Word: collector
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Strictly Conditioned." President Truman promptly released the Bell report. Its recommendations: 1) increased taxation on high incomes and reform in the tax collector's office; 2) cutting up big estates for homesteaders, and production credits for small farmers; 3) encouragement for new industries; 4) two-year emergency tax of 25% on imports; 5) encouragement for trade unions; 6) higher civil service salaries, to reduce the temptation of graft; 7) U.S. to grant a $250 million loan, "strictly conditioned...
...Collector's Item...
...There It Was." Until 1947, Arthur Arberry kept himself clear of all this. Then one day a wealthy collector brought him a slim, yellowed volume of Persian poetry. Sure enough, reported Arberry, "There it was ... the oldest copy of Omar Khayyám's poems hitherto discovered ... The celebrated [Bodleian] codex had been bettered by exactly two centuries . . . This was more than human curiosity could resist...
...catalogue introduction, National Gallery Curator John Walker pointed out that Gulbenkian had picked virtually all his pictures without the assistance of experts, and that he got fine art, anyway. The collection, wrote Walker, reflects "his personality. Gladstone enumerated six qualities which distinguish a collector: 'Appetite, leisure, wealth, knowledge, discrimination, and perseverance.' These qualities Mr. Gulbenkian possesses to a pre-eminent degree. [Fellow financiers] would be surprised to hear him comparing their business dealings to . . . Italian paintings! With tireless patience he has sought beautiful objects; pictures, sculpture, ancient coins, Near Eastern ceramics, manuscripts, eighteenth-century furniture, tapestries...
...beginning collector years ago, Gulbenkian did not always show classic taste. He fell in love with, and bought, the original of the popular old chromo, September Morn, a fact which embarrasses him nowadays. But few experts could criticize the taste, or the diversity, of a collection which included prime examples of Hals, Gainsborough, Degas and Manet. His crystalline views of Venice by Francesco Guardi were matched against a soft, misty one by Corot. He contrasted Stefan Lochner's strict, gothic Presentation in the Temple with a tasty chunk of cheesecake by Francois Boucher, entitled Cupid and the Graces. Clearly...