Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 12, 1929. GOING WEST

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 10, 12 January 1929, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 12, 1929. GOING WEST

Mr. Andrew W. Mellon, who for some years has, as Secretary of the United' States Treasury, been privileged to receive payment of Britain's war debt at the rate of about £100,000 a day, was reported on Monday to have,paid in his private capacity the equivalent of two of these daily quotas for a picture. Though £200,000 is a large sum, there is no reason to suppose that Mr. Mellon cannot afford it. He has certainly not been able to pay the money out of his official, salary, for, without making any allowance for interest or any deduction for living expenses, Miv Mellon would have to remain in oilice more than sixty-six years before he would have drawn enough salary to pay for that picture. By that time, it may be noted in passing, he would actually have stayed there long'enough to receive Britain's final payment of £38,000,000, which falls due in 1985. But in appointing Mr. Mellon to the Treasury President Coolidge did not choose a man.who had claims upon the party and no other means of support. Mr, Mellon is one of the wealthiest men in the United States, who in accumulating his, fortune had administered his own finance and that of his clients in a manner which suggested that he was able to do as well for the finance of the United States, and he has not disappointed. The scale of Mr. Mellon's private operations may be inferred from the note in "Who's Who in America" that he was associated with Mr. Henry C. Frick in development of coai, coke, and iron enterprises, and that incidentally to one of them he

founded town of Docovn, Pn., where established great stool mills. In Mr. Mellon's State of Pennsylvania- no . less, than twenty-eight' persons returned incomes exceeding ,1,000,000 dollars in 1925, and the incomes of three of them exceeded thrice that amount. Mr. Mellon was certainly one of the twenty-eight, and probably one of the three. .There' is, therefore, no need to worry on Mr. Mellon's account because he has paid what is perhaps but a small fraction of an income .which the time absorbed by his official duties may make it harder to spend than it was to make. Whether he can really get what at 5 per cent, would be £10,000 worth of satisfaction a year out of his purchase may be open to argument, but if he thinks he can and, as we have shown, he can afford it, the non-millionaire may keep his sympathy for a more deserving case. Nor- does Sir Joseph Duveen appear to require any sympathy. He paid Lady Desborough £175,000 >for Raphael Cowper's "Madonna" last year. Before a week of the New Year had passed he had sold it for £200,000. ■In less than a year he has made £25,000 on his bargain, which, even after, allowing him reasonable interest on his money, works out at something better than 10 per ; cent. But whatever credit Sir Joseph may have received as a British purchaser who had rescued this great picture from the incessant flow of masterpieces to America must now be withdrawn. He has received a world's record price for a picture, but at the same time he has achieved the less desir. able record of sending to America what is said to have been the last privately-owned Raphael in England, The price may be exceeded some day, and the increase of American wealth and the growing rarity of the opportunities of acquiring any work of the old masters may bring that day very soon. But in the other respect the record established by the departure of the Cowper Raphael for the United States is not likely to be beaten. „ "

Britain is, now receiving from the Americans the same treatment which for ahout a century she had been giving to Continental Europe, hut her superiority in wealth does not appear to have been the principal cause of the advantage which she then enjoyed. It is indeed not even mentioned in the pre-war "Encyclopaedia Britannica" as a cause at all.

- Tho importation of pictures iind other objects of art, says the writer of the article on "Art Sales," Imd assumed yxtensivo proportions by tlie end of the 18th century, but the genuine examples of the old masters probably fell far short of 1 per cent. England was 1 felt to bo the only sufe asylum for valuable articles, but the home which was intended to bo temporary often became permanent. Had it not been for the political convulsions on tho Continent, England, instead of being one of the richest countries in tho world in art treasures, would have been one of the poorest. This fortuitous circumstance had, moreover, another effect, in that it greatly, raised the critical knowledge of pictures.

It is interesting to learn that even in those comfortable'pre-war days prices were being appreciated by American and German buyers, and that the turn-over of one London firm had in some years exceeded £1,000,000. As far back as 1876 Mr. Pierpont Morgan had paid 10,100 guineas for Gainsborough's "Duchess of Devonshire." -Twenty years laler Romney's "The Ladies Spencer" fetched 10,500 guineas, and at the Peel sale in 1900 £24,250 was paid for Vandyck's portraits of a Genoese Senator and his wife. Before com-

petition had become so keen ihc National Gallery had'had the good fortune to purchase the Garvagh "Madonna" for the modest sum of £9000 in 1865. In the later of the "Encyclopaedia Brilannica's" post-war supplements, which carries the story from 1911 to 1926, it is said by Mr. James Greig to be in the main "a sad record of the depletion of national treasures." In 1919 at the Hamilton Palace sale, Romney's "The Beckford Children,," for which the artist had received 100 guineas, fetched £54,600, "the highest price given in the public market for any picture." Great excitement was caused in 1921 by the Duke of Westminster's private sale of "The Blue Boy," by Gainsborough, and "Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse," by Reynolds, to Mr. Henry E. Huntington, the great American collector, for £200,000. £150,000 had been previously refused for "The Blue Boy" alone, which had been sold for 35 guineas in 1796 and for 65 guineas in 1303. At Lord Glenconner's sale in 1923 the ten finest British masterpieces found American purchasers, and in 1925 Lord Leverhulme actually arranged to save Americans | the trouble of being represented in London by providing for the sale of a portion of his collection of pictures in New York. In the same year the Raphael portrait of Guitiano de Medici, which crossed the Atlantic, came from Germany, but Britain now gets the unkindest cut of all in the loss of the last of her purj chasable Raphaels. The purchase by the Rosenbach Company a few days ago of a second edition of Burns's "Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect," with an autograph inscription by the poet —-which may perhaps have been in America already—and the sale to the same company of the MS. of "Alice in Wonderland" at the absurd price of £15,400, about which so much fuss was made last year, were trivial ( in comparison.

If there had been any Shakespeare folios of ;MSS. in the market we may j be sure that they, too, would have gone west.. An appalling proposal made some time, ago by Mr. ], C. Squire suggested that even Shakespeare himself may not be safe. I honestly believe, he said, that in return'for the single body . of .'Shakospoare we.might secure the cancellation of the entire American debt. Though Barnum had made an audacious attempt eighty years ago to purchase Shakespeare's home, nobody has yet made a bid for his bones, but the chance may come, though perhaps not at Mr. Squire's price. Meanwhile the last of our privately-owned Raphaels has not helped us much with the war debt. As we have said, the price'represents but a two days' quota of a^ liability which has still nearly sixty years to run, ' •'