PROFILES

THE DAYS OF DUVEEN

II ~ A BEGINNING IN DELFT

S. N. Behrman
The New Yorker
 October 6, 1951: 41-62

The original Duveen establishment, the forerunner of the distinguished firm of Duveen Brothers, with its art galleries in New York, London, and Paris, was a blacksmith shop in the little village of Meppel, in Holland. Joseph Duveen, the proprietor, and his wife, Eva, were Jewish. They had four children—Joseph Joel, born in 1843; Henry, born in 1854; and two daughters. The blacksmith's wife must have been a remarkable woman. Although her husband, hammering out horseshoes for the farmers in Meppel, often called Joseph Joel to pump the bellows and Henry to hold the metal on the anvil, she managed, in addition to doing her household chores, to give the boys an elementary education—which was all the education they ever had—and to become a collector in a small way, the only disinterested collector the family has produced. She acquired a hobby that must have been a relaxation to her after the grind of her daily existence. She took to buying bits of Holland's celebrated delft pottery with her small savings. Whatever she could spare from the family budget she put into delft, and in time she became a connoisseur of it. She would send her two boys around the neighborhood to buy or exchange pieces, and for this particular pottery the children developed a taste that was as perceptive as her own. The blacksmith was humorously condescending about his wife's hobby. Delft was cheap, and he doubtless concluded that she bought it only because she didn't have the money to buy land or houses, as her more fortunate neighbors did. Actually, she bought it not just for that reason but because she loved it passionately. After she had been collecting for some years, the news percolated through to Meppel that across the Channel, in rich and mighty England, there were people who wanted to buy delft even if they could afford to buy other things, and this gave her a startling inspiration. She had loftier hopes for her boys than blacksmithing. In 1866, when Joseph Joel was twenty-three, she improvised a career for him; she loaded him with all the delft he could carry, and packed him off to England to sell it.

Joseph Joel was quite happy to go to England, but when he got there he had a change of heart. Selling delft struck him as an unmanly sort of work, and since, like so many of the Dutch, he could speak some English, he decided to become a travelling salesman of more substantial commodities. After experimenting briefly with one unmarketable product after another, he finally hit his stride in lard. His slitherings about in lard took him, in 1867, to the city of Hull, and there, one evening, he met a Miss Rosetta Barnett, the daughter of a local pawnbroker. Either Joseph Joel was taken with her charm or he had reached the point where he wanted to settle down, or both. In any case, he proceeded to rush her, and, perhaps because he was tired of carrying it around, he showered her with his mother's delft. Miss Barnett, who had never been wooed with delft before, showed her presents to her father, and he was more impressed by them than she was. Possibly he had made advances on delft to Hull collectors who were hard up. He questioned his daughter's suitor and discovered that there was a great deal more good delft where that came from. He also found out that the young man was knowledgeable about delft but somewhat deprecatory about it. Mr. Barnett took a firm line. He didn't like the idea of having a son-in-law in lard, but he was titillated by the idea of having one in delft. He said he would give his consent to the marriage if Joseph Joel would get enough delft from his mother to set up a shop in Hull. Moreover, Mr. Barnett said, he would finance the enterprise. Joseph Joel gave up his swashbuckling career in lard, married Miss Barnett, and rented a tiny shop with living quarters above it. From delft, he branched out into furniture and objects of art, learning about his merchandise as he acquired it. He attended to the buying and selling; his wife was treasurer, a task that at first consisted largely of getting her father to put up more money from time to time. The Duveens' business and reputation grew, and so did their family. They produced eight boys and four girls. Their eldest was Joseph, the future Lord Duveen of Millbank and the greatest art dealer in history, who was born over the delft-and-furniture shop on October 14, 1869.

The blacksmith's wife, having launched her first argosy successfully, felt justified in launching another. She decided that Henry should undergo a course of instruction under Joseph Joel and then move on to America. If rich Englishmen bought delft, so, she reasoned, would rich Americans. In 1876, after a few years of apprenticeship in Hull, Henry landed in Boston. A rotund, flat-footed little man with a walrus mustache, who had never been to school and who spoke English with a guttural Dutch accent, Henry was to become within a few years the confidant, and the adviser on art purchases, of two of the most inaccessible men in America, the elder J. P. Morgan and Benjamin Altman, as well as of a group of more sociable men that included Collis P. Huntington, P. A. B. Widener, and George J. Gould. It is not recorded that Henry ever gave anything away, but he managed nevertheless to generate an atmosphere of Santa Claus benevolence. His clients, and all his fellow-dealers, were soon affectionately calling him Uncle Henry. When he arrived in Boston, though, he was just a Dutch immigrant with hardly any English and a lot of delft. There was no Miss Barnett in Boston to give his delft to, so he began to peddle it from shop to shop. The architects and decorators of Boston liked his pottery, with its graceful blue designs and charming Dutch genre scenes. After Henry had covered Boston thoroughly, he decided to try New York. He rented a room on the third floor of a loft building on Maiden Lane, and set up shop there, expanding his line to include various kinds of china, and also furniture. When he had been in New York less than a year, he felt encouraged enough to write home, "This is a fine place and I think we will do good business here." Many years later, his nephew Joseph had this letter framed, and hung it in the office of his Fifth Avenue gallery.

The "good business" probably began when one day there toiled up the three flights of stairs to Uncle Henry's Maiden Lane establishment a short, stout gentleman with thick glasses, who said, after he had recovered his breath, that he was interested in Chinese porcelains. So was Henry Duveen, and they had a porcelain-lovers' chat that ended in the visitor's buying two antique Chinese vases of enamelled copper. The visitor was the department-store magnate Benjamin Altman, and this visit led to the accumulation by Altman, through Uncle Henry, of a distinguished collection of Chinese porcelains. The two copper vases are now in the Altman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. "Mr. Altman's career as a collector began in 1882," the official handbook on the collection says, "with the purchase of a pair of Chinese enamel vases (Nos. 44 and 45 in case C, Room 1) which, for sentimental reasons, he always retained as the beginning of a great undertaking. . . . They are of interest as being the first objects of art which attracted Mr. Altman's attention, and he always regarded them with affection as the nucleus from which his entire collection grew." Altman evidently regarded Uncle Henry with an affection almost as deep. Altman was a bachelor and a recluse. He had no social life to speak of, and he lived frugally. Shortly after his death, Lord Duveen said to an interviewer, "Though he spent millions on art, he travelled like a Cook's tourist." Altman's business partner and heir, Michael Friedsam, never forgave Duveen. It is the kind of remark that Uncle Henry would not conceivably have made; it is the kind of remark that his nephew Joseph often made, which is one reason he was never given an affectionate nickname. Lord Duveen was called many things in his lifetime, but never Uncle Joseph—not even by his nephews and nieces. Altman's reluctance to spend money on himself was so great that it may have hastened his death. At the age of seventy-three, he became ill at a resort in the Thousand Islands. His regular doctor was in Europe, and he asked a local doctor to call a certain physician in New York and, without mentioning the name Altman, inquire what he would charge to come up and take care of a patient. The New York physician, who happened to be a friend of Altman's regular doctor, said that his fee would be a thousand dollars a day. Altman thought it was too steep, and stuck with the local man, whose ministrations were more reasonably priced. By the time Altman could be got to New York, his disease had advanced too far to be effectively treated. Perhaps he comforted himself with the thought that he was achieving a considerable economy by dying. Altman's regular doctor, returning from Europe, was horrified to learn of his patient's death. "Why didn't he give his name?" he asked a member of the family. "If he had, Dr. A— would, of course, have gone at once, without bothering about the fee."

Altman seems to have found Uncle Henry a crony after his own heart. Uncle Henry was a constant visitor at his Fifth Avenue house, and they had orgiastic sessions on ceramics in Yiddish. In dealing with J. P. Morgan, however, Uncle Henry presumably restricted himself to bad English. Though he could not be as fluent with Morgan as he was with Altman, he nevertheless managed to give him a strong push in the direction of ceramics. In fact, before Uncle Henry was through, Morgan's collection was many times the size of Altman's. Uncle Henry did not drop in casually at J. P. Morgan's house as he did at Altman's—Morgan had more insistent social obligations—but he was often invited to breakfast. Morgan was the Lorenzo the Magnificent of American collectors, and Uncle Henry explored with him many realms besides ceramics. By then a big-scale dealer in furniture as well as ceramics, he even, in 1882, furnished Morgan's house on Madison Avenue. The late Belle da Costa Greene, the director of the Morgan Library, used to recall an incident that demonstrated not only Uncle Henry's continuously developing critical faculty but his detachment. After the elder Morgan's death, his son wished to redecorate the Madison Avenue house. Knowing that Uncle Henry had done the original job, and realizing how fond his father had been of him, he called him in. Miss Greene accompanied them on a tour of the house. "Well, Uncle Henry, what do you think of it?" she asked when it was all over. "It iss orful!" Uncle Henry said, and, undaunted by the horrors around him, set about correcting the errors he and his late patron had accomplished together.

Uncle Henry's migration from Boston to New York was paralleled by Joseph Joel's from Hull to London. Mr. Barnett, who seems to have been a pawnbroker with imagination, thought that his son-in-law, after twelve years in Hull, should try the big city. Joseph Joel Duveen was a dictatorial, irascible man, but he did what his father-in-law suggested; he transported his stock to a shop on Oxford Street and, as before, installed his family in rooms above it. It must have been quite a clutter, for the stock had grown enormously: English, French, and Italian furniture, French and Gothic tapestries, Chinese porcelains, the mingled aromas of Italian velvets and Spanish leathers, the retrieved handiwork of vanished master craftsmen, and, before long, fourteen Duveens. The former Miss Barnett still presided at the till, handling the books and the cash. Joseph Joel was absorbed in buying, without worrying too much about overstocking—a tendency his eldest son inherited. He had unlimited confidence that he would be able to sell the merchandise once he had got it. Like his eldest son after him, he could never buy enough; as for the financial intricacies, he was perfectly willing to leave them to his wife, just as his eldest son was one day to leave them to his comptrollers. Joseph Joel and his wife carried on a running altercation about insuring their property. He did not believe a fire could ever happen to him and held out stubbornly against insurance. But a fire did happen to him—a bad one—and he was in despair. His wife came forward to save the firm. Joseph Joel's absorption in acquiring merchandise had enabled her to put aside sums of money from time to time, so that in this crisis she had enough to rebuild and restock and get going again. After that, the Duveen property was liberally insured.

The four Duveen girls were sent to school, but the boys Joseph, Charles, John, Louis, Edward Joseph, Benjamin, Henry, and Ernest—had very sketchy educations. Joseph went briefly to Brighton College, quitting at seventeen. From infancy, the boys were spoon-fed on the lore of their father's inventory. They were put to work in the shop, arranging the stock, running errands, wrapping, dusting, learning prices, and studying their father's sales technique. The sons were extremely quarrelsome by the time they reached their early teens. A family conference, an observer recalls, was usually a pitched battle. The father's decision, however, always prevailed. In later life, Joseph was fond of telling stories about how autocratic his father had been. He remembered that when they all sat at the dinner table in their Oxford Street quarters, his father used to begin the meal with the command: "Let no one speak unless I ask a question." As he didn't feel that his children could tell him much, there were often long silences at the table. 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. Therefore, Morgan wanted Joseph Joel to see five Chinese porcelain beakers he had just bought. He showed the Duveens, father and son, into his library. "Uncle Henry tells me you know a lot about porcelains," he said to Joseph Joel. "Well, here are five beakers. Three of them are authentic and two of them are reproductions. Now, if you're such an authority, which are which?" Joseph Joel peered at the beakers, then lifted his walking stick and smashed two of them. He offered, if he'd broken good ones, to pay for them. Mr. Morgan was relieved to find that he could not collect.

The Oxford Street business prospered. The advent of William Morris and his wallpapers enabled Joseph Joel eventually to make a killing in tapestries. The craze for Morris's wallpapers caused the owners of English country houses to get rid of their tapestries as fast as they could. Joseph Joel bought them up at bargain prices, and waited for the craze to pass. Then he began selling them at handsome profits to famished customers. His fame spread, and the nobility and royalty started to show an interest in his shop. He acquired three distinguished patrons: the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, and two of the Prince's close friends, Lord Esher and the financier Sir Ernest Cassel, a grandfather of the present Lady Mountbatten. There is a trade legend about Joseph Joel's first meeting with the Prince of Wales. One day, a gentleman of about Joseph Joel's age came into the shop, showed the proprietor a piece of jewelry, and asked if he would pay a hundred pounds for it. Joseph Joel examined it, and then his visitor. He asked him where he had got the piece. "Never mind about that," the caller said. "It's mine and I want to sell it. Will you give me a hundred pounds?" "No," said Joseph Joel. "It's worth much more than that. I'll give you five hundred!' According to the legend, Joseph Joel didn't recognize his visitor. Those who knew Joseph Joel intimately doubted this. They suspected that he was pretty sure his petitioner was the Prince of Wales. In any case, when the Prince became King, in 1901, he had Joseph Joel arrange much of the decoration of Westminster Abbey for the Coronation. This automatically made Joseph Joel the foremost decorator in England. For this and other services, the King knighted him. The reformed lard salesman, the son of the Dutch blacksmith, became Sir Joseph Joel Duveen. Later, his son Joseph was knighted, and, ultimately, raised to the peerage, by King George V. Uncle Henry had a cozy relationship with King George, cemented by the passion both men had for collecting stamps. The King's cousin, Nicholas II, the Czar of Russia, was also a serious stamp collector, and also became Uncle Henry's friend. Uncle Henry used to reminisce about tranquil evenings spent in Buckingham Palace, with the King and himself working at their albums, and Queen Mary embroidering. He remembered huddles between the King, Nicky, and himself over stamps; during these sessions, though he was not strictly one of the family, he must have felt almost like a cousin. After Uncle Henry's death, his stamp collection, which he had bequeathed to his wife, was privately sold, for a million and a half dollars. King George's collection is still at Buckingham Palace, and what happened to Nicky's collection is not known. The Duveens dearly loved a queen. Queen Mary was a friend and patron of Joseph Duveen. For many years, she seldom ventured into an art gallery without him.

The firm of Duveen Brothers, dealers in furniture and objects of virtu, was established in 1879; Joseph Joel Duveen, presiding over the Oxford Street shop, and Uncle Henry, presiding over his Maiden Lane walkup, were partners. In 1886, Joseph Joel sent his son Joseph, then seventeen, on his first trip to America, to get several months' experience in Uncle Henry's place and to size up the country—a country whose art intake he was to boost so astonishingly and whose taste he was to revolutionize singlehanded. He came over on the Cunarder Etruria; he had heard a great deal about her, and he was disappointed by her smallness. He was also disappointed by the smallness of Uncle Henry's establishment. It served well enough for Altman, Morgan, and Uncle Henry, but Joseph didn't care for it. Before Uncle Henry knew what was up, he had been hustled out of Maiden Lane to what Joseph considered a more becoming location, on Fifth Avenue just below the old Waldorf. The Cambridge Hotel, then perhaps the most chic in New York, was also close by. When the landlord asked for security, Joseph, with the lordly manner King George V was later to make official, paid him six months' rent in advance. The day he got his bewildered uncle into the new quarters, somebody came in and asked to look at a certain tapestry. It was William C. Whitney. Joseph parted with the tapestry for ten thousand dollars. When he got back to London, he reported to his father that not only had he moved Duveen Brothers to the smartest location in New York but he had acquired for them an American customer who appeared to have taste. Uncle Henry's attitude toward his prodigious nephew had about it something of the resignation with which one submits to a tornado. "This boy is a genius, but he will drive me crazy," he said.

One day not long after Joseph's return to London, a stocky gentleman with a marked Irish brogue, accompanied by his wife, a modest, unassuming little woman in a plumed hat, walked into the shop on Oxford Street. They looked like a country couple dressed up for a visit to the city. They asked to see some screens. Joseph Joel had recently had several made up of fine old Spanish leather, and he told Joseph to bring them out. The lady, in ecstasy, bought one screen after another. As the sales mounted, the elder Duveen whispered to his son to find out quickly who these people were. Joseph went into consultation with their coachman—an early instance of his lifelong practice of picking up useful intelligence from servants. He wrote the customers' name on a slip of paper, and handed it to his father. "You may think it strange, Mr. Duveen, that I am buying so many screens," the woman was saying just then. "Not at all, Lady Guinness," replied the proprietor. "You have many fine homes, and you are quite right to supply them with screens." With the delight of anonymity welcoming recognition, Lady Guinness beamed at her husband. "You see, Edward," she said. "Mr. Duveen knows who we are!" When, years afterward, Joseph Duveen told the story to one of the sons of the purchaser of the screens, Guinness said, "At last I know why we had such a bloody lot of screens in the house."

Since the purchaser, Sir Edward Guinness, later Lord Iveagh, was one of the richest men in England, the elder Duveen was enchanted by the episode, but it had an entirely different effect on his son. The pleasure the father took in selling thousands of pounds' worth of screens to the Guinnesses indicated to the son a circumscribed and unimaginative outlook. For he knew that while Guinness was picking up these knickknacks on Oxford Street for trifling sums, he was spending millions of pounds on paintings and sculptures on Bond Street, chiefly with Thomas Agnew & Sons, an old and important firm of art dealers. Guinness, simply by his purchases for his famous art collection at Ken Wood House, in Hampstead Heath, made Agnew's rich. The inner illumination that sometimes converts playboys into dedicated men, wastrels into saints, must have flared up in Joseph. He determined to deal in paintings and sculptures. His father and Uncle Henry felt that since they knew practically nothing about paintings and sculptures, they had better stick to their own province, which was porcelains, furniture, tapestries, and silver. Moreover, they were aware that dealing in paintings and sculptures was risky, because of the difficulties of authentication. "It made me sick to my stomach to see people like Lord Iveagh buying mere art objects from us and paintings elsewhere," said Joseph Duveen some years later. "My father was satisfied, my Uncle Henry was satisfied, my brothers were satisfied, but I was not!' His mind, like theirs, was a tabula rasa as far as pictures were concerned, but he promptly set about making entries. He began an intensive courtship of experts that was to continue the rest of his life. The biggest man in the field then was Dr. Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and the world's leading authority on Rembrandt. Duveen went to Berlin and got Dr. von Bode to advise him. He then began to advise his father. With headlong impetuosity, he started to make enormous financial commitments for the firm, and cajoled his father as best he could into stringing along with him. He bought like a man possessed.

Joseph Duveen made his real debut as an art dealer in 1901, when he paid the biggest price that up to that time had been paid for a painting sold at a British auction—$70,250. The picture was "Lady Louisa Manners," by John Hoppner. (He started paying high, and kept stepping it up higher the rest of his life.) The fact that he had to sell his first picture at a loss did not deter him from buying more and more. Finally, in 1906, in Berlin, he soared into the ether and bought for two and a half million dollars the famous Oskar Hainauer Collection, the official catalogue of which had been prepared by Dr. von Bode. The price made the newcomer a major figure in the art world. Duveen called his father's attention to the lucky circumstance that the collection contained a vast number of objects of virtu. His father couldn't resist them; indeed, they made the elder Duveen's mouth water so much that he swallowed the paintings, too. The objects of virtu in the Hainauer Collection began at once to sell furiously, and this made it easier for Duveen to persuade his father to let him buy another collection—the Rodolphe Kann. Joseph made the point to his father—in talking up the advantage of buying collections, as against buying pictures and sculptures individually—that when one bought a famous collection for a lump sum, the potential repurchaser of a particular item could have no idea of its price, as he would if that item had been sold separately at public auction. You could fix your price at will, and the purchaser had no standard to go by. But the stark fact that stared the elder Duveen in the face was that the art was in his storehouse, the purchasers were nonexistent, and the firm's debts were monumental. Joseph bought the Rodolphe Kann Collection at a private sale in Paris, with a loan of five million dollars he got from the firm's bank. As his father suffered from high blood pressure and Duveen didn't wish to send it up still farther, he didn't inform him that this collection consisted almost entirely of pictures and sculptures. His father found it out, however, and the elder Duveen, who had been so happy selling screens and hadn't divined the art hunger of American millionaires, felt that his world was collapsing. Shortly after Joseph's acquisition of the Rodolphe Kann Collection, his father mercifully died of apoplexy.

A few months after his father's death, Joseph Duveen unhesitantly bought still another Paris collection, the Maurice Kann, for which he paid three million dollars. The firm now had nearly ten and a half million dollars invested in three collections—mostly pictures and sculptures, about which Uncle Henry and Joseph's seven brothers knew very little. Since Joseph did at least know Dr. von Bode, he had a great tactical advantage in dealing with his uncle and his brothers. As things worked out, the vast heterogeneity of these three collections formed the backbone of Joseph Duveen's business. Up to the day he died, in 1939, he was still selling pictures and sculptures from these collections; their acquisition so early and the gradual selling of them over a period of nearly four decades has been called, by those close to the art business, the most singular feat of long-range investment in art history. From these three original collections, thirteen pictures eventually went to Altman, twelve to Frick, and others to H. E. Huntington and Morgan. The last trip Duveen made to see his old friend and client Huntington in California was in 1926. It was not a frivolous trip. He was too modest to think that Huntington wanted to see him for himself alone, so he was accompanied by a freight car containing his wares. Among them were many items from the old Hainauer and Kann Collections. Duveen sold Huntington the entire contents of the freight car. How many times Duveen multiplied his investment of ten and a half million in his first three collections cannot be accurately computed (indeed, as he made clear, that had been one reason for buying them), but the increment was enormous.

Joseph Joel Duveen left his children and Uncle Henry an estate of close to seven million dollars. When the estate was settled, it was found that about two million was in cash. The rest was tied up in the business, of which Uncle Henry owned thirty-five per cent and Joseph fifteen per cent. How the rest was divided up, no one outside the family knows. As long as Uncle Henry lived, he was the de-forma head of the company and Joseph was the de-facto head. At Uncle Henry's death, in 1919, Joseph bought his thirty-five per cent and took full command. All the shares his brothers and sisters received at the time of their father's death Joseph ultimately bought, almost entirely on credit. Several of the brothers took an active part in the business—or as active a part as was possible in a firm that contained Joseph Duveen. John, who was the first to be paid off, and in cash, immediately retired. Ernest helped run the Paris gallery, which was opened shortly before the father died, and then left it to become an official in an insurance firm in London, where he handled the Duveen account. Edward worked in the London shop on a salary. Charles had the temerity to go into the decorating business for himself. Duveen paid him twenty-five thousand dollars a year not to use his last name professionally. Duveen grandly ignored the excessive proliferation sometimes indulged in by nature; there was only one Duveen and that was Joseph, and he did not wish the art-buying public to be confused. So Charles became Charles of London. Benjamin, after being bought out by Joseph, became a salaried connoisseur in the New York gallery; he was even permitted to have his own customers. Louis became manager of the London gallery; when he died, in 1920, Duveen bought his share of the business, on credit. Louis's estate was soon threatening lawsuits, but no suits materialized.

The impulse to sue was an endemic family trait. All their lives, the Duveen brothers and sisters pressed for their shares of the estate; all his life, Joseph sought to keep them off balance by unexpectedly paying them large sums of money. At one time, he owed them a total of eleven million dollars, and he doled them out a half-million or a million at a time, when he had it handy. When, however, they wanted more than he doled out, or wanted all he owed them, he sat back and blandly invited them to go ahead and sue. This invitation, attractive as it was, they realized they couldn't accept. Most of the firm's money—and a great deal more—was invested in pictures and sculptures, and Joseph was the only one in the family who knew what anything was worth or what it might bring. Their one hope of getting cash lay in Joseph's theoretical ability to sell not only the incalculable jumble of stuff he had to begin with but all the pictures and sculptures he continued to acquire. When Joseph said "Sue me," he half meant it. Lawsuits gave his life savor; suits against him by competitors, by outraged collectors about whose choice items (bought from rival dealers) Duveen made disparaging remarks, by customers, and, in one instance, by the government of the United States were a ceaseless obbligato to his life. He himself got too much pleasure out of litigation to deny the same pleasure to his relatives. But they never really treated themselves, no matter how often they threatened to. Their threats sometimes sounded so genuine, however, that Duveen had almost as much fun as if they had actually sued. As a result, he was seldom bored.

Not long after buying his third big collection, Joseph Duveen, confident in the knowledge that he owned the greatest inventory of works of art any art dealer had ever owned, sailed for New York with the intention of making it his headquarters. He had begun to siphon off some of these gems through Uncle Henry, who was permitted to sell them to his American clients. Uncle Henry once more found his nephew's presence not only exhilarating but disturbing. Joseph wanted him to move again. Now the possessor of a princely store of art, Joseph felt that he must have a showcase commensurate with its magnificence. He leased the northwest corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, cleared the site, and put up a building that was a replica, in miniature, of one wing of the French Ministry of Marine, in Paris. This cost over a million dollars. Uncle Henry was appalled by his nephew's grandiose ways, but his nephew's optimism and impetuosity overwhelmed him. "I have it sold," Joseph told him, referring to his inventory. "You have everything sold," said Uncle Henry helplessly. "Show me the bill of sale."

Meanwhile, in romance as well as in business, Joseph had proved himself unpredictable. In 1899, he was engaged to marry the daughter of Isaac Lewis, who was one of the South African gold millionaires. The wedding was to be held in London. Duveen's Aunt Dora, Uncle Henry's wife, went over for it and took with her a lovely young friend of hers, Elsie Salamon, the daughter of a New York tobacco merchant of moderate means. Miss Salamon was just along for the ride. At one of the prenuptial parties, Duveen met her. The effect on him was so powerful that he called off his marriage to Miss Lewis and, with Miss Salamon's consent, married Miss Salamon instead. The marriage lasted till Duveen's death. The Duveens had one child, a daughter they named Dorothy; now married to a surgeon, she is living in London, as is Lady Duveen.

Duveen Brothers never advertised specific wares and never employed salesmen in Joseph's lifetime. In the beginning, all sales, except of insignificant items, were engineered by the Duveens themselves: Uncle Henry, Joseph, and Benjamin in New York, Louis in London, Ernest in Paris. The rest of the staff consisted of, in the words of a former member of it, "gentlemen ushers, who just walked around and knew a lot." This sophistication extended even to the stockrooms. One day early in 1910, a disgruntled clerk employed there went, after an argument with Benjamin, to Delmonico's for solace. While there, he confided to the headwaiter certain facts about some Duveen importations; after discussing them for a while, the two men decided to go to William Loeb, Jr., the Collector of the Customs of the Port of New York, and confide in him. He was willing to listen, because up to 1909 all art treasures had been subject to duty, and the Duveen importations under discussion had come in before 1909. As a result of the clerk's revelations, there fell on the Duveens an unimaginable disaster: the famous Duveen smuggling case, which, in the end, led to the family's paying the government of the United States the biggest settlement fine in the history of American jurisprudence up to that time. At four in the afternoon of Thursday, October 13, 1910, a squad of three customs agents and three special agents from the United States District Attorney's office entered the office of Duveen Brothers with warrants calling for a search of the premises and the seizure of certain art treasures. Wagons drew up at the rear of the establishment and were loaded with books and papers covering the firm's business for the past several years. Warrants also called for the arrest of Joseph, Benjamin, Louis, and Uncle Henry Duveen, on charges that by means of false and fraudulent invoices three Chinese porcelain vase had been brought into the country on February 10, 1908, at less than their true value. The value on which duty was paid had been $1,100, whereas the actual value—the price paid for the vases in Europe—was not less than $28,000.

Benjamin, who must have wished that he had been more conciliatory toward the stock clerk, was the only Duveen in the gallery at the time. He was arrested, taken to the office of the District Attorney, and held in fifty thousand dollars bail, which the firm's lawyers, Stern & Corbitt, quickly put up, giving real estate as security. Joseph and Louis Duveen were both in England, and Uncle Henry was due to arrive from England that night on the Lusitania. Customs men were waiting to grab him when the ship came into the harbor about ten o'clock. They boarded the ship before it docked and brought Uncle Henry ashore in a revenue cutter. His bail was seventy-five thousand dollars. He signed for it and then went home to try to get some sleep. The next morning, Uncle Henry felt that in making his way through the difficulties that loomed before him he would need more imposing representation than Stern & Corbitt could afford him. He asked some distinguished friends to make suggestions. Five of them wrote out a list of law firms. The name of one firm—Stanchfield & Levy—appeared on all five lists, and Uncle Henry decided on that one. There is a story in legal circles to the effect that Uncle Henry let himself in for more than was necessary when he engaged counsel. He called at the office of the eminent John B. Stanchfield to ask him to handle the case. Stanchfield had just taken on a junior associate, and while Uncle Henry waited in the outer office, Stanchfield discussed with this young man what he should ask for a retainer. "You go and talk to him," said Stanchfield finally. "Try him out on ten thousand dollars." The novice went out, passed the time of day with Uncle Henry, talked a bit about the case, and then brought up the question of money. Uncle Henry inquired politely what Mr. Stanchfield's notion of a retaining fee was. "Ten thousand," said the novice. "Dollars or pounds?" asked Uncle Henry. Instantly, by the utterance of a monosyllable, the novice became a professional. "Pounds," he said, and Uncle Henry nodded his assent.

A piquant circumstance connected with the case was the fact that the Customs Collector, having a rather cloudy sense of values about works of art coming into the Port of New York, had been relying for some time on Uncle Henry as its expert. The secret wish-dreams that rival art firms had harbored about the Duveens seemed about to come true when the famous smuggling case started; they were gleeful. Their homicidal gaiety was all the greater because Uncle Henry, in his advice to the Bureau of Customs, had put high valuations on the works imported by his competitors. It now appeared that he had been more modest about his own. It had been an additional exacerbation to some of Duveen's rivals that Uncle Henry, while in a position to appraise their importations, also ladled out to them the pious maxims of a man who is himself immaculate. One of them was "Avoid lawsuits," a piece of advice that blithely ignored the fact that the Duveens were themselves almost constantly involved in several. It is easy to understand how Uncle Henry got his avuncular nickname. He was plump, geniality radiated from his countenance, and his Bairnsfather mustache belonged to the kind of man addicted to sitting in ample armchairs and dandling children on his knees. When the smuggling case arose, several unemotional men were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to do something for Uncle Henry.

The case hung fire for more than a year. The Duveens, it was charged, were in the habit of putting valuations on the works of art they imported that had no relation to their actual worth. It was also charged that they had a tendency to send over lovely old cabinets whose locked drawers held rolled-up paintings and tapestries that had been absent-mindedly stored away in them and then forgotten. The government held that every shipment including even one undervalued item should be forfeited. The government's demands on the Duveens started at six million dollars, then climbed to eight, and eventually hit ten. After long and patient whittling, the Duveens' lawyers got the government down to a modest one million two hundred thousand. At that moment, a tapestry the Duveens had sold to George J. Gould was found by the government sleuths to have been undervalued. This upped the final claim to one million four hundred thousand dollars. (The government comforted itself for not getting the ten million it had been asking for by slapping a fine of ten or fifteen thousand dollars on each of the Duveens still in the business.) The Duveens didn't have one million four hundred thousand dollars handy. At this point, the aura of Uncle Henry's benevolent personality shone out to save them. It was an awful lot to ask of an aura, but Uncle Henry's made it. J. P. Morgan sent for one of the Duveens' lawyers to come to see him in his private office on the top floor of the Bankers Trust, at Wall and Nassau Streets. When the lawyer entered the office, the great man was sitting behind his desk. On this occasion, Morgan revealed himself as a kind of Grumpy, horrendous in manner but with a heart of gold. He transfixed his visitor with his piercing black eyes and barked, "Going to get Uncle Henry off?" The lawyer said that he'd like nothing better but that the government had put a trifling obstacle in the way. "Get him off, get him off," barked Morgan. The lawyer then became specific about the obstacle. It would require one million four hundred thousand dollars, he was forced to say. "We've got to get Uncle Henry off," Morgan said, sticking to the theme. "Chauncey Jones will take care of it." Chauncey Jones, it turned out, was Morgan's switchboard operator and handyman, but he must also have been a man of parts. When his boss asked him to get one million four hundred thousand dollars for Stanchfield Levy, he didn't bat an eye. He pulled out his switches and ambled over to the First National Bank. The next day, Stanchfield, whose office was at 120 Broadway, a block or two away from the Bankers Trust, received, in an envelope containing no other communication, a check for one million four hundred thousand. Uncle Henry got off. In the process, Joseph Duveen, whom Morgan didn't particularly care for, also got off, but Morgan couldn't help himself.

At the time, all their rivals in the art world were convinced that the Duveens were finished. Joseph Duveen, who ten years before had been a mere furniture dealer, had said things about the works of art owned by his rivals that were not altogether flattering. Because it seemed inevitable that he was now through for all time, they began, somewhat prematurely, not to miss him. Certainly the outlook for the Duveens was unpromising, and Uncle Henry's morale had been shattered. But Joseph was imperturbable. The very magnitude of the settlement pleased Duveen, who loved the grandiose wherever he encountered it. "Who else would have so big a settlement?" he asked one of his friendly enemies a few days after the case ended. There was no answer to this question; his rivals conceded his superiority. The nephew tried to buck up the uncle. The jig was by no means up, he said. He pointed out that neither Morgan nor Altman nor Widener nor Gould had been convicted of any crime, and that there was no reason for the Duveens to snub them. He also pointed out that none of the works of art the Duveens owned had been convicted of any crime, and, further, that since the works of art were now in the possession of what could technically be called smugglers, it was all the more urgent to move them. Besides, he said, the Duveens were the victims of a quirk in legal chronology; inasmuch as a law providing that no duty be collected on works of art over twenty years old had been passed in 1909, the United States government was merely penalizing the Duveens for being prophetic. (In 1930, the law was revised to make all works of art over a hundred years old duty-free.) In the days before 1909, Morgan himself had, in order to avoid paying the tremendous duties, kept many of his works of art in his London home. But the Duveens were educators; they were out to elevate American taste, and they couldn't do that if they kept their works of art in London. To show Uncle Henry what good company they were in, Duveen pointed out that just a few years earlier Mrs. Jack Gardner, of Boston, had also felt that she had a justified grievance against customs. For a long time, her friends in Italy had been trying to buy for her a fresco by Piero della Francesca. The Italian government wanted to keep the fresco in Italy, but in 1906 Mrs. Gardner's friends finally won out. When the picture arrived in New York, together with some tapestries from the Charles M. Ffoulke Collection and a marble bust of Cardinal Riario by Verrocchio, the customs agents collected huge duties on her purchases. An indignant editorial in a Boston paper read:

When the duties of $150,000 on the old masters, valued at $80,000, have been paid, it may perhaps dawn on Mrs. J. L. Gardner how grievously she has offended against this great and glorious republic, in trying to import works of art. The law of this republic is very strict with all misguided persons who dare to bring to this land paintings, or statuary, or valuable works of research. What these persons should do, if they wish to be favorably regarded by the law, is import dogs. A snarling, blear-eyed bulldog of uncertain walk and disagreeable temper, valued at $10,000, can be imported free of duty. A yelping, howling, snapping poodle, of no earthly good to himself or humanity, but valued at $8000 can be imported duty free. An obese, ungainly, and repulsive dachshund of a value of $5000 can be imported duty free. It is expected that all good and wealthy citizens will spend their money in decorating the land of the free with high art of this variety, and if the animals are "pedigreed," no duty will be charged. But any millionaire who tries to import works by Titian, Rubens, or Turner, is lucky if he escapes jail. All of which proves us to be a logical, reasonable, and highly intelligent nation.

Troubles, Joseph Duveen found, come not single spies but in battalions. When the reverberations of the smuggling case were beginning to fade, the firm suffered two blows that were, if anything, more devastating. In 1913, although he was engaged in many negotiations with the Duveens, Morgan died. It was the only time he ever let Uncle Henry down. He owed the firm a quarter of a million dollars, and his estate immediately paid it, but a quarter of a million dollars was small change compared to what the Duveens would have got had he lived. A few months later, Duveen suffered another blow, equally severe, in the death of Altman. This had a special poignance. Shortly after the smuggling case ended, Duveen had gone after a great picture known as the "Small Cowper Madonna," by Raphael. For it he happily paid more than a half million dollars in cash, despite the fact that his firm had just had to pay nearly a million and a half to the government. While Duveen was taking on this new obligation, Altman agreed to buy the picture from him for three-quarters of a million. But when the Raphael arrived, Altman was no longer alive to receive it. Duveen couldn't grieve full time over Altman's death; he had to worry about what to do with the Raphael, since even in his circle three-quarter-million-dollar customers were rare. The agreement between Altman and Duveen had been oral, and, finding no evidence of sale, Altman's executors declined to accept the picture. (Duveen's remark about Altman's travelling like a Cook's tourist did not predispose Altman's executors in his favor.) By this petulance, the executors deprived the departed Altman of what would have been one of the finest things in the Altman Collection.

(This is the second of a series of articles on Lord Duveen.)