Joseph Duveen

Artist Info

Joseph DuveenHull, England, 1869 - 1939, London

Duveen, Joseph Joel, Baron Duveen (1869–1939), art dealer and benefactor, was born at Hull on 14 October 1869, the eldest of the ten sons and four daughters of Sir Joseph Joel Duveen (1843–1908) and his wife, Rosetta, daughter of Abraham Barnett of Hull. He was educated privately, and at the age of seventeen entered his father's business, which dealt mainly in oriental porcelain, tapestries, furniture, and objets d'art. Duveen quickly realized the vast profits to be made by buying great masters in Europe and selling them in America, thus adding enormously to the activities of the family business, which became the most prominent in the British art trade. His intense energy and salesmanship soon made him the world's foremost dealer, and his transactions were on an unprecedented scale; he paid, for instance, £60,900 for George Romney's small portrait of Mrs Bromley Davenport (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), £77,700 for Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Mary Moulton Barrett (Pinkie; Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California), and £73,500 for Gainsborough's Harvest Waggon (Barber Institute, Birmingham). Apart from purchases at auction, he acquired whole collections at immense sums, including the Hainauer collection of Renaissance objets d'art in 1906, and the Rodolphe Kann collection of pictures and objets d'art in 1907, both bought when his father Joseph Joel Duveen was still alive. Joseph Duveen went on to purchase the Maurice Kann collection in 1909, the Morgan collection of Chinese porcelain and eighteenth-century furniture, and in 1914, the great Fragonard room now in the Frick Museum in New York. In 1927 he acquired the R. H. Benson collection of Italian paintings for $3 million, in 1930 the Gustav Dreyfus collection of Italian sculpture and bronzes, and in 1936 Lord Hillingdon's collection of Sèvres porcelain and furniture.

A vast number of important paintings passed through Duveen's hands. Frequently he purchased works from aristocratic collections in Britain and Europe to sell to American clients, who included Benjamin Altmann, Jules S. Bache, Henry Clay Frick, Henry E. Huntington, Andrew Mellon, Mrs Hamilton Rice, Samuel H. Kress, and Joseph E. Widener. In 1921 he acquired Gainsborough's portrait of Jonathan Buttall (The Blue Boy) from the duke of Westminster and sold it to Henry Huntington. In 1929 he sold the Raphael Madonna of 1508 (‘The Cowper Madonna’; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) to Andrew Mellon for $970,000. In 1937 he bought from Lord Allendale Giorgione's Adoration of the Shepherds (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). As the family firm had originally specialized in the decorative arts, Duveen wisely made use of the expertise of art historians and museum officials to authenticate the paintings he acquired, and was associated in this respect with Wilhelm von Bode and Bernard Berenson. Through Duveen's agency, many significant European works of art, donated by American collectors, have entered American museums and art galleries.

Duveen's art benefactions in Britain were on a grand scale. He donated Hogarth's The Graham Children and Correggio's Christ Taking Leave of his Mother to the National Gallery, and John Singer Sargent's study of Mme Gautreau and Augustus John's portrait of Mme Suggia to the Tate Gallery. To the Tate he also gave several galleries to house contemporary non-British paintings, one devoted to the work of Sargent, and in 1937 a new building comprising three large and two smaller galleries for contemporary sculpture. In 1932 he presented a gallery for early Italian pictures to the National Gallery; in 1933 he paid for an extension to the National Portrait Gallery; and he provided the British Museum with a gallery for the Elgin marbles (during the preparation of which the statues were controversially cleaned). He also bore the cost of the decorations at the Wallace Collection and of Rex Whistler's mural decorations at the Tate, and was a generous contributor to the National Art Collections Fund. He founded, financed, and organized the British Artists Exhibitions Organization for the encouragement of lesser known British artists, and in 1931 he endowed a chair for the history of art in London University.

Duveen was a trustee of the Wallace Collection from 1925, of the National Gallery from 1929 to 1936, and of the National Portrait Gallery from 1933. He was an honorary member of the council of the National Art Collections Fund and of the council of the British School at Rome. He was director of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, New York, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and honorary correspondent of the commissions of ancient and modern art of the Royal Belgium Museum of Fine Art. In 1929 he was presented with the freedom of the city of Hull. He received foreign decorations from France, Belgium, Holland, Serbia, and Hungary. He was knighted in 1919, created a baronet in 1927, and raised to the peerage as Baron Duveen of Millbank, commemorating his long association with the Tate Gallery, in 1933.

Duveen was an overwhelming and extremely persuasive character. A fervent cigarette smoker, he adopted a fake cigarette when illness precluded his maintenance of the habit. On 31 July 1899 he married Elsie, daughter of Sol Salomon, tobacco grower, of New York. She survived him with their only child, a daughter. The peerage therefore became extinct when he died at Claridges Hotel, Brook Street, London, on 25 May 1939.

Alec Martin, rev. Helen Davies

Sources

The Times (26 May 1939) · auction and exhibition catalogues · personal knowledge (1949) · A. C. R. Carter, Let me tell you (1940) · S. N. Behrman, Duveen (1952) · J. H. Duveen, Collection and recollections: a century and a half of art deals (1935) · J. H. Duveen, Secrets of an art dealer (1937) · J. H. Duveen, The rise of the house of Duveen (1957) · E. Fowles, Memoirs of Duveen brothers (1976) · C. Simpson, The partnership: the secret association of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen (1987) · F. Spalding, The Tate: a history (1998) · W. St Clair, Lord Elgin and the marbles, 3rd edn (1998) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1940) · m. cert.