“Then the museum is an ideal place,” I hear you say. No, it isn’t. The museum is a mausoleum of art. The art objects there seem to me buried forever in costly catacombs with beautiful monuments and tombstones, but buried away from our world, separated from life forever; yet the beautiful things done by past generations should be a part of our own throbbing life.
The great antique dealers are not the high-priests of the beautiful in New York. Suave and well-meaning gentlemen; their words come not from their hearts and their love is tied to the price of their wares and not to their merit. Some of these gentlemen have sold shoes, shirts, furniture and cash registers before they went into the “antique business.” Works of art are mere merchandise to them. Money-changers they are in the temple, but the temple is theirs, too; no one ever can chase them out.
“Names” are their gods. Authenticity their dogma. The art of persuasion their greatest asset. To find big names (names that bring high auction prices) is their constant desire and to sell these names to the highest bidder at fabulous prices is their daily dream.
What do I care who painted a portrait? Perhaps it is a priceless Velasquez or Rubens or Botticelli or by some unknown artist of several hundred years ago? But I like to contemplate the person who sat for the portrait; the beautiful girl in her strange attire; I like to dream about the love, hatred, contempt, affection, about all the hopes and all the despair mutely witnessed by some old-fashioned writing cabinet with secret drawers and dozens of pigeon-holes, where once letters reposed that meant so much to the writers and recipients. I like to think of the soft, well-cared-for hands of some Prince of the church, who wore the beautiful Bishop’s ring hundreds of years old that will adorn perhaps tomorrow the jewel-case of an American millionairess.
There are divans and chairs.... Who used them? In whose home have they served? Where will they go to from here? The mystery and romance woven around all the various works of art and useful objects that have withstood the destructive powers of time and men is captivating. How did all these things get into the fashionable antique stores?
Most of them were purchased from other antique dealers; some were bought in auctions and obscure places and a few were purchased from another kind of antique dealer who are not very infrequent in New York.
Where there is mystery there are surely people who wish to solve the mystery, and very curious people are these “detectives of the antique.” The peripatetic antique dealers are in a true sense connoisseurs. They prowl about all sorts of out-of-the-way places; storage houses, auction rooms, in garrets of houses that will be torn down and in cellars of old family dwellings, unoccupied perhaps for generations. They sense the value of a thing the moment they see it. Some of them are scholarly gentlemen who have a great book knowledge, who know more than professors in our universities and curators of our museums. Others know by intuition. And a few have the instinct of a Sherlock Holmes and the sense of adventure of a pirate.
Some weeks ago I noted the following advertisement in the American Art News. It sounded mysterious as well as promising:
W A R N I N G!
The Original Sketch of the Head
for the
Lansdowne Full Length
All Collectors, Museums, Dealers and other interested parties are advised to take no part in the buying or selling of a certain oil painting:—