NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. On this general subject, see Jones, “The Renaissance and American Origins,” 140–151; Saltzman, Old Masters, New World; Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces, 71–98; Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 69–83; Strouse, “The Collector J. Pierpont Morgan”; and Wilson, “Architecture and the Reinterpretation of the Past in American Renaissance,” 69–87.

2. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors, 153.

3. See Santori, The Melancholy of the Masterpieces, 29, 277nn9, 10.

4. Baltimore Sun, May 14, 1902. The suggestion, as reported in both the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times, that Walters and Massarenti continued to negotiate over the sale of the collection throughout April, May, and June of 1902 was erroneous. The contract of sale was executed on April 16, 1902, but due to Walters’s concern that the deal could become unraveled by publicity, he withheld this information until the collection had safely arrived in New York in July 1902.

5. “Massaranti [sic] Collection Here From Italy,” NYT, July 13, 1902. On May 20, 1902, the New York Times reported that there had been several offers to purchase individual objects, especially in the field of Greek and Roman art, from the Massarenti collection but that these efforts had been rejected because of Massarenti’s interest in keeping the entire collection together.

6. Baltimore Sun, July 13, 1902. The Baltimore Sun’s optimistic belief that Raphael’s self-portrait was on its way to Baltimore was based apparently on a description of this painting in Massarenti’s 1897 Catalogue.

7. Henry Walters’s careful reading of the newspaper accounts of his purchase of the Massarenti collection is documented in his letters to William Laffan and Emile Rey dated May 13, 1902, both of which are in the Walters Art Museum’s archives. In his letter to Rey, Walters wrote that he refused to be interviewed by the press about his purchase, but “the papers keep on commenting.” Although Walters objected to the press coverage, he conceded in his letter that “it is always a pleasure to know that other people appreciate things which you own.” In his letter to Laffan, Walters enclosed articles from the Baltimore Sun and New York Times.

8. In 1898, the art dealer Joel Duveen (Joseph’s father), after visiting the Massarenti collection, dismissively noted: “Everything ghadish (imitation) . . . Practically all the great names in this lot are copies or daubs by minor artists.” Duveen, House of Duveen, 187. Likewise, Wilhelm von Bode, after inspecting the Massarenti collection, wrote that it “would be difficult to name a second [collection] that is so void of good things and contains so many mediocre pictures and forgeries of great names.” “Wanted: A School for Art Collectors,” The Nation, 416.

9. NYT, July 13, 1902. Walters’s claim that he could replace 25 percent of the Massarenti collection because he had “better pieces of work of the same kind” was fallacious. When Walters acquired the Massarenti collection, he owned only fifteen Italian Renaissance paintings.

10. For examples of the laudatory articles written in the nineteenth century about William T. Walters’s art collection, see “Mr. William T. Walters,” in Harpers Weekly, Dec. 1, 1894, 1132 (“one of the finest private art collections in the world”), and “The Walters Collection of Art Treasures,” in Magazine of American History, 27, no. 4, April 1892, 241–262 (a collection of “unrivalled magnitude and far-reaching influence”).

11. Hill, “William T. Walters and Henry Walters,” 178–186, 180, 184.

12. NYT, January 30, 1909.

13. Baltimore Sun, January 30, 1909.

14. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John G. Johnson dated December 10, 1910, Archives Philadelphia Art Museum.

15. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated October 26, 1911, Archives Villa I Tatti.

16. Baltimore News, January 12, 1915, “Isabel Smith Clippings,” Archives Walters Art Museum.

17. Bernard Berenson, Venetian Painting in America, 173.

18. For a comparison of the quality and quantity of Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings in American public collections, see Fredericksen and Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Paintings, 555. The authors describe the Walters collection of Italian paintings as “wonderful” and state that “the Italian paintings constitute the second largest group in the United States” (after the collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). See also Brown, Review of Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, 367–369 (“The Italian paintings in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore form one of the most significant collections in America.”).

Chapter 1. BERENSON’S MISSION

1. Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves,” 339.

2. There are several good articles relating to Jarves’s art collections, including Santori, “James Jackson Jarves,” 177–206, and Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves,” 328–352.

3. Jarves, “A Lesson for Merchant Princes,” 361–380.

4. Ibid., 379.

5. Pater, The Renaissance.

6. Barolsky, “Walter Pater and Bernard Berenson,” 47. For Pater’s influence on Berenson, see also Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson, 69–71.

7. Seiler, Walter Pater, 5.

8. With regard to Berenson’s influence on collectors around the turn of the century, see Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, 353–376, 418–432 (hereafter cited as Samuels, Connoisseur); Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson, 136–157; and Brown, Berenson and Italian Painting, 13–29.

9. See Calo, “Bernard Berenson and America,” 8–18, 9, and Barolsky, “Walter Pater and Bernard Berenson,” 7. For the reference to the “Four Gospels,” see Walker, Self-portrait with Donors, 95. (Walker refers to these four essays as “the best introduction to Italian painting ever written.”) The four essays were later collectively published in 1930 and in 1952 (with illustration) as The Italian Painters of the Renaissance.

10. Brown, Berenson and Italian Painting, 16–17.

11. By 1910, the Italian dealers and intermediaries who were bringing paintings to I Tatti had become so numerous that Berenson retained the services of an employee whose job was “to do all the mediating work in buying pictures, seeing the dealers, beating down the prices and arranging to get the pictures safely out of the country.” Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend, 103 (quoting letter from Berenson) (hereafter cited as Samuels, Legend).

12. Brown, Raphael in America, 41.

13. For descriptions of the social life at I Tatti and the art that was available to purchase there, see Samuels, Legend, 54, 123, 137 (there was morning traffic of dealers from all over Italy beating a path to Berenson’s door and offering their purported treasures); see also Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 127, 128, 152–157. For a description of the art and library at I Tatti, see Rubin, “Berenson, Villa I Tatti, and Visualization,” 209–213.

14. The quotation is from one of Berenson’s neighbors and guests, Iris Origo. It is found in Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, 265–266.

15. Behrman, Duveen, 154, 155.

16. For a firsthand description of Berenson’s ritualistic method of disclosing the identity of the artist, see Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 138.

17. Fry, Review of The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 668–669.

18. See Berenson, Venetian Paintings in America.

19. Berenson made substantial contributions to the catalogues of John G. Johnson and Peter and Joseph Widener. See Samuels, Legend, 74, 77, 78. For Berenson’s contribution to the catalogue of John G. Johnson, see Berenson, Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, vol. 1. For Berenson’s contribution to the catalogue of Joseph Widener’s collection, see Paintings in the Collection of Joseph Widener at Lynnewood Hall (privately printed, 1923).

20. Behrman, Duveen, 176; Brown, Berenson and Italian Painting, 24.

21. Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 45. For a good analysis of Gardner’s relationship with Berenson and the tension that arose due to the deceptive manner in which Berenson acquired and inflated the price of paintings, see Saltzman, Old Masters, New World, 67–92.

22. See Samuels, Connoisseur, 431; Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 104.

23. Kenneth Clark has described the art market during the thirty years from 1900 to 1930 as “in an unusually depraved condition.” Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 140.

24. Samuels, Connoisseur, 301–309.

25. Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 154, 155.

26. Saltzman, Old Masters, New World, 82–84.

27. The most thorough description of Bernard and Mary Berenson’s trip to the United States is in Samuels, Connoisseur, 402–432.

28. For Mary Berenson’s account of her and Bernard’s impression of the collections in America, including her impression of a collection that included many Monets and which she characterized as the “most revolting spectacle BB has seen,” see Gilmore, “The Berensons and Villa I Tatti.”

29. Samuels, Connoisseur, 421, 427.

30. Ibid., 422.

31. NYT, March 21, 1904, p. 9.

32. Samuels, Connoisseur, 431.

33. In 1902, Richard Norton, while at the American Academy of Rome, called Berenson “dishonest” and warned friends about him. Walters at that time was a principal supporter of the American Academy and knew Norton. The growing list of Berenson enemies is also reflected in an exchange of correspondence between Isabella Stewart Gardner and Mary Berenson in January 1904. On January 19, 1904, Gardner wrote to Mary Berenson that, at a dinner party she attended, vile and horrible remarks had been made by Berenson’s “enemies” about his character. On January 21, 1904, Mary Berenson responded that “B.B. is very much hated,” and she categorized his enemies into four groups: (1) the owners of pictures whose attributions had been challenged by Berenson, (2) competing collectors, (3) dealers whom Berenson believed were selling pictures having false attributions, and (4) other writers about art who were jealous of Berenson’s success. Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 329–331.

34. See Simpson, Artful Partners, 96–98. According to Simpson, Berenson was reported to have seen photographs of the Massarenti collection and to have participated in a conspiracy to dupe Henry Walters into buying it. Simpson’s dubious account should be treated with considerable skepticism. His references to Henry Walters in his book are full of errors. He misidentified Henry Walters as “John T. Walters” (pp. 97–98, 120); erroneously asserted that, in 1902, Berenson wrote to Walters that he had seen photographs of the Massarenti collection and that Walters was being duped; and stated that, as a result of this letter, Walters closed his gallery and would not let anyone see the Massarenti collection until the “imposters were weeded out” (p. 98). There is no evidence that Berenson ever wrote such a letter to Walters, and the Massarenti collection was not in the Walters Gallery of Art at that time but in a warehouse in New York. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that Berenson saw the Massarenti collection in Rome before Walters acquired it and that Berenson was not favorably impressed by it.

Chapter 2. WALTERS’S CULTIVATION

1. Sutton, “Connoisseur’s Haven,” 2.

2. See “His Mother’s Idea,” Wilmington Messenger, Nov. 27, 1894. For a collection of newspaper clippings about William and Henry Walters, see “Bill Reaves Collection,” New Hanover Public Library, Wilmington, North Carolina. I want to thank the library, and especially Beverly Tetterton, for bringing this information to my attention.

3. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 14. Johnston’s book is the best source for information about William T. Walters, especially at pp. 1–111.

4. Ibid., 34–40.

5. See King, The Judgment of Paris, 202–205.

6. Matthews, “Walters Art Collection of Baltimore,” 4.

7. “The Walters Collection of Art Treasures,” 242.

8. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 68, 79, 108, 254n79.

9. Johnston, “William Thompson Walters,” in The Taste of Maryland: Art Collecting in Maryland, 1800–1934, pp. 50–56, 50. In considering the laudatory assessments of William Walters’s collection, it is salutary to bear in mind that, in the second half of the nineteenth century in America, there were very few private art collections of distinction. Except for the collections of James Jarves and Isabella Stewart Gardner, there were no private collections in the United States that featured Italian Renaissance old-master paintings. See Venturi, “Private Collections of Italian Paintings,” 168–177.

10. Matthews, “Walters Art Collection of Baltimore,” 2.

11. “The Walters Collection of Art Treasures,” 264.

12. “Mr. William T. Walters,” Harper’s Weekly, 1132.

13. Zeri, “The Italian Pictures,” 26.

14. Sutton, “Connoisseur’s Haven,” p.7.

15. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 50–52.

16. Ibid., 47, 63.

17. The Baedeker guide to Italy was originally published in Germany. After it was translated into English in 1876, it served as the standard for English travelers to Italy for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The three-volume guidebook relied heavily on Crowe and Calvavcaselle, New History of Italian Painting, published in 1867. In preparing for his tour of Italy, Walters probably referred to both the Baedeker guide and the English translation of Burckhardt’s The Cicerone.

18. Henry Walters’s Notebook—Trip to Italy (1879), Archives Walters Art Museum.

19. See Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers, 392, 393.

20. For Berenson’s reference to the famous Tribuna, see the notes he wrote in 1914 about the painting Public Square, painting #677 in the 1909 Walters Catalogue of Paintings, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

21. Henry Walters’s Notebook, Archives Walters Art Museum.

22. The Baltimore Sun’s report of this event was quoted in a later article about William and Henry Walters. See May Irene Copinger, “The Walters’ Gift Gains Stature,” Baltimore Sun, Jan. 14, 1934.

23. Matthews, “Walters Art Collection in Baltimore,” 14.

24. Block, Airlie: The Gardens of Wilmington, 27.

25. Ibid., 26.

26. Ibid., 35–37, 48, 54, 66–68.

27. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 113, 264n5.

28. Ibid., 113.

29. Ibid., 116–119.

30. Ibid., 130.

31. See The Walters Collection (1889), Archives Walters Art Museum. The 1899 catalogue listed 173 paintings. The previous catalogue prepared in 1884 listed 149 paintings. See The Art Collection of Mr. Wm T. Walters (1884), Archives Walters Art Museum.

32. Mark S. Watson, “Adventures in Art Collecting,” Baltimore Sun, January 25, 1931.

33. See “Henry Walters,” a speech given by Henry Watson Kent, secretary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on January 27, 1940, Archives Walters Art Museum.

34. Sutton, “Connoisseur’s Haven,” 12.

35. Santori, “Turning Points.”

36. Hill, “The Classical Collection,” 352–354.

37. Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 92.

38. Brown, Raphael in America, 73, 77–79, 106n225; Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 139, 140. In the view of Federico Zeri, the painting “is largely a workshop piece.” Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters, 349.

39. Walters informed Berenson that he acquired the painting from “a nephew of [Hugh Andrew Johnstone] Munro of Novar [Scotland],” who previously had bought it at Christies, London. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson, January 4, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

40. See “A $200,000 Picture for the Walters Art Gallery,” Wilmington Messenger, July 7, 1901. See also “Madonna of the Candelabra,” Baltimore News, Jan. 1, 1910, in Walters Archives—Isabel C. Smith Clippings (“No less than $100,000 is said to have been paid for the Madonna”).

41. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 4, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

Chapter 3. ONE COPY ON TOP OF ANOTHER

1. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, 2:317–318, quotation on 318.

2. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 276–277, quotation on 277.

3. Findlen, “Possessing the Past,” 112, 113.

4. Pepper, “Reni’s Practice of Repeating Compositions,” 27–54. “Reni, especially, in his sacred images, repeated almost each and every one multiple times, making in most cases small variations on his basic theme, and these in turn became sources for repetitions.” (47)

5. O’Malley, The Business of Art, 91, 222. For a thorough discussion of the two existing versions of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, see Marani, Leonardo Da Vinci, 124–155. Marani argues that the painting in the Louvre is the original painted around 1483–86 and the painting in the National Gallery in London is a copy made around 1491–95 at Leonardo’s direction by two of his most able assistants, Marco D’Oggino and Giovan Antonio Boltraffio.

6. Holmes, “Copying Practices and Marketing Strategies,” 38–74, 60.

7. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 338.

8. Tietze-Conrat, “Titian’s Workshop,” 80.

9. Walker, Self-portrait with Donors, 93. See also Schmitter, “Virtuous Riches,” 943, 944 (discussing the culture of emulation in the cittadini class in Venice), and Fantoni, The Art Market in Italy, 21, 22.

10. O’Malley, The Business of Art, 8, 90–96; Spear, “Di Sua Mono,” 79–98, 80.

11. Tietze-Conrat, “Titian’s Workshop,” 76–88.

12. Spear, “Di Sua Mono,” 80.

13. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford University Press, 1991), 338.

14. Prior to 1970, the portrait of Julius II in London’s National Gallery was considered as a copy of a painting by Raphael in the Uffizi Gallery. For a discussion about the change in attributions, see Beck, “The Portrait of Julius II,” 69–95.

15. Loh, Titian Remade; Loh, “New and Improved,” 477–504.

16. For a discussion of Borromeo’s use of copies in the context of the practice during the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, see Spear, “Di Sua Mano,” 79–98, 92.

17. For an excellent analysis of the purposes and accomplishments of the Ambrosiana and its use of copies of paintings, see Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana, 54, 55, 65, 146, 147, 187.

18. Heisinger, “The Paintings of Vincenzo Camuccini,” 301, 314 (app. A).

19. For an interesting discussion about the obscure difference between types of copies, see Kennick, “Art and Inauthenticity,” 3–12.

20. Although no one knows the number or percentage of notable paintings in Italy at the turn of the last century whose attributions were mistaken or unknown, one scholar has estimated that “most Italian Renaissance paintings were wrongly attributed and at least half of them were unlisted.” Waterhouse, Book Review, 476.

21. For a good discussion of Morelli’s scientific method and its influence on the field of connoisseurship, see Wollheim, “Morelli and the Origin,” 176–201.

22. Gibson-Wood, Theory of Connoisseurship, 219–226.

23. Samuels, Connoisseur, 97–105.

24. Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto, x, 101.

25. Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism (1895) and The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (1902). For a good discussion of Morelli’s influence on Berenson, see Gibson-Wood, Theory of Connoisseurship, 238–247.

26. For an excellent discussion of Morelli’s role in the flourishing market for Italian paintings during the Risorgimento, see Fleming, “Art Dealing and the Risorgimento,” 7. With regard to the question of the accuracy of Morelli’s attributions, Berenson in 1956 lamented some mistakes he made by relying to heavily on Morelli. See Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto, xi.

27. Anderson, Review of “La Raccolta Morelli,” 468–470.

28. See Levey, Later Italian Pictures, 17 (tracing the purchase of Italian copies to the early Stuarts in the seventeenth century).

29. Berenson’s critique initially was published as a forty-two-page pamphlet in March 1895. It was republished in 1901. See Berenson, “Venetian Painting, Chiefly before Titian,” in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 1:91–146.

30. For a discussion of Berenson’s “devastating” attack on the attributions given by the English aristocracy to their Venetian paintings and how it helped to launch his career, see Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson, 132–135, and Samuels, Connoisseur, 221–223.

31. Berenson, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 1:92.

32. Berenson, “Rudiments of Connoisseurship,” The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Second Series, pp. vii, 111–148.

33. Jarves, “Italian Experience,” 578–586.

34. Santori, “James Jackson Jarves,” 191, 192.

35. Gilman, “Museums of Fine Art,” 28–44.

36. “Old Masters Themselves Were Adept in Copyist’s Art,” New York Times Magazine, June 20, 1909; see also Bode, “More Spurious Pictures Abroad.”

37. Walker, National Gallery of Art, 104.

38. Strehkle, Italian Paintings.

39. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John G. Johnson dated August 18, 1904, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

40. See Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 427, 428; see also Brown, Berenson and Connoisseuship, 19. For an article about the source of Widener’s misattributed paintings, see Lopez, “Gross False Pretenses.”

41. For an excellent article tracing the history of the Widener collection, see Quodbach, “The Last of the American Versailles,” 42–96, 81.

42. Strouse, Morgan: American Financier, 630, 631.

Chapter 4. THE MASSARENTI COLLECTION

1. For references to Massarenti’s reputation, see Duveen, “The Mazzarenti [sic] Collection,” 185, and Simpson, Artful Partners, 97. For two brief sketches of Massarenti’s life written in the 1930s, see letter written by Augusto Jandolo, dated November 2, 1936, and letter from Bartolomeo Nogara, dated October 20, 1936, Archives Walters Art Museum.

2. Sutton, “Connoisseur’s Haven,” 9. Sutton asserts that the Massarenti collection numbered 1,540 works. However, the written agreement between Henry Walters and Massarenti dated April 16, 1902, and the Massarenti catalogues indicate that there were more than sixteen hundred works of art. More specifically, the contract referred to “paintings numbered 1 to 865” in the 1897 catalogue and to “paintings numbered 1 to 62” in the 1900 supplement. This suggests that there were a total of 927 paintings. However, the 1897 catalogue skips some numbers, reducing the number of paintings by my analysis to 910. The written agreement also refers to 501 terra cottas and bronzes, 149 marbles, and 35 other objects. See Agreement dated April 6, 1902, between Henry Walters and Dr. J. H. Sennet (Massarenti’s agent), Archives Walters Art Museum.

3. Catalogue d’une Collection de Tableux de Diverses Ecoles (Rome, 1881), Archives Walters Art Museum.

4. For a sympathetic description of Massarenti at the time of the sale of his collection, see Memorandum of Regina Soria, June 2, 1958, “Massarenti files,” Archives Walters Art Museum.

5. Edouard Van Esbroeck, Catalogue du Musée de Pienture, Sculpture et Archeologie, (Rome, 1897), and Supplement (Rome, 1900), Archives Walters Art Museum (hereafter cited as Massarenti Catalogue).

6. There are forty-nine photographs of the Massarenti collection as it appeared in Rome shortly before 1902, when Walters purchased the collection. The photographs are not dated and do not identify the photographer. Archives Walters Art Museum.

7. Zeri, Italian Paintings, xiv.

8. NYT, July 13, 1902, 1.

9. Duveen, “The Mazzarenti [sic] Collection,” 186, 187.

10. Massarenti Catalogue, p. 25, no. 133.

11. Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo.

12. Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

13. Hill, “The Portraits of Michelangelo,” 345–346. Hill notes that Michelangelo did not paint any self-portrait, and he argues that he did not do so because he did not consider portraiture to be a good vehicle for his ideas. Although there is no evidence that Michelangelo painted a typical self-portrait of the kind attributed to him by Massarenti, Michelangelo probably alluded to himself in his fresco of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and in the sculpted figure of Nicodemus in the Pietà in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. See Hartt, “Michelangelo in Heaven,” 191–209. See also Paoletti, “Michelangelo’s Masks,” 423–440. Paoletti argues that Michelangelo also revealed his image in the figure of Night in the Tomb of Giuliano dei Medici, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence.

14. The process by which Volterra sculpted the bust of Michelangelo is disputed. According to Symonds, Volterra made it from a wax model of Michelangelo’s face at the time of Michelangelo’s death. Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, 267–270. According to Hugo Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings, 262, 263, Volterra used an earlier lead point and black chalk portrait that he drew around 1550 as the model for his bronze bust of Michelangelo.

15. Massarenti Catalogue, nos. 174, 175, Archives Walters Art Museum.

16. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings, (1909), 137, nos. 655 and 658. Henry Walters published three catalogues of his paintings between 1909 and 1922. Each was entitled Catalogue of Paintings. The first catalogue was published in 1909 around the time of the grand opening of his new museum and featured the paintings, including the alleged masterpieces attributed to Michelangelo and Raphael, that Walters had acquired from Massarenti. The second catalogue was published in 1915, and most of the attributions in the 1909 catalogue were changed based on the advice of Berenson. The third catalogue was published in 1922 and reflects the relatively modest additional paintings that were acquired between 1915 and 1922. The catalogues did not contain publication dates, and this omission generated a lot of confusion. After Walters’s death, the 1915 catalogue was erroneously inscribed with a handwritten date of 1922, and the 1922 catalogue was erroneously inscribed with a handwritten date of 1929.

17. There were three different accounts of these paintings written in the seventeenth century by Passari, Malvasia, and Bellori. For a discussion of these accounts, see Pepper, “Reni’s Roman Account Book—II,” 372–386.

18. The question of whether Domenichino received this commission from Reni or obtained it through his mentor Annibale Carracci remains a subject of debate among the leading scholars and historians of Baroque art. See Pepper et al., “State of Research,” 305–309.

19. For a discussion of the contrasting styles of Domenichino and Reni, see Spear, Domenichino, 54–57, and Pepper, Guido Reni, 24.

20. This comparison was made by Pepper in “Guido Reni’s Roman Account Book—II,” 376.

21. Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers, Central Italy and Rome, p. 250; Burckhardt, The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy, translated by Mrs. A. H. Clough, p. 240.

22. Pepper, “Guido Reni’s Roman Account Book,” 379.

23. Massarenti Catalogue Supplement (1900), no. 19.

24. For a good analysis of Caravaggio’s working methods, see Puglisi, Caravaggio, 369–393. For a rebuttal of the notion that Caravaggio created many replicas of his paintings, see Christiansen, “Caravaggio’s Second Versions,” 502–504.

25. For an extensive study of the influence of Caravaggio on other painters in Rome in the early seventeenth century, see Brown, The Genius of Rome.

26. Moir, Caravaggio and His Copyists, 19, 22, 23, 35 (illustrating more than one hundred notable copies of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings).

27. For a good analysis of this painting and its influence on Italian art, see Graeve, “The Stone of Unction.” See also Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 186–188.

28. Bellori’s quotation is found in Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, 186.

29. Berenson, Caravaggio, 28–30, 108.

30. See Hiesinger, “The Paintings of Vincenzo Camuccini,” 301.

31. For references and images of more than one hundred renditions of Caravaggio’s Entombment, see Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies.

32. Matthew 22:21, The Oxford Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 1992), 1293.

33. Askew, “Parable Paintings of Domenico Fetti,” 21–45.

34. For a discussion of Fetti’s painting and how it differs from Titian’s, see Shilpa Prasad, “Domenico Fetti, 1588/89–1623,” in Masterpieces of Italian Painting: The Walters Art Museum, 116–119.

35. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1915) [the 1915 catalogue was erroneously hand dated 1922], 126, no. 596.

36. Hansen and Spicer, Masterpieces of Italian Painting, 96–99. See also Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici, 19–27 (essay by Elizabeth Cropper), 120–121, 149–151. For an account of Alessandro’s assassination and its effects on Maria de Salviati, Cosimo I, and Guilia, see Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 13–21.

37. Zeri, Italian Paintings, 147–150. Zeri notes that the following artists or schools of art have been credited with painting The Ideal City: Pintoricchio, Fra Carnevale, Luciana Laurana, Bernardino Baldi, Piero della Francesca, School of Piera della Francesca, Francesca Giorgio Martini, Giuliano Sangallo, Baccio d’Agnolo, Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Rosselli.

38. For descriptions and pictures of the paintings by Lorenzetti, Filippo Lippi, Rosso Fiorentino, Giulio Romano, Crivelli, Strozzi, and Tiepolo, see Hansen and Spicer, Masterpieces of Italian Painting, 22, 23, 46–49, 66–91, 94, 95, 148, 149, 152–155.

39. “Wonders in Art,” Baltimore Sun, May 13, 1902 (quoting from the New York Times).

Chapter 5. A REMARKABLE ACQUISITION

1. Auchincloss, Theodore Roosevelt, 58.

2. For a discussion of Morgan’s business activities in the steel and transportation industries at the turn of the twentieth century, see Strouse, Morgan, 396–408, 426, 458–476.

3. For a detailed discussion of the financial arrangements involved in the merger of the Savannah, Florida & Western Railway Co. with the ACLRR Co., see Hoffman, A History of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, 130–144.

4. NYT, Dec. 1, 1931.

5. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 162, 278n123.

6. Memorandum to H. Walters transcribed by John J. Walsh, Archives Walters Art Museum.

7. Samuels, Legend, 13.

8. Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933). See also American National Biography, vol. 13 (Oxford University Press, 1999).

9. As to whether Laffan initially trusted Berenson is questionable. Laffan’s wife, who also met Berenson in 1904, applied to Berenson a brand of anti-Semitism that was virulent at that time. In a letter to Roger Fry, she wrote that Berenson “was the first person of whom she understood what people felt when they talked about the feeling of mistrust inspired by Jews.” Samuels, Connoisseur, 421.

10. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated December 8, 1909, Archives, Villa I Tatti, Florence.

11. Baltimore Sun, July 13, 1902.

12. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson, January 4, 1910, Archives, Villa I Tatti. See also Rubin, “Bernard Berenson, Villa I Tatti,” 215.

13. For a study of the replication of these and other French paintings in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Kahng, The Repeating Image.

14. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1909), p. 110, no. 468.

15. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 178, 179.

16. Wilson, “Architecture and Reinterpretation of the Past,” 69–87.

17. For a discussion of the history and early photographs of the architecture and design of the Peabody Institute, see Hayward and Shivers, The Architecture of Baltimore, 144–146.

18. Massarenti Catalogue, 1897, no. 121. Massarenti attributed the painting to Pintoricchio. Over the years, it has been attributed to many different artists by different scholars. The Walters Art Museum presently attributes the painting to Fra Carnavale. See Hansen and Spicer, Masterpieces of Italian Painting, 62–67.

19. The identity of the four virtues in this painting is debatable. Federico Zeri has identified them as Justice, Temperance, Abundance, and Fortitude. Zeri, Italian Paintings, 143. Joaneath Spicer has identified them as Justice, Moderation, Liberality, and Fortitude. Hansen and Spicer, Masterpieces of Italian Painting,67.

20. For an article that links Henry Walters’s acquisition of the Massarenti collection to other milestones in the history of art collecting, see Mayo, “Collecting Ancient Art,” 133–141.

21. For an article about “How Purchase was Made,” written by the Baltimore Sun’s Rome correspondent, see “$1,000,000 for Art,” Baltimore Sun (1902), Archives Walters Art Museum.

22. Massarenti Catalogue, p. 25, no. 132.

23. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 313.

24. For an excellent discussion of the history of this painting and images of the engravings that were copied after it, see Brown and Nimmen, Raphael and the Beautiful Banker.

25. Ibid., 165–169, figs. 28, 36, 39.

26. Walker, National Gallery of Art, 180, 181.

27. Duveen, The Rise of the House of Duveen, 188, 189. Part of the confusion might have stemmed from the fact that another Self-portrait by Raphael was in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

28. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1909), no. 483; Baltimore Sun, January 30, 1909.

29. Letter from Henry Walters to William Laffan dated May 13, 1902, Archives Walters Art Museum.

30. For an excellent discussion of Morgan’s acquisition of the Colonna altarpiece and the publicity it generated, see Wolk-Simon, “The Colonna Altarpiece,” 56–59.

31. For Morgan’s purchase in 1901 of Raphael’s Colonna Madonna for $400,000, and his purchase in the Spring of 1902 of a tapestry that once belonged to Cardinal Mazarin for $340,000, a bas-relief by Donatello for $74,000, and a library containing magnificent illuminated manuscripts belonging to William Bennett for $700,000, see Strouse, Morgan, 414, 489, 490.

32. Letters from Henry Walters to William Laffan dated May 13 and May 29, 1902, Archives Walters Art Museum.

33. For a discussion of the import fee on art in the early twentieth century, see Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces, 34–37.

34. Strouse, “The Collector J. Pierpont Morgan,” 2.

35. The letter from Gardner to Berenson, dated November 7, 1900, is published in Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 233. Whether Mary and Bernard Berenson also participated in the smuggling of Renaissance art out of Italy is addressed in Hoving, “The Berenson Scandals,” 134.

36. Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 231, 327.

37. Letter from Henry Walters to Laffan dated May 29, 1902; letter from Henry Walters to Emil Rey dated May 13, 1902; both Archives Walters Art Museum.

38. “Mr. Walters New Treasures,” NYT, May 20, 1902.

39. Cablegram from William Laffan to Henry Walters dated June 22, 1902, Archives Walters Art Museum.

40. See U.S. Import record dated July 14, 1902, and signed by Henry Walters, Archives Walters Art Museum.

41. See Memorandum dated April 2, 1904, Archives Walters Art Museum.

42. “The Duty on Art,” NYT, September 10, 1902 (letter from A.W. Lyman).

Chapter 6. THE SACRIFICE OF CANDOR FOR ACCLAIM

1. Letters from Henry Walters to William Laffan dated May 13 and May 29, 1902, Archives Walters Art Museum.

2. Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces, 18, 19.

3. “Wanted: A School for Art Collectors,” 417.

4. “Mr. Walters New Treasures,” Baltimore Sun, 1902, Archives Walters Art Museum.

5. “Mr. Walters to Hide It,” Baltimore Sun, 1902, Archives Walters Art Museum.

6. Walters’s inventory of the paintings he purchased from Massarenti is in the Archives Walters Art Museum.

7. See Memorandum dated April 2, 1904, Walters Art Museum Archives (“the collection is now in New York where twelve men are engaged upon it in the work of restoration.”)

8. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1909), nos. 629, 713, 587, 588, and 599.

9. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 166.

10. For a description of the new museum and how it was constructed, see ibid., 163–169. See also letter from William Adams Delano to Dorothy Miner dated October 9, 1939, Archives Walters Art Museum.

11. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 163–169.

12. For a description and initial impression of the Walters courtyard and its objects of art as seen by a reporter for the New York Times, see “Walters Art Temple Shown,” New York Times, Jan. 30, 1909.

13. The handwritten plans for hanging the paintings acquired from Massarenti are in the Archives Walters Art Museum.

14. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1909), nos. 422 (Botticelli), 472 (del Sarto), 478 (Perugino), 483 (Raphael Self-portrait), 484 (Raphael Madonna), 486 (Correggio), 487 (Michelangelo), and 492 (Reni).

15. “Walters Gallery to Open Feb. 3,” Baltimore News, Jan. 22, 1909, “Warren Wilmer Brown Journal,” p. 64, Archives Walters Art Museum.

16. New York Times, January 30, 1909; Baltimore Sun, January 30, 1909.

17. “Art Lovers Throng Walters Gallery,” Baltimore News, Feb. 3, 1909, “Warren Wilmer Brown Journal,” p. 72, Archives Walters Art Museum.

18. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 177.

19. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1909).

20. Pitt was an art collector and a longtime friend of the Walters family. In 1900, with the financial backing of Henry Walters, Pitt opened an art gallery in Baltimore. As indicated on the letterhead of his business, Pitt’s gallery sold Paintings and Engravings, Chinese and European Porcelain, English and Colonial Silver and Antique Jewelry. In 1902, Pitt also served as the General Manager of the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore. He is credited with supervising the transfer of Walters’s art collection from New York to Baltimore and advising Walters on how to arrange and display the paintings at the time of the grand opening of the Gallery in 1909. Walters retained Pitt as the museums’ curator, and he held this position for twenty years until the time of his death in 1922. Information about Pitt can be found in the “Pitt” folder in the Archives of the Walters Art Museum.

21. Letter from Walters to Berenson dated January 4, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

22. See four-page pamphlet describing the Walters Gallery in 1909, box 10, Archives Walters Art Museum.

23. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1909), nos. 466, 542, 559, and 651.

24. Puglisi, Caravaggio, 392, 393. At the turn of the last century, “defamation of Caravaggio all but supplanted acclaim.”

25. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated December 31, 1914, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

26. The painting purportedly by Caravaggio of The Magdalen remains in the collection of the Walters Art Museum (WAM 37.651) but has been reattributed to Spadarino, a follower of Caravaggio. See Zeri, Italian Paintings, 444.

27. In 1909, American museums were beginning to develop principles and standards for educating visitors. See Gilman, “Museums of Fine Art,” 4–17 (encouraging museums to provide visitors with handbooks describing works of art in order to encourage appreciation and investigation of art).

28. “Many Pictures of the Massarenti Collection Not Hung in the New Gallery,” Baltimore News, Feb. 28, 1903, “Warren Wilmer Brown Journal,” p. 85, Archives Walters Art Museum.

29. In an article about the best collections of art in America published in the New York Times, Walters’s collection was not mentioned. William Bode, “Old Art in the United States,” New York Times, December 31, 1911.

Chapter 7. THE WALTERS-BERENSON CONTRACT

1. Samuels, Legend, 73–77.

2. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John Graver Johnson dated October 5, 1909, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

3. The paintings owned by Walters that were referred to by Berenson in Northern Italian Painters of the Renaissance were Cesare da Cesto, Madonna, p. 194; Defendente Ferrari, Holy Family, p. 204; Vicenzo Foppa, Sts. Agnes and Catherine, p. 219; G. B. Moroni, Portrait of a Lady, p. 269; Sodoma, Holy Family, p. 287; and Marco Zoppo, St. Francis, p. 303.

4. Letter from William Laffan to Bernard Berenson dated July 10, 1909, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

5. Letter from William Laffan to Bernard Berenson dated July 28, 1909, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

6. Letter from William Laffan to Bernard Berenson dated August 28, 1909, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence. Laffan acknowledged Berenson’s offer to work on the project without compensation and stated that Walters preferred to defer any question pertaining to compensation.

7. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated September 16, 1909, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

8. For a good article on William Walters’s publications, see Minor, “Publishing Ventures,” 271–311.

9. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John Graver Johnson dated March 9, 1911, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

10. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated September 16, 1909, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

11. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John Graver Johnson dated May 5, 1912, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

12. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John Graver Johnson dated November 18, 1912, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

13. While Berenson was purchasing paintings for Walters, he was also advising John G. Johnson about his collection and writing a catalogue about the Italian paintings in it. See Bernard Berenson, “Italian Paintings,” in Catalogue of a Collection of Painting and Some Art Objects. The Italian painters in Johnson’s collection whom Berenson recommended to Walters were Bartolomeo Di Giovanni, Antoniazzo Romano, Marco Basaiti, Bartolomeo Bramantino, Cima da Conegliano, Bernardo Daddi, Francesco Grannaci, Bartolomeo Montgna, Giovanni Battista Moroni, Ercole di Roberti, Niccolo Rondinelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Sodoma, Tintoretto, Barnaba da Modena, Giovanni Di Paolo, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Lo Spagno, and Giovanni Battista Vivarini.

14. Letter from Henry Walters to Ferris Pitt dated October 30, 1909, Archives Walters Art Museum

15. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated November 13, 1909, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

16. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 4, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

17. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Joseph Duveen dated April 5, 1913, “Duveen Brothers Records,” Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, box 537, folder 5.

18. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated March 18, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

19. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated March 18, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

20. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated May 23, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

21. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated May 24, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence. With regard to the amount of Berenson’s commission, the letter was somewhat contradictory. Although it called for “ten percent of its [the picture’s] cost,” elsewhere in his letter Walters stated that he would send Berenson “115 % of purchase price.”

22. Letter from Walters to Berenson dated May 24, 1910.

23. After years of effort, in 1908, the Italian government enacted a “protection art law,” which required the seller of ancient objects of art, including old-master paintings from the Renaissance, to apply to the government for approval prior to selling and exporting such object to a foreign purchaser. See “Italy Stoutly Holds Her Art Treasures,” New York Times, March 29, 1908.

24. Letter from Walters to Berenson dated May 24, 1910.

25. The conversion is based on the worth in 2006 of $7,500 in 1910 using the Consumer Price Index. See Measuring Worth (www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/result.php).

26. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated March 9, 1914, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

27. Berenson’s wife was delighted with the prospects of obtaining commissions from Walters on an annual basis. See Samuels, Legend, 106.

28. Walters’s propensity to shy away from publicity is well captured in William Johnston’s excellent biography of him and his father, who are fittingly referred to by Johnston as the “Reticent Collectors.”

29. Baltimore News American, November 6, 1910, in “Isabel C. Smith Clippings,” Archives Walters Art Museum.

Chapter 8. THE PAINTINGS BERENSON SOLD TO WALTERS

1. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated August 25, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence. Walters informed Berenson that he had sent him 880 pounds for “ye triptych.” For a biographical sketch of Rondinelli and a detailed analysis of this painting, see Zeri, Italian Paintings (WAM 37.517 A.B.C.), 255, 256.

2. Bernard Berenson, Venetian Painting in America, 218, 219.

3. Neither Walters nor Berenson maintained any log or inventory that identifies all of the paintings Walters purchased from Berenson. As a result, the Walters Art Museum and outside scholars have been unable before now to identify with certainty these paintings. The Walters Art Museum’s Accession Log prepared in the 1940s indicates that Berenon might have been the source of thirty-eight Italian paintings but expresses uncertainty about this by literally placing question marks after several of the references to Berenson. Likewise, Federico Zeri, in his two-volume study of the Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, lists thirty-seven paintings that Walters might have acquired from Berenson but expresses uncertainty about seven of these by stating that they “possibly” or “perhaps” were acquired from Berenson. The problem is compounded by the fact that the references to Berenson in the Walters Accession Log and in Zeri’s study are inconsistent.

The best source of information about the identity of the paintings Walters acquired from Berenson is the correspondence between them that expressly refers to the paintings Berenson offered and Walters accepted. This extant body of correspondence consists of sixty letters and telegrams located in the archives of the Villa I Tatti and the Walters Art Museum. This complete body of correspondence was not accessible and was probably unknown to the recorder of the Walters Gallery accessions in the 1940s or to Zeri when he published his study of the paintings in 1976. This body of correspondence was also unavailable to Meryle Secrest in 1979, when she wrote Being Bernard Berenson; consequently, the list of paintings that she identifies as being sold by Berenson to Walters is not complete (see Being Bernard Berenson, xxi, 403, 404). In preparing my list of thirty-six paintings that Walters acquired from Berenson, I relied heavily on the correspondence between Walters and Berenson. Their letters identify thirty-three of the thirty-six paintings on my list. Based on my review of other archival records, including photographs, I concluded that three additional paintings not referred to in the existing correspondence between Walters and Berenson should be on my list. They are Bronzino’s Portrait of a Baby Boy (WAM 37.451), Giovanni Martini da Udine’s Dead Christ Supported by Angels (WAM 37.1056), and Giovanni Batista Utile’s Virgin and Infant Saint John Adoring the Child (WAM 37.506). I want to express my appreciation to Prof. Patricia Rubin for providing me with her research notes on this topic.

4. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated October 26, 1911, Archives Walters Art Museum.

5. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated May 30, 1911, Archives Walters Art Museum.

6. See Rubin, “Bernard Berenson, Villa I Tatti,” 213–216. Professor Rubin reports that Berenson sold to Walters eight paintings that were from Berenson’s own collection. According to the research conducted by her, they were by Marco Basaiti (WAM 37.444), Bernardo Daddi (WAM 37.553), Alvise Vivarini (WAM 37.537), Cosimo Rosselli (WAM 37.518), Pseudo Boccaccino (Agostino Da Lodi) (WAM 37.545), Giovanni da Udine (WAM 37.1056), Giovanni Battista Utili (WAM 37.506), and Bronzino (WAM 37.451). Zeri also noted that Walters acquired paintings from Berenson that were in Berenson’s own collection, including paintings by Cosimo Rosselli (WAM 37.518), Giovanni di Paolo (WAM 37.554), Giovanni Battista Utili (WAM 37.506), Giovanni da Udine (37.1056), and Bronzino (WAM 37. 451). See Zeri, Italian Paintings, xiii, 93, 122, 179, 275, 328.

7. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Henry Walters dated October 8, 1911, Archives Walters Art Museum.

8. Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, pl. 185, 186.

9. Rubin, “Bernard Berenson, Villa I Tatti,” 214, 215.

10. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John Graver Johnson dated February 9, 1911, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

11. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Henry Walters dated October 8, 1911, Archives Walters Art Museum.

12. In Principal Central Italian Painters, Berenson referred to Benvenuto Di Giovanni, Fiorenzo Di Lorenzo, Bernardino Fungai, Pintoricchio, and Lo Spangno. In Principal Venetian Painters, Berenson referred to Antonello Da Messina, Marco Basiati, Vittore Carpaccio, Giovanni Battista Cima, Bartolomeo Montagna, Polidoro Lanzani, Rondinelli, Schiavone, and Tintoretto. In Principal Florentine Painters, Berenson referred to Alunno Di Domemico, Bronzino, Raffaello die Carli, Francesco Grannaci, and Cosimo Rosselli. In Principal Northern Italian Painters, Berenson referred to Bramantino, Butinone, Ercole de’Roberti, Giovanni Moroni, and Sodoma.

13. Letters from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated February 7, 1911; June 9, 1912; and February 14, 1914; Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

14. Letters from Bernard Berenson to Henry Walters dated November 4, 1911; December 16, 1911; January 16, 1911; and November 9, 1912; Archives Walters Art Museum.

15. Walters did not maintain any organized or coherent records of the prices he paid for art. Indeed, he was known to have cut up invoices and other records that recorded the price of his art. In Merchants of Art, Germain Seligman writes that on one occasion he observed Walters using a large scissors to cut up invoices while informing him that “I don’t want anybody in later years to talk of my collection in terms of money spent.” Seligman, 134. The information set forth in the text about the prices Walters paid for art is based on either the prices set forth in the correspondence between Walters and Berenson or Walters’s informal, handwritten lists of prices that have been discovered in the Walters archives. In 1913, the exchange rate was 1 pound = $4.86.

16. Hansen and Spicer, Masterpieces of Italian Painting. For an analysis of Bicci Di Lorenzo’s The Annunciation (WAM 37.448), see 42–45; for an analysis of Bartolomeo di Giovanni’s Myth of Io (WAM 37.421), see 52, 52; and for an analysis of Pintoricchio’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (WAM 37.1089), see 68–71.

17. In 1962, the Walters Art Gallery engaged Federico Zeri to carefully evaluate the museum’s entire collection of Italian paintings. Zeri’s study, entitled Italian Painting in the Walters Art Gallery, was published in 1976. The study includes a history of the attributions given to each of the paintings by various scholars, including Berenson, and sets forth Zeri’s own attribution. Zeri disagreed with most of the attributions made by Berenson of the paintings that Berenson sold to Walters. See also Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson, 402–404 (finding that two paintings sold by Berenson to Walters were “fakes” and fourteen carried attributions that have not withstood the test of time).

18. See conservation file on Carpaccio’s painting of Saint George and the Dragon, Conservation Department, Walters Art Museum.

19. Zeri, Italian Paintings (WAM 37.482), 166, 167.

20. For the painting attributed by Berenson to Cima da Conegliano (WAM 37.470), see Zeri, Italian Paintings, 258, 259.

21. Registrar’s De-accession File, 37.528, Walters Art Museum.

22. Zeri, Italian Paintings (WAM 37.526), 344, 345.

23. Ibid. (WAM 37.515), 400.

24. Ibid. (WAM 37.500), 216.

25. Ibid. (WAM 37.552), 8.

26. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1915) , nos. 449, 450, pp. 106, 107.

27. The two paintings by Bonsignori were discussed and praised by Berenson in Venetian Paintings in America, 170–173. In 1976, Zeri judged these paintings to be either forgeries or inferior copies with mistaken attributions. Zeri, Italian Paintings, 579. In 1989, the Walters Art Museum sought unsuccessfully to sell these paintings and ultimately contributed them to charity. See Registrar’s De-accession files, Walters Art Museum.

28. Zeri, Italian Paintings (WAM 37.545), 419, 420.

29. Zeri, Italian Paintings, 255, 256.

30. Berenson’s significant influence on the collection of Italian old-master paintings by those who contributed their collections to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is summarized in Boskovits and Brown, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century, xiv, xv.

31. For a good article about the acrimonious relationship between Berenson and Wilhelm von Bode, see Brown, “Bode and Berenson,” 101–106. There is no historical evidence that Bode or any other contemporary competitor of Berenson challenged the quality of the attributions that Berenson provided to Walters.

32. Although no objective study has attempted to score Berenson’s attributions, it has been estimated that Berenson was right about his attributions 75 to 85 percent of the time. Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson, 252.

33. Brown, Berenson and Connoisseurship, 30–41: “Berenson grasped that Connoisseurship can never be an exact science but must depend on the intuitive and analytical capabilities of an individual.”

34. Ibid., 15, 16.

35. Berenson explained to Nicky Mariano that he had no misgivings about changing his attributions because “I have learned to see more clearly and that alone is important.” Mariano, Forty Years with Berenson, 139.

36. Samuels, Legend, 223, 369, 370. Samuels quotes Berenson as stating that, “if I had leisure, I would reconsider every attribution I ever made.”

37. Berenson, Venetian Paintings in America, 142.

38. For the changes in Berenson’s evolving views about Bellini’s contribution to the painting, see Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1932), 69 (“in part by the artist”) and Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1952), 22 (“in great part autograph”).

39. In Hansen and Spicer, Masterpieces of Italian Painting, published in 2005 by the Walters Art Museum, the painting is attributed to Giovanni Bellini and his workshop. X-rays have revealed that the saints in the painting were added by Bellini’s assistants (see p. 80).

40. For the changing attributions to this painting, see painting no. 548 in the versions of the Walters Gallery Catalogue of Paintings published in 1909 (Giulio Romano), in 1915 (Bedolo), and in 1922 (Bedolo). See also Zeri’s attribution in Italian Paintings, published in 1976 (Raffaello Dal Colle, pp. 355–357); the Walters Art Gallery Guide to the Collections, published in 1997 (Giulio Romano and workshop, pp. 52, 53); and Masterpieces of Italian Painting, published in 2005 (Giulio Romano, pp. 88–90).

41. This analysis is based on a comparison of the attributions given to paintings at the time they were acquired by Walters with the attributions given to these paintings in 1976 by Zeri in Italian Paintings. A change in attributions does not mean that the change downgraded the importance or quality of the painting. For example, Walters acquired from Paolo Paolini in Rome a Full-Length Portrait of a Lady with a Little Girl that was attributed to Zelotti. Walters Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings (1915), no. 541. Years later, the attribution of this painting was upgraded to Paolo Veronese.

Chapter 9. BERENSON’S FAUSTIAN BARGAIN WITH DUVEEN

1. Secrest, Duveen , 287.

2. Simpson, Artful Partners, 135.

3. Samuels, Legend, 136.

4. Meryle Secrest, biographer of both Berenson and Duveen, has written that the relationship between Berenson and Duveen became increasingly strained as the supply of paintings was dwindling. “Duveen still needed to sell and Berenson, more than ever was thinking about his legacy. Duveen was always pressing for the best possible attribution; Berenson, hating him for putting him once again into emotional torment, would capitulate. It could never be an easy relationship.” Secrest, Duveen, 249.

5. For example, Paul Mellon regarded Joseph Duveen “with distaste and thought of him as an impossibly bumptious and opinionated ass who took advantage of any opportunity that presented itself to burnish his own image and to further his own interests.” Mellon, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 298.

6. For the reference to “king of the jungle,” see Brown, Berenson and Connoisseurship, 26. For the reference to “evil,” see letter from Bernard Berenson to John Graver Johnson dated March 9, 1911, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

7. Samuels, Legend, 143.

8. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Henry Walters dated January 16, 1912, Archives Walters Art Museum.

9. Kiel, The Bernard Berenson Treasury, 139.

10. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated August 25, 1910, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

11. Letters from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated May 30, 1911, and October 26, 1911, both Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

12. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Henry Walters dated May 13, 1912, Archives Walters Art Museum.

13. Samuels, Legend, 142. Walters thanked Berenson after the trip, stating, “I enjoyed my trip to Florence and the kind hospitality.” Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated June 9, 1912, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

14. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated July 24, 1912, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

15. Several photographs of paintings recommended by Berenson with Berenson’s name on their backs are in the Archives Walters Art Museum.

16. Letters from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated August 25, 1910; October 7, 1910; February 7, 1911; October 26, 1911; and December 22, 1913; all Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

17. See “Mr. Anderson’s Account Book,” 72, Archives Walters Art Museum.

18. For a discussion of the rising prices in Renaissance art after 1910 and the willingness of wealthy Americans to pay such prices, see Harris, Cultural Excursions, 258–267. For a discussion of the prices that Duveen clients were paying for art around this time, see Secrest, Duveen, 105–110.

19. The terms of the agreement dated September 18, 1912, between D.B. (Duveen) and Doris (Berenson) are set forth in Simpson, Artful Partners, appendix 1, 265–271. For a good description and analysis of the terms of this contract, see Samuels, Legend, 146–148.

20. Simpson, Artful Partners, 266.

21. Ibid., 265; Samuels, Legend, 146.

22. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Joseph Duveen dated June 2, 1912, “Duveen Brother Records,” Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, box 537, folder 5.

23. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Henry Walters dated October 12, 1912, Archives Walters Art Museum.

24. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John Graver Johnson dated September 25, 1912, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

25. Samuels, Legend, 147.

26. Although I have found no hard evidence that Berenson intentionally misattributed any of the works of art that he sold to Walters, there is a division of opinion as to whether he did so with other collectors. According to David Alan Brown, Berenson resisted Duveen’s requests that he misrepresent certain attributions to aid Duveen in making sales. Brown, Berenson and Connoisseurship, 26–29. Brown contends that “there is no evidence to suggest that he [Berenson] ever made an attribution he did not genuinely believe at the time it was made” (26). On the other hand, Colin Simpson, who wrote about Berenson’s relationship with Duveen in Artful Partners, has opined that certain misattributions made by Berenson to help sell paintings were “deliberate.” See Hoving, “The Berenson Scandals,” 132–137.

27. See Samuels, Connoisseur, 311: “Of all the critics and art experts concerned with the traffic in Old Masters . . . no one was to equal Berenson’s success and no one was to be so greatly envied and slandered.” With regard to the unethical nature of the art market that Berenson entered, see Samuels, Legend, 3: Berenson “found his involvement in the art trade a source of anguished dissatisfaction. As an idealistic aesthete he had quickly learned that the ethics of the world of art dealing were not those of Epicurus: to buy low and sell high was an imperative that could not be avoided, and conflicts of interest, dissimulation, and lavish puffery were an inevitable accompaniment.” On p. 356: “Distasteful as the world of business and art dealing was to him, he found himself hopeless mired in it . . . He who as a younger man had inveighed against insincerity and commercialism found himself growing adept in the age-old art of the huckster.” The attacks on Berenson’s integrity began as early as 1902, when Richard Norton, a classicist at the American School in Rome and a competitor of Berenson, wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner that “Berenson is dishonest. He is as you must know a dealer . . . Ask whom you will . . . collectors or people in Italy & I believe you will find no dissident voice to the statement that he is not honest,—that he will try to prejudice possible buyers against other dealers in order to keep commissions in his own hands.” Norton’s letter is quoted in Rubin, “Portrait of a Lady,” 41. Berenson certainly was aware that his reputation was under attack. Mary Berenson noted in her diary that Berenson’s enemies were trying to persuade Gardner that he “had cheated her” (Rubin, 42). After Henry Walters ceased doing any business with Berenson, Mary Berenson similarly attributed this defection to the belief that “they [the rival Seligman & Company] must have concocted all sorts of stories against all of us.” Samuels, Legend, 354.

28. Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 139–141.

29. There is no dispute that Berenson became wealthy as a result of his dealing with Duveen. By one account, Berenson’s share of the profits exceeded $100,000 each year and by 1937 amounted to $8,370,000, an enormous amount of money at that time. See Updike, “How to Milk a Millionaire.”

30. Berenson, Sketch for a Self-portrait, 29. Using a biblical analogy to describe the choice he made to sell his expertise to Duveen, Berenson wrote that, at the age of thirty, he was pushed out of Eden and wandered through the wilderness for thirty years, during which the commercial misuse of his creative talent caused his dignity to be reduced to the ranks of fortune tellers and charlatans (see pp. 38, 43, 44, 47, 153, 154).

31. See Walters’s letters to Berenson dated June 15, 1911 (commenting about Morgan’s recent acquisition of enamels, which had been given to the Metropolitan, and his opinion about its quality and price), and September 25, 1917 (commenting about the high prices for works of art paid by Americans who had profited from the war), Archives, Villa I Tatti, Florence.

32. Samuels, Legend, 148 (gossip about Duveen having obtained an exclusive call upon Berenson’s services).

33. Samuels, Legend, 106.

34. See “A Railroad Monarch,” Wilmington Morning Star, September 12, 1905, “Bill Reaves Collection,” New Haven County Public Library

35. Hoffman, Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, 178, 180: “These were marvelously prosperous times.”

36. “To Erect Handsome Cottage,” Wilmington Evening Dispatch, Feb. 17, 1911, “Bill Reaves Collection,” New Haven County Public Library.

37. See Henry Walters Newspaper Clippings Collection, 1910, Archives Walters Art Museum.

38. See Hill, “The Classical Collection,” 357, 358, and Simpson, “A Gallant Era,” 103–111. For a chronological record of Walters’s purchases of art, see Walters Art Museum Accession Records. For the Egyptian antiquities purchased from Kelekian in 1912, see WAM 32.1–32.9. For the French paintings purchased in 1913 and 1914 from Arnold Seligman, see WAM 27.355–27.359. In 1915, Walters purchased more than one hundred Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan paintings. See WAM 35.1–35.121.

39. Pottier’s “Record of Exports,” dated December 10, 1914, lists on a month-by-month basis the art that was shipped to Walters during that year. During 1914, fourteen shipments contained hundreds of diverse objects of art, including sculpture, furniture, ivories, manuscripts, and paintings. A similar inventory exists for the year 1913. Archives Walters Art Museum.

40. Hill, “William T. Walters and Henry Walters,” 183.

41. Taylor, “What Baltimore Will Do,” 261–266, 261.

42. Walters maintained no coherent log that recorded the dates on which he acquired his paintings. Most of the dates when he bought paintings from Berenson can be ascertained from Walters’s correspondence with Berenson. There is no similar source of information about dates on which Walters acquired paintings from other dealers. As a result, any determination of these dates depends on secondary sources of information. In estimating the years when Walters acquired paintings from sources other than Berenson, I have considered the following: (1) Mary Berenson’s list of “New Acquisitions” recorded around 1914–15, at the time of her visit to the Walters Art Gallery, which is in the Archives of the Villa I Tatti; (2) the dates when paintings arrived at the Walters Art Gallery as indicated in Journal of James Anderson, the building superintendent, which is in the Archives of the Walters Art Museum; (3) the dates of acquisition estimated in the accession records of the Walters Art Museum; and (4) the dates referred to by Federico Zeri in his Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery.

43. The precise date on which Walters acquired this painting is unknown. It was not listed in Walters’s 1909 catalogue. The painting probably was not in Walters’s collection in July 1912, when Walters turned down Berenson’s offer to sell him a Bellini. The first reference to the painting appears in Mary Berenson’s notes compiled in April 1914, at which time she and Bernard Berenson were inspecting the Walters collection. Mary Berenson listed the painting under the heading, “New Acquisitions.” Accordingly, the painting was probably acquired by Walters between July 1912 and April 1914. Mary Berenson’s notes recorded in Walters’s 1909 catalogue are in the Archives of the Villa I Tatti. The painting was listed in Walters’s 1915 catalogue at no. 446.

Chapter 10. THE JUDGMENT OF BERENSON

1. For a discussion of Berenson’s business trip to the United States in the winter of 1913/14, see Samuels, Legend, 168–176.

2. Letter from Bernard Berenson to John Garner Johnson dated August 18, 1904, Archives Philadelphia Museum of Art.

3. According to William Johnston, the biographer of William and Henry Walters, no guest had stayed overnight in Walters’s Baltimore house since 1894. The only person who resided in this home was Walters’s servant.

4. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated March 10, 1914, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

5. For the dates when the painting was shipped to Berenson and returned to Walters, see Mr. Anderson’s Account Book, Archives Walters Art Museum.

6. Letter from Belle da Costa Greene to B. Howell Griswold Jr. dated January 31, 1934, Archives Morgan Library.

7. Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 514. Based on her tour of the Walters Gallery in 1904 and her subsequent review of the photographs of the Italian paintings that Henry Walters sent to Bernard Berenson, Mary Berenson had a poor impression of the Walters collection. On March 3, 1914, the day before she and Bernard Berenson returned to the Walters Gallery to inspect firsthand the Italian paintings, Mary Berenson wrote a letter to Geoffrey Scott, in which she referred to the overall collection as “the horrible, huge, mixed Walters’ colln” and stated that, “It is bad business to bring order into even the small Italian section.” For an account of the Berensons’ visit to the Walters Gallery in 1914 and their impression of it, see Rubin, “Bernard Berenson, Villa I Tatti,” 213, 214.

8. See Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life, 322–323.

9. Duplicate copies of the memorandum, entitled “Pictures to be removed from Mr. Walters Collection,” are in the Archives of the Villa I Tatti and the Archives of the Walters Art Museum.

10. Walters’s 1909 catalogue containing Bernard and Mary Berenson’s notes and impressions recorded during their visit to the Walters Gallery in 1914 is in the Archives of the Villa I Tatti. I want to express my appreciation to Dr. Fiorella Superbi, the former curator of the Berenson Fototeca at the Villa I Tatti, for discovering this catalogue and bringing it to my attention.

11. Samuels, Legend, 174.

12. Letter from Walters to Berenson dated March 10, 1914, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

13. Baltimore News, “Walters Gallery: Art Critic Denies it was Intentionally Slighted” (“To the Editor of the News”) [1915—exact date unknown], clippings file, Archives Walters Art Museum.

14. Bryant, What Pictures to See in America.

15. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated July 13, 1914, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

16. Samuels, Legend, 180.

17. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 23, 1915, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

18. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated February 25, 1915, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

19. Anderson’s Account Book, Archives Walters Art Museum.

20. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated February 25, 1915, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

21. The reference to these corrections is found in the letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated February 27, 1915, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence. Walters corrected three attributions in the 1915 catalogue. As is evident from an examination of the 1915 catalogue, the corrections were made by pasting white slips of paper over items no. 644 (Raffaello Dei Carli); no. 687 (Nicola Di Maestro Antonion Da Ancona); and no. 752½ (Giovanni Di Paolo). A copy of the 1915 catalogue containing these pasted slips is in the Archives of the Walters Art Museum and in the Library of the Villa I Tatti.

22. The newspaper stories about the changes made by Walters in 1915 are collected in the Isabel C. Smith Clippings, Archives Walters Art Museum.

23. Baltimore News, “New Art Objects,” Jan. 1, 1915, Isabel C. Smith Clippings, Archives Walters Art Museum.

24. Baltimore News, January 12, 1915, Isabel C. Smith Clippings, Archives Walters Art Museum.

25. Walters’s identification of the Italian paintings that, in his view, were “the most important pictures in the Gallery,” is set forth in Baltimore News, “Walters Gallery: Art Critic Denies It Was Intentionally Slighted.”

26. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 8, 1919, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

27. Photographs of Salvator Rosa’s Soldier in Armor with a Banner and Pietro Liberi’s Allegorical Figure in the Cape Fear Club are in Leslie N. Boney Jr., The Cape Fear Club (Cape Fear Club, 1984). For an article about Henry Walters, his life in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the Cape Fear Club, see Steelman, “Art-loving Millionaire,” Wilmington Star-News, December 28, 2003, 7D–F.

Chapter 11. THE UNFINISHED CATALOGUE

1. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Henry Duveen dated September 23, 1914, “Duveen Brothers Records,” Box 537, folder 5.

2. Duveen Brother Records.

3. Ibid.

4. Samuels, Legend, 195, 196.

5. Ibid., 201.

6. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated September 19, 1914, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

7. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated December 31, 1914, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

8. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated February 25, 1915, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

9. Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces, 156, 157.

10. Letter from Bernard Berenson to Henry Duveen dated December 6, 1914, “Duveen Brother Records,” Box 537, folder 5.

11. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 23, 1915, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

12. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated August 18, 1915, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

13. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated February 29, 1916, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

14. Berenson, Venetian Paintings in America.

15. See Mr. Anderson’s Journal, December 27, 1916, Archives Walters Art Museum.

16. Berenson, Venetian Painting in America, 3, 13, 46, 47, 53, 139, 185, 164, 226, 245, 246.

17. The undated list of the six different schools and 156 paintings prepared by Mary Berenson is in a file relating to Berenson’s unfinished catalogue in the Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

18. Berenson’s handwritten notes for the Walters catalogue are in the Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

19. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated September 25, 1917, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

20. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated September 25, 1917, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

21. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 8, 1916, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

22. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 8, 1919, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

23. Letter from Henry Walters to Bernard Berenson dated January 8, 1919, Archives Villa I Tatti, Florence.

24. Letter from Henry Walters to James Anderson dated January 26, 1927, Archives Walters Art Museum

25. Hans Froelicker, “Italian Art at Walters Gallery,” Baltimore Sun, January 20, 1919.

26. Samuels, Legend, 354.

27. Hadley, Letters, 650.

28. Samuels, Legend, 354.

Chapter 12. A MUSEUM IN REPOSE

1. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 221.

2. The seven paintings were identified somewhat awkwardly at the end of the list of Italian paintings and numbered as 756 (A) through (G). The paintings, in the order in which they were acquired, were: 1915-no.756 (B) Mythological Subject [Myth of Hippo]; 1916-no. 756 (E) Virgin and Child by Bartolomeo Montagna; 1916-no. 756 (D) Virgin and Child and Saints; 1917-no. 756 (C) Murder of the Innocents by Bartolo di Fredi; 1920-no. 756 (F) Virgin and Child by Pietro Lorenzetti; 1920-no. 756 (A) The Crucifixion by Simone Martine; and 1920-no. 756 (G) Madonna and Child by Bernardino Martini. While adding these seven pictures, the 1922 catalogue retained all of the Italian pictures and attributions previously decided upon by Berenson. In this sense, the 1922 catalogue was not a brand new catalogue but a modestly updated version of the catalogue published in 1915 under Berenson’s direction.

3. Letter from Henry Walters to Laurana Vail Coleman dated January 13, 1923, Archives Walters Art Museum.

4. Letter from Henry Walters to James C. Anderson dated May 8, 1931, Archives Walters Art Gallery.

5. See for example Henry Walters letter to James C. Anderson dated March 10, 1923, Archives Walters Art Museum.

6. Letter from Henry Walters to J. C. Anderson dated March 6, 1915, Archives Walters Art Museum.

7. Letter from Henry Walters to H. G. Kelekian dated September 14, 1918, Archives Walters Art Museum.

8. Letter from Henry Walters to Pembrook Jones Jr. dated January 13, 1930, Archives Walters Art Museum.

9. Seligman, Merchants of Art, 132.

10. Seligman, Merchants of Art, 133.

11. See letter from Walter Gale, Maryland Representative of the American Art Journal, dated May 6, 1931, and the response of the Gallery dated May 9, 1931, Archives Walters Art Museum.

12. “Baltimore as an Art Center.”

13. The absence of any documented visits to the Walters Art Gallery by any trustee or officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1922 to the time of Walters’s death in 1931 probably reflects the lack of interest on the part of that museum in Walters’s collection, especially his collection of Italian Renaissance paintings. It is reasonable to assume that Walters in 1922, in his capacity of vice president of the Metropolitan, informed the other leaders of the Metropolitan of his decision to bequeath his collection of art to the city of Baltimore to avoid any false expectations that the collection, in whole or in part, would be given to the Metropolitan. Although there was no factual basis for believing that Walters’s collection was destined for New York, such speculation continued to the time of his death: “In that Walters was a director and a patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York it had been thought probable that at least part of the works of art assembled in the Walters gallery would go to that institution, but [Walters’] will provides only for a cash bequest to it” (New York Times, December 8, 1931).

14. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, 172, 198. Johnston notes that Walters came to Baltimore alone and that he seldom visited the collection in the company of his wife, Sadie.

Chapter 13. THE LINE BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION

1. New York Times, June 6, 1923, 23.

2. The paintings that were stored in the Long Museum at the time of Walters’s death in 1931 were listed in the probate records prepared by John E. Marshall & Son, Archives Walters Art Museum.

3. For information about Wharton’s relationship with Berenson, see Lee, Edith Wharton, 403–418; and Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, 265–272. For a discussion about the connections between Walters and Wharton and the likelihood that she modeled the figure of Horace Maclew after Walters in The Mother’s Recompense, which she published in 1925, see Johnston, “Edith Wharton and Henry Walters,” 14–19.

4. The identity of the actual art collector whom Wharton had in mind when writing False Dawn is debatable. Sizer, in an article about Jarves published in 1933, wrote that Wharton informed a third source that she modeled Raycie after Tomas J. Bryan, whose collection of around thirty purported Italian masters was brought to the United States in 1853. Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves: A Forgotten New Englander,” 328–352, 341n28. Lee, in her very recent biography of Edith Wharton, asserts that Wharton based her portrait of Raycie on the life of Jarves (601). There is good reason to question whether Raycie was based on Jarves. Jarves was not from New York but from Boston, and Berenson spoke highly of Jarves and wanted to own some of the Italian paintings Jarves had collected. Samuels, Connoisseur, 426, 429.

5. See letters from James Anderson to Henry Walters dated January 25, 1929 and February 5, 1929, Archives Walters Art Museum.

6. Letter from Henry Walters to James Anderson dated January 22, 1931, Archives Walters Art Museum.

7. Hans Froelicher, “Italian Art at Walters Gallery,” Baltimore Sun, January 20, 1929.

8. Baltimore Sun, December 31, 1929.

9. Johnston, 224, 294n8; Walters Art Gallery, Second Annual Report, 2.

10. Mark S. Watson, “Adventures in Art Collecting,” The Baltimore Sun, January 25, 1931.

Chapter 14. FADED MEMORIES

1. “Henry Walters, Financier, Dead,” New York Times, December 1, 1931, 27.

2. Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol. 27, January 1932, 2.

3. The two articles about Henry Walters’s death appeared in the Baltimore Sun on December 1, 1931. Insofar as Walters’s collection of Italian paintings was concerned, the two articles were inconsistent. The lengthier article praised the collection but misrepresented what remained in it. The obituary entitled “Henry Walters” stated that his art collection was particularly famous for its Persian and Oriental collections, and made no reference to Walters’s collection of Italian paintings.

4. This report can be found in the files relating to Belle da Costa Greene in the Archives of the Morgan Library, 3.

5. The Baltimore Sun, February 3, 1934.

6. Letter from Dorothy Minor to Belle da Costa Greene dated March 30, 1934, Archives Morgan Library.

7. For the quotation by Pearlman, see The Baltimore Sun, February 2, 1934.

8. See “Walters Art Called Finest of Kind in U.S.,” The Baltimore Sun, February 2, 1934.

9. Walters Art Gallery, First Annual Report, 2.

10. Walters conveyed to Berenson in their correspondence that he had read his books, and given Walters’s interest in Italian paintings and his own interest in collecting books about Italian paintings, it is safe to assume that Walters at one time had all or practically all of the books that Berenson had written. Some of these books, such as Venetian Paintings in America, focused on Walters’s collection. None of the books by Berenson that Walters once owned were found following Walters’s death. There is some evidence that Walters gave them away. On April 3, 1917—a time which coincided with Walters’s decision to sever his financial ties with Berenson—Walters donated to the Peabody Institute Berenson’s The Drawing of Florentine Painters in the Ufizzi Gallery. See Anderson Log, 122, Archives Walters Art Museum. Walters wrote 56 letters to Berenson (which are in the Archives of the Villa I Tatti). The letters appear to respond to letters that Berenson sent to Walters. On this basis, it is reasonable to estimate that Berenson sent approximately 50 letters to Walters. Walters, however, retained only 8 of these letters which were dated: October 15, 1909, October 8, 1911, November 4, 1911, December 16, 1911, January 16, 1912, May 13, 1912, October 21, 1912, and November 9, 1912.

11. The letters from Marshall and Greene to Berenson and Berenson’s response are in the files pertaining to Belle da Costa Greene in the Archives of the Morgan Library.

12. See letter from Edward S. King to Bernard Berenson dated October 21, 1952, Archives Walters Art Museum.

AFTERWORD

1. Zeri’s early observations about the Walters collection of Italian paintings were reported in the Baltimore Sun on March 9, 1959 and June 28, 1963.

2. Bernard Berenson died on October 6, 1959. Mary Berenson died on March 23, 1945. Belle da Costa Greene died on May 10, 1950.

3. The earliest reference to the catalogue that Walters, with Berenson’s guidance, published in 1915 appears in Samuels, Legend, 192. Berenson’s notes relating to the 1915 catalogue and his unfinished draft of the grand, illustrated catalogue that he promised to write for Walters was discovered in 2008 in the archives of the Villa I Tatti.

4. Zeri, “The Italian Pictures: Discoveries and Problems,” 24, 25. Zeri’s lack of knowledge about the details of the relationship between Walters and Berenson is reflected in his misunderstanding that the relationship between Berenson and Walters lasted until 1922. This mistake was compounded by Zeri’s estimates that certain paintings were acquired by Walters from Berenson “before 1922.” See Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, xiii.

5. Zeri, Italian Paintings, xiv.