Art: Clarke Collection

This week the swank Manhattan house of Knoedler & Co. proudly announced the acquisition of the Thomas B. Clarke collection of early U. S. portraits. The sale price was around $1,000,000. In Knoedler’s de luxe parlors, the occasion was comparable in excitement to the purchase by that firm two years ago for Andrew William Mellon of Raphael’s Madonna of the House of Alba, from the Soviet Government’s Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

No collector was ever more beloved by the U. S. art world than Thomas Benedict Clarke. Born in Manhattan in 1848, he was the son of Dr. George W. Clarke, founder and longtime head master of the old Mount Washington Collegiate Institute, one of the best-known private schools in the East in the years following the Civil War. Young Tom Clarke went into the linen business. His real life, though, was spent buying & selling pictures and furniture. He started the nucleus of his great collection of U. S. portraits in 1872. In 1899, dissatisfied with what he had bought, he sold most of them at auction for $235,000, began collecting all over again. In 1924 a sale of his early American furniture brought $103,679.

In 1892, the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the vogue for early American antiques set up in business as a dealer not in his own personal hobby but in rare Chinese porcelains. Near his home on 35th Street he rented another house, filled it with expensive bric-a-brac which he promptly began to sell to the elder Morgan, Joseph Widener, Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden and other Orientalists. No passer-by would ever know that it was an art shop because Tom Clarke never had a show window, never published an advertisement, never hung out a name plate. His business was conducted entirely through privately circulated catalogs. About six feet tall, bald and pink-cheeked, Tom Clarke was a man of bound less energy, though a childhood attack of diphtheria left him with a lame foot which he dragged all his life. He was one of the founders of the swank Brook Club, also served as Shepherd of the plebeian Lambs. For years he never missed a first night on Broadway, yet was always at work at 8:15 o’clock the following morning, writing all his business letters in longhand. And when he bought pieces of art, he paid cash for them.

In 1919, when he was 71, Collector Clarke gave up his porcelain business, concentrated on his real love, early American portraits. His standard: All portraits must, be of persons important in the his tory of New York or the U. S., by artists of importance during the subject’s life time. He never found a decent portrait of Abraham Lincoln. On his death in 1931 Collector Clarke had assembled 175 pictures by 77 different artists. His collection of 29 Gilbert Stuarts is generally rated the finest of its kind in the world. The portrait collection was a major part of the Clarke estate. Yet Tom Clarke was not rich enough to present it to any public institution. It was his wish that the collection be sold as one lot. City Bank Farmers Trust Co., executors, put a reserve price of $1,250,000 on it. Groups were formed to buy the collection for Yale and Princeton. On auction day several dealers were prepared to bid a million but none would go higher. Until this week, when a deal was finally closed with Knoedler, the pictures remained in the bank’s vaults where they had been most of the lime when Collector Clarke was not exhibiting them. Certainly the most famed of the Clarke collection is the Vaughan portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. Of all the Washington pictures busy Gilbert Stuart turned out, only three were from life. The Clarke one, showing the right side of the first President’s face, was the earliest. It was followed by the life-sized Lansdowne portrait, showing Washington from the left, and finally Boston Museum’s unfinished Athenaeum bust portrait. The Vaughan portrait was taken to England in 1795, the year it was painted, was not returned to the U. S. until 1851. In 1912 Collector Clarke bought it for $16,100. Knoedler’s now value it at $175,000. Not so well known, but to many critics an even finer portrait of Washington, is one of the round-chinned elderly President by Rembrandt Peale, executed when that talented Pennsylvanian was only 17. This is valued at $35,000. Other great pictures in the Clarke col-lection:

Mrs. Richard Yates. by Gilbert Stuart, as a hawk-nosed old lady in white lace cap and satin gown stitching away at her fancy work.

John Howard (Home, Sweet Home) Payne, by William Dunlap (1776-1839). Subject Payne was the first U. S. citizen ever to play Hamlet.

Andrew Jackson, by Ralph E. W. Earl (1788-1837) who was one of “Old Hickory’s” closest friends, married his niece, lived with him in the White House, and lies buried in Jackson’s garden at the Hermitage. Three of the Clarke pictures are of particular interest because the painters are so seldom connected in the public mind with portrait painting: By John James Audubon is the portrait of dour, white-cravatted Henry Clay. Trained for a few months in Paris, Audubon did portraits for years before he first became seriously interested in ornithology.

By Robert Fulton is the portrait of one-time (1834-38) Secretary of the Navy Mahlon Dickerson. Portraitist Fulton made a reputation in Philadelphia and studied painting with Benjamin West in London long before he began experimenting with steam engines in Paris.

By Samuel Finley Breese Morse is the portrait of Levi Lincoln who served Thomas Jefferson as Attorney General. Not realizing that they had the future inventor of the telegraph in their studio, Washington Allston and Artist West taught Morse painting in London. Painting always interested Morse more than electricity. He was a founder and first president of the National Academy of Design.