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| Paolo Veronese Boy with a Greyhound ca. 1570-80 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
Overall, the Havemeyers concentrated their art-buying in their prime on seven artists – Courbet, Corot, Degas, Manet, Cézanne, Monet, and their friend Mary Cassatt. They owned at least a dozen paintings by each of these – and in some cases several dozen – but also occasionally expanded their scope with works by other nineteenth-century artists and by recognised European Old Masters. Their at-the-time unusual enthusiasm for Spanish painting led to the acquisition of a few genuine masterpieces by El Greco and Goya – but the acquisition also of many outright fakes or false attributions. Several of the more successful ventures outside the main boundaries of the Havemeyer collection are gathered here.
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| El Greco Portrait of Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara ca. 1600 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| El Greco View of Toledo ca. 1599-1600 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Louisine, determined to acquire as many as possible of the works in which her husband had shown an interest, now turned to El Greco's View of Toledo. Mary Cassatt had first mentioned it to the Havemeyers in 1901; six years later Durand-Ruel had finally obtained the picture from its Spanish owner. Harry had cabled the dealer in August 1907, requesting his lowest price, and Durand-Ruel had replied that he could deliver the View of Toledo to New York for $14,000. But for some reason Harry had not made up his mind. In April 1909, however, his widow, upon seeing El Greco's only pure landscape, did not hesitate about buying it. Louisine thought the town of Toledo she had visited looked exactly as it did in El Greco's painting, considering the artist's dramatic interpretation of the scene to be not visionary but a detailed and factual rendering."
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| Jacques-Louis David Portrait of a young woman in white ca. 1789 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Francisco Goya Portrait of Bartolomé Sureda y Miserol ca. 1803-04 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Francisco Goya Portrait of Thérèse Louise de Sureda ca. 1803-04 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Paul Durand-Ruel was responsible for bringing two portraits by Goya to the Havemeyers' attention while they were in Paris that September [1897]. Knowing of their love for portraiture, he was sure that they would respond to the work of Goya, that master of psychological and sociological studies of character. Louisine and Harry were indeed dazzled by Goya's likenesses of Don Bartolomé Sureda and his wife, acquiring the pair for slightly less than $8,500, with Mary Cassatt's enthusiastic approval. This purchase marked the beginning of the Havemeyers' interest in Spanish painting . . . later, Louisine took great pride in their having been pioneers in collecting Spanish art: 'We were, so to speak, to open the market for Grecos and Goyas, at least in the United States.'"
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Joseph-Antoine Moltedo ca. 1810 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Théodore Duret had offered the Ingres portrait to the Havemeyers (through Mary Cassatt) in 1905, but Louisine and Harry had turned it down because they specifically wanted an attractive woman's portrait, and preferred to wait. Yet after her husband died, Louisine, never having been able to secure a female portrait, had acquired Joseph-Antoine Moltedo, about which she had written to Duret in 1916: 'Ingres's portrait still gives me more and more pleasure, like so many other canvases I owe to your energy.'"
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| Eugène Delacroix Christ asleep during the Tempest or Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret ca. 1853 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Honoré Daumier Man reading in garden or Corot sketching at Ville d'Avray ca. 1850 pen and ink over crayon with watercolor Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Honoré Daumier The Connoisseur or The Collector ca. 1860-65 watercolor Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Honoré Daumier The Third-Class Carriage ca. 1862-64 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"The sale of the collection of the late Matthew Borden, held at the Plaza Hotel in New York on February 13 and 14, 1913, contained many Barbizon works and other pictures, among them Honoré Daumier's The Third-Class Carriage. Durand-Ruel had offered the painting to Louisine and Harry in 1892, but they, for whatever reason, had turned it down, and he did not sell it until four years later to Borden. Now Louisine wanted to make up for what she considered a serious omission. In the intervening twenty years she had not found a significant painting by Daumier, whose work she greatly admired. On a cold February day, Louisine invited her sister Adaline Peters to go with her to take a look at Daumier's The Third-Class Carriage, exhibited in the auction house before the sale. Mrs. Peters had also seen this picture at the Durand-Ruels in Paris in the summer of 1892, and had urged the Havemeyers to buy it then. The two sisters were touched by Daumier's poignant rendition of the solitude and resignation of the poor travelers enduring the discomforts of a "modern" railway car. Louisine particularly responded to the artist's vigorous technique of integrating color and drawing, and noticed the pencil lines visible beneath the paint where the glaze was thin. After studying for a long time Daumier's treatment of the hapless victims of public transportation, Louisine was glad that they had taken a streetcar to the auction house and insisted on riding home in one. She commissioned Joseph Durand-Ruel to obtain Daumier's The Third-Class Carriage, which sold at the record price of $40,000. She could have bought the painting in 1892 for $9,000 – a costly mistake."
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| James McNeill Whistler The Greek Slave Girl (Variations in violet and rose) ca. 1870 pastel on brown paper Shelburne Museum, Vermont formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| James McNeill Whistler The Steps 1879-80 pastel on brown paper Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Having seen and admired Whistler's Portrait of Miss Alexander, Louisine decided that she must have an example of the artist's work. Being a young woman of initiative, she did not want to leave London [in 1881] without meeting the master himself, and she and her mother went to Whistler's Tite Street studio. Far from intimidated by the eccentric and unpredictable artist, Louisine promptly told him that she had but thirty pounds to spend and asked what she might buy for that sum; she was clever enough to add that her friend Mary Cassatt had already persuaded her to purchase with her pocket money a Degas, a Monet, and a Pissarro. Whistler selected for her five of his Venice pastels on brown paper, carefully putting a title on the back of each and adorning them with his butterfly signature. Louisine's resourcefulness had bought her the best bargain in London, for six pounds per pastel was a very low price even then (she did not know that the artist – as usual – was hard up). Whistler delivered the framed pastels to Louisine's hotel and stayed for several hours, touching 'upon every subject of interest in London at the time, artistic, theatrical, and literary . . . .' Afterward he sent her a copy of his pamphlet Art & Art Critics on his controversy with Ruskin, inscribed to 'Miss Louisine Elder, with strong faith in her charming championship.'"
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| Auguste Renoir By the Seashore 1883 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"The other work the Havemeyers bought that day [in 1899] was one by Renoir, which Durand-Ruel had sold to Catholina Lambert in 1892. By the Seashore remained the only painting by Renoir in the Havemeyer collection, though Louisine regretted its purchase all her life. In 1927 when Paul Durand-Ruel's young grandson Charles was paying his first visit to the Havemeyer residence, Louisine greeted him with these words: 'I knew your grandfather, your father and your uncles as well as your brother Pierre. You are therefore the third generation and the sixth Durand-Ruel that I have met. So welcome. But never try to sell me a Renoir! I do not like him and I still hold it against your uncle George who forced me to buy one. I am still sorry.'"
– quoted passages from The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America by Frances Weitzenhoffer (New York: Abrams, 1986)