Manhattan's Hamilton

Subtler but just as resonant as the ballyhooing of the late Phineas Taylor Barnum was the publicity which preceded, last week, the public auction of two Renaissance paintings from the collection of Carl W. Hamilton of Manhattan. The two pictures were hung in a shadowy chamber in the Anderson Galleries. Tall candles gave an air of piety to the occasion. Uniformed Negroes stood gravely beside each canvas, so immobile, so harmonious with the austere gloom, that they were nearly invisible. Visitors hushed their voices, lightened their footsteps.

One of the paintings was a Crucifixion, painted by Piero della Francesca (circa 1406-92) on a tiny wood panel (14" x 16"). Into a golden sky, grievously cracked with age, were lifted the cross, the scarlet banners of the soldiery. Humans and horses were drawn with that rude simplicity of Italian Primitives which is pronounced charming by modern sophisticates. This painting, according to gallery officials, had been appraised by experts at $800,000. The other, a similarly styled Madonna and Child by Fra Filippo Lippi (circa 1406-69), was said to have been appraised at $650,000.

Loudly intoned by the press, these astonishing appraisals produced country-wide reverberations. The world's auction room record for a painting was a mere $377,000.* The U. S. record was only $360,000./- The record for a private sale was $750,000.** Even this last figure, in the face of the announced appraisals seemed likely to be surpassed.

From the offices of sleek Sir Joseph Duveen, international art dealer, who had originally sold the paintings to Collector Hamilton, came a gala descriptive brochure. In it were pontifical utterances of Bernhard Berenson, famed European art critic who hovers eruditely in the background of most Duveen dealings.

Thus was the public prepared for a tremendous fiscal-esthetic event. The art world whispered names that would surely stir the auction--Mellon, Bache, Widener, Ringling. Preparations were made to broadcast the epochal proceedings to the nation. When the bald auctioneer briskly mounted the rostrum, he surveyed a tight-packed attendance of more than 1,000.

Then, while the crowd gazed at each other for ten minutes of increasing bewilderment, the auction proved a fiasco. True, the Crucifixion was sold for $375,000, breaking the U. S. record. But there was no feverish bidding, there were no great names. The picture was quietly repurchased by Sir Joseph Duveen himself. The Madonna and Child went to Leon Schinasi, Manhattan tobacco merchant, for a paltry $125,000. The auctioneer had to face the fact that between the appraisal total and the realized total was a difference of $950,000.

A persistent rumor described Collector Hamilton as Dealer Duveen's close colleague, the sale as, in reality, a Duveen sale. Collector Hamilton's careful avoidance of reporters and photographers enhanced this rumor.

Carl Hamilton is one of the least publicized, most picturesque figures in Manhattan life. A laborer's son, he was born about 40 years ago in the mining town of Hollidaysburg, Pa. There were several other children. His zealous mother gave a biblical stamp to his mind which it still retains.

At 15 he worked his way on a freight train to Phillips-Andover Academy. There he convinced the faculty of his right to enter, slept on a self-made straw mattress. He was soon leading his classes, playing in school sports, tutoring faculty children, organizing religious meetings, preaching in the pulpits of nearby towns.

Like most Andover boys, he went to Yale. A suit-pressing business which he organized paid all his expenses, infuriated old-established rivals, left him a large surplus after his graduation (1913). One of his employes in the pressing business, a bright Italo-Amcrican boy of eight or nine, so delighted Undergraduate Hamilton (then about 18) that he legally adopted him, later sent him through Andover and Yale. This adopted son now has a son of his own, making Bachelor Hamilton a legal grandfather.

Collector Hamilton Was an outstanding member of his Yale class, although an injury to his back, and the consequent wearing of a steel jacket, prohibited any athletics. He was potent in campus religious interests. Singlehanded, he removed a heavy mortgage from his fraternity house by personally visiting graduate brethren. Allowed six months, he required only six weeks.

After college he went to the Philippines, where he organized anil financed cocoanut oil mills (Philippine Refining Corp.). During the War, Hamilton products sold well, the Hamilton fortune mightily increased. Returning to the U. S., he lived quietly in Great Neck, L. I. Sir Joseph Duveen and others were commissioned to start an Italian collection for the Hamilton home. They bought paintings by Veneziano, dei-Conti, Francia, Perugino, Melzi, Desiderio, Botticelli. Titian. The Hamilton home became a Renaissance rarity, authentic in painting, sculpture, tapestry, velvet, bric-a-brac. When it proved too small to hold the collections, Collector Hamilton moved to a 14-room apartment on Park Avenue, Manhattan.

He is still on Park Avenue. His galleries have never been open to the public, though once he took his collections en a nationwide, personally-conducted exhibition-tour. Post-War conditions injured the Hamilton Philippine interests. From time to time lately some painting has been sold. But the Hamilton collection remains among the nation's best.

Collector Hamilton has aided in the education of perhaps 100 school and college boys. They never know the identity of their benefactor, all transactions take place through a third party. Once a month they write letters describing their progress to Collector Hamilton, addressing him as "Dear Friend."

Prix de Rome

Two visionary young men went to Manhattan, last week, where they joyously, officially learned they had won the annual Prix de Rome, one in painting, the other in sculpture. This most-coveted of U. S. art-student awards entitles each of them to $1,600 a year, residence and studio, for a three-year period at the American Academy in Rome.

Prizeman Sidney B. Waugh, 25, a sculptor, has an enormous brow, a tiny mustache. Hailing from Amherst, Mass., he has studied at Amherst College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rome, Fontainebleau. For the last three years he has practiced sculpture in Paris, obtaining an honorable mention in the Paris Salon, modeling a war memorial for Kemmel, Belgium. He is fascinated by the burly stevedores who labor along the Seine. One of these solidly planted fellows posed for Steel which won the Prix de Rome.

Prizeman John M. Sitton, 22, a painter, comes from Greenville, S. C. He has been studying at the Yale School of Fine Arts, which has turned out five successive Prix de Rome men in the 35 years the awards have been established. He holds medals from the Beaux Arts Institute, the National Academy of Design, has paid much of his tuition by working as a waiter. His painting Flight from Earth is a symbolic composition of draped figures soaring above things mundane.

The annual Prix de Rome awards in architecture and landscape architecture will shortly be announced. Award dates differ by circumstance, not intention. After next year the landscape award will be made only in alternate years.

*Paid for Sir Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie, by the late Henry Edwards Huntington, famed California connoisseur, in London, November, 1926.

/-Paid for Thomas Gainsborough's The Harvest Waggon, by Sir Joseph Duveen, in New York, April, 1928.

**Paid for Raphael Sanzio's Madonna di Siena, by a U. S. syndicate in London, last year.