Art: Maecenas

About every other week, sharp-eyed collectors read a two-inch news item about a man named Huntington who buys things. Last week it was a collection of the letters of Mary Queen of Scots, and her son, James I of England. Other items have announced that this Mr. Huntington bought Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy,” and the best Gutenberg Bible in existence, and that very rare object, a first folio of Shakespeare, and a first edition of Hamlet, and . . . But the “Blue Boy” and the Bible aside, what sort of man, people have wondered, is Mr. Huntington?

In despatches, Mr. Huntington is generally defined in two words— “California Capitalist.” Sometimes the newspapers add that he owns the largest private library in the world, and that, since he is giving it to the U. S., he is making the most important gift on record by a citizen to his government. Such statements, facts, as these, evoke little personal image, for capitalists may or may not cultivate the lore of what they buy.

Mr. Huntington is much like his uncle, Collis P. Huntington—the Huntington who owned most of the Southern Pacific Railroad, of which he was President when he died, and who passed on most of his shares to his nephew. Henry Edwards Huntington, the nephew, was not, in the conventional idiom, self-made; he took Collis Huntington’s money and used it to advantage. Born in Oneonta, N. Y., in 1850, he dealt in hardware, switched to railroading, grew. He bought land, built resorts in southern California, and ran railroads out to them (the Pacific Interurban, the Los Angeles Street Railways). He made about a hundred million dollars. He said he would retire at 60. That age loomed in his life like a pillar at a boundary, dividing the world of business from that other world in which his thoughts had their root.

Acquisitiveness had shaped him from the beginning. There was acquisition, first of money, then of beautiful things. John Pierpont Morgan, too, was acquisitive, with the vehemence that made him grip life with both hands like a vase that must be held to be admired. Mr. Morgan had a very great library, a very great gallery. He is dead, and now the world produces no one else to match in the depth of this need to buy and hold the California gentleman who has come to own the letters of Mary Queen of Scots. If Mr. Huntington wants to read Chaucer in the evening, he can take down the original manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, in Chaucer’s spidery, faded, careful hand, manuscript said to be the most valuable in the world. He owns the original manuscript of the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin “from the ink splash on page 71, to the day before his death.” In 1911 he paid a million dollars for three Gainsboroughs. His Gutenberg Bible (often mistaken for the famed copy from the library of Cardinal Mazarin*) is worth $50,000; he has on his shelf the first edition of Venus and Adonis, the oldest existing edition of any work by Shakespeare. He has, in short, the most valuable collection of first editions in the world, and the most complete Americana. (To catalogue it cost $40,000.) These things and his magnificent 500-acre home at San Marino will go at his death to the government, together with a trust fund to preserve them and add to them.

Urbane, precise, conservative, rather than dapper; tolerant, rather than genial; exhibiting button shoes, a cold eye, grey hair and long fingers, Henry E. Huntington goes on buying things. At San Marino he breakfasts at seven and reads for an hour, turning the pages carefully. When he is in Los Angeles or Manhattan he goes to his office and spends a few hours with his railroads, his villages, cliffs, painted motor buses, trolley-cars, skyscrapers, his coupons, clerks, cigars and the polite young men who look after his money and call him “Sir.” It is pleasant to feel that these things now largely take care of themselves. It is pleasanter to be Maecenas than Croesus.

Ineffable Bohemian

Seventy-two modern paintings, collected by the late John Quinn, Esq., were sold last week in the Hotel Druot, Paris, in an hour and a half, for 1,648,750 francs (about $55,000). A Cezanne went for 280,000, a nude by Matisse for 100,000; the highest price of the sale 520,000 francs was paid for a picture by Henry Rousseau, “The Sleeping Bohemian,” which the artist sold 15 years ago for 400 francs. Even now some critics laugh at it. “What Idiot,” asked L’Oetivre, “Will Pay the Big Price for the ‘Sleeping Bohemian’?” To pass sentence on the mental soundness of M. Bigne, the buyer, one must see the picture.

It was exhibited last winter in Manhattan. Artist Rousseau painted it when his memory gave him a scene that some sentence or story had buried in his mind a long time before, perhaps in his childhood; for the picture of the night, the desert, the beast and the sleeping woman is achieved in accents as intense and dim as the words of a child in a fever. It may be that the word “Bohemian” had taken on, when he first heard it, some quality not its own, a jangling note that suggested the picture, for why the painted traveler, asleep under the moon with her mandolin should be a “Bohemian” is hard to say. Her mandolin is quiet. All around her, upon the desert and upon her limbs, disposed in sleep, the moon bends its light, and a lion (come down from a hill colder and stonier than the desert) stands with a black shadow on its face, solitary, looking at the traveler with wild, tender eyes.

In Chicago

Fattest of all prizes at the Chicago Art Institute’s 39th annual show last week was one of $1,500 given by Patron Frank Granger Logan, retired grain broker, the Institute’s assiduous vice president. This sum they presented to Painter George Benjamin Luks for his strong, broadly painted, modernistic study of a male native of Cuba operating an accordion. Another $1,000 from Patron Logan went to Painter Charles Sydney Hopkinson for a study of himself and his family.

Up from Iowa had come a canvas, property of the Des Moines Association of Fine Arts, executed by Artist Eugene Edward Speicher. It showed, baldly speaking, a lady with no clothes on and was simply called, like many another masterpiece, “Nude.” The judges found it worthy of $1,000 donated by Capitalist Potter Palmer.

Mrs. Keith Spalding’s $1,000 for contemporary sculpture was bestowed upon Sculptor Benjamin T. Kurtz for his “Mask of a Nubian Girl” (i. e. Negress).

*CardinaI Mazarin’s Gutenberg Bible was the first to attract notice. The Cardinal (1602-61) was a famed patron of letters. There are 79 copies or fragmentary copies of Gutenberg Bibles. At least seven are known to be in the U. S. The latest copy to be sold brought $280,000.