Word: duveens
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...merchants and connoisseurs fought for it at auction at the American Art Galleries, Manhattan. Somebody began the bidding at $50,000. Competitors nodded their heads. Each nod sent the price up another $10,000. Near the end, nods were only worth $1,000 apiece. Sir Joseph Duveen, semi-Semitic, ornate dealer and art authority, as might well be guessed, nodded last. "Titus in an Armchair" became his for $270,000, the highest price ever paid for a painting at a U. S. auction...
Ambrose McEvoy's reputation was almost as high in the U. S. as in England. In 1920, his exhibition at Sir Joseph Duveen's Manhattan galleries led to many commissions here, at $5,000 each, for his idealized representations of fashionable ladies. (He had painted Consuelo, onetime Duchess of Marlborough.) He was compared with Gainsborough. His "Portrait of my Mother" looks less like Gains- borough's lacy work, however, than Whistler's calm familiar model by the same name. Only, Madam McEvoy seems not so old as Madam Whistler. In fact one feels she would take...
...auction price to date, $370,000. "Pinkie" is regarded as Lawrence's best work in his early debonair manner, that manner of captivating, almost too facile grace which made him adored of the great ladies of his day and keeps him popular since. "Pinkie" went-to Sir Joseph Duveen. "Pinkie," who was none other than Miss Mary Moulton Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's aunt, painted as a young girl coquettishly sauntering over a barren moor before a thunderstorm...
...Joseph Duveen's third great acquisition was Romney's portrait of Lady Elizabeth Forbes. These three, together with certain other paintings and objets d'art, cost him $1,000,000. Governor Alvan T. Fuller of Massachusetts, millionaire art collector, secured Romney's superb "Lady de la Pole" for $220,000. The sale continued three more days, but without further headlines in the press; $2,280,000 had been realized in the first two days...
...excellence of its technical effects, there hovers over it a formal and elegant carnality which the modern mind likes to encounter. Perhaps carnality is the wrong word; perhaps you cannot apply it, for instance, to Lawrence's picture of Miss Mary Moulton Barrett for which Sir Joseph Duveen gave 74,000 guineas; perhaps you cannot call this pure and lovely miss, standing with round arms pressed to round bosoms, a storm behind her head, animation in her eyes, gauze around her legs, anything but "Pinkie...