Duveen Quotes

PRAXIS DUVEEN, AT THE age of five, sitting on the beach at Brighton, made a pretty picture for the photographer. Round angel face, yellow curls, puffed sleeves, white socks and little white shoes—one on, one off, while she tried to take a pebble from between her tiny pink toes—delightful! The photographer had hoped to include her elder sister Hypatia in the picture, but that sullen, sallow little girl had refused to appear on the same piece of card as her ill-shod sister.

Stevie herself believed that evil began in small acts of selfishness, banal cruelties in a normal day; their horror was that they were casual. To be casual with the lives of others was evil. This was an uncomfortable idea because it meant that everyone had the potential to influence the balance of good and evil on the earth. It demanded that we take individual responsibility.

When you pay high for the priceless, you’re getting it cheap.

You can get all the pictures you want at fifty thousand dollars apiece – that’s easy. But to get pictures at a quarter of a million apiece – that wants doing!

As a novice in collecting,’ he said with a modesty not unlike Bache’s, ‘I expected to have to pay the highest prices for masterpieces. What I did not expect, what I was to discover, was that I would also have to pay a large premium for the privilege of paying the highest prices!

He did not think that art should, or could, be sold overnight. He believed in waiting for advantageous moments; he arranged them far in advance, so he was not surprised when they came. In his grand financial strategy, he calculated in terms of his total life span. The final tally would not be in, he figured, until he had made his last sale and died. His strategy proved sound. It was not until 1937, after he put over his last great deal with Mellon, that Duveen liquidated his £1,200,000 debt to his London bank. When he had made his very last sale, he was out of debt, and had £3,000,000 in the bank, an inventory worth £2,000,000, and his self-confidence intact.

The passion of these newly rich Americans for industrial merger yielded to an even more insistent passion for a merger of their newly acquired domains with more ancient ones; they wanted to veneer their arrivisme with the traditional. It would be gratifying to feel, as you drove up to your porte-cochère in Pittsburgh, that you were one with the jaded Renaissance Venetian who had just returned from a sitting for Titian; to feel, as you walked by the ranks of gleaming and authentic suits of armour in your mansion on Long Island – and passed the time of day with your private armourer – that it was only an accident of chronology that had put you in a counting house when you might have been jousting with other kings in the Tournament of Love; to push aside the heavy damask tablecloth on a magnificent Louis XIV dining-room table, making room for a green-shaded office lamp, beneath which you scanned the report of last month’s profit from the Saginaw branch, and then, looking up, catch a glimpse of Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan and flick the fantasy that presently you would be ordering your sedan chair, because the loveliest girl in London was expecting

He more than once asked a prospective client, ‘Do you realise that the only thing you can spend a hundred thousand dollars on without incurring an obligation to spend a great deal more for its upkeep is a picture? Once you’ve bought it, it costs you only a few hundred dollars every fifteen years for cleaning.’ It was a revolutionary sales argument, and one admirably adapted to American royalty.

An effective supplementary sales argument, which he used repeatedly, was: ‘You can always make more money, but if you miss this picture, you’ll never get another like it, for it is unique.’ It was the sort of home truth Duveen’s clients understood.

The fact is,’ Mrs Hearst said, in relating the episode, ‘you couldn’t buy anything from Duveen! Everything was either in reserve for somebody else or he had promised it to his wife or for some reason he wasn’t ready to sell it yet.

Though Morgan was a collector as indiscriminate as he was voracious (‘a chequebook collector’, one of his biographers, John Kennedy Winkler, has called him), he was able to create, by the sheer weight of his name, a valuable provenance of his own.

Duveen was not selling merely low upkeep, social distinction, and watermarks; he was selling immortality.

I didn’t want that fellow to get used to buying modern pictures,’ he said. ‘There are too many of them.’ Duveen was never eager to sell anything painted after 1800, because the fertility of the nineteenth-century painters would have sadly upset the Duveen economy of scarcity.

Duveen instantly wrote his ten-thousand-pound purchase off as a total loss, but the pictures he acquired from the diplomat’s friends returned him a profit many times as large as his investment.

Compared to his clients, Duveen was a child in business, but he almost always had his way with them. When they started talking about prices, he started talking about values – values that, as it happened, he himself had created. When customers complained about the price of his masterpieces, he brought into play, sometimes subtly and sometimes brutally, his standard threat – that he had a rival collector whose sense of values was more perceptive, whose taste, in fact, was anything but vulgar. The rival collector was his trump card.

Another recollection of Duveen’s was of being taken by his father to see the elder J. P. Morgan in his London house, at Prince’s Gate. His Uncle Henry, who had by then become a pet of Morgan’s, had told Morgan that his brother was, next to him, the highest authority on Chinese porcelains.

One habit I have not yet succeeded in getting rid of: the inveterate one of feeling that when at home I must sit at my desk for so long each day to write, not letters whether of business or of friendship, but printable stuff, even when there is no idea of publishing connected with it. If I have failed to do it, I feel morally hang-doggy and physically unclean.

In fact, on Duveen’s last visit to H. E.’s California mansion, San Marino, just before H. E. died, the host didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay for the freight-car load of merchandise in the guest’s caravan. Duveen accepted instead some Los Angeles real estate, a commodity of which H. E. was then the largest owner.

Hitler’s preferences in art had a strong nationalist tinge; he deplored the fact that so many early German artists had been displaced, in museums and private collections, by decadent Italians. Duveen went to considerable trouble to see that Hitler’s preferences were indulged. Working under cover of an English firm of unblemished Aryan genealogy – a firm that, in turn, employed a similarly impeccable Dutch concern – Duveen furnished the funds for a large and long-term operation that funnelled back into Germany early German art works which came quite cheap, in exchange for the decadent Italians.

One rather celebrated butler in a Fifth Avenue house that stocked Duveens put in so much overtime that, before he retired, his emoluments from Duveen totalled over a hundred thousand dollars. The gratitude of servants was a fine silt from which burgeoned the flower of remembrance. They developed a feeling that it was only fair to transmit to the generous nobleman any information that might interest him: what rival dealers (who had no comparable sense of the value of a servant’s time) had the effrontery to offer works of art to their masters, what purchases the masters were considering, what was said about Duveen’s emissaries on the walls – in short, all the minutiae of relevant gossip that in the art world are as pregnant with significance as the secret memoranda exchanged by chancelleries.

This was the largest transaction ever consummated in the world of art. Duveen had easily outdone the Soviets. There were twenty-one items in the Soviet deal, forty-two in Duveen’s. Mellon paid the Soviets seven million dollars; he paid Duveen twenty-one million.

Since Duveen was able to assemble a large part of the Mellon Collection – and a large part of so many others besides – in one lifetime, it can be argued that he was the greatest collector in history.

The millionaires of the Duveen Era were all dressed up, but they really had nowhere to go. Duveen supplied a favoured few of them with a destination. The private lives of these sad tycoons were often bitter; their children and their family life disappointed them. The fathers had too much to give; the returns were often in inverse ratio to the size of the gifts. They knew that they were ruining their children and yet they didn’t know how to stop it. Their children made disastrous marriages, got killed in racing cars, had to pay blackmail to avoid scandal. But with the works of art it was different. They asked for nothing. They were rewarding. They shed their radiance, and it was a lovely, soothing light. You could take them or leave them, and when you had visitors you could bask in the admiration the pictures and sculptures excited, which was directed towards you even more subtly than towards them, as if you yourself had gathered them and, even, created them. The works of art became their children.

Two years after Duveen died, Kress bought all the pictures that had been hanging fire. Duveen went right on selling.

Early in life, Duveen – who became Lord Duveen of Millbank before he died in 1939, at the age of sixty-nine – noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing career was the product of that simple observation.

Making his clients conscious that whereas he had unique access to great art, his outlets for it were multiple, he watched their doubts about the prices of the art evolving into more acute doubts about whether he would let them buy it.

Astonishingly, most experts had no such qualms. With the exception of Duveen and a tiny handful of others, the leading scholars of the day all shared Bredius’s opinion that Emmaus was a masterpiece.* They focused their attention on the Vermeer touches they liked best and ignored or downplayed the others.