Art: No Sale

The 20-by-30-ft. canvas lay unrolled like a rug on the floor. Pushing up his horn-rimmed spectacles, the auctioneer eyed Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem dubiously and wondered out loud whether it would bring $100 or $10,000. “Somebody might want it for a church,” he mused hopefully, “and then again a dealer might want to cut it up into handy-size art.”

In a grimy Manhattan warehouse last week, the long-lost oil paintings of famed Illustrator Gustave Doré went on sale. Like the auctioneer, none of the 150 cautious dealers and enthusiastic old ladies on hand for the auction had any clear idea of what the paintings were worth.

Doré’s blown-up, pretentious oils had never commanded anything like the critical praise accorded his classic black-&-white illustrations for Rabelais, Coleridge, Balzac, Dante, Cervantes and the Bible. His paintings were blandly ignored by 19th Century Paris, but Doré managed to sell the whole lot of them to an English dealer for $300,000. They were more to the taste of Victorian London. Queen Victoria bought a few herself, and for 21 years a Bond Street gallery exhibited the rest. Shipped to the U.S., the paintings were valued at $1,000,000 and viewed by over a million people in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Many wept over them; several clergymen felt inspired to preach on-the-spot sermons.

In 1899, the art importing company which had brought them to the U.S. stored them in a Manhattan warehouse. The company kept up storage payments until 1927, then went out of business. Not until last spring did the storage company get around to unpacking the crates to see what was in them. Unpaid storage charges of $10,000 had piled up.

To many at the auction, Doré’s paintings looked like tremendously outsized Sunday school chromos darkened by varnish and dirt. In the general murk, Moses could be discerned gesticulating at Pharaoh, a sad-faced monk daydreamed over an organ, pagan gods fell in a heap beneath a cross, and Paolo and Francesca embraced in hell. Critics wondered how the great illustrator could possibly have turned out such daubs.

The auction was a slow, staid, unexciting affair, and individual bids had reached a total of only $10,829 when a man named John M. Holzworth, identified in Who’s Who as a lawyer and big-game hunter, offered $12,500 for the lot. The auctioneer promptly canceled all previous bids in favor of Holzworth’s and shut up shop. But next day Gustave Doré’s paintings were still gathering grime in the warehouse. As a final twist, which Balzac might have appreciated, Collector Holzworth was arrested, charged with passing phony checks.