Quotes from S.N. Behrman

He more than once asked a prospective client, 'Do you realise that the only thing you can spend a hundred thousand dollars on without incurring an obligation to spend a great deal more for its upkeep is a picture? Once you've bought it, it costs you only a few hundred dollars every fifteen years for cleaning.' It was a revolutionary sales argument, and one admirably adapted to American royalty.

An effective supplementary sales argument, which he used repeatedly, was: 'You can always make more money, but if you miss this picture, you'll never get another like it, for it is unique.' It was the sort of home truth Duveen's clients understood.

The fact is,' Mrs Hearst said, in relating the episode, 'you couldn't buy anything from Duveen! Everything was either in reserve for somebody else or he had promised it to his wife or for some reason he wasn't ready to sell it yet.

Though Morgan was a collector as indiscriminate as he was voracious ('a chequebook collector', one of his biographers, John Kennedy Winkler, has called him), he was able to create, by the sheer weight of his name, a valuable provenance of his own.

Duveen was not selling merely low upkeep, social distinction, and watermarks; he was selling immortality.

I didn't want that fellow to get used to buying modern pictures,' he said. 'There are too many of them.' Duveen was never eager to sell anything painted after 1800, because the fertility of the nineteenth-century painters would have sadly upset the Duveen economy of scarcity.

Duveen instantly wrote his ten-thousand-pound purchase off as a total loss, but the pictures he acquired from the diplomat's friends returned him a profit many times as large as his investment.

As a novice in collecting,' he said with a modesty not unlike Bache's, 'I expected to have to pay the highest prices for masterpieces. What I did not expect, what I was to discover, was that I would also have to pay a large premium for the privilege of paying the highest prices!

When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap.

You can get all the pictures you want at fifty thousand dollars apiece – that's easy. But to get pictures at a quarter of a million apiece – that wants doing!

Another recollection of Duveen's was of being taken by his father to see the elder J. P. Morgan in his London house, at Prince's Gate. His Uncle Henry, who had by then become a pet of Morgan's, had told Morgan that his brother was, next to him, the highest authority on Chinese porcelains.

One habit I have not yet succeeded in getting rid of: the inveterate one of feeling that when at home I must sit at my desk for so long each day to write, not letters whether of business or of friendship, but printable stuff, even when there is no idea of publishing connected with it. If I have failed to do it, I feel morally hang-doggy and physically unclean.

In fact, on Duveen's last visit to H. E.'s California mansion, San Marino, just before H. E. died, the host didn't have enough cash on hand to pay for the freight-car load of merchandise in the guest's caravan. Duveen accepted instead some Los Angeles real estate, a commodity of which H. E. was then the largest owner.

This was the largest transaction ever consummated in the world of art. Duveen had easily outdone the Soviets. There were twenty-one items in the Soviet deal, forty-two in Duveen's. Mellon paid the Soviets seven million dollars; he paid Duveen twenty-one million.

Since Duveen was able to assemble a large part of the Mellon Collection – and a large part of so many others besides – in one lifetime, it can be argued that he was the greatest collector in history.

Two years after Duveen died, Kress bought all the pictures that had been hanging fire. Duveen went right on selling.

Early in life, Duveen – who became Lord Duveen of Millbank before he died in 1939, at the age of sixty-nine – noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing career was the product of that simple observation.

Making his clients conscious that whereas he had unique access to great art, his outlets for it were multiple, he watched their doubts about the prices of the art evolving into more acute doubts about whether he would let them buy it.