Return of the Natives

In their dark days of austerity. Britons were apt to find few experiences more painful than a successful art auction. At sale after sale, they saw their treasures knocked down to the prosperous bidders, who came mostly from the U.S. "It was.'' says London Dealer Geoffrey Agnew, "a slaughter." But the slaughter is now over: Britons have not only been bidding princely sums to keep their Old Masters at home, they have even been bringing some that have been absent for decades back across the Atlantic.

Only last March, Gainsborough's Mr.

and Mrs. Robert Andrews was bought at Sotheby's for $364,000--the highest auction price paid for an English painting since the 1920s. Geoffrey Agnew has been paying between $30,000 and $56,000 for Turners and Constables, and is happy that he has done so ("Most reasonable," he says, in view of his subsequent profits).

Leggatt Brothers of St. James have bought at least 70 British masters from the U.S., and Dealer John Partridge insists that the English "can stand up to anyone in competition for furniture and art objects.

They are in the market for everything except French impressionists.'' In the twelve months ending December 1959, British imports of art works topped their exports by $12 million.

Up & Down. One American who has had reason to take special note of the trend is Director Daniel Catton Rich of the lively Worcester Art Museum. Several months ago, when he began rounding up American-owned paintings for his current exhibition of Regency Painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, he found that "several of the best paintings had simply gone home." There was a time when Lord Duveen was reported willing to pay the Earl of Durham $1,000,000 for Lawrence's famous Red Boy, but a few years later, no one seemed to want Lawrence at all. Now, along with his great contemporaries, he is in demand once again--both in the U.S. and at home.

To the gay travelers of the 1770s who stopped off at the Black Bear Inn on their way from London to Bath, the future Sir Thomas was already a celebrity at the age of ten. Sooner or later, his father, the innkeeper, would bring forth the boy and ask: "Would you like him to recite from the poets or take your portrait?" In 1779 Sir Joshua Reynolds reportedly called the boy "the most promising genius I have ever met." By the time he was 17, he was on his way to becoming one of the most sought-after portrait painters of all time.

Down & Out. He was perfect for his period--a handsome, somewhat dandyish man who was given to fits of black melancholy, complained of "constitutional languor," suffered from compulsive extravagance. The Duchess of Devonshire was his patron, David Garrick encouraged him. King George III appointed him to the lucrative post of Painter in Ordinary.

Day after day, a procession of noble sitters would parade through his studio, and some were willing to wait as long as 20 years for their portraits to be finished.

Sir Thomas worked feverishly until the day he died, at 60, but he never saved a penny in his life. "I have paid him -L-24,000," complained the King, "and have not got my pictures. All the world is willing to employ him at -L-1,000 a picture, yet he never has a farthing!" The 29 ladies and gentlemen who graced the walls of the Worcester Museum last week gave their own explanation of why Lawrence's reputation could soar and then plummet, but could never be forgotten.

He was stagy, often garish, and outrageously flattering to his subjects; but he was also an ideal mirror for an age whose ideal was elegance and whose idol was Beau Brummell. In a sense, Lawrence was more honest with his time by painting it in all its blatant vanity--not as it was, but as it wanted to be.

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