Joseph Duveen was born over his parents’ shop in the back streets of Hull in October 1869. He ended his days in London in 1939 as a member of the House of Lords, an ever-dexterous pillar of the art trade and a key figure in the evolution of the Tate Gallery. Meryle Secrest, the author of Duveen: A Life in Art, has for many years been directly or indirectly on the track of her subject.[1] Duveen was born and bred to the art business. From his father, Joel Joseph Duveen, he inherited the eye, the memory, the passion for specialized knowledge, and the ability to dissemble. Never, for a moment, was he fooled. He was expected to make a mark by his early twenties, and he did.
If he was in a hurry to go to Holland, he got a ride on a Dutch fishing smack and came back with offers that enabled his employers to beat out the competition and make big profits. Already at twenty he knew the source of antiques and the markets for them. He was so smart, and so persuasive, that he could come back to England with fifty superfine Nanking vases and sell them even before the goods had arrived. (He himself had three months in which to pay the bills.)
He was initiative personified. To be the first on the scene at a great Dutch country seat, he would charter the fastest available horses. If the master of the house welcomed him with the offer of a drink, Duveen would say, “No, show us the art first,” and make sure that he got it.
Just outside the Tate, a street is named after Lord Duveen of Millbank. Inside the Tate, his name turns up at every turn, and above all in the majestic Turner rooms, which form up almost as a secular cathedral. The Tate would not have opened at all in 1897 if Sir Henry Tate had not given the building, together with a collection of sixty-five “modern British” paintings. “The Tate” today now stands not only for the much-loved building on Millbank but for the Tate Modern by Giles Gilbert Scott, which is on the south bank of the Thames and offers one of the best of all views of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The existing Tate Gallery was enlarged and reshaped when Duveen gave the Turner wing in 1930. The tall and slender spaces that resulted were invaluable not only for Turner’s paintings but also for the evolution of the Tate (and for its ongoing commitment to contemporary art). Tate paid for the buildings, and he is not forgotten. But Duveen was the insider’s insider who put the Tate on everyone’s map, once and for all.
He never paraded his importance. The Tate is still the Tate, and Tate Britain on the south bank of the Thames is its majestic extension. Duveen did not need panache, but he saw big, and he acted big. If the Tate Gallery is now in effect, though not in name, Britain’s National Gallery of Modern Art, it was Duveen who made it possible. And posterity has lived up to his pioneering example.
At the age of sixteen he entered his father’s firm (Duveen Brothers, Art Dealers), where he made a great fortune and never put a foot wrong. (He learned, among much else, that there were clients who would rather pay too much, and go away feeling important, than go home with a bargain.)
In later life, his aim was always to give as much as to take. He gave important paintings to both the National Gallery and the Tate, as well as to provincial museums. And when he was thirty-seven, he began to employ Bernard Berenson as his chief art advisor. For the next thirty-three years, he and “B. B.” (singly or jointly) were never out of the news. B. B. got a salary of £50,000 a year—no small sum at the time—and was worth every penny of it.
As the reigning expert on Italian Old Master paintings, Berenson had a world-wide market for his opinions. He was also sought out by younger art historians, who prized his delicious company. Both he and they were the better for it (and often the richer, too). Not to have known “B. B.” in his later years was to have missed a unique opportunity, in that for more than fifty years in Settignano he had known “everyone” and remembered everything. Major thinkers and major doers often come to mind in that context, as do persons of high degree or current celebrity.
But B. B. was just as delighted to talk about minor country families in England. He was the best imaginable audience for an amusing story or an intelligent comment on a current controversy. He loved to get letters, and unless they bored him he replied by return mail. And he was looked after ideally well by Nicky Mariano, an entirely presentable friend, employee, and sometime mistress who saw to it that he was never pestered by people whom he would not like.
Mariano rightly regarded herself as a person of consequence. “What do you think of me?” she asked, when she first drove me to Settignano. “Am I what you expected?”
I could have told her later she was more fun than B. B. himself, who spent much of our lunch party in discussing the dogs and the servants of an English family in one of the drearier suburbs of London. He had written to me that it would delight him to hear me talk, but the opportunity did not occur and I never saw him again, though I kept his letters.
When Joseph Duveen entered his father’s firm, Duveen Brothers, in London, in 1886, Thomas Agnew and Sons were the senior dealers of paintings. Then as now, the Agnews were, as Meryle Secrest puts it, “gentlemen with gentlemanly lives.” “Duveen,” in her view, “was always ahead because he had no other life.” Ms. Secrest writes with the perspective of one who has written books on both Berenson and Kenneth Clark. But Clark, Berenson, and Duveen were masters of self-presentation who kept their thoughts, and their secrets, intact.
Duveen in his last years is beautifully evoked in this book. We hear of him, for instance, at a dinner party in London in the summer of 1938. The talk was all about cricket, and Duveen (then almost seventy) might have fallen silent, waiting for the life-members of Lord’s to have their say. But Duveen took over. Was not Jack Hobbs, an old personal friend of his, the greatest batsman who ever lived? As to that, according to Richard Kingzett, later to be a partner in Thomas Agnew’s, Duveen put his case “with the greatest élan, vitality and self-assurance. The party simply revolved around him and you didn’t notice anyone else.”
In no matter what company, Duveen had that effect. But if he scented big business, he would drop everything at any time and go anywhere. He lived at a time when British portrait painting was in very high favor with American collectors. He also had an infallible sense of occasion. When he bought Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” in 1921 for H. E. Huntington he took it to his ailing mother in London so that she could see “the most beautiful picture in the world.” (Even to get it safely to California was regarded as almost a miracle.)
The “Blue Boy” had been green (in color) when Duveen bought it, but after its restoration it attracted 90,000 visitors to the National Gallery, where it was on temporary loan, and street sellers offered rudimentary reproductions to those who were queueing outside to see it.
When it was shipped to New York—the Huntingtons had bought it—it traveled in a steel box which was enclosed in a weatherproof iron-bound box. Sir Joseph Duveen himself was on the train that carried it to Los Angeles. Thanks to the attendant publicity, Duveen was beyond question what he had always wanted to be—the most famous art-dealer in the world.
We live at a time in which record auction prices are the equivalent of football results for an uninformed public. Whether the painting in question is great or merely very good, of eternal interest or simply in high fashion, is neither here nor there. It can come from anywhere, and from any period, and take its chance.
Duveen belonged to an earlier age. He knew his collectors, and he encouraged them not so much to enlarge their likings as to stick with them and to count on him to get the very best examples. When they had already got them, as was the case with the British Museum and the Elgin Marbles, Duveen would still have liked to make an appearance. A great poet, John Keats, had felt “a most dizzy pain” on first seeing the Elgin Marbles, and he gave a sublime expression to his feelings.
One of the paintings which arouses in us “a most dizzy pain” when we first see it is Giorgione’s “Nativity.” When it was included in this year’s Giorgione exhibition in Vienna, and later in Venice, it made an unforgettable impression. Never before had that specific vision had such a hold upon us. We were not, of course, the first to have been aware of it, but we felt that this painting had kept something of itself for us alone.
That was an illusion. But it remains true that a great painting reveals itself in different ways to every one of us. There is no end to it, any more than there need be an end to ourselves while we are still around. In that respect, art is even more generous than life itself.
Duveen worked on the principle that everyone had the right to see everything. He also thought that, within reason, everything should be brought to them, or at any rate be within their reach at one time or another. When the great pioneer exhibition of Italian painting was on its way from Italy to London, by sea, in 1937, informed observers trembled to think how much might be lost on a single shipload to London.
Such fears have since been abandoned. Air travel ranks higher, until the next crash, than the sea-ship and the overcrowded highways. And the demand is ever more imperious. “We want the best, here and now!” the public says. Private, civic, and governmental prestige and profit also play a part. In that context, great art is way up there with the Vienna Opera, the Bolshoi Ballet, and the Comédie Française.
A key event in this context was the arrival in the British Museum of the Elgin Marbles. These were brought to London from Athens in 1806 by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, and sold to the British government in 1816. The gallery in which they now appear was paid for by Duveen. To the extent that more visitors now ask for the Elgin Marbles than for anything else in the British Museum, they can be regarded as Duveen’s greatest monument.
John Russell is author of The Meanings of Modern Art (HarperCollins).
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
- Duveen: A Life in Art, by Meryle Secrest; Knopf, 560 pages, $35. Go back to the text.
