The Men Who Sold Europe to America
The most powerful art-dealing dynasty of the Gilded Age — and the family from which one brother broke away to furnish this house.
From a China Shop in Hull
The dynasty began with Sir Joseph Joel Duveen (1843–1908), born in the Netherlands and arrived in the English port of Hull, where he opened a modest shop dealing in china. With his brother Henry, he founded the firm of Duveen Brothers, and in 1879 erected fine-art galleries beside the Pantheon on London’s Oxford Street. They became the largest buyers of old tapestry in the trade — and then reached further, into porcelain, furniture, and the decorative arts of a fading European aristocracy.
It was the age of the Gilded Age fortune, and the Duveens understood, before almost anyone, what the new American titans truly wanted: not merely wealth, but the patina of old-world legitimacy that only centuries-old beauty could confer. In 1902, Sir Joseph was knighted for a gift of £20,000 to build the Turner Gallery at London’s Tate.
1909 – 1939
Under the founder’s son — Joseph Duveen, later 1st Baron Duveen (1869–1939) — the firm rose to legend. As president from 1909, he moved Duveen Brothers into the risky, dazzling trade of Old Master paintings, guided by the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, and sold them to the greatest collectors America ever produced: Frick, Mellon, Morgan, Huntington, Kress.
His genius was as much salesmanship as scholarship. Lord Duveen built his empire on a single, ruthless observation about his moment in history — one that would reshape where the masterpieces of Europe came to rest.
Europe had a great deal of art. America had a great deal of money.The insight on which the Duveen empire was built
A Family Divided by Taste
Where Joseph chased paintings, his brother Charles Joel Duveen (1871–1940) loved something else entirely: the carved oak, the plaster ceilings, and the leaded glass of England’s old houses. In 1908 he left the family firm to set up on his own account, trading under a name that would become legend in its own right — “Charles of London.”
It was Charles, not the famous Lord Duveen, who stripped the Rotherwas estate of its Tudor rooms, who acquired the priceless fireplaces and the ancient cathedral glass — and who sold them, across an ocean and half a continent, to a flour magnate in Minneapolis. The treasures of this house came through his hands.
The Record They Left
The firm’s vast archive — stock books, sales ledgers, invoices, and photographs running to nearly 400 linear feet — survives today at the Getty Research Institute, a paper monument to the greatest transfer of art in history. Much of it was moved quietly: decorative pieces and ancient glass were often undervalued on import, the better to slip past American customs as mere “objets d’art.”
From a china shop in Hull to the walls of the Frick and the Mellon collections — and to the oak rooms of a Minneapolis mansion — the Duveens did not simply sell art. They moved a civilization’s treasures across the sea.