"A Real Connoisseur"

With everything else to see in Washington's vast National Gallery, it was easy to miss the 28 small pieces of Egyptian sculpture set up last week in one of the first-floor galleries. None of the well-preserved little Nile maidens with their high busts and long bobs stands more than 30 inches in bare feet. The handsome obsidian head of Pharaoh Amenemhat III (1800 B.C.), ranked by Egyptologists as one of the great masterpieces of Egyptian art, measures less than 5 inches from chin to crown. Other pieces--the intricately carved make-up spoon used by Egyptian belles to mix cosmetics, and the bronze cat (with the remains of the sacred original coffined inside)--also take up little room. Nonetheless, the National was sporting (for an indefinite period) the most important private collection of Egyptian art in the world--on loan from the art collection of Armenian Millionaire Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian.

Tall, pale octogenarian Gulbenkian is best known to Americans for the operations in Near Eastern oil (TIME, Nov. 15) which have made him one of the world's richest men. Impassive and aloof as the statuettes he collects, Gulbenkian neither confirms nor denies the stories that describe him variously as a descendant of Armenian kings, an ex-Turkish rug peddler, a lace merchant. He will say little more about his tastes in art, except that he has been collecting old masters, sculpture, rare books, Greek coins and Persian rugs since early in the century.

About 1930, on an impulse, he persuaded suspicious Soviet bureaucrats to part with six of the best canvases in the magnificent Hermitage collection in Leningrad (including Rubens' Portrait of Hellena Fourment, Rembrandt's Athena and Flemish Dierick Bouts's The Annunciation), thus opening the way for bids from more timid collectors and dealers.

In 1934, on another impulse, he paid 90,000 francs for Chabas' innocuous and notorious September Morn. Now, with many of his best pieces farmed out,* he lives in Lisbon's tiny, luxurious Hotel Aviz, also has a palatial home in Paris and another in London. He has no art scouts, does all his purchasing by himself, or on the advice of a few trusted dealers. National Gallery officials would say nothing of Gulbenkian himself last week except that he was "extremely modest" and "a real connoisseur": one of the conditions of the loan was that there must be no personal publicity from the gallery on the subject of Calouste Gulbenkian.

* London's choosy, space-proud National Gallery has had 18 old masters from the Gulbenkian collection since 1936.

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