Appetite

Washington's National Gallery opened a long-awaited loan show this week: 40 paintings from the collection of Oil Tycoon Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian. Publicity-hating Gulbenkian, one of the richest men in the world (TIME, June 16, 1947 et seq.), was not on hand for the festivities; at 84, the Near East genius spends most of his time in his adopted Lisbon.

What Washington gallerygoers saw was only a part of Gulbenkian's collection, but it was enough to establish him as one of the most assiduous art buyers of the 20th Century. Among the prize packages in the show at the National were Rubens' luxurious, full-length portrait of Helena

Fourment, Dierick Bouts's The Annunciation and Rembrandt's Pallas Athena (for which the artist's adolescent son Titus had posed in a glittering helmet and shield). Gulbenkian had bought all three of them from the famous Hermitage collection of the Russian czars, after persuading the Soviet Union to part with them.

In the catalogue introduction, National Gallery Curator John Walker pointed out that Gulbenkian had picked virtually all his pictures without the assistance of experts, and that he got fine art, anyway. The collection, wrote Walker, reflects "his personality. Gladstone enumerated six qualities which distinguish a collector: 'Appetite, leisure, wealth, knowledge, discrimination, and perseverance.' These qualities Mr. Gulbenkian possesses to a pre-eminent degree. [Fellow financiers] would be surprised to hear him comparing their business dealings to . . . Italian paintings! With tireless patience he has sought beautiful objects; pictures, sculpture, ancient coins, Near Eastern ceramics, manuscripts, eighteenth-century furniture, tapestries . . ."

As a beginning collector years ago, Gulbenkian did not always show classic taste. He fell in love with, and bought, the original of the popular old chromo, September Morn, a fact which embarrasses him nowadays. But few experts could criticize the taste, or the diversity, of a collection which included prime examples of Hals, Gainsborough, Degas and Manet. His crystalline views of Venice by Francesco Guardi were matched against a soft, misty one by Corot. He contrasted Stefan Lochner's strict, gothic Presentation in the Temple with a tasty chunk of cheesecake by Francois Boucher, entitled Cupid and the Graces. Clearly, Collector Gulbenkian's appetite was wide and deep as his wallet.

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