Great Bequest

Thrice has the Metropolitan Museum of Art been notably, spectacularly enriched by the munificent bequests of great and rich collectors. The John Pierpont Morgan and Benjamin Altman collections, both given in 1913, spread paintings, carvings, sculpture, jewelry, porcelains, tapestries, furniture through long galleries for the benefit of the U. S. public. And all last week thousands of people shuffled back and forth through four galleries, two corridors, to see the latest, possibly the greatest of the museum's gifts. At one bound the Metropolitan, already an imposing pile, became one of the world's greatest museums.

When Louisine Waldron Elder of Philadelphia was a small speculative girl in pigtails she carefully hoarded her pennies and bought a picture from elegant, irascible James A. McNeill Whistler. So impressed was Whistler with little Louisine's good judgment that he gratefully sent her copies of several of his etchings. That was the beginning of the collection exhibited last week. Years later Louisine met and married another collector, the late Henry Osborne Havemeyer, potent sugarman, President of American Sugar Refining Co. It was no longer necessary to save pennies. Together they wandered about the world, buying magnificently. It was Mr. Havemeyer, for whom the present collection is named, who bought the Old Masters. Mrs. Havemeyer, ever interested in what was new, eschewed dealers remembering Whistler. She bought directly from the artists whenever possible.

The paintings piled up. The Havemeyer house on 66th Street & Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, large as it was, began to look like a warehouse. When every inch of wall space was covered, Monets, Manets, Degas were piled in the closets. French bronzes and Japanese ivories found their way into Mr. Havemeyer's silk hats, among his collars. Exuberant, enthusiastic Mrs. Havemeyer kept on buying.

In her will, probated last January, she left to the Metropolitan Museum a specific group of 142 paintings and works of art to be known as the H. O. Havemeyer Collection. She directed that the Museum should also be given "all such other pictures, paintings, engravings, statuary and other works of art as my son Horace might appoint to it." No less generous than their mother, her son Horace and her daughters Adaline and Electra (now Mrs. Peter H. B. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Mrs. James Watson Webb) appointed and appointed until the H. O. Havemeyer Collection was bloated to 1.907 specific objects. More modest than other museum donors, Mrs. Havemeyer specified that her collection was not to be kept separate and sacrosanct but was to be split up and subdivided, after the original exhibition, among the proper museum departments.

There was on view last week far too much for any one brain to appreciate at a single view: six Rembrandt portraits and eight drawings; five Goyas; eight Monets; 20 Courbets; nine Corots (all figure paintings) ; eleven Manets; five Cezannes; 22 Chinese paintings; 820 Japanese prints; 247 pieces of Japanese lacquer; 182 European prints and etchings--critics grew dizzy, ran out of adjectives. What was obvious to everyone was that this collection for all its beauty and value did not represent, like the Morgan and Widener collections or the Huntington collection in California, the purchases of an intelligent man obediently following the advice of a corps of experts, but expressed the very personal tastes of Mr. & Mrs. Havemeyer. Given the money and the opportunity, almost anyone would have bought the superb Rembrandts that grace the Havemeyer collection, but at the same time Mrs. Havemeyer was eagerly following the suggestion of her good friend, the late great Mary Cassatt,* and assembling the 36 pictures and 69 bronzes which make up probably the finest collection of Degas in the world.

There is no prize exhibit in the Havemeyer collection. Outstanding are El Greco's portrait of the Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Fernando Nino de Guevara, a crafty-eyed prelate in thick horn-rimmed spectacles, painted over 300 years ago, just before Inquisitor Fernando burned alive half a hundred heretics in the Toledo market place; Manet's portrait of the redhaired, raffish George Moore; the superb example of Rembrandt's engraving: "Christ Healing the Sick."

*Mary Cassatt, sister of President A. J. Cassatt of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was born in Pittsburgh in 1855, went to Paris in 1875, died there in 1926. Friend and disciple of Manet, Renoir, Degas and the Impressionists she became known as "the painter of Mothers and Children," is avidly collected in France.

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