An Astonishing Record of a Vast Collection by Walter Kaiser

The Robert Lehman Collection
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton University Press;
fifteen volumes

I. Italian Painting
by John Pope-Hennessy, assisted by Laurence B. Kanter
331 pp. (1987; out of print)

II. Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Paintings
by Charles Sterling, Maryan W. Ainsworth, Charles Talbot, Martha Wolff, Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Jonathan Brown, and John Hayes
245 pp., $130.00

III. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Painting
by Richard R. Brettell, Paul Hayes Tucker, and Natalie H. Lee
466 pp., $130.00

IV. Illuminations
by Sandra Hindman, Mirella Levi d’Ancona, Pia Palladino, and Maria Francesca Saffiotti
240 pp., $145.00

V. Italian Fifteenth- to Seventeenth-Century Drawings
by Anna Forlani Tempesti
388 pp. (1991; out of print)

VI. Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings
by James B. Shaw and George Knox
261 pp. (1987; out of print)

VII. Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Drawings
by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Mary Taverner Holmes, Fritz Koreny, Donald Posner, and Duncan Robinson
478 pp., $150.00

VIII. American Drawings and Watercolors
by Carol Clark
259 pp., $115.00 (paper)

IX. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Drawings
by Richard R. Brettell, Françoise Forster-Hahn, Duncan Robinson, and Janis A. Tomlinson
462 pp., $130.00

X. Italian Majolica
by Jörg Rasmussen
292 pp. (1989; out of print)

XI. Glass
by Dwight P. Lanmon and David B. Whitehouse
342 pp., $199.95

XII. European Sculpture and Metalwork
by Frits Scholten
274 pp., $75.00

XIII. Frames
by Timothy Newbery
465 pp., $130.00

XIV. European Textiles
by Christa C. Mayer Thurman
300 pp., $145.00

XV. Decorative Arts
by Wolfram Koeppe, Clare Le Corbeiller, William Rieder, Charles Truman, Suzanne G. Valenstein, and Clare Vincent
452 pp., $95.00

Robert Lehman Collection/Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giovanni di Paolo: The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445

One evening in June 1914, Osbert Sitwell attended a concert in London at which Richard Strauss performed his Sonata in E-flat for piano and violin, Strauss playing the piano and Lady Speyer the violin—much as John Singer Sargent depicts her with her Stradivarius in the portrait he painted in 1907. Writing afterward about Lady Speyer and her wealthy American-born financier husband, Sir Edgar, Sitwell says that their grand mansion in Grosvenor Street

sheltered the sort of art collection that is seldom seen in England but is more common in America. Many of the items might have been chosen by a magpie who had found himself a millionaire: some were dark in tone, it is true—yet all glittered and were rich in luster. There was something in the atmosphere, too, that recalled the public rooms of an expensive liner. French staircases, German woodcarving, Augsburg plate, crystal vases from China, Persian tiles, and some of the furnishings of Marie Antoinette’s boudoir, all these were united by the taste of the owners for objects of luxury.¹

What Sir Osbert apparently means by an American sort of art collection is one that displays paintings and sculpture in a luxurious setting of splendid decorative arts. He could, of course, have found much the same thing nearer home, with the Sassoons at Houghton Hall or in Park Lane, for example, or with the Camondos in Paris on the rue de Monceau. The English prototype of all such collecting is Hertford House in London, where the opulent Wallace Collection has been displayed to the public since 1900. But the American “squillionaires,” as Bernard and Mary Berenson liked to call them, were often richer and not infrequently more ostentatious—and of riveting fascination to English nobility for the heiresses they might provide as spouses. What is interesting is that Sitwell thinks of such comprehensive collections as American rather than as English or European.

Beginning with J.P. Morgan and Isabella Stewart Gardner, a lengthy succession of very wealthy nineteenth-century American “buccaneer collectors,” as Kenneth Clark once termed them—Henry Walters, Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Charles Lang Freer, Andrew Mellon, Joseph Widener, to name the most eminent—formed large collections of paintings that they then displayed in an ambiance of elegant, expensive decorative arts. There were, of course, other notable collectors—the Havemeyers, the Lewisohns, the Cone sisters, the Clark brothers, Guggenheim, Kress, Phillips, etc.—but they collected paintings almost exclusively. In the twentieth century, fewer comprehensive collections were formed, but one of the largest of all time was that of Robert Lehman, so eminent that it was given a special exhibition at the Orangerie in Paris in 1957, the only American collection ever to be afforded that honor. Lehman was probably the last of the magpie millionaires.

Such comprehensive collections may be seen as reflections of that characteristic nineteenth-century impulse to undertake …