The title is a bit dramatic, of course he bought and sold it, a principal transaction earned multiples of what he would have made brokering. But if need be he was not above acting as agent.
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PROFILES
THE
DAYS OF DUVEEN
V ~
THE BLUE BOY AND
TWO LAVINIAS
S. N. Behrman
The New Yorker October 27, 1951: 38-63 |
Certainly one of the most fascinating unsung heroines of the American scene at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was Arabella Duval Yarrington. Born in Alabama in 1853, she married a man named A. D. Worsham, also unsung; in 1884, a few years after he died, she married Collis P. Huntington, the biggest of California's Big Four, the promoters of the Central Pacific Railroad; and in 1913, after his death, she married his nephew H. E. Huntington, who was one of his heirs. H. E. Huntington thus married his aunt, something men don't ordinarily do unless there is an inescapable fascination. When the impulse to marry his uncle's widow became irresistible, H. E. Huntington, who had been divorced by his first wife some years before, was sixty-three.
Arabella Huntington's early life is obscure. When the newspapers, with a gasp, reported her marriage to Collis P. Huntington—they gasped again when she married H. E.—one of them noted, in lieu of more definite biographical information—that she was "ambitious." What she was ambitious for, it let its readers guess. Oscar Lewis, in his book on the Central Pacific Railroad, "The Big Four," makes it clear that one thing the multiple Mrs. Huntington was ambitious for was social recognition. He tells how she induced Collis, a former Sacramento storekeeper who had always prided himself on the fact that he spent no more than two hundred dollars a year on himself, to build a two-million-dollar mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street (it looked like a warehouse) and, while he was about it, a comparatively modest two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar mausoleum in Woodlawn. Collis never even went to look at his Woodlawn place; as for the Fifty-seventh Street house, he hated it.
Arabella, on the other hand, was enthusiastic about the house. Soon after it was completed, she filled it with tapestries, pictures, and fragile French gilt chairs (Collis, a giant of a man weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, couldn't sit on any of them), and invited a lot of prominent people to a party. Nobody much came. Arabella transferred her activities to San Francisco, where she remodelled a house, filled it with gilt chairs, and gave another party. As Collis was cordially hated in San Francisco, nobody much came to that party, either. In the end, Mrs. Huntington was saved from the social isolation that threatened her by the celebrated art dealer Joseph Duveen, later Lord Duveen of Millbank.
Whereas the upper stratum of American society turned its collective back on Arabella Huntington, Duveen received her, whenever she consulted him, with deference. He introduced her to the enchanting realm of the aesthetic, and while doing so treated her, as she herself once said, "like a queen." It was a sensation that New York and San Francisco denied her, and one that she enjoyed; Duveen, who knew some authentic queens personally, was in a peculiar position to provide it. There was a special essence of authority about Duveen that eventually made her forsake all others.An eminent New York antique dealer once showed her some very expensive Renaissance furniture; she was delighted with it, and bought it. The furniture was delivered to her New York home at a moment when Duveen was there, giving her a lesson in art appreciation. What he said about the furniture is not known, but her reaction to his criticism is. She telephoned the furniture dealer and told him to come at once and take it back. "You'll find it in the back yard," she said. The same antique dealer had another exacerbating experience involving Duveen. Andrew Mellon, soon after he became Secretary of the Treasury, asked the antique dealer to come to Washington and give him an estimate on furnishing his apartment. Forehandedly thinking of possible future profits, the dealer made the estimate as low as he could—thirty thousand dollars. Mellon mentioned this figure to Duveen, who pronounced it excessive; he said he could do the job admirably for twelve thousand. Mr. Mellon then asked the antique man how it was that Duveen could make an estimate so much lower. "Because I haven't got expensive pictures to sell!" the dealer answered bitterly....MORE
There are at least three prices quoted in the literature as the price paid for The Blue Boy, $620,000; $640,000 and $728,800. Any of these would have established the world record price for a painting.
Previously:
Duveen, The Greatest Salesman in the World: Early Days
Duveen the Art Dealer: The Greatest Salesman in the World Pt. III
Duveen, The Greatest Salesman in the World: Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson and the Boston Connection Pt. IV
