The ideally expensive thing

Susan Moore on how the Americans have become net sellers of works of art

Junius Spencer Morgan caused a sensation in 1876 when he paid the staggering sum of £10,100 — more than the National Gallery of London’s annual purchase grant — for Gainsborough’s celebrated portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Since then a seemingly interminable line of nouveaux-riches American ‘Despoilers’ has relieved the impecunious (and often only too willing) European aristocracy of the art treasures their ancestors had amassed over the centuries. The phenomenon prompted the foundation of the National Art Collections Fund in Britain in 1903 to help save such treasures for the nation, and was subtly dissected by Henry James eight years later in The Outcry. Revealingly, the essence of James’s acquisitive American, Mr Breckenridge Bender, was his desire for ‘an ideally expensive thing’. He had ‘no use’ for Lord Theign’s £10,000 Moretto; he was out to spend millions.