Art-Dealing
The Rise of The House of Duveen
By James Henry Duveen
Alfred A. Knopf. 293 pp. 10 illustrations. $5.00.
In The decades of peace and great prosperity after the Civil War in the United States and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe, bankers and industrialists on either side of the Atlantic sought to fill their mansions with rare porcelain, heirloom furniture, old tapestries, and expensive pictures. Art dealers—and prominently among them the Bernheims, the Rosenbergs, the Wildensteins—were quick to seize the moment; the number of Jews who gained prominence at that time on the art market was astonishingly large. Also, it was still possible before 1900 to find, in old castles and churches, objets d’art that could be bought for a trifle and sold for a fortune. The huge drawing rooms of the newly rich required enormous paintings, and if there were not enough Tintorettos and Veroneses to satisfy the clients, French gold medalists were mass-producing canvases on historical themes, or of voluptuous baigneuses, certainly more accessible than the work of the famous Renaissance and Baroque masters.
Jewish pawnbrokers and junk dealers had handled enough old jewelry, silver, porcelain, and carpets so that the change to dealing in antiques, paintings, and sculpture appeared gradual, almost imperceptible. Nathan Wildenstein (1851-1934) was an old-clothes dealer in Paris before he founded his gallery in 1875; his son Georges, who inherited the business, became a celebrated art historian and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Other Jews graduated to dealers via shopkeeping—art shopkeeping. Alexandre Bernheim (1839-1919) was one of those who originally operated an artists’ supply shop. He loved the works of his close friend, Courbet, but, on demand of his regular customers, carried Bonnat, Bouguereau, Meissonier, and such other academicians, now largely forgotten. His sons’ predilection for the Impressionists (rejected as radicals in the 1870’s and 1880’s) made him unhappy. Alexandre Rosenberg, whose firm was founded in 1878, dealt in antique furniture and academic genre and landscape paintings: he made his son Paul quickly sell Van Gogh’s Man with a Night Cap, for which the younger man had been unbusiness-like enough to pay the equivalent of $120.
But perhaps the most famous art-dealing Jewish family of the period was the Duveens, who are the subject of this memoir by an eighty-four-year-old member of the clan. The book—filled with adventure tales in which one character tries to outmaneuver the other, to steal his customers, if not his money—is a family chronicle that will be valuable to Jewish historians, as well as to specialists in the Victorian and Edwardian ages.
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The story of the Duveens begins with a 17th-century Franco-Jewish banker and connoisseur, Eberhard Jabach, who was once compelled to sell his Titians, Giorgiones, and other great pictures to Louis XIV, thus unwittingly laying the foundation for the Louvre. In 1810, from a female descendant of Jabach named du Vesne, the ironmaster Henoch Joseph of Meppel, Holland, took the name of Duveen. From the middle of the 19th century, nearly all members of the Duveen family and the branch that was dubbed “Hangjas” (the Dutch for caftan) dealt in antiques, but it was not until 1870 or so that the genius needed to make “Duveen” a trademark was manifested in the person of the English Joel (Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, 1843-1908).
Uncle Joel—as he is called in this book—was not satisfied simply to sell in England the old porcelain he imported from Holland. Establishing magnificent galleries in London, he acquired patrons among the nobility and, more profitably, among the American millionaires. While he knew very little about art, he had a good eye for fakes—and in the days of Victoria the art market was infested with forgeries. Above all, he knew his customers. Joel could quickly convince a patron that a certain object was precisely what he wanted, and a safe investment to boot. Among the visitors to his galleries were the future Edward VII and his bride, Alexandra.
Uncle Joel had eight sons and four daughters, and—believing in the traditional Jewish concept of a family whose members could trust one another blindly—he wanted to create a dynasty of art dealers similar to the Rothschild banking dynasty. His plans, however, were shattered by the egotistical and ambitious Joe (Lord Duveen of Millbank, 1869-1939) who drove out one Duveen after another, resorting, according to the author, to pretty sharp practices in the process. Lord Duveen declared: “I don’t want any Duveen to come after me,” and his wish was realized: the glory of the house perished with him, in 1939.
That the Duveens were smart businessmen who knew how to turn contemporary Victorian and Edwardian mansions into veritable storehouses of the most expensive stuff, beautiful and otherwise, clearly emerges from this saga. That Uncle Joel, who before turning to dishes was on his way to becoming a success in groceries, derived little aesthetic pleasure from works of art is equally clear. James Henry himself displays enthusiasm only about Rembrandt; apparently he has not yet caught up with the merits of 19th-century art, not to mention the art of our time.
Inevitably, the reader will recall the biography of Lord Duveen of Millbank, written by S. N. Behrman, first serialized in the New Yorker, and published in book form by Random House in 1952. Behrman treated the earlier Duveens only sketchily in one chapter, “A Beginning in Delft,” and devoted the bulk of his book to his hero and his hero’s relations with Bernard Berenson, and with his fabulous customers. By comparison with Behrman, who had no first-hand information but was able to retell the stories he obtained from numerous sources with extreme skill and charm, James Henry Duveen is a rather awkward writer. His first-hand knowledge only serves to seduce him into a recital of many tedious details. But there is good reading to be found in the pages devoted to those insatiable collectors, J. P. Morgan and Benjamin Altman.
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