An art connoisseur is a relatively new breed that is a slightly higher rung than an art buff. He or she is like an expert wine-taster: someone with a more refined and more intricate knowledge about art and artists than can advise institutions and investors. But like the export wine connoisseur, the art connoisseur can dupe and be duped, since although his or her knowledge is built on experience, it is also built on intuition and personal taste.

The rise of the connoisseur comes simultaneously as the private collector, in a world where far more people were able to leverage their opinion and influence. It is also a natural consequence of time when more and more art is available to see and for sale. Where once the elite was the aristocracy, the connoisseur was the elite spokesperson for a middle-class keen to consume conspicuously and to demonstrate their claims to taste and finer discernment.

Let’s Start with an Anecdote from Literature

Early in Marcel Proust's magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past, the young narrator makes the acquaintance of the novel's great aesthete, Charles Swann, son of a wealthy stockbroker, who spends his time in leisure consorting with the aristocratic elite, offering society women advice on painting purchases and home decoration, while amusing himself with finding resemblances between Renaissance painting and prominent figures.

Had it been essential to apply to Swann a social coefficient peculiar to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in his father's position, his co-efficient would have been somewhat lower than theirs, because, being very simple in his habits. Having always had a craze for 'antiques' and pictures, he now lived and amassed his collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit… 'Are you really a connoisseur, now?' she would ask him; 'I ask for your own sake, as you are likely to have fakes palmed off on you by the dealers’.

There is much more to this than subjective observation and social satire. Proust has painted a portrait of the quintessential gentleman collector at the end of the nineteenth century and the curiosity and skepticism he aroused.

I could as easily have quoted a dozen other passages from other authors, especially Henry James, many of whose major novels are based on the pressures occasioned by the new wealth of America's infiltration into Europe.

The Art Market of the End of the Nineteenth Century and the Rise of the Connoisseur

The latter half of the nineteenth century's robust art market gave birth to the connoisseur (from the premodern French, conoistre, ‘to know’), a gentleman of taste whose knowledge came not only from professorial wisdom but from continuing experience and lay advice.

The connoisseur was conventionally someone of knowledge with the unquantifiable gifts of discernment and good taste. Like Swann (who had real prototypes in the aesthete Charles Haas and the founder of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Charles Éphrussi), such beings were sought out by people wishing to make the right decisions, to keep up with the Joneses and for making profitable investments.

Such commerce was in the connoisseur's best interests, who did not just hanker after recognition, but always the opportunity to view rare and beautiful objects. Connoisseurs could seldom resist becoming collectors, and their passion would frequently lead them into becoming art dealers.

Antecedents

The great antecedent of the connoisseur is Diderot, whose most reliable source of income in middle life came from Catherine the Great (1729-96), who entrusted him with significant purchases of art treasures from France and the Netherlands to grace what she planned to be her Francophile, newly enlightened empire. Many of the great works of the Hermitage are thanks to Diderot's amiable prejudices.

Wikipedia (Public Domain). Portrait of Denis Diderot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot#/media/File:Denis_Diderot_111.PNG

Expanding Art Worlds

By the end of the nineteenth century, the focus began to move from Paris to other great European cities like Vienna, London, and Berlin, to New York, which is now the commercial art world's hub.

I say commercial because even if the best work is not done there, it is where artists, dealers, and collectors gather with the confidence of the best buying and selling successes and, by virtue of being in New York, with the best prestige. It is a commonplace for major dealers in commercial centres in Europe (Cologne, Münich, and Zürich) to have offices there as it is seen as the international nexus of artistic affairs. It is much like what Rome was in the eighteenth century.

The idea of a commercial, artistic centre only came about with the invention of tourism. Rome was the end of the 'Grand Tour', popularized by the British at this time, and was a place where artists gravitated to find commissions and where the affluent sought the right artist for what they had in mind. As Goethe remarked in 1787 in his Journeys in Italy, ‘Big money is now being paid for Etruscan vases […] There is no traveller who doesn’t want to own some’.

But there was a difference between the gentleman collector and the modern speculator-dealer. They monopolized on the turn of Europe's fortunes, when old patrimonies started to dry up, which forced their progeny to look across the Atlantic to mop up mounting debts.

Baron Duveen: King of Connoisseurs (and Dealers)

The greatest bar none of the connoisseur-dealers was the son of a Jewish-Dutch immigrant to Hull in England, Joseph Duveen (1869-1939), who later became Baron Duveen of Millbank. His most famous saying, ‘Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money’, was exploited mercilessly. He, more than anyone, exploited the decline of the old families and the rise of the American financial empires.

National Portrait Gallery. Baron Duveen Portrait. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01995/Joseph-Duveen-Baron-Duveen

Duveen’s clients comprised the who’s-who of collectors and collection: Frick, Hearst, Huntington, Morgan, Kress, Mellon, and Rockefeller. Point to a handful of masterworks in one of the American collections, and chances are Duveen had a hand in at least a couple. In the process, Duveen amassed enormous wealth and built the Duveen gallery in the British Museum in his honour to house the Elgin Marbles (for whose disastrous cleaning he was also responsible).

In 1912 Duveen entered into a private pact with the other archmage of connoisseurs, Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), who in his heyday was treated as the last word in attribution.

The sagacious Berenson and mercurial Duveen were responsible for reviving interest in the Renaissance, which also raised their prices.

Their relationship ended in acrimony just before Duveen’s death in 1937 over the attribution of the Adoration of the Shepherds (intended for the Kress collection), which Duveen rightly attributed to Giorgione, but which Berenson hailed as a Titian.

While their story is the stuff of legend and their influence of envy, respect for them has paled, as many of their attributions have been proved to be false, some of them fakes. It has given cause to presume that this was due to cynicism as much as casual error.

The equation that both motivated and haunted connoisseurs and collectors at the turn of the century was: culture = class.

The great magnates of the Unites States used art not just as a vehicle for buying class, but as a means of expiating their sins, of cleansing their unimaginable wealth while still allowing them to keep it.

Great (Super-Rich) Collectors

There are many fascinating tales to be told, and I can only offer a glimpse. In the case of Mellon, who for most of his life had no time for art, collecting only began in his sixties.

During the depression, he bought half of the best paintings in the Hermitage, which Stalin let go for a song—having long been victimized by F.D. Roosevelt, Mellon took revenge through beneficence, donating his collection to the National Gallery in Washington.

Then there was Alfred Barnes who made his fortune from the antiseptic drug, Argyrol, who, with the help of the dealer Paul Guillaume and luminaries like Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, bought up some of the finest works of early Modernism, the centerpiece being Matisse’s Joy of Life (1905). His foundation now had over 2500 objects to its name. The paintings alone are estimated at over USD2 billion. To rarify the collection all the more, works from the Barnes collection are not permitted to be lent, making any visit like an act of pilgrimage.

Another interesting case is that of the names behind the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, two brothers of wildly different temperaments and tastes, Stephen and Sterling. Inheritors of the Singer sewing-machine firm, Stephen was sedate and bourgeois, Sterling an extrovert with cosmopolitan leanings.

Yet it is Stephen’s collection, with its share of pioneer modernists like Cézanne, that holds the greater interest, Sterling having a penchant for the softly brushed idylls of Sargent and Renoir. Taken apart, the collections are studies in personal preference; taken together, they cast a wide and clear lens on the artistic developments of four decades.

The Importance of the Private Collector

But when one casts one’s eyes over the gamut of any of the great collectors, one sees the victory of idiosyncrasy over objectivity. Exercising a powerful subjective will appears to be a lot more interesting than trying to please everyone. Private collections—may it be in Paris the Cognacq-Jay or Nissim de Camondo, in Basel the Beyeler, in London the Wallace—bear the imprint of their originator. As Walter Benjamin remarked in his famous essay on the collector, they reveal as much of the collector as what is collected.

Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau (en.parisinfo.com). Musée Cognacq-Jay building. https://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/71087/Musee-Cognacq-Jay-Le-gout-du-XVIIIe

Reidsfrance.com. A bedroom in the Musée Cognacq-Jay. http://www.reidsfrance.com/places/paris/see/musee-cognacq-jay/

As such, they retain the stamp of the fallible individual. Collections are not motivated by the generalizing impulse to which, rightly or wrongly, many public collections are accountable. As imprinted with the individual sensibility, the private collection has many surprises and curious, incidental works that enrich the significant ones.

Each work has been chosen according to imperatives that have nothing to do with public accountability. While such collections remain on display without supplementation or interference, experiencing them is frequently, in my opinion, a less depersonalizing and more rewarding experience.

One has the sense of having uncovered and shared something rather than of being the witness to an aesthetic event that exists in all its grandeur whether you are there to see it or not.

Ironically, it would seem, the private collection, although born from elitism, the least democratic impulse, succeeds in highlighting the humanist function of the objects in its store and the particular (as opposed to general) impulse that gathered them together.

As John Updike remarked in a review of an exhibition devoted to the Clark collections, ‘Collectors invest in the future, assembling a perpetuation of their best, most discriminating selves’.

No national budget or latter-day billionaire can realistically compete with the collections which the American magnates of the turn of the century assembled, especially since museums will do anything to avoid deacquisition.

An alternative for the contemporary collector is to buy from the present and hope that the works will experience a similarly favourable fate in time.

What is an Art Connoisseur?