2023-08-13 19:12:00
Wilhelm Bode was frustrated. In 1903, the director of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie complained in a magazine article: “Where a dispute breaks out about a valuable work of art at auction or in the art trade, you can be fairly certain that the Americans will emerge victorious.” According to Bode, the buyers were from the USA the “horror of European museums and collectors”. In 1896 he had tried to acquire Titian’s oil painting The Rape of Europe from a British private collection. But he didn’t stand a chance against Isabella Stewart Gardner. With a purchase price of 20,000 pounds – a record for Titian at the time – the collector from Boston trumped the German museum man. Even when the Louvre and the London National Gallery wanted to bid on the oil painting “The Concert” by Jan Vermeer at the Paris auction house Drouot in 1892, Gardner sat in the hall to the dismay of the museum curators and had the upper hand in the bidding war.
American bankers, oil barons, steel magnates, railroad tycoons and department store owners had accumulated enormous fortunes with their rampant financial speculation and with the rapid industrialization of the USA. Because of their wealth, they saw themselves as the aristocrats of the New World and wanted to live appropriately. Not owning castles that were centuries old, they built palatial mansions in the Italian Renaissance or French Baroque style. The need for representation led to an exuberant historicist luxury inside the houses, which was enhanced with original old masters.
Travelers to Italy on a spending spree: Anders Zorn’s painting “Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice” from 1894 belongs to the collection of the sitters. : Image: Picture Alliance
The collectors of the so-called Gilded Age, like Isabella Stewart Gardner, coveted nothing so much as old European art, intended to make up for the lack of their own cultural tradition. For the nouveau riche millionaires, owning an important art collection was an expression of their success, their sophistication and their social position. They benefited from the fact that around 1900 impoverished nobles, especially in Italy, France and Great Britain, needed money and had to part with their inherited treasures. In their frenzy on buying, the collectors from overseas acquired art and handicrafts from Europe not only by the truck but by the wagon.
She led a lion on a leash
In New York at the end of the 19th century, Benjamin Altman, Henry Clay Frick, Henry Marquand and John Pierpont Morgan were the top dogs among the collectors specializing in high-quality Old Master paintings. New York native but Boston resident Isabella Stewart Gardner was her closest competitor. As the heir to a large family fortune and the wife of a wealthy merchant, she was able to draw on plenty of financial resources. The grande dame of Boston society and the city’s most important patron, she associated with artists, art historians, writers and musicians. A certain eccentricity was part of her self-image, which, for example, ensured that she sometimes went for a walk in public with a full-grown lion on a leash. Gardner traveled the world and was frequently in Europe. With an understanding of art and a passion for collecting, she acquired more than 10,000 works, for which she spent a total of 2.4 million dollars, around 76 million dollars in today’s value.
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