Background
Born in Hull, he inherited his love for art from various members of his family, among them his father, who sold delft, furniture and objects of art.
Born in Hull, he inherited his love for art from various members of his family, among them his father, who sold delft, furniture and objects of art.
From childhood Joseph, the eldest of a family of eight boys and four girls, helped in his parent’s store but he soon decided that dealing in paintings and sculptures would be more lucrative than selling porcelains, furniture, tapestries, and silver.
He began to learn about the field by courting experts, the first of whom was Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and later the American Jewish expert on Italian painting, Bernard Berenson.
Under Bode’s guidance Duveen began investing in art and in 1901 paid over fourteen thousand pounds sterling for a painting, the highest price ever paid until then for a picture sold at a British auction. He followed a policy of buying full collections rather than individual pictures and sculptures, thus enabling him to fix the price of individual items for resale. He acquired the Rodolphe Kann Collection in Paris for five million dollars and another Paris collection for three million dollars.
During his five decades of selling in the United States, he transformed American taste in art. He not only educated the small group of collectors who were his clients, but encouraged the public to visit the museums to which he brought the finest works of the world’s masters of painting.
In the course of time, Duveen established galleries in New York, Paris, and London and divided his time among them. In New York, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he built a five-story, thirty-room reproduction of the Ministry of Marine building in Paris, which served as his gallery in America. His accommodations at other points of his annual itinerary was always transformed into a small-scale art gallery, and employing his infallible taste for decoration, he arranged the paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art he brought with him so that his clients and friends could visit him in the proper setting, and possibly take home some of the items. He kept his current favorite picture beside him on an easel whenever he dined in his suite and took it to his bedroom when he retired.
Among the numerous personalities Duveen introduced to the world of art was Ramsay Macdonald, who, when he became prime minister of England in 1929, appointed Duveen to the board of the National Gallery in London. The appointment was revoked in 1937 by Neville Chamberlain, who claimed that a person who sold art should not be party to the purchase of art on behalf of the public.
During the last years of his life, painfully suffering from cancer, he devoted his energies to persuading the renowned American art collector and later secretary bf the treasury, Andrew Mellon, to endow the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Once settled in the United States, Duveen set himself a twofold mission: to teach millionaire American collectors to appreciate the great works of art and to teach them that they could get those works of art only through him. To this end he preached his dictum, “When you pay high for the priceless, you’re getting it cheap.”
