#339 Joseph Duveen: Robber Baron Art Dealer

**David Senra** (0:00)
Two quick things before we jump into this episode on Joseph Duveen. I just finished listening to this entire episode. It is a wild episode. Imagine building your business based on a handful of clients. Your business only has a handful of clients, but those clients are the wealthiest, some of the wealthiest people in the world. That is the episode that you're about to hear. Before we jump into that, two quick things. If you've been dilly-dallying about investing in a subscription to Founders Notes, you might want to do that now for the first time ever. And for a limited time only, I got a bunch of requests asking if you could do a one-time option. And so I'm currently testing that right now. You can get access by going to foundersnotes.com. That is founders with an S, foundersnotes.com. I haven't even mentioned it publicly and people are already selecting that option. So again, the one time is for a limited time only, foundersnotes.com. I'll talk more about that at the end. The second thing real quick is Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like The Best Podcast and I are looking for partners. If you are building B2B products and you'd be interested in partnering with Patrick and I, you can go to founderspodcast.com four slash partnerships, that is partnerships with an S. There you can tell us about what you're working on and then get in touch. Again, that is founderspodcast.com four slash partnerships.
So that's it. Let's jump into this episode. I just finished listening to it. I loved it. I hope you do too.
Joseph Duveen noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money. And his entire astonishing career was the product of that one simple observation.
Beginning in 1886, when he was 17, he was perpetually journeying between Europe, where he stocked up on merchandise, and America, where he sold that merchandise.
There was almost nothing Duveen wouldn't do for his important clients. These immensely rich Americans were shy and suspicious of casual contacts because of their wealth and often didn't know where to go or what to do with themselves when they traveled abroad. Duveen provided them with an entrance to the great country homes of the European nobility. It was just a coincidence, a fabricated coincidence, which you and I will talk about a few times today that Duveen always did. There's nothing, as you'll see as we go through this, there's nothing in this guy's life and career that was a coincidence. So he'd provide rich Americans entrance into these country homes of European nobility. These homes were full of ancestral portraits that were for sale.
Duveen also wrangled hotel accommodations and passage on sold out chips for his clients. He got his clients houses and he provided architects to build them houses. And then he saw to it that the architects planned the interiors of these houses with wall space that demanded plenty of pictures. He even selected brides for some of his clients. These selections of potential brides had to meet the same refined standard that governed his choice of houses for his clients, which meant a bride that was receptive to collecting expensive art.
Duveen was not a patient man. He had choleric imperialism and he felt that the world must stop while he got what he wanted. He had a convulsive drive, a boundless and explosive fervor and a reckless contempt for works of art handled by rival dealers.
That's a funny way to say that he was extremely, extremely competitive.
One time in New York, a millionaire collector who was so undisciplined that he was thinking of buying a 16th century Italian painting from another art dealer asked Duveen to come to his mansion on Fifth Avenue to take a look at it. The prospective buyer watched Duveen's face closely and he saw his nostrils quiver.
I sniff fresh paint said Duveen. Duveen's remarks about other people's pictures sometimes resulted in lawsuits that lasted for years, cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars and brought him into courts in New York and London and Paris.
In his business, Duveen had to bear that the temperaments of the men that he dealt with were the direct opposite of his own.
The great American millionaires of the Duveen era were slow speaking and slow thinking and cautious and secretive and deliberate. They were the emperors of oil and steel, of department stores and railroads and newspapers, of stocks and bonds, of utilities and banking. And these men had trained themselves to talk slowly and pause before each word. Duveen dealt constantly with cryptic men like JP. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon.
That was an excerpt from this long form, two part New Yorker profile that I'm gonna talk to you about today. It's called The Days of Duveen, a legendary art dealer and his clients and it was written by SN. Burnham all the way back in 1951