Four Portraits

by

Lev Raphael

You don’t usually think of Kansas City when Leonardo da Vinci comes to mind but the city is a major player in John Brewer’s The American Leonardo.

Eager to outdo Chicago as a cultural center, in 1919 the Kansas City Art Museum was hot for a painting called “La Belle Ferronière,” offered for sale by a local couple who claimed it was a da Vinci. To have the only da Vinci in America would be an unbelievable coup.

How had the Kansan couple acquired this rare work? The wife was French and she said it was a wedding gift. There was only one hitch: the Louvre had a similar picture, so was this one truly a da Vinci, or a copy? Asked for his opinion, famed art dealer Joseph Duveen called the Kansas City canvas a fake, and its devastated owners eventually took him to court. What followed was years of litigation.

In the art world a century ago, experts like Duveen relied on their knowledge, their taste, their experience, and their sixth sense more than science to verify a work's authenticity. A man who loved his lawsuits, Duveen came off in this particular case as an unbearable snob, with the battle lines drawn in court between American sincerity and European arrogance. Duveen finally settled out of court, but the story didn't end there.

Brewer follows every complex twist and turn of the painting's weird history—it even wound up as a guest star in Hollywood for awhile—as its owners doggedly tried to prove it was authentic and the lookalike painting in the Louvre was a fake. Though today experts don't even believe it to be by a student of da Vinci's, it recently sold at Sotheby's for 1.5 million dollars anyway. The association with Leonardo was evidently enough to triple the expected selling price.

While Brewer discusses questions of authentication and the inbred world of art connoisseurs, it's the human drama that carries the book. His most fascinating character in a cast of what seems like hundreds is Duveen, the same high-flying dealer whose longtime colleague Bernard Berenson helped Isabella Stewart Gardner amass her amazing collection, now housed in the Gardner Museum that was her home in Boston.

Duveen was the first international celebrity art dealer, catering to American plutocrats by appealing to their vanity and pulling their strings as only he knew how to do. Selling masterpieces to the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, and William Randolph Hearst, he was a master manipulator, self-promoter, and wheeler-dealer. How was he so successful? He made these super-rich men believe that “art was priceless and that when you pay for the infinite with the finite,” you’re getting a real bargain. Shelling out exorbitant amounts for Old Masters gave plutocrats who longed for European-style display the “assurance of getting genuinness [sic], rarity, uniqueness.” Europe had art; America had money. A simple equation, perhaps, but only Duveen could make it work so well for so long: thirty years.

S.N. Behrman's beautifully written, fast-paced study Duveen does justice to this flamboyant showman and salesman whose father and uncle sold porcelains, tapestries and furniture in London, just barely laying the foundation for Duveen's extraordinary career. Though they may have flourished, the younger Duveen soared into an empyrean he created.

Behrman published the book in 1951, based on articles written for The New Yorker. A noted playwright and screenwriter, he excels at recounting complex and sometimes hilarious anecdotes that display Duveen’s inimitable ability to make millionaires part with big bucks. Though sometimes he made them wait, as when he refused to sell a Rembrandt to a Californian industrialist because the man owned “no other pictures [and] the Rembrandt would be lonely.” Duveen started the mogul off with (relatively) more modest paintings and gradually found him worthy of a Rembrandt. Duveen loved to take millionaires in hand and educate them to appreciate and lust after the paintings he sold.

For Duveen, buying collections and paying record prices for art was crucial: the large amounts generated publicity and made him seem like a juggernaut. In effect, he monopolized the market, making himself the sole source for the best Old Masters; Duveen insisted on being “associated not just with great works of art but the greatest.” A master at PR, he could turn even a huge financial penalty from the U.S. Customs Bureau for smuggling into a source of pride: “Who else would have so big a settlement?”

Though he was exigent, impatient, witheringly dismissive of rivals and the works they sold, Duveen was also surprisingly generous, giving away ten million dollars to various charities. On a more personal level, “he wore friendliness like a nimbus, and let it shine upon an enormous miscellany of people connected—sometime directly, sometimes indirectly—with art: critics, museum directors, restorers, architects, decorators, servants of all grades, including deck stewards on ships.  Accustomed to doing things en prince, he scattered largess, often for no specific purpose but with a touching faith in the emotion of gratitude.  Unimpressed himself by sums that were less than colossal, he was continually being pleasantly surprised by the welcome that people who had a different scale of values accorded smaller amounts.”

With galleries in Paris, London and New York, Duveen not only seduced multi-millionaires into parting with vast sums for Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Van Eycks and Vermeers, he eventually talked them into passing these works on to museums. The lure? He promised them immortality in the company of geniuses.

It’s fascinating to think that this opulent, imperious man who was eventually made a Baron was in effect a democrat: hundreds of great works of art might have stayed in private collections without his guidance and advice. Instead, thanks to Duveen's golden tongue, American museums like the National Gallery, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts have some of the finest collections in the world.

When people come to that Boston museum, one of the paintings that holds them the longest is Sargent’s extraordinary large portrait “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” Curator Erica E. Hirshler reports that some visitors stand there crying; others study and sketch it; still more try to engage their children by the fascinating individual portraits of four girls who together create a world that has sparked everything from arrogant contempt to adulation. As all great art should, it speaks to people, and Hirshler helps us hear what the world has said about it, and what it says about the world.

Only twenty-seven when he painted it, Sargent was just beginning to be renowned and compared to Velasquez when his well-connected Boston friend Ned Boit commissioned the unconventional portrait which is as much about light and shadow, presence and absence, as it is about the young girls depicted in it. The girls stand almost mysteriously disconnected from one another in a deeply shaded hallway where large decorative Chinese vases loom larger than they do.

Finished quickly for its size and achievement, the painting sparked intense opposition and misunderstanding because it was so unlike the typical saccharine portraits of children popular at the time, and barely a portrait at all, since the treatment of light fascinated Sargent as much as capturing the girls. But Henry James wasn't the only viewer to call it “astonishing,” and eventually the painting achieved the status it has today of a masterpiece, though Sargent’s reputation had to soar, plummet and then rise again before that happened.

Lushly illustrated in color and black and white, Hirshler's Sargent's Daughters: The Biography of a Painting is encyclopedic, guiding us through the intimate world of the painting itself; the lives of its privileged subjects before and after they were captured by Sargent; the intersections between Sargent and Mr. Boit, a lawyer turned watercolorist; and the painting’s long life as a subject for analysis of all kinds, some of it pretty tendentious.

It’s hard to know what’s more fascinating here: Boit’s sad up-and-down career; the strange fates of some of his family members; the peripatetic life of wealthy expatriate Americans in the Gilded Age; or the wildly varying readings art critics of all kinds have given this painting. Fittingly enough, though Hirshler marshals writing from the period, there is almost no documentation about the making and purchase of the painting itself: no sketches, no letters or journal entries, no photographs, no bill of sale, no shipping records. Ultimately, the painting keeps its mystery, transcending time, transcending mere fact.

The divergent reactions to Sargent’s work certainly prove that taste can be variable, but can bad taste give you insomnia? Someone else's bad taste? It does in The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James’s hilarious dark novel about the love of collecting and how it can expand one’s horizons while it narrows one’s heart.

Mrs. Gereth is a woman of exquisite, indefatigable taste. She and her late husband filled their lovely Jacobean house Poynton with a collection of gorgeous objects, from tapestries to Louis Seize furnishings, from bronzes to antique altar cloths. Out of many works of art they’ve made something transcendent. To reach such perfection, she and her husband lived like hunters, stalking Europe for hidden treasures which they could snatch up at a bargain, and now she has a house whose perfection is legendary, at least to her.

The Brigstocks who own Waterbath have “smothered it with trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keep-sakes for housemaids and nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible instinct for gross deviation and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered them almost tragic.”

In this wasteland, Mrs. Gereth has noted another guest, young Fleda Vetch, who also seems struck dumb by Waterbath’s colossal bad taste and they quickly become a mutual admiration society as they confess utter loathing for their surroundings. Impecunious Fleda has a sly sense of humor. The house is smothered in acres of varnish and she jokes that the Brigstock clan probably applies it to every surface possible on rainy days when there’s nothing else for them to do, with lots of jocular pushing and shoving.

Alas, the Brigstocks aren’t a joke to everyone. Owen Gareth is smitten by Mona Brigstock, a girl whose personality seems coated with varnish that seals everything in; she’s quite impenetrable. A “massive maiden,” Mona is “long-limbed and strangely festooned . . . without a look in her eye or any perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature.” With priceless, deadpan wit, James writes, “her expression would probably have been beautiful, if she had had one.”

Because kind-hearted but not very bright Owen Gereth wants to marry Mona, that means his parents’ extraordinary collection will pass into the control of two people who don’t resonate in any way whatsoever to the achievement of Mrs. Gereth’s lifetime. Written according to English custom at the time, her husband’s will requires her to give up the house and move to a smaller one, leaving Owen in complete possession. But Mrs. Gereth is a warrior, devoted to her collection, and isn’t so easily displaced. It’s not greed that drives, her, however, as Fleda comes to learn: “[Mrs. Gereth] cared nothing for mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best for the objects themselves.” It's too late to donate them to a museum, so Mrs. Gareth is determined to throw Fleda and Owen together in the hopes of breaking up his engagement  to Mona Brigstock.

Fleda is sadly a woman who thinks too much, worries too much, has too many scruples, and can’t let herself go, and so despite her love of Poynton when it’s shown to her, and her deep appreciation of it, she’s not the best choice of a savior for either Mrs. Gereth or Owen, whom she falls in love with. The story evolves quickly through the conflict among all these characters as played out in Fleda’s super-fine consciousness. James’s poignant drama explores troubled family ties, selfishness, generosity, and being true to oneself with great verve and deep emotion. The end is a tragedy on many levels, but along the way, the barbed wit makes you laugh even while certain events and conversations will make you wince. Today the story would be called “ripped from the headlines” since James had in mind some actual tussle between a mother and her son when he conceived the novel. But while lawyers and bailiffs hover as a threat, they never appear; there’s more than enough damage done by over-confidence, shame, and lack of courage. James’s dramas are often about the imagination of disaster; sadly for Mrs. Gereth, her collecting has ironically made her too coarse, too demanding, too abrupt and so she brings about what she sought to avoid. A lifetime of collecting, of making fine discriminations, has left her unable to see people with the same kind of clarity and generosity: “She had no imagination about anybody’s life save on the side she bumped against.” Spoiling for a fight, she doesn’t see how she herself has been spoiled by her adoration of the beautiful. As Emerson wrote, “art is a jealous mistress.”

Books mentioned in this column:
The American Leonardo by John Brewer (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Duveen by S. N. Behrman (The Little Bookroom, 2003)
Sargent's Daughters: The Biography of a Painting by Erica E. Hirshler (MFA Publications, 2009)
The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.