Word: kress
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...name of Lord Duveen will always be associated with the names of Mellon and Morgan and Kress, and today it is still true that a Duveen customer should be something more than merely solvent. Prices range from $850 for an illuminated manuscript page from a 15th century book to $500,000 for a Giorgione. But buying an old master is not a prerequisite for enjoying the treasures Lord Duveen stashed away during his incredible career. On a Saturday the gallery is usually jammed with art lovers of every age and income, perhaps dropping in to see a small but appealing...
Last week, when that program officially came to an end, the gallery was no longer the only museum to be grateful. Smaller Kress collections have gone to 18 other museums in the U.S., and last week all of these had some of their treasures on display at the National Gallery in honor of the program. It was a dazzling show, the quality of which can be measured by the brooding Giovanni Bellini from the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City (see color). In further commemoration, the Phaidon Press has published a handsome book on the Kress Collection...
...Good as the Count's. The life of Samuel Henry Kress could have been written by Horatio Alger, except for the fact that Kress never married the boss's daughter. Born in Cherryville. Pa., in 1863, he grew up a bookish boy who at 17 landed a teaching job in Slatington, six miles away. Kress's salary was only $25 a month, but he managed to save up enough money to open a novelty store in Nanticoke. Before long, he had a wholesale house in Wilkes Barre. By the time he died in 1955, there were...
...lifelong bachelor with neurotic fear of disease (during World War I he lived for a year and a half in a hospital to be sure of getting sanitary food), Kress seemed to have only one love, his business. In reality, he had two. He read a good deal about art, was collecting in a small way before World War I. Finally, about 1920, he met the Italian collector Count Contini-Bonacossi in Rome. Kress decided on the spot that he would some day have a collection as good as the count's. Soon he was the friend of Bernard...
Bigger than Mellon. Until Kress, Duveen's best customer was Andrew Mellon, who built the National Gallery and gave it his collection. But the collection was not big enough to fill all those marble halls, and the story goes that it was Duveen who planted in Kress's head the idea of the great gallery gift ("You're not going to let Mellon have the whole National Gallery to himself, are you. Mr. Kress?"). Even after the first gift, the Kress Foundation kept buying, in 1951 started adding other institutions to its gift list. To qualify...