Information about Joseph Duveen, 1st Baron Duveen Of Millbank

Joseph Duveen, 1st Baron Duveen (October 14, 1869 Hull – May 25, 1939 London) was one of the most influential art dealers of all time.

Duveen was British by birth, the eldest of eight sons of Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, a Jewish-Dutch immigrant who had set up a prosperous import business in Hull. The Duveen Brothers firm became very successful and became involved in trading antiques. Duveen Senior died in 1909 and Joseph took over the business. He had received a thorough, though unfashionable education at University College School and Brighton College. He moved the Duveen company into the risky, but lucrative, trade in paintings and quickly became one of the world's leading art dealers due to his good eye, sharpened by his reliance on Bernard Berenson, and skilled salesmanship.

His success is famously attributed to noticing that "Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money." He made his fortune by buying works of art from declining European aristocrats and selling them to the millionaires of the United States. Duveen's clients included Henry Clay Frick, William Randolph Hearst, Henry E. Huntington, J.P. Morgan, Samuel H. Kress, Andrew Mellon, and John D. Rockefeller. The works that Duveen shipped across the Atlantic remain the core collections of many of the United States' most famous museums. Duveen played an important role in selling robber barons on the notion that buying art was also buying upper-class status. He greatly expanded the market, especially for Renaissance paintings; with the help of Bernard Berenson, who certified some questionable attributions, but whose ability to put an artistic personality behind paintings helped market them to purchasers whose dim preceptions of art history was as a series of biographies of "masters".

Duveen quickly became extremely wealthy, and made many philanthropic donations. He gave paintings to many British galleries and he donated considerable sums to repair and expand several galleries and museums. Amongst other things he built the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum to house the Elgin Marbles and a major extension to the Tate Gallery. For his philanthropy he was knighted in 1919 and created Baron Duveen, of Millbank in the City of Westminster, on February 3, 1933.

In 1920 Duveen was sued by Andree Hahn for $500,000 following his comments questioning the authenticity of a version of the Da Vinci painting La belle Ferronière that she planned to sell. The court case took eight years to come to court and after the first jury returned an open verdict Duveen agreed to settle paying Hahn $60,000.

In recent years his reputation has suffered considerably. He was responsible for the damaging restoration work done to the Marbles. A number of the paintings he sold have turned out to be fakes; it is questionable whether he knew this when they were sold. He certainly was unscrupulous in his attributions; but he is not unique among dealers in that.

Duveen greatly increased the trade in bringing great works of art from Europe to America. Duveen eventually became "the art dealer", through shrewd planning and his insight into human behaviour. If a great painting came into the market he had to have it, no matter what, he always out did his bidders and eventually acquired the best collections. He went to great lengths to get hold of great works of art; his network went beyond American millionaries and English Royalty, and Art critics, he relied heavily on valets, maids and butlers of his household and his clients, because he paid everyone generously, he was always rewarded with information other art dealers didn't have access to.

One incident from the Behrman's Duveen illustrates this very well. When Duveen was still a young man in his father's employment, a well-to-do couple came into the store to buy tapestries. As the lady was choosing and picking up pieces generously, Duveen's father discreetly asked him to find out who these people were, Duveen went outside to the horseman and was told that the couple were Lord and Lady Guinness. Duveen wrote their names and slipped it on a piece of paper to his father, when the lady was almost done she innocently asked "We are buying so many tapestries, you must be wondering why?" Duveen's father immediately beamed and said "Of course not, Lady Guinness, you have so many beautiful homes, you will need more than one tapestry to decorate them!"

Duveen played a large part in forming many of the collections that are now in American museums, for example the Frick collection in New York, the Huntington Library, and the Mellon and Kress collections now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and elsewhere. Duveen exploited his American clients' wish for immortality through buying great works of art, an ambition in which they were successful: today only economic historians can name the rich partners of Frick, Mellon or Morgan. One of his later clients was J. Paul Getty, who, though he was less interested in paintings, bought from Duveen the second Ardabil Carpet. Duveen had always kept a stock of grand French furniture and tapestries in stock.

Duveen's portrait was painted by many artists, but his best painter-friend was the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury (1862-1947), who painted him three times, in 1923, 1929 and 1938. The 1923 portrait was reproduced on the cover of Meryle Secrest's 2004 biography, and later sold at TEFAF Maastricht in 2006 for $95,000. Müller-Ury also painted a full-length standing portrait of his daughter Dorothy as a girl in 1914, and in 1924, at the time of her engagement, a bust-length portrait, which was exhibited the following year at Müller-Ury's exhibition at Duveen Brothers as 'Miss X'.

References

• S. N. Behrman Duveen (1952)
• Meryle Secrest Duveen : A Life in Art (2004)

External Links

• Art Review review of secrest biography, Peter Daily