Empty Mansions

explaining that if he acquired more paintings, he would have to remove something, and he was happy with things as they were.
    • • •
    W.A. personally led visitors down the back stairs of the Clark mansion, giving tours of a hidden art gallery close to his heart and his social ambitions.It was a long room alongside the driveway court, a room lined with tapestries and two dozen glass cases. Huguette remembered this room well. A few of the shelves were devoted to antique sculptures from Greece and Egypt. Inside the rest of the cases were, well, dishes.
    But such dishes. These earthenware plates and three-dimensional forms—vases, inkwells, figurines—conveyed the refinement, status, and classical education of their owner. Under the names majolica in Italy and Spain, faïence in France and Germany, and delft in the Netherlands, this decorated pottery from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries passed through the most honored families of Europe.
    Though paintings dominate art auctions today, in the Italian Renaissance great value was also placed on tapestries, furniture, fine lace, and these earthenware pots. They were glazed white with tin oxide, then brightly painted with colors from the earth: copper produced green hues; cobalt, blue; manganese, purple; antimony, yellow; and iron, ocher, orange, and red. The artists used brushes made from the whiskers of mice.
    Clark’s pieces showed a great variety of themes—whimsical, religious, grotesque. Christ as a man of sorrows. The tragic lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Saint George slaying the dragon. Icarus flying too close to the sun. Saint Catherine of Alexandria appearing as a vision to Joan of Arc. Satyrs and nymphs and drunken Bacchus.
    To understand the collection, one needed a grounding in literature, mythology, and music. For a man such as W.A. with a classical, though interrupted, education, leading a tour of his faïence gallery conveyed a clear message. These art pieces had been owned by the Borgias and the Medicis and were now right where they belonged, with the Clarks.
    • • •
    In the rotunda of the sculpture hall on the main floor, where Huguette and Andrée enjoyed their games, was a small marble statue of Eve that W.A. had bought directly from Rodin, who had created it for his masterwork,
The Gates of Hell
. Rodin’s
Eve
is a powerful portrait of shame, her head bent, her eyes open, barely hiding her nakedness.
    Dominating the rotunda, however, was a life-size marble sculpture of another female nude, the delicate
Hope Venus
, commissioned by theEnglish collector Thomas Hope from the eighteenth-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, who was renowned for making marble look like human skin. Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, stands as though surprised in her dressing room, inadequately covering herself with her garment, her hand touching her right breast.
    The
Hope Venus
found its way into the rotunda because the seller knew enough to raise the price. Most of Clark’s contemporaries in the mining world had hardly any education and even less interest in foreign travel and culture. However, those who achieved great wealth felt it incumbent on them to decorate their mansions with expensive art. They bought capriciously, often through order-taking dealers who exploited their naïveté. As a result, many ended up with hodgepodge collections of mediocre, repainted, or counterfeit work. One critic reported that of the eight hundred landscapes executed by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, American millionaires owned more than eleven hundred.
    Clark approached the collection process with considerable advantages. He had, at a minimum, a dilettante’s knowledge of fine art. In addition, he found intrinsic value in art for his own enjoyment. He tended to be conservative in his acquisitions, choosing the established work of old masters and the prevailing Barbizon school. And by willingly paying the highest prices, usually buying paintings with a clear provenance, he was less susceptible to buying fakes. He held twenty-three scenes by Corot (most of them legitimate), twenty-two landscapes and scenes of everyday life by Cazin, and a better collection of Monticellis than held by the Musée du Louvre. W.A. did buy those daring but vulgar new Impressionists, but he was a bit late in betting on them. He bought a Pissarro in 1897 and then at the turn of the century two Degas studies of ballet dancers, but he could have snatched up the entire