A fully illustrated study of the Duveen Brothers Company, the firm behind many of the United States’ most famous museum collections.
Active in London, Paris, and New York, Duveen Brothers was the most prominent art and antique dealer from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The firm’s success came from buying furniture, tapestries, porcelain, and other objets d'art and selling it at high prices to wealthy Americans, including Henry Clay Frick, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Arabella Huntington, and John Pierpont Morgan. Making extensive use of Duveen Brothers records at the Getty Research Institute, as well as letters and invoices in the archives of the firm’s clients, Vignon provides a rich study of this influential firm in the history of collecting. AUTHOR: Charlotte Vignon is curator of Decorative Arts at The Frick Collection, as well as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. Vignon has organised a number of exhibitions at the Frick, including Pierre Gouthiere: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court (2016) which she co-authored. In 2018 she was awarded the Medal of Chevalier of The Order of Arts and Letters. SELLING POINTS: . A detailed, highly illustrated, engaging and well researched account of Joseph Duveen, his company and of the art market in the first half of the twentieth century. . Duveen Brothers success is famously attributed to noticing that Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money ; Duveen’s clients included Henry Clay Frick, William Randolph Hearst, Henry E. Huntington, J.P. Morgan, Samuel H. Kress, Andrew Mellon, and John D. Rockefeller, and the works they bought remain the core collections of many of the United States’ most famous museums. . Makes extensive new use of the James Duveen’s letters and personal memoirs at the Getty, the Met and in Paris. Not just a biopic, this new book looks at the Duveen Brothers company as dealers in objets d'art and decorative arts; a trade that had its origins in Joseph Duveen’s uncle’s bric-a brac business. . Brief bios for each of the key characters who feature in the book. 75 colour images