The Duveen Brothers, Joseph Joel Duveen (1843-1908) and Henry J. Duveen (1855-1918), were notable art dealers in London, Paris, and New York from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. They brought to America high quality old master paintings and decorative arts from the great private collections in Europe. Under the guidance of Joseph Duveen (1869-1939) and assisted by art experts, most notably Bernard Berenson, the Duveen Brothers monopolized the American art market for five decades. They helped to form the art collections of many extremely wealthy Americans and a number of these collections became the nuclei of American museums such as the Frick Collection, the Huntington Art Collections and the National Gallery of Art.
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The Duveen Brothers business began when Joseph and Henry, left their home in Meppel, Holland for Hull, England. They specialized in selling delftware from their native Holland and later branched out to include Chinese porcelain, tapestries, furniture, and old master paintings. Starting by selling antique furniture in London, Joseph realised in about 1880 that Edward Guinness, one of his better clients, was spending much more on art at nearby Agnew's, and decided to concentrate on that market.[1]
The Duveens opened a London office in 1879; a New York office followed in 1886. In 1897 the firm closed a temporary shop located on the rue de la Paix in Paris. By this time Duveen Brothers was purchasing important paintings, including acquisitions from the Mulgrave Castle sale of 1890 and the Messrs. Murrieta sale of April 1892. Joseph Duveen eventually commissioned a grander store in Paris in the style of the Petit Trianon designed by French architect René Sergent at 20 Place Vendôme, later referred to as the "Little Palace" which was opened in 1907.
Shortly after Henry J. Duveen arrived in New York to head the office there, his brother Joseph Joel sent his son Joseph junior (later Sir Joseph Duveen, Bt., and in 1933 Lord Duveen of Millbank, also known simply as Joe or just Duveen) to assist his uncle Henry. By the 1880s Henry had developed a clientele of American millionaires whose wealth in those years was without precedent among private individuals. Joseph became more active in the management of the New York house, took over its operations in 1907, and served as president of the firm between 1909 and 1939. One of the first changes Joseph Duveen made was to move the New York house in 1912 to a more highly visible location on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, where he erected a reproduction of Jacques-Ange Gabriel's palatial buildings on the Place de la Concorde.[2] The 720 Fifth Avenue building was sadly demolished in 1951. Joseph transformed the Duveen show rooms, avoiding commercial show windows but displaying art with dramatic lighting in lavish surroundings: "it was all stage-managed for the very rich," recalled the dealer in antique furniture John Partridge.[3] He made grand gestures to persuade prospective clients, as, for example, when he had an elaborate plaster model of Senator Clark's Fifth Avenue mansion constructed (at the cost of $20,000) to entice the Senator to hire Duveen Brothers to furnish it.
While in New York Joseph made a number of bold purchases in Europe on behalf of Duveen Brothers. In 1906 he acquired three large collections: the Rodolfe Kann collection, the Maurice Kann collection (both in Paris), and the Hainauer collection (in Berlin). In 1927 he bought the Robert H. Benson collection of 114 Italian paintings in England and three years later he purchased the Dreyfus collection of Italian paintings and sculpture in Paris. Joseph sold selections from the Dreyfus collection to Andrew Mellon and Samuel H. Kress; these items formed the core of the National Gallery collections in Washington, D.C. As late as 1939, the year of his death, Joseph was still selling paintings and sculpture from these purchases.
As president of Duveen Brothers, Joseph developed with a number of clients extremely close ties that went beyond influencing their art-buying habits. He arranged travel plans for his important clients, designed their table settings, and stored their preferred cigars in the Duveen Brothers' vaults. Joseph Duveen was actively involved in numerous art organizations and served as a trustee for the National Gallery, London; the Wallace Collection; and the Imperial Gallery of Art, London. He was a member of the Council of the British School at Rome and of the National Art Collections Fund. Joseph founded the British Artists Exhibitions Organization for the encouragement of lesser-known British artists. He provided for additions to and extensions of London museums, such as the Tate Gallery (a new building of several galleries for modern foreign art, works by John Singer Sargent, and modern foreign sculpture), the National Gallery (a new gallery), the National Portrait Gallery (a new building of several galleries), University of London, and the British Museum (a new wing to house the Elgin marbles and Nereid statues). In 1930 he wrote Thirty Years of British Art.
The Duveen Brothers' business began to decline after Joseph's death in 1939, at which time Armand Lowengard (Joseph Duveen's nephew) and Edward Fowles became joint owners of the firm. When Lowengard died in 1943, Edward Fowles assumed the presidency of Duveen Brothers. The Nazi occupation of France forced Duveen Brothers to evacuate Paris. The London office at 4 Grafton Street closed shortly thereafter. After the war Duveen Brothers had a number of notable clients, such as Henry Ford II and Robert Lehman, but the business never regained its former vibrancy. In 1964 Edward Fowles sold Duveen Brothers to Norton Simon, including the East 79th Street mansion and all remaining stock (excluding the business records).
Edward Fowles served as a consultant to the Norton Simon Foundation and, in 1968, donated his papers and the Duveen Brothers business records to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were housed until 1996. In 1969 the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute purchased the Duveen library of books, periodicals, exhibition catalogues, and sales catalogues, along with a portion of the Duveen Brothers business records that was interfiled with the library and remains at the Clark. In 1996 the Metropolitan Museum of Art donated the Duveen archive to the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute.[4]
Henry Duveen was an important philatelist who in 1921 was entered on the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists as one of the "Fathers of Philately".