Arthur Joseph Sulley (1853-1930) was a London-based art dealer best known for selling Dutch Old Master paintings, including the record-setting Rembrandt van Rijn's The Mill.
Sulley was born in 1854 [1] in Nottingham, England to Selina Sulley and Joseph Sulley, a jeweler. He was the second-oldest of five children. He married Louisa A. Gordon in 1880 and settled in Hampstead Village, a London suburb. [2] By the time of his death on 30 October 1930, he lived and worked at 54 Grosvenor St. in the center of London. [3] [4]
Sulley established himself in the art world by working with Thomas McLean on the Haymarket, a street in the City of Westminster, London. He left his partnership there on 30 June 1892. [5] He went on to become a principal for Lawrie & Co., a major London art dealership with a base in Glasgow. [4] He also worked extensively with P. & D. [Colnaghi] & Co. and Thomas Agnew & Sons (both based out of London), M. Knoedler & Co. in New York, and Galerie Sedelmeyer of Paris. In 1895 and 1896, he traveled in the United States. At the time, most of the American purchases of Dutch Old Master paintings went through Lawrie & Co. and Sulley found a role to play in this market. He worked with several American collectors and industrialists, including Alexander Byers, Peter Arrell Brown Widener, and Henry Clay Frick. [1]
On behalf of Knoedler & Co., Sulley first reached out to Frick in the summer of 1897, about an Anthony van Dyck painting of a “Grimaldi child.” [1] [6] The exact painting is unclear. Van Dyck painted only one pair of children's portraits—of Elena Grimaldi's children, Filippo and Maddalena (also known as “Clelia” [7] )—but Knoedler & Co. did not acquire its stake in the two works until 1907 and sold them to Peter Widener in 1908. [8] [9]
On 30 October 1899 Knoedler & Co. contacted Sulley about selling a Frans Hals piece to Frick. And two years later, Sulley helped to sell Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at her Music, which Knoedler & Co. and Lawrie & Co. co-owned, to Frick for $26,000. In 1902, Knoedler & Co. agent Charles Carstairs sold a Meindert Hobbema painting (jointly owned by Lawrie & Co.) to Frick. Carstairs wrote about the sale to Sulley: “[I]t is also a good thing to get Mr. Frick in the habit of buying these expensive things.” .” [1]
In 1906, Knoedler & Co. sold Frans Hals’ Portrait of a Painter which Sulley had supplied (not to be confused with Portrait of a Man [Michiel de Wael], which Knoedler's also acquired from Sulley), to Frick.
Inge Reist notes that the Knoedler stock books fail to mention Sulley's handling of the picture and suggests that Frick may have appreciated the painting because of “the mistaken notion that it was [Hals’] self-portrait.” Other grand sales took place during the same period: in 1900, Sulley arranged the $55,000 sale of a Rembrandt van Rijn self-portrait to Herbert Terrell. [1] The Lawrie & Co. partnership—which comprised William Duff Lawrie, John Mackillop Brown, and Sullley---dissolved on 31 October 1904. [10] Sulley had some of his greatest coups after 1905 when he founded his own art dealership A.J. Sulley & Co.(which was also listed in a directory of booksellers [11] ), with Brown [12] - especially in sales of Vermeer works, which were increasingly popular among Gilded Age collectors. [13] Sulley had retained Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid from the dissolution of Lawrie & Co. and, in 1906 sold the painting to James Simon for $88,000. (The painting did not stay with Simon for long. In 1914, Frick offered to buy Mistress and Maid through Sulley from Simon for $250,000. Simon initially refused, but five years later, he sold the painting to Frick through Abraham Preyer.) [14] [15]
In 1911, Sulley acquired an interest in 33 paintings from the collection of Mrs. Samuel S. Joseph—one of which was Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl. [1] Carstairs arranged the sale of this Vermeer work to Frick for $225,000. [16]
Sulley made history in the same year, 1911, by selling Rembrandt’s The Mill, which the Berlin art luminary and museum director Wilhelm von Bode, called “the greatest picture in the world,” to Peter Widener for £100,000. [17] This painting, which Sulley had taken from Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marquis of Lansdowne for Widener to buy, set a record price for a painting. [18]
Through World War I and 1920s, Sulley continued his work in masterpieces. In 1914, with the help of connoisseur Bernard Berenson, he sold Lorenzo di Credi’s Boy in a Scarlet Cap and Bernardo Daddi’s Madonna and Child with a Goldfinch to Isabella Stewart Gardner, [19] for $25,000 and $7,000 respectively. [1] He kept Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods in his London gallery during World War I air raids and, in 1921, he and Thomas Agnew & Sons sold it under the name The Bacchanal to Joseph Widener. [20]
In 1919, he sold Frans Hals’ Adriaen von Ostade [21] and, around the same time, Hals’ Portrait of a Gentleman in White, both to Andrew Mellon. [1] In November 1921, Sulley and Brown dissolved their partnership. [22] Sulley alone continued to head Sulley & Co., working from his house at 54 Grosvenor St., London. [23]
Sulley tried to buy Rembrandt's Portrait of a Gentleman with Tall Hat and Gloves and Portrait of a Lady with an Ostrich-Feather for Peter Widener from Russian Prince Felix Yusupov, using the same buyer seduction that he had used on the Marquis of Lansdowne to obtain The Mill. The royal family, however, would not part with them. A sale went through only after World War I and the Russian Revolution, when Prince Felix Yusupov's son, Felix Felixovitch (famous for participating in the murder of Grigori Rasputin [24] ), was living in exile in London. In 1921, Sulley arranged for Joseph Widener, who was Peter Widener's son, to buy the works for £100,000. Widener promised the prince, who had used the paintings as collateral for a debt, that he could repurchase them in three years at 8 percent interest if his financial situation had improved. Another collector, Calouste Gulbenkian, later offered Yusupov £200,000 to renege on the deal and sue to repossess the paintings, but their lawsuit failed. Widener kept the works until he donated them to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. [25]
Because of this affair, Sulley gained notoriety in the United States. He testified in relation to the 1925 Yusupov-Gulbenkian suit that the prince's cronies had tried to claim money for the sale before signing a contract or handing over the paintings. The New York Times wrote up Sulley's story with the title "Friends of Prince Grabbed for Cash." The paper also quoted expert witnesses, including Stevenson C. Scott and Colin, saying that $100,000 was a fair price for the two Rembrandt works - particularly during the art market depression of 1921. Former New York governor Nathan L. Miller counseled Widener in the suit, which made it to the New York Supreme Court. [26]
Back in 1913, Sulley had sold Carlo Crivelli’s Pietà to Wilhelm Valentiner for the Metropolitan Museum of New York. [27] And at the very end of his career, in 1930, Sulley sold another famous item to Valentiner: Pieter Brueghel’s Wedding Dance, this time for the Detroit Institute of Arts. [28] [29]
Sulley kept a low profile later in life, sometimes buying works at auction under the name “Hopkins.” [30] Nonetheless, by the end of his career, he had won "widely-shared" respect as a man of "incomparable fairness." [31] Upon his death in 1930, an obituary in Art News lauded his half-century of work in the art world [32]
Henricus Antonius "Han" van Meegeren was a Dutch painter and portraitist, considered one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century. Van Meegeren became a national hero after World War II when it was revealed that he had sold a forged painting to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
The Mauritshuis is an art museum in The Hague, Netherlands. The museum houses the Royal Cabinet of Paintings which consists of 854 objects, mostly Dutch Golden Age paintings. The collection contains works by Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Steen, Paulus Potter, Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Hans Holbein the Younger, and others. Originally, the 17th century building was the residence of count John Maurice of Nassau. It is now the property of the government of the Netherlands and is listed in the top 100 Dutch heritage sites.
Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Southern Netherlands and Italy.
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The Frick Collection is an art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection features Old Master paintings and European fine and decorative arts, including works by Bellini, Fragonard, Goya, Rembrandt, Turner, Velázquez, Vermeer, and many others. The museum was founded by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), and its collection has more than doubled in size since opening to the public in 1935. The Frick also houses the Frick Art Reference Library, a premier art history research center established in 1920 by Helen Clay Frick (1888–1984).
The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, Germany, displays around 750 paintings from the 15th to the 18th centuries. It includes major Italian Renaissance works as well as Dutch and Flemish paintings. Outstanding works by German, French, and Spanish painters of the period are also among the gallery's attractions.
Peter Arrell Browne Widener was an American businessman, art collector, and patriarch of the Widener family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
A tronie is the name given to a type of work common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that depicts an exaggerated facial expression or people in costume. These works were not intended as portraits but as studies of expression, type, physiognomy or an interesting character such as an old man or woman, a young woman, the soldier, the shepherdess, the Oriental, or a person of a particular race, etc.
Girl with a Red Hat is a rather small painting, signed by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. It is seen as one of a number of Vermeer's tronies – depictions of models fancifully dressed that were not intended to be portraits of specific, identifiable subjects. Others believe it is a portrait. Whether Vermeer chose family members as models or found them elsewhere in Delft is irrelevant to the appreciation of his paintings. Its attribution to Vermeer – as it is on a (recycled) wood panel and not on canvas – has been a matter of controversy with scholars on both sides of the argument.
Colnaghi is an art dealership in St James's, central London, England, which is the oldest commercial art gallery in the world, having been established in 1760.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. was the curator of the Northern European Art Collection at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC until his retirement in Spring, 2018.
A Polish Nobleman is a 1637 painting by Rembrandt depicting a man in a costume of Polish szlachta (nobility). The identity of the subject of the painting is unclear, and has given rise to several different interpretations. The view that the figure's dress is clearly Polish is not universally held and it may have been a self-portrait.
Thomas Agnew & Sons is a fine arts dealer in London that began life as part of in a print and publishing partnership with Vittore Zanetti in Manchester in 1817 which ended in 1835, when Agnew took full control of the company. The firm opened its London gallery in 1860, where it soon established itself as one of Mayfair's leading dealerships. Since then Agnew's has held a pre-eminent position in the world of Old Master paintings. It also had a major role in the massive growth of a market for contemporary British art in the late 19th century. In 2013, after nearly two centuries of family ownership, Agnew's closed. The name was subsequently purchased privately and the gallery is now run by Lord Anthony Crichton-Stuart, a former head of Christie's Old Master paintings department, New York.
Walter Arthur Liedtke, Jr. was an American art historian, writer and Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was known as one of the world's leading scholars of Dutch and Flemish paintings. He died in the 2015 Metro-North Valhalla train crash.
Lawrie & Co. was an art dealership and gallery in London, England.
Charles Carstairs was an American art dealer. Throughout his career, Carstairs encouraged American clients to invest in European Old Master paintings. He worked closely with industrial magnate Henry Clay Frick, and was responsible for Frick's acquisition of the 'Ilchester Rembrandt' in 1906. Carstairs also worked with Joseph Widener, an American art collector and founding benefactor of National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The De Wild family was a Dutch family of art professionals, including conservator-restorers, art dealers, painters, and connoisseurs. Prominent internationally in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, they were especially known for their advances in art restoration.
Portrait of Petronella Buys (1610–1670) is a 1635 portrait painting painted by Rembrandt. It shows a young woman with a very large and impressive millstone collar. It is in a private collection.
Xavier F. Salomon is a British art critic and both Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick Collection in New York. Born in Rome to an English mother and Danish father, he has British citizenship and is most notable for his expertise on Paolo Veronese. From April 2020 through July 2021, Salomon hosted an online program "Cocktails with a Curator" with Frick curators Aimee Ng and Giulio Dalvit. The program examined artworks at the Frick and had 66 episodes, which are available on YouTube.