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Things That Have Interested Me

Old Master Criminals

James Fenton
copyright © 2007

Originally published in The Guardian
8 December 2007

The first great generation of American art collectors, people like PAB Widener, with his 110-room Philadelphia mansion, tend to be referred to as the Robber Barons. What is sometimes forgotten is that they were not the only robbers, nor indeed the only barons, on the scene. The people who sold them their masterpieces also included a bunch of scoundrels.

Prince Felix Yusupov, the man who in 1916 murdered Rasputin and who in due course fled Russia taking a couple of Rembrandts with him, sold these heirlooms to Widener for £100,000, with an agreement that, if the old regime was restored in Russia before January 1 1924, Widener would sell them back to him for the original price plus eight per cent per annum.

Shortly afterwards, Calouste Gulbenkian, annoyed that Widener had secured a bargain, let it be known that he was prepared to pay twice the sum. Yusupov asked for his paintings back, so he could resell them. Widener demanded to know what had happened in Russia to make the restoration of the old regime likely. Yusupov's answer (he was litigious as well as a murderer, and later successfully sued MGM over a film which, he claimed, asserted that Rasputin had raped his wife) was to take Widener to court.

Widener, who won at the end of a thoroughly scurrilous case, had experience of dealing with the scum of European high society. An article in the December issue of Apollo tells the hitherto unpublished story of a moustachioed villain - champion swordsman, international chess master, art swindler - called Leo Nardus, who between the mid-1890s and 1908, sold Widener a total of 93 paintings, most of which were dross.

Widener's suspicions had been aroused in 1907 when the three Vermeers he had bought from Nardus failed to be included in the new catalogue raisonné. He decided, instead of hushing up a story which might make him look a fool, to call in the experts and get to the bottom of the matter. He called in Hofstede de Groot (the author of the Vermeer catalogue), Bernard Berenson (to look at his Italian paintings), Roger Fry (for the British art) and a German scholar called Wilhelm Valentiner.

To appreciate the awfulness of the situation, it helps to understand that Widener had himself already had a catalogue published, in two volumes, bound in red leather, of his collection as it stood in 1900. A vanity publication, to be sure, of which 250 copies had been printed for distribution, the catalogue itself would not have been seen by the general public. But the illustrations had been engraved in Paris, and word had spread, arousing the suspicions of Widener's sons (one of whom was later lost, with wife, son and servants, on the Titanic).

The best of Europe's experts were brought to Lynnewood Hall, north of Philadelphia, and those who could not be summoned were consulted by letter. The news was not unrelievedly gloomy, since a few of the paintings Widener had bought were acknowledged as genuine. But the list of fakes included many of the great names of European art.

What is fascinating about the Apollo article, written by Jonathan Lopez, is that the story it tells has been, to an extent, covered up till now. Widener himself seems not to have cared who knew of his misfortune, so long as reparation was made. But his friend, neighbour and lawyer John G Johnson, another noted collector, had been just as badly stung by Nardus. Johnson, more than Widener, was afraid of ridicule, and his instinct was to suffer in silence.

Gallantly, Lopez tells us, Johnson agreed to forego reparations for himself if Widener was to some degree compensated. In the end he was, although only to a limited extent. But the Widener family tradition has been, hitherto, that - yes - Widener was sold some dud paintings early on, but that the dealers responsible had gamely agreed to take their paintings back. This turns out to be not really true, and it took years for all of the Nardus fakes to be winkled out of the collections in which they had found discreet and expensive homes.

People sometimes get the impression that it was Berenson, working for the dealer Joseph Duveen, who fooled the American collectors of the day. But Lopez makes a vital point when he says that, however dubious the unacknowledged financial relationship between Berenson and Duveen may have been, it was a way of selling genuine paintings, not passing off fakes. Berenson may have made his share of errors, but he was a real expert, and those who bought on his advice are likely to have done very well out of it.

The same goes for Duveen. He may have been expensive to deal with, but if you were prepared to pay top dollar - if you were a Mellon or a Frick or a Kress or a Widener - you ended up with masterpieces. The ultimate beneficiary of much of this art-collecting has of course turn out to be the great American collections - in Widener's case, as with several others, the final resting-place being the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

American collectors had once been shy of buying Old Master paintings, precisely for fear of being made fools of. There's an interesting Edith Wharton story on the subject of early collecting, called "False Dawn". There, the father believes his son has been cheated when he buys Italian primitives on the advice of John Ruskin. It is only years later that his taste is vindicated.

Widener made his initial fortune as a purveyor of meat to the army in the civil war, before becoming the public transport mogul and princely art collector. He obviously had, as the expression is, something of a sharp learning curve, in dealing with European villains like Nardus and Yusupov. As for the prince himself, I see that his court case against MGM, through which he won a handy £25,000, has bequeathed us one familiar thing: the disclaimer at the end of films which tells us that all the characters in the foregoing story are fictional, and that any resemblance to living persons is accidental.

    
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