Word: ericksons
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ALFRED WILLIAM ("Eric") ERICKSON, son of a Swedish engineer, was a kindly, rotund gentleman whose affable manner concealed one of the shrewdest business minds of his day and the same kind of boundless energy that was the hallmark of his friend Teddy Roosevelt. Long before he merged his prospering advertising agency with another to make McCann-Erickson, he had piled up a fortune by investing in products for which few others saw any future. Once, for example, he heard about an unsuccessful roofing material called Congo. He bought the company, painted the material a different color, turned it into...
From now on, the Erickson name will more likely be linked to his small but choice collection of paintings, bought largely with the guidance of Dealers Wildenstein and Duveen. Erickson began collecting in 1922, when he bought a portrait of a strange little boy by George Romney. English painters-Romney, Gainsborough, Raeburn-were fashionable in the '20s, but Erickson and his wife Anna were also willing to wander into richer pastures...
Besides Aristotle, the Erickson collection contained two other Rembrandts. A handsome Prince of Orange went to Knoedler's for $110,000, and a small Portrait of an Old Man was snagged by a London dealer for $180,000. Crivelli's 1472 Madonna and Child, which British Critic Roger Fry said was "one of Crivelli's greatest designs," brought $220,000; in 1886 it had been sold at Christie's in London for ?131.5. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Fine Arts paid $125,000 for Perugino's St. Augustine with Members of the Confraternity...
...Erickson sale also showed that great art can go down as well as up. A Raeburn that the Ericksons bought for $100,000 in 1927 went for $60,000; a regal Gainsborough that cost $300,000 in 1928 went for a dismal $35,000. A Holbein portrait also went for $35,000, which was $95,000 less than the Ericksons paid. The painting that took the worst tumble was a Van Dyck: it cost the Ericksons $200,000 plus two paintings, went for $27,000 last week...
Aristotle, commissioned for 500 florins (an estimated $7.800) by a Sicilian nobleman in 1652, was sold by Joseph Duveen in 1928 to the Ericksons for $750,000. In 1929, when Erickson was in need of funds, he let Duveen have it back for $500,000, but in 1936 repurchased...