Chapter Two

Calm motions are essential for the smooth running of a vice-regal establishment, and in this respect Norman was a model aide-de-camp, self-contained, efficient, and apparently unflappable. Even so, the events of the morning that culminated thus far in his interview with Lady Sutherland gave to Norman a sharp burst of forward propulsion.

Had one of the footmen seen Norman emerge from Lady Sutherland’s sitting room on the east front of Government House, descend the stairs, cross the hall, dart through the pantry door, trot down the back stairs, and head out along the path towards the mews, he might have paused to take note. However, that morning all three were distracted by preparations for the luncheon party, so Norman’s swift passage was observed only by Old Sock, who was working in the kitchen garden.

The climate of the island group of St. Edward is in any case benign, but that day was especially beautiful. The sun had risen over the Inner Thimbles shortly before half past six. It caressed those ships of the third squadron and flagship of the Indian Ocean fleet that just now lay at anchor in Victoria Sound. A faint breeze stirred the cypresses along the boundary with Bishopscourt, while Fort Borthwick and the naval observatory briefly cast their shadows over the pretty town and harbour of Palmerston below.

From the direction of the Customs House and Wellington Quay came the thrum and clangs of industry upon which the great wealth of the colony was lately founded—that is, the incessant loading of shipments of guano continually hauled from the Outer Thimbles in huge, flat-bottomed barges. Wisps of wood smoke ascended from the Chinese quarter and the Malay kampongs at the opposite edges of town, while cattle grazed peacefully on lush pastures belonging to the nearest and richest of the old estancias in the hinterland farther distant.

Over this charmed colonial estate His Excellency Lieutenant-General Sir George Sutherland, G.C.M.G., K.B.E., D.S.O., had presided as Governor and Commander-in-Chief since 1919. Far from raising eyebrows in the Colonial Office, Sir George’s appointment was greeted with enthusiasm in Whitehall, and much relief among the lower officials of Palmerston, because, it was felt, the government of St. Edward, New Scotland, and the Thimbles was by then far too complicated for an old gentleman as kind but vague as Sir George’s immediate predecessor, Sir Evelyn Broome. Guano and everything connected to it required a much firmer hand on the tiller, and whose could be more reliable than that of the hero of Beersheba? Such was the consensus of opinion all the way up to Cabinet, and even the Palace.

After the Secretary of State sounded him out during a lull in the Versailles Peace Conference, without hesitation Sir George confessed he had never heard of St. Edward, New Scotland, and the Thimbles. However, in due course, when properly briefed, he began to like the idea of taking up the reins of government. Naturally, the General would require a suitable household composed of existing and previous members of his personal and military staff. Yet initially Sir George and Lady Sutherland experienced some misgivings arising from a close reading of the relevant portion of the Colonial Office List.

“George. George,” said Lady Sutherland, over breakfast at the Ritz; Sir George was slightly deafened during the bombardment of Liège. “Listen to this: ‘ The islands of the St. Edward Group are said to be as numerous as the days of the year but not more than one hundred of them deserve the name. Most are mere rocks. Even of the three hundred thus far enumerated not more than fifteen or sixteen are inhabited, the remainder being flat and inconsequential.’ It sounds ghastly.”

“Yes,” said Sir George, returning to his newspaper. “Quite a bit of guano, though. Tons of it.”

In due course Lady Sutherland especially was partly swayed by reassuring accounts of polite and colonial Society, the surge of prosperity currently engulfing the local treasury and the Royal Bank of New Scotland, and, above all, a long article in the Illustrated London News about Government House, St. Edward, which was fairly described as “among the loveliest in the Empire.”

At length, together with their two unmarried daughters, Lettice and Marigold, and their staff, including Colonel Ernest Roberts, V.C., private secretary—who lost his right arm at Passchendaele—Lieutenant Norman Threlfall, R.N., aide-de-camp; Miss Lucy Edwards, secretary to Lady Sutherland; Dr. Henry Craddock, surgeon, and about fifteen others, including Foster, Sir George’s long-serving batman, in May 1919 the governor-designate sailed from Southampton aboard H.M.S. Fantome, reaching St. Edward via Cape Town and Mauritius in mid-July.

Nearly three years on, it was as if Sir George and Lady Sutherland had been en poste for thirty.

By then, as a matter of natural progression, Foster, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, had been entrusted with the care, maintenance, and operation of the Governor’s stately and enormous vice-regal motor car, an extravagant purchase proudly made by the legislative council of St. Edward not long before His Excellency’s arrival. Hitherto nothing so remotely unusual as a headless torso wrapped in a lady’s foundation garment had ever turned up in the rear compartment.

Chapter One

“Come in, Norman.”

“Yes, Lady Sutherland.”

“Sit down.”

“Thank you, Lady Sutherland.”

“I gather Foster has found something disagreeable in the motor car.”

“Yes, Lady Sutherland.”

“A torso, George said. Headless.”

“Yes, Lady Sutherland.”

“You’re quite sure it is headless?”

“Quite, Lady Sutherland.”

“Limbs?”

“I beg your pardon, Lady Sutherland?” Although dependable and thorough, Norman was at times slow.

“Does it have limbs, Norman?”

“No, Lady Sutherland.”

“How provoking.”

“Lady Sutherland?”

“A headless torso is bad enough without being limbless as well. Two more stray parts drifting about. At least four more bits to account for. Four more at least: one head, two arms, nether regions—assuming they’re in one piece.”

“No guarantees there, Lady Sutherland.”

“Exactly my point, Norman. Sex?”

“Male, Lady Sutherland, as far as we call tell.”

“Don’t be silly, Norman. How can there be any doubt?”

“The Colonel felt we shouldn’t unwrap it before Dr. Craddock comes back from golf.”

“Unwrap it? What on earth is it wrapped up in?”

“A lady’s foundation garment, Lady Sutherland.” Millicent Sutherland suppressed what might otherwise have been mistaken for a girlish giggle; Norman’s phrasing was impeccable as always, but she formed a mental picture of the young gentlemen of the Governor’s household puzzling over a torso wrapped in smalls. She recovered her composure.

“Good Heavens! But you say Foster thinks it is, was, male—a man—never mind the foundation garment?”

“Yes, Lady Sutherland. He was very specific.”

“Odd. Do we know him?”

“I’m sure I cannot say, Lady Sutherland.”

“No, I suppose not. Nothing there to go on, really, is there?”

“Quite, Lady Sutherland.”

“What have you done with it—him?”

“The Colonel felt it best to leave it—him—in the Rolls until Foster can find a suitable spot in the cool room.”

“Out of the question, Norman. The Rolls is no place for a headless torso, wrapped or unwrapped—animal, vegetable or mineral.”

“No, Lady Sutherland.”

“Think of the germs, Norman.”

“Yes, Lady Sutherland.”

“The same applies to the cool room, apart from the obvious.”

“Lady Sutherland?”

“Cook,” said Lady Sutherland.

“Ah,” said Norman.

“In and out. Constantly rummaging for comestibles.”

“He is slightly short on imagination, Lady Sutherland.”

“On the contrary, Norman. Cook has a vivid imagination. Lots of ideas, most of them dreadful. We don’t want him grilling parts of it by mistake.”

“I could speak to him.”

“Now you know that’s not a good idea, Norman. I’m quite sure he’s never seen a foundation garment. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

“I suppose so.” Norman grasped the larger point, even if in this case, as in so many others, he found it difficult to trace the individual steps in Lady Sutherland’s reasoning. “What about the tool shed?” he added, doubtfully.

“Worse: Sock would probably put it in the compost like everything else.” Lady Sutherland sighed, and tapped the arm of her chair with a pencil. “We had better have Foster use the laundry.”

“You don’t think it might get mixed up with the washing?”

“I shall speak to Mrs. Huntingfield.”

“If you say so, Lady Sutherland.”

“Right away, Norman. Chop, chop.”

“Very good, Lady Sutherland.”

“Oh, Norman?”

“Yes, Lady Sutherland?”

“I shouldn’t say anything about this to Miss Edwards. Rather overzealous and inquisitive. Sleeping dogs, and all that.”

“Quite, Lady Sutherland.”

“That’s all, Norman. Off you go.”

Kissing Their Rings

Those who say that President Barack Obama’s standing in the world has been damaged by the decision of the International Olympic Committee to eliminate Chicago, Illinois, at the earliest opportunity and to award the games of the XXXI Olympiad of the modern era to Rio de Janeiro would do well to look a little closer at the composition of that unsavory organization.

No fewer than twenty members of the I.O.C., between a sixth and a fifth of the entire membership, were not long ago found to have accepted bribes. But even if they hadn’t, the inexact process of assessing at first hand the rival bids of many cities all over the world has for years constituted an especially disgusting gravy train—an unending palanquinade of lavish official hospitalities, institutionalized obsequiousness, and plain, old-fashioned corruption.

As if to underline its far right-wing credentials, the I.O.C.’s honorary president for life, the diminutive Marquis of Samaranch, was a minister of state in the fascist régime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. By coincidence the Marquis’s son and namesake now also sits on the I.O.C.

The organization, based in Switzerland—where else?—has a particular fondness for European and petrodollar royalty, and one might ask what collective skills are brought to the task of allotting without bias immense sporting fixtures to whole nations by such luminaries as H.S.H. Princess Nora of Liechtenstein; H.S.H. the Sovereign Prince Albert II of Monaco; Sheikh Ahmad al Fahad al Sabah of Kuwait; H.R.H. the Grand Duke of Luxembourg; H.R.H. the Prince of Orange; H.R.H. Prince Nawaf Faisal Fahd Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia; H.R.H. Prince Tamim bin al Thani of Qatar; H.R.H. Prince Tunku Imran of Malaysia; H.R.H. Princess Haya Bint al Hussein of the United Arab Emirates; H.M. ex-King Constantine of the Hellenes, or H.R.H. the Infanta Doña Pilar de Borbón of Spain.

To be fair, a good number of these persons were once good at riding horses, shooting guns, sailing yachts, and/or participating in bobsleigh competitions, among other hearty out-of-door recreations of the very rich.

Nor is one especially reassured by the membership also of General Nyangweso (Uganda), General Sabet (Egypt), General Palenfo (Côte d’Ivoire), General Adefope (Nigeria), and Dr. Henry Kissinger (honorary).

There were no women members before 1981, and the current tally is 16 out of 106. This is pathetic. Far more women have been elected president or prime minister of countries all over the globe than have ever served as members of the I.O.C.

More sinister yet was the investment some years ago of millions of dollars to prevent what became known as the Gay Games from adopting and therefore tarnishing the ancient Greek name “Olympic.”

I am sure it can be good for business to win the right to stage the modern Olympics. However, there can be no shame in being rejected by a body as dubious as the I.O.C. Indeed a far, far bigger question mark ought to hang over those supplicants who manage to win its favor.

O tempora, O mores

Air travel has been intolerable for years, but this morning for me the process sank to new depths. Since 9/11 I have navigated security and boarded innumerable aircraft all over the world, but never before have I had my tube of toothpaste confiscated. Clearly I had no choice but to submit to this impertinence today in Montréal, Québec, but the grounds upon which my toothpaste tube was impounded were not that it might conceivably contain plastic explosives—or any other contraband—but simply that it exceeded the allowable volume (expressed, somewhat pointedly, in milliliters, and in appalling French). The fact that my toothpaste tube was quite obviously three-quarters empty… ça ne marchait pas. A little later, queuing forlornly towards U.S. customs and immigration, a tall, middle-aged man—Canadian passport, je regrette—passed the time by clipping his fingernails. Each painstaking snip rang through the hangar-like space with eye-watering reverberation, made worse by the thought of that horrid trail of new-mooned leavings under foot. I have rarely seen anyone exhibit such complete disregard for the boundary that used to separate behavior that is suitable for public places from behavior that is not. How do people learn to forget that distinction? Reflecting presently upon this strange incident somewhere over New Hampshire or Vermont, I wondered how many other travelers were as revolted as I was, offended, or merely incommoded by this performance. It is not unusual to see the occasional, leathery old slapper filing her nails on the train or at the departure gate, so I suppose someone might therefore make a sort of case for tolerating the more radical process of clipping them also. The difference is, of course, that filing mostly produces less noise, and only a little dust.

Malapropisms

My malapropism collection is expanding. To (a) “one foul swoop”—or, I suppose, “one fowl swoop”—(b) “pet noire,” and (c) “it never seems to amaze me,” I can now add “I wish I’d been a flower on the wall,” and my favorite (in connection with something that the utterer really did not like one little bit): “It really sticks in my groin.” The trouble is, I hear them continually but rarely remember to copy them down at once. All of these have Australian provenance, and in the cases of (a) and (b) seem worryingly widespread.

Switching off the media

This week I did what I should have done years ago—I got rid of the television. The cable man came today to disconnect me, and took away the little black box. Good riddance. It is not simply that among the dozens, even hundreds of channels to which one has access in return for monthly payments of ridiculous sums of money there is nothing at all to watch except rubbish, and advertisements. Rather it is, above all, the disgusting feeding frenzy that has unfolded here in New Haven since a sordid murder took place on the Yale campus last Tuesday week, not two hundred paces from where I sit. No aspect of this human calamity has been shielded from obsessive scrutiny, endlessly prurient comment, or what passes for “coverage” by those absurd chattering heads who have flocked here by the truckload with cameramen in their forlorn quest for viable news entertainment. I cannot, and will not continue to watch or listen—especially just now, when there has never been (as far as I can remember) more urgent need of serious debate about issues of real importance. There are other factors as well. Lately I have found that the outrageousness of many of the angry Republican and other critics of President Barack Obama and his administration has made it simply impossible to endure such mendacious, indeed hate-driven sound bites as find their way into the television news. To some extent this is merely a reflection of that greatest of all American paradoxes: The guarantee of rights and freedoms that, under the United States Constitution, extends farther than almost anywhere else in the world, inevitably therefore accommodates, even embraces not just the barmy, but the mad and dangerous as well. Certainly it permits the endless circulation of fear-mongering gossip—cynically destructive diatribes and hysteria dressed up as political discussion. Whereas serious policy-makers obviously know better, the rest of us must patiently sit there listening to ignorant nonsense. So the only option, for me at least, is to switch off the electronic media. Thankfully from now on it will be books only, my beloved T.L.S., the Australian Book Review, and what remains of the New York Times. Far, far better for the soul.

Manuscript 3

The snag with checking a large manuscript (The Finger: A Handbook) is that although you get better at it as you go along, you also start to get rather weary. I think you can see this also in the quality of the writing—and that’s an excellent argument for writing out of sequence, if you can manage or organize it that way. In this case I did, more a result of happenstance than of careful planning, and therefore at least in theory only I definitely know which sections came in those last few months of crazy slog, and which bits benefited (maybe) from several years of exhaustive finessing. On the other hand, I am quite certain that the principal differences between these are not too hard to spot, but let us not be deflected. In the end I was getting up at four o’clock in the morning, and writing until seven thirty, whereupon I went to work. My sustenance in those peaceful hours before dawn was three full pots of double-smoked Lapsang Souchong tea from the nice man at McNulty’s, to whom therefore at least some of the credit must go for dragging me over the line. Several months later, I am having that slightly peculiar experience of re-reading things that I only have a vague recollection of having written. However, the encouraging part is that from time to time you think to yourself, you know, this is actually quite good. Thus far the publishers have been gracious enough not to contradict me. No more body parts, I think. So I am starting to think about life after The Finger: A Handbook; what next?

Manuscript 2

Morning tea, again. I am going through the corrected manuscript of The Finger: A Handbook and am beginning to piece together tiny flecks of detail about my meticulous purple critic and companion. He or she—the gender is unclear at this stage—turns out to be Scottish, alert to the misuse of the word England where Britain should more properly stand. Actually, it’s not always the case that this was an egregious error on my part, unlike that confusion over the sting versus the bite of an ant. Because sometimes I really did mean England, notwithstanding the Act of Union, but somehow it doesn’t really seem worth the effort to explain in jade green pencil what I was originally getting at. The fact that it’s not entirely clear to my copy editor means that it almost certainly won’t be to any general reader, so, that being the case, it’s far better to accept the amendment with good grace. To some extent this is the overriding obligation of the author, and besides: Resistance is futile. My copy editor is also a little sensitive in respect of a small point I made somewhere about how the sensible remarks in respect of infantile thumb-sucking that were made in a letter to the editor of The Times from the doughty Scottish matron of a public school in Wales, are especially charming if you imagine them uttered with an especially strong accent; all I can do is to assure him or her that this was meant as a genuine compliment. I wonder if that will be enough to save that portion of the relevant sentence; perhaps it ought to go. At this stage other people are much better equipped to make the necessary call.

Manuscript

This long weekend I am tackling the manuscript of my next book, The Finger: A Handbook, which has returned from the copy editor with gratifyingly few substantial alterations or corrections. The process is a humbling one, though, because I realize how completely I am still unaware of many of the strictly codified rules of American punctuation—and much else besides. The elegant notations in purple pencil of my invisible but kindly critic draw my attention to the fine distinctions between further and farther, for example, onwards/upwards and onward/upward, and, indeed, between between and among (or vice versa). Just now I am on my morning tea break, and I have decided that life is definitely too short to spend any amount of time sorting out the American way with which and that, or that and which—something an English friend and colleague of mine describes as the great American which hunt—especially when there are patient souls who are prepared to correct me. Because clearly I have developed the ineffable knack of getting it wrong each and every time. My purple critic—with whom I am rapidly developing a sort of bond—evidently has immense learning also, because at one point I refer to the sting of an ant—you’ll have to read my book to find that particular reference. The word sting is struck and replaced with bite. The marginal note reads “O.K?—no sting; it’s the formic acid in the bite that causes the burn.” To which, in the face of a statement at once so gentle but so compellingly authoritative, there can be no response more appropriate from authors, we solitary laborers in the vineyard of prose, than humility, gratitude, and a solemn resolve never again to make the same error. This is not to say that I have not from time to time rebelled. In a section where I remark, in relation to the opposability of the thumb, that this unique capacity has elevated us above all other mortal creatures, my purple companion asks in the margin “Best word?—One could argue, in ecological terms, that we’re actually parasites or a virus, for example.” I suppose it was wrong of me, but late last night I responded to this challenge with my soft jade-green colored pencil: “Speak for yourself!”

Caroline Matilda Sotheron at Sea

In his Island to Empire: 300 Years of British Art, 1550–1850, Ron Radford cleared up the problem of the identity of Caroline Matilda Sotheron, the subject of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s beautiful three-quarter length seated portrait in Adelaide, formerly in the Bowmore collection (above). In the process he also made a satisfactory revision of the date of execution, backwards from ca. 1825 to a more plausible ca. 1808, and, incidentally, made entirely redundant my own catalogue entry for the painting in Christopher Menz’s 1998 exhibition Regency: British Art and Design, 1800–1830.

However, a chance discovery now adds a further note of color, and indeed mystery, to the early history of the portrait. Hitherto, the work has been traced to a Duveen Brothers’ sale conducted in New York on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 1915 (lot 12). In the following day’s New York Times (Friday, April 30, 1915, p. 13), under the breathless headlines “PAINTING BY CUYP SOLD FOR $73,000; Top Price of Fifteen Damaged Masterpieces Given for a Dutch Landscape. A LAWRENCE FOR $31,000…” we find the following remarkable report:

Probably one of the shortest picture sales on record and the smallest number of pictures for which the ballroom of a great hotel was taken for a sales-room was the sale of fifteen masterpieces of painting belonging to the Duveen Brothers by the American Art Association at the Plaza Hotel last evening.

These were the pictures which were on the steamship Mississippi in November, 1914, when, a fire breaking out, they were more or less damaged. The paintings were sold as they were, without attempt at restoration, and the returns for the fifteen were $190,125. The highest price of the evening was $73,000 given by Scott & Fowles for Albert Cuyp’s “Herdsmen, Cattle, and Shepherds in a Landscape.”…

The picture by the Dutch master shows a beautiful summer morning, a road by a stream, and a little color, read and blue, is introduced in the figures on the road. It is a picture which was said by [Cornelius Hofstede] de Groot to be one of the best by the artist on the Continent. It came from the collections of Edmund Higginson [1802–1871] of Saltemarsh [sic] Castle, 1842; Joseph Bond, 1872, who lent it to the Academy; C[harles]. [John] Wertheimer [1842–1911], who lent it to the Academy, and Comte Boni de Castellane [1867–1932] and M. Maurice Kann, Paris. Mr. [Thomas Ellis] Kirby said in putting up the picture that it was valued at $200,000. It was started at $3,000, ran up immediately to $10,000, was the subject of considerable competition, other dealers trying for it, and it was finally knocked down to the purchasers.

There was apparently little damage done this picture by the fire. Others of the pictures painted on panels had the wood badly warped, and in some places cracked where the colors were little affected. Only two pictures of the lot were very materially defaced.

They came first on the catalogue. A panel, “Bust Portrait of a Young Man in Black Cap,” by Poero [sic] di Jacopo [d’Antonio] Benci, called Pollaiuolo, went to R. H. Loines for $250, and the “Portrait of a Youth in a Red Cap,” by [Giovanni] Ambrogio [de Predis], went to M. J. Rugeron for $175.

Giving the other pictures in the order of sale, a circular panel 3 feet in diameter, “Virgin and Child with St. John,” by Lorenzo di Credi, went to Henry Reinhardt [of Henry Reinhardt & Son, 606 Fifth Avenue] for $3,700, and to the same buyer went another circular panel, 30⅜ inches in diameter, “Virgin and Child with Saints,” by Pier Francesco Fiorentino, for $5,700. The “Madonna and Child,” a panel, by Mariotto Albertinelli, 31⅛ by 22¾, went to E. L. Lueder [of L. W. Minford & Co., 106 Wall Street, coffee and sugar brokers], for $1,200, and Cosimo Rosselli’s “Virgin and Child with St. John and Saints,” circular panel, 3 feet 2¾ inches in diameter, went to Bernet, agent for $2,600.

The delightful long, narrow panel, “Processional Scene,” 17 inches in height by 65¾ inches, by Jacopo del Selajo [Sellaio], went to P. [&] D. Colnaghi of London for $3,300. Paul[us] Potter’s “Landscape with Cattle,” a pleasing picture, which had been in the [Charles T.] Yerkes collection, went to A. G. Brown for $3,000 [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, now re-attributed to Anthonie van Borssum; the Friedsam Collection; Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931; 1932.100.12]. There were three Cuyps in the collection, and a panel, 18 by 22, “The Flight Into Egypt,” went to Knoedler & Co. [also now in the Met; Bequest of Josephine Bieber, in memory of her husband, Siegfried Bieber, 1970; 1973.155.2], who were competitors for the more important picture by the artist, for $4,000. “Oxen in a Shed,” by Cuyp, went to Dr. Paul Mersch [of Paris] for $3,500.

The two beautiful portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir Joshua Reynolds brought nearly the same price. The “Portrait of Miss Sotheran [sic],” by Lawrence, was nearly full length, a charming young woman, simply dressed in a creamy white gown, blue sash, and salmon-colored shawl. It went to Scott & Fowles for $31,000. W. E. Evarts paid $30,000 for Reynolds’s “Mrs. Otway and Child,” a woman seated, wearing a white gown and quilted coat, with a yellow bow as a headdress. She holds the hand of the child, who stands upon a sofa [Mannings, No. 1371]. Sir Anthony Van Dyck’s “Portrait of Alexander Treist, Baron d’Auweghem,” a standing figure in black velvet, with wide, thick ruff and one hand resting on the pommel of his sword, went to Seaman, agent, for $8,700. [This painting is now convincingly re-attributed to Gaspar de Crayer (1584–1669), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Sachs, Mrs. W. Scott Fitz, Mrs. Ernest B. Dane, Felix M. Warburg, and three anonymous subscribers, 1915.13.]

Rubens’s, “The Holy Family,” was the last picture sold and went to C. F. Williamson of Paris, for $20,000. This was from the collection of the [fourth] Duke of Sutherland. It is 63 by 39 inches, composed of six life-size figures, the Virgin with the Child at her breast, a cherub at her feet, at the left St. Catherine holding the little St. John with St. Joseph on the right bending over the group [Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: Duveen Brothers Records, 1876–1981, Acc. No. 960015, Series II.A., Part 5, Box 286, Folder 4].

Leaving aside the remarkable disparity of prices paid (clearly, and dazzlingly in Lawrence’s favor), this sale is fascinating because it so exactly reflects the competing, even incongruous elements of Gilded Age taste in New York, much fortified by Duveen Brothers, Knoedler’s, and P. & D. Colnaghi before the Great War: in other words Italian Renaissance panels jostling with Rubens and Van Dyck; seventeenth-century Dutch landscape, and eighteenth-century English grand-manner portraits. An earlier article in the New York Times (Sunday, March 28, 1915, p. 12, “MARRED PAINTINGS OF MASTERS IN SALE…”) made it clear that this capsule of paintings was consigned as cargo aboard the Mississippi by Duveen Brothers in London the previous November (1914), and damaged in the hold of the vessel.

The 4,738-ton S.S. Mississippi was built for the Atlantic Transport Line by Harland and Wolff in Glasgow, and was the first ship to sail the transatlantic route that was equipped solely with internal combustion diesel engines. She was launched on February 11, 1914, and ultimately sold for scrap in 1933. In 1902 the A.T.L. was subsumed, through a merger with five other lines, into J. Pierpont Morgan’s huge, parent International Mercantile Marine Company, and with them became synonymous with the opulent First Class services between New York, Boston, and British ports. Apart from these reports, however, there appears to be no other mention in the press of any fire aboard the Mississippi. It must have been comparatively minor.

Nor indeed do we know how the New York dealers Scott & Fowles ultimately disposed of the Adelaide Lawrence, if in other words they found a local buyer; it seems at least possible, because the United States did not enter the War until April 1917, and money was still plentiful in New York, despite the economic malaise of 1913–14. Certainly the painting was back with Duveens’ in 1923.

In 1980 an elderly former employee of Scott & Fowles donated several hundreds of files from the company to the Cincinnati Art Museum, who, in turn, donated them to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It is just possible that that 2.2 linear feet of documents may contain some reference to the present picture. However, I think I shall leave this matter for Adelaide to pursue.