Child, a fifteenth-century Saint John the Baptist, and a twelfth-century Roman head.109 Hers was one of a very few medieval collections in the Midwest before the war, frequented by visitors from Buffalo and Cleveland as well as Chicago.110 Another woman, Florence Blumenthal, abetted by her husband George, cultivated a passion for medieval culture. In their Parisian apartment on the Boulevard Montmorency, she sought to capture the atmosphere of the Middle Ages. But we should not forget the part played by major collectors—the Havemeyers, Dreicer, Morgan, Walters, and Hearst in particular—in promoting the Gothic and medieval cause.111 Objets d’art and manuscripts dating to even remote periods fell The triumph of Quality

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within their ken, but all owned works of medieval sculpture as well. Henry Walters, for instance, greatly admired pre-Renaissance glassmakers.112 One of his New York friends, Henry C. Lawrence, assembled an important collection of stained glass. Beyond the sentimental and artistic aspects of medieval art that attracted collectors like Gardner and Barnard, Raymond Pitcairn saw in it an expression of high religious feeling; in works of art produced in an age of ardent faith, he looked for examples likely to inspire those who shared his faith. Though his construction of the Bryn Athyn Cathedral and a veritable castle surrounded by a Gothic village (of which he had long dreamed) came after 1919, he had earlier acquired a number of important medieval stained-glass windows and splendid Romanesque sculptures that included a King and a Moses Bearing the Tablets of Law from Notre-Dame-dela-Couldre in Parthenay and a famous twelfth-century Madonna and Child from Le Mans. A part of his collection is today on deposit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.113 Thanks to the Gardner and Morgan bequests, the arrival of Barnard’s Cloisters in New York, and especially books, articles, and lectures by Arthur Kingsley Porter at Harvard, Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton, and their many colleagues and students, Americans became more and more familiar with Romanesque thought and art. Visits to France by Paul J. Sachs during the war, his time spent at the home of Georges Joseph Demotte, and [Demotte]’s decision to relocate to the United States furthered this diffusion. The enthusiasm of the directors of the Fogg for Romanesque sculpture found material expression in 1921 with the purchase of the splendid set of capitals from the Benedictine abbey Moutiers- Saint-Jean.114 That same year, the Met also acquired a sculpted column and a number of capitals.115 [145] These were the first Romanesque architectural ensembles to enter major American museums, marking the beginnings of a new politics of expansion. Men like Joseph Brummer, [Georges] Demotte, and Arnold Seligmann worked to promulgate in the United States a taste for Romanesque art, which, even before the war, had begun to catch the eye of antiquarian dealers in Europe such as Jacques Bacri, Nicolas Brimo, and Raoul Heilbronner. Slowly over time, medieval art for many Americans let go of its status as architectural stage furnishing, as mere décor distantly and indistinctly evoking a past age, to become an object of profound admiration. Doing so meant overcoming not just snobbish allegiance to supposedly well established reputations and misperceptions concerning the evolution of the history of art but also, especially for the public at large, a snobbish preference for works of art by recognized artists. Despite the anonymity of its makers and its challenging religiosity, medieval art was no sooner seen than embraced. This interpenetration of the thinking of two ages that neither the writings of Walpole and Ruskin nor the collection of Primitives assembled by Jarves had managed to effect was managed by the visual splendor, decorative spirit, teasing colors, and evocative power of an array of suits of armor, tapestries, enamels, and works of sculpture seen in the original. America had at long last gotten past the countless impediments raised by its colonial past and nineteenth-century small-

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mindedness to reclaim traditions to which it had as much hereditary right as any European nation.116 Given the vastness of medieval Europe, the interests of American amateurs extended beyond the arts of France. Spain had always found its most fervent admirers in the United States. Among them, we would not wish to forget Archer M. Huntington, in 1904 instrumental in founding, and later in supporting, the Hispanic Society of America,117 who assembled a splendid personal collection of HispanoMoresque ceramics.118 The 132 pieces that Huntington eventually would donate to the society included a famous fifteenth-century vase from the Alhambra, splendid platters decorated with animals, and pots entwined in vine-leaf arabesques, among the finest and rarest known. His collection comprised a wide variety of forms, taking this art of luminous reflection to its glimmering extreme. Hearst shared this weakness for all things Spanish, and his collections, of ceramics in particular, were the equal of Huntington’s and even those one might visit at the Osma Institute in Madrid.119 Where Italian decorative arts were concerned, American collectors were most taken with ceramics as well. We have already considered the collection of Mortimer Schiff. Two other major ensembles deserve mention as well: one offered by V. Everit Macy to the Met; the other formed by the important American architect Whitney Warren. Both included extremely rare pieces from northern Italian workshops in Florence, Faenza, and Deruta. These amateurs, like those who specialized in medieval arms and armor or medieval sculpture, were motivated in their choice of objects by a pleasure in their teasing colors and in the economy of means involved in their construction. Two amateurs, Robert Woods and Mildred Barnes Bliss, went even further in their passionate pursuit of the roots of Western art. Their collection comprised several fine medieval sculptures, including a twelfth-century head and thirteenthcentury Angel, a tapestry representing the allegory of Malebouche from the Roman de la Rose, French sixteenth-century drawings, early European paintings, and, in particular, beautiful Byzantine jewelry and enamels, textiles and antiques.120 In this fashion, moving incrementally back through history, American scholars and collectors broadened what was understood of Mediterranean culture during the Middle Ages. Thanks to collections, the herald of the age of arms and tapestries, the cleric of the great basilica and cloisters, attained a status equal to that of other vestiges of Latin culture in the public imagination. No longer were the Middle Ages, heir to the Classical world, considered the Dark Ages, a formulation old and out of date; medieval art was at last felt to mark one of the high points of Western culture.121 [146] The Philadelphia Exposition, of course, also marked for the United States a return to the cultural past in celebration of the Centennial of American Independence. If architecture did not strike the same personal note [in Philadelphia] that it would in Chicago two decades later,122 1876 nonetheless was the year Henry Hobson Richardson, along with two other major American architects, Augustus The triumph of Quality

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Saint-Gaudens and [ John] La Farge, began work on a decorative program for Trinity Church in Boston. American art was revitalized; pastiche and outright copying seriously lost their luster; the art of the past, no longer imitated outright, served these talented men as inspiration instead. Contemporary American art, once completely eclipsed by the virtuoso arts of Paris, had its moment of revenge. George Fuller, Thomas Eakins, and George Inness emerged from oblivion and neglect. In 1875, the Boston Art Club organized an important exhibition of paintings by Frank Duveneck and other young American artists. Thanks to this resurgent nationalism, America, little by little, rediscovered its artistic roots. We might recall the importance of that great eclectic collector Thomas B. Clarke, who did so much to bring modern American painting and later the work of the great eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraitists to his contemporaries’ attention; nor should we forget the often intense commitment of local organizations to preserving past traditions, sheltering them from the accelerated rhythms of modern industrial and commercial culture, the promise of the future in an age of tumultuous economic expansion. In the tradition of the late eighteenth-century Encyclopedists, institutions like the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, New-York Historical Society in New York, Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and the Peabody [Essex] Museum in Salem had long shown preservationist interest in the natural resources, culture, and [original] inhabitants of the New World.123 In the context of scientific advancement, ethnology and ethnography found their advocates in American universities, which became involved in organizing important expeditions and digs in an impassioned search for traces of the lost peoples that had once reigned over the continent. But beyond such scholarly investigation, contemporary artists were introducing another sort of Primitive art to the American public. At the Armory Show in 1913, Fauvists and Cubists, disciples of [Guillaume] Apollinaire, extolled the ingenuity, instinctive sense of color, and breadth of design and modeling of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the [Native] Americas. Jewelry, pottery, and figurines, no longer mere curiosities or ethnographic artifacts, were now works of art. By war’s end, private collectors and museums had come to see in such works what artists, critics, and antiquarian dealers in Paris had divined at the turn of the century. The “American Primitivism” and “Americana” movements presented in this period a dual aspect, pursuing, on the one hand, a colonial revival and, on the other, an interest in the vestiges of non-Western cultures. Both movements found much of their impetus in the search to justify contemporary art. Collectors who specialized in modern American art and museums of art slowly found their way back to the colonial period. Around 1895, works by Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Rembrandt Peale, and Samuel Lovett Waldo began to appear among the modern paintings in the collection of Thomas B. Clarke. Later, reprising an approach dear to American collectors early in the nineteenth century, Clarke became interested in “great men.” He founded a private club in New York and decorated its walls with portraits of famous Americans.124 With the help of

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Charles Harris, Clarence J. Dearden, and Charles Henry Hart, he assembled a considerable personal collection of such works, governed by a redoubled sense of historical responsibility both to preserve the image of important figures in the nation’s history and to document developments in the history of American portraiture. Historical importance thus tended [147] to outweigh the artistic value of the paintings themselves.125 No matter! Clarke launched a widespread return to American tradition, ancestors, and history. Dealers like Louis Rinaldo Ehrich in New York and Robert Vose and Frank William Bayley in Boston began buying and selling colonial-era art. Families combed their attics for ancestral portraits, hanging those they discovered in places of honor in ancestral homes, themselves carefully restored. Finding none, they sought instead to acquire famous examples from the colonial period and the early Republic. Impressive collections were formed, for instance, that of Herbert Lee Pratt, which included portraits by [ John Singleton] Copley, Daniel Huntington, Henry Inman, Charles Robert Leslie, John Neagle, various Peales (including Rembrandt’s well-known Washington), West, Sully, a series of Stuarts (including another [portrait] of Washington), plus portrait miniatures by [Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de] Saint-Mémin.126 Other [collectors], like John B. Lewis, J. P. Morgan, Lawrence Park, Judge Pears, Percy Rockefeller, and Frank B. Smith, assembled important holdings as well. Studies of American painting, miniatures, and decorative arts appeared; men like Charles Henry Hart, Albert Rosenthal, Henry W. Kent, Richard Townley Halsey, and Harry B. Wehle published surveys and monographs that helped to spread the taste for national art among the elite. But it was thanks especially to numerous museum exhibitions that the public at large made contact with its past. In 1909, the Hudson-Fulton Exposition, more than just celebrating two important dates in American history[—“the discovery of the Hudson River by Henry Hudson in 1609 and . . . the first successful use of steam in navigating that river by Robert Fulton in 1807”—]was itself a landmark event in the history of American taste. Alongside seventeenth-century Dutch paintings on the Fulton side of the exhibition, one encountered important American paintings, furnishings, silver, and glass from before 1825.127 Also in 1909, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where already two large rooms were devoted to American art, mounted an exhibition of ecumenical silver.128 No less noticed was an exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum dedicated to American painting [and] featuring works from the private collections of [Thomas B.] Clarke and Herbert Lee Pratt.129 Museums already in possession of a few portraits of famous Americans sought representative examples of work by all the major American artists.130 More and more notice was taken of historical society collections by scholars, critics, and the educated public. A law passed in 1906 creating an American Association for the Preservation of Natural Beauty and Historical Monuments offered parks, houses, and monuments of historical interest special protection.131 Dealers The triumph of Quality

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in Americana specializing in souvenirs for the tourist trade sprang up everywhere, in older parts of the country most particularly. Simple lines and fine materials were rediscovered along with the sturdy comforts of colonial and early nineteenthcentury furniture. If, on the whole, this art owed a great deal to Dutch woodworking, styles varied greatly from region to region. The collection of H. Eugene Bolles, a portion of which is today at the MFA, and that of George S. Palmer, today at the Met, complemented each other perfectly, offering a good picture of the evolution of furniture design in the United States.132 Bolles had brought together two earlier collections belonging to Irving P. Lyon and Albert Hosmer, who had taken an early interest in the genre.133 The Charles L. Pendleton collection at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design is also fairly exhaustive, as is that of Wallace Nutting, purchased in 1924 and 1926 for the Wadsworth Atheneum by J. P. Morgan Jr.134 It was after the war especially that Departments of American Art would be formed in museums and colonial-era period rooms installed,135 although as early as 1916 the City of New York gave the Met custody of an entire eighteenth-century mansion.136 [148] American décor, as a result, became increasingly fashionable. American intellectuals and members of the social elite made it a point of honor to own, if not a colonial-era or early nineteenth-century home, at least a few American paintings, furnishings, or objects. Heavy yet sturdy silver services from New England and New York, ceramics from Pennsylvania, and glass from the [Boston and] Sandwich [Glass Company] works on Cape Cod were all increasingly and passionately sought out. This love of region [du terroir], this historical provincialism, found at times still more specific expression, as in the case of Amos F. Eno, moved by his passion for New York to amass prints illustrating the city’s history.137 As with paintings and furniture, a point was soon reached where objets d’art and engravings were sought for the sake of their rarity or age—an American Primitivism that often led to interest in popular culture and folklore, the latter with high snob appeal still today. Led by changing taste to this interest in ethnography, collectors found themselves in league with archaeologists and scholars in America as well as Europe who had been students of the subject since the eighteenth century—though scientific pursuit of these investigations dated only to the late nineteenth.138 Native American, Mayan, African, and Oceanic art would enter American art museums only in the postwar period, although popular ethnographic collections like those of the United States National Museum, [Chicago’s] Field Museum, New York’s Indian Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the Peabody Museum at Harvard already possessed admirable artifacts representing these various cultures at the turn of the century.139 Similarly, even before 1919, a few enlightened amateurs like Henry G[urdon] Marquand, George D. Pratt, Robert W. de Forest, and Albert C. Barnes had recognized the beauty in Peruvian textiles, Mexican pottery, Native American jewelry, and even African sculpture and masks.140

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Museum visitors, scholars, and curators proved equally content with considering such objects as purely documentary in their interest, as scientific curiosities; catalogues and labels made no attempt to point out their possible artistic interest. Such was the state of affairs in Europe as well, where one encountered the same tiresome, outdated, unprepossessing presentations, the same disarray. Following the example of artists and a few dealers, however, art museums [in the United States] began to take Native American, African, and Oceanic tribal cultures themselves more seriously. At institutions like the Smithsonian and University of Pennsylvania Museum, religious and ethnographic interest still came first in typical late nineteenth-century fashion,141 but interest in artistic expression soon arrived with the opening of new venues like the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico, founded in Sante Fe in 1917. In this way, well before 1919, works of art from a diverse array of world cultures that in 1876 were still little understood, considered souvenirs of travel, curiosities, or artifacts of relevance to the history of religion, had won a predominant place in American collections. So-called archaic periods enjoyed in the United States a popularity unmatched [anywhere else] in the world. But why? Perhaps attempts to fill in gaps in public collections in an attempt to document artistic developments [149] played some role, although the process almost invariably entailed setting aside the focus on famous works universally recognized as masterpieces. More powerful factors had played an equally determinative role. [Of these factors, w]e should emphasize, first and foremost, the growing importance of travel. Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, American adventurers and businessmen scoured the globe in search of pleasure and opportunity. The ease with which they were able to cover great distances at home led them to think of foreign travel similarly, as a way to get from here to there. For a good many Americans, visiting Chartres or Mont Saint-Michel was no more difficult than visiting San Francisco. One might say their sense of distance differed from the [general] norm. With the expansion of industry and commerce, contacts by Americans with various world cultures grew increasingly more common and mutually reinforcing until even far distant lands grew familiar. Though Americans in foreign places most often had exports in mind, the history, monuments, and art of various lands left a strong impression. The much-vaunted American spirit, with its taste for adventure and enterprise, its insatiable passion for the new, its undying “pioneer spirit,” made such contacts easier; and this search for the exotic was aroused and encouraged by short stories, novels, history books, and magazines filled with tales of distant travel and adventure. This taste for the exotic would only grow. Photography, cinema, and radio offered an even more direct, if less poetic, opportunity for anyone and everyone to take stock of the world during an age of new historical discoveries. Period worship [la culte de la date] spread with the dissemination of historical scholarship. Until late The triumph of Quality

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in the century, the plastic arts had been thought to offer little more than illustrations of the “customs and manners” of ancient peoples. But historians and critics more attuned to the world of art discovered in such “documents” much greater interest, a growing admiration for their quality as works of art that went beyond mere respect for their ancientness. Although research conducted by archaeologists and scholars shut up in their ivory towers may not have been responsible directly for this redirection of taste, their discovery and preservation of particular objects made possible this blossoming of new ideas in particular cultural contexts. University courses, textbooks, and articles in journals devoted exclusively to art history contributed to this general embrace of historical understanding. If, in Europe, the nineteenth century was the Age of History, in the United States, the early twentieth century might be considered the Reign of Archaeology. Thirst for knowledge and physical evidence of the past caused the surface of the earth to be dug up everywhere. The race to find the oldest artifact or trace of this or that famous monument led to an outright snobbishness regarding first discovery that dominated both intellectual circles and museums, though not even this can explain the “taste for the Primitive.” The reader will have to trust me when I suggest that its motivations lay deeper still. The external factors we have considered served to steer collectors in the direction of ancient civilizations. As the rhythm of life accelerated and the ephemeral and counterfeit came to play a larger and larger role in American life, more and more importance was attached to ancientness in general. But historical choices were being exercised, a new sense of history [une conception nouvelle du temps] emerging. [150] Undoubtedly influenced by historical advances, new research was undertaken that focused on works of art from periods considered of greatest historical significance but whose appeal, perhaps unexpectedly, seemed tied to characteristics such as quietude, monumentality, vastness, and tactility, so that, for instance, of the arts of France, one preferred the twelfth century to the fifteenth or even fourteenth. Where ceramics were concerned, collectors came to prefer the simplicity of monochrome to the overly ornate, fantastic Chinese enameled cloisonné. Just as the genius of Giotto and Piero della Francesca was deemed superior to that of Meissonier and Bouguereau, and all memory of the Crystal Palace [in London] and [the Musée du] Trocadéro [in Paris] was effaced by the examples of Chartres and the Pyramids at Giza, Gothic “functionalism” and the frank economy of Roman architecture proved a satisfaction to those watching as twentieth-century skyscrapers and factories rose up around them. After the turn of the century, Americans rediscovered the formal simplicity of the colonial period and the early Republic. The same sensibility that led early colonists to a domestic architecture of grand austerity led their descendants to favor simple forms, broad modeling, and colorful though sober patterning, equally available in Persian ceramics, Roman sculpture, and medieval tapestry. This concordance in taste is unmistakable, though its causes may in the end resist easy explanation. The role played by certain artists or the influence of certain antiquarian dealers was of considerable importance, to be sure, though, of course,

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counterbalanced by the equally powerful influence of those specializing in other areas of artistic activity. Over the course of frequent peregrinations in Europe and elsewhere, American collectors generally bought, either from dealers or at public auction, whatever tickled their fancy. We have already noted key proponents of particular artistic styles, who managed to draw the attention of collectors to theretofore largely neglected periods through effort and their own example. But this was but one source of Primitivist tendencies among American collectors. Where Far Eastern, Egyptian, or Native American art was concerned, new archaeological finds put the discovery and acquisition of much new work within reach. War, the partial destruction or transformation of monuments and sites, encouraged fresh exploration in search of previously unknown objects, developments only hastened by broad changes in taste and increased interest in archaic periods. It is also interesting to note that the propagation of Primitivist taste in the United States took place independently of European influence. Certainly, in the early years [of the twentieth century] especially, relationships played an important role; there were reciprocal influences, parallel tendencies; but the rhythm of change in America was so much more rapid and intense that, surprisingly, the influences tended to run in the opposite direction, with American taste influencing European and, to an even greater degree, Japanese, as the increased popularity of Romanesque art in France and Chinese bronzes in Japan attests. The influence exercised by the taste of American collectors has had a continuing impact on contemporary art in the United States as well. [Not only t]he designs of modern silverware and pottery but also painting, architecture, and the decorative arts in general reflect the new sensibility, fabrics, fashion designs, hairstyles, and lines of clothing taking inspiration from the vogue for this or that period or celebrated work of art recently in the public eye. Above all, archaeological discoveries and artifacts have helped to reconfigure and correct the way past civilizations, countries, and eras are seen and understood in human terms. The contribution of American collections to these changes has been and continues to be considerable. The work of art is now understood to play a privileged and primary, indeed instrumental, role in education, its direct impact constrained, however outrageously, only by the dawn of the age of the specialist. [151] Collections are not to be managed by intellectuals, scholars, or historians; great collections all rest on a foundation of individual human sensibility. If properly artistic concerns with beauty and quality are to retain their role in the creative process and keep faith with the public, they must not yield to historical or merely archaeological interest tied to the rarity of objects. This was a pitfall most American collectors were able to avoid in the period under consideration. Their continued ability to do so seems less certain.

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chapter 4

Staying in Touch with the Contemporary Scene

Collectors in America have been divided at various points between those seeking to escape their moment in history or social circumstances for an artificial world of their own making and those choosing instead the path of affirmation and acceptance, an almost opposite strategy of self-definition through a determined embrace of the here and now. Recent developments in contemporary art tend to be shaped by both attitudes, by nostalgia on the one hand and by dynamic engagement on the other, abhorred or celebrated depending on the individuals and particular moments involved. Patrons of modern art, major figures and ordinary individuals alike, and those preferring to collect the art of the past are often exact contemporaries, and sometimes a given amateur will even favor both [kinds of art]. The collector of modern art needs to be guided by an understanding of ancient art in the same way an artist develops a personal style inspired by the work of older masters. There is no necessary conflict here, though arguably a tight mutuality of interest. But often collectors of modern art, taking their cue from recent developments in the art world itself, prove given to particularism and narrow-mindedness. Petty debates in which amateurs may feel obliged to take sides cloud and encumber their judgment and, accordingly, their taste. Collectors concerned, first and foremost, with artistic beauty would be well advised to pay little heed to an artist’s personality, friendships, and conflicts. The greater pitfall, snobbishness, is even worse. Though most people, out of respect or ignorance, abstain from casting judgment on the masterpieces of the past, virtually all of us feel secure enough in our understanding and taste to voice our opinions of contemporary art; neither established reputation nor received opinion serves to silence ignorance and presumption. No era has proved as susceptible as our own to sudden shifts in taste, whether the fickleness of the salon, the whims of the critics, or the inconstancy of the artists themselves. For nearly a century, schools and styles have come and gone with increased rapidity, as if to discover new ways of thinking about art were a competition, abetted by an army of partisans, critics, writers in search of something to write about, and offshoot salons eager to discover new genius, to adorn their own unworthiness in

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the glory attached to the brilliance of this or that artist. Even dealers have had a hand in this, if only by exaggerating certain stylistic developments as a result of contractual arrangements and commissioned articles that serve neither to shine light on contemporary art nor to make the work of collectors just starting out any easier! Works of art have frequently gone up and down in value and been speculated on—really, a speculation on the artists responsible—as with any other investment. It must be admitted that this type of collecting has been relatively rare in the United States, although temptation to follow the fluctuations of snobbish fashion has proved to have had its own negative effect. [156] The difficulties facing American collectors of contemporary art have been further exaggerated by the lack of available comparisons with earlier works, at times outlandish bursts of nationalism, and the tendency to admire too quickly and uncritically whatever has enjoyed so-called success abroad. Nonetheless, as we shall see, taste has improved as collectors have grown surer of themselves and more independent minded. The Centennial Exposition of 1876 did not succeed immediately in freeing American amateurs from the taste for anecdote and realism. Lesser works appealing to less sophisticated buyers continued to enjoy public favor and even brought what were record prices at the time.1 But the edifice was shaken, undermined at its foundations, by unfavorable side-by-side comparisons with original works of older art that proved a revelation. Despite American vernacular painting’s clear embeddedness in the life of the times, those with heightened sensibilities had already noticed its many shortcomings. In numerous collections, as we have seen, examples of older European art had begun to appear.2 Dutch paintings, English grand manner portraits, and sixteenth-century Old Masters, little by little, dethroned the taste for anecdote, if not among the public, then at least for important collectors, although preference for the more realistic works of the past remained strong.3 Among certain amateurs, however, this abandonment of modern art was less marked. The Romantics and Barbizon painters, for example, whose works we have already seen begin to make their appearance in Boston collections like that of Mary J. Morgan, provided a middle path, as suggested by record prices set at its sale in 1886: $45,000 for an Alma-Tadema, with works by Bouguereau, Cabanel, Dagnan-Bouveret, de Neuville, Fortuny, Gérôme, Ryder, Troyon, Vibert, and Zamacoïs also going for very high prices, as did others by Corot, Delacroix, Dupré, and [Théodore] Rousseau, one painting by whom sold for $9,000.4 Morgan’s collection, composed principally of contemporary or at least recent works, was displayed in an interior decorated with bronzes by Auguste Moreau, Jean-Louis Grégoire, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, ceramics from both Sèvres and Worcester, and silver from the great American workshop Tiffany and Co. Strangely, though, this collection’s creator seems to have felt the need to own and appreciate older works of art as well. If only for the purpose of comparison, Morgan had assembled a fairly vast collection of prints by all the Old Masters of etching and engraving from Schongauer to Méryon. Few fin de siècle collections evidence this degree of research and balance in their selections. Most amateurs continued to focus on the same Realist and genre The triumph of Quality

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painters, augmented, in the case of Abner Harper, by a handful of works by Michel, Couture, Corot, Díaz, Monticelli, but also, rarer still and suggestive of the collector’s personality, paintings by three of the best American artists of the day, Ralph Blakelock, George Inness, and William Merritt Chase.5 Daniel and Helen Craig Powers of Rochester, New York had also started out with the French painters then fashionable but rapidly broadened their focus to include works by Corot, Courbet, Couture, Daubigny, Díaz, Dupré, Millet, and even, at the last, Claude Lorrain.6 The collection of Dr. Edward M. Harris, sold at auction in 1899 at the very same time, was similarly constituted, though with works by Géricault and Mignard replacing those of Claude. Inness and the British painter Richard Wilson, we might add, put in appearances as well. In the somewhat smaller collection assembled by Edward Holbrook, the Romantics—Corot, Daubigny, Díaz, Dupré, and Isabey—stood out among works of lesser importance.7 Two major collections, those of F. O. Matthiesen and Edward LeRoy Stewart, illustrate even more effectively the diversity of fin de siècle taste. [157] The former included examples of work by virtually every Old Master of the Düsseldorf school, but both genre and Barbizon paintings as well in an unlikely mix of relatively well known names and works.8 A few older paintings undoubtedly acquired later only increased this confusion. The same French school painters appeared again in the equally considerable collection of Stewart’s widow, Emily B. Davis Stewart. Among a narrower selection of better-known names, the Düsseldorf school was again well represented, along with the American painters Inness, Chase, Church, Twachtman, and Charles Sprague. Though moderns predominated, the presence of Gainsborough, Hoppner, Canaletto, Teniers, and van Ostade signaled a characteristic late nineteenth-century return to the past.9 In Boston, we see the same mix of Realists, Romantics, and Barbizon painters we do elsewhere, evidence of the penetration of different tendencies in taste into a relatively closed milieu nonetheless sensitive to changes of all kinds. The collection of Thomas Wigglesworth, characteristic of the taste of the city’s important families around 1900, featured works by Michel, Delacroix, Corot, Couture, Daubigny, van Marcke, and Monticelli.10 In Baltimore, the collection of David T. Buzby, though more coherent, included nonetheless a rather mediocre ensemble of Düsseldorf school and a miscellany of other artists, among whom Troyon, Koekkoek, and Bouguereau are the best known.11 Amateurs out west, influenced by the same trends, traveled to New York to purchase works by the artists in fashion. In this way, the collection of John J. Emery, bequeathed to the Cincinnati Museum at the end of the century, could easily pass for virtually any New York collection of the day. The rather good selection even includes works by Hobbema and Reynolds, suggesting the influence of the new trend.12 Emery’s fellow Cincinnatian Reuben R. Springer was interested especially in the Düsseldorf school painters and French and Dutch Realists but also owned a few copies after Raphael, Luini, and Murillo, as well as original works by van Mierevelt and Potter.13

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In Chicago, the collection of Albert A. Munger comprised works by Meissonier, Stevens, Ziem, Courbet, Bouguereau, Gérôme, and Munkácsy, along with representative works of the Düsseldorf school.14 Henry Field, by contrast, owned works by Constable, Delacroix, Corot, Millet, Díaz, Daubigny, Jules Breton, Decamps, Dupré, Rousseau, and Fromentin, on a long-term loan to the Art Institute, made permanent in 1917.15 In Milwaukee, the [Frederick] Layton collection, thirty-eight paintings bequeathed to the city museum in 1888, featured Barbizon, Realist, and, like any good eastern collection, a few American paintings and included works by Corot, Breton, Couture, Bouguereau, Cazin, Bastien-Lepage, Inness, and Munkácsy but also Cole, Constable, and Michel.16 The railroad king James H. Hill, especially taken by the Romantics, owned a number of works by Delacroix including Tiger Lying Down and Attila. His Corots— Eurydice Wounded, Woman Reading, and Woman Walking—were very well known.17 We find still more Barbizon school paintings in the collection of Frederic Bonner, sold in 1900, along, however, with works by newcomers like Raffaëlli and Besnard. At the same sale, three Monets brought a fairly high price: $3,000.18 After this point, it is no longer possible to speak of “romantic Realism” as a contemporary artistic phenomenon, a matter previously discussed at some length. The Düsseldorf school had become [158] old fashioned. In Munich, a violent reaction against the students of Munkácsy was taking shape, and artistic secessions were in the works under the banner of Symbolism in Berlin and Vienna and of Impressionism in Berlin. Public taste had outgrown a style still with its adepts in the United States. As for France, the great innovative movements were all timeworn, with a number of the great Impressionists already dead or soon to be. At the École des Beaux-Arts, Bouguereau and Gérôme no longer succeeded in dissuading their students from turning in new directions. The Exposition [Universelle] of 1900 served to consecrate Impressionism. Romanticism, Barbizon painting, even Corot presided over an ever more distant past. This is the moment when the new modes of modern art began to spread across America. Realists retained the favor of the larger public, but the record prices reached back in the 1880s, in contemporary art often a warning of proximate collapse, had since declined. Though the stars of the Düsseldorf and Realist schools were soon to set, at the same hour in the Midwest, especially in areas with concentrations of German immigrants, the number of small private collections specializing in such art was still considerable. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, at which the art of twenty-two nations was exhibited, marked the apogee of modern Dutch painting: Jozef Israëls and Albert Neuhuys knew a tremendous success. But already artists of the next generation like Sargent and Zorn were being noticed.19 So, too, was Whistler, soon to claim his place in American collections. If his European associates were not to find acceptance until after the turn of the century, the movement originated much earlier. The triumph of Quality

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An event of considerable consequence for the evolution of taste in the United States, whose importance can hardly be exaggerated, was the first exposure of American collectors to Impressionist painting at an exhibition organized in 1885 by Paul Durand-Ruel in the galleries of the American Art Association in New York. There it was possible to see works by Monet, Renoir, Manet, Sisley, Morisot, Seurat, Degas, and Cassatt—whose art was not ridiculed, as it had been in Paris. The exhibition attracted a great deal of curiosity and interest.20 The early days were difficult, but success came sooner than in France. Durand-Ruel, already acquainted with the Havemeyers, soon met other interested amateurs. A comprehension and an appreciation of a style of art that had scandalized Paris soon developed, so much so that a great many of this school’s most important paintings passed into American collections. The battle between the Impressionists and so-called Salon painters, all the rage in Paris, was soon decided in the United States, where, in 1889, two major works by Manet, his Woman with a Parrot and Boy with a Sword, entered the collections of the Metropolitan, the gift of Erwin Davis.21 These two paintings cannot be considered Impressionist in the strict sense of the term. Atmospheric works in a lighter palette painted after 1870 proved a harder sell where American collectors were concerned. Works of this kind appear in turn-of-the-century sale catalogues only in the company of those by Romantic painters, American masters, and contemporary virtuosi like Sargent and Zorn. There would be little remarkable about the collection of George N. Tyner in the New York of 1900 were it not for the presence of early examples of Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley alongside more typical American favorites.22 Edward Fullerton Milliken demonstrated an extremely refined taste in his excellent choice for his own collection of works not only by Michel, Corot, Millet, Monticelli, and Puvis de Chavannes but also by the Americans Richard Morris Hunt, Albert Pinkham Ryder, William Merritt Chase, and J[ulian] Alden Weir, an ensemble that would be the pride of any major collection today.23 Though that of Cyrus McCormick was dominated by Barbizon paintings, already works by Puvis [de Chavannes] and Monet had joined their company.24 It was among the members of a rather small but intense milieu that [159] Impressionism found its first important admirers. In addition to [Erwin] Davis, Albert Spencer, Desmond Fitzgerald, Cyrus J. and Emily Hoe Lawrence, the Havemeyers, Senffs, Fullers, and Seneys were the first to show interest in the painters represented by Durand-Ruel. But Harris Whittemore and Alfred Altmore Pope collected Impressionists almost exclusively. Born in Cleveland, Pope lived mostly in Farmington, Connecticut. By birth a Quaker, a sect not much drawn to art, he nonetheless displayed a tremendous open-mindedness and independence of judgment, owning paintings by Turner and Daumier (Window Shopping and Lawyers), de Barye bronzes, and, among the modern school, selected with remarkably up-todate taste, Manet’s Woman with a Guitar, Monet’s Fishing Boat, Renoir’s Girl with a Cat, Whistler’s The Wave and Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Westminster Bridge, Cassatt’s Baby Getting Up from His Nap, and four paintings by Degas.25

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The Whittemores, old friends with whom Pope renewed his acquaintance in Connecticut, fell equally under [Paul] Durand-Ruel’s sway (he worked in New York with his three sons), who all the while insisted on their freedom of selection. The finest works in the Whittemores’ collection, which is still partially intact, included Monet’s Fishing Nets, a female nude by Renoir, and three paintings by Degas: a racecourse image, a ballet rehearsal, and The Rape. This elegant couple sought to fill their home with lively, colorful paintings by artists they quite rightly considered the representative figures of the age.26 Two important ensembles, however, would soon be assembled in order to “fatten up” the collections of modern painting at the Art Institute and Met. Neither Potter and Bertha Honoré Palmer in the former instance nor the Havemeyers in the latter collected Impressionist paintings exclusively, but it was precisely in this [regard] that their central and principal contribution consisted. The Palmer bequest in 1922 comprised no fewer than two Manets, seven Monets (including the 1868 version of Argenteuil), four Pissarros, two Raffaëllis, four Renoirs, and a Sisley, to which two Whistlers, a Zorn, and two Besnards might be added. But we must not forget works by Corot, Delacroix, Millet, and Cazin, marking the rigor of a selection intended for public exhibition.27 The ensemble given the Met by the Havemeyers in 1929 was of greater importance and, after a fashion, more comprehensive still. We have already spoken of this couple’s eclecticism, but it is especially as collectors of modern painting that they deserve our admiration. Thirty-six Degas, eight Manets, and five Cézannes demonstrate the Havemeyers’ clear predilection for Impressionism. But there were also nine Corots and twenty Courbets, an astonishing selection in quality as well as number, to be explained perhaps, most notably, by Mrs. Havemeyer’s friendship with Mary Cassatt, but also by her own early artistic training.28 [Both] families continued to acquire art beyond 1919, as did many other collectors, among them Adolphe Lewisohn, John Taylor Spaulding, Chester Dale, and Alfred Barnes[, though these four] cannot be counted as participants in the contemporary art world in the same fashion. Their first admiration for the work of the Impressionists as a continuation of that of Corot, Courbet, and Monet yielded to a more historical and intellectual understanding: Impressionism seen either as initiating modern painting or as following in its wake. All four of their collections were assembled in this spirit. Impressionism’s widespread diffusion and its consecration by the public would have to await the postwar period, reaching its apogee in the United States in the winter of 1929–30 with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art and exhibition of the Havemeyer collection at the Met. Impressionism, a laughingstock at its debut, had become “museum art” par excellence. [160] Finally, an artist who occupies a category apart when it comes to American public perception, [Auguste] Rodin, found his way to collectors despite a violently negative critical treatment in the French press.29 Following the [World’s Columbian] Exposition of 1893, Rodin’s fame and popularity in American grew and grew. Quite early on, in 1898, Arthur Jerome Eddy commissioned a bust portrait of himThe triumph of Quality

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self. Patrons like Kate [Seney] Simpson [the wife of John W. Simpson], in 1903, Bertha [Honoré] Palmer in 1905, Joseph Pulitzer, and Edward Henry Harriman supported the artist with further commissions. Apart from the large body of works Rodin left directly to the French state, American museums are arguably among the richest repositories of his work. Thanks to the generosity of Thomas Fortune and Ida Barry Ryan, a space has been dedicated to Rodin’s sculpture at the Met; Philadelphia now boasts its own Rodin Museum. The artist’s widespread popularity can be gauged by the large number of bronze replicas of his work on view all over the country.

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It took American collectors a certain time to move beyond Impressionism to embrace the styles of painting that came after Cézanne. One does not come to love Monet and Degas, Gauguin and Picasso, for the same reasons. In my view, the emergence of this new appreciation around 1913 or 1914 can be traced to American artists and to changes in their own art. Thus it may be useful to take a moment to consider the repercussions that the developments we have been following had on American art at this time, with an eye to the close contacts between artists themselves and the Parisian scene. At the end of the nineteenth century, numerous American painters like R. Swain Gifford, Alexander Wyant, Homer Martin, and George Fuller continued to be drawn to Barbizon school and other midcentury painting on stylistic grounds. The greatest among them, [George] Inness and [Ralph Albert] Blakelock, even [Thomas] Eakins and [Winslow] Homer, owed a substantial debt to the French school. Most had traveled extensively or studied in France. [Albert Pinkham] Ryder, the most imaginative, visionary, and perhaps most talented of them all, had a genuine passion for [the artistry of] Marseilles-born and -trained Adolphe Monticelli. The Edgar Allan Poe of American painting, expressing himself in yellow and green pigments dense with poetry, managed to adapt the Frenchman’s thick impasto to the theaters of the sea and night, romantic subjects he typically treated with a remarkable fluidity and breadth of handling. [ James Abbott McNeill] Whistler, in his rebellion against the [Royal] Academy [of Arts] and the Pre-Raphaelites, found himself allied with the Impressionists. He participated so closely in the evolution of the movement that he became one of its chief personalities. Artists and collectors arrived at an admiration for the various schools of French painting at about the same time, so that the history of American painting from the early nineteenth century onward traces the history of American taste for modern painting in general. One can hardly make sense of the various artistic currents sweeping the United States during this period, each affecting all the others, without taking the impact of the principal collectors into consideration. Many artists contributed to the formation of collections, but their own art also profited from the exposure. Is not helping to shape contemporary art all in fashioning a personal vision the most interesting purpose served by any collection? In defending Romantic, Barbizon, and Impressionist painting, American artists succeeded in cultivating a public relatively The Contemporary Scene

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timid in its tastes, yet with a lively interest in work in these various styles by American artists. This is in no way to denigrate American painting as offering but an echo of French sources. Artists involved in what amounted to two parallel developments [161] maintained their originality and personal particularities. Thomas B. Clarke, who would go on to form a wide variety of collections, began as a contemporary American art enthusiast. A sort of late-century Luman Reed, this friend to artists liked to visit their studios and, through his connections, activities, and faith in American art, stirred up tremendous curiosity and interest as a consequence. He had had a great deal to do with the success of American art at the World’s Columbian Exposition, and the sale of his own collection in 1899 contributed greatly to the spread of its popularity.30 Morris Ketchum and Maria DeWitt Jesup added to their own collection a number of American Old Masters, works of the Hudson River school most particularly. The eleven paintings Jesup would donate to the Met in 1915 would include compositions by [Thomas] Cole, [Asher B.] Durand, [Frederick Stuart] Church, [ John Frederick] Kensett, [R. Swain] Gifford, and George Henry Boughton, as well as by the urban genre painter Edward Lamson Henry.31 Some private collectors like William T. Evans went so far as to sell off modern French paintings in order to acquire American works. In establishing numerous prizes, underwriting exhibitions, and supporting artists with purchases, this hardworking businessman took pleasure in the fact that “American art had emancipated itself from foreign trammels.”32 The paintings by Martin, Homer, Inness, Wyant, Anne Rogers Minor, John Francis Murphy, Henry Ward Ranger, Frederick Stuart Church, [Ralph Albert] Blakelock, Arthur B[owen] Davies, [Albert Pinkham] Ryder, George Fuller, and [ Julian Alden] Weir that [Evans] assembled make him, along with Clarke, one of the pioneer collectors of American art. Filled with these paintings, his home was decorated by artist friends, the stained glass windows in the salon executed after drawings by Church.33 Here it is important to mention the collection of George A. Hearn, and especially the foundation he established to help the Met increase its holdings in American painting.34 Just as today, the more fortunate artists helped out others and in the process assembled small collections of their own. Robert Loflin Newman, neglected and almost unknown in his day, survived only thanks to Wyatt Eaton, William Merritt Chase, and Thomas B. Clarke.35 Ryder, too, early in his career, was appreciated only by his fellow painters. Popular success came later, after the war. In the Midwest, further removed from European trends and more given to an American understanding of art, major collectors appeared relatively early on. In Detroit, Edward Chandler Walker, president of the DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts], donated his personal collection of American paintings by Melchers and Cassatt to the institute in 1909.36 Certain amateurs like Edward B. Butler took this even further in a sort of refinement of the art of specialization by focusing on just a single artist. If Chicago’s roomful of Innesses is owed to him,37 it is to another midwesterner, Charles L. Freer, a Detroiter by birth, that Washington owes its roomful of Whistlers The triumph of Quality

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[housed in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution]. Influenced by the great American master, Freer had come to develop a genuine passion for art in general and for the arts of the Far East in particular. His motivating ambition to benefit contemporary art through the study of the art of much earlier eras was arguably inspired by contemplation of Whistler’s work, imbued as it was with everything that wandering genius had learned from the study of Eastern painting.38 In any case, this generous patron acquired a considerable ensemble of Whistlers.39 He even purchased the famous interior the artist had designed for Frederick Richards Leyland, the so-called Peacock Room, and had it reinstalled in a space constructed for that purpose in his museum of Asian art. Despite differences in epoch and milieu, here were brought together two similarly dreamlike interpretations of the natural world, Whistler nocturnes side by side with Utamaro prints, like sister siblings. A few other American painters chosen among those most representative of this poetic sensibility completed a collection in viewing which one easily divines how far American culture—that distant branch on the European family tree—had been penetrated by Orientalism while retaining its own originality. [162] From Buffalo, the influence of the personality of Charles M. Kurtz was felt throughout the Midwest. A New York journalist, apostle of American art at various World Fairs, as director of the Albright Art Gallery, [Kurtz] organized a sort of annual salon. Very independent minded, he judged works of art according to criteria all his own. Among the considerable number of objects he acquired for his personal collection, not all were of the highest quality. Works by American artists like [Ralph Albert] Blakelock, Charles H[arold] Davis, Julian Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, Eastman Johnson, and John Francis Murphy were the principal attraction, accompanied by numerous works of lesser importance by artists today forgotten. The breadth of his interest led him to consider art from all over Europe, as well; however, like many Americans, he was particularly drawn to the various currents of British art and to its most international expression, the Glasgow school in particular. The paintings of Edward A. Hornel, R. Macaulay Stevenson, David Gould, James Guthrie, J. Whitelaw Hamilton, William Kennedy, George Houston, and Stuart Park that he collected seem today a bit old fashioned. A contemporary of [ John Singer] Sargent, Kurtz appreciated the virtuosity of artists like Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida as well, by whom he owned three sketches and from whom he commissioned his own portrait. At the same time, with that sense of fantasy and illogic collectors so often display, he persisted in holding on to a fine portrait of a woman by Couture. Kurtz deserves remembrance due to his impact on his contemporaries, his faith in modern art, which he propagated through articles, and his unwavering [personal] example over the course of a long career.40 Little by little, [the efforts of] American museums in most major cities including Chicago, Boston, and New York, not to mention [those of] institutions playing a role similar to that of the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, led to the establishment of Friends of American Art. In Cincinnati, members were responsible for financing a room devoted to the art of Frank Duveneck, which opened in 1919. Quite

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a number of special funds were established to make possible the purchase of American art, and here, too, one sees the familiar return to the past with the establishment of Departments of American Art with specialization in its early history, though it was more recent American art that carried the day. Yet contemporary artists still struggled with a less-than-ideal cultural milieu, largely deprived of that sympathetic atmosphere even more necessary to artistic creativity than willing buyers, perhaps less [the result of] a flaw in the American character than the final act in a drama played out since the divorce of art from the social mainstream during the Renaissance that had only intensified during the Romantic period. In the United States, nevertheless, artists won sufficient admirers to get by, and those who collected American art, already considerable in number, grew ever more numerous, so much so that to list them all would be tedious. We will just content ourselves with naming the best known whose activities fit within the historical framework of our study. The home of Mary Williamson Harriman, in an unmistakably American décor, held works by [George] Inness, John W. Alexander, [ John] La Farge, [ James] Whistler, Will Sparks, Constant Troyon, and Herman A. Webster, all of very good quality. A portrait of her daughter by another fine American painter, George de Forest Brush, accompanied more venerable works by Copley, Stuart, and Sully, reinforcing the American theme.41 One of the most important collections in quality—due to the owner’s influence—belonged to John Gellatly. This friend to “The Ten”—those American artists who joined forces to resist both academicism and the foreign invasion—owned important works by Ida Tarbell, Joseph DeCamp, Frank Benson, Arthur B[owen] Davies, [ Julian Alden] Weir, [Childe] Hassam, Joseph Pennell, [Mary] Cassatt, and [ John Henry] Twachtman at a time when these figures were still little appreciated.42 Like Thomas B. Clarke and William T. Evans, another collector, Samuel T. Shaw, turned to a new generation of artists who had managed to learn from French painting while retaining a greater independence and more national flavor.43 This new nationalism in matters of taste would develop mostly [163] after the war, culminating in 1929 in New York with the creation of the Whitney Museum of American Art, specifically devoted to documenting contemporary trends, a development that went hand in hand with new interest in American history, the popularity of Americana, and interest in Native American art. We should note that American paintings collected before the war tended to be by somewhat older artists like Inness, Whistler, or their followers. Truly contemporary, already Post-Impressionist artists like “The Eight”—painters working in the circle of Robert Henri—had greater difficulty in finding patrons, but their impact on the evolution of American taste was greater than their commercial success.44 Maurice Prendergast arrived in the United States in 1890, full of enthusiasm for the art of Cézanne.45 But he had to wait until 1913 for conditions to become favorable. At that point, with the constitution of an artistic milieu around American painters like Max Weber, Samuel Halpert, Alfred Henry Maurer, John Marin, Bernard Karfiol, WilThe triumph of Quality

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liam and Marguerite Zorach, Thomas Benton, Walt Kuhn, and especially Walter Pach, all of whom had studied in Paris between 1900 and 1910, the new tendencies in modern art began to spread through the United States. Arthur B[owen] Davies, the best-known artist in this group, a painter with a solid talent, rose to considerable prominence due to his relations with collectors and his presiding role in [New York’s] Armory Show Exhibition of 1913, which he organized. That event brought together members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors with Cézanne, Parisian Fauves, and Cubists. The early public response, mockery, was not what the exhibition organizers had hoped for.46 Of the very few collectors who supported the enterprise, Arthur Jerome Eddy, extremely independent minded, left his acquisitions to the Art Institute of Chicago at his death in 1920. Patron and critic, in 1896, Eddy had commissioned his portrait from Whistler, whom he befriended and about whom he published a book. But it is especially for Cubists and PostImpressionism (1914), an introduction to Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism, that Eddy deserves a place in this account. In the catalogue of his own collection, one discovers works by André Derain, [André] Dunoyer de Segonzac, Maurice de Vlaminck, [Auguste] Rodin (a portrait of Eddy himself), and Constantin Brancusi. Eddy’s four Kandinskys and Franz Marc’s well-known painting The Bewitched Mill suggest his lack of allegiance even to the Parisian-style Armory Show.47 All such demonstrations of independence from French taste deserve special attention, for almost no American collectors, including the most important among them, showed any interest in the almost equally innovative art being produced in Germany and Italy. Lillie P. Bliss, for example, owned Parisian works almost exclusively with the exception of a few paintings by Americans; and, in fact, [Arthur Bowen] Davies, the American artist best represented in her collection, who had advised her on her purchases, remained to the end a great admirer of French art. This ensemble would constitute the core collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art at its opening in 1929 with a remarkable selection of works by Cézanne (twenty oils and a watercolor), two Degas (we can recognize the shift in focus by recalling the Havemeyers’ thirty-six), plus works by Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat (one painting but numerous drawings), Odilon Redon (three works), le Douanier Rousseau, Modigliani, Matisse (two works), Derain, Picasso, and Dunoyer de Segonzac, illustrating almost every aspect of contemporary painting. The great predecessors [164] of the Fauves, Daumier and Delacroix, their principal importance restored by changes in painting in the years leading up to the war, were represented as well.48 Relations between Parisian painters and American amateurs benefited greatly from the presence in Paris of the writers and siblings Gertrude and Leon Stein, passionate collectors of Matisse, Picasso, and the Cubists. Their Parisian salon was a place where young visiting Americans could encounter figures like [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse, and Ambroise Vollard.49 It was chez Stein that the future organizers of the Armory Show made their selections among the new artists, and there that the sisters Claribel and Etta Cone learned to love the art they acquired for a collection

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that offered (and, preserved today in Baltimore, still offers) an almost complete picture of developments in modern painting from Boudin by way of Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Redon up through the Fauves, whose work enjoyed pride of place: Matisse, the dominant figure with three paintings, Marie Laurencin, Albert Marquet, André Derain, Émile Othon Friesz, Maurice de Vlaminck, [Giorgio] de Chirico, Moïse Kisling, Félix Vallotton, William Zorach, and Picasso, [also] dominant with three paintings, illustrating a range of approaches. Sculpture by [Auguste] Rodin, Charles Despiau, and Aristide Maillol completed this veritable retrospective (though with the notable absence of Cubist painting).50 A role similar to that played in Paris by the Steins was played in New York by Hamilton E. Field, who, though principally interested in American painting, also collected Jules Pascin and Armand Guillaumin and had hoped to hire Picasso to decorate his home. Founder of the magazine The Arts and first president of Salons of America, Field had the means to promote his own taste while directly supporting the contemporary arts.51 Another collection assembled with a certain concern for unity in response to a certain sense of developments in the world of contemporary art was that of John Quinn, also in New York. At the center of his collection were five paintings by Seurat, including the artist’s final work, Le Cirque, which Quinn would bequeath to the Louvre. The others, Lady Powderina [La Poudreuse], Three Models, and two landscapes, were meant to be displayed together, and Quinn surrounded them with works by painters whom certain critics saw as influences on Seurat and the Cubists: La Fornarina by Ingres, The Third Class Carriage by Daumier, Summer by Puvis de Chavannes, and three works by Cézanne. Quinn collected contemporary art as well, including paintings by Picasso (The Beggar), Matisse, Derain, and Laurencin, and sculpture by Duchamp, Villon, and Brancusi.52 This same historical sensibility, inspired by artists and critics alike, seen in the practice of displaying alongside modern art much earlier or more recent objects thought to have inspired it, led to the formation of four major collections that, before 1920, set the high mark for quality in the engagement of American amateurs in the contemporary scene. First among them, the Lewisohn collection, was begun some fifty years ago by an independent-minded young man who, thanks to his good instincts, pursued every significant development in the history of art; unafraid of making mistakes, relying on intuition, he created a great and beautiful work of art himself for his own and later his son’s personal enjoyment. Around 1890, Adolphe Lewisohn began with Monet and then worked backward to the sources of Impressionism, acquiring works by Delacroix, Corot, Daumier (The Drinkers), Courbet, Manet (The Soap Bubble), Degas, and Renoir (Oarsmen at Chatou). Then the Post-Impressionists drew his attention and, little by little, works by Cézanne, Gauguin (Ia Oriana Maria), Van Gogh (Woman from Arles), Redon, Seurat (Afternoon on the Grande Jatte), and even le Douanier Rousseau found their place in an increasingly remarkable ensemble. Later on, Lewisohn, who kept his finger on the pulse of the art of his day, made what The triumph of Quality

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were among the first purchases by an American of works by Picasso (Pierrot), Modigliani, [165] Derain, Rouault, Matisse, Soutine, and Émile Antoine Bourdelle. The splendid quality of certain among these objects was matched by the size and scope of the collection itself, responsible for certain weaknesses.53 The Lewisohns had the great merit of keeping always a step ahead of changing fashion, for the most part, embracing artistic developments with true staying power grounded in artistic quality rather than those of only passing interest with only snob appeal. Where French as well as American art was concerned, they frequently set the tone without falling prey to extremism or eccentricity, as did certain of their contemporaries.54 More eclectic still was John T[aylor] Spaulding, whose collection, still preserved in Boston, included numerous examples of older painting. Works by Raeburn, Rubens, Goya, Chardin, Daumier, and Courbet hung alongside a magnificent selection of Impressionist painting including works by Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, and Guillaumin. Places of honor were reserved for Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Redon, major artists with a necessary place in any comprehensive collection of modern painting. Among twentieth-century artists, Spaulding preferred work by Les Nabis, relatively little appreciated in America, with not a single Cubist painting to be seen, perhaps as a result of the conservatism of the circles he frequented. It is certainly the case that he preferred paintings by André, Bonnard, Vlaminck, Matisse, and Utrillo to more aggressive works by more dogmatic artists.55 An even more complete picture of the recent history of French painting, if only in the number of painters represented and works included, was offered by the Chester Dale collection in New York, a veritable museum from which more mainstream painting was not excluded. In his search for origins, Dale went as far as [ JacquesLouis] David and [ Jean-Auguste-Dominique] Ingres. Though Romanticism and Realist works in the Spanish style do not so much anchor as complement its principal holdings, the collection includes a Daumier, a Delacroix, two Corots, and works by Millet, Daubigny, and Couture on the one hand and by Díaz, Courbet, Monticelli, and Carolus-Duran on the other. Dale focused with much greater seriousness on the Impressionists, whom he preferred, evidencing a tremendous confidence in his purchase of Manet, Monet, Bazille, Pissarro, Degas, two Renoirs, Whistler, Cassatt, Puvis de Chavannes, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and portraits by Gauguin. More recent artists like Matisse, [Henri] Rousseau, Derain, Vlaminck, Modigliani, and Eugène Zak are represented by only a work or two, as are Cubist painters like Picasso, Braque, André Lhote, and even a Surrealist like Jean Lurçat. Though Dale collected to gather evidence in tracing the history of a style of art, it would be wrong to conclude that personal preference played no part. The fine quality of the objects he collected compensated for their lack of unity. Indeed, a private gallery of this kind provides an excellent prototype for the public museum collection comprehensive in ambition.56 This historical approach to modern painting characterizes the collection of even so independent an amateur as Albert C. Barnes, whose singular personality encouraged frequent coverage by the press.57 Barnes focused on Cézanne and Renoir,

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whom he considered the twin pillars of contemporary [artistic] practice.58 In a response to the overly “factual” and monographic tendencies so typical of the practice of art history in the United States—and, unfortunately, elsewhere as well— Barnes, a chemist by training, took formal analysis to something of an extreme. The Barnes Foundation’s contributions to the visitor’s understanding remained rather didactic, however, perhaps as a result of the collector’s personal fascination with certain recent developments in art history, at least those which most interested him. Barnes indulged this predilection by hanging his modern paintings alongside others from earlier periods—whether Primitive (that is to say, early European) painting or African sculpture—which he had good reason to consider their analogues, a tendency he shared with a generation of collectors.59 A certain stylistic ornamentality characteristic of [166] most works in the collection, an invisible logic presiding over its formation, lent the ensemble, preserved at his home in Merion, Pennsylvania, a remarkable unity. His “series” of more than two hundred Renoirs and more than one hundred Cézannes, unparalleled in scope, includes examples in every relevant genre from portraiture to landscape. French painting in general—works from Manet, Monet, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, and Gauguin through Laurencin and Matisse— dominates the collection. Foreign-born followers of the Parisian school—Van Gogh, Picasso, Jules Pascin—also enjoy places of importance. And, thanks to the Impressionists, we find works by Goya and Daumier, those precursors of modern painting, as well. Barnes always remained intensely concerned for the future of American art, as his foundation or school—I would write “museum” if he did not find the very term offensive—bears witness. But he encouraged a number of American artists directly through purchases. In 1923, his holdings included works by [Thomas] Eakins, William Glackens, Charles Demuth, Ernest Lawson, [Maurice] Prendergast, [Arthur Bowen] Davies, and Walt Kuhn, and they have grown considerably since. Even those who fail to share Barnes’s vision must acknowledge his accomplishment. The quality of most of what he owns helps one to forget certain regrettable choices and an inflexibility redeemed by unfailing vigor and originality. These four amateurs formed their collections at the very end of the period with which we are concerned and, since 1920, have continued along these same lines, pursuing an attempt to make visible the origins of recent developments in painting. The same approach has been shared by a great many collectors following in their footsteps: Duncan and Marjorie Acker Phillips in Washington, D.C.; Frederic Clay and Helen Birch Bartlett, Lewis Larned and Annie Swan Coburn in Chicago; Stephen and Susan Vanderpoel Clark in Cooperstown; A. Conger Goodyear, Laura Rockefeller, Albert Eugene Gallatin in New York; William Preston and Ada Sanberg Harrison in Los Angeles; and Carroll S. Tyson and Henry P. McIlhenny in Philadelphia, to name only a few among the best known. The museums themselves to which important collections are destined inherited this same historical ambition and have pursued it, if anything, more conscientiously. Certain public collections, like those of Smith College or the Art Institute of Chicago, went private collectors one better in soliciting or purchasing European and American works directly from The triumph of Quality

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contemporary artists.60 In the case of other public collections, such purchases have proved possible only after a certain delay. The practice of “endorsing” certain artists as a matter of civic responsibility has made more than one museum curator uncomfortable. Even the annual prize awarded by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh to build up the collection through the purchase of “the Old Masters of tomorrow” has continued to go to creators working in established modes, most recently, for example, in 1937, honoring a famous Cubist! 269

How, then, might we characterize the relationship between collecting practices and recent developments in the world of art? Certainly the appeal of being in on the latest trends, of “Fashion” itself in the best sense of the term, by which I mean the ceaseless quest for something new, has played a larger role in recent years than ever before. We must not presume to question the sincerity of collectors who purchase objects that please them and speak up with enthusiasm to defend the artists responsible, but their attraction to modern art has of course been mediated by those with an interest in the “next new thing” (as Pissarro once put it to Durand-Ruel in recommending Cézanne), whether artists, [167] scholars, avant-garde critics, or dealers. Thus encouraged, amateurs will always be shopping around, an activity concentrated in Paris, where every collector takes great pleasure in doing so, frequenting artists, visiting exhibitions, spending time in artistic and literary salons and cafés. Even in America, in Chicago and New York and Boston, clubs have formed to bring together amateurs and artists, to organize exhibitions, and to spread the word about recent developments in contemporary art. Other, less structured groups have also emerged with chapters largely made up of young people, dissatisfied with the previous generation’s values, in search of a community of shared thought and taste superior to what they perceive around them. It was in such soil that numerous collections of modern art took root. Novelists and poets involved in these circles attempted to take charge, remaking themselves as art critics for the good of the cause. Art criticism in France was redefined by such figures: Émile Zola, Gustave Geffroy, Georges Leconte, André Mellerio, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jacques Rivière, Henry de Monfreid, Rainer Maria Rilke, and later Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau.61 We see the same phenomenon among English and American writers like George [Henry] Moore, Oscar Wilde, Royal Cortissoz, Gertrude Stein, and Forbes Watson. Even artists like Émile Bernard, [Auguste] Rodin, Maurice Denis, Armand Seguin, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Paul Signac, Albert Gleizes, André Lhote, Roger Fry, and, in America, Childe Hassam, Bryson Burroughs, Guy Pène du Bois, Arthur B. Davies, Henry Field, and Walter Pach, among others (to cite only the best known among them) took up the pen to defend their work. Amateurs like [Albert C.] Barnes, Adolphe Lewisohn, and Duncan Phillips defended their protégés in print. A crowd of journals and reviews appeared, specifically devoted to modern art and even to particular tendencies and styles: in France, L’Impressioniste, La Revue Blanche, and Art et Décoration; in Italy, Vita d’Arte; in England, the Magazine of Art; and in the United States, the American The Contemporary Scene

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Magazine of Art, the Arts, and later Parnassus. In these magazines, recent developments in art history are taken seriously, as are contemporary artists, seen as major figures. The vogue of the monograph has extended its embrace to include even living artists, and richly illustrated tomes are more and more frequently devoted to the work of artists still in the midst of active careers. Such practices, not without consequence, help to spread the word about modes of art whose merits are still being debated, creating an aura of glory and celebrity, however artificial, with an influence on the snobs among collectors attentive to artistic reputation. Any painter or sculptor thus favored by the critics is presented as a “person of note,” a creative genius whose work is seen as acutely expressive, say, of the intellectual disquietude of the day: Rodin was made by such a campaign an absolute original, independent of the evolution of art; Cézanne a free spirit, completely detached from the world. The proliferation of monographs and rising prices suffice for snobbish cliques of collectors “in the know” and monkey-see-monkey-do painters to take up and exalt the artists involved, surrounding their names with glory and prestige. This phenomenon, frequently noted, has been attributed to astute marketing by dealers and speculators.62 But, in my view, art lovers and intellectuals, either by encouraging or benefiting from this snobbism and naïveté on the part of both collectors and the public, must be seen as even more responsible, however unwittingly. This distortion of the market due to snobbism may explain in part the almost exclusive enthusiasm for modern French art among Americans in those very social and cultural circles in which the taste for modern art was first propagated. The fashion for French manners, the attraction to and admiration (at times tinged with suspicion) of French modes of being and thinking and especially French taste, may have displaced an Anglophilia of long standing, but the degree of this shift must not be exaggerated. Historical factors and [168] intellectual predispositions previously discussed played an even larger role. We ought to recognize that, in locating the site of artistic modernity in France, Americans were merely acknowledging a truth, confirmed by history, that the sporadic efforts of the Germans, Austrians, Italians, and Dutch in a certain sense merely pursued Parisian initiatives. American historical methods, inspired as it happens by German critics like [ Julius] Meier-Graefe, have perhaps overstressed or exaggerated the influence of Cézanne, Renoir, and Seurat over that of Gauguin and Redon. With the fine-tuning that time will surely provide, the theory itself is solid enough. It remains more difficult to comprehend why American collectors took as long as they did to appreciate twentieth-century developments such as German Expressionism and Italian Futurism, or even major figures like Édouard Vuillard. It was not until the late 1920s that names like Oskar Kokoschka and [Wassily] Kandinsky began to be heard. Perhaps the facile sentimentality and late Romantic sensibilities of artists with inflated reputations like Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, and Alfred Stevens soured American collectors of modern art on Germanic countries and scenes of family life. The result of this exclusive popularity of French art was that American collectors purchased an incomparable number of works by Impressionists and by those working in reaction The triumph of Quality

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to Impressionism between 1885 and 1895 and even on into the new century. American collections are in these areas far richer than those of the Old World. The massive purchases by American amateurs and the books, articles, and catalogues devoted by American critics to European art not only inflated prices but drew the attention of the public and scholars alike to artists and movements previously or otherwise ignored. It seems possible that American appreciation pushed European curators to accept contemporary painting sooner than they would have if left to their old habits. The play of reciprocal influences between France and the United States contributed to the “appreciation” of the art of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat, whose unique work in the principal French museum, lest we forget, was the gift of an American collector. This rebound in influence [from the United States to Europe] was due perhaps to the greater rapidity with which modern painting gained acceptance in the United States, and to the fact that public resistance there was less well organized, whereas throughout Europe, in France especially, the authority of the Écoles des Beaux-Arts and other educational establishments still had to be reckoned with. Then as today, officials accorded their seals of approval under the influence of the artistic Old Guard, slowing down progress enormously. No institutions of like importance existed in America. Traditions of painting inherited from ages past were far less strong and interest in art the province of an elite. The rapidness of the evolution of taste in the United States was counterbalanced by a thorough incomprehension on the part of the public. The gap between advances in art and the taste of the public was deeper in America than in Europe and, after the rise of Impressionism especially, grew deeper still. The admiration of a handful of collectors and artists found little echo in the public at large. Awareness of changes in the art world remained slight: not only did relatively few amateurs understand what was happening in the contemporary scene; much of what understanding did exist was tainted with snobbism. More recently, a mutual understanding between the realms of art and ordinary life so beneficial to artistic creativity has deepened and improved. Thanks to the efforts of many individuals discussed in this chapter, modern art has reached deeper into American society than it has in France. The great murals with which all America has covered itself, the thousands of enthusiastic visitors to exhibitions of modern painting, and the diffusion of Modernist ideas via the decorative arts offer dramatic proof of the broad appeal and staying power of a movement much indebted to the rich troves of modern art in American collections.

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chapter 5

The Modern Art Museum

As we have seen, the Philadelphia Centennial marked a turning point in the evolution of American taste; however, it was in museums that these changes became most apparent. In that year, 1876, two important trusts established in Philadelphia and Boston already bore in their conception all the hallmarks of the modern American art museum, the culmination of earlier tendencies. My project in this chapter will be to describe the principal characteristics, organization, and activities of public collections in the United States during the ensuing period of experimentation, making it possible for us to more easily recognize the ways in which the modern art museum has departed from certain past practices while maintaining others. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, public collections remained dependent upon private collections, which were most often destined to enter the public domain, transitions in venue having negligible impact on the quantity, quality, or exhibition of the works on display. This was as true of the reinstallation of James Bowdoin’s collection at Bowdoin College as it was of John Trumbull’s after its purchase by Yale.1 When earlier that university had acquired the [ James Jackson] Jarves collection, no effort was made to eliminate secondary works arguably of less interest to a museum than to an individual. Not every bequest of paintings or objects was entirely logical, merging into and perfectly complementing a preexisting ensemble capable of continued growth. A perfect example of a “moribund” collection of this kind is the one the New-York Historical Society received from the family of William Cullen Bryant in 1910,2 a bequest very like the gifts of private cabinets that established the Musée Wicar in Lille in 1834 and, more recently, the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris (1913) and the Wallraf[-Richartz Museum] in Cologne (1924), among other European examples. In such cases, again it is the personal taste of the collector that determines the character of the museum or at least its core collection: Italian drawing in Lille; the Italian Renaissance in Paris; Dutch, Flemish, and German painting in Cologne. Nonetheless, it is important to distinguish between the situation in Europe and that

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in America. European amateurs today, able to discover objects of great beauty at a reasonable price, show more confidence and independence in matters of taste than Americans—with the exception of a Jarves or a Bryant—typically have, living as they do in a country where works of art are rare. That a collection like Vanderbilt’s could contain little besides works by minor nineteenth-century Realists and pasticheurs seems the expression of a fashionable snobbery. David Hosack, on the other hand, around the turn of the previous century [i.e., ca. 1800] had assembled a surprising collection of portraits without a thought to their value as works of art. Yet another type of nineteenth-century collection was that of Robert Gilmor, who purchased randomly, here and there, without always paying attention to the quality of the art he acquired. There were collectors like this in Europe as well, Alfred Chauchard being an excellent example. Émile Guimet, a Lyon banker fascinated by the history of religion, amassed an equally uneven collection [172] in the same fashion. However, such ensembles, once they entered the public museums, typically either disappeared into the general collections or grew. Completely lacking in the United States were major collections created at the behest of and with the resources available to a head of state. Royal and princely collections in Europe gave rise to the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado; as late as the nineteenth century, the Victoria and Albert in London and Louis-Philippe’s Spanish Gallery at the Louvre offer good examples of this practice. A second characteristic of the great European museums is that they belong to the state, which can draw on theoretically unlimited resources in managing them. Individuals [in European countries] tend to leave their collections to the nation, unlike in the United States, where, as we have seen, the spirit of independence of the individual combined with the indifference of the nation to intellectual concerns led to a general lack of public museums before the Centennial. These differences become even more striking when we consider the, to European eyes, rather unusual organizational structure and activities of the American museum itself. Institutions of importance like those founded by [Charles Willson] Peale and [P. T.] Barnum disappeared, sold outright—in 1876, the Boston Museum, for instance, was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts [MFA]—or at auction.3 The American Museum, surviving on ticket sales, became a slave to public interest and thus went out of business when that interest flagged.4 A recognition of the importance of publicity resulted, the necessity of pulling in the public, of appealing to middling taste. Even today, American museums retain something of this mission of public outreach, seeking to interest the largest possible number of potential visitors. If public awareness lessens or disappears, if a museum loses popularity, [if it] no longer responds to current attitudes and ideas, it becomes vegetative and ceases to expand. The New-York Historical Society and Bowdoin Museum, whose respective collections have grown very little, offer good examples of this phenomenon. The life of the European museum differs greatly from this model. There is no comparable reliance on public interest. Resources are guaranteed by the state, the city, or, as in the case of the National Gallery in London, by a trust run by a powerful

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society of friends. The nation itself purchases on behalf of its museums works of art that are absorbed into larger ensembles, which thus continuously evolve. It must be admitted that these European museums are much less in touch with changes in ordinary taste. If their riches remain of interest to the elite, their connections with current events are far weaker. Even if, from time to time, the gift of an avant-garde collection is accepted, for the most part, the museum lives a life apart, in isolation from the day to day. A second means museums have of staying up to date, the purchase of contemporary art on the open market, has been attempted by institutions like the [Musée du] Luxembourg in Paris, the Neues Museum in Berlin, and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich; yet, here again, only works by artists who have “made it” are considered in deciding such purchases, innovators being for the most part excluded. There are dead museums in Europe as well: [those of] a certain number of private foundations and most provincial museums, where works of great beauty, at times hidden beneath thick layers of dust and varnish, are seen only by the occasional visitor who manages to discover their existence. Here contact with the contemporary scene is essentially nonexistent.5 From this perspective, the American museum existed in a state of redefinition from the first—more open, thus more subject, to variations in public taste. This relationship was crystallized in the vision of the museum not as an attic or warehouse for the preservation of beautiful objects, as is so often the case in Europe, but as serving a mission to form taste and to educate the public, something much more utilitarian and practical. Jarves already was preoccupied with the goal of education, seeking to demonstrate and spread an understanding of the evolution or the history of art—a preoccupation that would prove particularly fertile.6 The magisterial premise of nineteenth-century Europe in this regard, conceived by the Duc d’Angevillers and taken up by the Revolution, was that one might elevate the populace through a display of masterpieces, presupposing a certain level of intellectual and artistic understanding previously attained.7 Promotion of instruction in the arts frequently accompanied this [173] ambition, though after the Restoration all was forgotten. In the United States, on the other hand, the goal was to present the history of art as an evolution in order to educate those who knew little or nothing. This meant that, in the early years especially, plaster casts and copies of generally only secondary interest very reasonably took on the status of masterpieces. When a concern with quality made its appearance, the American museum was born; all that remained was to bring its promise to fruition. Art museums in the United States roughly between 1876 and 1919 shared certain characteristics with those of earlier periods, for instance, the importance of private initiative and of popular appeal.8 But this era also marked the appearance and prodigious expansion of museums wealthy enough to increase their holdings rapidly and on a grand scale in fulfillment of their founders’ wishes.9 The difference of scale, of paramount importance, helps to explain the increasingly outsize role such museums came to play both at home and internationally. The end of the war that marks The triumph of Quality

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the end point of our study did not mark an end to the magnificent efflorescence of public collecting in America, much to the contrary in fact; but, by that time, the basic patterns and governing principles had certainly been decided. What did this involve? Museums are not everywhere organized in precisely the same fashion, and those in the United States displayed in this period a degree of variation unknown in Europe, where every major museum depends more or less either on the state or on the general public. In America, the state has remained far less involved in public collections. The federal government early on took little initiative in organizing museums, though it did accept a number of important bequests, including a small fortune left the nation in 1846 by the Englishman James Smithson for the establishment of a National Museum conceived as far more than a museum of art.10 The natural sciences and ethnography and the arts were to coexist side by side in an ensemble more like a museum in the modern sense than an eighteenth-century-style cabinet. The several buildings eventually constructed in Washington, D.C., today house disparate collections, enhanced by numerous diverse gifts. The National Gallery of Art, which opened its doors to the public in 1903, has seen its holdings incrementally grow through three important gifts in particular: the first, of English painting, received from Harriet Lane Johnson in 1903; the second, of modern American painting, from William T. Evans in 1908; and the third and most significant, of Asian art, from Charles L. Freer in 1919.11 State contributions have been inconsequential to the museum’s growth and upkeep. Individual patrons almost invariably have taken it upon themselves to provide funds necessary for the purchase of new objects. And the state has played [only] a small role in museum governance; although the property of the nation, the museum is run by its own board, this the most original of American innovations, the first thing one notices about the administrative organization of the major museums in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Of the three American museums founded through important trusts, two, the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, were both established in 1876. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, although then already in its sixth year, would not really take off until after the Centennial. The idea of the museum trust was an English import; the National Gallery of London, founded in 1824, had been organized in this fashion, although it continued to receive considerable contributions from the Crown. The English trust was, in the end, little more than an association of friends charged with preserving or expanding a [museum’s] collection. In the United States, on the other hand, such trusts were run by administrative boards charged with managing funds provided by one or more generous patrons. Legal responsibility for running the museum fell to the trustees. Although, in theory, this meant that a museum’s material possibilities were reduced because annual support depended on the size of the endowment, interest earned, and gifts received rather than on the far vaster resources provided by the community, in practice, trustees enjoyed an enormous freedom of operation where the purchase of objects, the naming of curators, and new initiatives were concerned, which the committees

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that ran European museums, always more or less overseen by the state, could only envy. [174] Thanks to the support of enormously rich patrons, private gifts of cash, land, stock, and works of art, such museums are free from state budgetary control. They have the wherewithal to recruit and remunerate an extensive and competent technical staff, the more zealously to acquit themselves of their assigned responsibilities because secure in their positions. Frequently, these large American museums have set their sights abroad—poaching, or rather importing, consultants, directors, and curators from European museums: Luigi Cesnola and Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner at the Met; Okakura Kakuzo, Jean Guiffrey, and Ananda Coomaraswamy at the MFA. Others, like Wilhelm von Bode, Bernhard Berenson, Max Friedländer, and Raimond van Marle, have been consulted on occasion and their advice generally taken. A number of cities elsewhere in the United States, centers of economic and intellectual activity, followed the example of these large East Coast public institutions. The year 1881 marked the founding of both the Cincinnati Art Museum and the City Art Museum of St. Louis, followed in 1885, also in the Midwest, by that of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1885 and the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1888. Smaller cities followed in their footsteps: the Rhode Island School of Design was founded in Providence in 1893; the Worcester Museum of Art there in 1898; and a bit later, the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901, the Minneapolis Museum of Art in 1915, the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1916, and on and on.12 The basic plan in each instance was to assemble an encyclopedic collection comprising a selection of works of art from all periods and representing every branch of artistic activity, acquired not haphazardly but, whether by means of purchase or bequest, according to a coherent program designed either to expand or round out the collection. There were two considerations to be kept in mind in the case of each new acquisition: quality on the one hand and educational value in documenting the history of art on the other. Already [ James Jackson] Jarves had defined the latter goal: a public gallery, he wrote, should exhibit “in chronological series specimens of the art of all nations and schools, arranged according to their motives and the special influences that attended their development.”13 In this spirit, we see Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, little by little, augmenting its collection of the arts of the Far East, filling in gaps left by previous bequests.14 It is today perhaps the most complete such collection in the world. At the Art Institute of Chicago, every development of importance in the history of European painting may now be studied in detail.15 But a concern to thus present the evolution of art through its “peak performances,” that is to say, works by Old Masters, has on occasion led curators to let go of even works of real quality in exchange for lesser works misattributed to artists of greater art historical renown, as was quite often the case, for instance, before 1920 at the MFA.16 Has it, in fact, proved possible to represent all periods equally? Certainly not. The predilection of highly placed collectors and curators for particular periods or techniques unbalanced, for instance, the holdings of the Met, where Egyptian and The triumph of Quality

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medieval art held absolute sway, an expression of passing taste.17 Art history experiences its own changing fashion, resulting over time in a de-emphasis by museums on eras newly considered decadent or of lesser interest, for example, the work of seicento painters or Baroque art in general. [Their] collections might be said to give the accepted standards of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history material expression. It seems almost unnecessary to note that, in all of Europe, perhaps only the Neues Museum in Berlin expressed the taste of its age so faithfully. The surplus of Renaissance and seventeenth-century and relative dearth of so-called Primitive paintings in European museums—at the Louvre, in Dresden, in Naples—recall earlier moments in history when their core collections were constituted. It is perhaps for this reason that Europeans find American museums not simply so appealing but so much more responsive to contemporary taste, their collections, organized around masterpieces but representative objects as well, being the pure products of art history, yet attentive to artistic culture besides. [175] The idea that museums have educational potential and so ought to address a mass audience inspired a vast infrastructure of schools, exhibition spaces, lecture halls, and guided tours, which European museums are still working to adapt to the ways of the Old World.18 Americans replaced the museum guidebooks popular in Europe with something more flexible, useful, and systematic.19 Museum schools came even earlier. The museums of Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Rochester had established actual academies of the fine arts, offering students the benefit of access to their collections.20 Those in Cleveland and Chicago, among others, have since grown considerably, with ever-increasing enrollments. Temporary exhibitions organized by major museums serve to introduce the public to little-known, at times considerable bodies of work by individual artists or from particular periods. The idea had its beginnings at two World’s Fairs, in Philadelphia in 1876 and at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893,21 just as in France exhibitions comprehensive in scope multiplied after the 1889 retrospective of the arts of France at the Petit Palais.22 In America in the same period, a number of smaller exhibitions proved of similar importance to the evolution of taste with regard, for example, to Dutch seventeenth- and American eighteenth-century art, [in particular,] the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York in 1909.23 There were also the annual exhibitions of contemporary art at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh beginning in 1896,24 at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo beginning in 1901, and others elsewhere, as well as more local exhibitions organized by museums all over the country with such frequency that they soon seemed commonplace. Space in every museum was set aside for these temporary exhibitions, the interest in and quality of which were understood to attract visitors. Lectures by local critics and scholars and by foreign art historians passing through served to keep the public up to date on current research and events. Special auditoriums were dedicated to this purpose.25 Guided tours completed the

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educational program.26 Concerts, organized at a number of museums, provided a worldly atmosphere that helped to create a community of supporters.27 In these ways, the museum, no longer closed off from the city, became the center of its artistic and social life. The material resources on which a museum typically relied—plaster casts, a library, a photographic archive—were also much improved to serve the purposes of public education, study, and research. When Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts was reorganized in 1907, something even greater was attempted: rethinking and, as it were, remodeling the way museums work.28 We will return to this event’s importance and significance. For the moment, let us simply note that trust-funded American museums spared no expense. Programs designed for educational and other edifying purposes reinvented the museum as a vital institution always concerned with attracting and educating a public with which it kept closely in touch, laying claim to a leadership role in the intellectual and artistic life of the community.29 Americans replaced the European conception of the museum as a storehouse of national treasure with one in which it served instead as [both] an enhancement of the lifestyle of the cultural elite and a site of public education.30 This vision becomes even clearer when we consider the invention and development of the university museum,31 to explain which a few words on university education in the United States, so very different from that in Europe, seem in order. Typically, American universities are privately run. Their courses of instruction are not sanctioned by the state; the value of the diplomas they issue is relative, determined by reputation. Tuition is paid by the students themselves, covering a major portion of the cost of instruction. Because the perceived value of the educational experience is the sole determinant of its worth, maintaining the high quality of the degrees it grants becomes essential to a university’s survival and success. Reliant on gifts from private foundations [176] and eventually on the trusts these evolved into, and exempted from paying federal and state taxes, these not-for-profit private enterprises over time came to play a role strikingly aligned with that of the museums. Another aspect of the American university of relevance to our concerns is the importance given very early on to the study of art and art history.32 Whereas, in Europe, schools of art were always separate from the university (where, in fact, the history of art only insinuated itself into courses of study late in the nineteenth century), a School of Art was founded at Yale in 1869 under the direction of John Ferguson Weir, and the History of Art was first offered at Harvard in 1873 under Charles Eliot Norton. It was, of course, impossible to manage either program without access to plaster casts, copies, and original works of art. But, whereas at European universities, with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge, study collections composed of casts and copies alone were thought sufficient, in the United States, the primary role that access to art in the original might play in education—whether of artists, cultivated individuals, or scholars—was soon recognized after only a brief period of hesitation.33 The triumph of Quality

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How, then, were such collections pieced together? Sizable donations allowed universities the means to acquire entire collections. We have already considered Yale’s purchase in 1831 and 1871 of those of Trumbull and Jarves, respectively, the latter of particular importance as an educational resource. A series of additional purchases and gifts would eventually provide a range of examples suitable for specialized art school instruction.34 There was a different vision in place at Harvard, where, from the days of Charles Eliot Norton and George Henry Moore, instruction in art history was the principal concern.35 The university’s art collection was thus intended to facilitate the study of objects, and the founding in 1891 of an art museum with the help of a gift from Elizabeth Fogg in memory of her husband was a response to that same need. When opened to the public two years later, the Fogg’s collections were at first limited to a few casts and an important set of photographs and engravings. Eventually, after 1912 especially, these holdings began to increase. An initiative undertaken by Edward Forbes and Paul J. Sachs in 1915 led to additional purchases, principally of early Italian paintings and, after 1920, works of medieval sculpture. A special gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1903 created a second, independent university museum devoted to models and casts of important German sculptures. At Princeton, the collections, though arguably less considerable, were acquired thanks to a bequest from a private foundation established by a professor of Art History there, Allan Marquand, which also supported art historical research by scholars early in their careers.36 The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology from its founding in 1887 kept its focus on ethnology and ethnography with the benefit of an encyclopedic collection perhaps responsible for the rigor of its approach, although the beauty of objects was not entirely neglected.37 These museums were supported not just by their respective university trustees but also by societies of friends—the one at the Fogg directly inspired by the Amis du Louvre—that united alumni in the sort of extended families so typical of American university life. When it came to purchasing works of art, the approach taken by such museums was virtually identical to that taken by endowed public institutions, although they enjoyed lesser means and thus shopped with greater focus. The goal was to assemble an ensemble of objects of use in familiarizing students with the various stages in the history of art and the styles, techniques, and artists responsible. Sometimes this meant buying second-rate works that offered useful comparisons or made some stylistic variation comprehensible. For this reason, the holdings of university museums differ in ways from those of their public counterparts. On occasion, secondary works keep company with masterpieces; works on view for educational purposes, with others there as examples of period taste. If didactic concerns often share the stage with the impulse to collect in its pure form, it is also true that these are essentially study collections complemented in the near vicinity by research laboratories, [177] slide and photograph collections, and libraries actively and systematically updated and maintained.38 Their directors, who hold the rank of university professor, surround themselves with teams of technical specialists, with whom students are invited to

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collaborate in optimizing the museum’s operation. It was notably at the Fogg that such a team produced one of the first and still one of the best catalogues of a museum collection.39 The importance of the university museum, an institution unknown in Europe perhaps due to the abundance and ready availability of historical resources, monuments, and museums, cannot be stressed enough. But then American universities enjoy the benefit of material means and facilities for teaching art history far less available elsewhere. In Europe, libraries and university presses languish due to a lack of funding. Thanks to extremely active circles of support, art history has achieved both independence and visibility in American life. Students with a degree from any number of institutions have no difficulty finding jobs either at a museum or some other university. A third category of museum can be identified in the United States: that of the specialized collection dedicated to the art of a single nation, region, period, or even medium.40 Such museums had long existed in Europe. The Musée Céramique de Sèvres (1824), Musée des Antiquités de la Seine-Inférieure [in Rouen] (1831), National Portrait Gallery in London (1856), and Ny-Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (1882) offer good examples of the various genres. There were also European museums devoted to the work of individual artists, for instance, Copenhagen’s Thorvaldsens Museum, founded shortly after the sculptor’s death [in 1844]. Before 1876, the only such museums in the United States were historical in focus, like the Trumbull Gallery at Yale, or regional, [which were] close to cabinet collections in style, sometimes filled out with souvenir items and old paintings. [Their] collections have been treated in book 1 of this study.41 In subsequent decades, a certain number of special collections were organized by scholarly societies in pursuit of their missions or assembled by individual benefactors and attached to universities, the best known among them being the Carnegie Institute of Art, founded in Pittsburgh in 1896, and the Museum of the Hispanic Society of America, founded in New York City in 1908. Other important specialized collections worth mention include the Museum of French Art, established in New York in 1910, though today fairly limited in its activities,42 and the Museum of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, devoted to the decorative arts and associated with a school of industrial design, founded in New York in 1897.43 The Semitic Museum at Harvard has, since 1889, collected and exhibited objects relevant to the history of religion. And almost every major city and university has its own ethnographic collection. The way such museums are run does not differ very much from what we have seen of museums of other kinds, except in the sense that the cachet of being associated with the learned societies and universities under which they operate involves its own very particular social and technical challenges. Take, for example, the Hispanic Society of America and the Carnegie Institute, each encouraged by the specialized nature of its mission to collect works of high quality. However, even though the society can boast of magnificent ceramics and famous paintings that include The triumph of Quality

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Antonio Moro’s Duke of Alba and multiple works by El Greco, Zurbarán, Velázquez, and Goya, earlier European paintings seem not to have been chosen with the same degree of selectivity.44 A room has been devoted to turn-of-the-century work by the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, but contemporary Spanish arts have been neglected. At the institute, a considerable number of paintings that today seem of only secondary importance hang alongside Impressionist works by artists such as Whistler and Monet.45 One of its essential activities has been to organize modern art exhibitions, a series of international “salons” devoted to painting, with prizes awarded living artists for works[, which are] then added to the permanent collection.46 The results [178] offer a certain perspective on developments in early twentieth-century American taste. In each instance, we see an American museum paying attention to its public, taking responsibility for public taste. The exhibitions organized by the Carnegie Institute and the research sponsored by the Hispanic Society are active engagements in social, artistic, and scientific life. Museums funded through private foundations constitute a final category of American museum, unique to the United States. Benefactors leave their collections not to communities but to private trusts, which manage them on the communities’ behalf upon their death. The legal standing of such bequests depends on extremely specific testamentary instructions governing the disposition of works in the collection. Quite a number of major collections organized as trusts belong to this category, including the [M. H.] de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Morgan Library in New York, the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, the Phillips Foundation in Washington, D.C., and, more recently, the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia, legally organized in 1922, and the Frick Collection in New York, in 1931. The Freer collection at the Smithsonian was a gift to the nation, although it is regulated by legal conditions similar to those governing other trusts. Private museums, we must not forget, are the projects of individuals working at times with the advice of specialists, and thus they reflect the taste of important amateurs, who are, of course, quite wealthy, and, something else worth remembering, who are collecting with such a museum in mind. These institutions might, if one insisted, be compared with the Wallace Collection in London or the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris.47 Psychological factors affect acquisitions made under these circumstances in ways that obviously distinguish them from purchases by curators or ordinary collectors. With a “museum collection,” self-consciousness affects the taste of the amateur involved, who nevertheless retains absolute freedom of action, as the examples of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Walters remind us. Despite this diversity in administrative structure, variations in programming, and the unequal resources available, public collections in the United States share many similarities. In Europe, even major museums with multiple departments offering a fairly complete picture of the history of art like the Louvre or the Staatliche Museen in Berlin retain the imprint of their institutional and national origins. Two factors contribute to this circumstance: first, European [museums] tend to be

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older, dating to the eighteenth century, though kept up since, like the Louvre and the Uffizi; and, second, they typically are national museums featuring the art of the nation, a good example being the Brussels Museum. Other museums of importance, like the Wallraf-Richartz in Cologne and the Galleria dell’Academia in Venice, are regional in focus. In the United States, virtually every museum pretends to universal coverage of art history, with, on occasion, areas of particular specialization, although, before 1920, virtually untouched by nationalist concerns or geographic location.48 A similar sense of educational mission led everywhere to noticeably similar results, where both the composition and the presentation of collections were concerned.49 A third cause of uniformity is the similarity of the buildings in which collections are housed—a shared “museum style” involving large structures of only modest height, bare walls, simple porticos, and natural lighting from above that replicated its way across the United States with lamentable monotony. With few exceptions, these structures, all built between the Centennial and the close of the Great War, were immune to modern architectural developments. Almost invariably, recourse was had to classical style. In Europe, where collections are often housed in palaces or castles, where each country insists on arraying closely related academic styles in national colors, museums tend to vary far more. The interiors of American museums reveal a similar uniformity, perhaps a bit too responsive to changing fashion, adapting through frequent and radical renovations to whatever new museological notion happens to be in vogue. Earlier installations hardly differed in [179] fustiness from what one saw in Europe: their style derived from that of the private museum with works organized in groups and distributed with more or less historical logic, though [in ways] perhaps overly concerned with picturesque arrangement—with pleasing the eye. [The collections of n]ineteenth-century American museums such as [those of] the New-York Historical Society, the Trumbull Galley at Yale, and even, in the early days, the Met were hung and arranged in this fashion.50 And attention was paid to creating a suitable atmosphere, another European innovation. Under the Restoration and July Monarchy, the Egyptian Rooms at the Louvre were hung with paintings in the Egyptian style; in 1866, those in Berlin were shrouded in a mysterious penumbra through the positioning of hypostyle columns expressly designed to create this effect. The goal was atmosphere, not education.51 The reinstallation of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection in 1901 took a similar direction. The goal there was not simply to immerse the visitor in a period atmosphere but also to resituate given objects more or less accurately in context. The pedagogic imperative in this can already be felt, which is why the Gardner Museum, not to open its doors to the public until 1925 but acclaimed in advance, had such influence in the United States. The architects of Boston’s new Museum of Fine Arts often took inspiration from Mrs. Gardner’s innovative attention to ensemble effect. The construction of that new museum in 1907 was preceded by long research and careful study broad ranging in nature, an approach of signal importance in museological history. The project, conscientiously pursued, began in 1903 with factThe triumph of Quality

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finding missions to Europe and resulted in the creation of the first truly modern museum, whose basic design would find imitators at home and abroad.52 The presentation of works of art would be governed by an attempt to provide appropriate context (with rooms devoted, for instance, to the medieval period or early Renaissance)[, with] objects [given] both identifying and explanatory labels.53 A reallocation of rooms made possible carefully controlled lighting and the wider spacing of paintings on the walls. The museum was, in effect, divided in two, with the second floor devoted to the permanent collection and the first to study objects and administrative offices, an organizing principle still considered optimal today.54 It represented clear progress over previous designs, based on the idea that objects in a collection can be grouped together meaningfully, yet avoid the overwhelming monotony of installation at the Louvre or Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, too enormous to take in. Modern museum design serves to facilitate study and to reduce the fatigue of the visitor[, who is] relieved of the need to choose among a mass of objects on display.55 Most recent American museums, either built or renovated during or following the war, took their inspiration from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where space has, in fact, been reallocated in subsequent years on more than one occasion, though without abandoning the overall vision of 1907. The complicated research into the optimal hanging of collections that eventuated in this vision was necessitated by their continual expansion. As a careful study of the evidence reveals, more than one solution was attempted; in each instance, curators found themselves facing new problems. Sometimes in such cases it becomes necessary to construct new buildings, the path chosen in Boston and New York. It is extremely interesting to follow the politics of acquisition during these years and the sorts of donations that were made. As in the case of private collections, progress proved in no way linear; public interest was drawn at different points to Old Master paintings, remote archaeological discoveries, and the European Middle Ages, and these shifts themselves, as we have seen, corresponded more or less to those in the private sector, though not always following precisely the same trajectory. At first, around 1876, museums either bought or received private collections, whether Europe or American, [180] randomly.56 The Met purchased seventeenthcentury paintings in Europe and Luigi Cesnola’s collection of Cypriot antiquities; the Art Institute, a portion of the Demidoff collection; Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, a series of paintings attributed to various Old Masters collected by local amateurs earlier in the century. There was, from the very beginning, the same close collaboration that continues today between these museums and private collectors generously willing to lend works even for long periods for the purpose of filling in gaps in the public collections. This led in the early years to understandable confusion, the result of a desire to hang collections with clear instructional value, even if this meant including works of only secondary importance. During these early years, prints and plaster casts played an important role in all American museums, not just those in Boston, Chicago, and New York.57 A clear preference for periods during which art was thought to have “flowered,” such as Classical Greece, the Italian

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Renaissance, and the Dutch seventeenth century, was widely shared and extended to the recognized masters of these periods. In Boston and New York, Departments of Greek and Roman Art were already well established. The [Henry Gurdon] Marquand donation to the Met in 1888 introduced into its collection important work by Van Dyke, Hals, Rembrandt, and the school of Florence.58 The Art Institute was buying works by Ruysdael, Teniers, Rembrandt, van Goyen, Van Dyke, Rubens, Hobbema, Gerard ter Borch, and Murillo, artists considered at the time the finest in the history of European art.59 The Detroit Institute was exhibiting a more or less parallel set of objects,60 as was Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, including paintings acquired at the San Donato sale [March–April 1880] by Stanton Blake.61 The NewYork Historical Society collection and the Jarves collection at Yale were less well known, however, and no attempt had been made to “fill in the gaps” of either. Then, in 1896, Bernard Berenson published an article lamenting the failure of major American museums to embrace early Italian painting.62 A veritable wave of interest in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting arose in response[, not only Italian but Dutch as well]. In 1898, a Perugino from the Ryerson collection went on display in Chicago; in 1906, the Fogg received a diptych then attributed to Rogier van der Weyden and Gerard David. In Philadelphia, exhibition of the Wilstach collection, bequeathed to the museum and managed by private collectors, including William T. Johnson and Joseph Widener, led to the acquisition of further works, among them, in 1903, a Pieter Brueghel Crucifixion. Ancient art and Old Master painting remained fashionable.63 The new influence of universities, critics, and private collections, however, led to some changes. So-called Primitive painters came to be considered new Old Masters; Giotto and Sassetta, the equals of Raphael and Titian. During the 1910s, important examples of their work acquired by museums in Chicago, New York, Boston, [and Cambridge,] by the Fogg in particular. The rise of archaeology gave birth to new departments where archaeological interest at times outweighed the aesthetic appreciation that for private collectors remained the core motivation. Early evidence of this shift can be seen in the Met’s acquisition of Cesnola’s Cypriot collection between 1872 and 1876, or in that by the MFA of ancient vases at around the same time.64 Interest in the arts of the Far East had once been driven by exoticism; increasingly, however, efforts to acquire older and older examples and to classify and explicate them stemmed from a desire to understand the cultures responsible. The Department of Oriental Art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts was established in 1890, but it was with the hiring of Okakura Kakuzo in 1904 that the work of historical classification truly began.65 Other museums in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia followed this example. The private collections received at the time as gifts from individuals like Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, Okakura [Kakuzo], Denman Waldo Ross, and Clarence Buckingham were, for the most part, intended for study. Such gifts inspired other [181] amateurs to form collections of their own in an area in which museums came to play a leading role.66

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The same archaeological spirit came to preside over the formation and development of Departments of Classical Antiquity, a number of which existed already at the turn of the century in cities like Boston and New York. But even major museums such as Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Met, the Art Institute, and the Yale Gallery found themselves unable to develop that specialization beyond a certain point, given the great difficulty, indeed impossibility, of acquiring essential pieces from countries that at the time would only permit the export of objects considered of secondary importance. Excavations undertaken by the American Academies in Greece and Rome, though they encouraged a taste for the arts of antiquity, did little to enrich museum collections. By contrast, archaeological digs in Egypt provided [the museums of] American cities, especially New York and Boston, a considerable number of works of the first order. Boston’s Museum of fine Arts acquired its core [Egyptian] collection in 1872 through the purchase of mummies and other objects from the Egyptologist Robert Hay. These were soon eclipsed at the Met, beginning in 1902, by artifacts unearthed in digs in the Valley of the Kings by Theodore M. Davis, and at the MFA by others similarly discovered in Thebes. After 1907, the Met would organize its own excavations, first around the base of the Pyramid of Amenemhat I, then at Lisht, the Kharga oasis, and, by 1913, Luxor. As a result of an agreement between the museum and the Egyptian government, all finds were shared, and to the objects thus obtained were added others acquired through European and American dealers. Public taste kept pace with these developments, and private collectors took an interest, but it was only after 1907 that the [archaeological] movement truly hit its stride, with fresh excavations permitting the considerable growth of Egyptian collections in museums across America. Where European art of the medieval period is concerned, French medieval art most particularly, American museum collections remain weak despite the acquisition of numerous objets d’art, tapestries, suits of armor, enamels, and ivories late in the nineteenth century through gifts from private collectors like Rutherford Stuyvesant and J. P. Morgan in New York, Frank Gair Macomber in Boston, and John L[ong] Severance in Cleveland.67 The example of Isabella Stewart Gardner exerted a powerful influence. As we have seen, she owned, in addition to finely crafted period furnishings, not just Gothic but also Romanesque sculpture, something virtually unprecedented [in either the United States or Europe]. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this development. It was only with [Arthur] Kingsley Porter’s publication in 1911 of his first major study of Lombard architecture and sculpture that a broader understanding of the medieval period, defined not just by the art of the great cathedrals but by Romanesque art equally, emerged in the United States.68 If we keep in mind that, at this point in Europe, only a small number of archaeologists and antiquarian dealers took any interest in Romanesque sculpture, the extent to which Gardner’s taste was ahead of its time can be better appreciated. After 1920 especially, American museums in pursuit of this interest went so far as to

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organize excavations in France, even purchasing entire cloisters and other architectural monuments. In 1916, as we have seen, the Department of Arms and Armor at the Met was already enormous, while at the Cleveland Museum, one of almost the same importance had just been created out of whole cloth through the purchase of the Severance collection.69 But the Morgan bequest to the Met that same year of medieval architectural fragments of the first order marked an important watershed in American museum history, opening a new field of collecting. It included among much else a Romanesque wood sculpture of the Virgin from the Hoenstchel collection, a capital from the Cathedral of Saint-Denis, and sculpture from the Château de Biron. No other Romanesque art of any significance was held by any other American museum at the time. The purchasing policies developed by museum curators in this period with regard to contemporary art deserve special attention. Even before 1876, as we have noted, [182] American private collections held a certain number of minor nineteenth-century Realist and virtuoso paintings along with occasional works of the Munich, Düsseldorf, and eventually Barbizon schools. Museums contented themselves at first with a passive acquisition policy, accepting entire collections as gifts, for instance, those of William P. and Anna Wilstach in Philadelphia; those of Catherine Wolfe and George L. Seney in New York; Henry Field and Albert A. Munger in Chicago; and Martin Brimmer in Boston, whose donation to the MFA nicely complemented a large selection of paintings by Millet, the gift of Quincy Adams Shaw.70 The rare direct purchases made by major museums at public auctions seem not to have had much impact on public taste. In a sense, the works involved answered to past standards of taste, ones that private collectors were in the process of abandoning. Such was certainly true of the 1887 purchase, at a very high price, of Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair for the Met by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Where the work of late nineteenth-century painters like Manet, the Impressionists, Whistler, or Puvis de Chavannes was concerned, public appreciation was won over only slowly. Just as in Europe, these artists’ reputations became established only thanks to openminded collectors. In the United States, where the ideological struggle between the “Academy” and independents was less bitter, as early as 1889, as noted before, the Met accepted Manet’s Woman with a Parrot and Boy with a Sword as gifts. (We might recall the problems encountered on the occasion of the gift to the French state of another Manet masterpiece, Olympia, in 1890, or the fuss attending the announcement of the Caillebotte bequest in 1894.) Thanks to a gift from [Martin] Brimmer, Courbet had also entered the collections of the MFA as early as 1876. The American museum débuts of the work of the Impressionists came in Chicago: first, Whistler in 1896 as a result of a gift to the Art Institute from Philander Chase and Emma C. O. Hanford; then, Monet in 1903 as a result of the purchase of a painting, with funds left the museum for that purpose by Elizabeth Stickney, that would shortly thereafter be installed in a gallery dedicated to her memory paid for by Cyrus and Nettie Fowler McCormick. But it took some time before ImpressionThe triumph of Quality

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ist painting found its place in public collections. The breakthrough came in 1929 with the gift of the Havemeyer collection to the Met. Puvis de Chavannes, much admired in Boston—where, in 1891, he was even hired to produce the decorations for the public library—found easier acceptance there. Leafing through collection catalogues published before the turn of the century, one does encounter here and there a few modern paintings, but curators clearly preferred Gérôme, Meissonier, Detaille, Vibert, Bonheur, Dagnan-Bouveret, and Bouguereau. By 1905, the Carnegie Institute already owned an important group of paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Raffaëlli, Whistler, and Lucien Simon. In Philadelphia at that time, the [William P.] Wilstach collection also held a growing number of Impressionist works. Post-Impressionist painting, however, would only first enter museum collections after the war, when, thanks to the discovery of Fauvism and Cubism at the Armory Show, a revelation that inspired research into Post-Impressionism’s origins in the work of Cézanne and Gauguin, resistance among Americans faded away. American art benefited from these changes in taste and this new place for independent painting in museum collections. As in Europe, museums [in the United States] have tended to hold artistic development back by accepting only work by well-known artists, witness the William Morris Hunt collection at the MFA or the Inness Room at the Art Institute, which opened in 1911. [ John] La Farge, George Fuller, and Frank Duveneck found their way into the MFA, the Met, and the Carnegie Institute; that infamous virtuoso John Singer Sargent soon would as well. Highly talented but unconventional painters like Albert Pinkham Ryder and George Luks, however, would have to wait beyond the period of this study to be admitted into major museum collections. The truth is that the directors of most important American museums—Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo perhaps excepted—did very little to encourage the work of American artists, who tended to be spirited and free-thinking, preferring to it the same sort of work being produced by artists in Europe. The postwar period saw, in reaction to this, the creation of museums devoted to the art of the modern avant-garde specifically, like the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, founded in 1929 and 1930, respectively. [183] The bulletins and catalogues of the major American museums clearly document the rapid increase in the richness and the size of their collections. Their search for objects of quality in an effort to illustrate the history of art as completely as possible was thus attended by an extraordinary expansion in the size of their collections, orders of magnitude greater than anything we see in Europe in the same period. So considerable an increase in the content of museum collections necessitated continuous improvement in the technical resources available to museum staff. New theories influenced these changes in important ways.71 A class in conservation practices at the Pennsylvania Museum in 1908[, however,] was no more a success than similar curricular experiments at Wellesley in 1913.72 The first real program in Museum Studies would have to wait until 1927, when Paul Sachs began to offer his “Museum Course” at Harvard.73

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American museums had long been equipped with laboratories, conservation studios, object study rooms, reference libraries, and photographic archives. Such facilities existed in an embryonic state in all museums, Old World and New; but it was in Boston in 1907 that dedicated spaces were first provided and energies devoted to improving them. Today, the Fogg, the Metropolitan, and the Frick all enjoy their own state-of-the-art scientific laboratories and enormously rich library and photographic collections acquired during the war. Publications are another piece of the puzzle when it comes to modernizing and rationalizing the museum’s operations, and nineteenth- century Europe offered many fine examples of collection catalogues—for instance, those prepared for the Louvre by Charles de Clarac and Frédéric Villot between 1841 and 1853, for Munich’s Alte Pinakothek by Franz von Reber, published in 1884—and sumptuous, handsomely designed museum periodicals such as the Jahrbücher issued in Berlin and Vienna in 1880 and 1883, respectively. In the United States, museum catalogues were relatively rare before the postwar period, but a volume by Edward Robinson devoted to the MFA’s holdings of ancient ceramics, an inventory of paintings at the Fogg, and Bashford Dean’s catalogue of European daggers at the Met were important exceptions.74 Private collections received by museums as gifts, on the other hand, did occasion the publication of extremely polished accounts of their holdings, like the catalogue of the [ James Jackson] Jarves collection prepared by Osvald Sirén, of various portions of the [ J. P.] Morgan collections by Seymour de Ricci, Bernard Berenson and Wilhelm Valentiner, or of the [ John Graver] Johnson and [Peter Arrell Brown] Widener collections in Philadelphia by some of the same authors.75 The genre of publication most in vogue was the museum guide, or handbook, in which information about works in a collection combined with a sort of general history of art. Fine examples of such “guides to the collection” were issued by the Met, the MFA, the Fogg, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Art Institute. Serious scholarly journals published by museums never enjoyed much success in the United States.76 Monthly newsletters documenting events, exhibitions, and recent acquisitions accompanied by short articles featuring objects in the collection have proved the preferred mode. The first such newsletter, published by the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in 1898, was followed by others at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1903, the Pennsylvania Museum in 1904, both the Met and Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery in 1905, and on and on, until, at this point, every major museum produces its own Bulletin. These small publications, agreeably designed and nicely illustrated, serve as an excellent means for curatorial departments to keep in touch with the public and to advertise their programs. There can be no doubt that the choice to privilege accessible art history and arts advocacy over accounts of scholarly research represents a self-conscious strategy on the part of museum directors. We have already noted that almost every [art] museum in America operates a school of some kind, whether with a focus on the decorative arts, the fine arts, or art history. But the concern for public education The triumph of Quality

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goes beyond the classroom; instruction and broad social outreach play a role in everything that goes on at the museum. [184] It is an attitude easily recognized in period texts devoted to American museum theory. Here again, James Jackson Jarves had broken new ground early on. The theory that had prevailed in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century that taste might be refined and manners improved by exposure to masterpieces of art was one already articulated by Quatremère de Quincy during the First Empire and a common thread that ran through all discussions of the purpose of museums.77 Jarves promoted a very different, much more straightforward approach, insisting that collections of works of original art be made available to the public to contribute to an understanding of the history of art by illustrating the formation and development of schools and thus the shifting tides in both civilization and the human spirit.78 One easily recognizes the rich promise such an idea held for the future. Another theorist, Carl DeMuldor [Charles Henry Miller], had advocated as early as 1855 for the creation of a National Museum and Ministry of the Fine Arts to encourage the development of public collections intended to elevate the status of instruction in the arts in American society.79 This approach represents a very different order of preoccupation, championing the cause of contemporary art by proposing that artists be offered models from which to work. Though an idea of long standing, frequently reprised, it had the effect of limiting the extent of a museum’s potential reach. It was due to the influence of the Reverend J. G. Wood that the idea that the museum offered an opportunity to educate the public would take off irresistibly.80 This English author, widely read in America, inspired the theoretical writings of both [Luigi di Palma] Cesnola and George Brown Goode, whose governing principles came to be realized in American museums in obvious ways.81 Their basic innovation was to see the promotion of public appreciation for works of art as contributing not simply to the betterment of cultural life and civic manners in general but also to personal improvement in the lives of individuals, increasing their awareness both of history and their place in the world as a result. Museums, for Goode, held the same importance as libraries or universities. He proposed that museums of science be taken as inspiration in transforming bric-a-brac-filled museums of art into “nurseries,” veritable grade schools for urban culture. The necessity of such museums to communities became his guiding premise, never to be compromised. Collections should be organized in a logical fashion so as to render them accessible, instructive, and a stimulus to creativity.82 Goode’s ideas would have a greater practical impact even than those of Jarves, not least because, as a curator himself, he took an interest in actual problems one encountered when running a museum.83 And we would do no justice to the complexity of American thought on this subject were we to overlook Benjamin Ives Gilman, for whom the principal raison d’être of the museum lay in the visual pleasure and satisfaction it afforded visitors by means of a rigorous selection of exceptional works.84 The rehanging of galleries attempted in Boston accorded with this notion, as did the new focus on

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“quality” that we have so painstakingly considered. Even here in a museum designed with amateurs in mind, concern with public education—so central to Goode’s understanding of the institution’s proper role—came first and foremost. More recently, another theorist, John Cotton Dana, has picked up where Goode left off, developing and, more important, refining his position by emphasizing the importance of visual education and the specific advantages that culture—and industry—might derive from a systemic reorganization of the museum.85 To create better continuity between traditional and modern art, he calls for an end to archaeological reconstructions and “museum style” displays too far removed from the world of contemporary urban life. Clarity of presentation should be privileged above all else and specialization resisted in a “museum of general culture” with the goal of meeting the needs of every individual.86 The decorative arts would enjoy a place of importance because close to the practical operations of daily life. This powerful preoccupation with social responsibility served to undermine the appeal of alternative theories like that of Clive Bell, who held that museums could only have a deleterious effect on the artists they purported to instruct, though he did acknowledge the pleasures they provided and believed they had a place in society.87 But even this position reflected the determinative role played [185] by social concerns in the life of the American museum. We can understand the situation from another perspective if we consider the role played by the curator at a public institution, allowing, of course, for differences between larger and smaller museums. In places like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, curators play a properly curatorial role and administrators an administrative one. The museum director and registrar manage the facility and public relations, whereas the curator sees to the collections themselves and their exhibition, writes about the artworks they contain in the museum bulletin, and offers public lectures, although when it comes, for instance, to new acquisitions, this division of responsibilities is not absolute. At smaller museums, the director typically serves as curator as well, with responsibilities as a consequence far more complicated than those at a European museum of the same size, ranging from collection installation and new acquisitions to administration and public relations, writing press releases and editing a wide variety of museum publications.88 The most difficult and time-consuming part of the job, however, involves attracting visitors, whether through public lectures or personal contacts—modes of social outreach on which the number of patrons, donors, and supporters of prominence in the community depends. A good many American museums owe their success to zealous director-curators of this kind, who have managed to create intellectual and artistic centers of activity in the heart of their cities.89 The more successful have tended to be young, their seniors, too long closeted in the silence of their studies, perhaps lacking the initiative and energy essential to accomplishing this work so necessary in the United States as elsewhere.90 In America, as a result, such museum curators are less guardians responsible for maintaining the integrity of collections, as is so often the case in The triumph of Quality

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Europe, than developers actively engaged in improving their institutions’ contributions to the common good.91 The system encourages this end, for the success curators enjoy in this regard determines that of their own careers. At this point, it should be possible to make sense of the most obvious ways in which matters of social conditions and public taste find expression in American museums. As a good starting point, we might note the close alignment museums in the United States maintain with the country’s democratic principles, understood not so much in a narrow political sense as more broadly, which serve to inspire acts of social philanthropy and patronage that include public programs intended not for the social elite alone but for a wider public, with the goal of cultural improvement. In European countries, the situation is entirely different. There, often the museum is considered simply a repository of tokens of national accomplishment, socially involved only its role of bearing witness to tradition, of providing a link to the nation’s past.92 Such museums, created in the name of the entire community, operate under the aegis of the state, and individual citizens participate in the artistic culture of the nation only on terms defined by the state’s own involvement. The European museum also gives expression to the ambitions of society at large in serving the needs of the elite—whatever elite, whether involved in the arts or not. The anonymous public for whose benefit and in whose name it operates no longer takes much interest, a situation no effort is made to remedy. Philanthropists who donate a collection or a sum of money to an American museum do so out of a feeling of responsibility to society, hoping to contribute to the lives of their fellow citizens. Typically, however, they do so with no thought of anonymity, motivated also by the desire to see their names attached to useful and celebrated institutions. Such motivations, whether a matter of parochial pride in family or even region, or a desire to see one’s city recognized as more culturally advanced than others, lie at the origin of numerous bequests. This manner of uniting patronage with democratic social instincts has become fashionable despite its apparent contradictions, modeled [as it is] on princely generosity. A veritable aristocracy in almost every major American city has stepped forward to take up the burden ignored by indifferent local government. Desire for popular recognition, a sort of rivalry among patrons to see who can be the most generous, has benefited museum development magnificently. The tremendously positive material contribution such patronage has made to the operation [186] of museums is suggested by the fact that, since the war, European benefactors have followed the American example, taking an equally direct interest in their home museums. Americans themselves have led the way. Gifts from T. B. Whitney to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, John David and Laura Spelman Rockefeller to the Musée Nationale de Versailles, Edward Tuck to the Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, and Walter Gay to the Louvre have either funded new collections or contributed works of art to previous ones in the name of FrancoAmerican cooperation. The best-known example of such philanthropic collaboration by Americans in France was a gift from Anne Morgan establishing the Musée

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Franco-Américain de Blérancourt. Of course, European museums received important gifts in the nineteenth century as well but in an entirely different spirit: collections offered to the community were not intended to grow over time or to prosper even as tastes changed. A clause in his will made it certain the admirable gift by the Duc d’Aumale of his personal collections (along with the Château de Chantilly, in which they were housed) to the Institut de France will remain forever unchanged. The La Caze and Thiers collections at the Louvre, or those at the Musée JacquemartAndré—these, too, a gift to the Institut—are other examples of a fashion of giving of serious inconvenience to museum directors. Such gifts, though they do certainly contribute to the “common treasure” of the city or nation, contribute far less to society or to public education than is the norm in the United States. More recent gifts to (and efforts in support of) the Musée des Arts Décoratifs by Raymond Koechlin, the Louvre by Maurice Fenaille, the French national collections more generally by David David-Weill, and the National Gallery of London by Samuel Courtauld have left the curators and directors of these recipient institutions a freedom of operation similar to that enjoyed by their counterparts in the United States. This attitude of intimate collaboration between amateur and museum has made relatively little headway in Europe, however, and numerous provincial collections languish as a consequence. The generosity to the Institut d’Art at the University of Paris or the Institute of Art in London by benefactors like [the Marquise Costanza] Arconati-Visconti, Jacques Doucet, Robert Witt, and Samuel Courtauld remain the exceptions that prove the rule. Other influences that experimentation in America has had on European museums are more widespread: the reorganization of collections; the implementation of lecture series with public education in mind; guided tours; increased labeling; more frequent exhibitions; traveling exhibitions . . . Since 1920, laboratories, photographic archives, and conservation studios have grown more sophisticated as well for the same reasons. All things considered, this influence represents a rather curious phenomenon.93 The United States had sought to achieve a level of artistic and cultural accomplishment comparable to that of regions of Europe. The campaign had been led by a handful of patrons, artists, art historians, curators, and dealers, who succeeded eventually in interesting a larger and larger circle of supporters in their enterprise. The process operated from the top down; it almost invariably involved a spirited struggle against ignorance and indifference; but, in the end, the missionaries met with success.94 By the postwar period, the museum had been transformed from a perfectly self-contained closed system, there to be admired, into a school instrumental in shaping every cultivated American. Here the role played by the visual arts in American culture would be difficult for a European to appreciate. Objects of art experienced directly have led in America to an appreciation of culture, history, human geography, and even such concepts as evolution or progress. If you ask Americans to identify Rembrandt, they will be able to respond; if you ask them to identify Racine, it is possible they will not. This result is all the more striking given The triumph of Quality

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how opposite the situation is in Europe, where primary and secondary education have taken a literary and historical turn, focusing on “humanism” and book learning instead. To Americans, what defines modern Europe is less its literature, attitudes, or way of life, [187] but the pictures they see in museums, works of art that they are taught to recognize from earliest childhood.95 This inculcation of shared visual culture is the primary role that the American museum plays, doubtless more important than its contribution to American art. However, any educational program systematic and didactic in nature breeds a critical sensibility warped by the accumulation of tidy ideas acquired without personal investment. The evidence supports this: American art in the years we have been considering had as yet profited very little from the admirable collections already at the time available in the United States. Dogmatic instruction impairs independent judgment and critical thinking. In their desire to be useful, American museums neglected to address either the imagination of students and visitors or their personal differences. This was probably just a necessary stage in the development of a culture of the arts in the United States in which collections had a necessary part to play. An atmosphere of shared receptivity to the arts—call it an “artistic milieu”—was to be created at all costs; with this, patrons, museum directors, and theorists were all in agreement. For the most part, American taste by the postwar period had grown infinitely more refined, more inclusive, and more flexible thanks to the proliferation of major public collections, with the desired milieu near to being established. In Europe, where museum practices have been less in the public eye, the broadening of public taste has been less evident, the art world its chief beneficiary—something that, in the United States, as we have seen, has not always been the case, although, in the postwar period, the American art world already shows clear signs of renewal. For authentic personal taste or a vibrant art scene to emerge from exposure to museums and collections (as did occur in Europe during the heyday of Romanticism and Impressionism) requires the prior existence of a receptive public. As in Medici Florence or eighteenth-century London, such results take time. Artists find themselves obliged to work out the tensions between working in imitation of Old Masters whose work they have learned to appreciate only very narrowly and reinterpreting the past more freely and in their own fashion. The other side of the tremendous influence of museums continues to be their tyrannical hold upon contemporary art. With these reservations, it would be foolish to deny that museums have assumed a place of importance in American life and have done so proudly. Attendance figures alone suggest the ever-growing public interest they generate.96 [Indeed, a]s it would be impossible to stress too much in a history of American taste, the museum has become the center, the very emblem, of intellectual life in the United States.

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Conclusion

Despite the relative brevity of this study, though none other like it exists to furnish a basis for verification or comparison, might we not now draw some general conclusions regarding what has remained constant in the American taste for collecting and how and along what general lines that taste has evolved? These constants and variables should allow us to arrive at some more general conclusions regarding the nature of taste itself. We may note among American collectors certain preferences that have remained constant, although inflected in individual cases, subject to fashion, and varying in intensity over time, the first of these being a strong penchant for verisimilitude, for exactitude in recording appearances, for exactitude in general. This has led to a widespread taste for portraits, for intimate scenes of everyday life, and for simple rustic landscapes. This preference has devolved at times into a love of anecdote, of narrative, of unambiguous delineation, of a certain facility of expression[, which Charles] Baudelaire considered the very definition of bourgeois taste, expressed with particular acuity, he thought, in the Netherlands. This, however, may be too absolute a judgment. The German obsession with Gemütlichkeit, with facile, often implausible sentimentality, and [with what], in Italy, we associate with bel canto, a parallel obsession with sumptuous, atmospheric décor and heroic subjects, should convince us that such taste cannot be reduced to the expression of any single social class or milieu. In the United States, these preferences are to be noted among eighteenth-century colonists, early nineteenth-century merchants, even late nineteenth-century nouveau aristocrats—and to the same degree. This explains a certain aversion to this day to mythological and religious subjects, to the High Baroque and to Romanticism. The appeal of anecdote and illustration has played a role in the acceptance by American collectors of works of art that might, on first consideration, appear irreconcilable with the dominant tendencies just described. This characteristic, though perhaps the most obvious, may not be the most important. With equal consistency, American collectors have been drawn to fine materials, often embracing subjects that in form or origin seem unlikely to have won

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favor yet have done so because precious seeming, titillating, or luxuriant to the touch or to the eye. We first encounter this penchant in the fine woods selected for the manufacture of colonial furniture, simple in appearance but carefully matched and polished to a fine patina. Americans have always been much taken by the beauty in supple, well-made textiles, as discernible in clothing design as in collections of fabrics and rugs. The high esteem in which contemporaries held the work of [ John Singleton] Copley stemmed in part from the loveliness of the textiles he painted with such virtuosity. The later success of [ John Singer] Sargent can be similarly explained. The taste for hard stones, for jasper, jade, and porphyry, certainly contributed to interest in collecting objects of art from Egypt or China. Nor must we forget the importance of lustrous surfaces in the acquisition of great quantities of emeralds, bronzes, and both Asian and Hispano-Moresque ceramics. Should we consider this an expression of taste for objects with an “expensive” look? Personally, I [191] think not. More likely, the durability and intrinsic beauty of these materials explain their enduring appeal. Even so, reminding us that truth can be complicated and even contradictory, the intrinsic value of a given object, let alone its form, subject, or materials, has often seemed of less importance to American collectors than their desire to possess a famous work of art. Fame itself takes many forms. Early on in the history of American collecting, the subject of a portrait, or a given object’s value as measured by its historical or patriotic associations, was its principal attraction. Later on, the mere fame of an image sufficed to render it attractive. Even a copy of a famous painting, a recognized name on a label, sufficed to make the happy possessor feel in touch with the past glories of the history of art. The emergence of quality as a concern merely redirected these feelings somewhat. More than one archaeological collection began with an appreciation for the extreme ancientness of objects found to evoke, not just thought to represent, some past civilization. For certain Americans, provenance, the fame of a previous owner, the storied past of an object took on often exaggerated importance. Even magnificent ensembles of European art assembled in the late nineteenth century, filled with works of great beauty and exceptional quality by the finest painters and sculptors, were at first considered attractive not due to a heightened awareness of the notion of quality but to the lingering appeal of famous names and popular reputation—perhaps less a shortcoming attributable to cultural inexperience than an admirable desire for tradition, a third characteristic of American taste that weighed heavily in the formation of period collections. These various contributing factors were only reinforced by certain religious persuasions, moral and social dispositions, cultural contexts, and snobbish tendencies. It is easy to see, for instance, that puritanical thinking must be held to some degree responsible for the late and very limited appearance in American collections of the nude, still today unwelcome in some museums and private homes, or that Protestant individualism, on the other hand, encouraged portraiture (just as the historical self-consciousness it also encouraged may help to explain an occasional taste for history painting). Social class found clearest expression in the widespread

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interest in genre paintings featuring familiar details of everyday life and portraits of great men serving to flatter their possessors. The same taste for scenes of ordinary life can be seen in an American literature given at times to scenes of domestic virtue and bitter lampooning of human foibles; the same passion for landscape, in James Fenimore Cooper and all the great late nineteenth-century American poets. Snobs of all varieties and the fashion conscious always display an absolute and unmistakable preference for superlatives, favoring expressions like “most important school,” “greatest artist,” and “most marvelous technique,” whether the topic is Italian art, Rembrandt, or Chinese porcelain. Famous works of art lend themselves to such [expressions of] public enthusiasm. As with all celebrity infatuations, our relations to them tend to lack in intimacy, and the “masterpieces” themselves, in personality; like movie stars or political heroes fawned over today, [they are] forgotten tomorrow, swept away on the currents of fantasy or fashion. Finally, the traits that we have seen to be most characteristic of American collectors or collections seem characteristic of American art as well: the abundance of portraits, the taste for resemblance, the fondness for lovingly, meticulously handpainted fabrics, history scenes, and narratives involving famous individuals—an unbroken pattern, and one in fact typical of the work of nearly every artist. [192] In the United States, collections have always exercised a sort of dictatorial control over contemporary art. Even during the colonial period, we see a Copley or a West learning the rudiments of art from randomly collected paintings. Artists have always kept closely in touch with collectors, just as collectors have always made their treasures abundantly accessible to artists. But collectors never collected solely for artists, or in fact for themselves. The American amateurs saw collecting as something more than a game, more than a source of egotistical pleasure to the dilettante, as playing an important role in shaping the future through a better understanding of the past. Private and public collections alike were imagined less as warehouses of ancient and dead forms than as contributions to present-day art and culture, a phenomenon well understood by the monks copying away in Roman scriptoria, by collectors in Renaissance Florence, as it was by the Duc d’Angevillers when he plucked the spoils of history for present and future use. This unbiased love of the past, this passion for collecting, did not prevent a Benjamin Franklin, a James Bowdoin, a J. P. Morgan, or an Isabella Stewart Gardner from living in the here and now with equal passion. Most major collectors, in fact, were men and women of action, often responsible for nation building, developers of banks, important industries, and railroads. More than usually accomplished, and more than others, such individuals defined the aspirations of their social milieu, importantly marking the age in which they lived. Their great merit lies not so much in having understood the national importance of collecting art as in having preached by example, putting their ideas into practice. This social agenda clearly distinguishes American collectors from their European counterparts, who seem more often motivated by personal pleasure, by the enjoyment that contemplation of a work of art can bring. For European museums, The Evolution of Taste

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the motivation seems to be to construct a sort of treasury in which the past can be preserved, to amass historical evidence. In America, as we have seen, museums have set their sights on the present and the future instead. Although I would not wish to define American taste simply in opposition to European, for the two have some traits in common, discernible differences in degree and style do exist that are worth noting. In addition to being less actively concerned with social relevance, European collectors seem less motivated by fame and less preoccupied with scholarly pursuits. This last difference strikes me as particularly significant. We have frequently noted Americans’ far greater intellectual and factual engagement with works they collect. In Europe, one’s connection with given objects seems more immediate, more personal, more intimate, and less constrained by what we might term “didactic” or “museological” concerns. Yet, in recent years, American ideas, and perhaps even American taste, have exerted an influence on public and private collecting in Europe.

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Now, at last, by gathering together the various strands of our analysis, let us attempt a rough outline of the evolution of taste in the United States, tracing its general tendencies and the basic stages through which it has passed over the course of a century and a half. We have seen a certain number of attitudes follow one from the next and new conceptions of the value in collected objects coalesce, motivated first by a desire for souvenirs of Europe, then by a more properly encyclopedic spirit appropriate to the Enlightenment, then by an incipient patriotic nationalism, and then by a Romantic [193] inclination. In the throes of unbridled economic and demographic expansion, the United States never experienced the same ideological fervor seen in Europe during the age of Romanticism, from which its taste for anecdote and concern for realistic effects were soon diverted into other channels. In the second half of the nineteenth century, [American] collectors increasingly looked to the past, thought didactically, and began to specialize. The Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia marked a decisive turning point in the struggle between traditional ways of thinking about art and a new interest in quality, as a result of which, beginning at that time but increasingly toward the start of the new century, major private collections and important public museums would enrich their holdings with works of consummate importance. Without a doubt, practical factors influenced these developments. The history of the economic growth of the United States is too well known to require detailed retelling. Suffice it to say that it entailed a steady climb toward greater and greater wealth, interrupted violently from time to time by passing crises. American collectors enjoyed purchasing power that increased with every generation. That these economic factors were not determinative in and of themselves, however, is suggested by geography, for, even as American wealth moved progressively westward, the principal centers of artistic activity and the principal collections, tradition having its own appeal, did not, remaining in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and especially New York. The Modern Art Museum

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Developments in the political sphere had little impact on American collecting. With the exception of a few short periods, freedom from England did not involve a breaking of ties with English culture. We can pass over the nineteenth century’s brief wars without comment. Only more recently has the cultural rivalry between Germany and France touched the United States, affecting American collections as a result of shifts in loyalty and income, with an effect on academic training and travel. The effects of the war fought in Europe between 1914 and 1918 fall into this category. Measuring the “cultural factor” in these influences is a more delicate matter. Although certainly enormous, the slow progress and almost imperceptible nature of changes of this kind not tied to any particular datable event make it impossible to draw any specific connections. We will have to content ourselves with recognizing a few general tendencies. These include, first and foremost, America’s increasing secularism, closely connected to changes in moral attitudes. At first penetrated by Protestant Puritanism more than any other society, America, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, experienced a powerful upsurge of “free thinking.” The astonishing human mosaic of races, nationalities, and religions introduced by immigration threw the initial [social] order into disarray, so that traditional Protestants came to live side by side with Catholics and Jews just as the nation was being swept by crises of ecstatic belief due to social unrest, a circumstance similarly acute today. [It is n]o surprise that earlier prohibitions of nudes, religious subjects, and frivolous representations weakened. A second tendency important to note was the rationalization of instruction. The hard necessity of working the soil, the immense challenge of imposing new order on the natural world, encouraged a practical sensibility, leading to a rational and highly specialized system of education. Study of the classics, literary or artistic, went out of fashion in this age of expansion. Although that age has now passed, the American spirit retains a penchant for getting straight to the point, for a certain “mechanization” of the business of civilization. These factors have importantly contributed to the didacticism of the American approach to collections management, as a result of which the museum has become a sort of “factory of art historical instruction.” Artists, as we have seen, played an instrumental role in the formation of American collections. How, then, do evolving taste and evolving artistic form relate? In my view, collections on the one hand and art [194] on the other give formal expression to evolving taste. Admirers of old forms as well as disciples of the new, American artists have shown amateurs the way by sharing their own new enthusiasms, often by example. An even more subtle sympathy links the activities of creating and collecting. The period during which remembrance of great men and important national events, elevated to the status of a cult, made the careers of artists like [ John Singleton] Copley, [Benjamin] West, and Gilbert Stuart, who often found themselves at the forefront in matters of taste. The vogue for anecdotal subjects, an The Evolution of Taste

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intimate American Romanticism, also found its adherents in artists like William Sidney Mount and George Morland. [ Jean-François] Millet, for example, was encouraged in his realism by William Morris Hunt, and it would be interesting to ascertain what role, if any, American artists who studied in Munich or Düsseldorf played in the popularity of those schools among American collectors. The research carried out by James Jackson Jarves found its echo in the neo-Romanesque style of public buildings and churches designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, as it did in the flamboyant style of houses built by Richard Morris Hunt. The vogue for Old Masters found its equivalent, perhaps one of its sources, in the art of John La Farge. This same taste was differently reflected in the art of great American virtuoso painters like John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and, a foreigner living in America, Anders Zorn. Japonism, promoted by the Impressionists and, in particular, by [ James] Whistler, friend of the important Asian art collector Charles Freer, offers a famous example of this phenomenon. Mary Cassatt and Henry Golden Dearth contributed importantly to the acceptance, by collectors, of French Impressionist painting in America. Where taste is concerned, artists sometimes evolve sooner than collectors and sometimes find themselves bending to their influence [subissent leur ascendant]. But even though some painters and sculptors do work for collectors, others contribute to evolving taste actively and directly. Consideration of social, economic, intellectual, and artistic factors, however, still fails to get at the true complexity of evolving taste itself. I have become persuaded of the intrinsic interdependence of the various factors involved in its operations, which appear at times logical, at times arbitrary, yet independent of external influence. This view results not from some theoretical predisposition but from simple observation. We have noted, for instance, that, in matters of taste, similar attitudes attract. Collectors took to Dutch and Barbizon painting, to Millet landscapes, as a result of their taste for anecdotal and Realist painting that was, at a certain moment, standard fare. A manufactured [artificiellement créé] taste for the Italian Primitives spilled over into interest in medieval painting. Studies in classical archaeology, spurred perhaps by mid-nineteenth-century religious unrest, led collectors to the arts of ancient Egypt and Asia, a vast realm. In the same way, a growing taste for the exotic led collectors from Japanese art to its sources on the Mongolian steppes. This pattern of taste advancing analogically, by leaps, from like to like, should not blind us to the fact that an opposite law, that of progress by reaction, would seem equally at work[, although n]ot a law, really, but flexible, ever-changing rules, driven by a deep underlying logic much like that governing aesthetics. Taste for one form of art or another weakens and dies away, either slowly over time or abruptly in a cascade of crises. Although we have seen the way in the late nineteenth century a taste even for run-of-the-mill Realist painting lingered, change more often than not involves reversals of fortune and occurs more rapidly. It would be hard to see the abandonment by museums of encyclopedic collecting in favor of specialization in any other way. The most visible and most important of these abrupt reversals took

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place after 1876 with the replacement of still-much-in-vogue imitations and copies with original works of art. Such moments of extreme reaction should not be confused with fashion trends or capricious shifts in public opinion, which are narrower in scope and themselves subject to reversals of fortune. Certain figures and monuments in the history of art, by contrast, seem immune to fashion: Rembrandt, Daumier, Donatello, Chartres. [195] It seems that, beyond these idiosyncrasies, a system of selection, we might say a “system of refinement,” is in play. Over the course of the period we have been considering, constant if not continuous progress has been achieved, with concern for quality and reliable standards of appreciation tending to eliminate works of secondary value. In looking closely at the history of collections of any art from any period, we see this law of selection—sometimes termed the “judgment of history”—at work, varying only in the strength and rapidity of its effect. This process has been particularly apparent in the United States, where the notion of quality has, in the face of vicissitudes of all sorts, developed and triumphed—perhaps even too completely where the evolution of taste is concerned. It is easy to predict that growth in the availability of models of appreciation thanks to art history and art criticism will only deepen this trend. The day may come when American amateurs will abandon their historical-mindedness and arrive at a taste for works of art admired in and of themselves, for their intrinsic beauty instead of their didactic interest. That prospect, an organic development within the individual, comes very near the heart of what we mean by “evolving taste”—and, though harder to define than “evolving form,” [it is] far more instructive. Attention to changing taste reveals both the direction in which attitudes are heading in a given period and their current state, understood as a confluence of differing points of view. It alone suffices to explain the emergence and efflorescence of the notion of quality, fundamental to the definition of taste itself. It helps us see in the work of the amateur not egotism but engagement in an activity with consequences that reach beyond the self, paying homage to art and to beauty, in service to human advancement.

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Notes BOOK 1 Part 1 Looking Backward 1. See, for example, Thomas Cuming Hall, The Religious Background of American Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930). 2. See, for example, Désirée Pasquet, Histoire politique et sociale du peuple américain, 2 vols. in 3 (Paris: A. Picard, 1924–31). 3. See Charles Austin Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1930), vol. 1, chapter 4, “Provincial America,” 122–88. 4. See Carl Lotus Becker, The Beginnings of the American People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915); and Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934). 5. Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 1:183. 6. See, for example, Samuel Isham, The History of American Painting (1905; 2nd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1927), chapter 1, “The Primitives,” 5 and passim; and Suzanne La Follette, Art in America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), chapter 1, “The Colonial Period,” 1–60. 7 [7 and 8]. See Thomas Hamilton Ormsbee, Early American Furniture Makers: A Social and Biographical Study (New York: Tudor, 1935); and Edwin Swift Balch, “Art in America Before the Revolution,” Bulletin of the Society of Colonial Wars of Philadelphia 2 (March 1908): 1–22.

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8 [9]. See Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), “Colonial Houses: The Seventeenth Century,” 1–52; and Thomas Eddy Tallmadge, The Story of Architecture in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1927). 9 [10]. La Follette, in Art in America, 29–30, mentions a 1768 advertisement for wallpaper manufactured in Philadelphia. 10 [11]. See, for example, Hamilton’s Itinerarium: Being a Narrative of a Journey from Annapolis, Maryland, Through Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, from May to September, 1744 (St. Louis: W. K. Bixby, 1908). 11 [12]. See, for example, Thomas Allen Glenn, Some Colonial Mansions and Those Who Lived in Them, with Genealogies of the Various Families Mentioned, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: H. T. Coates, 1908). 12 [13]. See, for example, Alan Burroughs, Limners and Likeness: Three Centuries of American Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 3–60; and Charles Knowles Bolton, The Founders: Portraits of Persons Born Abroad Who Came to the Colonies in North America Before the Year 1701, 3 vols. (Boston: Boston Atheneum, 1919–26). 13 [14]. Virgil Barker, “Portraiture in America Before 1876,” Arts 13 (May 1928): 275–88. 14. [new note] Brimo appears to be referring to portraits of Abraham de Peyster, first mayor of New York City and onetime colonel in the militia, and his wife—Ed.

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15. See George Francis Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England, 1704–1775: Gleanings from Boston Newspapers Relating to Painting, Engraving, Silversmiths, Pewterers, Clockmakers, Furniture, Pottery, Old Houses, Costumes, Trades and Occupations, &c. (Topsfield, Mass.: Wayside Press, 1927), 5. 16. Mary Newton Stanard, Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1917). [Reference incorrect; as the work’s title would suggest, Stanard nowhere discusses this gift to Boston, neither in chapter 13, “Paintings,” 314–19, nor elsewhere.—Ed.] 17. See Isham, The History of American Painting, chapter 1, 3–18. 18. See William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States (1834; Boston: C. E. Goodspeed, 1918), 3:272. 19. See Bolton, The Founders, esp. “A List of Portraits of Persons Born in the Colonies Before the Year 1701,” 3:1017–54; and John Hill Morgan, Early American Painters (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1921). 20. Harry Brandeis Wehle, American Miniatures, 1730–1850, followed by Theodore Bolton, A Biographical Dictionary of the Artists (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page for Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1927), 1–4 and passim. 21. Charles Henry Caffin, American Masters of Painting (1902; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1913). [Reference misleading.—Ed.] 22. See Isham, The History of American Painting, 13. 23. Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 3:270. [Dunlap mentions no specific titles.—Ed.] 24. See Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), 340 [Copley to Pelham, Parma, 25 June 1775].

25. Ibid., 163–64 [Copley to Pelham, New York, 29 September 1771]. 26. Ibid., 340 [Copley to Pelham, Parma, 25 June 1775]. 27. See Marquis de Chastellux [François Jean de Chastellux], Travels in North-America, in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782, trans. G. Grieve (London: for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787), 1:204. Originally published as Voyages de M. le marquis de Chastellux dans l’Amérique septentrionale dans les années 1780, 1781, & 1782, 2 vols. (Paris: Prault, 1786). 28. Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 272 [Pelham to his mother, Mary Singleton Copley, 10 November 1774]. 29. See Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 1:114. 30. Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 372 [Henry Caner to Copley, ca. 1776] 31. See Rembrandt Peale, “Reminiscences: The Stier Gallery,” Crayon, 19 September 1855, 175. 32. Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 3:271. 33. See Isham, The History of American Painting, 10. 34. See, for example, Frank William Bayley, Five Colonial Artists of New England: Joseph Badger, Joseph Blackburn, John Singleton Copley, Robert Feke, John Smibert (Boston: privately printed, 1929). 35. Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania [sic] (Philadelphia: for the author, 1749); see also Bernard Faÿ, The Two Franklins: Fathers of American Democracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933). 36. Richard Townley Haines Halsey, “Benjamin Franklin: His Interest in the Arts,” in Franklin and His Circle: A Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of

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37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

Art, New York, from May 11 Through September 13, 1936 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1936), 5. Thomas C. Corner, “Private Art Collections of Baltimore,” Art and Archaeology 19 ( June 1925): 239–45. Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England, 1704–1775, 5. See, for example, Reynolds’s travels through Holland and Italy. [Reynolds, in his Discourses, famously considered Italian art superior to that of either Flanders or Holland. He lived and traveled in Italy for two years (1749–51) and in Holland for two months (1781).—Ed.] See, for example, John Galt, comp., The Life and Studies of Benjamin West Prior to His Arrival in England, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1816). See Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 244–45 [Copley to Pelham, Paris, 2 September 1774]. See ibid., 171 [Pelham to Copley, Boston, 22 October 1771], 241 [Copley to Pelham, London, 17 August 1774], 246 [Copley to Pelham, Paris, 2 September 1774], 278 [Pelham to John Morgan, New Haven, 4 December 1774], 299 [Copley to Pelham, Rome, 14 March 1775], 303 [Copley to Pelham, Rome, 14 March 1775]. [See also Horace Walpole, Some Anecdotes of Painting in England (1763); Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1769–91); and Daniel Webb, An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting and into the Merits of the Most Celebrated Painters, Ancient and Modern (1760).—Ed.] See, for example, Halsey, “Benjamin Franklin: His Interest in the Arts,” 5–6. See Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Manuscripts, &c. &c., trans. Lady Eastlake, 3 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1854), published in 1857 with a supplement, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain.

45. Cecil Reginald Grundy, “American Collectors,” Connoisseur 76 (November 1926): 131–32. [The example of Sir Robert Walpole hardly made itself felt for some thirty-four years after his death in 1745, until his son George, the third Earl of Oxford, sold the Houghton collection to the Empress Catherine of Russia, where it became the nucleus of the famous Hermitage collections.—Ed.] 46. See Paul Yvon, Le gothique et la renaissance gothique en Angleterre (1750–1880) (Caen: Jouan et Bigot, 1931), chapter 1: “Le goût pour le gothique dans la littérature anglaise au XVIIIième siècle,” 3–48. How odd that the United States, having lived through its own nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Gothic revival, enthusiastic about all things medieval, should apparently have remained unaware of the ruins most cherished by the English Romantics. 47. La Follette, Art in America, 48. 48. Ibid. 49. Dow, in The Arts & Crafts in New England, 1704–1775, 5–6, cites additional examples, especially from dealers in engravings— seemingly in high demand in Boston at the time. 50. Chandler Rathfon Post, A History of European and American Sculpture, from the Early Christian Period to the Present Day, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921); Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 15. 51 [51 and 52]. Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England, 1704–1775, 5–6; and Edward Alfred Jones, “Lost Objects of Art in America,” Art in America 8 (April 1920): 137–44, ( June 1920): 187–92. 52 [53]. See Varum Lansing Collins, “Princeton—An Historical Glimpse,” Art and Archaeology 20 (September 1925): 103–4. 53 [54]. Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 71 [Myles Cooper

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to Copley, 5 August 1768; Copley to Myles Cooper, undated.] 54 [55]. See John Thomas Scharf and Thompson Wescott, History of Philadelphia, 1609– 1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 1:215; and Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784, trans. and ed. Alfred J. Morrison (Philadelphia: Campbell, 1911), 2:168–69. 55 [56]. See William John Potts, “Du Simitière, Artist, Antiquary, and Naturalist, Proprietor of the First American Museum, with Some Extracts from His Notebook,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 3 October 1889, 341–75. 56 [57]. See François-Alexandre-Frédéric, Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America, the Country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, trans. H. Neuman (1799; London: R. Phillips, 1800), 1:583; William Gaillard Mazyck, “The Charleston Museum: The Period Previous to 1798,” Charleston Museum Bulletin 3 (October 1907): 49–51; and Paul Marshall Rea, “A Contribution to Early Museum History in America,” Proceedings of the American Association of Museums 9 (1915): 53–65. 57 [58]. See Benjamin Franklin, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth (New York: Macmillan, 1905–7), 9:45. Part 2 [Historical Introduction, 1776–1840] 1. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man [1791], cited in Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 1:183, 237–38, 364, 446–47; and Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (1930; 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 1:78–79, 243. 2. Alexandre Marie Quesnay de Beaurepaire, Mémoire: Statuts et prospectus concernant

l’Académie des Sciences et Beaux-Arts des États-Unis d’Amérique, établie à Richemond, capitale de la Virginie (Paris: de Cailleau, 1788), “Académie des Sciences et BeauxArts de Richemond: Rapport des Commissaires de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture,” 13–16. 3. See Comité France-Amérique, Les ÉtatsUnis et la France: Leurs rapports historiques, artistiques, et sociaux. (Paris: Alcan, 1914). 4. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America. 5. See Anne Newport Royall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States (New Haven: privately printed, 1826); and Napoléon Achille Murat, A Moral and Political Sketch of the United States of North America, 1826–1832, with a Note on Negro Slavery, trans. anon. (London: E. Wilson, 1833), “Letter Eighth: Of the Army, Navy, and the Indians,” 252–301, and “Letter Ninth: Of the Finances,” 302–40, and a second translation of same, published as America and the Americans, trans. H. J. S. Bradfield, in 1851. 6. Scharf and Wescott, History of Philadelphia. 7 [7 and 8]. See, for example, Timothy Dwight, Travels: In New-England and New-York, 1796–1810 (New Haven: for the author, 1821), 1:489–524; and Caleb Hopkins Snow, A History of Boston, the Metropolis of Massachusetts, from Its Origin to the Present Period, with Some Account of Its Environs (1825; 2nd ed. Boston: A. Bowen, 1828). 8 [9]. Alexis de Tocqueville, La démocratie en Amérique, 2 vols. (Paris: C. Goselin, 1835–40). 9 [10]. See, for example, Geraldine Brooks, Dames and Daughters of the Young Republic (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1901). 10 [11]. See Frederick Paul Keppel and Robert Luther Duffus, The Arts in American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933). [Reference misleading; no discussion of this topic in the text.—Ed.]

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11. Joseph Jackson, Development of American Architecture, 1783–1830 (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1926); and Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic. [References misleading.—Ed.] Chapter 1: Encyclopedic Spirit 1. See George Brown Goode, “The Origin of American Public Museums,” Popular Science Monthly, December 1890, 282–83. 2. Harold Sellers Colton, “Peale’s Museum,” Popular Science Monthly, September 1909, 221–38. 3. Jefferson was something of a collector himself. He even owned an Ecco Homo by Mabuse, today in the collections of the New-York Historical Society; see Lewis Einstein and François Monod, “Le Musée de la Société Historique de New-York,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ser., 33 (May 1905): 414–20; 36 (September 1906): 235–55. 4. See Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1:89; and Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America, 2:385. 5. After Peale’s death, his museum deteriorated rapidly under his son Rubens’s direction and was sold in part to P. T. Barnum in 1850; see William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, eds., Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Reverend Manasseh Cutler, LL.D. (Cincinnati: R. Clarke, 1888), 1:281–83. 6. Snow, A History of Boston, 336. 7. Ibid. 8. Scharf and Wescott, History of Philadelphia, vol. 2, chapter 29, “Amusements of the Philadelphians,” 939–80, esp. “Minor Museums, 1794–1840,” 946–57; for mention of Sharpless, see p. 1045. 9. Dwight, Travels: In New-England and NewYork, 2:30. [Reference misleading. Brimo appears to have in mind Isham, The History of American Painting, 187, where the charac-

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

terization of Paff is attributed to John M. Duncan, an “English traveler.”—Ed.] Isham, The History of American Painting, chapter 10, “New York Becomes the Art Center,” 185. Royall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States, 278. See P[hineas] T[aylor] Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York: American News, 1871). See, for example, Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop, The Englishwoman in America (London: John Murray, 1856), 344–45. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 2:280. [Reference misleading; no relevant discussion of collections at Harvard, Yale, or Brown on the page cited or elsewhere in the text.—Ed.] Isham, The History of American Painting, chapter 10. [Reference misleading; no relevant discussion of Hosack’s collection in the chapter cited or elsewhere in the text.—Ed.] Dwight, Travels: In New-England and NewYork, 2:30. [Reference misleading.—Ed.] Royall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States, 357–63. Winifred Eva Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a Chapter on the Early Institutions of Art in New York (New York: Gilliss Press, 1913), 35–36. [A broadside issued on 1 June 1791 called for the establishment of a museum “for the purpose of collecting and preserving everything related to the history of America.”—Ed.] See book 1, part 2, chapter 2, “The Search for a National Style” below; and Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 3:270–71. See George Champlin Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport, R.I.: C. E. Hammett Jr., 1884), chapter 21: “The Vernon Pictures,” 165–73.

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21. See Fred Hovey Allen, The Bowdoin Collection (Brunswick: Bowdoin College Library, 1886); Henry Johnson, Descriptive Catalogue of the Bowdoin College Art Collections (Brunswick: Bowdoin College, 1895); and Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “Drawings By Old Masters at Bowdoin College,” Art in America 1 ( January 1913): 244–53. 22. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 3:270–75. [Dunlap provides a partial inventory of Gilmor’s collection.—Ed.] 23. Ibid., 2:277–78. 24. See Earl Shinn [Edward Strahan, pseud.], “The First American Art Academy,” Lippincott’s Magazine, February 1872, 143–53; March 1872, 309–21. 25. Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], ed., The Art Treasures of America: Being the Choicest Works of Art in the Public and Private Collections of North America (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1879–80), 1:29 and passim. [Reference misleading.—Ed.] 26. John Sartain, The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 1808–1897 (New York: D. Appleton, 1899). [Reference incomplete and misleading.—Ed.] 27. See Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 3:75. Dunlap mentions Henry Carey, Gouverneur Kemble, and other collectors in this regard. [Reference misleading. Brimo appears to have later passages (e.g., 3:154 and 184) in mind, though he miscites the text.—Ed.] 28. See Comité France-Amérique, Les ÉtatsUnis et la France: Émile Boutroux, “La pensée américaine et la pensée française,” 3–22; Walter V. R. Berry, “La société américaine et la société française,” 113–34; James Hazen Hyde, “Les relations historiques franco-américaines (1776–1912),” 25–51; Louis Gillet, “L’architecture aux États-Unis et l’influence française,” 55–71; and Léonce Bénédite, “La peinture française et les États-Unis,” 75–87; see also

Bernard Faÿ, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America: A Study of Moral and Intellectual Relations Between France and the United States at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), chapter 3, “Essays in Fraternity,” 206–23. 29. Murat, in A Moral and Political Sketch, “Letter Tenth: Of Manners, Fine Arts, and Literature,” 368, expresses his surprise at artists’ avoidance of the nude and at paintings he saw in museums covered with curtains. 30. Louis Réau, L’art français aux États-Unis (Paris: H. Laurens, 1926), chapter 3, “Les artistes américains en France,” 73–96, esp. section 2, “Peintres,” 82–96. 31. William Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting: With a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures by the Great Masters into England Since the French Revolution (London: for R. Ackerman, 1824), introduction, 1:xv–xvi, and passim. 32. On this subject, the autobiography of William Dunlap, the American Vasari, makes interesting reading; see also his History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 1:208. [Reference misleading.—Ed.] 33. Réau, L’art français aux États-Unis, chapter 1, 82–96. 34. See Keppel and Duffus, The Arts in American Life, chapter 5, “Art Education: The Schools,” 35–62, esp. 35–38. 35. See Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, vol. 2, part 2, “Collections of Pictures,” 457–66. 36 [35]. Edward Savage, Mr. Savage Informs the Ladies and Gentlemen of New-York that the Columbian Gallery, Containing a Large Collection of Ancient and Modern Paintings & Prints, Is Opened This Day [6 April 1802] (New York: Columbian Gallery, 1802). A number of Savage’s own works were added to the 214 listed, a portrait of George Washington among them.

Notes to Pages 112–115

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37 [36]. Descriptive Catalogue of the Four Magnificent Paintings of the Most Interesting Monuments of Ancient and Modern Rome, Being the Original Pictures Painted for the Duke de Choiseul, a Minister of Louis XV, by Giovanni Pannini (Boston: W. W. Clapp for the Boston Atheneum, 1834). The works described include an interior of St. Peter’s. 38 [37]. See Catalogue of a Collection of Ancient Armor and Arms, Chiefly of the Period of Charles V, from the Royal Armory of Segovia (Boston: Harding’s Gallery, 1841). [It is uncertain what Brimo means by “more strangely”—perhaps only that Spanish arms and armor were uncommon in American collections until much later in the century.—Ed.] 39 [38]. It is interesting to note in this regard that the Revolutionary government in France purchased wheat from the United States with Beauvais tapestries; see Louis Étienne Dussieux, Les artistes français à l’étranger (1852; 3rd ed., Paris: Didron, 1876), 249–55. 40 [39]. See Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, introduction, 1:xv–xvi. 41 [40 and 41]. Charles Saunier, Les conquêtes artistiques de la Révolution et de l’Empire:Reprises et abandons des Alliés en 1815: Leurs consequences sur les musées d’Europe (Paris: H. Laurens, 1902). Those involved [in such purchases] ran the gamut from Cardinal Fesch and Maréchal Soult to Louis-Philippe himself. 42. Among the works obtained in this way was a portrait attributed to Velázquez and purchased in Cadiz, today at the New-York Historical Society. 43. “Free Art,” Outlook, 29 May 1909, 257. 44. Rembrandt Peale, Notes on Italy, Written During a Tour in the Years 1829 and 1830 (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831), 4. The [Stanwick Hall] collection had been brought to the United States in 1786.

45. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 3:270–71. 46. See Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, vol. 1, “Collection of John Trumbull, Esq., Purchased by Him in Paris in the Spring of 1785” (“sold by Mr. Christie in February 1797”), 257–70. Buchanan thoroughly details the contents of Trumbull’s collection, amassed in Paris during the Revolution. At that time attaché at the American Embassy, Trumbull had acquired numerous Italian, Flemish, French, and Dutch works by Teniers, Rubens, Jordaens, Bourdon, Lesseur, Hobbema, Cuyp, and Rosa from the collections of one Donjoux, Edmond Grandpré, Néicault Destouches, Baron d’Espegnac, Prince Carignan, and Madame de la Regnière. The single most important piece he acquired, a Virgin and Child by Raphael originally owned by Cardinal Mazarin, was purchased for 895 pounds by Benjamin West at the first Trumbull auction in 1795. Another important painting, Nicolaes Berghem’s Landscape with Figures and Cattle, was sold for 945 pounds. Trumbull appears to have brought home to America only what he could not otherwise sell, and the collection was put back up for sale in 1812 by Peter Coxe in London. 47. Sartain, The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 165–68. 48. Casper Souder Jr., The History of Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, from the Founding of the City to the Year 1859: The Thoroughfare as It Was and Is (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1860). [Reference misleading. It has not been possible to locate an English phrase corresponding to the one noted anywhere in the seventy-seven articles comprised by the text, published by Souder serially in the Sunday Dispatch between 18 April 1858 and 9 October 1859. The text as cited, my own back-translation, is thus only approximate. The version

307

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308

cited by Brimo reads: “dont les noms ont été immortalisés par leur génie et leur talent, au-dessus de tout éloge.”—Ed.] 49. See Isham, The History of American Painting, chapter 11, “Figure Painting in New York in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century,” 208; and Daniel Catton Rich, “A Century of Collecting in America,” in Art in America from 1600–1865: An Illustrated Guide for a National Radio Broadcast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). [Reference misleading. Astor Mansion on Fifth Avenue was the site of Paff ’s bric-a-brac shop. It seems more likely that he would have shown Old Masters at his Old Paff Gallery on Wall Street.—Ed.] 50. See Shinn [Strahan, pseud.], “The First American Art Academy.” 51. “Remarks on the Progress and State of the Fine Arts in the United States,” Analect Magazine, November 1815, 363–77. Chapter 2: The Search for a National Style 1. See, for example, Jean Locquin, La peinture d’histoire en France de 1747 à 1785: Étude sur l’évolution des idées artistiques dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: H. Laurens, 1912); and Faÿ, The Two Franklins. 2. See William Alexander Lambeth and Warren H. Manning, Thomas Jefferson as an Architect and a Designer of Landscapes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); and Fiske Kimball, Thomas Jefferson, Architect (Boston: Riverside Press, 1916), “Jefferson’s Architectural Influence,” 84–89. [ Jefferson wrote this letter to L’Enfant in 1791; see The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C., 1907), 8:162.—Ed.] 3. See Galt, The Life and Studies of Benjamin West. 4. See, for example, La Follette, Art in America, chapters 2 and 3: “Painters of the Transition” and “Painters of the Transition (continued),” 63–94, esp. 79–80.

5. See Post, A History of European and American Sculpture. 6 [5bis]. See, for example, A. Burroughs, Limners and Likeness, 61–85. [Brimo appears to have resorted to “bis” as a way to add additional or inadvertently omitted notes into the text without having to renumber all subsequent notes.—Ed.] 7 [6]. See Halsey, “Benjamin Franklin: His Interest in the Arts,” 12. 8 [7]. James Sharples, Catalogue of the Portraits and Other Works of Art, Independence Hall, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: George H. Buchanan, 1915), 176. 9 [8]. Ibid., 4. This fine exhibition organized in Independence Hall in 1784 was probably the first of any importance in the United States. 10 [9]. See Colton, “Peale’s Museum.” A number of these portraits hang today in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. 11 [10]. See Frank Jewett Mather Jr. et al., The American Spirit in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), 33. 12 [11]. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 2:64–76; La Follette, Art in America, 25; William J. Stillman, “The Trumbull Gallery,” Crayon, 30 May 1855, 346–47; and Handbook of the Gallery of Fine Arts (New Haven: Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University, 1931), 49–53. 13 [12]. Johnson, Descriptive Catalogue of the Bowdoin College Art Collections. 14 [13]. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 3:275–76. [David Hosack (1769–1835) was a founder of the NewYork Historical Society, its president (1820–28), and an incorporator in 1808 of the American Academy of Fine Arts.—Ed.] 15 [14]. See, for another example, Peale, Notes on Italy, 173. 16 [15]. See Isham, History of American Painting, 257.

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17 [16]. Richard Townley Haines Halsey and Charles O. Cornelius, A Handbook of the American Wing (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1924). 18 [17]. Catalogue of Paintings in the Picture Gallery (New York: New York Public Library, 1929). 19 [18]. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 36. [Quotation taken from a broadside issued 1 June 1791.—Ed.] 20 [19]. See, for example, Sartain, The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 140. 21 [20]. John Melish, Travels in the United States of America, in the Years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810, & 1811 (Philadelphia: for the author by T. and G. Palmer, 1812). [Citation incomplete (no page number indicated) and apparently incorrect since no relevant discussion is to be found anywhere in the text.—Ed.] 22 [21]. See Scharf and Wescott, History of Philadelphia, vol. 2, chapter 29, “Minor Museums, 1794–1840,” 946–57. 23 [22]. La Follette, Art in America, 70. 24 [23]. See George Brown Goode, Report on the United States National Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1888); and Richard Rathbun, The National Gallery of Art: Department of Fine Arts of the National Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916). 25 [24]. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (1835; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838) [citation apparently incorrect; no relevant discussion is to be found anywhere in the text—Ed.]; Charles Lyell, Travels in North America in the Years 1841– 2, with Geological Observations of the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845), vol. 1, “The National Museum,” 128. 26. [new note] William Henry Holmes, National Collection of Fine Arts: Catalogue of Collections (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922).—Ed.

27 [25]. William J. Stillman, “Sketchings [The Wadsworth Atheneum],” Crayon, 23 May 1855, 331. 28 [26]. In 1815 [or early 1816—Ed.], Gouverneur Morris became the New-York Historical Society’s first president. 29 [27]. See Shinn [Strahan, pseud.], “The First American Art Academy.” Benjamin West, Robert Fulton, George Washington and his nephew, and Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington were all honorary members of the academy. 30 [28]. See Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, vol. 1, chapter 10, “The Young Republic,” 454. 31 [29]. [ John Pintard, c]ited in Isham, History of American Painting, 182. In 1818, Trumbull succeeded Livingston as president of the academy. [Apparently miscited; see instead Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 23–24]. 32 [30]. “Remarks on the Progress and State of the Fine Arts in the United States,” 370. 33 [31]. A plaster copy of this bust [of Franklin] is in the Boston Atheneum. 34 [32]. See Paul Vitry, “Works of Houdon in America,” Art in America 2 (April 1914): 217–26, and (August 1914): 368–79. Louis Réau [L’art français aux États-Unis, chapter 1: “Les artistes français en Amérique,” 23–49] discusses Houdon’s work in the United States in some detail. 35 [33]. Thomas Jefferson, Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, from the Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1830), 1:248–49: Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 10 July 1785. 36 [34]. A plaster copy of this bust of Fulton can be seen at the National Academy of Design in New York; see Henry Winram Dickinson, Robert Fulton, Engineer and Artist: His Life and Works (London, John Lane, 1913). [Citation incomplete (no page number indicated) and apparently

309

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incorrect since no relevant discussion is to be found anywhere in the text.—Ed.] 37 [35]. One of Barlow’s descendants owns the original marble bust in New York. There are three plaster copies, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, National Academy of Design in New York, and New-York Historical Society, respectively. 38 [36]. See Shinn [Strahan, pseud.], “The First American Art Academy,” 39. 39 [37]. It is curious to note that Jefferson, whose taste had changed, recommended Canova for this work [statue of Washington for North Carolina’s Capitol], although it is true that Houdon was getting on in years. 40 [38]. See Joseph Florimond Loubat, Duc de, The Medallic History of the United States of America, 1776–1876 (New York: for the author, 1880). 41 [39]. Another sign of the period’s taste: Rembrandt Peale, during his stay in Paris, painted major French intellectuals, Georges Cuvier, Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, as well as major artists, [ Jacques-Louis] David, [ Jean-Antoine] Houdon, and Dominique Vivant Denon, director of the Louvre. On his return to the United States in 1810, he executed an equestrian portrait of Napoleon. 42 [40]. See Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, 1:288–92. 43 [41]. La Follette, Art in America, 75–78. 44 [42]. Halsey and Cornelius, A Handbook of the American Wing. [Citation incomplete (no page number indicated) and apparently incorrect since no relevant discussion is to be found anywhere in the text.—Ed.] 45 [43]. “Remarks on the Progress and State of the Fine Arts in the United States,” 369 [passage cited slightly out of context]; see Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 20 September 1785.

46. [new note] Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions, 1837–1838 (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1839), 1:147–48. Marryat had this to say about Philadelphia’s museums: “Side by side with the most interesting and valuable specimens, such as the fossil mammoth, &c, you have the greatest puerilities and absurdities in the world—such as the cherry-stone formed into a basket, a fragment of the boiler of the Moselle steamer, and Heaven knows what besides.”—Ed. 47 [44]. Marryat later noted that “[t]he wayside inns are remarkable for their uniformity . . . sometimes with the extra embellishment of one or two miserable pictures, such as General Jackson scrambling upon a horse, with fire or steam coming out of his nostrils, going to the battle of New Orleans, etc., etc.” [See Marryat, Second Series of a Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions (Philadelphia: T. K. and P. G. Collins, 1840), 34.—Ed.] Part 3 [Historical Introduction, 1840–1876] 1. See Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937); and Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918). 2. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Burton’s, May 1840, 243–45. 3. See, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841); see also Perry Bliss, ed., The Heart of Emerson’s Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926). 4. See Kenneth McKenzie Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: Constable, 1928); and George Harold Edgell, The American Architecture of To-day (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), part 1, “The Development of American Architecture,” 1–84.

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5. See, for example, Arthur Charles Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1934). Chapter 1: The Taste for Anecdote and Realism 1. All works currently [as of 1938] in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy; see Catalogue of the Permanent Collection (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1885). [Given this reference, Brimo appears to have presumed both that all the works mentioned were acquired by the museum by 1885 and that none had been deaccessioned by 1938.—Ed.] 2. See Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America. 3. Ibid., vol. 1, “The Collection of Mr. John Jacob Astor,” 141–52. 4. Ibid., vol. 1,”The Collection of Mr. August Belmont,” 107–18. 5 [5 and 6]. See Executor’s Sale of the Collection of Paintings Belonging to the Estate of the Late Wm. T. Blodgett (New York: Evening Post Steam Presses, 1876). 6 [7]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 1, “The Collection of Mr. R. L. Cutting,” 171–74. 7 [8]. See George Ward Nichols, “Private Picture Collections in Cincinnati,” Galaxy 5 (October 1870): 511–20. 8 [9]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 1, “The Collection of Mr. Henry C. Gibson,” 65–80. [The clear illumination of Gibson’s gallery Brimo refers to seems to have been due to the effect of natural light passing through a glass ceiling; Strahan recommended viewing the collection by moonlight.—Ed.] 9 [10]. See Catalogue of the Permanent Collection (1885). 10 [11]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 1, “The Collection of Mr. Samuel Hawk,” 163–70. 11 [12 and 13]. See Catalogue of Paintings, European and American, from the Collection of

the Late Raymond B. Livermore (New York: W. P. Moore, 1888. See also Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 3, “The Collection of Mr. John T. Martin,” 59–64. 12 [14 and 15]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, 3:59–64, and vol. 2, “Additional Collections in the City and State of New York,” 123–24, 129. 13 [16]. Ibid., vol. 1, “The Collection of Miss Catherine Lorillard Wolfe,” 119–34. 14 [17]. Ibid., vol. 2, “Additional Collections in the City and State of New York—The Collection of Mr. G. I. Seney,” 126; see also Fiske Kimball, Catalogue of Mr. George I. Seney’s Collection of Modern Paintings (New York: American Art Association, 1885). 15 [18]. See Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 1, “The Collection of James H. Stebbins,” 95–106; see also Catalogue of the Private Collection of Paintings and Sculpture Belonging to Mr. James H. Stebbins (New York: American Art Association, 1889). 16 [19]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 2, “The Collection of Mr. William H. Vanderbilt,” 130. See also Strahan [Shinn], Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, 4 vols. (Boston: George Barrie, 1883–84); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, New York (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1882); Collection of W. H. Vanderbilt, New York (New York,: G. P. Putnam, 1884); [“The William H. Vanderbilt Bequest,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 15 (December 1920): 268–71]; and Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 338. [Reference misleading. The story of Vanderbilt’s purchase of one or both of his two Corots, Classical Landscape and Road Scene, both undated, is nowhere mentioned in the sources cited, nor is Vanderbilt’s claim concerning the appreciation of dead artists’ work, which thus cannot be verified.—Ed.]

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17. [new note] Brimo appears inadvertently to have included among these artists’ names the name of the Anglo-Belgian dealer Prosper Léopold Everard, through whom a number of their works had entered Wolfe’s first collection.—Ed. 18 [20]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 1, “The Collection of Mr. John Wolfe,” 53–64. 19 [21]. Henri Focillon, La peinture aux XIXe et XXe siècles: Du réalisme à nos jours (Paris: H. Laurens, 1928–29), vol. 2, chapter 4: “L’Impressionisme,” 200–227. 20 [22]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 2, “Collections in New England,” 87–89. 21 [23]. See Quincy Adams Shaw Collection: Italian Renaissance Sculpture: Paintings and Pastels by Jean-François Millet (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1918). 22 [24]. See Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 2, “Collections in New England,” 94. 23 [25]. Ibid., 1:153–71. 24 [26]. See The W. P. Wilstach Collection (Philadelphia: Commissioners of Fairmount Park, 1913). 25 [27]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 3, “The Collection of Mr. J[ohn] C. Runkle,” 29–32. 26 [28]. Ibid., vol. 1, “The Collection of Mrs. A. T. Stewart,” 23–52. [The Met’s online index suggests that the Vienna Exhibition was in 1873, that Stewart bought the work in 1876 directly from the artist, and that he paid only $60,000.—Ed.] 27 [29]. See Catalogue of the A. T. Stewart Collection of Paintings, Sculpture, and Other Objects of Art (New York: J. J. Little, 1887). 28 [30]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 3, “The Collections of ExGovernor E. D. Morgan and Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan,” 1–12. 29 [31]. See ibid., vol. 1, “The Collection of William T. Walters,” 81–94; see also Clayton Coleman Hall, ed., Baltimore: Its History

and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publications, 1912), 1:638–39. 30 [32]. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Illustrated Handbook of Paintings, Sculpture, and Other Art Objects (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1933). 31 [33]. See book 1, part 3, chapter 1, [49], above. 32 [34]. Catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1873). [Citation incomplete; reference misleading.—Ed.] 33 [35]. See Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 2, “The Collection of Mr. Henry Hilton,” 17–28. 34 [36]. See ibid., vol. 3, “The Collection of Mr. John D. Lankenau,” 65–68. 35 [37]. See ibid., vol. 3, “The Collection of Mrs. Joseph Harrison,” 87–92. 36 [38]. See ibid., vol. 2, “Collections in Cincinnati,” 75–80. 37 [39]. Nichols, “Private Picture Collections in Cincinnati.” 38 [39bis]. See Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 2, “Inland Art Treasures,” 72–73. 39 [40]. See ibid., 67. 40 [41]. See ibid., vol. 2, “Collections in the City of St. Louis,” 61–64. 41. [new note] See ibid., vol. 3, “Inland Art Treasures,” 66.—Ed. 42. See Isham, The History of American Painting, 207; and La Follette, Art in America, 124–25. 43. “Free Art,” 257. 44. See Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 88n1. 45. Ibid., 86. 46. See Catalogue of a Private Collection of Paintings and Original Drawings by Artists of the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts (New York: William Cullen Bryant, 1851). 47. See Illustrated Record of the Industry of All Nations, New York Exhibition, 1853 (New York: G. P. Putnam; London: Sampson Low, Son, 1853–54); see also Howe, A

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History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 89–90. 48. Isham, The History of American Painting, 267 and following. [Reference misleading.—Ed.] 49. See, for example, Commemorative Exhibition by Members of the National Academy of Design, 1825–1925 (New York: The Academy, 1925). 50. [new note] Since Brimo indicates no source here, the text as cited, a back-translation, is thus only approximate. The French reads: “pour répandre en Amérique la connaissance et le goût des œuvres d’art supérieures.”—Ed. 51 [50 and 51]. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 1, “The Collection of Miss Catherine Lorillard Wolfe,” 119–34. 52. See “Corot Came to U.S. by Grace of Seth M. Vose: Great N.Y, Exhibition Recalls Boston Dealer as First to Import Corot’s Work,” Boston Evening Transcript, 17 November 1934, “Artists and Fine Arts Exhibitions,” 1. 53. See Helen M. Knowlton, Art-Life of William Morris Hunt (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899); and Martha A. S. Shannon, The Boston Days of William Morris Hunt (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1922). 54. La Follette, Art in America, 122–23. 55. See The Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts, published in New York, 1855–61. 56. See Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America. See, as well, the numerous private collection, sale, and museum catalogues published between 1870 and 1880. 57. See Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 1, “The Collection of Mr. John Wolfe,” 53–64. 58. See Post, A History of European and American Sculpture; and Taft, The History of American Sculpture, 72–91, 123–27, 187. 59. See Edgell, The American Architecture of To-day, 40–41; and Tallmadge, The Story of Architecture in America, 162–65.

Chapter 2: The Discovery of History 1. See La Follette, Art in America, chapter 4: “The Decline of Taste,” 95–115. 2. See Louis Thies, Catalogue of the Collection of Engravings Bequeathed to Harvard College by Francis Calley Gray (Cambridge, Mass.: Welch, Bigelow, 1869); and Osvald Sirén, Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Paintings (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1919). 3. The [Gray] collection was held at first by the Harvard Library, then placed on loan to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1877 before returning to the Fogg Art Museum in 1897. 4. See Rathbun, The National Gallery of Art. 5. This according to a letter from his sister, Miss Belinda Randall, held at the Fogg. [See Belinda L. Randall to “Sirs,” undated, ALS. Edward W. Forbes Papers (HC 2), file 1693, HAMA—Ed.] 6. See, for example, William J. Stillman, “Picture Buying,” Crayon, 14 February 1855, 100–101. 7. See, for example, William J. Stillman, “Sketchings: Cheap Art,” Crayon, 17 October 1855, 248. 8. See, for example, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, “The Taste for Collecting Works of Art in England,” Crayon, 31 January1855, 72. 9. William J. Stillman, “The Growth of Taste,” Crayon, 17 January 1855, 33–34. 10. See Catalogue of the Entire Collection of Paintings of the Late Samuel Farmar Jarvis (New York: Houel & Applegate, 1851). 11. See Arthur Edwin Bye, “The Lea Collection,” Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin 21 (May 1926): 156–60. The collection, which arrived in the United States in 1852, is divided today among Isaac Lea’s descendants. 12. See Sales Catalogue of a Choice Collection of Oil Paintings of William Beebe of New York (Boston: Leonard and Pierce Gallery, 1852). [Catalogue cited by Brimo has not been possible to locate. See instead Catalogue of

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13. 14.

314

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

39 Choice and Valuable Oil Paintings, the Property of William Beebe of New York (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1851).—Ed.] See Crayon, 11 April 1855, 237. Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 2, “Collections in Cincinnati,” 75–80. A Handbook of the S. P. Avery Collection of Prints and Art Books in the New York Public Library (New York: De Vinne Press, 1901). Henry Johnson, Descriptive Catalogue of the Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings and of the Walker Collection (Brunswick: Bowdoin Museum of Fine Arts, 1930). Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 39. [Lenox’s gift to the society was made in 1859 according to Howe.—Ed.] Handbook of the Gallery of Fine Arts, 14. See Henry Abbott, Catalogue of the Egyptian Antiquities of the New-York Historical Society (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1915), 1. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 77. See John Linton Myres, Handbook of the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities from Cyprus (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1914). See Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Bronzes (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1915). Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 43. See, for instance, Edith Wharton, False Dawn: The Forties (New York: D. Appleton, 1924); and Einstein and Monod, “Le Musée de la Société Historique de NewYork.” See Bernard Berenson, “Les peintures italiennes de New-York et de Boston,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ser., 15 (March 1896): 196–99 [citation misleading; Berenson (196–99) makes only passing reference to the collections of the New-York Historical Society—Ed.]; and Richard Offner, “Ital-

ian Pictures at the New-York Historical Society and Elsewhere,” Art in America 7 ( June 1919): 148–61, and 7 (August 1919): 189–98. [References misleading; neither text makes mention of Bryan.—Ed.] 27. See Theodore Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves: A Forgotten New Englander,” New England Quarterly 6 ( June 1933): 328–52. 28. See James Jackson Jarves, “Italian Experiences in Collecting ‘Old Masters,’ ” Atlantic Monthly, November 1860, 578–86. 29. See Charles Eliot Norton, Letters Relating to a Collection of Pictures Made by Mr. J. J. Jarves (Cambridge, Mass.: privately printed, 1859). 30. See James Jackson Jarves, Descriptive Catalogue of “Old Masters” Collected by James J. Jarves, to Illustrate the History of Painting from A. D. 1200 to the Best Periods of Italian Art (Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton, 1860); Osvald Sirén, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures of the Jarves Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916); and Richard Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University: Comments & Revisions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), xvii–xx, 1–2. [On Norton’s first efforts, see Jarves, Descriptive Catalogue of “Old Masters”(1860), “Prefatory Remarks,” 8–9, and many of the documents assembled there, 11–39.—Ed.] 31. [31 and 31bis] See James Jackson Jarves, Descriptive Catalogue of “Old Masters” Collected by James J. Jarves, to Illustrate the History of Painting from A. D. 1200 to the Best Periods of Italian Art (Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton, 1862); this later edition included only 134 paintings, Jarves having eliminated a certain number of works to appease his relentless critics. 32. See Stella Rubinstein, Catalogue of the Collection of Paintings &c. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917).

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33. See The Vanderbilt Collection of Drawings in the East Galleries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1881). 34. See List of the Jarves Collection of Laces, Stuffs, Embroideries, Costumes, Church Vestments, &c., Formed in Italy, Dating from the Twelfth through the Eighteenth Centuries (New York: American Art Association, 1887); the auction was held on March 16 and 17 of that year. See also “A List of Some Important Accessions,” Wellesley College Bulletin 1 ( June 1923): 4. 35. See Thomas Ellis Kirby, Catalogue of the Art Collections, Literary Property, &c. Belonging to the Estate of the Late Samuel Bradford Fales (New York: American Art Association, 1881). 36 [35bis]. See R. H. Adams, The Walker Art Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota (Minneapolis: The Gallery, 1927). 37 [36]. Einstein and Monod, “Le Musée de la Société Historique de New-York” 36 (September 1906): 235. 38 [37]. See Benjamin March, China and Japan in Our Museums (New York: American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1929), passim, esp.14–20. 39 [38]. Today in the collections of the Peabody Museum [today the Peabody Essex Museum] in Salem. 40 [39]. Today also in the collections of the Peabody Essex. 41 [40]. Today in the collections of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. 42 [41]. See James Jackson Jarves, A Glimpse at the Art of Japan (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1876). 43 [42]. Every issue of the Crayon announced a Ruskin lecture or commented on one of his ideas. 44 [43]. See Charles Eliot Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860). See also Norton’s articles in the Atlantic Monthly beginning in 1857, and Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913).

45 [44]. See, for instance, James Jackson Jarves, Art Hints: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855); Jarves, Art Studies: The “Old Masters” of Italy (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1861); Jarves, Art Thoughts: The Experiences and Observations of An American Amateur in Europe (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1869); and Jarves, “On the Formation of Galleries of Art,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1860, 106–9. 46. [new note] See John Ruskin, “Mountain Beauty,” from Modern Painters, vol. 5, in Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1903–12; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7:424.—Ed. 47 [45]. See Russell Sturgis, Jr., Manual of the Jarvis Collection of Early Italian Pictures Deposited in the Galleries of the Yale School of Fine Arts (New Haven: Yale College, 1868). 48 [46]. See Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). 49 [47]. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 90. [The Crystal Palace Exhibition in question was organized by a group of New York business leaders two years after the opening of its namesake and prototype in London.—Ed.] 50 [48]. See the many catalogues of these [Boston Atheneum] exhibitions in Harvard’s Widener Library. 51 [49]. See, for example, Atheneum Gallery, List of Chromolithographs After Italian, German, and Flemish Frescoes Now on Exhibition (Boston: Arundel Society, 1872). 52 [50]. See Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Catalogue of Pictures Belonging to His Royal Highness, the Duke de Montpensier, and of Other Pictures Also Loaned to the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1874).

315

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316

53 [51]. See Shearjashub Spooner, Biographical and Critical Dictionary of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors, and Architects: From Ancient to Modern Times (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1853). [Reference misleading; Spooner makes no mention of Paff. It is hard to imagine what Brimo has in mind beyond the appearance of numerous Old Masters in Spooner’s dictionary.—Ed.] 54 [52 and 53]. See Catalogue of the Entire Collection of Paintings, of the Late Samuel Farmar Jarvis; and Catalogue of 39 Choice and Valuable Oil Paintings, the Property of William Beebe of New York. [Brimo cited Sales Catalogue of a Choice Collection of Oil Paintings of William Beebe of New York, which could not be located.—Ed.]. 55 [54]. In The Fantastic City: Memoirs of the Social and Romantic Life of Old San Francisco (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 176–77, Amelia Ransom Neville notes that [in 1866] one Robert B. Woodward had opened his home to the public in the hopes that his collection of such copies might contribute to the education of local artists. 56 [55]. See Sartain, The Reminiscences of A Very Old Man, 245. [Reference misleading.—Ed.] 57 [56]. See Julius Ritter von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1908). [Reference misleading; unclear what the “glories of nineteenthcentury France” have to do with the sixteenth-century Renaissance.—Ed.] 58 [57]. See Norton, Letters Relating to a Collection of Pictures Made by Mr. J. J. Jarves, 6, Jarves to Charles Elliott Norton, Florence, 26 August 1859. 59 [58]. “Free Art,” 257. 60 [59]. See George Fiske Comfort, Art Museums in America (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1870). [First published in Old and New in April 1870.—Ed.]

61 [60 and 61]. See, for instance, Charles Callahan Perkins, “American Art Museums,” North American Review, 1 July 1870, 1–29; and Comfort, Art Museums in America, 6–8. 62. James Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America,” Galaxy 10 ( July–December 1870). [Reference incorrect; the phrase “masterpieces to educate the eye,” though plausibly Jarves’s, does not appear in this essay.—Ed.] 63. Norton taught at Harvard between 1873 and 1897. His courses, in particular his “Lectures on Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients,” in which he addressed “cultural ethics” more than history proper, were extremely popular, generating great enthusiasm among students. 64. See Edgell, The American Architecture of To-day, part 1, “The Development of American Architecture,” 1–84. Book 2 [Historical Introduction, 1876–1919] 1. See Alan Nevins, The Emergence of Modern America, 1865–1878 (New York: Macmillan, 1927); and Charles Ramsdell Lingley, Since the Civil War, 3rd ed. (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935). 2. See Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, vol. 2, chapter 20, “The Triumph of Business Enterprise,” 166– 210; chapter 25, “The Gilded Age,” 383– 479; and chapter 30, “The Machine Age,” 713–800. 3. See Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme (Paris: H. Laurens, 1933); see also Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Political and Social Growth of the United States, 1852–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1933). 4. See Arthur Edwin Bye, “One Hundred Years of American Art [in Philadelphia],” Art and Archaeology 21 (April 1926): 153–61.

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5. See La Follette, Art in America, section 3, chapters 6 and 7, “The Revival of Art” and “The Rival of Art (continued),” 159–201. 6. See, for example, Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. 7. See, for example, Norton, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2:216, Norton to Leslie Stephen, 1 March 1893; 2:248–49, Norton to Goldwin Smith, 14 June 1897; and Henry James, The American (1877). 8. See Gustavus Myers, The History of the Great American Fortunes (New York: Modern Library, 1936). 9. See Keppel and Duffus, The Arts in American Life, chapter 14, “Government and Art,” 195–97. 10. See Edgell, The American Architecture of To-day, part 2, “The Domestic and Academic Architecture,” 85–193. 11. See La Follette, Art in America, 159–201. 12. See Lionello Venturi and Charles Marriott, History of Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936). 13 [13 and 14]. See William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911); and Isham, The History of American Painting. 14 [15]. Edgell, The American Architecture of To-day, 77–84. Chapter 1: Eclecticism 1. See X, “The Consequences of the American Invasion,” Burlington Magazine, July 1904, 353–55. 2. See The Collection of Mr. P. Stevens: Paintings, Oriental and European Porcelains, Empire Furniture, Antique Tapestries, Rare Ivory Miniatures, Jewels, Silver, Old French Bronzes, Arms, and Other Objects of Art (New York: Moore Auction Galleries, 1887) and Catalogue of the Entire Stock of P. Stevens, 341 Fifth Ave.: Artistic Furniture, Antique Tapestries, Old European China, Fine Oil Paintings, Bronzes, &c. (New York: American Art Association, 1888).

3. See Illustrated Catalogue De Luxe of the Very Valuable Art Property Collected by the Late Robert Hoe (New York: American Art Association, 1911). 4. See Marjorie Charles Driscoll, The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California: Story of Its Foundation and the Objects of Its Founder (San Francisco: Park Commission, 1921). 5. See Thomas Ellis Kirby, Illustrated Catalogue of the Art and Literary Property Collected by the Late Henry G. Marquand (New York: J. Little, 1903). 6. The same sort of effect can be seen in certain late nineteenth-century dwellings in France. 7 [7 and 8]. See “The Marquand Gallery,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 6 ( January 1911): 3–6; and Bryson Burroughs, Catalogue of Paintings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1931). 8 [10]. See De Luxe Illustrated Catalogue of Early American Portraits Collected by Mr. Thomas B. Clarke (New York: Lent & Graff, 1919). 9 [9]. See Robert B. Woodward, Catalogue of the Private Art Collection of Thomas B. Clarke (New York: American Art Association, 1899). 10 [11]. Ibid. 11 [12]. See Luke Vincent Lockwood, A Collection of English Furniture of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (New York: Tiffany Studios, 1907). 12 [13]. See Dana H. Carroll, An Illustrated Catalogue of the Important and Interesting Collection of Beautiful Pottery Vases of Eastern Origin Dating from the Sixth Century B.C. to the Eighteenth Century, Being the Collection of the Widely Known Connoisseur Mr. Thomas B. Clarke of New York City (New York: American Art Association, 1917). 13 [14]. Dana H. Carroll, The Antique Artistic Furnishings of the City Residence of Mr. Thomas B. Clarke (New York: American Art Association, 1925), Introduction: “A

317

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318

Most Unusual Offering,” in which Carroll cites an article by Charles A. Dana and William Laffan in the Sun [New York, published] on 25 May 1902 describing the house in this way. 14 [15, 16, and 17]. See Catalogue of the Exceedingly Valuable Ancient and Modern Paintings, Extraordinary Antique Rugs, and Beautiful Old Tapestries, Belonging to the Estate of the Late Charles T. Yerkes (New York: American Art Association, 1910); see also Bernard Berenson, “Le pitture italiane nella raccolta Yerkes, lasciate di recente al Metropolitan Museum di Nuova-York,” Rassegna d’Arte 6 (March 1906): 33–38. 15 [18]. In 1893, Yerkes was among the first in the United States to acquire a Rodin sculpture; the same year, the same collector at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago purchased the largest Japanese cloisonné enamel vase in the world, a “technical marvel” according to the catalogue! 16 [19]. See “The Benjamin Altman Bequest,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 8 (November 1913): 226–41; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Handbook of the Altman Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1915); François Monod, “La Galerie Altman au Metropolitan Museum de New-York,” Gazette des BeauxArts, 5th ser., 8 (September–October 1923): 179–98, (November 1923): 297–312, and (December 1923): 367–77; [and Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl, “Oriental Carpets in American Collections: Three Silk Rugs in the Altman Collection,” Art in America 4 (April 1916): 147–61]. 17 [20]. See John Kennedy Winkler, Morgan the Magnificent: The Life of J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) (New York: Vanguard Press, 1930). 18 [21]. See Thomas Humphrey Ward and William Roberts, Pictures in the Collection of J. P. Morgan at Prince’s Gate and Dover House (London: privately printed, 1907). [Bri-

mo’s note 22 has been incorporated into the main text.—Ed.] 19 [23]. See, for instance, Catalogue of a Collection of Books Formed by James Toovey, Principally from the Library of the Earl of Gosford, the Property of J. Pierpont Morgan (New York: privately printed, 1901); Léopold Delisle, “Les manuscrits de la bibliothèque de M. Pierpont Morgan,” Journal des Savants, n.s., 5 (August 1907): 415–21; and Henri Omont, “Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de M. Pierpont Morgan à New-York,” Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartres 69 (1908): 412–22. 20 [24]. See Belle da Costa Greene, The Pierpont Morgan Library: A Review of the Growth, Development, and Activities of the Library During the Period Between Its Establishment as an Educational Institution in February 1924 and the Close of the Year 1929 (New York: Plandome Press, 1930). 21 [25]. See Edward Alfred Jones, Catalogue of the Gutmann Collection of Plate, Now the Property of J. P. Morgan, Esq. (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1907). 22 [26, 27, and 28]. See Seymour de Ricci, Catalogue of A Collection of Germanic Antiquities Belonging to J. P. Morgan (Paris: privately printed, 1910); Ricci, Catalogue of Merovingian Antiquities Belonging to J. P. Morgan (Paris: privately printed, 1910); and Ricci, Catalogue of Gallo-Roman Antiquities Belonging to J. P. Morgan (Paris: privately printed, 1911). 23 [29]. See André Pératé and Gaston Brière, Collections Georges Hoentschel (Paris: Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 1908). 24 [30]. See Edward Robinson, “The Wing of Decorative Arts,” printed as a 36-page supplement to the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 15 (March 1910); and Joseph Breck and Meyric R. Rogers, The Pierpont Morgan Wing: A Handbook (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1925). 25 [31 and 32]. See Wilhelm von Bode, Collection of J. Pierpont Morgan: Bronzes of the Renais-

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sance and Subsequent Periods, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 1910); and Seymour de Ricci, Catalogue of Twenty Renaissance Tapestries from the J. P. Morgan Collection (Paris: P. Renouard, 1913). 26 [33]. See Friedrich Hirth, “The Morgan Collection of Chinese Porcelains,” Burlington Magazine, February 1908, 325–26. 27 [34]. See George Charles Williamson, Catalogue of Miniatures, the Property of J. Pierpont Morgan, 4 vols. (London: Chiswick Press, 1906–8). 28 [35]. See The Collections in the Avery Memorial (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1934). 29 [36]. See Paul Vitry, “Les collections de Pierpont Morgan,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 4th ser., 11 (May 1914): 425–40. 30 [37]. Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 107. [See also Bernard Berenson, Venetian Painting in America: The 15th Century (1916; 2nd ed., London: Bell, 1918).—Ed.] 31 [38]. See John La Farge and August F. Jaccaci, eds., Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections (New York: A. F. Jaccaci, 1907), vol. 1, “The Collection of Mrs. John Lovell Gardner,” 1–254. [The text makes no mention of the Simone Martini polyptics Brimo includes in his rough inventory.—Ed.] 32 [39]. Cited in Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner, 188. [The phrase cited is taken directly from the museum charter, issued on 19 December 1900.—Ed.] 33 [40]. See Philip Hendy, Catalogue of the Exhibited Paintings and Drawings (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1931); and August L. Mayer, “Das Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston,” Pantheon/ Der Cicerone 14 (September 1934): 278–82. 34 [41]. On the elder [William T.] Walters, see book 1, part 3, [46, 53, 54, 57, 59, 72] above. 35 [42]. See Catalogue of Paintings, Walters Gallery, Baltimore (Baltimore: Walters Art Gal-

lery, 1915); and Handbook of the Collection (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1936). 36 [43]. See Francis Henry Taylor, “The Walters Gallery Revisited,” Parnassus 6 (December 1934): 2–6, 31. 37. [new note] Reference missing; Brimo’s intentions unknown. Winthrop would in fact leave his collection of more than 4,000 objects to Harvard in 1943. Brimo’s note 44 has been incorporated into the main text.—Ed. 38 [45 and 46]. See Arsène Pierre Urbain Alexandre, [“La Collection Havemeyer et Miss Cassatt,” La Renaissance de l’Art Français et des Industries de Luxe 13 (February 1939): 51–56, 259]. Mrs. Havemeyer, like Cassatt, disliked Renoir, by whom she owned but a single painting and, at that, late in life hoped to replace it with yet another work by Degas. 39 [47 and 48]. See Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havemeyer Collection: Catalogue of a Temporary Exhibit (New York: College Art Association, 1930), 43, 48; [August L. Mayer], “Die Sammlung Havemeyer im Metropolitan Museum,” Pantheon/Der Cicerone 5 (May 1930): 210–13; and “The H. O. Havemeyer Collection,” Parnassus 2 (March 1930): 1–8. 40 [49]. See, for example, Alan Burroughs, “The Links of Tradition: A Study of the H. O. Havemeyer Collection,” Studio 100 (November 1930): 332–37. 41 [50]. See book 2, chapter 3, [135–37], below. 42 [51]. “The Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 13 (March 1918): 58–65. 43 [53]. Joseph Breck, “Dipinti italiani nella raccolta del Signor Teodoro Davis,” Rassegna d’Arte 11 ( July 1911): 111–15. 44 [54]. See Elisabeth Luther Cary, “The Theodore M. Davis Bequest,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 26 (March 1931): 58–62. [This issue of the Bulletin was accompanied by a special supplement devoted to the Davis bequest.—Ed.]

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45 [55]. See Harry Brandeis Wehle and Joseph Breck, “The Michael Dreicer Collection,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 17 (May 1922): 100–110. 46 [56]. See Louis Réau, “French Primitives” in Bryson Burroughs, Harry Brandeis Wehle, et al., The Michael Friedsam Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1932); also published as Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 27 [November 1932], section 2: 5–14. 47 [57]. See B. Burroughs, Wehle, et al., The Michael Friedsam Collection [Bellegambe’s triptych is today known as the Le Cellier Altarpiece.—Ed.] 48 [58]. See A. E. Rueff, “Notes on the Michael Friedsam Collection,” Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 20 (April 1933): 1–9; and Guy Pène du Bois, “Famous American Collections: The Collection of Mr. Michael Friedsam,” Arts and Decoration 7 ( June 1917): 397–402. 49 [59]. See William Henry Holmes, “Installation of the W. A. Clark Collection in the Corcoran Gallery of Art,” Art and Archaeology 25 (April 1928): 163–80, 204; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Illustrated Handbook of the W. A. Clark Collection (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1932); and Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “The W. A. Clark Collection,” Arts 13 (April 1928): 236–41. 50 [60]. These two collections [Hutchinson and Ryerson] are comparable to that of Sir William [Cornelius] Van Horne; see Martin Conway, “Sir William Van Horne’s Collection at Montreal,” Connoisseur 11 ( July 1905): 135–42. 51 [61 and 62]. See Rose Mary Fischkin, “The Charles L. Hutchinson Bequest,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 19 (December 1925): 102–4; and Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (Chicago: The Institute, 1898). 52 [63]. See Ella S. Siple, “The Art Institute of Chicago: The Ryerson Collection,” Burlington Magazine, November 1927, 240–44.

53 [64]. See Mildred J. Prentiss, “The Charles Deering Collection of Prints and Drawings,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 24 (November 1930): 101–3; and Lena May McCauley, “Some Collectors of Paintings,” Art and Archaeology 12 (September– October 1921): 155–72. 54 [65]. See Charles Fabens Kelley and Helen Cowan Gunsaulus, Handbook of the Department of Oriental Art of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1933). 55 [66]. See Art Institute of Chicago, A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection (Chicago: The Institute, 1932). [Citation incorrect.—Ed.] 56 [67]. Mrs. McIlhenny retained usufruct; see Fiske Kimball et al., “The McIlhenny Bequest and Exhibition,” Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin 21 (February 1926): 87–108. 57 [68]. See book 2, chapter 3, [137], below. 58 [69]. See Guillaume Tronchet, “La donation Edward Tuck au Petit Palais,” La Renaissance 14 ( January 1931): 2–11; and Some Works of Art Belonging to Edward Tuck in Paris (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910). 59 [70]. See James Hazen Hyde, L’iconographie des quatre parties du monde dans les tapisseries (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1924). 60 [71]. See book 2, chapter 3, [137, 140, 142]. 61 [72]. See Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, The Clarence H. Mackay Collection: Italian Schools (New York: privately printed, 1926). [See also Wirt de Vivier Tassin, The Clarence H. Mackay Collection: Italian Schools (New York: privately printed, 1926).—Ed.] 62 [73]. See Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, “The Clarence H. Mackay Collection of Italian Renaissance Sculptures,” Art in America 13 (August 1925): 239–65, and (October 1925): 315–31. 63 [74 and 75]. See Stella Rubinstein, “French Mediaeval Sculpture in the Mortimer

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Schiff Collection,” Art in America 11 (February 1924): 76–88; and Rubinstein, “French Eighteenth-Century Sculpture in the Collection of Mortimer Schiff,” Art in America 11 (February 1924): 67–75. 64 [76]. See Seymour de Ricci, “Les majoliques italiennes primitives de la collection Mortimer L. Schiff,” La Renaissance 11 ( June 1928): 221–33. 65 [77]. See Works of Art, Furniture, Fabric, Rugs, Bronzes, Sculptures, and Chinese Porcelains: The Collection of the Estate of the Late Judge Elbert H. Gary (New York: American Art Association, 1928). 66 [78]. See De Luxe Illustrated Catalogue of the Art of the French Eighteenth Century and the Italian Renaissance Belonging to the Estate of the Late William Salomon (New York: American Art Association, 1923). [Possibly not the text to which Brimo refers.—Ed.] 67 [79]. See The Gothic and Renaissance Art Collection of T. F. Ryan (New York: American Art Association, 1923); and also The Thomas Fortune Ryan Collection of Gothic and Renaissance Art (New York: American Art Association and Anderson Galleries, 1933). [Les Amours de Gombaud et Macé was a period farce.—Ed.] 68 [80]. See Guy Pène du Bois, “Mistresses of Famous American Collections: The Collection of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney,” Arts and Decoration 7 (February 1917): 177–82, 210. 69 [81]. See Illustrated Catalogue of the Rare and Beautiful Antique Art Treasures, American and Foreign Gold Coins, and Many Operatic Costumes, the Property of the Late Enrico Caruso (New York: American Art Association, 1923); and Stella Rubinstein, “Painted Limoges Enamels in the Collection of Enrico Caruso,” Art in America 7 (December 1918): 21–31. 70 [82, 83, and 84]. See The Collections in the Avery Memorial; Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, Catalogue of Paintings, Sculpture, and Other Objects of Art in the Isaac Del-

gado Museum of Art (New Orleans: Fontana, 1932); and The Rita Lydig Collection of Notable Treasures of the Gothic and Renaissance Periods (New York: American Art Association, 1913). 71 [85 and 86]. Since the death of [his wife,] Florence, George Blumenthal has given up their Parisian home and sold a portion of their eighteenth-century collections there. The house in New York is still adorned with their medieval and Renaissance objects and others he continues to buy; see Stella Rubinstein-Bloch, Collection of George and Florence Blumenthal, 6 vols. (Paris: A. Lévy, 1926). 72 [87]. Ibid. 73 [88]. See [August L. Mayer] and Otto Von Falke, “Die Sammlung George und Florence Blumenthal in New-York,” Pantheon/ Der Cicerone 10 ( July1932): “1: Die Gemälde und Plastiken” (Mayer), 249–53; “2: Kunstegewerbe (Von Falke), 254–57 [“The Collection of Georg [sic] and Florence Blumenthal in New-York,” trans. C. C. H. Drechsel, Pantheon/Der Cicerone 10 (August 1932): 58–61]. 74 [89]. In October 1935, for instance, the lead story in Fortune magazine [42–55, 123–24, 126, 128, 130, 133–36, 139–40, 144, 146, 149–50], was devoted to Hearst. 75 [90]. See John Nilson Laurvick et al., Catalogue of the Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1917), preface, iii–vi. Apparently, William Randolph Hearst had a hand in his mother’s collecting. 76 [91]. See John Kennedy Winkler, William Randolph Hearst, trans. M. Lebas (Paris: Gallimard, 1931). [Very possibly an incorrect citation; Brimo cites the French translation of Winkler’s 1928 book, which I have had no success consulting.—Ed.] 77 [92]. Hearst and [ Julia] Morgan rebuilt part of Buxbaum Castle near Würzburg, a property that once belonged to Count Bassenheim.

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Chapter 2: The Notion of the “Old Master” 1. See Edmond de Goncourt, La maison d’un artiste, 2 vols. (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881). 2. See Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, ed., Chefs-d’œuvre inconnus des Grands Maîtres conservés dans les collections particulières et publiques (Paris: G. Van Oest, 1930); and Hans Tietze, Meisterwerke Europäischer Malerei in Amerika (Vienna: PhaidonVerlag, 1935). 3. See Catalogue of Paintings in the Private Collection of William Lukens Elkins, 2 vols. (Paris: Manzi, 1887–1900). 4. See Important Paintings by Old and Modern Masters Collected by Charles H. Senff (New York: Anderson Gallery, 1928). 5. See book 2, chapter 4, “Staying in Touch with the Contemporary Scene,” [155–68]. 6. See Art Institute, A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection. 7. See Frank Wakeley Gunsaulus, A Catalogue of a Collection of Plaques, Medallions, Vases, Figures, &c., in Colored Jasper and Basalt, Produced by Josiah Wedgwood (Chicago: Art Institute, 1916). 8. See Catalogue, Biographical and Descriptive, of A Collection of Paintings Belonging to R. Hall McCormick, Esq., Principally of the English School (Chicago: Art Institute, 1900). 9. See Catalogue of the Collection of Foreign and American Paintings Owned by Mr. George A. Hearn (New York: Gilliss Press, 1908); and “Gift of Mr. George A. Hearn,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 6 ( July 1911): 145–47. 10. See Memorial Catalogue of Paintings by Old and Modern Masters Collected by Edward R. Bacon (New York: privately printed for V. P. Bacon, 1919). 11. See Maurice Tourneux, “Les galeries privées en Amérique,” Gazette des BeauxArts, 3rd ser., 40 (November 1908): 420. [Reference misleading; Tourneux mentions Terrell only in passing.—Ed.]

12. See George B. Rose, “The Ralph Cross Johnson Collection,” Art and Archaeology 10 (September 1920): 75–107. 13. See Bryson Burroughs, “The Jesup Collection,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 10 (April 1915): 64–69. 14 [15]. See “The Kimball Collection,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 14 (May 1920): 77. 15 [16]. See The John Howard McFadden Collection of Portraits and Landscapes of the British School, from Hogarth, 1697–1764, to Linnell, 1792–1882 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1923); and William Roberts, “The John H. McFadden Collection—1: Portraits” Connoisseur 18 (November 1918): 125–37. 16 [17]. See William Roberts, “Recent Additions to Mr. McFadden’s Collection,” Art in America 6 (February 1918): 108–17. 17 [18]. See Maurice Walter Brockwell, A Catalogue of Some of the Paintings of the British School in the Collection of Henry E. Huntington (New York: privately printed, 1925). 18 [19]. See, for example, Edward R. Du Parcq, “Old English Silver in American Private Collections,” Art in America 7 (December 1918): 10–21. 19 [20]. See B. Burroughs, Catalogue of Paintings. 20 [21 and 22]. See Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Catalogue of Works of Art Exhibited, part 2: Paintings, Drawings, Engravings, and Decorative Art (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1881), 4–8, figs. 11–22; and Palais de San Donato, Florence, Sale Held on the Premises, 15 March–3 May 1880. 21 [23]. See Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (Chicago: The Institute, 1896), 86–87. [Note number omitted in the original text.—Ed.] 22 [24]. See Handbook of the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1895); “The Museum’s Donors,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Art 1 (April 1920): 102–4; and Catalogue of Paintings in the Permanent Collection of the Detroit Institute

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of Arts (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1930). 23 [25]. See Henry Watson Kent and Florence Nightingale Levy, Catalogue of an Exhibition of American Paintings, Furniture, Silver, and Other Objects of Art (1625–1825), vol. 2 of Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1909). 24 [26]. See Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, “Important Rembrandts in American Collections,” Art News, 26 April 1930, 3–83. 25 [27]. See Walter Heil, “The Edgar B. Whitcomb Collection in Detroit,” Art in America 16 (February 1928): 49–58; and Catalogue of Paintings in the Permanent Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. 26 [28]. See, for example, Edmond Bonnaffé, Les collectionneurs de l’ancienne France: Notes d’un amateur (Paris: A. Aubry, 1873). 27 [29]. See Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, vol. 2. 28 [30 and 31 reversed; 30 not in the text]. See Lionello Venturi, Pitture italiane in America, trans. Countess Vanden Heuvel and Charles Marriott (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1931– 33), vol. 2, “Fifteenth-Century Renaissance,” and vol. 3, “Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century.” In fact, certain American collectors and museums, like at least one department at the Louvre, managed to profit from the sale of art by the Soviets. [Brimo appears to refer to the Louvre’s acquisition of a trove of Renaissance paintings in 1930 and 1931.—Ed.] 29 [32, not in text]. See, for example, Berenson, “Les peintures italiennes de New-York et de Boston,” 196–99; see also Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of Principal Artists and Their Works, with an Index of Places (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 675. 30. [new note] See Einstein and Monod, “Le Musée de la Société Historique de NewYork.”—Ed.

31 [33]. See B. Burroughs, Catalogue of Paintings, 266. [These cassone panels were titled Hunting Scene and Return from the Hunt, respectively.—Ed.] 32 [34]. Miss Frick [Helen Clay Frick, daughter of Adelaide Childs and Henry Clay Frick], is, on the contrary, much more attracted to the Italian Primitives. 33. [new note] See Rose, “The Ralph Cross Johnson Collection.”—Ed. 34. [new note] See Pictures in the Collection of Henry Clay Frick (New York: privately printed, 1915); and The Frick Collection: Paintings from the Collection of Henry Clay Frick at Pride’s Crossing (New York: Frick Collection, 1935).—Ed. 35. To document this impoverishment of European collections, nothing would be more instructive than to reunite the works of art that hung in the Art Treasures Exhibition held in Manchester in 1857. 36. See Venturi, Pitture italiane in America, vol. 1, “Romanesque and Gothic.” 37. [new note] Brimo’s reference to Richard Norton appears to be in error.—Ed. 38 [37 and 38]. See Sirén, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures of the Jarves Collection, “Italian Painting,” 19–236 (and also “Introduction: The Collection of Early Paintings,” xiii–xiv); and Sirén, Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Paintings. 39 [39 and 40]. For discussion of the Friedsam and Ryerson collections, see book 2, chapter 1,above. See also Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Catalogue of Paintings (14th and 15th Centuries) in the Collections of the Hispanic Society of America (New York: The Society, 1930). 40 [41, inadvertently omitted]. See Bernard Berenson and Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings and Some Art Objects from the Collection of John Graver Johnson (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1913–14): vol. 1, “Italian Paintings,” 1–313; vol. 2, “Flemish and Dutch Paintings,” 314–708; vol. 3, “German, French,

323

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324

Spanish, and English Primitives, and Art Objects,” 709–1189. 41 [42]. See Réau, L’art français aux États-Unis, 156. [Note placed where logic dictates.— Ed.] 42 [43]. See Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, The Henry Goldman Collection (New York: privately printed, 1922); and Valentier, “The Henry Goldman Collection,” Art News, 14 May 1927, 3–17. 43 [44 and 45]. See Robert Lehman, The Philip Lehman Collection, New York: Paintings (New York and Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1928); and Walter W. S. Cook, “Spanish and French Paintings in the Lehman Collection,” Art Bulletin 7 (December 1924): 54–64. 44 [46]. See Royal Cortissoz, “The Jules S. Bache Collection,” American Magazine of Art, May 1930, 244–61. 45 [47]. See Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, 637–38; and, for an inventory of Platt’s collection, Venturi, Pitture italiane in America, 1:xxvii. 46 [48]. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance; and, for an inventory of Smith’s collection, Venturi, Pitture italiane in America, 1:xxxiv–xxxv. 47 [49]. See The Collection of Frank Lusk Babbott, 1854–1933 (New York: privately printed, 1934); and Frederick Arnold Sweet, “The Collection of Frank Lusk Babbott,” Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 21 (October 1934): 86–89. 48 [50]. See Malcolm Vaughan, “Masterpieces in the [Cyrus W.] Hamilton Collection,” Art News, 27 April 1929, 77. 49 [51]. See An Exhibition of Italian Paintings Lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress of New York to Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1934). 50 [52]. See, for instance [regarding the collections of Allan Marquand and Frank J. Mather Jr.], Ernest Theodore Dewald,

“Two Private Art Collections,” Art and Archaeology 20 (September 1925): 156–59. 51 [53]. Regarding works in the Mather, Forbes, and Sachs collections, see Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. 52 [54]. See Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “Veronese Primitives in the Cannon Collection,” Art in America 24 (April 1936): 49–58. [The catalogue to which Brimo refers is Jean Paul Richter, Descriptive Catalogue of Old Masters of the Italian School Belonging to Henry White Cannon, Villa Doccia, Fiesole (Florence: Galileiana, 1907).—Ed.] 53 [55]. See Vitry, “Works of Houdon in America.” 54 [54bis]. See Réau, L’art français aux ÉtatsUnis, 158. 55 [55bis]. [Reference missing, Brimo’s intentions unknown.—Ed.] 56 [57]. See Réau, L’art français aux États-Unis, 146. 57 [58]. See Helen Naomi Forbes Lewis Salomon, An Important Eighteenth-Century French Art Collection Belonging to the Late Mrs. William Salomon (New York: American Art Association, 1928). 58 [60]. The French dealer Nathan Wildenstein would set up shop in New York in 1902. Ernest Gimpel and the Seligmann brothers [ Jacques, Arnold, and Simon] participated in this campaign as well. 59 [61]. See, for example, Jeanie Gallup Mottet, Art in Exhibitions: Museum of French Art, French Institute in the United States (New York: Harbor Press, 1931). The institute would have greater influence if better organized. 60 [62]. See book 2, chapter 1, “Eclecticism,” above; see also, for example, Tronchet, “La donation Edward Tuck au Petit Palais.” 61 [59] [note transposed]. See Réau, L’art français aux États-Unis, 142. 62 [63]. See Guy Pène du Bois, “Mistresses of Famous American Collections: The Collection of Mrs. John W. Simpson,” Arts and Decoration 7 (March 1917): 233–36;

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and Jean Guiffrey, “The Fragonards of the John W. Simpson Collection,” Art in America 2 (December 1913): 29–44. 63. [new note] See, however, Rudolf Oldenbourg, “An Attribution to Jan Lys,” Art in America 4 (1915): 53–58; and Tancred Borenius, “Jan Lys,” Burlington Magazine, September 1918, 114–15.—Ed. 64. See Réau, L’art français aux États-Unis, 29. 65 [66]. See George Brinton McClellan Harvey, Henry Clay Frick, the Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), chapter 23, “An Art Collector,” 331–43 [including an inventory of art purchases, 1881–1919— Ed.]; chapter 24, “Reflections and Bequests,” 344–55. 66 [65]. See Pictures in the Collection of Henry Clay Frick; The Frick Collection: Paintings from the Collection of Henry Clay Frick at Pride’s Crossing; and James Howard Bridge, Portraits and Personalities: Imaginary Conversations in the Frick Galleries (New York: Aldine, 1929). 67. See Bernard Berenson, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, and Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, Catalogue De Luxe of the Widener Collection, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: privately printed,1923). [Though Brimo cited the 1916 edition, it would appear that he intended to cite the “De Luxe” 1923 edition of this text instead.—Ed.] 68. French paintings were among those eliminated by Joseph Widener from the collections he inherited from his father. 69. See Henri Gabriel Marceau, “The Art of El Greco in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin 25 (December 1929): 23. 70. See Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, “The Italian Renaissance Sculpture in the Widener Collection,” Art News, 14 April 1928, 14–21. [A catalogue of Widener’s sculpture on which Valentiner was then working with Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Paintings and Sculpture from the Widener Collection, would be published by the National Gallery of Art in 1948.—Ed.]

71. See, for example, Alfred M. Frankfurter, “The Mellon Gift to the Nation,” Art News, 9 January 1937, 9–13. 72. See William A. Preyer, “The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Max Epstein,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 17 (September 1923): 55–56. 73. See Ella S. Siple, “Notes on the Emery Collection in the Cincinnati Museum,” Burlington Magazine, June 1930, 330–36. 74. See Henry Preston Rossiter, “The Print Department’s First Half-Century,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 35 (February 1937): 6; and Frank Weitenkampf, “Public Print Collections in the United States,” Museumskunde 10 (May 1914): 108–10. [The Sewall collection included, among some 23,000 prints, an important set of Rembrandts.—Ed.] 75. Regarding the Gray, Marsh, and Randall collections, see book 1, part 3, chapter 2, [62–63], above. 76. See The Print Collection of the Late Charles E. Norton (New York: Anderson Gallery, 1912). 77 [76bis and 77]. See Agnes Mongan and Gordon Bailey Washburn, Master Drawings, Selected from the Museums and Private Collections of America (Buffalo, N.Y.: F. W. Burow, 1935), catalogue nos. 99–103. The catalogue of Harvard’s print collection is soon to be published. [See Agnes Mongan and Paul J. Sachs, Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940).—Ed.] 78. See Henry Preston Rossiter, “The Gift of Dr. William Norton Bullard,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 21 (October 1923): 60–66; Rossiter, “Miss Ellen Bullard’s Gift of Prints,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 24 (February 1926): 12–16; and Catalogue of the Collection of Prints from the Liber Studiorum of Joseph Mallard William Turner Formed by the Late Francis Bullard (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1916).

325

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79. See Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (Chicago: The Institute, 1920). 80 [81]. See Catalogue of Etchings and Drawings by Charles Méryon and Portraits of Méryon in the Howard Mansfield Collection (Chicago: Art Institute, 1911). [Brimo erroneously reports that these works were “given to” rather than “purchased by” the Art Institute; see “The Howard Mansfield Collection of Etchings by Meryon [sic],” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 3 (October 1909): 17–18.—Ed.] 81 [82]. See A. Philip McMahon, “The Dan Fellows Platt Collection of Drawings,” Parnassus 3 (December 1931): 14–15. 82 [82bis, not in text]. See, for example, Catalogue of the Collection of Prints from the Liber Studiorum. 83. Works from the [Russell] Allen collection were often shown at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. 84 [85]. See Rossiter, “The Print Department’s First Half-Century.” [Citation incorrect.—Ed.] 85 [86]. See Germain Bazin, “La collection Walter Gay au Musée du Louvre,” L’Amour de l’Art 19 (February 1938): 25–30. 86. See Collection J. Pierpont Morgan: Drawings by the Old Masters Formed by C. Fairfax Murray, 2 vols. (London: privately printed, 1905–12). 87 [88; note 87 eliminated]. See French Eighteenth-Century Drawings Coming from the T. P. Heseltine Collection (New York: Gimpel & Wildenstein, 1914). 88 [89]. See Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, “Index of Places,” 609–723. 89. [new note] Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance appeared only in 1930, though the first three of the volume’s four parts had originally been published much earlier, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance in 1894, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance in 1897, and The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance in 1909.—Ed.

90. [new note] See, for example, Manuel B. Cossío, El Greco, 2 vols. (Madrid: Suarez, 1908); and Maurice Barrès, Greco ou le secret de Tolède (Paris: Plon, 1910); and August L. Mayer, El Greco: Eine Einführung in das Leben und Wirken des Domenico Theotocopuli, gennant El Greco (Munich: Delphin Verlag, 1911).—Ed. 91. See, for example, William Mills Ivins Jr., “New Tastes in Old Prints,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 27 (1932): 202–4. One can also follow developments in American taste by studying past issues of The Print Collector’s Quarterly, a journal of interest to specialists published by Knoedler & Company. 92. See, for example, Bryson Burroughs, “The Taste of Today in Masterpieces of Painting Before 1900,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 27 ( July 1932): 170–73. 93. See works by Berenson, some previously cited; Lionello Venturi, Il gusto dei primitivi (Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1926); and Osvald Sirén, “Trecento Pictures in American Collections,” trans. L. I. Armstrong, Burlington Magazine, November 1908, 125– 26; December 1908, 188–94; February 1909, 325–26. Chapter 3: The Vogue for Archaeology and “Pre-History” 1. See Immanuel M. Casanowicz and Cyrus Adler, Biblical Antiquities: A Description of the Exhibit at the Cotton States International Exposition, Atlanta, 1895 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898); and Casanowicz, Descriptive of a Collection of Objects of Jewish Ceremonial Deposited in the United States National Museum by Hadji Ephraim Benguiat (1899; Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office 1901). This same period saw numerous other exhibitions of Egyptian, Buddhist, Jewish, and so-called Primitive ceremonial objects. 2. To compare French with American attitudes regarding the import of art from

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China, see Hélène Belevitch-Stankevitch, Le goût chinois en France au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Jouve, 1910). 3. Morse, a zoologist by training, taught at the University of Tokyo until 1879, when he returned to Salem to become director of the Peabody Academy of Sciences [today the Peabody Essex Museum]. Fenellosa, a Salem-born Harvard graduate, became in turn professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo, curator of the Imperial Museum of Japan, and curator of Oriental Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 4 [4, 5, and 6]. See, for example, John Getz, Catalogue of the Macomber Collection of Chinese Pottery (Boston, 1909); and Catalogue of Beautiful Old Chinese Porcelain: The Private Collection of Deming. Jarves, Esq. (New York: American Art Association, 1909). Almost the entirety of Morgan’s collection is today at the Pennsylvania Museum; see Getz, The University Museum: Section of Oriental Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1917). 5 [7]. See John Getz, Catalogue of the Avery Collection of Ancient Chinese Cloisonnés, preface by William Henry Goodyear (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1912). 6 [8]. See, for example, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, L’art en Chine et au Japon (Paris: Hachette, 1913). 7 [9 and 10]. See Osvald Sirén, La peinture chinoise dans les collections américaines (Paris: G. van Oest, 1928), also published as Chinese Paintings in American Collections: Handbook of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1929), “Chinese and Japanese Art,” 127–42; and Langdon Warner, “The Weld Bequest,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 9 (August 1911): 34–36. 8 [11]. See, for example, Howard Mansfield, “The Charles Stewart Smith Collection of Chinese and Japanese Paintings,” Bulletin

of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 9 (September 1914): 196–200. 9 [12]. See Frank Jewett Mather Jr., Estimates in Art (New York: H. Holt, 1923), chapter 10, “Color Prints of Japan,” 303–15; and Raymond Koechlin, Souvenirs d’un vieil amateur d’art d’Extrême-Orient (Chalon-sur-Saone: Imprimerie Française et Orientale E. Bertrand, 1930), 98–101 and passim. 10 [13]. See Mather, Estimates in Art, 303–15. 11 [14]. See, for example, John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897; New York: Century, 1903). 12 [15]. See Thomas Ellis Kirby, Catalogue of Rare Oriental Art Objects, Extraordinary Japanese Paintings, Prints, and Screens, Textiles and Curios, Collected by the WellKnown Connoisseur John La Farge (New York: American Art Gallery, 1908). 13 [16]. See, for example, Frederick William Gookin, Catalogue of a Memorial Exhibition of Japanese Color Prints from the Collections of the Late Clarence Buckingham (Chicago: Art Institute, 1915); and Kelley and Gunsaulus, Handbook of the Department of Oriental Art of the Art Institute of Chicago. Buckingham, a trustee of the Art Institute (1901–13), assembled one of the largest collections of Japanese prints in the world. The “friends” of the institute’s Department of Oriental Art, furthermore, referred to themselves as “the Orientals.” 14 [17]. See A Guide to the Collections of the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, Mass: Worcester Art Museum, 1933), 34–35. 15 [18]. See Kojiro Tomita, “The William S. and John T. Spaulding Collection of Japanese Prints,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 20 ( June 1922): 31–35. 16 [19]. See Handbook: General Information Concerning the Museum, Its History, Building, Exhibits, Endowments and Activities (Chicago: Field Museum, 1933). 17 [20]. A good example of archaeological finds considered as cultural artifacts is offered by the Asian collections of the University

327

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of Pennsylvania Museum that closely resemble ethnographic collections; see Getz, The University Museum: Section of Oriental Art. 18 [21]. See book 2 [Brimo writes “book 3”— Ed.], chapter 1, “Eclecticism,” [89]. 19 [22]. See Kung Ching Wang, Illustrated Catalogue of the Remarkable Collection of the Imperial Prince Kung of China (New York: Yamanaka, 1913); and John Getz, The Kelekian Collection of Ancient Chinese Potteries (Chicago: Art Institute, 1917). 20 [23]. See Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, “The Collection of Mr. Charles L. Freer,” Pacific Era 1 (November 1907): 57–66. 21 [24]. See Agnes E. Meyer, “The Charles L. Freer Collection,” Arts 12 (August 1927): 65–82. 22 [25 and 26]. See Catalogue of a Selection of Art Objects from the Freer Collection Exhibited in the New Building of the National Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912); see also, for example, Frederick William Gookin, Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Freer Collection (Chicago: Art Institute, 1917), preface, 3–4; introduction, 5–8. 23 [27]. See Denman Waldo Ross, A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907). 24 [28]. See Anne Webb Karnagham, “The Ross Collection,” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts 30 (February 1932): 8–21. 25 [29]. See Edward Waldo Forbes, “Denman Waldo Ross,” Bulletin of the Fogg Art Museum 4 (November 1935): 2–6. 26 [30]. See Hamilton Bell, “Early Chinese Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston,” Art in America 5 (April 1917): 117–30, 168–80, 221–40. 27 [31]. This trend grew even stronger after the war in the study of certain periods neglected until then in Europe as well as in the way collections were presented. 28 [32]. See “The New Museum,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 7 (December 1909): 58.

These were among the earliest contextual displays before the creation of “period rooms” popular in American museums after the war. 29 [33]. See Edward Waldo Forbes, “The Gândhâra Sculptures,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 5 (October 1907): 59–61. 30 [34]. See Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Catalogue of the Indian Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 6 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1923–30). 31 [35]. See Joseph Breck, “The New Indian Galleries,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 13 (May 1918): 104–6. 32 [36]. See, for example, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, The Sculpture, Painting, and Drawing of Ancient India (New York: Kevorkian Gallery, 1918). Dealers who took an early interest in Indian art, like Charles Vignier, Sadajiro Yamanaka, and Ching Tsai Loo, also deserve mention. 33 [37]. Until 1935, a rudimentary knowledge of Latin was required for admission to Harvard. 34 [38]. See Charles Rufus Morey, “Allan Marquand, Founder of the Department of Art and Archaeology,” Art and Archaeology 20 (September 1925): 105–8. 35 [39]. The journal’s first editor, Arthur L. Frotingham Jr., professor of Art History at Princeton, relied on the advice of Charles Eliot Norton. 36 [40]. See, for example, regarding the collection of plaster casts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Edward Robinson and Charles G. Loring, Catalogue of Casts (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), part 3, devoted to Greek and Roman sculpture. 37 [41]. The Slater Memorial Museum at the Norwich Free Academy, for example, as early as 1884 boasted a collection of antique and Renaissance casts selected by Edward Robinson. 38 [42]. See Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, Handbook of the Classical Collections (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1930).

Notes to Pages 229–232

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39 [43]. See Joseph Breck, “In Memoriam Edward Robinson,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 26 (May 1931): 111–12. 40 [44]. See, for instance, Lacey Davis Caskey, “The Warren Collection of Engraved Gems,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 26 ( June 1928): 46–50. The vases Edward Warren collected are today in the Providence Museum, gift of Eliza Greene Metcalf Radeke. See also Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, United States of America: The David M. Robinson Collection, Baltimore, Maryland, 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934–38). 41 [45]. See, for example, Walter A. Roselle, “The Place of Classical Art in the Private Collection,” Art in America 10 (April 1922): 117–26. 42 [46]. See Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, United States of America: Joseph Clark Hoppin and Albert Eugene Gallatin Collections (Paris: E. Champion, 1926), fasc. 1. 43 [47]. See Stephen Bleeker Luce, Providence: Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), preface, 5. 44 [48]. See Paul Victor Christopher Baur, Preliminary Catalogue of the Rebecca Darlington Stoddard Collection of Greek and Italian Vases, Memorial Hall, Yale University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914). 45 [49]. Morgan collection. [Reference incomplete but also likely incorrect. Brimo almost certainly has in mind the extensive collection of ceramic art received from Princeton when William Cowper Prime was chair of the newly formed Department of Art History.—Ed.] 46 [50]. See, for example, John Davidson Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vases in American Collections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918); Beazley, Attische Vasenmaler des rotfiguren Stils (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925); Hubert Philippart, Collections d’antiquités classiques aux États-Unis, supplement to vol. 4 of La Revue Univer-

selle de Bruxelles (1928); Henry Roy William Smith, “American Vase Collections: A Survey of American Pottery Collections within the Scope of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum,” Bulletin of the Council of American Learned Societies 14 (November 1930): 39–54; and Charles Picard, Manuel d’archéologie grecque, 2 vols. in 3 (Paris: A. Picard, 1935), 1:58. To these gifts from archaeological specialists must be added that of M. H. de Young to the San Francisco museum that bears his name, by Frank Howard to the Isaac Delgado Museum, and by John Huntington to the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as others given the Smith College Museum of Art and Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Elsewhere in North America we might add gifts to the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, a catalogue of which was recently published; see David M. Robinson and Cornelia Gaskins Harcum, A Catalogue of the Greek Vases in the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology (Largely the Gift of Sigmund Samuel, Esq.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1930). 47 [51]. See Edward Robinson, Catalogue of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Vases in the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1893); Lacey Davis Caskey, Geometry of Greek Vases: Attic Vases in the Museum of Fine Arts Analyzed According to the Principles of Proportion Discovered by Jay Hambidge (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1922); and George Henry Chase, Catalogue of Arretine Pottery (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1916). 48 [52]. See G. Richter, Handbook of the Classical Collections. 49 [53 and 54]. See Adolf Furtwängler, Neue Denkmäler antiker Kunst III: Antiken in den Museen von Amerika (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1905), 2:241–80, from the series Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München,

329

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330

Philosophische-Philologische und Historische Klasse; and George Henry Chase, Greek and Roman Sculpture in American Collections (1919; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924). 50 [55]. See José Pijoán, Antique Marbles in the Collection of the Hispanic Society of America (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1917), a work not listed by Philippart; see note 46 [50], above. 51 [56 and 57]. See Lacey Davis Caskey, Catalogue of Greek and Roman Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1925); and Charles Picard, La sculpture antique de Phidias à l’ère byzantine (Paris: H. Renouard, 1922–26), 2:133. 52 [58]. See G. Richter, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Bronzes. 53 [59]. See Wirt de Vivier Tassin, Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection of Gems in the United States National Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902); Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, Catalogue of Engraved Gems of Classical Style (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1920); and Caskey, “The Warren Collection of Engraved Gems.” 54 [60]. See Special Catalogue of the Collection of Antiquities Exhibited by Signor Alessandro Castellani of Rome (Philadelphia: E. Stern, 1876); and George Henry Chase, The Loeb Collection of Arretine Pottery (New York: privately printed, 1908). 55. [new note] See book 1, part 3, chapter 2, [64–65], above.—Ed. 56 [61]. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, already in possession of the Way collection, created a special department devoted to Egyptian art in 1902. The Art Institute of Chicago’s 1898 Catalogue of Objects in the Collection lists a collection of Egyptian antiquities, the gift of Henry H. Getty, Norman Wait Harris, and Charles L. Hutchinson. 57 [62]. See the Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin beginning in 1905, especially the April issues of 1905, 1909, 1911, and 1913.

58 [63]. See the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning in 1907, especially the issues of January and October 1914, February 1915, and March 1918, a special number describing the expedition of 1916–17. 59 [64]. Along with Henry Getty and Norman Harris, these collectors underwrote the formation of the Art Institute’s Egyptian collections, though these remained less important than those in Boston and New York. 60 [65 and 66]. See Egyptian Antiquities in the Pier Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906); and T. George Allen, “Egyptian Objects in the Collection of Mr. Walter A. Roselle,” Art in America 10 ( June 1922): 173–78. In the Roselle collection, these objects included glass, jewelry, and assorted day-to-day articles. 61 [67]. See Cary, “The Theodore M. Davis Bequest.” See also book 2, chapter 1, “Eclecticism,” [90], above. 62 [68]. See, for example, Immanuel M. Casanowicz, The Collection of Ancient Oriental Seals in the United States National Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926). 63 [69]. See Walter A. Roselle, “Three Examples of Ancient Babylonian Art,” Art in America 11 (October 1923): 324–27. 64 [70 and 71]. See The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Today, along with the institute, the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also possess important Assyrian collections. 65 [72]. [Reference uncertain; Brimo refers the reader to chapter 5 of a book he neglects to specify.—Ed.] 66 [73]. See Koechlin, Souvenirs d’un vieil amateur d’art d’Extrême-Orient. 67 [74]. Paul J. Sachs, for example, whose collections of drawings and prints would gain great importance and whose influence after 1919 on the understanding of French

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art in general and French nineteenthcentury art in particular would be enormous, took an interest in Arab miniatures. 68 [75]. See Arthur Upham Pope, “Introduction: Rugs,” in Laurvick et al., Catalogue of the Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection, 78n7, which, in discussing [Mrs.] Hearst, also touches upon a number of her contemporaries. 69 [76]. See Handbook of the Collection (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1936), 42. 70 [77]. See “The Exhibition of the Havemeyer Collection,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 25 (March 1930): 64. 71 [78]. See “The Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection.” 72 [79]. The McIlhennys donated their collection to the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in 1921, although with Frances, like her husband a museum patron, retaining usufruct during her lifetime; see Kimball et al., “The McIlhenny Bequest and Exhibition,” 87–108. 73 [79bis]. [Note omitted; Brimo inadvertently placed a redundant note 79 in the main text and so never completed this one.—Ed.] 74 [80]. See Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl, preface to “Rugs” in Corcoran Gallery of Art, Illustrated Handbook of the W. A. Clark Collection, 79–82. 75 [81]. See Catalogue of the Exceedingly Valuable Ancient and Modern Paintings, Extraordinary Antique Rugs, and Beautiful Old Tapestries, Belonging to the Estate of the Late Charles T. Yerkes; and John Kimberly Mumford, Yerkes Collection of Oriental Carpets: A Limited De Luxe Portfolio (London: B. T. Batsford, 1911). 76 [82]. Today in the collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in New York. 77 [83]. See “Handbook of European and American Art,” Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin (1931). [Citation incomplete.—Ed.] 78 [84]. See Sarah Gore Flint, “Rugs Lent from the Collection of Dr. George A. Kennedy

and Mrs. Mary Price Kennedy,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 11 (February 1913): 2–5. 79 [85]. See James B. Musick, “The Ballard Rug Collection,” St. Louis Museum Bulletin 14 ( July 1929): 30–31; “The James F. Ballard Collection of Oriental Rugs,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 18 (October 1923): 221–23; and Charles Percy Davis, “The James F. Ballard Collection of Oriental Rugs,” St. Louis Museum Bulletin 14 (December 1929): 54–67. 80 [86]. See Catalogue des anciennes faïences persanes: Damas, Rhodes, et Koubatcha, composant la collection de T. B. Whitney (Paris: G. Petit, 1910). The T. B. Whitney collection is today in Paris at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. 81 [87]. See Art Institute, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (1920). 82 [88]. See Carroll, An Illustrated Catalogue of the Important and Interesting Collection of Beautiful Pottery Vases of Eastern Origin [. . .] Being the Collection of the Widely Known Connoisseur Mr. Thomas B. Clarke. 83 [89]. See The V. Everit Macy Collection: Including Rare Important Persian and Mesopotamian Pottery, Persian and Indian Miniatures, Persian Brocades and Velvet Carpets (New York: American Art Association, 1938). 84 [90]. See Hervey Edward Wetzel, “Examples of Persian Painting and Drawing from the Ross Collection,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 13 ( June 1915): 45–46. Edward Forbes and, upon his arrival in Boston, Paul J. Sachs both supported Ross in these efforts. 85 [91]. See René Jean, “Une collection d’art asiatique: La collection Victor Goloubew,” Les Arts 145 ( January 1914): 10–31; Florence Virginia Paul, “The Goloubew Collection of Persian and Indian Paintings,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 13 (February 1915): 1–16; and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Les miniatures orientales de la collection

331

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332

Goloubew au Museum of Fine Arts de Boston (Paris: G. van Oest, 1929). [According to Paul, the manuscript to which Brimo refers was the Materia Medica, written and illustrated by Abdallah-ibn-el-Fadl in 1222 AD.—Ed.] 86 [92]. See The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, in Commemoration of the Dedication of the Oriental Institute Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). 87 [93]. See Clark, The Gothic Revival. 88 [94]. See, on a related subject, René Lanson, Le goût du Moyen-Âge en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: G. van Oest, 1926), chapter 3, “Le Moyen-Âge en France,” 28–49. 89 [95]. It would be interesting to investigate whether, beyond simple topography, nostalgia for Gothic architecture was not a contributing factor in the development of that American architectural expression, the skyscraper. 90 [96]. These two collections [Ellis and Pell] are today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; see Bashford Dean, Handbook of Arms and Armor, European and Oriental, Including the William H. Riggs Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1921), 17. 91 [97 and 98]. See Bashford Dean, “Rutherford Stuyvesant,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 4 (September 1909): 154; Kenyon Cox, “Rutherford Stuyvesant,” Burlington Magazine, December 1909, 184–85; and “In Memory of Bashford Dean, 1867–1928,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 24 ( January 1929): 5–6. 92 [99]. M. H. de Young, who had an interest in most everything, purchased fifteen full suits of armor, today in San Francisco; see book 2, chapter 1, “Eclecticism,” [81–82], above. See also Driscoll, The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. 93 [100]. See Bashford Dean, “The William H. Riggs Collection of Arms and Armor,”

Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 9 (March 1914): 66–74. 94 [101]. See Bashford Dean, Catalogue of European Daggers, Including the Ellis, de Dino, Riggs, and Reubell Collections (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1929). Reubell donated his collection in memory of his mother, Julia C. Coster, and wife, Adeline E. Post of New York. 95 [102]. See Stephen V. Grancsay, “The Bashford Dean Memorial Collection,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 25 (April 1930): 86–94. 96 [103]. See, for example, George R. Conroy, The John Woodman Higgins Armory of the Worcester Pressed Steel Co. (London: Constable, 1931). 97 [104]. See Bashford Dean, introduction to “Armor,” in The Cleveland Museum of Art: Catalogue of the Inaugural Exhibition (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1916). 98 [105]. See Helen Ives Gilchrist, A Catalogue of the Collection of Arms and Armor Presented to the Cleveland Museum of Art by Mr. and Mrs. John Long Severance (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1924). 99 [106]. See, for example, Phyllis Ackerman, A Catalogue of the Tapestries in the Collection of Frank Gair Macomber (Boston: privately printed, 1928), 1, 3, 7, 17, 20–21, 27, 50, 59, 87, 89, 91, and 100; and Ackerman, The Rockefeller-McCormick Tapestries: Three Early Sixteenth-Century Tapestries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932). 100 [107]. See Joseph Breck, “The Tapestry Exhibition,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 23 ( June 1928): 147–54, ( July 1928): 178–85. 101 [108 and 109]. See George Leland Hunter, Tapestries of Clarence H. Mackay (New York: privately printed, 1925). This last example is today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 102 [110 and 111]. See Valentiner, The Clarence H. Mackay Collection: Italian Schools. The

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Simon Marmion altarpiece is today at the National Gallery of London. 103 [111bis]. Moore was the first director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and author of The Development and Character of Gothic Architecture (New York: Macmillan, 1890). 104 [112 and 113]. Henry Adams’s Mont SaintMichel and Chartres (1905; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1913) was widely read in the United States, republished in numerous editions. Arthur Kingsley Porter’s first book was The Construction of Lombard and Gothic Vaults (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911). 105 [113bis]. [Note omitted.—Ed.] 106 [114]. See Catalogue des sculptures, tableaux, tapis, &c. formant la collection d’objets d’art du Musée Van Stolk à Haarlem (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1912). 107 [114bis]. See Joseph Breck, “The First Year at the Cloisters,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 22 ( June 1927): 158– 60; Breck, The Cloisters, a Brief Guide (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1926); and Jean Vallery-Radot, “Pierres qui roulent,” La Renaissance 9 (1926): 91–102. The Cloisters have been reinstalled more exactly and more archaeologically under the supervision of James Joseph Rorimer, curator at the Metropolitan Museum, thanks to the generosity of the Rockefellers. A guide written by James Joseph Rorimer [The Cloisters: The Building, and the Collection of Medieval Art, in Fort Tyron Park, New York (New York: George Grady Press, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1938)] is in preparation. 108 [115]. Mrs. Dearth, the former Cornelia Van Rensselaer Vail, still lives with the collection in Héricy, France. 109 [116]. See Garrett Chatfield Pier, “The Blair Collection, Chicago,” Art in America 3 (February 1915): 71–77, and (April 1915): 119–23.

110 [117]. See, for instance, Catalogue of the “Mary Blair” Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Art (Lent by Mrs. Chauncey J. Blair) (Buffalo: Albright Art Gallery, 1915). The following year, the collection was lent to the Cleveland Museum of Art for its inaugural exhibition. 111 [118]. Most of the medieval sculpture in the [Henry] Walters collection was acquired following the war. The real popularity of Romanesque art in the United States took off only around 1919; see, for instance, Arthur Kingsley Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, 9 vols. (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1923). Art Studies was founded by art historians at Princeton and Harvard in 1922; the first issue appeared the following year. 112 [119]. See book 2, chapter 1, “Eclecticism,” [88]. 113 [120]. See Fiske Kimball, “The Display Collection of the Art of the Middle Ages,” Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin 26 (April 1931): 3–27; and Lucien J. Demotte, “The Pitcairn Collection,” Formes 28–29 (1932): 307–8. 114 [121]. See Arthur Kingsley Porter, “Romanesque Capitals,” Fogg Museum Notes 1 (1922): 23–36. 115 [122]. Joseph Breck, “A King of Judah and Other Mediaeval Sculptures,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 16 (March 1921): 48–52. 116 [123]. See René Brimo, “La sculpture romane française dans les collections américaines,” in preparation. 117 [124]. See W. G. Blaikie Murdoch, “The Hispanic Museum of New York,” Connoisseur 49 (September 1917): 23–30. Huntington was the society’s first president. Regarding the diffusion of the Spanish and Portuguese languages, literature, and art, see La Revue Hispanique, published bimonthly in Paris. 118 [125]. See Albert Van de Put, “An American Collection of Spanish Pottery,” Burlington Magazine, November 1915, 67–72.

333

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334

119 [126]. See book 2, chapter 1, “Eclecticism,” [96]. 120 [127]. The Bliss collection, formerly in Paris, is today in Washington. [In 1940, it was presented to Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.—Ed.] 121 [128]. See, for example, Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind: A History of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1925). 122 [129]. See Tallmadge, The Story of Architecture in America, 162–65. 123 [130]. See book 1, part 1, “Looking Backward,” [14–22], and part 2, chapter 2, “The Search for a National Style,” [36–43]. 124 [131]. These works are now at the stateowned Philipse Manor Hall in Yonkers, New York. 125 [132]. See De Luxe Illustrated Catalogue of Early American Portraits Collected by Mr. Thomas B. Clarke; and Portraits by Early American Artists of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries Collected by Thomas B. Clarke (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Museum of Art, 1928). 126 [133]. See Charles Henry Hart, Historical Descriptive and Critical Catalogue of Works of American Artists in the Collection of Herbert L. Pratt (New York: privately printed, 1917). 127 [134]. See Kent and Levy, Catalogue of an Exhibition of American Paintings, Furniture, Silver, and Other Objects of Art (1625–1825). [A long phrase from the catalogue introduction has been interpolated into Brimo’s text to complete a description.—Ed.] 128 [135]. “A Gift of Church Silver,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 9 (October 1911): 50. 129 [136]. See Early American Paintings: Catalogue of an Exhibition Held in the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1917). For an inventory of works by Pratt and Clarke, see “List of Contributors,” unpaginated appendix.

130 [137]. See, for example, Lena May McCauley, “Friends of American Art [in Chicago],” Art and Archaeology 12 (September–October 1921): 173–78. The Friends of American Art was founded in 1909. 131 [138]. See Laurence Vail Coleman, “La législation des monuments historiques aux États-Unis d’Amérique,” Mouseion 27–28 (1934): 254–63. 132 [139 and 140]. See Henry Watson Kent, “Examples of Furniture from the Bolles Collection, the Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 5 ( January 1910): 5–16; and Richard Townley Haines Halsey, “The Palmer Collection of Eighteenth-Century American Furniture,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 13 (December 1918): 251–53. 133 [141]. See Irving Whitall Lyon, The Colonial Furniture of New England: A Study of the Domestic Furniture in Use in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891). 134 [142 and 143]. See Lockwood, A Collection of English Furniture of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century. Other well-known collections were formed in subsequent years; see, for instance, Wallace Nutting, Furniture of the Pilgrim Century (1620–1720), Including Colonial Utensils and Hardware (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1921); [William Henry Holmes], “Pennsylvania Furniture in the Reifsnyder Collection,” Art and Archaeology 27 (May 1929): 224–34; and The Collections in the Avery Memorial, 78. 135 [144]. See, for example, Halsey and Cornelius, A Handbook of the American Wing, 225–57; and Halsey and Cornelius, “WallPapers and Paint in the American Wing,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 19 (October 1924): 235–39. 136 [145]. See Bashford Dean and Alexander McMillan Welch, The Dyckman House: Built Around 1783, Restored and Presented to the City of New York in mcmxvi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1916).

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137 [146]. See Frank Weitenkampf, The Eno Collection of New York City Views (New York: New York Public Library, 1925). 138 [147]. See Holger Cahill, “American FolkArt,” Formes 23 (March 1932): 232–34. 139 [148]. The Peabody held, among other articles, an admirable set of Mayan objects, a portion of which now fills a room at the Fogg Art Museum at the same university. 140 [149, 150, 151, and 152]. See, for example, Philip Ainsworth Means and Joseph Breck, Peruvian Textiles: Examples of the Pre-Incaic Period, with a Chronology of Early Peruvian Cultures (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1930); Edwin Atlee Barber, Catalogue of Mexican Majolica Belonging to Mrs. Robert W. de Forest (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1911); [Barber, “Mexican Maiolica in America,” Art in America 3 (December 1914): 23–31]; Catalogue of Indian Metalwork in the Baltimore Museum [citation unidentified.—Ed.]; and Marius de Zayas, “Negro Art,” Arts 3 (March 1923): 199–205. 141 [153]. See, for instance, Loan Exhibition of Objects Used in Religious Ceremonies and Charms and Implements for Divinations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1892). Chapter 4: Staying in Touch with the Contemporary Scene 1. Émile Durand-Gréville, “La peinture aux États-Unis: Les galeries privées,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2nd ser., 36 ( July 1887): 65–75, and (September 1887): 250–55. In the second installment of this essay, Durand-Gréville focuses on collections discussed in book 1, part 3, chapter 1, “The Taste for Anecdote and Realism,” [48– 60], above. 2. Léonce Bénédite, “Les collections d’art aux États-Unis,” Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne 23 ( January 1908): 21, 162–76. “America,” Bénédite notes, “is beginning to understand and acquire a taste for his-

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

tory” (21). The article seems beholden to La Farge and Jaccaci, Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections. See, on this subject, Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner’s astute remark that the first collectors of Rembrandt, Havemeyer among them, were interested in the painter’s early work specifically and exclusively. [“The first generations of Rembrandt collectors in America, whose characteristic representative was H. O. Havemeyer, was interested only in the . . . realistic paintings of the [16]30s, solidly drawn and painted with firm technic.” Valentiner, “Important Rembrandts in American Collections,” 3.—Ed.] Thomas Ellis Kirby, Catalogue of the Art Collection Formed by the Late Mrs. Mary J. Morgan (New York: American Art Gallery, 1886). [Brimo gives no source for the auction prices he provides.—Ed.] See Catalogue of Paintings in Oil and Water Colors, the Private Collection of Mr. J. Abner Harper (New York: Fifth Avenue Galleries, 1892). Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol. 2, “The Collection of D. W. Powers,” 115–18. See Illustrated Catalogue of a Highly Important Collection of Master Works by Distinguished Painters of the French, Early English, Dutch, and Flemish School, Belonging to E M. Harris, Edward Holbrook, and T. J. Blakeslee (New York: American Art Association, 1899). See Catalogue of Valuable Paintings Collected by the Late F. O. Matthiessen (New York: American Art Association, 1902). See The Collection of Mrs. E. LeRoy Stewart; Also a Number of Important Addition by the Great Masters (New York: Fifth Avenue Galleries, 1904). See Collection of Oil Paintings of T. S. Wigglesworth of Boston (New York: Fifth Avenue Galleries, 1900).

335

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11. See Collection of Oil Paintings of David T. Buzby (New York: Fifth Avenue Galleries, 1900). 12. See Catalogue of the Permanent Collection of Paintings (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Museum Association, 1913). 13. Ibid. 14 [14 and 15]. Art Institute, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (1898). In Canada, of the two major collectors, Sir George Drummond and Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, the former held works by Géricault, Corot, Daubigny, and even a studio interior by Degas; the latter, who specialized in older paintings, also owned works by Delacroix, Daumier, Monticelli, and Troyon. See Emil Waldmann, “Modern French Pictures: Some American Collections,” Burlington Magazine, April 1910, 62–66. 15 [16 and 17]. See Art Institute, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (1898); and Art Institute, A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection. 16. [new note] See James William Pattison, “The Layton Art Gallery of Milwaukee,” Brush and Pencil 3 ( January 1899): 202–7, 209–13, 215–16.—Ed. 17 [18]. Waldmann, “Modern French Pictures.” 18 [19]. See Catalogue of the Private Collection of Valuable Modern Paintings Principally of the Barbizon School Belonging to Mr. Frederic Bonner (New York: American Art Association, 1900). 19 [20]. It was at the [World’s Columbian E] xposition that Isabella Stewart Gardner met [Anders] Zorn. 20 [21]. See Rich, “A Century of Collecting in America,” 52. [Apparent miscitation; page range for Rich’s contribution to Illustrated Guide is 43–45.—Ed.] The catalogue [for the 1885 exhibition] was entitled Works in Oils and Pastels by the Impressionists of Paris. The American Art Association, headquartered at New York’s Madison Square, had been granted tax-exempt sta-

tus in 1885. After a month, the exhibition was moved to the National Academy of Design[, also in New York]. The following year a number of commercial galleries attempted to place paintings of their own, delaying the exhibition until 1887. According to Durand-Ruel’s own unpublished notes, this time, Degas and Cassatt were represented, as were Puvis de Chavannes (for the first time in America), [Henri] Rousseau, Delacroix, Daubigny, and Henner. [Brimo does not suggest where he consulted Durand-Ruel’s personal papers, but very probably he did so at the Archives Durand-Ruel in Paris; see Paul Durand-Ruel, Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (1831–1923), revised, corrected, and annotated by Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel (Paris: Flammarion, 2014). An earlier version, Archives de l’Impressionisme (Paris and New York: privately printed, 1939), edited by Lionello Venturi, was in production as Brimo revised his dissertation for publication.—Ed.] 21 [22]. See B. Burroughs, Catalogue of Paintings, 219. Waldmann, in his “Modern French Pictures,” previously cited, demonstrated that no appreciation of Impressionist painting was possible without taking works in American collections into account, and that was in 1910. Imagine what he would have to say in 1938! 22 [23]. See Robert B. Woodward, Illustrated Catalogue of the Private Collection of Valuable Modern Paintings Belonging to Mr. George N. Tyner (New York: American Art Association, 1901). 23 [24]. See Thomas Ellis Kirby, Catalogue of Mr. E. F. Milliken’s Private Collection of Valuable Paintings (New York: American Art Association, 1902). 24 [25]. See Art Institute, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (1898); at that time, [Cyrus] McCormick’s collection was on loan to the museum.

Notes to Pages 257–259

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25 [26]. See La Farge and Jaccaci, Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections, 1:257. Pope owned, in addition, a number of Japanese prints and engravings by Dürer, Méryon, Haden, and Whistler. 26 [27]. Waldmann, “Modern French Pictures.” 27 [28]. See “The Potter Palmer Collection of Paintings,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 16 (May 1922): 37–38. 28 [29]. Alexandre, “La collection Havemeyer.” 29 [29bis]. See Georges Pierre François Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin: Essai de classement chronologique des œuvres d’Auguste Rodin (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1929), “Avant-Propos,” 22–23; and catalogue proper. [Grappe makes no mention of Rodin being criticized by the press, however.—Ed.] 30. See Woodward, Catalogue of the Private Art Collection of Thomas B. Clarke. 31 [30bis]. See B. Burroughs, “The Jesup Collection.” 32. [new note] Charles de Kay, introduction to Robert B. Woodward, Catalogue of American Paintings Belonging to William T. Evans (New York: American Art Association, 1900), 5.—Ed. 33 [31]. See ibid., 5–9. 34 [31bis]. See book 2, chapter 2, “The Notion of the ‘Old Master,’ ” [105], above. 35 [32]. See La Follette, Art in America, 194–95. 36 [33]. See Catalogue of Paintings in the Permanent Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts: Cassatt, catalogue nos. 275–76; Melchers, catalogue nos. 340–45. 37 [34]. See Art Institute, A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection, 157–58. 38 [35]. Focillon, La peinture aux XIXe et XXe siècles, vol. 2, chapter 3, “Le Génie Nomade: Whistler,” 190–99. 39 [36]. See List of Paintings, Pastels, Drawings, Prints, and Copper Plates by and Attributed to American and European Artists, Together with A List of Original Whistleriana in the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery, 1928).

40 [37]. See Catalogue of Oil Paintings, Water Colors, and Drawings of the Late Charles M. Kurtz, Director of the Albright Knox Gallery, preface by Carleton Sprague (New York: Fifth Avenue Galleries, 1910), 7–13. 41 [38]. See Guy Pène du Bois, “Mistresses of Famous American Collections: The Collection of Mrs. E. H. Harriman,” Arts and Decoration 7 (April 1917): 291–96. 42. [new note] Note omitted; source unidentified.—Ed. 43 [39]. See Childe Hassam, “Twenty-Five Years of American Painting,” Art News, 14 April 1928, 22–37; and Forbes Watson, “The Whitney Museum of Art,” Arts 16 ( January 1930): 291. 44 [40]. See Hassam, “Twenty-Five Years of American Painting.” 45 [41]. See La Follette, Art in America, 308. 46 [42]. See Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr Jr., eds., Art in America in Modern Times (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1934), “The Impact of Modern Art,” 34–42: “Most critics and artists greeted the show with ridicule and abuse” (35). 47 [43]. See Daniel Catton Rich, The Arthur Jerome Eddy Collection of Modern Paintings and Sculpture (Chicago: Art Institute, 1931), figs. 12 and 32. 48 [44]. See Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr., The Lillie P. Bliss Collection (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934). 49 [45]. See Ambroise Vollard, Souvenirs d’un marchand de tableaux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1937), 153. 50 [46]. See George Boas, The Cone Collection of Baltimore, Maryland: Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore: privately printed, 1934). 51 [47]. See Henry McBride, “Hamilton Easter Field’s Career,” Arts 3 ( January 1923): 3–5; and Maurice Sterne, “Field, the True Amateur,” Arts 3 ( January 1923): 6–7. 52 [48 and 49]. See Forbes Watson, “The John Quinn Collection,” Arts 9 ( January 1926):

337

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338

5–21, and (February 1926): 77–92; and Walter Pach, “Georges Seurat,” Arts 3 (March 1923): 161–74. On critics expressing views concerning artistic influences on Seurat et al., see Amédée Ozenfant, La peinture moderne (Paris: G. Crès, 1927). 53 [50]. See Stephan Bourgeois, The Adolph Lewisohn Collection of Modern French Paintings and Sculptures, with an Essay on French Painting During the Nineteenth Century and Notes on Each Artist’s Life and Works (New York: E. Weyhe, 1928). 54. Stephan Bourgeois, “The Passion of Art Collecting: Notes on the Adolph Lewisohn Collection,” Art News, 14 April 1928, 63–65; and Sam Lewisohn, “Is Collecting an Art?” Parnassus 6 (October 1934): 14–15. 55 [51]. See Forbes Watson, “The John T. Spaulding Collection,” Arts 8 (December 1925): 321–44; and Arthur Upham Pope, “French Paintings in the John T. Spaulding Collection,” Art News, 26 April 1930, 97–128. 56 [52]. See Before Manet to Modigliani: from the Chester Dale Collection (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929); and Maud Dale, “French Art in the Chester Dale Collection,” Art News, 27 April 1929, 46–55. 57 [53]. See Forbes Watson, “The Barnes Foundation,” Arts 3 ( January 1923): 9–23, and (February 1923): 140–49. See also Paul Philippe Cret, “The Building for the Barnes Foundation,” Arts 3 ( January 1923): 8. 58 [54]. See Albert C. Barnes, “Some Remarks on Appreciation,” Arts 3 ( January 1923): 25–29; and Barnes, The Art in Painting (Philadelphia: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 247: “It may be said that in Renoir and Cézanne design is more completely realized in terms of color than in any of the early great painters.” 59 [54bis]. See, for example, Albert C. Barnes and Violette de Masia: The French Primitives and Their Forms from Their Origin to

the End of the Fifteenth Century (Merion, Pa.: Barnes Foundation Press, 1931). 60 [55]. The intelligent, highly sensible policies of the former curator of the Smith College Museum of Art, Alfred Vance Churchill, whose example young curators everywhere might consider, deserve special mention; see, for example, Alfred Vance Churchill, “Our Concentration Plan,” Bulletin of the Smith College Museum of Art 13 (May 1932): 2–22. 61 [56]. See, for example, Venturi and Marriott, History of Art Criticism. 62 [57]. See, for example, Vollard, Souvenirs d’un marchand de tableaux, chapter 8, “Amateurs et collectionneurs,” 126–69; and Marie Dormoy, “Ambrose Vollard’s Private Collection,” Formes 17 (September 1931): 112–13. Chapter 5: The Modern Art Museum 1. See book 1, part 2, chapter 2, “The Search for a National Style,” [38–39]. 2. See “Historical Society Gets Bryant Relics,” New York Times, 6 November 1910, 13. 3. See Snow, A History of Boston, 335–37. 4. See William Clifford, comp., Bibliography of Museums and Museology (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1923); Handbook of American Museums, with an Appended List of Museums in Canada and Newfoundland (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1932); and the American Art Annual, edited by Florence N. Levy, published by the American Federation of Art, beginning in 1903. 5. See Henri Focillon, “Paradoxe sur les musées français,” Cahiers de la République des lettres, des Sciences, et des Arts 13 (1929): 227–34; and René Brimo, “Réalisation pratique pour une renaissance du sentiment esthétique,” Beaux-Arts: Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, n.s. 11, 17 September 1937, 2. 6. See Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America.”

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7. See Henri Focillon, “La conception moderne du musée,” in Actes du Congrès d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1921–24), 1:85–94. 8. See Keppel and Duffus, The Arts in American Life. 9. The Association of American Museums was established in 1908. 10. See Goode, Report on the United States National Museum; and Holmes, National Collection of Fine Arts, chapter 6: “Art Education Outside the Schools,” 63–89. 11. Most recently, of course, there has been Andrew W. Mellon’s gift in 1937 of funds for the construction of a building to house these collections on the National Mall. 12. See Alfred Goldsborough Mayer, “The Status of Public Museums in the United States,” Science, 29 May 1903, 843–51. Most American museums were established by major gifts from generous patrons. With the larger role played by museums in the life of cities, certain municipalities (Boston, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Toledo, etc.) and state governments have lent their support, though with no effect on administrative structure. Most revenues, however, come from gifts and annual memberships by individuals. 13. Jarves, “On the Formation of Galleries of Art,” 106. 14. See Samuel D. Warren, “The New Museum,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 5 [misnumbered 4] [special issue no. 27] ( June 1907): 27–30. Warren describes the planned museum as comprising seven departments: Chinese and Japanese Art; Classical Art; Egyptian Art; Pictures (including Prints); Western Art (other than Pictures); Library and Photography Collection; and Collection of Casts. 15. See Art Institute of Chicago, A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection. 16. See Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Catalogue of Paintings (Boston: The Museum, 1921).

17. See Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Guide to the Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1934): vol. 1, “Egyptian Art,” 1–18; vol. 2, “Medieval Art,” 1–16. 18. See Edwin Ernest Lowe, A Report on American Museum Work (Edinburgh: United Kingdom Carnegie Trustees, 1928). 19 [19 and 20]. See “Guidance in the Gallery: The Office of Docent,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 5 (April 1907): 9; and Laurence Vail Coleman, “Le rôle éducatif des musées: L’enseignement dans les musées américains,” Mouseion 3 (December 1927): 240–43. 20 [21]. See Keppel and Duffus, The Arts in American Life, 35–62. 21 [22]. See Charles M. Kurtz, Illustrations (Three Hundred and Thirty-Six Engravings) from the Art Gallery of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Philadelphia: G. Barrie, 1893). The buildings of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in Elkins Park and the Art Institute of Chicago were built for these World’s Fairs. 22 [23]. There were major exhibitions in England, as well: Art Treasures in Manchester in 1857 and 1863, and annual shows at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, beginning in 1868. 23. [new note] See Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration.—Ed. 24. See the catalogues of the Founders Day Exhibitions held at the Carnegie Institute between 1895 and 1933, at the Carnegie Corporation, Pittsburgh. 25. See Henry Watson Kent, “The Why and Wherefore of Museum Planning,” Architectural Forum 56 ( June 1932): 529–32. 26. See Benjamin Ives Gilman, “Popular Education in Fine Art in the United States,” in Report of the Commissioner for Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1913 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), 1:277–97; and Edith Abbott, “L’œuvre éducative du Metropolitan Museum of Art,” in Actes du Congrès d’Histoire de l’Art

339

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27.

340

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1921–24), 1:56–61. A similar attempt was made in 1930 at the Delacroix Exhibition in Paris, at which [musical] works the artist had liked were performed. It is interesting to note that at the Fogg in 1938 the Friends of the Museum and Friends of Music were merged. See Benjamin Ives Gilman, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1870–1920 (Boston: The Museum, 1920); Julia de Wolfe Gibbs Addison, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Giving a Descriptive and Critical Account of Its Treasures, Which Represent the Arts and Crafts from Remote Antiquity to the Present Time (Boston: L. Page, 1924); and Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “The New Museum at Boston,” Burlington Magazine, February 1910, 293–96. See Keppel and Duffus, The Arts in American Life, 35–62. See Benjamin Ives Gilman, Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1923). See Edward Waldo Forbes, “The Relation of the Art Museum to a University,” Proceedings of the American Association of Museums 5 (1911): 47–55; and Charles Diehl, “Universités et musées d’Amérique: Tendances nouvelles,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 7th ser., 15 May 1928, 427–50. See Edgerton Swartwout, The Yale Gallery of Fine Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929). See, for example, Sirén, Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Paintings, introduction, ix: “[E]ven in the first year [1895] originals began to appear [at the Fogg].” Today Yale’s School of Fine Arts is larger than the Department of the History of Art directed by Theodore Sizer, with a number of important foreign scholars on its faculty: Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtseff, Marcel Aubert, and Henri Focillon.

35. See Fogg Art Museum, Handbook (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 222–23. 36. See Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “The Museum of Historic Art [at Princeton],” Art and Archaeology 20 (September 1925): 113–14. 37. See Getz, The University Museum: Section of Oriental Art; and University of Pennsylvania Museum, Handbook: Primitive Art of Africa and the South Seas. 38. Harvard has a separate study collection, as does the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. 39. See Sirén, Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Paintings. 40. See, for instance, Charles Russell Richards, The Industrial Museum (New York: Macmillan, 1925). 41. [new note] See book 1, part 2, chapter 1, “Encyclopedic Spirit,” [37–35].—Ed. 42 [41]. See Mottet, Art in Exhibitions. 43. See William Mills Ivins Jr., Address at the Cooper Union Museum (New York: Pandlich Press, 1932). 44 [42bis]. See Trapier, Catalogue of Paintings (14th and 15th Centuries) in the Collections of the Hispanic Society of America. 45 [43]. See Carnegie Institute, List of Paintings, Drawings, and Japanese Prints in the Permanent Collections of the Department of Fine Arts (Pittsburgh: The Institute, 1912). 46 [44]. See the annual reports prepared for the trustees and various exhibition reviews, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. 47 [45]. Frick hoped to provide the United States its own Wallace Collection, and Isabella Stewart Gardner’s sensibility was very similar to that of Nélie Jacquemart. 48 [46]. See book 2, chapter 4, “Staying in Touch with the Contemporary Scene,” [156–57]. 49 [47]. Where presentation is concerned, see the important anthology Muséographie: Architecture et aménagement des musées d’art; Conférence Internationale d’Études, Madrid, 1934, 2 vols. ([Paris]; Société des

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Nations, Office Internationale des Musées, Institut de Coopération Intellectuelle, [1934]). 50 [48]. At the New-York Historical Society, this style of arrangement remains in place. 51 [49]. At the end of the eighteenth century in Paris, the Musée des Monuments Français, designed and directed by Alexandre Lenoir, took a similar approach. 52 [50]. See Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Communications to the Trustees (Boston: privately printed, 1904). 53 [51]. See Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “An Art Museum for the People,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1907, 729–40. 54 [52]. See Eric MacLagan, “Les différents systèmes de présentation des collections,” in Muséographie, 1:224–45. 55 [53]. See Forest H. Cooke, “Culture and Fatigue: Reflections on Museums,” Century 111 ( January 1926): 291–96. 56 [54]. See, for example, Ernest Chesneau, “Le Metropolitan Museum of Art à NewYork,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 2nd ser., 15 October 1871, 947–53; Louis Decamps, “Un musée translatlantique,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2nd ser., 5 ( January 1872): 33–40, and (May 1872): 434–37; and André Saglio, “Le ‘Metropolitan Museum of Art’ de New-York,” La Revue Encyclopédique 1 (1891): 552–57. 57 [55 and 56]. See, for example, Weitenkampf, “Public Print Collections in the United States.” Evidence provided by the earliest collection catalogues published by American museums. 58 [57]. See, for instance, Metropolitan Museum of Art, General Guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition of 1888–89 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1888). 59 [58]. See Art Institute, Catalogue of Objects in the Collection (1898). 60 [59]. See Catalogue of Paintings in the Permanent Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

61 [60]. See Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Catalogue of Works of Art Exhibited, part 2, 4–8, catalogue nos. 11–22. 62 [61]. Berenson, “Les peintures italiennes de New-York et de Boston.” Compare Venturi, Il gusto dei primitivi. 63 [62]. According to Osvald Sirén, writing in the introduction to his Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Paintings, introduction, x: “Special emphasis has been laid on Greek sculpture and early Italian religious painting because they are of unique significance and fundamental importance in the history of art.” 64 [63]. See E. Robinson, Catalogue of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Vases in the Museum of Fine Arts. 65. [new note] Okakura was invited by William Sturgis Bigelow to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1904 and became the first head of the Asian Art Division in 1910.—Ed. 66 [64]. See March, China and Japan in Our Museums. 67 [65]. See, for example, Dean, Handbook of Arms and Armor, European and Oriental, 16–23. [In particular, the items collected by Rutherford Stuyvesant and, of course, William Riggs.—Ed.] 68. [new note] See Porter, The Construction of Lombard and Gothic Vaults.—Ed. 69 [66]. See Gilchrist, A Catalogue of the Collection of Arms and Armor Presented to the Cleveland Museum of Art by Mr. and Mrs. John Long Severance. 70 [67, 68, and 69]. See, for instance, Jean Guiffrey, “Tableaux français conservés au Musée de Boston, et dans quelques collections de cette ville,” in Mélanges offerts à Henri Lemonnier, member de l’Institut, &c., par la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français, ses amis et ses élèves (Paris: Édouard Champion, 1913), 533–52, as well as many of the museum collection catalogues [cited] previously (and subsequently), including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,

341

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342

Catalogue of Paintings, 112–29, catalogue nos. 304–56. 71 [70 and 71]. Courses devoted to curatorial practices organized at the Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia in 1908 and at Wellesley College in 1913 each failed in turn, and it was not until 1927 and the “Museum Course” directed at Harvard by Paul J. Sachs that the truly scholarly study of museums had its start. Most of the younger curators in America today are course graduates, the course itself being the model in its genre. The Newark Museum has experimented with a course for docents charged with museum education; see E. T. Booth, comp., Apprenticeship in the Museum (Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum of Art, 1928). [Brimo inadvertently inserted a redundant set of note numbers (66–69), the second set of which consequently lack corresponding notes; notes 70 and 71 have been reversed in order, with an interpolated passage from the text added.—Ed.] 72. [new note; redundant note 66] Because Brimo omitted this note inadvertently, his intentions remain unknown.—Ed. 73. [new note; redundant note 67] Because Brimo omitted this note inadvertently, his intentions remain unknown.—Ed. 74. [new note] See E. Robinson, Catalogue of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Vases in the Museum of Fine Arts; Sirén, Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Paintings; and Dean, Catalogue of European Daggers.—Ed. 75 [71]. See, for example, Berenson and Valentiner, Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings and Some Art Objects from the Collection of John Graver Johnson; and Berenson and William Roberts, Pictures in the Collection of P. A. B. Widener at Lynnewood Hall, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1913–16). [The contents of Brimo’s original note must have been placed here mistakenly, in lieu

of the more detailed bibliography here provided.—Ed.] 76 [72]. The most serious attempt at the genre was Metropolitan Studies (1928–37). The Brooklyn Quarterly, first published in 1913, always includes fairly extensive articles, sometimes also issued separately. 77 [73]. See René Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (1788–1850) (Paris: Hachette, 1910). 78 [74]. See James Jackson Jarves, “Art in America, Its Condition and Prospects,” Fine Arts Quarterly Review (London) 1 (May 1863): 393–401; and Jarves, “American Museums of Art,” Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, July 1879, 405–8. 79 [75]. Carl DeMuldor [Charles Henry Miller], The Philosophy of Art in America: A Dissertation upon Vital Topics of the Day, Perhaps of All Time (New York: W. R. Jenkins, 1885). 80 [76]. See, for example, J. G. Wood, “The Dulness of Museums,” Nineteenth Century 21 (March 1887): 384–96. 81 [77 and 78]. See, for example, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, An Address on the Practical Value of the American Museum (Troy, N.Y.: Stonewell Printing House, 1887); and George Brown Goode, The Museums of the Future (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1891). 82 [79]. See George Brown Goode, “Museums and Good Citizenship,” Public Opinion, 1 November 1894. 83 [80]. See, for example, George Brown Goode, The Principles of Museum Administration (New York: Coultas & Volans, 1895). 84 [81]. See Benjamin Ives Gilman, “A Selective Art Museum,” Nation, 24 May 1906, 422– 23; and Gilman, Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method. 85 [82]. See, for example, John Cotton Dana, The New Museum (Woodstock, Vt.: Elm Tree Press, 1917); Dana, Should Museums

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Be Useful? (Newark, N.J.: The Museum, 1927); [and Dana, The Gloom of the Museum (Woodstock, Vt.: Elm Tree Press, 1917)]. 86 [83]. See John Cotton Dana, “In a Changing World Should Museums Change?” Papers of the American Association of Museums, n.s., 1 (May 1926): 17–23. 87 [84]. See Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913), part 5, chapter 2: “Art and Society,” 276–93. 88 [85]. See, for example, Laurence Vail Coleman, Manual for Small Museums (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), “The Director,” 27–29. 89 [86]. See Robert Weeks de Forest, “The Importance of Art Museums in Our Smaller Cities” [1912], American Art Annual 10 (1913): 11–18. 90 [87]. See, for example, John Cotton Dana, “Un musée local en Amérique et ses efforts pour servir le bien publique,” in Actes du Congrès d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1921–24), 1:43–55.

91 [88]. See Edward Kirby Putnam, Museums Passive and Active (Davenport, Iowa: Contemporary Club, 1925), a talk read before the club on 13 April 1925. 92 [89]. See Focillon, “La conception moderne du musée.” 93 [90]. On the state of European museums in this period, see, for example, Jean Capart, Le rôle social des musées (Brussels: Revue Catholique des Idées et des Faits, 1930). 94 [91]. See, for example, Reginald C. Coxe, “American Art Ignorance,” Current Literature 34 (September 1902): 324. 95 [92]. See Edward Drummond Libbey, “Les musées d’art américain: Leur œuvre d’enseignement et la méthode du Musée d’Art de Toledo,” in Actes du Congrès d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1921–24), 1:33–42; and Ethel W. Spiller, “L’enseignement de l’histoire de l’art à la jeunesse dans les musées,” in ibid., 1:66–70. 96 [93]. See “Percentage of Attendance at Art Museums Compared to Population,” Art and Archaeology 17 ( January 1924): 75.

343

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Middle Ages. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1925. Thies, Louis. Catalogue of the Collection of Engravings Bequeathed to Harvard College by Francis Calley Gray. Cambridge, Mass.: Welch, Bigelow, 1869. The Thomas Fortune Ryan Collection of Etchings and Engravings. New York: American Art Association and Anderson Galleries, 1933. The Thomas Fortune Ryan Collection of Gothic and Renaissance Art. New York: American Art Association and Anderson Galleries, 1933. Tietze, Hans. Meisterwerke Europäischer Malerei in Amerika. Vienna: Phaidon-Verlag, 1935. ———. “The Psychology and Aesthetics of Forgery in Art.” Metropolitan Museum Studies 5 ( June 1934): 1–19. Tocqueville, Alexis de. La démocratie en Amérique. 2 vols. Paris: C. Goselin, 1835–40. Tomita, Kojiro. “The William S. and John T. Spaulding Collection of Japanese Prints.” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 20 ( June 1922): 31–35. Tourneux, Maurice. “Les galeries privées en Amérique.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ser., 40 (November 1908): 417–25. Trapier, Elizabeth du Gué. Catalogue of Paintings (14th and 15th Centuries) in the Collections of the Hispanic Society of America. New York: The Society, 1930. Tronchet, Guillaume. “La donation Edward Tuck au Petit Palais.” La Renaissance 14 ( January 1931): 2–11. Tuckerman, Henry T. American Artist Life, Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists. New York: G. Putnam & Son, 1867. University of Pennsylvania Museum. Handbook: Primitive Art of Africa and the South Seas. Philadelphia: The Museum, 1920. Valadon, René. De la contrefaçon des objets d’art aux États-Unis. Paris: L’Imprimerie de Boussod for the author, 1888. Valentiner, Wilhelm Reinhold. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings by Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century, volume 1 of

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. References to René Brimo are abbreviated R. B. Abbaye Saint-Sauveur de Figeac, 18 Abbott, Henry, 154, 162, 235 Abraham collection, 115 Adams, Alvin, 140 Adams, Charles Francis, 132 Adams, Henry, 132, 147, 167, 245 Adams, John, 111, 125 Albany, New York, 112–13, 125, 162 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 34, 37, 263, 277, 288 Allen, Joseph, 100 Allen, Russell, 219 Allen, William, 101 Allston, Washington, 101, 116, 122 Allston Club, 147 Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 138, 144, 173, 256 Alte Pinakothek, 288 Altman, Benjamin, 46, 175, 212, 227, 238 Altounian, Joseph, 8, 26 Americana, 248–52 American Academy (Richmond), 108 American Academy of Fine Arts (New York), 117, 124–25, 127, 128 American Antiquarian Society, 126 American art. See also nationalism collections with, 144, 169, 172, 174, 177 contemporary, 261–64 early colonial, 99–101 museums dedicated to, 264 post-revolution reception of, 149, 151 pre- vs. post-WWI comparisons, 264 promotion of, 125, 145, 146, 148 American Art Association, 259 American Art-Union and Apollo Association, 145 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 132 American Association for the Preservation of Natural Beauty and Historical Monuments, 250

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American Indians, 125, 158 American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, 232 American Magazine of Art, 269–70 American Museum (New York/Barnum), 113, 273 American Museum (Philadelphia/C. W. Peale), 105 American Nativism, 126 American Philosophical Society (formerly Junto), 98, 107, 108 American Quarterly (journal), 61 American Revolution, 106, 107–8, 123–25 American Schools of Classical Studies, 232 American Universal Magazine, 108 Amiens, Jumel d’, 176 Les Amis de l’Art (journal), 59 Anderson, Henry, 154–55, 235 Anderson, Larz and Isabel, 144 Anecdotes of Painting in England (Walpole), 104 Angelico, Fra Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin, 179 in collections, listed, 185, 216 Anglicans, 97 Anthology Club (journal), 108 Antiken in den Museen von Amerika (Furtwängler), 233 The Antiquities of Athens (Stuart and Revett), 104 anti-Semitism, 1, 3, 56–57 Apollo Gallery, 145 Appleton, Thomas G., 147 Archaeological Institute of America, 232 archaeology. See also Classical art and archaeology; Egyptian art and archaeology Americana ethnography, 251–52 ancient civilization studies, 133 Asian art, 227–31, 284

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archaeology (continued) Assyrian art, 154, 161, 180, 235, 236–37 Cyprian art, 155, 284 historical studies and, 154–55 interest in, 226–27, 252–54 medieval art, 241–48, 285–86 as museum collection influence, 284 museum display and object popularity, 161 Near East art, 237–41 architecture American style development, 169 colonial styles, 99 medieval collections, 241, 247 natural history museums with exhibitions of, 112 nineteenth-century eclecticism in, 150, 168–69 Venetian, in fin de siècle collections, 179 Arconati-Visconti, Marquise Costanza, 240, 292 Ardebil Mosque, 174, 239 Armory Copley collection, Plate 2b Armory Show Exhibition, 249, 265, 287 Arndt, Paul, 233 Arnold collection, 111 art academies, 108, 116–17, 124–25, 127–28 art advisors, 178, 183, 193, 221, 260 art associations, 145 art auctions, 119–20 L’art aux États-Unis (R. B. book proposal), 59–60 art books, 36, 104, 136, 141, 148, 154, 155, 265 Art Bulletin, 36–37 art clubs, 147 art critics, 148, 240, 269. See also Ruskin, John art dealers. See also Brimo, Nicolas; Brimo de Laroussilhe antiquarian, 223–24, 231, 237, 247 artists as, 118–19 colonial-era (Americana), 250 notable American, 146–47, 148–49 prints, 147–48, 149, 154, 162, 220 Art et Décoration (magazine), 269 L’art français aux Etats-Unis (Réau, L.), 213 art galleries, 119, 145, 146–47 art historians as collection advisors, 178, 220, 221 as influences, 169, 193, 204, 205, 206, 218, 219, 220–21 Art in America (Cahill and Barr), 34 Art in America (La Follette), 36

Art Institute of Chicago artist exhibits, 287 Classical art, 232, 285 collection catalogues, 288 collection development and acquisition policies, 276, 283, 284 collection donations to, 199, 200, 286 collection loans and acquisitions, 258 contemporary American art, 265 factors influencing growth of, 186 founding, 276 Impressionist art, 260, 286 Near East art, 240 Old Master acquisitions, 201 print collection, 187, 219 R. B. visit to, 34 The Artist in American Society (Harris), 61 artists American, living in Europe, 103, 116, 122, 193 American, promoting French art, 147 during American Revolution, 106 as art critics, 269 as art dealers, 118–19 as collection advisors, 183, 237, 260 early competition and challenges for American, 149 French, living in America, 116, 128–29 post-revolution network of, 117–18 purchases directly from, 149 as taste influence, 93–94, 269, 270, 298–99 art market in colonial America, 104–5 contemporary American art, 264 French dealership practices, 5–6, 8–9 nineteenth-century, 148–49, 162–63, 224 Old Masters acquisitions, 118–19, 151, 203, 224 R. B. dissertation commentaries on, 44 stock market crash impact on, 15–17 art reviews, 108, 136, 160, 269–70 Arts (magazine), 270 Arts, Beaux-Arts, Spectacles (journal), 59 Art Treasures Exhibition, 161 The Art Treasures of America (Strahan), 136, 141, 148 Arundel Society, 162 Ashburnham, Bertram IV, Earl of, 176 Asian art. See Chinese art; Oriental art Aspinwall, Anna Breck (Mrs. William Henry Aspinwall), 137

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Assyrian art, 154, 161, 180, 235, 236–37 Astor, John Jacob, 136, 143 Astor, Mrs. William, 167 Astor, William, 136 Astor Mansion, 119 Atlantic Monthly, 148, 168 Aubert, Marcel, 1, 22, 32 Augé, Claude, 18 Augé, Paul, 59–60 August II of Saxony, 90 Aumale, Henri d’Orléans, Duc d’, 193, 203, 292 Avery, Samuel P. collection of, 154, 190, 228 as print dealer, 147, 149, 162, 220 Avignon school: Adoration of the Magi, 185 Babbott, Frank Lusk, 209 Babcock, William Perkins, 219–20 Bache, Jules S., 207–8, 212 Bacon, Edward R., 199, 212 Bacon, Francis, 87, 98 Bacon, Leonard, 154 Bacri, Jacques, 8, 29, 56, 194, 237, 247 Baker, George Fisher, 144 Baker, John G., 145, 148 Baldovinetti, Alesso: Madonna and Child, 188 Ballard, James F., 239 Ballou’s Monthly, 148 Baltimore, George Calvert, Lord, 100, 102, 103 Baltimore, Maryland art awareness cultivation, 133 as cultural center, 167 growth and cultural development, 109 museums in, art, 233 museums in, natural history, 112, 123 museums in, private foundation, 11, 142, 146, 164, 281 notable collections in, 115, 119, 141–42, 163, 180–82, 232, 257, 266–67 Bancroft, John Chandler, 229 Bancroft, Samuel, 154 bande blanche/noir, 8–9, 56 Barbedienne, Ferdinand, 147, 149 Barbizon School art dealers associated with, 223 in collections, contemporary, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261 in collections, private, 136, 140, 141, 144, 147, 175, 198, 200, 299 museum acquisition policies, 286

popularity and promotion of, 132, 139, 147, 149, 261 popularity decline, 203, 258 Puritanism and love of, 223 religion and, 223 Bardac, Sigismond, 177, 194 Bardini collection, 194 Barlow, Joel, 121, 128 Barna da Siena: Crucifixion, 181 Barnard, George Grey, 12, 21, 33, 169, 193, 245– 46 Barnes, Albert C., 33, 33–34, 251, 267–68, 269 Barnes, Alfred, 46, 260 Barnes Foundation, 268, 281 Barnum, P. T., 113, 124, 125, 273 Baron, Stanislas, 176 Baroque, 153, 222–23, 294 Barr, Alfred H., 34 Barre, Isaac, 100 Barrès, Maurice, 221 Bartlett, Frederic Clay and Helen Birch, 268 Barye, Antoine-Louis artists promoting, 147 in collections, listed, 141, 172, 180, 182, 188, 189, 259 first American sales, 147 museum acquisitions, 142 Theseus and the Centaur, 142 Theseus and the Minotaur, 142 Basaiti, Marco: Pietà, 204 Baudelaire, Charles, 148, 294 Bayley, Frank William, 250 Beck, Paul, 120 Beebe, William, 153, 162 Behague, Martine-Marie-Pol, Comtesse de, 240 Belcher, Thomas, 100, 105 Belgian Gallery, 146 Bell, Clive, 290 Bell, I. C., 119 Bellini, Gentile in collections, listed, 214 Madonna and Child, 179 Bellini, Giovanni art style descriptions, 182 in collections, listed, 185, 204, 208, 209, 214, 216, 221 The Feast of the Gods (Bacchanalia), with Titian, 215, Plate 6b The Virgin and the Sleeping Child, 184 Bellini, Luigi, 7, 8

373

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374

Belmont, Auguste, 136 Belmont, Jean, 48 Benedick gallery, 146 Benguiat, Vitall, 237 Bennett, Richard, 176 Berenson, Bernard associates of, 27 as collection advisor, 178, 221 collection catalogues prepared by, 206, 288 L’évolution biographical information on, 46 as influence, 204, 205, 206, 220 Italian Renaissance studies and publications, 204, 221 as museum art consultant, 276 publications on museums, 284 Berlin Museum, 193, 235 Bermejo, Bartolomé: Santa Engracia, 179 Bernini attribution controversy, 35 Berwind, Edward, 211, 212, 213 Bey, Hakkim, 237 Bianchi, Francesco, 147 Bicci di Lorenzo: Annunciation, 181 Bickwell, Albion Harris, 147 Bigelow, William Sturgis, 228 Bing, Samuel Siegfried, 194, 228, 231, 237 Blackburn, Joseph, 103 Blair, Chauncey J., 144 Blair, Frances P., 169 Blair, Mary A. I. Mitchell (Mrs. Chauncey Blair), 246 Blake & Cunningham, 119 Blakelock, Ralph in collections, listed, 174, 186, 257, 262, 263 influences on, 261 popularity and perception of, 257, 261 Bliss, Lillie P., 46, 265 Bliss, Mildred Barnes, 169, 248 Blodgett, William T., 136, 142–43, 149, 158, 162, 201 Blumenthal, Florence, 169, 190–91, 244, 246, Plate 6a Blumenthal, George, 190–91, 244, 246, Plate 6a Bode, Wilhelm von, 193, 205, 221, 276 Böhler, Julius, 194 Boisfremont, Charles Boulanger de, 129 Bolles, H. Eugene, 251 Bonaparte, Joseph, 115, 120, 142

Bonaparte, Louis, 153 Bonheur, Rosa in collections, listed, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143 The Horse Fair, 141, 286 museum acquisitions, 286 Ready for the Market, 138 Bonnaffré, Edmond, 243 Bonner, Frederic, 258 Bonviso, Angelo, 153 books art, 36, 104, 136, 141, 148, 154, 155, 213, 265 illustrated, 148, 168 libraries and collections of, 98, 103, 108, 112, 176, 278 Borie, Adolf E., 140 Boston, Massachusetts art auction houses of, 119, 149 art clubs of, 147 artists influencing art scene in, 147 art market in, 149 arts development, 132 church architecture, 249 collection preferences, 112 collections in, notable, 113–14, 139–40, 256, 257 (see also Gardner, Isabella Stewart) as cultural center, 167 early collecting in, 20 European art exhibitions in, 117 exhibition venues in, 146 museums in, fine arts (see Museum of Fine Arts) museums in, museum academies, 114, 117, 125, 128, 146, 161–62 museums in, national, 125 museums in, natural history, 112, 273 museums in, private foundation, 178, 179, 204, 281 museums in, specialized, 125 sculptural commissions, 149 Sergovian arms and armor exhibitions in, 117 socio-cultural development and growth, 109, 132 Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, 155–56, 251 Boston Art Club, 147, 249 Boston Atheneum, 114, 117, 125, 128, 146, 161–62 Boston Museum, 112, 273

Index

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Botticelli, Sandro The Adoration of the Magi, 216 in collections, listed, 175, 208, 209, 216 The Death of Lucretius, 178, 204 Portrait of a Young Man, 188 Saint Mary Magdalen predella, 206 Boucher, François drawings, 190 paintings, 172, 176, 184, 189, 199, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 220 promotion and reception of, 223 tapestries, 175, 189, 201, 211 Vertumne and Pomone, 175 Bouguereau, Adolphe William in collections, listed, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144 exhibitions of, 146 Hesitation Between Love and Riches, 138 Return from the Harvest, 141 sales prices and popularity, 137 Boulle, Charles, 172 Bourdichon, Jean: Falconer, 186 Bourdieu, Pierre, 45 Bouts, Dirk in collections, listed, 175, 184, 185, 206, 208, 216 Moses Before the Burning Bush, 206 Portrait of a Man, 185 Virgin and Child, 184 Bowdoin, James collection acquisitions, 118 collection bequests, 114, 120, 272 collection descriptions, 114–15, 116, 124 drawing collection, 114, 217 Bowdoin College (Bowdoin Museum of Art) Assyrian art, 154 Classical art, 233 collection bequests to, 114, 120, 154, 159, 272 stagnation of, 273 Bowen’s Museum, 112 Bowrer, W. B., 239 Boydell, John, 118, 119 Breton, André, 37 Breton, Jules, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 258 Brière, Gaston, 15 Brière-Misme, Clotilde, 50 Brimmer, Martin, 132, 139, 147, 148, 149, 286 Brimo, Antoine, 1–2, 2, 4, 7, 9, 50, 237 Brimo, Elias “Joseph,” 1–2

Brimo, Ezilda (Marie-Thérèse Lascombes de Laroussilhe), 4, 6–7, 10, 24, 56–57, 61 Brimo, Jean, 1–2, 2 Brimo, Joseph le jeune, 2, 2, 8 Brimo, Nicolas. See also Brimo de Laroussilhe advice of, 24–25, 28–31, 43 children, 6–7 citizenship status, 10 death, 61 descriptions, 3, 7–8, 9 early life, 3, 4 L’évolution art dealers featuring, 194, 247 with Ezilda, 10 family background, 1–2 gambling, 50 image management, 31 language fluency, 11 mantra, 26 marriage, 4 residences, 4, 13, 56–57, 59 son’s memorial gift gift from Henri Michaux to him and Ezilda, 60 World War II, 56–57, 59 Brimo, Nicolas-René, 61, 62 Brimo, René. See also “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections”; L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections art acquisitions of, 37, Plate 3b associates, 15, 18, 26–27, 37, 46, 88 attribution controversies, 35–36 birth and name, 6 book translations, 36 in Chaponval with bike, 58 childhood, 6–7, 7, 8 collector interviews, 33, 33–34 death and burial, 60 descriptions, 18, 30, 33, 35, 58 education, art history, 1, 14–18, 48 (see also Harvard University, R. B. education) education, early, 6–7, 11, 13, 14 employment, 1, 26–27, 36, 46–47, 54 family background, 1–13, 31 father’s advice to, 24–25, 28–31, 43 fellowship awards, 19–24, 32–33 “J’aime Fortune” ex libris designs, 48, 55 “J’M FORTUNE” dial designs, 48, 49, 50 name adjustment, 34 papers of, 61 publications, 18–19, 33, 34, 54, 59–60

375

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376

Brimo, René (continued) research papers and theses, 18, 31, 36, 49 residences, 24, 32 scholarship applications, 54–55, 56, 57 travels, 15, 24, 53–54, 55 travels and networking, 29, 33, 33–34 World War II, 55–57, 59 Brimo de Laroussilhe (formerly La Fayette Art Gallery) archives of, 62 business name, 4–5, 10 business practices, 5–6, 8–9 clientele, 5, 10–13, 13, 25–26, 36 criticism of, 31 exposition sponsorships, 37 later history and ownership, 61–62 letterhead, 11 locations, 4, 9, 13, 36 marketing strategies, 5 partnerships, 5–6, 9, 10, 11 photo albums of, 5 post-WWI success of, 9–10 R. B.’s academic training benefits, 17, 50 R. B.’s American business networking and sales for, 29 R. B.’s fellowship research project benefits, 21–22, 29 sales displays, 13 sales employees for, 11 specialization, 4–5, 8 stock market crash impact on, 15–17 during World War II, 56, 59 Brimo de Laroussilhe, Albert Antoine childhood, 6–7, 7 education, 6, 11, 13, 34 gallery ownership, 61 letters to R. B. at Harvard, 24–25 religious affiliations, 31 World War II, 56, 57 British Museum, 235 Bronck, Jonas, 102 Bronzino, Agnolo Baccio Bandinelli, 179 in collections, listed, 197, 204, 214, 215 Brooklyn Atheneum, 145 Brooklyn Museum, 185, 209, 228, 250 Brooks, Peter C., Jr., 132, 140 Brouwer, Adriaen in collections, listed, 158 Landscape at Dusk, after, 186

Brown University, 105, 113 Bruegel, Pieter, the elder, 206 Brueghel, Pieter, the younger in collections, listed, 186 Crucifixion, 284 Procession to Calvary, 156 The Wedding Feast, 181 Brummer, Joseph, 8, 24, 26, 29, 30, 194, 247 Brussels Museum, 281–82 Bryan, Thomas Jefferson, 155, 160, 162 Bryant, William Cullen, 163, 203, 204, 272, 273 Bryn Athyn Cathedral, 247 Buckingham, Clarence, 229, 284 Buckingham, Kate, 169, 187 Buffalo, New York art galleries in, 34, 37, 263, 277, 288 contemporary American art collections, 263 as cultural center, 167 expositions in, 169 museum academies in, 277 museum American art encouragement, 287 private collections in, 263 Buffalo Fine Arts Academy (renamed AlbrightKnox Art Gallery), 34, 37, 263, 277, 288 Bullard, Francis, 219 Bulletin des Musées de France, 18 Bullfinch, Charles, 122 Burckhardt, Jacob, 220 Burlingame, Anson, 159 Burnet, William, 104 Burrough, Alan, 33 Burt, Andrew Gano, 144 Butler, Edward B., 262 Buzby, David T., 257 Byzantine art, 12, 156, 181, 184, 190, 209–10, 248 cabinets of curiosity (cabinet de curiosité), 105–6, 113, 157, 220, 272, 280 of drawings (cabinets de dessins), 116, 217, 218 Caffieri, Jean-Jacques, 128 Cahill, Holger, 34 Cahn, Walter, 40 Cairo Museum, 236 Calvert, George (Lord Baltimore), 100, 102, 103 Camondo, Moïse de, 211 Campana, Giampietro, 156 Campbell, Colen, 104 Campin, Robert: Nativity Scene, 176

Index

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Le Canard Enchaîné (publication), 61, 62 Cannon, Henry W., 210 Canova, Antonio in collections, listed, 186 Cupid and Psyche, Tadolini after, 138 Venus, 142 Washington statue, 128 Carey, Edward L., 63, 135 Carleton House collection, 173 Carlier, Marie-Amélie, 10, 61 Carlier, Philippe, 61 Carnegie Institute of Art, 277, 280–81, 287 Caroline of Ansbach, Queen of England, 100 Carpaccio, Victor: Story of Alcione, 206 “Carpenter’s Cabinet,” 112 Carrand, Louis, 243 Carroll, Charles, 100 Caruso, Enrico, 189–90 Carver, Henry, 102 Caskey, Lacey Davis, 232 Cassatt, Mary Baby Getting Up from His Nap, 259 exhibitions of, 259 French residences, 193 influence of, 169, 183, 237, 260, 299 Castellani, Alessandro, 235 Castelnau-Bretenoux, 18, 36 casts, plaster, 127, 128, 153, 163, 232, 235, 278, 283 Catherine the Great of Russia, 104 Catlin, Daniel, 144 Catlin, George, 125 celebrity, as purchasing influence, 153, 196, 295, 296 Centennial Exposition (Philadelphia 1876) ancient art collection exhibitions, 235 contemporary art exhibitions at, 256 décor and architectural styles at, 150, 241, Plate 5b influence of, 164, 167, 169, 248, 277, 297 style descriptions, 150, 171 Century Club, 146 Ceracchi, Giuseppe, 127 Cesnola, Luigi Palma di, 155, 162, 163, 232, 276, 283, 284, 289 Cézanne, Paul art criticism and promotion of, 270 in collections, listed, 183, 213, 260, 265, 266, 267, 268 exhibitions of, 287 museum collections, 265

reception of, 264, 265 Chabrière-Arlès, Comte de, 193, 243 Chaplin, Charles, 139 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon in collections, listed, 172, 199, 210, 212, 213, 276 popularity of, 213 Still Life with a Hare, 187 Charles I, King of England, 153 Charles IV, King of Spain, 115 Charleston Museum, 105–6 Chase, George Henry, 233 Chase, Philander, 286 Chase, William Merritt in collections, listed, 257, 259, 262 popularity and perception of, 257, 299 Chassinat, Émile Gaston, 235 Château d’Assier, 8, 18, 36, 48, 49, 50, 60 Château de Montal, 18, 36, 60 “Le château et l’église d’Assier” (R. B. thesis), 18 “Les châteaux de Haut-Quercy, Castelnau-Bretenoux, Montal, [et] Assier” (R. B. minor thesis), 36, 48, 49, 60 Chauchard, Alfred, 203, 273 Checkley, John, 104 Chicago, Illinois art market in, 149 collections in, 144, 186, 258, 262, 268 as cultural center, 167 expositions in (see World’s Columbian Exposition) growth of, 108, 133 museums in (see Art Institute of Chicago) Chinese art archaeological expeditions, 230 archaeology and historical interests, 227–31 ceramics, 158, 159, 173, 174, 177, 182, 183, 185, 201, 227, 228, 229, 230, 253, 296 historical/ethnological studies and, 159 paintings and screens, 183 precious materials, 295 Chinese Revolution, 227 Chometon, M., 11 Christus, Petrus Annunciation, 185 in collections, listed, 185, 207, 208 Church, Frederic in collections, listed, 136, 142, 174, 200, 257 in museums, 126, 262 stained glass windows designed after, 262

377

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378

Cima da Conegliano, Giovanni Battista art style descriptions, 182 in collections, listed, 178, 187, 206, 221 Madonna, 187 Virgin and Child, 178 Cincinnati, Ohio art museums in, 257, 263, 276 collections in, private, 136, 143–44, 154 contemporary art collections, 257 Cincinnati Art Museum, 257, 263, 276 City Art Museum (St. Louis), 239, 276 Civil War, 133 Clarac, Charles de, 288 Clark, Stephen and Susan Vanderpoel, 268 Clark, William A., 186, 238, 239 Clarke, Thomas B., 46, 174, 232, 240, 249–50, 262 Classical art and archaeology. See also classicism expeditions, 232 historical value and collections of, 155 interest and specialization in, 226 museum collections, 232, 234, 284, 285, Plate 8b museum storage and reemergence, 161 periodicals on, 232 private collections of, 136, 173, 174, 180, 181, 183, 186, 207 publications on, 233 public exhibitions of, 235 reception of, 232 study of ancient civilizations, 133 university programs in, 232 classicism (classical revival), 110, 112, 116, 117, 122, 231–32 Cleveland Museum of Art, 157, 244, 276, 286, 288 Clinton, DeWitt, 127 Clodion: Satyr and Nymph, 188 Cloisters, 12, 21, 29, 246, 247 Clouet, François, 184 Clouet, Jean Charles III, Duke of Savoy, 185 Charles IX as a Boy, 185 in collections, listed, 178, 186, 207 Coale, Samuel A., Jr., 144, 149 Coburn, Lewis Larned and Annie Swan, 268 Cole, James Foxcroft, 147 Colin, Armand, 36 collection catalogues, 117, 288

“Les collections américaines actuelles” (R. B. award proposal), 54–55 collections and collecting, overview character and style of, 45, 89–90 European comparisons, 297 influences on, 45, 91–94, 269–71, 297–99 motivation and purpose, 91–93, 196, 255, 296–97 traits of, consistent, 294–96 collectors, overview as artists, 90 European, 104, 193 as influence, 162, 190, 220–21, 237, 269 instincts of, 90 letters of introduction to, 33 living abroad, 193, 212 networking as influence on, 160 personality descriptions of, 296–97 personality self disclosures through acquisition preferences, 90, 91 public perceptions of, 87 Colnaghi, 220 colonial period Americana from, 249–52 arts during, 99–105, 295 collection characteristics and styles, 101–2, 103, 104, 105, 111 diversity of, 96–97 house interiors exhibitions, Plate 2a political influences during, 97, 98–99, 106 scientific expeditions, 99 socio-cultural developments, 97–98, 103 colonial revival, 174, 249 Colton, David and Ellen, 144 Columbian Gallery, 117 Columbian Magazine, 108 Columbian Museum, 112, 125 Columbianum, 127 Combe, Jacques, 53 Conant, James Bryant, 31 Conant, Kenneth J., 20, 34 Cone, Claribel and Etta, 265–66 Coney, John, 105 contemporary art American, 258, 261–64 art market and, 270–71 challenges of, 255–56 collection advice for, 255 collection eclecticism including, 256–58 collection motivation, 255, 269

Index

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French, 258, 265–69, 270–71 German, 258 Impressionism, 259–60 influences on, 256 influences on collection of, 269–71 influences on development of, 255 museum collections and acquisition policies, 286–87 Post-Impressionism, 261 sculpture popularity, 260–61 taste evolution in, 258–59 Conway, H. S., 100 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 231, 276 Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 177 Cooper Union, 176 Copley, John Singleton during American revolutionary war, 106 The Copley Family, Plate 2b European travels and exhibitions, 103 influences on popularity of, 298 miniature portraits, 101 museum acquisitions, 105, 125 Nun Before a Candle, 105 textiles in works of, 295 Coptic art, 181 Corcoran, William W., 142, 149 Corcoran Gallery of Art, 142, 146, 186 Corneille de Lyon in collections, listed, 184, 186, 207 Jean de Rieux, 185 Cornet de Ways Ruart, Comte, 143, 149 Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille The Atelier, 214 in collections, listed, 137, 138, 139, 140, 154, 158, 178, 182, 184, 186, 188, 192, 197, 198, 200, 212, 214, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 266, 267 Daumier drawings of, 183 Eurydice Wounded, 258 popularity and promotion of, 132, 147 Woman Reading, 258 Woman Walking, 258 Correggio, Antonio art dealers for, 162 in collections, listed, 101, 103, 113, 114, 115, 117, 198, 203 colonial admiration for, 104 Holy Family, after, 101 Mary Magdalen, 115 Virgin and Child, 113

Cosmopolitan Art Association, 145 Cossio, Manuel, 221 Costa, Lorenzo in collections, listed, 189, 204 Holy Family, 204 Courbet, Gustave The Beach at Trouville, 178 in collections, listed, 144, 147, 178, 183, 198, 203, 257, 258, 260, 266, 267 in museums, 286 The Quarry, 147 reception and promotion of, 132, 147, 149 Courtauld, Samuel, 292 Courtois, Jacques, 114 Couture, Thomas in collections, listed, 137, 141, 172, 257, 258, 263, 267 exhibitions of, 146 students of, 147, 161 Couturier, Henry, 100 Crawford, Thomas, 140, 141, 149 Crayon (art journal), 148, 153, 162 Cristadoro, Joseph, 161 Crivelli, Carlo in collections, listed, 206, 208, 209 Madonna and Child, 181, 207 Saint George and the Dragon, 179 Crocker, Charles, 144 Crocker, William H. and Ethel Sperry, 238, 239 Cross, Henry H., 158 Crystal Palace Exhibition (New York), 146 Cubism, 265, 287 Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Eddy), 265 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Burckhardt), 220 Cutting, R. L., 136 Cuyp, Albert in collections, listed, 115, 202, 214, 215 A Dutch Family in a Garden, 184 Cuyp, Jacob, 216 Cyprian art, 155, 284 Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples (Cesnola), 156

379

Daguerre, Henri François, Marquis de Saint Lever, 5–6, 6, 9, 11, 13 Dale, Chester, 260, 267 Dana, Charles A., 227 Dana, John Cotton, 290

Index

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380

Daumier, Honoré in collections, listed, 182, 183, 203, 218, 219, 259, 265, 266, 267, 268 “Corot Sketching at Ville d’Avray,” 183 The Drinkers, 266 Lawyers, 259 lithographic prints of, 219–20 The Prison Choir, 182 R. B. sales of, 29 reception of, 218, 219 “The Third Class Wagon,” 182, 266 Window Shopping, 259 David, Gerard in collections, listed, 175, 182, 185, 206, 207, 208, 214, 215, 216, 284 Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, 185 David, Jacques-Louis art style descriptions, 117 Charlotte due Val d’Ognes portrait by, 184 in collections, listed, 129, 158, 184, 267 popularity of, 182 Le Sacre de Napoléon, 129 students of, 116, 122 David-Weill, David, 292 Davies, Arthur Bowen, 262, 264, 265, 268, 269 Davillers, Baron, 243 Davis, Erwin, 259 Davis, Theodore M., 184, 235–36, 285 Dean, Bashford, 242, 243, 288 Dearth, Henry Golden, 193, 237, 240, 246, 299 Decamps, Alexandre Gabriel, 138, 140, 141, 173, 212, 258 DeCamps, Joseph Rodefer, 136, 264 Declaration of Independence portraits, 123 Deering, Charles, 187, 206, 239 Degas, Edgar art style popularity, 144 in collections, listed, 179, 182, 183, 186, 198, 212, 215, 219, 259, 260, 261, 265, 266, 267, 268 exhibitions of, 259 Portrait of Josephine Gaujelin, 179 The Rape, 260 Delacroix, Eugène Attila, 258 collection exclusions, 145 in collections, listed, 140, 143, 182, 186, 198, 203, 218, 219, 256, 257, 258, 260, 266, 267 Frédéric Villot portrait, 19

Lion Hunt, 140 Sultan of Morocco, with His Officers and Guard of Honour, 138 Tiger Lying Down, 258 Delgado, Isaac, 190 Demidoff collection, 193, 201, 283 Demotte, Georges Joseph, 20, 194, 247 Demotte, Lucien, 29 DeMuldor, Carl, 289 Denon, Dominique Vivant, 116, 161 Detroit Institute of Art, 26, 34, 202, 262, 276, 284 Deveau, Philippe, 121 Deveaux, Raoul, 240 DeWolf, Wallace L., 219 De Young, Michael Henry, 173, 236 Diderot, René, 107, 118, 148 Discourses (Reynolds), 104 Domenichino, Veneziano in collections, listed, 114, 119, 153, 157 colonial admiration for, 104 Coronation of Saint Agnes, Strange print after, 103 Don Carlos rebellion, 117–18 Dormition of the Virgin (ivory), 11–12, 13 Doucet, Jacques, 292 Dousman, H. Louis, 144 drawings, 112, 182, 183, 216–17, 218, 220 Dreicer, Michael, 44, 184–85, 241, 244, 246 Drey, Edward and Margaret, 194 Drummond, George A., 140, 144 Duncan, Sally Anne, 27 Dunlap, William during American revolutionary war, 106 art quality descriptions, 129 art style descriptions, 122 Christ Rejected, 129 collections of, for artist viewing, 116 European art collections, 117 European travels, 103 nationalistic themes in plays, 121 in post-revolution collections with, 124 Dupont, George, 244 Durand, Asher B., 124, 127, 142, 200, 262 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 3, 182, 197, 223, 259, 260 Durr, Louis, 158, 163 Du Simitière, Pierre Eugène, 105, 111 Düsseldorf Gallery, 145, 146, 149 Düsseldorf school, 135, 136, 144, 158, 257, 258

Index

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Dutch art art market and dealers for, 223 collections specializing in, 201, 245 colonial architecture, 99 contemporary, 258 exhibitions, 277 furniture and woodworking, 251 landscapes, 197, 198, 201 Old Masters, 46, 143, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201–3, 214 paintings, 46, 104, 115, 136, 140, 142–44, 150, 155, 156, 184, 186, 188, 197, 199, 200, 201, 204, 214, 218, 222, 223, 224, 250, 256, 257, 284 popularity of, 197 portraiture, 100, 197, 213 Primitives, 155, 175 Dutuit, Eugène and Auguste, 182, 193 Duveen, Joseph, 29, 194, 205, 223, 224, 228 Duveneck, Frank, 249, 263–64, 287 Duvivier, Pierre-Simon, 129 Duyckinck, Gerardus, 100 Dwight, Timothy, 121 Eakins, Thomas, 169, 249, 261, 268 Earl, Ralph, 125 Earle, James, 119 Eaton, Wyatt, 262 eclecticism architecture style, 150 benefits of, 194 causes, 192–93 collections, 171–92, 193 disadvantages of, 195 Old Master collections, 213–16 École de Paris, 148 École du Louvre, 1, 14–15, 18 École Rocroy Saint-Léon, 6–7, 14 economic growth, 108–9, 166–67, 297 Eddy, Arthur Jerome, 46, 260–61, 265 education as collection purpose, 91, 149, 274, 298 collections for public perception of, 163 colonial developments in, 98 geographic location and, 159 as influential factor, 91, 298 as museum acquisition policy, 276 as museum purpose, 112, 113, 277–78, 288–89

post-American revolutionary war reforms in, 107–8 standards of, 231–32 women and, 131–32 Egyptian art and archaeology collections of, 186, 236 historical study value of, 154–55, 161, 230 interest in, 235–36 museum collection development, 285 precious materials in, 295 Egyptian Society, 235 Ehrich, Louis Rinaldo, 250 The Eight, 264 Eliot, Charles William, 163 Eliot, George, 156 Elkins, William L., 197 Ellis, John Stoneacre, 242 Elouis, Jean-Pierre-Henri, 116 Éluard, Paul, 37 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109, 133, 148, 160, 167 Emery, John J., 257 Emery, Mary Muhlenberg (Mrs. Thomas J. Emery), 216 Encyclopedism, 98, 105–6, 109–13, 116 England American artists in, 103–4 American collectors living in, 193 American relationships with, 97, 106, 298 art magazines published in, 269 art market in, 224 art styles popular in, 134, 153–54 colonial-era collections, 104 English painters in America, 100 exhibitions and expositions, 161 influence of, 99, 103, 106, 134, 198, 298 royal collection models, 153 English art ceramics, 103, 199 collections specializing in, 200–201 engravings, 217, 218 furniture, 174, 188, 201 painting, 104, 135, 153–54, 172, 173, 176, 197, 198, 199, 200, 208, 214, 215, 275 popularity of, 104, 129, 198–200, 201, 203, 210, 298 portraiture, 202, 212, 213, 222, 224, 256 silver, 201 subject preferences, 135

381

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382

engravings (prints) art dealers specializing in, 147–48, 149, 154, 162, 220 art market for, 101, 104, 118, 119 collections of, as art form, 152, 217–20 for education, 91 in illustrated books and magazines, 148, 168 museum popularity, 161 Old Master, 152–53, 162, 216–17 Enlightenment, 106, 111, 120 Épinay, Prosper d’, 163, 175 Epstein, Max, 216 Essayan, E., 79, 88 Esther and Ahasuerus (tapestry), 191 ethnographic collections, 159, 249, 251–52, 275, 279, 280 Evans, William T., 262, 275 everyday life subjects, 124, 135, 151, 294, 295–96 “L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections” (The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting) (R. B. dissertation) audience, intended, 43 class, terminology usage, 43 collector interviews for, 33, 33–34 completion of, 46, 48 composition and drafts, 33, 35, 36, 37–43, 46, 47 composition and writing style, 43–44 contents and descriptions, 43–46 geographical boundaries of, 87 introduction draft for, 39 “J’M” dial logo draft doodle, 49 “J’M FORTUNE” design, 49 manuscript preparations, 47–48 notes for, 40, 41, 42 organization, 43 origins of, 20–22, 32 overview and descriptions, 1 periods covered in, 87–88 publication of, 1, 46, 48 reproductions in, 37, 46, 84, Plates 2–8 surviving copies, 48 title registration, 34–35 L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections (The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting) (R. B. publication) book price, 50 circulation of, 52 dial design and logo, 48, 49, 50

endnotes from, 65 frontispiece, 84 library acquisitions of, 60 printing purpose, 50 publication attempts, 54 publication of, 1, 46, 48, 50 reception and review of, 50–53 scholarship recognition, 53 surviving copies, 48 translations, 54, 60–66 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, 37 Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1900), 169, 213, 258 Expressionism, 265 Eyck, Jan van Annunciation, 185 The Annunciation, 216 Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, 206 Virgin and Child, 173 Fabius, André and Pierre, 8 Fair, Joseph Brooks, 219 fakes, terminology usage, 29–30, 43 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice Bacchante, 175 in collections, listed, 186, 188, 211, 212, 214 Venus and Cupid, 201 Fales, Samuel B., 157–58 Far East art. See Chinese art; Oriental art Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 158, 211, 228 Fauvism, 265, 287 Fellowship of Arms and Armor, 243 Fenaille, Maurice, 292 Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco, 159, 227, 228, 229, 284 Fenway Court, 179 Fesch, Joseph, 163 Field, Hamilton E., 266 Field, Henry, 144, 258, 269, 286 Field, Marshall, III, 144 Fischer, Theodor, 194 Fitzgerald, Desmond, 259 Flagg, George W., 124 Flemish art paintings, 102, 162, 190, 197, 199, 201, 204, 206, 212, 214, 218, 244, 272 Primitives, 144, 158, 172, 189, 198, 206 stained glass, 184 tapestries, 189, 191, 211 Fletcher, Isaac, 12, 236, 237 Fletcher, Isaac D. and Mary, 183–84, 238

Index

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Focillon, Henri academic advisor and mentor, 15, 17, 19, 31–32, 38–40 intellectual property issues, 52 letters of recommendation from, 23, 32, 55 notes from conversations with, 40, 41, 42 portraits of, 17 professor exchange programs, 22, 36, 38 publications of, 40 Fogg, Elizabeth, 279 Fogg Art Museum (Harvard University) abbey capitals at, Plate 7b Asian collection, 230 assistant directors of, 20, 27 Classical art, 232–33 collection catalogues, 288 collection development, 279 collection donations, 34, 219, 279 essays published for, 33 founding, 279 galleries of, 46, Plate 8a Italian Primitives, 206 lectures at, 32–33 loans to, 34 medieval art, 20, 34, 247, 279 memorial donations to, 60 purpose, 20, 279 R. B. curatorial department employment, 1, 26 scientific laboratories at, 288 Forbes, Edward W. art history instructors of, 206 Bernini attribution controversies, 35–36 collections of, 210, 231 L’évolution copy, 50, 60 as influence, 220–21 portraits of, 21 university museums founded and developed by, 20, 26, 27, 279 Forbin-Janson collection, 163 Ford, Edsel, 176 Forest, Robert W. de, 251 Fortune, Thomas, 189, 244, 261 Foulc, Edmond, 243 Four Hundred, 167 Fragonard, Jean Honoré L’Amour et la Folie, 212 in collections, listed, 176, 189, 199, 208, 212, 213, 214 Girl with a Marmot, 212

Mademoiselle Duthé, 212 Mademoiselle Guimard, 212 popularity of, 118, 213, 223 The Progress of Love, 213 France. See also French art American artists living in, 116 American art popularity in, 129 American donations to French museums, 291 art criticism in, 269–70 artistic rebellion and independence from, 259–61, 265 art styles and, 134, 139 collection sales, 163 collections for emulation, 104 as colonial influence, 99–100 contemporary art and taste evolution, 258 decorative arts styles, popular, 158, 211, 228 encyclopedia style influence, 98 French artists in America, 116, 128–29 French Revolution and art market, 115, 117 influence of, 98–99, 106, 107, 116 nationalism in, 121 travel destination popularity, 103, 104, 192 Françon, Marcel, 26, 50 Franklin, Benjamin, 98, 102–3, 106, 109, 111, 116, 123, 128 Freer, Charles L., 229–30, 231, 236, 262–63, 275, 281 French art contemporary, 258, 265–69, 270–71 as contemporary American art influence, 261–62 decorative arts, 103, 146, 203, 211, 256 medieval, 246 museums specializing in, 212, 280 Old Masters, 197, 198, 199, 202, 210–14 painting, 144, 146, 180, 185–86, 188, 202–3, 210–14, 223, 261, 267, 268 Primitives, 185, 206, 207 Freund, Karl, 35 Frick, Helen Clay, 50 Frick, Henry Clay, 46, 202, 204, 213–14 Frick Collection, 281, 288 Friedländer, Max, 276 Friedsam, Michael, 185–86, 206 Friends of American Art, 263–64 Fromentin, Eugène, 136, 140, 186, 258 Frotingham, Arthur F., Jr., 232

383

Index

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Fry, Roger, 206 Fuller, George, 174, 249, 259, 261, 287 Fulton, Robert, 64, 122, 128, 250 functionalism, 253 Furtwängler, Adolf, 233

384

Gabet, Olivier, 2–3 Gaignières collection, 186 Gaillard, Claude Ferdinand, 240 Gainsborough, Thomas The Blue Boy, 201 in collections, listed, 158, 176, 184, 188, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 208, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 222, 257 gallery sales, 119 Galerie Beaux-Arts, 37 Galiot de Genouillac, 48–49, 50 Gallatin, Albert Eugene, 233, 268 Galleria dell’Academia, 282 Galloway collection, 100 Gardner, Alfred TenEyck, 51–52 Gardner, Isabella Stewart art advisors to, 178, 221 associates, 27, 178 Classical collection, 232 collection development and acquisitions, 178–79, 194 descriptions, 177–78, 179–80 influence of, 20, 169, 190 Italian Primitives collection, 206 medieval art, 244, 245, 285 museums of, 178, 179, 204, 281, 282 Near East art, 238 paint portraits of, 178 residential architectural styles, 178, 179 Garland, James A., 190 Gary, Elbert H., 188, 227 Gates, Horatio, 128 Gauguin, Paul Brimo de Laroussilhe sales of, 29 in collections, listed, 213, 219, 261, 265, 267, 268, 270, 271 La Orana Maria [Hail Mary], 266, Plate 7a reception of, 261, 287 Gavet collection, 178, 193 Gay, Walter, 147, 193, 220, 291 La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot, 18–19 Gellatly, Arthur, 190 Gellatly, John, 264 Gemütlichkeit, 294

Gentile da Fabriano in collections, listed, 183, 184, 221 Madonna and Child, 156, 206 George I, King of England, 100 George II, King of England, 100, 105 Georgian architecture, 99 German art Düsseldorf school, 135, 136, 144, 158, 257, 258 Expressionism, 270 Gérôme, Jean-Léon in collections, listed, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 158, 172, 175, 189, 198, 256, 258 exhibitions of, 146 L’Éminence Grise, 138 popularity of, 134, 287 Ghirlandaio, Domenico in collections, listed, 158, 176, 185, 186, 199, 208, 215 Giovanni Tornabuoni, 176 Gibson, Henry C., 137 Gibson, John, 142 Gilman, Benjamin Ives, 289–90 Gilmor, Robert, Jr., 115, 116, 119, 162, 273 Gimpel, Ernest and René, 194 Giordano, Luca, 117, 153 Giorgione, 101, 204 Giotto, 156, 170, 199, 205, 213, 221, 253, 284 Giovanni di Paolo in collections, listed, 182, 186, 207, 208, 221 The Entombment, 181 Miraculous Communion of Saint Catherine of Siena, 185 Gobelin tapestries, 119, 146, 175, 178 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 148 Godwin, Blake-More, 26 Gogh, Vincent van in collections, listed, 213, 266, 267, 268 Woman from Arles, 266 Goldman, Henry, 207, 232 Goloubew, Victor, 241 Goncourt, Edmond de, 228 Goncourt brothers, 195, 217 Gonse, Louis, 228 Goode, George Brown, 289–90 Goodyear, A. Conger, 268 Gorton, Alexander, 104 Gothic art architecture, 104, 134, 150, 168, 190, 241, 245, 247, Plate 5b

Index

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arms and armor, 243, 244 decorative arts, 168, 181, 241, 285 painting, 196 sculpture, 181, 182, 184, 245, 246 tapestries, 178, 180, 186, 207, 244, 245 Gothic Mannerism, 196 Goupil, Adolphe, 140, 148, 149, 154 Goupil, Jules, 137, 237 Goupil, Léon, 220, 237 Goupil et Vibert, 146 Goya, Francisco A City on a Rock, 183 in collections, listed, 181, 186, 187, 199, 208, 212, 213, 214, 216, 219, 267, 268, 281 Don Tiburcio Perez, 184 The Forge, 214 Majas on a Balcony, 183 Gray, Francis C., 152, 160, 162, 217 Gréau collection, 176 El Greco Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara, 183 in collections, listed, 182, 183, 184 Holy Family, 184 Marriage at Cana, 204 in museums, 162 popularity of, 215, 221 Portrait of a Cardinal (L’évolution frontispiece), 84 Saint Jerome, 214 Saint Jerome as Cardinal, first American purchase, 207 Saint Martin and the Beggar, 215 View of Toledo, 183 Virgin with Santa Inés and Santa Tecla, 215 Greek and Roman Sculpture in American Collections (Chase), 233 Greek art. See also Classical art and archaeology architectural styles, 122 art books on, 233 ceramics, 173, 180, 182, 232–33 glass, 183 manuscripts, 230 museum galleries with, Plate 8b painting, 234 sculpture, 186, 207 Green, Nathaniel, 128 Greenough, Horatio art style descriptions, 122 commissions, 149

private commissions, 149 Washington, 122 Grodecki, Louis, 15, 16, 17, 18, 36, 88 Grodecki, Pawel, 16 Gruber, Francis, 60 Gruel, Léon, 11, 12, 194 Guardi, Francesco in collections, listed, 143, 178, 184, 186, 190, 197, 199, 202, 210, 214, 220 View of Venice, 178 Guido da Siena admiration for, 103, 104 in collections, listed, 114, 115, 119, 153, 208 Guido di Pietro, 221 Guiffrey, Jean, 276 Guimet, Émile, 273 Gunsaulus, Frank Wakely, 198–99, 237, 240 Gutman collection, 176

385

Haight, Richard K., 155, 235 Hallet, Étienne, 116, 122 Halpert, Samuel, 264 Hals, Frans in collections, listed, 115, 158, 173, 176, 186, 188, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 214, 215, 216, 284 Merrymakers at Shrovetide, 175 Halsey, Richard Townley, 250 Hamilton, Cyrus W., 209, Plate 6b Hamilton, James, 102 Hanford, Emma C. O., 286 Harding, George F., 243–44 Harding’s Gallery, 149 Harper, Abner, 257 Harper’s Bazaar, 168 Harper’s Family Bible, 148 Harper’s Weekly, 148, 168 Harriman, Edward Henry, 261 Harriman, Mary Williamson, 264 Harris, Edward M., 257 Harris, Maurice, 31 Harris, Neil, 61 Harris, Tomas, 194 Harrison, Joseph, 143 Harrison, William Preston and Ada Sanberg, 268 Hart, Charles Henry, 250 Harvard University. See also Harvard University, R. B. education art collection advisors from, 178, 221 collection donations, early, 113, 120

Index

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386

Harvard University (continued) engraving collections bequeathed to, 152 foreign student dormitories at, 24, 25 founding and early history, 98 History of Art program, 278 museum courses at, 21–22, 25–26, 27–28, 32, 51–52, 287 museums at, 280 (see also Fogg Art Museum) Norton courses at, as influence, 160, 161 portrait galleries of, early, 105 professor exchange programs, 19–20, 22, 34 Harvard University, R. B. education associates at, 26–27 Bernini bust attribution controversies, 35–36 classes at, 25–26, 27–28, 32, 33 family correspondence and care packages, 24–25 Fiske fellowship acceptance letter, 23–24 Fiske fellowship application proposal, 20–22 Fiske fellowship extension, 32–33 Fiske fellowship inspiration, 19–20 letters of recommendation to, 22, 23, 32 residences at, 24, 25 success at, 27, 28 teaching assistant positions, 26 Haskell, Henry B., 154, 235 Hautecoeur, Louis, 53 Haut-Quercy chateau, 18, 36, 60 Havemeyer, Louisine (Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer), 169, 183, 237, 260 Havemeyer, T. A., 183 Havemeyer Collection, 141, 238, 246, 259, 260, 287 Hawk, Samuel, 137 Hawkes, McDougal, 212 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 148, 156 Hay, Robert, 285 Healy, Peter Alexander, 125 Hearn, George A., 199, 262 Hearst, William Randolph Classical art, 232 collection development and descriptions, 190, 191–92 influences on, 243 medieval art, 242, 244, 246, 248 Near East art, 238, 239

Hearst Castle, 191 Heilbronner, Raoul, 29, 247 Helft, Jacques, 9 Helft, Léon, 9 Helft, Yvon, 9 Henri, Robert, 264 Henri II, King of England, style, 168 Hermitage Museum, 13, 26, 216, 224 Herring, James, 148 Hesselius, Gustavus, 100, 101, 103 Higgins, John Woodman, 244 Higginson, Henry Lee, 228 Hill, James H., 258 Hiller, Abigail, 105 Hills, Frances Fenwick, 53 Hilton, Henry, 143 Hispanic Society of America, 206, 233, 248, 280–81 historical societies, 114, 124, 126–27 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 126 historical studies. See also archaeology; nationalism antiquities, 154–55 as collection purpose, 151 collections for, 157–58 English landscapes, 153–54 engraving collections, 152–53 influences on interest in, 159, 160, 169 Old Masters as, 155, 156–57, 158 Oriental art and ethnological studies, 159 popularity of, 159 priorities of, 153 universities and, 159–60 Hoadley, George, 154 Hoe, Robert, 172–73 Hoentschel, George, 177, 194, 286 Hogarth, William The Assembly at Wanstead House, 200 in collections, listed, 103, 158, 172, 176, 182, 198, 199, 200, 214 The Fountaine Family, 200 Holbein, Charles V. in collections, listed, 115, 156, 199, 207, 208, 214, 216, 238 Edward VI as a Child, 216 Head of the Dead Christ, 156 Holbrook, Edward, 257 Holden, Liberty E., 157, 160 Homberg, Octave, 237, 240, 245

Index

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Homer, Winslow artistic influences on, 261 art style descriptions, 144 in collections, listed, 169, 174, 186, 262 contemporaries of, 134 as greatest American painter, 199, 261 homosexuality, 27 Hone, Philip, 124 Hope, Henry R., 37, 54, 59 Hopkinson, Charles, 127 Hoppin, Joseph Clark, 232–33 Hoppner, John in collections, listed, 173, 176, 184, 188, 189, 199, 200, 201, 202, 214, 215, 216, 257 Portrait of the Countess of Darnley and Lady Elizabeth Bligh, 207 Hosack, David, 113, 114, 120, 124, 135, 273 Hosmer, Albert, 251 Hôtel de Cluny, 193 Hôtel Drouot, 2, 7 Houdon, Jean-Antoine American residence, 116 art academies and cast set acquisitions, 127, 128 decorative arts and preference for, 211 Diana, 175, 211 nationalism associations, 138 portrait busts by, 128, 143, 144, 175, 212 reputation and popularity of, 128 Hudson-Fulton Exhibition (Celebration), 250, 277 Hugh, William Fitz, 100 Huguenots, 97 Hunt, Richard Morris, 241, 299 Hunt, William Morris, 136, 139, 147, 149, 287, 299 Huntington, Archer M., 248 Huntington, Collis P., 137 Huntington, Henry E., 200–201, 211 Hurlbut, Hinman B., 144 Hutchinson, Charles L., 186, 236 Hyde, James, 187, 193, 212 Impressionism art market, 270–71 in Berlin, 258 contemporary art collections of, 259–60 first exposure in United States, 259 museum collection development, 286–87 reception of, 94, 139, 259, 286

L’Impressioniste (magazine), 269 Indian art, 231 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique collection exclusion, 145 in collections, listed, 146, 182, 183, 216 La Fornarina, 266 “Lady and Boy,” 183 Portrait of a Gentleman, 183 Inness, George in collections, listed, 136, 174, 186, 257, 258, 262, 264 influences on, 261 museum exhibits of, 262, 287 popularity and perception of, 199, 249, 257, 261 An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting (Webb), 104 Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, 1, 15, 17–18, 23, 34, 48, 54 Institute de France, 292 Institute of Fine Arts (New York), 156, 162 Institute of International Education, 24 International Art Union, 146 investment, as collecting motivation, 92 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 178, 179, 204, 281, 282 Islamic art, 237–39 Italian Futurism, 270 Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Berenson), 221 Italian Primitivism, 134, 141, 155, 156, 163, 175, 186, 189, 203, 204–10, 284 Italian Renaissance acquisition limitations, 203, 224 architectural style, 150, 168, 171, 242 arms and armor, 243 interior design, 181, 188–89, 190, 192 Old Masters, 197, 203–4 paintings, 175, 184, 185, 188, 190, 192, 197, 203–4, 209, 214, 215, 216, 224 prints, 218 sculpture, 157, 178, 185, 187, 188, 197, 215, 244 studies and publications on, 220, 221 textiles, 177, 179, 184, 185, 207, 244

387

Jackson, Andrew, 149 Jacque, Charles, 142, 172, 188, 198 Jacquemart-André, Nélie, 193 Jahrbücher (periodicals), 288

Index

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388

“J’aime fortune” Châteaux d’Assier staircase carving, 34 dial design, 48, 49, 50 ex libris design, 48, 55 James, Henry, 147 James, William, 147, 167 James Fortune (publisher name), 50 Japanese art, 113–14, 159, 161, 227–31, 228, 263 Jarnot, Paul, 32 Jarves, Deming, 155–56, 227 Jarves, James Jackson acquisition limitations, 203 Asian art, 227 associates, 156, 157, 160 biographical information, 155–56, 157 collection acquisitions, 156, 157, 163, 203, Plate 4b collection catalogues, 156, 157, 288 collection exhibitions, 156, 157, 162 collection promotion, 163 collection purpose, 274, 276, 289 collection sales to Yale, 156–57, 159, 206, 279, Plate 4b descriptions, 44 financial resources, 163 influences on, 160, 220 medieval art collection, 241 subject preferences, 155, 157 Jarvis, John Wesley, 124 Jarvis, Samuel, 153, 162 Jefferson, Thomas, 107, 111, 122, 124, 128 Jesse Isidor Straus Award, 54–55, 56, 57 Jesup, Maria DeWitt, 200, 262 Johnson, Harriet Lane, 275 Johnson, James Taylor, 232 Johnson, John Graver, 206–7, 288 Johnson, Ralph Cross, 199, 204 Johnson, Sir Nathaniel, 100 Johnson, William T., 284 Jones, Inigo, 99 Jones, J. Russell, 144 Jones, John, 211 Jones, John Paul, 128 Junto (renamed American Philosophical Society), 98, 107, 108 Kaiser Friedrich Museum, 203 Kakuzo, Okakura, 276, 284 Kalebjian, Irène, 237 Kandinsky, Wassily, 270

Kann, Rodolphe, 193 Karfiol, Bernard, 264 Karrman, William, 144 Keayne, Robert, 98 Kelekian, Dikran, 8, 237 Kennedy, George and Mary, 239 Kent, Henry W., 250 Keppel, Frederick, 146–47, 220 Ketchum, Morris, 200, 262 Kevorkian, Hagop, 237 Kidder, H. P., 140 Kimball, William Wallace, 200 King, Charles Bird, 125 King’s College, 98, 105 Kleinberger, Franz, 205, 223 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 100, 102 Knoedler & Co, 146, 149, 197, 220, 223 Koechlin, Raymond, 240, 292 Koehler, Sylvester R., 219 Kohn, Adolph, 146–47, 149 Kokoschka, Oskar, 270 Kouchakji family, 237 Kress, Samuel H., 209 Kubler, George, 38 Kuhn, Charles Lewis, 88 Kuhn, Walter, 264 Kurtz, Charles M., 263 Labille-Guiard, Adélaïde: The Atelier of an Artist, 212 La Farge, John art club memberships, 147 art styles promoted by, 147 church decoration program, 249 in collections, listed, 169, 172, 264, 299 exhibitions, 161 influence of, 161, 228–29 Japanese art collection, 227, 228 museum collection inclusion, 287 Lafayette, Marquis de, 124, 128 La Fayette Art Gallery, 4–10. See also Brimo de Laroussilhe La Follette, Suzanne, 36 Lambertin, N., 43 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 135 Langweil, Florine, 231 Lankenau, John D., 143 Lansing, Ambroise, 236 LaPointe, Alfred V., 34 Larousse Mensuel (publication), 18, 22

Index

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Laroussilhe, Claude Schidlof, 57 Laroussilhe, Elza Schidlof, 56, 57, 59 Laroussilhe, Lucien Lascombes de (Lulu), 4, 10, 56, 57, 61 Laufer, Berthold, 229 Lavedan, Pierre academic collaborations with, 54 graduate assistants of, 46–47 letters of recommendation from, 22, 55 as university advisor, 36, 38, 48 vacations with, 53–54 Lavisse, Ernest, 23 Lawrence, Cyrus J. and Emily Hoe, 259 Lawrence, Henry C., 246 Layton, Frederick, 258 Lazaro Galdiano, José, 193 Lea, Isaac, 153 Leavitt, George A., 149 lectures, 19–20, 32–33, 161, 168, 228, 277 Lehman, Philip and Carrie Laurer, 207, 244 Lemoyne de Morgues, Jacques, 99 L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles, 116, 122 Lenox, James, 124, 143, 154 Leonardo da Vinci Christ with Apostles (The Last Supper), after, 102 in collections, listed, 119, 223 Leopold Wilhelm, Archduke, 215 Leroy, Étienne, 149 Le Roy, Martin, 177, 245 Leslie, Charles Robert, 63, 119, 139, 250 Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb, 137, 143, 144, 145, 148 Lewisohn, Adolph, 260, 266–67, 269, Plate 7a Leyland, Frederick Richards, 263 libraries, 98, 103, 108, 112, 176, 177, 278, 281 The Life of Charlemagne (tapestry), 191 Limners and Likenesses (Burroughs), 33 Liotard, Jean-Étienne, 100 Lippi, Filippino in collections, listed, 216 Madonna, 178 Lippi, Filippo in collections, listed, 199, 208 Madonna and Child (Hamilton collection), 209 Madonna and Child (Walters collection), 181 Liss, Johann: The Satyr and the Peasant, 215 Littlefield, William, 27 Livermore, Raymond B., 137 Livingston, Robert R., 127

livre de police, 9 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 167 Lodge, John E., 230 Loeb, James, 235 Loeser, Charles, 206 Longacre, James Barton, 148 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 148 Loo, Ching Tsai, 231 Louise-Caroline Alberta, Princess, 140 Louis Philippe, King of France, 162, 163, 273 Louis XI, King of France, 186 Louis XIII style, 168 Louis XV style, 168, 175 Louvre art bequests to, 185 Brimo de Laroussilhe acquisitions, 11, 13, 26 cast collection and catalogue collaboration, 19 collection catalogues, 288 collection descriptions, 281–82 Egyptian collection, 235 as influence, 161 interior design descriptions, 282 museum donations to, 291 philanthropy challenges, 292 R. B. curatorial department employment, 1 royal collection donations, 273 Society of Friends (Amis du Louvre), 279 Lowell, James Russell, 148, 167 Lowengard, Armand, 29, 194 Luini, Bernardino in collections, listed, 114, 208, 209, 257 Madonna, 197 Lydig, Rita, 190 Lyman, John P., 227 Lyon, Irving P., 251

389

Mackay, Clarence H., 188, 238, 242, 244–45 Macomber, Frank Gair, 227, 244, 285 Macy, V. Everit, 240, 248 Madison, James, 124, 142 Magazine of Art, 269 magazines and journals archaeological, 232 art, 148 art reviews in, 269–70 illustrated, 148 influence of, 108, 168 literary, 132 museum, 288

Index

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390

Maine Historical Society, 126 Mancini, Antonio in collections, listed, 189 The Young Groom, 178 Manet, Édouard Boy with a Sword, 259, 286 in collections, listed, 182, 183, 189, 198, 212, 214, 259, 266, 267, 268 The Dead Toreador, 215 exhibitions of, 259 Olympia, 286 Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 179 At the Races, 215 reception of, 286 The Soap Bubble, 266 Woman with a Guitar, 259 Woman with a Parrot, 259, 286 Mangin, Joseph, 116, 122 Mannerism, 153, 182, 196 Mannheim collection, 194 Mansfield, Howard, 219 Mantegna, Andrea in collections, listed, 175, 204, 208, 215, 216 Judith and Holofernes, 215 Marc, Franz:The Bewitched Mill, 265 Marie Antoinette, 211, 212 Mariette, Pierre-Jean, 104, 217 Marle, Raimond van, 206, 276 Marnier, Marcel, 13, 56, 57 Marnier, Suzann Poidevin, 13, 56, 57 Marquand, Allan, 232, 279 Marquand, Henry Gurdon Classical collection, 232 collection development and description, 173–74, Plate 5a collection donation, 284 Dutch Old Masters, 201 ethnographic collections, 251 Italian Renaissance Old Master collection, 204 Near East art, 238 Marsh, George Perkins, 152, 217 Marshall, John, 232, 233 Martin, John T., 137 Martorell, Bernat: Saint George Killing the Dragon, 187 Mary II, Queen of England, 100 Maryland Historical Society, 126 Massachusetts Historical Society, 126 Master of Flémalle: Nativity Scene, 176

Master of Moulins: Martyrdom of Four Saints, 185 Master of Saint George: Saint George Killing the Dragon, 187 Mather, Cotton, 100 Mather, Frank J., 209–10 Mather, Increase, 100 Matisse, Henri, 265, 266, 267, 268 Matteo di Giovanni in collections, listed, 209, 221 Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, 188 Matthiesen, F. O., 257 Maurer, Alfred Henry, 264 Maurice, L., 53 Mauricheau-Beaupré, Charles, 15 Mayer, August, 221 McCormick, Cyrus, 259, 286 McCormick, Edith Rockefeller, 244 McCormick, James, 198 McCormick, Nettie Fowler, 286 McCormick, R. Hall, 199 McFadden, John Howard, 200 McIlhenny, Berenice, 169 McIlhenny, Henry P., 268 McIlhenny, John D. and Frances P., 187, 238 McMahon, Philip, 52 Meade, George, 115, 119 medieval art. See also Gothic art; Romanesque art archaeological interest in, 241–48 ceramics, 177, 181, 248 in collections, 173, 175, 177, 181, 185, 188, 190, 192 interest and motivation, 227 Italian paintings, 205 museum collection development, 285–86 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 270 Mellon, Andrew W., 215–16, 244 Memling, Hans Annunciation, 207 in collections, listed, 175, 184, 186, 208, 216 Saint Anne with the Virgin, 176 Mengs, Raphael: Adoration of the Shepherds, 142 Mercury (publication), 168 Metropolitan Fair Picture Gallery Exhibition, 146 Metropolitan Museum of Art Americana (colonial), 251 archaeology and ancient art, 155, 284

Index

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Brimo de Laroussilhe sales in, 12 Classical art and archaeology, 232, 233 Classical art collection development, 285 collection acquisitions, 149, 175, 283, Plate 7a collection bequests, 183, 185, 200 collection catalogues, 288 collection donations, 5, 21, 157, 175, 176, 177, 184, 185, 199, 262, 284, 286 Egyptian collection, 236, 285 exhibitions, 142, 146, 162, 260 founding, 142, 163–64 Impressionist collection, 259, 260, 286, 287 interior design descriptions, 282 medieval art, 12, 21, 29, 246, 247, 286 newsletter publications of, 288 Old Master collection, 149, 201, 204 Rodin sculpture exhibits, 261 Romanesque collection, 247 scientific laboratories at, 288 Michael Henry de Young Museum, 281 Michaux, Henri, 37, 60 Michelangelo art market and prints of, 101, 104 Old Master status, 205 The Sibyl, 184 Migeon, Gaston, 237 Mignaty, Giorgio, 156 Miller, Charles Henry, 289 Millet, Jean-François The Angelus, 139 associates, 147 Cliffs at Gruchy, 139 in collections, listed, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189, 197, 198, 203, 212, 214, 257, 258, 259, 260, 267, 286 influences on, 299 The Knitting Shepherdess, 139 Naïade, 140 popularity of, 132, 222, 223, 299 promotion and sales of, 139–40, 147 Le Retour de la Fontaine, 144 The Sower, 139 Village de Gréville, 139 Washerwomen, 139 Mills, Clark, 149 Mills, Odgen, 212 Mills, Susan and Cyrus, 144 Minassian, Kirkor, 8, 28–29 miniature paintings, 100–101

Minneapolis Museum of Art, 158, 276 Minnesota Historical Society, 126 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 154, 161 Molinier, Émile, 237 Monet, Claude Argenteuil, 260 in collections, listed, 179, 182, 183, 184, 186, 192, 197, 200, 258, 259, 260, 266, 267, 268 Fishing Boat, 259 Fishing Nets, 260 in museum collections, 281, 286, 287 popularity of, 260, 261 sales prices, 258 Mongan, Agnes, 26, 46, 60 Montgomery, Richard de, 128 Monthly Anthology (journal), 108 Monticelli, Adolphe, 186, 198, 257, 259, 261, 267 Montross, Newman, 146 Moore, Charles Herbert, 245 Morey, Charles Rufus, 247 Morgan, Anne, 291–92 Morgan, J. P. Asian art, 227 Assyrian art, 237 biographical information, 166–67 Brimo de Laroussilhe sales to, 5 Classical art, 232 collection catalogues, 288 collection development and descriptions, 29, 141, 175–77 collection donations and bequests, 175, 176, 247, 286 collection loans, 177 collection locations, 193 collection purchases by, 155, 194 collection style comparisons, 220 French art, 212, 213 as influence, 190 Italian Primitives collection, 206 medieval art, 241, 244, 246, 285, 286 Morgan, J. P., Jr., 251 Morgan, John, 111 Morgan, Julia, 191 Morgan, Junius, 176 Morgan, Mary J., 256 Morgan Library, 176, 177, 281 Morland, George, 184, 197, 199, 200, 299 Moro, Antonio in collections, listed, 199, 216 Duke of Alba, 281

391

Index

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392

Moro, Antonio (continued) Margaret Roper portrait, 181 Marie Tudor portrait, 179 Morris, George P., 124 Morris, William, 176 Morse, Edward Sylvester, 159, 227, 228, 284 Morse, Samuel F. B. art academies founded by, 127 art style descriptions, 122, 127 in collections, listed, 122, 124 The House of Representatives, 129 Layfayette portraits by, 124 Mosely, A. Colonel, 100 Moutiers-Saint-Jean abbey, 247, Plate 7b Muller, H., 78–79, 88 Munger, Albert A., 258, 286 Munkácsy, Mihály in collections, listed, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 258 popularity decline, 158, 258 Munroe, Thomas, 154 Murillo, Bartolomé Estebán in collections, listed, 115, 117, 141, 153, 154, 156, 158, 189, 202, 214, 216, 257 Galician Women, 215 Immaculate Conception, 181 in museum collections, 162, 284 popularity of, 115 Roman Charity, 115 Saint Ignatius Captured by A Spanish Vessel, West after, 102 Murray, Fairfax, 220 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 291, 292 Musée du Luxembourg, 139 Musée Franco-Américain de Blérancourt, 292 Musée Jacquemart-André, 272, 281, 292 Musée Nationale de Versailles, 291 Musée Wicar, 272 “Museum Course” (Harvard course), 21–22, 25–26, 27–28, 32, 51–52, 287 Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) Americana (colonial), 250, 251 archaeology influences on collection development, 284 art acquisitions, Plate 2b artist exhibits, 287 Asian collection, 228, 230, 231, 276 building redesign, 282–83 Classical art, 232, 233–34, 285 collection catalogues, 288

collection development and acquisition policies, 276, 283 collection donations, 286 collection exhibitions, 162 curators at, 228, 276, 284 directors of, 139 educational programs, 278 Egyptian collection, 235, 285 engraving collections at, 152 founding, 164, 275 Greek and Roman sculpture gallery, Plate 8b interior design descriptions, 282 Italian Renaissance Old Master collection, 204 natural history museums acquired by, 273 Near East collection, 240–41 newsletter publications of, 288 Old Masters collection, 201 organizational structure, 275 print collection, 217, 219 seventeenth-century house interior displays, Plate 2a Museum of French Art, 212, 280 Museum of Modern Art, 260, 265 Museum of Natural Science and Art, 112, 273 Museum of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 280 museums, American, overview. See also specific names of museums academic, 117, 277 American art promoted by, 263–64 architectural design considerations, 282–83 challenges of, 274, 277 collection bequests determining style of, 272 collection development and acquisition policies, 276–77, 283, 286–87 collection development influences, 284–86 in colonial period, 105 conservation courses at, 287 curator-director roles at, 290–91 descriptions and similarities between, 281–82 development and growth of, 167, 168, 274–75 educational programs at, 277–78 educational resources at, 278

Index

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European museum comparisons, 54, 273– 77, 280, 281–82, 291, 296–97 European museums impacted by, 291–92 exhibitions at, 161–62, 277 influences of, 161 interior design and art display techniques of, 282, 283 mission of, 274, 282, 288–89, 291 nationalism and patriotic-themed, 111, 123–26, 152, 275 organizational structure of public, 274, 275–76 philanthropy and, 291–92 in post-American revolutionary war period, 109, 111, 120 postwar art market role of, 25–26 as private foundations, 281 publications of, 288 roles of, 292 scientific laboratories at, 288 specialized collections, 280–81 storage and reemergence of collections, 161 university, 278–80 university courses on, 21–22, 25–26, 27–28, 32, 51–52, 287 wax, 112, 125, 129 Museum School, 117 Napoleon, 116, 127 National Gallery (London), 161, 203, 274, 275, 292 National Gallery of Art (Washington), 125–26, 152, 275, Plate 2b nationalism art academies promoting, 127–28 as art acquisition influence, 91, 92, 295 artists associated with, 128, 129 classicism as expression of, 122–23 colonial portraiture supporting, 100 contemporary American art and, 261–64 historical societies and, 126–27 museums with themes of, 123–26 patronage, lack of, 129–30 post-American revolutionary war themes of, 109–10, 121–25 traveling exhibitions with themes of, 129 wax museums, 129 National Museum, 111

national museums, 111, 123–26, 152, 275 The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (Herring and Longacre), 148 Nattier, Jean-Marc in collections, listed, 112, 176, 189, 199, 200, 212, 214 The Marquise d’Argenson, 182 natural history collections, 105–6, 111–12, 113–14, 273 Near East art, 237–41 Neri di Bicci in collections, listed, 157, 185, 208, 209 Virgin and Child with Saints Paul, Peter, Sigismund, Francis, Archangel Raphael and Tobias [The Virgin Enthroned], 185 Nerrocio de’ Landi: Annunciation, 156 Neues Museum (Berlin), 277 Newcombe, H. Victor, 144 New England Museum, 112 Newman, Robert Loflin, 262 newsletters, museum, 288 newspapers, 98, 108 New York art academies of, 117, 127 art associations in, 145 art auctions in, 119–20, 149 art galleries in, 119, 145, 146–47 art market, 148–49, 162 city hall, architectural style, 122 as cultural art center, 132, 167 early growth and development, 109 exhibitions in, 161 exhibition venues, notable, 146 French museums, 211–12 libraries with collections in, 143 museums in, art, 114, 126, 145, 185, 209, 228, 250, 281 (see also Metropolitan Museum of Art) museums in, modern art, 260, 265 museums in, natural history, 112 museums in, popular (wax), 112 patrons in, 124 private collections in, 117, 136, 137–39, 154, 173–77, 188–89, 257, 259, 266, 268, Plate 4a, Plate 52 sculptural commissions, 149 wealthy families of, 167 New York City Hall, 122 New York Drawing Association, 127 New York Exhibition, 161

393

Index

18935-Brimo_Evolution.indd 393

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394

New-York Historical Society collection acquisitions, 124, 154, 158, 204, 272 collection development and acquisition policies, 284 collection exhibitions, 162 exhibitions, 146 founding, 114, 126 interior design of, 282 stagnation of, 272, 273 New York Public Library, 143 New York Rotunda panorama, 129 nineteenth-century period, overview art and art market during, 134, 135–36, 148–49, 162–63, 224 collection acquisitions, influences on, 145– 47, 159–62 collections, importance of, 163 collections and historical studies, 151–53 collection styles and descriptions, 134, 144, 151, 297 socio-cultural developments, 131–32 Nineveh artifacts, 154, 160, 235 North American Review (journal), 108 Norton, Charles Eliot ancestral home sales, 27 as art agent for books and manuscripts, 178 art history university programs, 20, 278 art styles promoted by, 147 associates of, 156, 160 Classical archaeology university programs, 232 engraving collection, 217 influence of, 20, 139, 160–61, 205, 206, 218, 219, 220 intellectual aristocracy, 167 Italian Renaissance Old Master collection, 204 print collection, 218, 219 travel as collection influence, 160 Norton, Richard, 206 Norton, William, 54 nudes, 116, 117, 222–23, 295, 298 Nutting, Wallace, 251 Old Masters. See also specific artists’ names acquisition limitations, 118–19, 151, 203, 224 American painters as, 151, 200 Barbizon School, 198, 200, 203

classicism, 198 drawings of, 216–17 Dutch, 46, 143, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201–3, 214 eclectic collections of, 213–16 economic growth and collections of authentic, 167 English, 197, 198–201, 214, 222 engravings/prints of, 152–53, 162, 216–17 Flemish, 201 French, 197, 198, 199, 202, 210–14 historical studies and, 155, 158 Italian, 156, 197, 198, 199, 203–10, 220–21 “master” definitions and taste fluctuations, 196–97 in nineteenth-century collections, early, 114–16, 117 in nineteenth-century collections, mid-, 124, 132, 134, 153, 156 in nineteenth-century collections, late, 142, 143, 155, 175, 181, 184 nineteenth-century preferences, overview, 197 popularity decline, 202–3 post-American revolutionary war collections of, 101–2, 104, 118 quality of, 153, 216, 224 Realism, 197, 198 reproductions vs. originals, 197 Romanticism, 198 selection criteria and collection purpose, 195–96, 216, 221–22 O’Mills, Darius, 137 Oriental art. See also Chinese art art dealers for, 231 as artistic influence, 228, 263 Far East ( Japanese), 113–14, 159, 161, 227–31, 228, 263 interest and collection purpose, 159, 227–28 Near East (Islamic), 237–41 Orléans (Montpensier), Philippe II, Duc d’, 90, 104, 141, 162, 215, 224 Orley, Bernard van Brimo de Laroussilhe sales, 29 Triumph of Mars, after, 189 Osborne, Henry, 183 Pach, Walter, 265, 269 Paff, Michael, 119, 162 Paine, Thomas, 107

Index

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Pajou, Augustin in collections, listed, 188, 189, 211, 212 Psyche, 188 Vigée Le Brun bust by, 212 Palace of Amenhotep III, 236 Palace of Assurbanipal, 154 Palace of Humbug, 113 Palace of Nimrod, 180 Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville Paris, 291 Palladian architecture, 99 Palmer, Bertha Honoré, 260, 261 Palmer, Erastus Dow, 137 Palmer, George S., 251 Palmer, Potter, 260 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, 1915), 169 Pannini, Giovanni, 117, 202 panoramas, 129 Parès, Emil, 194 Parish-Watson, 228 Parker, Harvey D., 217 Parnassus (journal), 53, 270 Pastoral (tapestry), 191 Pater, Jean Baptiste Joseph in collections, listed, 176, 182, 199, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214 Fête Champêtre, 182 Fête Galante, 212 Peabody, George, 163 Peacock Room, 263 Peale, Charles Willson post-American revolutionary war patronage, 122 during American revolutionary war evolution, 106 art academies of, 117, 127 as art class model, 127 as art dealer, 118, 119 artistic influences on, 116 in collections, listed, 103, 124, 125, 143, 174, 250 collections and museums of, 105, 111–12, 273, Plate 3a Colonial Army officer portrait series, 123 influence of, 109 London travels and West studio visits, 103 miniature portraits by, 101 Peale, James, 103, 124, 143, 174, 250

Peale, Rembrandt art style descriptions, 122 in collections, listed, 103, 143, 174, 250 The Court of Death, 129 French residence, 116 natural history museums of, 112 Washington, 124, 250 Pelham, Henry, 101–2, 104 Pelham, Peter, 104 Pell, William Cruger, 242 Pendleton, Charles L., 251 Penn, John, 101–2 Penn, William, 123 Pennell, Joseph, 219 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts American art promotion, 263 art acquisitions, 120, 127 collection bequests to, 187 collection development and exhibitions, 125 founding, 115, 116–17, 125, 127 Houdon busts in, 128 library donations, 127 Old Master collection donations, 115 Pennsylvania Museum of Art, 206, 275, 287, 288 Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and Useful Arts, 127 Perino del Vaga, 139 Perkins, Mason, 206 Perregaux, Jean-François, 163 Perry, Commodore, 159 Perry, Marsden J., 218, 219 Persian art, 238–39 Peters, Samuel T., 227 Petit, Georges, 147, 149 Peyster, Abraham de, 100 Peytel, Joanny, 237 Philadelphia art academies in, 115, 116–17, 125, 127 art galleries in, 119 art market in, eighteenth-century, 118 art subject preferences, eighteenth-century, 135 centennial expositions in, 150 collections in, 135, 136–37, 140, 143, 268 as cultural center, 109, 133, 167 French refugees living in, 115 historical societies in, 126

395

Index

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396

Philadelphia (continued) national museums in, 125 natural history museums in, 111–12, 273, Plate 3a portrait studios in, 123 Rodin Museum, 261 Philadelphia Museum, 111–12, 273, Plate 3a philanthropy, 93, 167, 291–92 Phillip IV, King of Spain, 153 Phillips, Duncan and Marjorie Acker, 268, 269 Phillips Foundation, 281 “The Philosophy of Furniture” (Poe), 133 Picard, Charles, 22, 38, 55 Picasso, Pablo art acquisitions, 24 The Beggar, 266 in collections, listed, 265, 266, 267, 268 home decoration commissions, 266 Pierrot, 267 reception of, 261 Piero della Francesca in collections, listed, 204, 213, 214 Crucifixion, 209 Hercules, 179 perception of, 253 Piero di Cosimo in collections, listed, 184, 204, 209 The Young Saint John, 184 Pietà (tapestries), 189, 191 Pigalle, Jean Baptiste Boy Eating an Apple, 201 Boy Seated, Holding a Bird Cage, 201 in collections, listed, 189, 211, 212 Mercury after, 175 Pilgrim Society, 126 Pine, Robert Edge, 118, 123 Pintard, John, 114, 124, 127 Pinturicchio, Bernardio: Madonna and Child, 179 Pisanello, Antonio Isotta degli Atti da Rimini, 216 Portrait of a Young Lady, 188 Pitcairn, Raymond, 12, 246 Platt, Dan Fellows, 208, 219 plutocratic asceticism, 161 Poe, Edgar Allen, 133 Poinsett, Joel, 125 Poldi-Pezzoli, Gian Giacomo, 193 Pollaiuolo, Antonio del Bust of a Young Warrior, 188

Hercules and Deïanira [L’Enlèvement de Déjanire], 156, Plate 4b Pollaiuolo, Piero del, 179, 204 Pope, Alfred Altmore, 259 Pope, Arthur Upman, 240 popular museums, 112–13, 124, 125 Porter, Arthur Kingsley, 20, 29, 220–21, 245, 247, 285 portraiture colonial, 99–100 early Republic, 122, 123, 128 museum galleries for, 106 religion influencing, 295 verisimilitude and preference for, 294 Post, Chandler, 206, 220 Post-Impressionism, 264, 266, 287 Poussin, Nicolas art market and prints after, 101, 103, 104 in collections, listed, 17, 103, 114, 115, 119, 153, 158, 172 colonial admiration for, 104 The Continence of Scipio, 110, 114 The Judgment of Hercules, Strange print after, 103 Moses Plucked from the Rushes [The Finding of Moses], 115 Orpheus and Eurydice, 183 Scipio after, 101 Powers, Daniel and Helen Craig, 257 Powers, Hiram art style descriptions, 122 commissions, 149 Greek Slave, 122 Prado, 273 Pratt, George D., 251 Pratt, Herbert Lee, 244, 250 Pratt, Matthew, 101 Praxiteles in collections, listed, 180, 207 Young Satyr, 180 Prendergast, Maurice, 264 Pre-Raphaelites, 154, 162, 182, 196, 261 Prescott, William Hickling, 133, 148 Primitivism American, 248–52 as contemporary art influence, 169 Dutch, 155, 175 Flemish, 144, 158, 172, 189, 198, 206 French, 185, 206, 207

Index

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Italian, 134, 141, 155, 156, 163, 175, 186, 189, 203, 204–10, 284 promotion of, 161 Spanish, 181, 206 Princeton University Classical archaeology courses at, 232 collection development, 279 collection donations to, 120, 210 colonial history, 98 early collections at, 105, 113 Prinet, Jean-François, 50 prints, 227, 228, 263, 283. See also engravings Probasco, Henry, 136, 143 Providence, Rhode Island, 132, 147, 149, 219, 276 Provost, Jean: Last Judgment, 202 Prown, Jules David, 60 Pulitzer, Joseph, 261 Puritanism, 97, 132, 222–23, 295, 298 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre Boston library commission, 287 in collections, listed, 184, 198, 207, 215, 259, 267, 268 reception of, 286 Summer, 266 Quakers, 96, 97 quality archaeological priorities and lack of, 227 eclecticism and lack of, 195 lack of, 153, 162, 224 as museum acquisition guideline, 276 nationalism and subject importance vs., 129, 130 origins of, 152–53, 170 quantity vs., 158 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome, 289 Queckenberg collection, 176 Quercia, Jacopo della: Virgin and Child, 178 Quesnay de Beaurepaire, Chevalier, 108, 116 Quinn, John, 46, 266 Radeke, Eliza, 233, 234 Raeburn, Sir Henry in collections, listed, 173, 188, 199, 200, 201, 207, 208, 212, 214, 215, 216, 267 Lord Stanley, 201 Master John Campbell of Saddell, 200

Raffaëlli, Jean-François, 143, 184, 197, 218, 258, 260, 287 Randall, John Witt, 152, 162, 217 The Rape of the Sabine Women (tapestry), 189 Raphael Agony in the Garden, 188 The Alba Madonna, 216 La Belle Jardinière, after, 113 in collections, listed, 115, 156, 158, 179, 208 Holy Family, school of, 114 Madonna of the Candelabra, 181 The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, 216 popularity of, 103, 104, 203 prints and reproductions of, 101, 104, 257 Saint George and the Dragon, 216 Small Cowper Madonna, 215 Tommaso Inghirami, 179 Virgin and Child, Enthroned, with Saints, 176 Ratton, Charles, 8, 37 “Réalisation pratique pour une renaissance du sentiment esthétique” (R. B. essay), 54 Realism in collections, 136–44, 197–98, 214, 216, 222, 257, 258, 273 decline in, 197 Old Masters and, 197 popularity of, 135–36, 144–45, 148–49, 222, 256, 258 Réau, Louis, 55, 213 Réau, Paul, 88 Reber, Franz von, 288 Reconstruction, 166 Redwood, Abraham, 103 Reed, Luman, 124, 135 Reisener, George Andrew, 235 religion archaeological studies and origins of, 226 colonial America and diversity of, 97 education and, 108, 132 as influence, 45, 91, 102, 111, 117, 138, 210, 212, 222–23, 295, 298 museums specializing in, 280 Rembrandt collections specializing in, 202 colonial portraits attributed to school of, 100 drawings of, 114, 183, 219, 220 engravings and prints of, 152, 219

397

Index

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398

Rembrandt (continued) fashion immunity of, 300 Head of Christ, 184 Hendrickje Stoffels portrait by, 181 Lady with a Pink, 175 The Marquis d’Andelot Putting on his Armor, 188 The Mill, 202 paintings of, 117, 141, 155, 158, 172, 173, 184, 185, 187, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 284 Pilate Washing His Hands, 175 A Polish Nobleman, 216 Polish Rider, 214 popularity of, 203, 292, 300 Portrait of Nicholas Ruts, 176 Portrait of the Guilder Herman Doomer, 183 print collections and catalogues, 219 promotion of, 221 reception of, 94 Self-Portrait, 175, 178 Washington, 250 Rémy, Jacques, 34 Reni, Guido in collections, listed, 153, 202 Venus Attired by the Graces, Strange print after, 103 Renoir, Pierre Auguste art market and, 270 in collections, listed, 182, 186, 213, 214, 215, 259, 260, 265, 266, 267, 268 exhibitions of, 259 Girl with a Cat, 259 Oarsmen at Chatou, 266 Restout, Jean-Bernard, 116 Reubell, Jean-Jacques, 243 Revere, Paul, 104, 105 Revett, Nicholas, 104 Revolutionary War. See American revolution La Revue Blanche (magazine), 269 Rexey, Virgil, 100 Reynolds, Sir Joshua art books by, 104 art style descriptions, 104 in collections, listed, 116, 172, 173, 176, 184, 188, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 208, 214, 215, 216, 222, 257 exhibitions of, 117, 118 Farmer family portraits commissions, 100 The Governor of Gibraltar, 114

Master Bunbury, 200 Nelly O’Brien portrait, 215 Rhode Island School of Design, 233, 251, 276 Ribera, Jusepe The Monk, 209 Saint Jerome, 181 Ricci, Seymour de, 288 Rice, Eleanor Elkins, 169 Richardson, Henry Hobson, 147, 149, 169, 241, 248–49, 299 Richardson, Jonathan, 135 Richardson, Joseph, 105 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal, 104 Richmond, Virginia, 108, 116, 133 Riggs, William H., 243 The Rights of Man (Paine), 107 Rimmer, William, 149 Ringling, John, 223 Roberts, Nicholas, 100 Roberts, Susan Endicott (Mrs. Marshall Owen Roberts), 137 Robinson, David, 232, 233 Robinson, Edward, 232, 288 Robinson, Thomas, 147 Robouchinsky, 59 Rockefeller, John D., 21, 244, 291 Rockefeller, Laura Celestia Spelman, 169, 244, 268, 291 Rodin, Auguste as art critic, 269 art donations, 261 in collections, listed, 175, 184, 186, 189, 212, 265, 266 Cupid and Psyche, 175 Eddy portrait by, 265 in museums, 261 Orpheus and Eurydice, 175 promotion of, 270 response and popularity of, 260–61 Rodin Museum, 261 Rogers, Jacob S., 238 Rogers, Randolph, 140 “Le rôle du musée dans la vie moderne aux États-Unis et en France” (R. B.), 60 Roman art. See also Classical art and archaeology architectural styles, 122, 253 art books on, 233 glass, 183 interior decoration, 241 jewelry, 158

Index

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museum galleries of, 234, Plate 8b sculpture, 176, 180, 181, 191, 221, 234, 245, 246, 253 Romanesque art architecture, 241 R. B. theses on, 31, 32, 36, 55 R. B. travels and, 54 sculpture, 246, 247, 285–86 Romanticism aversion to, 145, 294 in collections, 136, 138, 143, 158, 197–98, 201, 209, 213, 222, 237, 257, 258, 259, 267 consequences of, 261 exhibitions of, 140, 256, 258 historical studies and value of, 154, 158 medieval themes and, 141, 241, 242 popularity decline, 145, 151, 258 popularity of, 149, 168–69, 197, 257, 261–62 promotion of, 147 reception of, 94, 139, 294 sculpture, 141, 142 subject preferences, 135 “Un rondeau sur la devise de Galiot de Genouillac” (R. B. and Françon), 34 Rorimer, James J., 29 Roselle, Walter A., 236, 237 Rosenberg, Paul, 194 Rosenthal, Albert, 250 Ross, Denman Waldo, 27, 229, 230–31, 240–41, 284 Rosselli, Matteo: David and Goliath, 153 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 156, 178, 186 Rossiter, Henry P., 219 Rothschilds collection, 240 Roulier’s Art Gallery, 34 Rousseau, Henri, 140, 172, 192, 267 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 108 Rousseau, Théodore in collections, listed, 136, 139, 140, 143, 173, 184, 198, 256 exhibitions of, 146 Royall, Anne Newport (A. Traveller), 63 Rubens, Peter Paul Briseis Given Back to Achilles, 202 in collections, paintings, 116, 117, 119, 153, 158, 162, 185, 197, 201, 202, 207, 212, 214, 215, 216, 267, 284 in collections, prints, 101, 104, 119 in collections, sketches, 206 Crucifixion, 156

exhibitions of, 103, 117, 119 popularity and admiration of, 104, 115–16, 267 Portrait of a Man, 184 The Rescue of Philemon and Baucis from the Flood, 206 Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, 179 Runkle, John C., 140 Rush, William, 127 Ruskin, John associates of, 156, 160, 178 books by, 154, 161 collection guidance of, 160 as influence, 134, 143, 198, 220 as influence on quality, 153–54 as medieval art influence, 245 Turner promotion, 158 Ryan, Ida Barry, 189, 244, 261 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 256, 259, 261, 262, 287 Ryerson, Martin A., 185, 186, 206, 236, 284

399

Saarinen, Aline Bernstein, 53 Sachs, Paul J. associates, 27 Bernini bust attribution controversy, 35 biographical information, 27 Brimo de Laroussilhe gallery criticism, 31 collections of, 19, 210, 218, 219, 247 dissertation reproductions provided by, 46 L’ évolution copy with letter to, 50 L’ évolution review and criticism, 50–52 Harvard classes taught by, 21–22, 25–26, 27–28, 32, 51–52, 287 as influence, 206, 220 lecture series, 19–20 museum assistant director positions, 20 museum collection development, 279 museum donations, 34 portraits of, with Delacroix drawing, 19 R. B. fellowship acceptance letter from, 23–24 Sachs, Samuel, 27 Sacrifice of Cain (Moutiers-Saint-Jean abbey), 247, Plate 7b Sacrifices of Cain and Abel (ivory carving), 12, 13 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 187, 248–49 Saint-Mémin, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de, 129 Salem East Indian Marine Society, 113–14

Index

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400

Salomon, William and Helen Forbes, 188–89, 211 Salting, George, 182 Saltonstall, Sir Richard, 100 San Donato sale, 201, 284 San Francisco, California as cultural center, 167 expositions in, 169 historical studies interest in, 160 nineteenth-century collections in, 144 private museums in, 281 Sargent, John Singer associates of, 178, 187, 263 in collections, listed, 169, 179 Gardner, I. S., portrait by, 178 El Jaleo, 179 museum collection inclusion, 287 popularity of, 258, 259, 295, 299 Sassetta, Stephano di Giovanni in collections, listed, 208 Old Master status, 284 Saint Anthony Tempted by the Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 156 Savage, Edward, 117, 118 Scarborough, William Woolsey, 144 Scenes of Adam and Eve and of Joseph (ivory), 11, 13 Schaus, William, 147, 149 Schidlof, Leo, 56 Schiff, Mortimer L., 188, 212, 248 Schneider, René death, 38 dissertation advice, 32, 38 graduate assistants of, 36 letters of recommendation from, 22 university academic advisor and professor, 15, 17–18, 34 Schoenberger, George K., 144 Schreyer, Adolf, 136, 137, 142, 144, 199 Schuylkill Fishing Company, 105 science, 108, 132. See also Encyclopedism scientific institutions, 132 Scripps, James E., 202 Scudder, John (Scudder’s Museum), 112, 124, 125 “La sculpture de bronze en France au XVIième siècle” (R. B. thesis), 18 “La sculpture romane français dans les collections américaines” (R. B. award proposal), 56

Sébastiani collection, 163 “A Second Capital from Notre-Dame-desDoms at Avignon” (R. B. essay), 34 secularism, 98, 132 Sedelmeyer, Charles, 193, 194 Seligmann, Arnold, 29, 247 Seligmann, François-Gérard, 15, 37 Seligmann, Germain, 7, 26 Seligmann, Jacques, 7, 8, 15, 56, 194, 220 Semitic Museum, 280 Seney, George T., 137, 259, 286 Senff, Charles H., 197–98, 259 Setting Out for the Hunt (tapestry), 191 Seurat, Georges Afternoon on the Grande Jatte, 266 American donations of, 271 Le Cirque, 266 in collections, listed, 265, 266 exhibitions of, 259 Lady Powderina, 266 Three Models, 266 Severance, John Long and Elisabeth, 244, 285 Sewall, Henry F., 217 Sharples, James, 123, 126 Sharpless, Jesse, 112 Shaw, Quincy Adams, 132, 139–40, 147, 160, 204, 286 Shaw, Samuel T., 264 Shepherd and Shepherdess (tapestry), 191 Signorelli, Luca Annunciation, 206 in collections, listed, 208 Silvestre collection, 163 Simpson, Kate Seney (Mrs. John W. Simpson), 169, 212, 261 Sirén, Osvald, 206, 288 Sisley, Alfred, 200, 259, 260, 267 Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (Royall), 63 Smibert, John, 101, 104 Smith, Charles S., 228 Smith, Frank C., 209 Smith, Joseph Allen, 115 Smithson, James, 126, 275 Smithsonian Institution, 132, 230, 262–63, 281 social class, 92, 109, 295–96 Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français, 36 Somerville Gallery, 147, 149 Sommerard, Alexandre du, 177, 193

Index

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Sorbonne (Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie), 1, 15, 17–18, 23, 34, 48, 54 Sorolla y Bastida, Joaquín, 189, 263, 281 Sorrowing Adam (casket plaque), 11–12, 13 Soult, Maréchal, 163 Spanish art, 115, 117–18, 192, 239, 281 Spanish Gallery, 162, 163, 273 Spaulding, John Taylor, 260, 267 Spaulding, William S., 229 specialization, 92, 113, 168, 172, 193, 195, 280–81 Spencer, Albert, 259 Spitzer, Frédéric, 175, 193, 194 Springer, Reuben R., 144, 257 St. Louis, Missouri art dealers and advisors in, 149 expositions in, 169, 213 museums in, 239, 246, 276 private collections in, 144 St. Louis World’s Fair (1904), 169, 213 Staatliche Museen, 281–82 Stanford, Leland, 144 Stanwick Hall collection, 118, 119 Stark, Harold, 34 Stebbins, James H., 138 Steen, Jan in collections, listed, 158, 201, 202 A Dutch Kermesse, 143 Stein, Gertrude, 46, 194, 265, 269 Stein, Leo, 194, 265 Steinbrück, Eduard: The Adoration of the Magi, 145 Stevens, Marietta Reed (Mrs. Paran Stevens), 137, 172 Stewart, Alexander T., 140–41 Stewart, Edward LeRoy, 257 Stewart, Emily B. Davis, 257 Stewart, Joseph, 113 Stickney, Edward S., 219 Stickney, Elizabeth Hammond, 219, 286 Stier collection, 102 Stillman, James, 212 Stillman, William, 153 Stoddard, Rebecca Darling, 233 Stolk, J. B. van, 245 Stora, Raphael, 194, 237 Stotesbury, Edward Townsend, 211 Stotesbury, Eva Roberts Cromwell, 211 Strahan, Edward, 136, 141, 148 Strange, Robert, 103

Stuart, Gilbert art education, 122 art style descriptions, 122 in collections, listed, 117, 124, 125, 141, 174, 249, 250, 264 collections of, for artists, 116 cultural influence of, 109 nationalism and portraits by, 123, 124, 125 popularity of, 298 post-American revolutionary war patronage, 122 during Revolution, 106 Stuart, James, 104 Sturges, Russell, 161 Stuyvesant, Rutherford, 242, 285 Sullivan, James, 107 Sullivan, Louis, 169 Sully, Thomas in collections, listed, 124, 125, 142, 174, 249, 250, 264 collections of, 116 collections visited by, 115 exhibitions of, 124 galleries of, 119 nationalism and patriotic portraits by, 123, 124–25, 142, 250 in national museums, 125 Patriotism and the Century, attributed to, 63, 124 Symbolism, 258

401

Tachard, Pablo, 5 Tadolini, Giulio: Cupid and Psyche, after Canova, 138 Tammany Society, 124 taxation, importation, 145, 163 Le Temps scholarship awards, 54–55, 56, 57 The Ten, 264 Teniers, David I. in collections, listed, 157, 161, 162, 186, 201, 202, 207, 257, 284 tapestry designs by, 175 10th Street Studio Building, 146 Terrell, Herbert L., 199 Theus, Jeremiah, 100, 101 Thierry, Tommy, 203 Thoré-Bürger, Théophile, 203 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 142, 280 Ticknor, George, 133

Index

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402

Tilden, Samuel J., 143 Tintoretto, Jacopo in collections, listed, 114, 188, 202, 204, 209, 213, 216 Venetian Senator, 178 Titian admiration of, 101, 103, 104 in collections, drawings, 114 in collections, paintings, 101, 102, 119, 141, 158, 175, 185, 199, 204, 207, 208, 209, 215, 216 in collections, reproductions, 101, 114 Danaë, 161 The Feast of the Gods (Bacchanalia), with Giovanni Bellini, 215, Plate 6b John the Baptist head from Holy Family after, 101 Lucretia, 115 in museum collections, 103 Pietro Aretino, 214 popularity of, 203 Portrait of a Man in a Red Cape, 214 The Rape of Europa, 178 Venus, after, 101 Venus with a Mirror, 216 Venus with Cupid, 101 Toledo Art Museum, 26, 276 Toovey, James, 176 travel antiquities acquisitions, 154–55 as collection influence, 91, 103, 116, 151–52, 168, 172, 252 history studies and archaeology, 160, 192– 93 Trevor, John B., 228 Trinity Church (Boston), 249 Trumbull, John during American revolutionary war, 106 as art dealer, 118–19 art style descriptions, 122 art themes, 121, 123–24 in collections, 124, 125, 126, 127 collections admired by, 101 collections of, 114, 115, 116, 118, 123, 125, 279, 282 patronage, 122, 129 West studio visits, 103 Tuck, Edward, 187, 212, 227, 291 Turenne collection, 163

Turner, J. M. W. art style descriptions, 198 in collections, drawings, 153, 154, 218 in collections, paintings, 154, 158, 173, 176, 182, 197, 199, 201, 214, 215, 219, 259 in collections, prints, 218 Liber Studiorum, 154 promotion of, 153–54, 219 Saltash, 173 View of Scarborough, 154 Tyner, George N., 259 Tyson, Carroll S., 268 Uffizi, 199, 273, 282 Ugolino da Siena: The Passion of Christ, 209 university courses archaeological studies, 232 art and art history studies, 160, 161, 168, 278 art conservation studies, 287 on museums, 21–22, 25–26, 27–28, 32, 51–52, 287 university museums, 278–79. See also specific universities and museums University of Chicago, 237, 241 University of Notre Dame, 223 University of Pennsylvania, 112, 233, 279 University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 279 Valentiner, Wilhelm Reinhold, 26, 206, 221, 276, 288 Valley of the Kings excavations, 285 Valtimaire, 135 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 157, 286 Vanderbilt, William H., 138–39, 244, 273, Plate 4a Vanderlyn, John Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, 116 artistic influences on, 116 art style descriptions, 116, 122 in collections, 116, 124 The Landing of Columbus, 129–30 patronage, 129–30 Van Dyke, Anthony in art galleries, 102, 119 Cardinal Bentivoglio portrait by, 101 in collections, listed, 102, 113, 115, 117, 119, 153, 155, 173, 189, 199, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 212, 214, 215, 216, 218, 223, 284

Index

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colonial admiration for, 104 John Montfort bust portrait by, 114 Lady with a Rose, 178 Lucas van Uffel, 175 Marchesa Durazzo, 175 vanity, as collecting purpose, 196 Van Rensselaer, Cornelia (Mrs. Henry Golden Dearth), 240 Vanuxem, Jacques, 22 Varden, John, 125 Vedder, Elihu, 147 Velázquez, Diego Rodriguez da Silva in collections, listed, 115, 117, 155, 156, 162, 208, 214, 216, 281 Maria Theresa portrait by, 207 Philip IV portrait by, 178 Venetian art architectural designs based on, 245 architectural fragments, 179 bronzes, 189 glass, 157 interior designs, 189 painting, 104, 161, 178, 181, 184, 190, 197, 204, 209, 210 Veneto, Bartolomeo Circumcision, 186 in collections, listed, 184, 186, 207 Veneziano, Domenico in collections, listed, 208, 210, 221 Saint John in the Desert, 209 Venturi, Adolfo, 205 Venturi, Lionello, 88, 205, 206 Vermeer, Johannes An Allegory of the New Testament, 185 art style descriptions, 144 in collections, listed, 197, 201, 202, 208, 214, 215 The Concert, 178 Young Girl Asleep, 175 Young Woman with a Water Jug, 173 Vernon, William H., 114 Veronese, Paolo in collections, listed, 153, 181, 204, 214 popularity of, 103, 104, 203 Verplank, Gulian, 124 Victoria and Albert Museum, 142, 273 Victorian Gothic architecture, 150, Plate 5b La vie des formes (Focillon), 40 Vien collection, 163

Vigée Le Brun, Louise Élisabeth in collections, listed, 172, 176, 189, 199, 208 Marie Antoinette portrait, 212 Pajou portrait busts of, 214 Vignier, Charles, 194, 231, 237 Villot, Frédéric, 19, 288 Virgin and Child (sculpture), 183 Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Catherine and Jerome (unknown), 185 Vita d’Arte (magazine), 269 Vitruvius Britannicus (Campbell), 104 Vitry, Paul, 1, 15, 18, 22 Vivarini, Bartolomeo in collections, listed, 204, 208, 209 Madonna and Child, 184 Vizzavona (publishing firm), 48 Vollard, Ambroise, 3, 265 Voltaire, 121 Vose, Robert, 37, 223, 250 Vose, Seth Morton, 147, 149 Vuillard, Édouard, 270

403

Wadsworth Atheneum, 126, 176, 177, 251 Wales, George Washington, 227 Walker, Edward Chandler, 262 Walker, Thomas Barlow, 158, 162 Wallace, Sir Richard, 193, 213 Wallace Collection, 281 Wallach, Alan, 46 Wallraf-Richartz Museum, 272, 282 Walpole, Sir Horace, 104, 160 Walpole, Sir Robert, 104 Walters, Henry acquisition purpose, 182 art acquisitions and record keeping, 11 as art awareness influence, 133 art gallery founding, 142 biographical information, 180, 193 collection development and acquisitions, 149, 180–82 collection purchases, 194 French decorative arts, 211 Italian Primitives collection, 206 libraries of, 176 medieval art, 241, 246 Near East art, 238 Walters, William Thompson, 141–42, 180, 227, 232, 236, 237

Index

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404

Walters Art Museum, 11, 142, 146, 164, 281 Warburg, Abraham Moritz, 219 Warburg, Felix Moritz, 219, 244 Ward, Edward Matthew, 119 Warren, Edward Perry, 232, 233 Warren, Whitney, 248 War Tariff, 145 Washburn, Gordon, 37 Washington, D.C. architectural style, 122 museums in, art, 142, 146, 186 museums in, national, 125–26, 152, 275, Plate 2b museums in, private foundation, 281 museums in, public foundations, 132, 230, 262–63, 281 private collections, 268 socio-cultural development of, 133 Washington, George, 107, 123, 124, 126, 128, 149 Washington Museum (Boston), 125 Washington Museum (Philadelphia), 125 Waterhouse, E. K., 53, 113, 120 Watson, John, 101, 104 Watteau, Jean Antoine in collections, listed, 189, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 220 Jupiter and Antiope, 211 popularity of, 118, 223 wax museums, 112, 125, 129 Way, Robert, 235 Webb, Daniel, 104 Wedgwood porcelain, 199 Wehle, Harry B., 250 Weill, David, 23 Weir, John Ferguson, 278 Weld, Charles Goddard, 228 Wellesley College, 157, 233, 287 Wells, Gabriel, 35 West, Benjamin The Ambassador from Tunis with His Attendants as He Appeared in England in 1781 (or The Armenians), 37, Plate 3b art academy collections with, 127 artistic influences on, 116 art style descriptions, 117, 122, 231 Christ Healing the Sick, 129 Christ Rejected, 129 in collections, listed, 127, 174, 198, 250 colonial revival and resurgence of, 249 European exhibitions, 103

European travels and residences, 103, 122 exhibitions of, 103, 117 influence of, 103, 109, 129 Lawrence portraits of, 125, 126 in national museums, 126 popularity of, 106, 298 R. B. acquisition and reproduction, 37 Saint Ignatius Captured by A Spanish Vessel, after Murillo, 102 students of, 122 Weyden, Rogier van der Annunciation, 176 Christ Appearing to His Mother, 184 Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and Saint John, 206 Portrait of a Monk, 184 Portrait of Lionello d’Este, 185 Whistler, James Abbott McNeil artistic influences on, 228, 261, 263, 299 associates, 178, 229, 265, 299 in collections, listed, 214, 215, 218, 219, 260, 264, 267, 281, 286 collections focusing on, 262–63 Harmony in Blue and Silver, 178 in museum collections, 286, 287 Nocturne in Grey and Gold, 259 popularity of, 219, 228, 258, 261, 264 reception of, 286 The Wave, 259 Westminster Bridge, 259 Whitcomb, Edgar B., 202 White, Stanton, 201 White City Exhibition (World’s Columbian Exposition), 173 Whitemarsh Hall, 211 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt (Mrs. Harry Payne), 189 Whitney, T. B., 240, 291 Whitney, William C., 189 Whitney Museum of American art, 264 Whittemore, Harris, 259, 260 Wicar, Jean-Baptiste, 217 Widener, Eleanor Elkins (Mrs. Hamilton Rice), 211 Widener, Joseph, 202, 204, 211, 212, 214–15, 238, 284 Widener, Peter Arrell Brown, 214, 227, 288 Wigglesworth, Thomas, 132, 140, 257 Wildenstein, Georges, 18, 53 Wildenstein, Nathan, 3, 8, 220

Index

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Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, 279 Wilkie, Sir David, 135 William, William F., 154, 235 William and Mary College, 98, 105 William III, King of England, 100 Williams, Charles F., 187, 239 Williams, S. Wells, 159 Williams and Company, 147 Wilstach, William P. and Anna H., 140, 284, 286, 287 Winslow, Edward, 100 Wint, Peter de, 135 Winthrop, Grenville, 182–83, 229 Winthrop, John, 100 Wisconsin Historical Society, 126 Witt, Robert, 292 Wolfe, Catherine, 137, 286 Wolfe, John, 139, 148, 149 women. See also specific individuals gender equity opportunities, 131–32 influential, 169 Wood, J. G., 289 Wood, Robert, 248 Worcester Museum of Art, 276 Worch, Edgar, 231 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893) American art exhibitions, 262 as influence, 169, 258, 260, 277 Islamic art exhibition, 237, 238 medieval art exhibition, 242 White City Exhibition at, 173 World War II, 45, 55–57, 59 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 169 Wright, Patience Lowell, 105 Wyle, Robert, 140

Yale University early history of, 98 English royalty portraits at, 100 library copy of L’évolution, 60–61 nationalism and portrait acquisitions, 123 natural history collections of, 113 portrait galleries at, 130 professor exchange programs, 22, 36, 38 School of Art, 278 Yale University Art Gallery ancient art collections, 154, 233, 285 interior design descriptions, 282 Jarves collection acquisition, 156–57, 159, 206, 279, Plate 4b Nicolas Brimo and art acquisitions for, 26 Trumbull collection acquisition, 123, 125, 279 Yale University Fine Arts Library, 60–61 Yamanaka, Sadajiro, 231 Yerkes, Charles T., 174, 188, 189, 211, 239

405

Zeitblom, Bartholomeus: Christ on the Mount of Olives, 181 Zorn, Anders associates of, 178, 187 in collections, listed, 178, 218, 219, 260 Gardner, I. S., portraits by, 178 popularity, 258, 299 promotion of, 219, 259 Zschille, Richard, 173, 242 Zurbarán, Francisco de in collections, 162, 179, 187, 281 A Doctor at Law, 179 exhibitions of, 117 Madonna, 178

Index

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