Book review: A Museum of One’s Own

For about 30 years either side of 1900, the heavens were in alignment for a small group of people whom Anne Higonnet describes as “extreme collectors”. Veritable tidal waves of money, often from across the Atlantic, swept temptingly through European private art collections.

Advisers such as the scholarly Bernard Berenson and dealers such as the legendary Joseph Duveen scoured Europe for works that met the tastes and ambitions of their wealthy clients.

Money, it seemed, was no object – on a single day in 1916 Henry Frick ran up a bill for $5.2m, well over $125m in today’s money. When Henry Huntington bought Gainsborough’s Blue Boy from the Duke of Westminster in 1921, England was outraged at this act of cultural piracy.

Even the director of the Berlin Museum, Wilhelm von Bode, described the painting’s loss to America as part of “the greatest transplantation of art works the world has known since the Roman plundering of Grecian art and the rape of the churches and museums of Europe whereby Napoleon enriched the Louvre”.

This was, of course, not solely a transatlantic struggle. Private collecting has never been solely a story of American money. Nevertheless, it was the battle between an old self-satisfied Europe and a brash new America that seemed to capture imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Perhaps it was the Americans’ smugness – “We have not only become the leaders in finance and industry, but… we are taking possession of the world of art.”

Perhaps it was the American pirates’ predilection for those icons of British art – Lawrence, Gainsborough, Raeburn, Reynolds and Romney; perhaps their ability to rub salt in the wound: Huntington hung the Blue Boy and Lawrence’s Pinkie in the same room at his gallery in California. Or, worse still, to cock a snook at English self-importance – Cole Porter even wrote a song about the Blue Boy’s immigration.

In her wide-ranging study of this era of collecting, Higonnet turns her spotlight’s sharpest beam on the American collectors Frick, Gardner, Huntington and Bliss. Her first eight pages are taken up by a series of striking black-and-white photographs of the principal characters.

They are a serious group: having a great deal of money and spending it on the world’s masterpieces doesn’t look like much fun. Indeed, only Mildred and Robert Bliss, the creators of Dumbarton Oaks, the home for their collection of Byzantine and pre-Colombian art, look anything like content, sitting before a roaring fire and living up to their surname.

A Museum of One’s Own is an elegant book, superbly illustrated and taking full advantage of the generous page size to appreciate just what a rich haul of treasures were gleaned in those well-financed raids and to see the galleries in which this cultural booty was elegantly displayed.

At the same time, in the huge pages of text, Higonnet leaves few stones unturned. Facts and figures, character sketches, events from a very broad sweep of history tumble over one another so that it often seems that A Museum of One’s Own contains two or three other books bursting to get out.

There are some tantalisingly brief glimpses of the collectors – the complex early private life of Arabella Huntington; the almost iconic status of Isabella Stewart Gardner; and Frick’s belief that beauty could ease “the infamy and grief” that had haunted his early public and private life.

Frustratingly, Higonnet, who is professor of art history at Barnard College, New York, offers no convincing explanation of the forces that drive extreme collectors. She suggests that one possible motive for collecting art was that its “timeless beauty promises immortality by association”.

This argument may work with Fragonard and Rembrandt, but it is less satisfactory when explaining the motives of those who collect objects that have only limited intrinsic beauty.

There is always the possibility that they just liked art – or, from across the Atlantic, enjoyed poking Europe in the eye with a sharp and rather expensive stick.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant