by Jon Lackman | 7 January 2009 | Renaissance
Amid all the talk of the UK’s national galleries buying Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, The Art Newspaper “has delved into the untold story of the 1916 Titian negotiations, combining material from archives in London, Glasgow, New York and Los Angeles”:
The two Titians of Diana, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, both 1556-59, were nearly sold at the height of World War One, when the National Gallery in London and American collector Henry Clay Frick competed to buy them. Joseph Duveen, the key intermediary, told Frick that the Titians were the greatest paintings in the world. The price asked for the pair was £420,000, an enormous sum at the time.
Most astonishing is what occurred at the National Gallery—and the extraordinary lengths it was prepared to go to in order to acquire them. Lord Curzon, the trustee who then effectively ran the museum, proposed buying both Diana paintings. Diana and Actaeon was to be kept, but Diana and Callisto would be sold on at a large profit, passing to a secret “syndicate” of the four leading Anglo-American dealers—Agnew, Colnaghi, Duveen and Knoedler …
In 1916 Frick was 66, but he was still a voracious collector … he wrote to Lord Ellesmere’s family … asking if they would sell the two Titians of Diana. “I have space in my gallery which would accommodate them nicely,” he explained.
