Volume 25, Number 19 · December 7, 1978
The Erratic Magpie
By Douglas Cooper
"The Noble Buyer": John Quinn, Patron of the Avant-Garde
by Judith Zilczer
Smithsonian Institution Press, 198 pp., $20.00
John Quinn—sixty years ago the name was widely known and commanded attention and respect in New York, Dublin, London, and Paris. Quinn was a successful lawyer, a patron of the arts who befriended the Yeats family and gave help to Pound, Eliot, and Joyce; and he became an avid collector of paintings. But today there are few who have heard more than the name, and none, apart from a few bibliophiles, some professors and curators, and one or two very aged art dealers, who know anything about his manifold activities in the world of modern letters and art. Quinn is thus a shadowy and forgotten figure, about whom nothing has been written for fifty years, except for a glib essay by Aline Saarinen in a silly book, The Proud Possessors, and a biography by Benjamin Reid, which was well researched and informative within the author's own scope but contained no detailed account of Quinn's literary and artistic activities and provided no checklist of the vast quantity of books, manuscripts, and assorted works of art with which he surrounded himself.
Review, 3343 words
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