Empty Mansions

banking, mining, the development of the country.”
    W. A. Clark’s family apparently wanted to make a show of defeating the claim of the three sisters so thoroughly as to scare off any others. Who knew what offspring W.A. might have in Iowa or Montana or New York. Witnesses to support Huguette and her half-siblings as the true heirs were found by Pinkerton detectives and brought out to Butte from Missouri and Pennsylvania on the train. They testified that the two men looked nothing alike, with the druggist standing about five feet eleven, weighing about 160 pounds, having brown hair, and usually being clean-shaven. The jury quickly rejected the three sisters’ claim, securing Huguette’s inheritance.
“LOOK ON MY WORKS”

 
    W.A.’ S WILL DIRECTED that his art go to America’s most prominent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just up Fifth Avenue from the Clark mansion. The Clark collection would be a permanent monument to his name—if the Met would accept certain terms. Here, even after death, W.A. overplayed his hand.
    The Met could have most of his art—more than 800 objects, including 225 paintings and drawings—if it agreed to three conditions: The entire collection must be kept together, in a separate gallery solely for its display, forever.
    The first problem, the Met’s leaders said, was that keeping the Clark collection together would prevent the pieces from being integrated into the Met by time period and style. Second, the collection was huge, and unless the Met bought Clark’s home, it had no suitable space for it.
    Left unsaid by the Met, but pointed out by the press in 1925, was the fact that Clark’s collection was also uneven—spectacular in some areas but no better in others than the pieces the Met already had, not to mention a few frauds or “misattributed” pieces, as was common in most private collections. His version of
The Judgment of Midas
was apparently not by Rubens but by another artist in Rubens’s studio. His
Man with a Sheet of Music
, attributed to Rembrandt, had the same uncertainty.
    Even Clark’s
Hope Venus
, it turned out, was a fake, or at least a copy. Lord Duveen had assured Clark that Canova made more than one version of the statue. But Clark’s
Venus
had been offered first to newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had seen the original in Florence and knew better than to buy this copy. After Clark’s death, his
Venus
was judged to have been made by an English artist after Canova’s death.
    People wrote to the Met, some urging that it accept the Clark collection, despite its flaws, even if it meant the Met had to buy the Clark mansion to hold it all. Others urged the Met not to indulge a millionaire’s vanity. After long debate,the Met said no.
    The collection was offered next to W.A.’s backup choice, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a second-tier museum in a city with a culture more political than artistic. Clark was no stranger to the Corcoran, having donated $100,000 to endow prizes for American painters and serving as a trustee from 1914 until his death. He lent the museum eighty-six works in his collection to be shown while his New York house was under construction, taking President Theodore Roosevelt on a private tour there in 1904. Despite T.R.’s environmental regulations and his criticism of the “malefactors of great wealth,” he and W.A. shared a love of art.
    The Corcoran quickly said yes, eager to bring to Washington’s cultural swamps a major collection of European paintings. Although W.A. had insisted on a private space for his collection, he hadn’t left the museum any funds to pay for it. His heirs put up $700,000 for the Corcoran to add a neoclassical Clark Wing to its Beaux Arts building, located just southwest of the White House. Anna made a contribution, as did Huguette and her half-sisters, Mary Joaquina and Katherine. The Corcoran built a space exactly designed to fit W.A.’s golden room, Salon Doré. PresidentCoolidge opened the W. A. Clark Collection in 1928. The heirs relaxed their father’s restrictions, agreeing that not all the collection had to be on view at once and pieces that turned out to be misattributed could be kept off the walls.
    In New York, the Clark house-museum was now without its art.
ONE GOOD CIGAR

 
    T HE DEATH OF HER FATHER meant that Huguette would soon be evicted from her childhood home. This, she may not have anticipated.
    W.A. had promised his grown children that