Swank in The Arts; 109; Prado West

The Meadows Museum spans 600 years of Spanish art. The Meadows Museum spans 600 years of Spanish art treasures and is a contemporary legend in American Museum making. It is a collection that had a rocky beginning and a happy ending. All because Algarmetis, a Texas oil man of old-fashioned integrity, came under the spell of Spanish art. This all began about 25 years ago when my company and the Spanish government were drilling for oil in Spain. I lived at the Ritz Hotel which was just across the street from the Prado. Every day about one hour or two we would go over to the Prado and walk through and visit the different sections of the Prado and learn something about the artist and the paintings in the various sections.

I became very much interested in Spanish art because this continued for several years. But the pictures in his first collection had barely arrived in Texas. I'm the building designed to house them was not yet complete before questions began to be asked.

Were these, in fact, the masterworks they were claimed to be? Meadows dealt with the problem head-on. He asked the help of two of the world's foremost scholars of Spanish art, Jose Lopez Ray of New York University and Diego Angulo of the University of Madrid, later to become director of the Prado. I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art. I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art. I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art.

I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art. I was very interested in Spanish art because I was very interested in Spanish art. The Meadows Museum spans 600 years of Spanish art treasures, and is a contemporary legend in American museum making.

It is a collection that had a rocky beginning and a happy ending. All because the Algarmentes, a Texas oil man of old-fashioned integrity, came under the spell of Spanish art. This all began about 25 years ago when my company and the Spanish government were drilling for oil in Spain. I lived at the Ritz Hotel which was just across the street from the Prado. Every day about one hour or two we would go over to the Prado and walk through and visit the different sections of the Prado and learn something about the artist and the paintings in the various sections. I became very much interested in Spanish art because this continued for several years. I finally decided I should acquire some of these paintings.

I could afford it, but I didn't know how to become a collector. Meadows is a businessman and he did not even begin to buy without advice he considered sound from experts recommended by his own associates and by the Spanish government. But the pictures in his first collection had barely arrived in Texas. I'm the building designed to house them was not yet complete before questions began to be asked. Were these, in fact, the masterworks they were claimed to be? Meadows dealt with the problem head on. He asked the help of two of the world's foremost scholars of Spanish art, Jose Lopez Ray of New York University and Diego Angulo of the University of Madrid, later to become director of the Prado. These two men concluded that although the paintings were painted in the period of the artist to which each had been attributed, only about half of them were really the works of the artists that I had thought the painting was by and had been advised they were by. When this work had been completed, Dr. Lopez Ray suggested that this museum would need a curator and director who was qualified in this field.

And he recommended Dr. William Jordan who he said was one of his finest students and had received his doctorate at New York University. And I asked him if he wouldn't want a committee of senior experts in the field to evaluate the collection for him and he did, said he did want that. So we set that up and the only person we could get on short noticed to come was my professor, Lopez Ray, who came down here with me and together we went through the museum painting by painting with Mr. Meadows and told him exactly what it was and what it wasn't. And this was about November of 66 after that we sat down at lunch and said frankly that you have to start over and are you prepared for the expense of that and he said well I'll put another million dollars into it and I hope you take the job. Dr. Jordan accepted the position with assurance by me that I would follow his advice and when he concluded that a painting was not a museum quality or was not by the artist to which it had been attributed.

That he could either trade it in or dispose of it and that when other great pieces of art came on the market we wouldn't negotiate for such paintings. Since he accepted the position we have managed to create here a collection of Spanish art which we are told by scholars is perhaps the greatest collection of Spanish art in America in one museum. We are very proud of that. Certainly not all of the original collection was bad. There was a group of about 20 or so pictures mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were excellent.

In fact I'd be hard pressed to find these on the market today and if I did they'd be more expensive than we might want to pay. For example this naughty and seductive picture is one of the most popular in the museum with the public was painted in 1842 by Antonio Maria Esquivel and is I think about as good a picture as Esquivel ever painted. And this one by Vicente López is a portrait done in 1812 of the Baronda from VA, one of Napoleon's generals in the Peninsula War and is an excellent example of Napoleonic portraiture. Some good paintings are sometimes in the storeroom as the collection has grown, things are rotated. These two paintings were a part of the original Meadows gift to SMU in 1965. They are portraits of the Arch Duchess Isabel Clada Eugenia and her husband the Archduke Albert. They come from the Royal Spanish collection and were attributed formally to the court portraitist Juan Pantoja de la Cruz.

They're close to his style but they're not, actually turns out they're by a Flemish painter named Franz Purgos and a full length version of this is in a monastery in Madrid signed by Purgos. So these two are something from the original group that we're proud to have and often they're on view just so happens at the moment they're not. Among the paintings that originally were here there were some excellent older pictures as well and this Saint Catherine of Siena is a perfect example. This is a painting that is famous, it's well known to scholars. It was given to the King of Spain in 1863 by the Count of Altameda who had a fabulous collection. He thought it was a Surbaran and it has been published several times as being a Surbaran but even in 1911 a great Spanish scholar questioned that and it's no longer attributed to him but it was labeled such when I arrived.

We took it down, we had it cleaned, we refrained it and what emerged was a marvelous picture and indeed there are about ten copies of it in various museums and collections in the world so in its own day it must have been famous. We still don't know who painted it but one day we will a picture this good just didn't paint itself and scholars are pleased to see it. Subsequently we did acquire a Surbaran, the mystical marriage of Saint Catherine from the collection of Sir William Sterling Maxwell of Kier, one of the great English collections of the 19th century. During those early years we also got some of our rarest and most important things. We learned about the Velasquez portrait of Philip IV just before it was going on in the market, the rumor got to us and so we were able to get involved in negotiating directly with the owner and to buy the painting for even then for a relatively reasonable price. Occasionally a private individual will come in and usually they don't have anything much they hope they do and turns out they don't but on two occasions they did have something very important.

One was the large Moudidio immaculate conception that we bought from Ambassador Fernando Bercamire from Peru, a painting that had a distinguished history of exhibition and publication and the other was the Rivera Saint Paul the Hermit. I got a letter from a South American gentleman who had come to this country and brought with him this Rivera. I examined it carefully, it was very dirty, needed a great deal of cleaning and restoration. I invited two other Rivera experts to look at the painting. They concurred with some excitement in my feeling that it was an early lost painting by him. Their copies of it were known but the original had not turned out and it turned out to be a startling masterpiece.

In that case we were working with a painting that had not been published and the existence of which was not known in the case of our other Rivera which we've recently got. We're dealing with a picture which was very well known which had a history going back well at least a hundred years. We have since traced the history of the picture back to 1661 but this portrait of a night of Santiago, even though it has all of this history, the determination to buy it still depended on the eye and what one can observe in the painting. Rivera had a characteristic way of applying paint and every one of his pictures bears the mark of his brush as only he could use it. It's a spectacular way that he uses his brush to create hair, each hair of the brush being the representation of the hair of beard or his head.

Similar characteristics in the use of the brush are evident in almost every painter. He has his own peculiar way of handling the paint brush, Velocicus has his own way and after seeing hundreds of pictures by these artists you learn to recognize that and to rely upon the ability of your eye to convince you that a painting is genuine and not a copy or an imitation. Once his museum was on track, Meadows moved joyfully into the chase and capture of further treasures which were to represent all periods of Spanish genius. He bought a Picasso and among other contemporary works are two Joan Miros which the artist himself chose for the museum. Though Meadows and Jordan remained true to their first priority, the collection of the finest obtainable examples of all ages of Spanish art.

It is undoubtedly the older ones which engage Meadows the most, particularly the small group of superb goyas. Of course I feel attached to so many of them and it would be difficult to pick out anyone but I guess the greatest would be the Velocicus downstairs or the Meadows scene up here of Goya. Goya told a story about this Meadows scene when he came back home and wrote a letter to a friend in which he described what he had seen at the Meadows. So he said I'm going to put this on Canvas and we happen to get this one that had this historical note to it. I admired him a great deal because I feel he was one of the first great artists 150 more years ago that put action into paintings. Many of his paintings you can just see movement and I admire that.

Do you ever just get carried away with the painting and food you must have it? No. Why not? If I permitted myself to do that I would pay any price that's asked and would buy many paintings that I shouldn't buy. Bill Jordan is always on the lookout for works of Spanish art. Many people know that I have been a collector of Spanish art and I receive letters from various dealers and from owners of paintings and I refer them immediately to Dr. Jordan. Sometimes he comes to my office, sometimes I go to his to do something further and connection with some painting here and sometimes right in the museum itself. Six years ago this painting was auctioned in Germany and ever since then I've been trying to find it. And the importance of it is that this painter in the 17th century was the most famous still life painter in Spain and the only one known in France and an in one outside of Spain.

For years there's been no sign to picture by him in existence and this is the first one to be discovered and this is the signature on the back giving his full name. And it's a picture of great importance to the history of Spanish still life painting. I don't even know if it's for sale. It belongs to the private collection of a dealer in Holland and he's invited me to come see it. But I want to really try to buy it from him. What price did you have in mind? Well since it's not for sale I didn't mention the price but I suspect it is for sale. I suspect it is too and I would think it could be as much as $100,000. Well you get in touch with me as soon as you find out and we'll discuss it.

The Meadows Museum now has a new curator of education and has enlarged its docent staff to meet the growing number of visitors and tours. Someday William Jordan would like a system of publications and a graduate program of Spanish art at SMU's campuses in both Dallas and Madrid. But the central component of the Meadows Museum is the collection. Algorithms does not consider it complete and he refuses to be boxed in by the future. Well I don't think we've fully determined how large it will be. We have determined that it shall be a great quality, all paintings shall be of museum quality and nothing of... but inferior nature will be shown in here. You can't determine size because you don't know how many Spanish paintings may be available to you in the future. Well each one of these paintings I had a part in acquiring and like having a family of children each and every one has a personal attachment.

And I get a great deal of pride out of having been able to do this and be a part of it. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The interest has always been in showing local artists and since 1970 when we opened that's what we've been doing. I started off I believe with ten artists representing ten artists, all of them from Texas. Since that time we've spread out a little bit and are showing people from Oklahoma and New Mexico and the surrounding states. I think Valley House has been the most rewarding life that I could possibly imagine. I have done just about everything that I have wished to do. If I have had any failures I think it was only the great...

...a few great paintings that I brought but did not stay. They had to be returned and now reside in other major museums about the world. Well we started with eight people. We thought that was a workable group or I thought that was a workable group and that was kind of in fact... ...and for the space, the amount of people that we could handle. Our first concerns of being able to show our art that we all wanted to be able to show our art. So we went on a basis. We always have a continuing group show in one of our rooms. The idea of a gather came a long time ago. I've always wanted a place where I could show the work. For years when I was young I would always look in different galleries. But I could never see any representation of a work that I like, a work about me, about black people. Dallas has more than a hundred galleries which deal in art along with other things. We do not have nearly so many whose exclusive priorities are the sale of art, the promotion of the individual artists and the personal involvement of the dealer.

A look at four galleries from this narrower group will give a sense of gallery climate in the city. Valley House started as the result of the closing of the Betty McLean Gallery which I was the director and manager with my wife. We had no idea what would occur when we moved out three miles from the city limits on Spring Valley Road because we were surrounded only by farms, cattle, hens, peacocks, foxes and it was so beautiful that we knew that the property itself would be rewarding and hoped that whatever we would do would be enchanting enough to bring people to visit and to do business with us. My son Kevin will meet you and handle things until I arrive.

Good night, bye. Hens was George, he's coming in Thursday, about two. Oh, fantastic. I'm not here, you'll handle. Okay, great. What time? Two o'clock, okay. I think I can manage to be here. You better. We finally received that letter from Shepherd Gallery that we were expecting and they say that they've got that 19th century French drawing exhibition for us anytime we want it. You see the catalog. It should be a stunning show. Valley House has changed since the early days, primarily because of the growth of other galleries in the community. There are so many of them now that they have taken much of the burden that we felt of serving the younger and contemporary painters that they could have a showcase. I have really stopped handling local artists except I don't handle as many because I feel there's very few that I can cope with their temperament.

Artists that I represent, we always have an understanding. We've, in the past, had formal contracts with the artist stating what each expects of the other and the commission of 40% and what we will do in terms of advertising, etc. But it's more of a gentleman's agreement that when we represent someone, we expect their loyalty. We expect them to keep us informed of their other activities as far as exhibitions. Since we represent a limited number of people, we get involved in their whole development of their work. We have regular exhibitions of their work and it's necessary that we have good communication with them. It never seems to matter, or at least to me, how prolific they are.

As long as we have work here, new work, it's fine. With our current exhibition, Roger Winner, he was away on a sabbatical from SMU for a year and where we didn't have work, a new work from it. We had a body of work from the past years that represented him very well, therefore it was fine with us. And I've always find that when an artist puts up a new show, people start asking about the earlier work. Slow to adapt. Right, right. And they're not quite accepting this as being because it's much more abstract than the other. Well, there are a lot of talk about the subject of percentages. And the percentage that the gallery gets and the percentage that the artist gets and the fact that artists don't get any percentage at all on resale of work. When I first started showing in galleries, which wasn't all that long ago, a gallery took 33 and a third percent, which seemed high enough. And somewhere in the meantime, it's gone up to 40, in some cases to 50 percent.

My concern is not that that's too high. If the gallery is doing a general job of promoting the artist, promoting the art, it's too high just for a clean wall and lights. It's too high if the gallery is doing nothing else except showing the work. I think my concern, I hope to them, speaking for a lot of artists right now, is that the gallery, the dealer, earn his 40 percent. Dallas has been a very conservative city. I feel this is changing, but they simply would not support contemporary art in this city. It was a great struggle for me, even in 70, to start a gallery that showed strictly local artists. I guess the essential thing is that I want a dealer to believe in what I'm doing. I don't mean that a dealer should like everything that I happen to do, but in general should believe in my capacity to come through as an artist and be able to support me or promote me without any reservations.

Without ever feeling embarrassed, or without ever feeling like he or she has to hide in my work. That's essential. I want to paint, painting to me is a medium to the dealer. It's an object. So I want to keep thinking of painting as a verb and let the dealer think of my work as nouns. What do I want? I want the dealer to promote me to sell my work and let me paint. Certainly there needs to be more galleries in Dallas. It's painful for me because each week I have many artists coming in to the gallery with their slides of their work. They want someone to show them. A lot of them are good.

The number of galleries is so limited. I tell them where they are, but quite often I have to send them to Houston. Where there are more galleries, a lot more galleries there of quality, and it's really sad for me because I would like to keep these people here. We got together, thought about doing it. Got a little scared. I don't know if we could do it or not. We went immediately to look for space. Everyone got really excited about doing it and said it was a wonderful idea. Within a month's time, eight women got together and formed a basis of the Dallas women's co-op. The idea behind it mostly was the fact that there weren't enough galleries in Dallas at the time. We realized that we had to have enough money to pay the rent, pay the fun bill, pay what else Linda? One more expense. There were very few because we had to start on a shoestring and so we literally divided what it would cost between the eight of us to manage this.

A little bit more. That looks beautiful. Okay, then just put it down. I think co-ops usually are fated to fail in a lot of instances. But we are really excited. We're expanding again and we're thinking about consignment people at this point. This point we're 11 strong. We're not eight anymore. We're 11. When we expanded last summer, we added new members. But we're thinking that we'd like to get more variety in the gallery on a consignment basis. As we go along, we learn more and more about ourselves or about our own gallery. But we're artists and gallery in one. There's no backer. There's no one with money. There's no director who's saying that has to go there. No, you can't hang that. Only bring us your prints. Once you're a gallery member, in fact, you hang what you make. None of us would ever approach Norman and say, that won't sell. It doesn't look good. I don't like it. It doesn't go with the rest of the show. Any of those things, it's really euro. Each artist is responsible for how their show looks, getting their invitation together.

It started the way we have progressed with the gallery. I really think. Starting out with members, showing members work. Then realizing that we could all get bored or the variety wouldn't be enough. That we really would like to do more for ourselves, for the community, for every sponsor, for each artist who don't have a gallery. The gallery is not a very flourishing. I don't know if any gallery that really flourished or flourished in much of this environment. But it's a good feeling to know that you don't piece of work. That it can't be seen. It should be home. The gallery rewards things for the sense that I can see it hanging. It's typically come in and look at it. I like to see the reaction to it, and possibly I can market it. The gallery means it's a personal thing. It's also a reward and satisfaction. I don't really need one, but I would like to have one. It helps to promote the steady $10.

This city has some art galleries of the highest order, and there's talent here to supply more. New ones will come when local buyers support them. The elements of good art are the elements of good environment. They work wherever they are, recognized or not.

Good public art has always performed a function, even when all it meant to most people was monument. What we regarded solely as statues did a lot of work. They identified place, they provided a flavor of another time, they gave scale, and they defined and related spaces. The statue of George Manumon D. Lee with its fountains and its plaques marks the west end of downtown decisively. Pioneer Park tells it once how strongly the old south felt about its heroes. Though E. Femister Proctor's equestrian figures of General Robert E. Lee and the young Confederate soldier came along 40 years later, to name Lee Park, they too carry Confederate fervor. The frescoes of a young Peter Heard, painted under the Federal Arts Project in the lobby of the U.S. Terminal Annex building, look even further back into pioneer days.

Alley Tenets' warrior figure at Fair Park's Hall of State was named for the Indian tribe, the Tejas, for which the state was named. The buildings, murals and figures erected in Fair Park for the Texas Centennial of 1936 were the last bloom of public art as an integral part of architecture. The reliefs and murals were decorative and accented the proportions of the structures. The fearsome ladies along the Esplanade were not very compelling as sculpture alone, but they give a commanding sense of scale to the buildings before which they stand. Art always marks our tragic events, from the death of a fireman to the assassination of a president. The fireman's monument was first raised in City Park in 1902 and moved to Fair Park in 1923 and it celebrates with dignity and paythas, the fireman who lost their lives in service from that day to this. Somehow less moving is the vast concrete box, raised to honor the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The Elizabeth Frank Eagle at the Dallas Trade Mark has more elegance and immediacy. It is set over words by William Blake and was given by the people who waited for the president to come to lunch on November day. We take public art for granted, but how important it is to us is revealed by the pressures that are constantly on it. Back in the 50s Mayor Robert Thornton, who strongly supported arts endeavors in the city, but had little personal involvement, happened to remark that a Harry Bertolio screen, destined for the new public library, looked to him like a piece of junk. The ensuing uproar caused the withdrawal of tax funds and necessitated a private collection to pay the artist. A quarter of a century later when fine hinry more works are to be seen in private collections, as well as at SMU and at the Museum of Fine Arts, a city councilman still felt it necessary to question the suitability of a more peace donated for the new city hall.

Racial pressures are more subtle. Art must stand above ethnic and religious considerations, but the race and the religion of the maker of the art is still a factor in its impact. Walton Wind Jr. and Oscar Graves were commissioned to do a figure for the Martin Luther King Center after an earlier commission to a white sculptor caused extreme distress in the black community. Rufina Tamayo's mural is an important possession for the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. What is more important to Dallas-Mexican Americans is that the mural is here, indirectly at least, because Tamayo once suffered in a little West Texas town, the kind of indignity which is still commonplace for many of his race in Texas. We are a city terrified of the naked human body. What is symbolically erotic, we simply ignore. We can accept mayo, virginal and remotely new bile, even mayo, ripely nude, since it is blessed by age and respectability.

If a miracle should drop Michelangelo's David in Dallas, we would be overjoyed. But could a contemporary Michelangelo get a 20th century David accepted for taxpayers' money in Dallas, Texas today? I think not. Things began to change in the mid-50s when art itself went public, and our beloved flying red horse got to be a famous symbol of instant pop art. It became apparent that public art could function on several levels at once, in that it could do its work from a posture of pure abstraction, but the elements alone were beautiful without reference to meaning or specific experience. There began to come a sense of why we remembered the great cities of Europe, of what art in its grandest sense of defining place and space had done for Rome's Spanish steps of busy, successful thoroughfare. We realized that what we bought in the shops on the Champs-Élysées was not what we remembered best about the most famous street in Paris. But good art has to be met halfway, and we're still not ready to grant that the commission of work of art is also a commitment to give it space and setting. It cannot do its work if it cannot be seen.

The small model for the millest figure of Pegasus found a happy home in the sculpture garden at Stemens Towers. The finished full-scale piece is lost at 2001 Brian on a busy street corner against a shiny skyscraper. Barely Pepper's land sculpture has strong character, yet it settles comfortably into a median at North Park easily accessible to the pedestrian or the motorist. But with all the arid spots in Dallas, who would expect, or want, to see a fountain, pleasant as its spray patterns may be, in the middle of the flowing waters of Turtle Creek. Sometimes a commissioned piece of art delivers more than its order. The Mark de Severro distinguishes the Lagoon Terrace at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and doubles agreeably as a climbing structure for Fair Park's younger visitors. Lots of public structures deliver more than its order, but in the opposite direction. They service art in addition to their practical use.

The glowing example is the venerable watering trough, erected in 1977, and much later given status in setting by the Park Department. It still does, though less often, what it was first put at commerce and wood streets to do. From any angle on the Dallas Fort Worth Toe Way, the Hampton Street Bridge is a fine marriage of function in aesthetics. The farmer's branch water tower must dominate any skyline on which it is visible, for its sturdy grace, and the strength and repose of its lines. A lot of places in Dallas need what art can do. The Covarubius mosaic mural on the Stewart Building was not commissioned to enhance Central Expressway, but it does. So why not a hugely scaled and magnificent mural along those enormous concrete support walls where Central crosses LBJ Freeway at the Texas Instruments property? Impossible space has never been a hindrance to the artist, so why not consider for serious commission, treatment of walls along Harry Heinz Boulevard, the Dallas North Toe Way, or the many weedy, often trashy, but potentially beautiful and exciting spaces under the city's freeways.

We have learned what a happy ending comes with the fusion of art elements and function. Pacific Plaza is open and hospitable, yet turns in on its own resources, its fountains and sculpture, its benches and trees, to become at once a retreat and a successful art entity in the midst of parking lots and traffic. Thanksgiving Square, a few blocks away, was conceived as a similar refuge, but its inside cannot be seen from its outside. Once past the wall and through the gates, you find pleasant elements, grass, water, trees, material textures. But Thanksgiving Square is a stylish work by a gifted architect. It is not a very inviting part. How far the elements of art and the requirements of function must bend to meet each other is a decision for the city to make with the best help it can get.

The questions, from where to place a single work of art, to the means of defining and relating whole blocks of city space, are as important as any Dallas has ever been asked. The creation of the Accord Mall is barely the beginning in the remaking of the spaces of a desiccated downtown and its dying residential ring into a great city where aesthetics is not an afterthought, but a part of the bone and sinew. What the elements of art can do for a single work, they can do for an entire city. That is the sense of public art. Rembrandt, portrait of a young Jew, painted in 1663 when Rembrandt was at the height of his powers.

A picture which I saw for the first time 30 years ago when I was a student in the company of two of my best mentors and at that time fell in love with the picture, never dreaming that many years later I would have the opportunity to acquire it for a museum where I was the director. It was the real plum in the Van Horn collection, about 150 of the works in the collection that had gone to the Montreal Museum and others had been sold or exchanged. There was still quite a few left, but this was the one that nobody thought they would ever relinquish.

And just to hear about it was so exciting that we really started to do something about it. The final person left in the Van Horn family is Mrs. Margaret Van Horn, whose husband was the grandson of Sir William, who founded the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the steamship company in a lot of mines and all those provinces up in Northern Canada. What we really had to do was to convince Mrs. Van Horn of the fact that this great picture representing this marvelous specimen of humanity would find a loving home with care and respect and really be wanted and be demanded and stimulate and excite the people who are our audience here in this part of the United States. The picture was in hiding, literally, in incarceration, you might say, because it was in a vault, deep in the heart of a granite mountain.

Now, the problem there was that the inside of a granite mountain is not the ideal place to inspect works of art, so we had to set up a special table and plug into electricity. And we had an infrared light scanner, ultraviolet light. We had to turn out all the other lights so we could see it purely under those special lights we had high powered magnification. But in spite of all that having probably looked at a million pictures or so from this point of view in the course of my career, I knew what I was seeing underneath all that grime and all that discoloration, especially under the proper intensity of light raked across the surface of the impasto of the picture. And looked at under magnification, I could tell that it was in as good a condition as it was the day Rembrandt stepped back and said that's finished and he was happy with it. The signature and date had been misread by most scholars for 100 years, and I thought I was reading it a new way, but there were a few days of tension when Perry Houston and our conservation lab was working on it.

There were a few days of tension where you never that sure about anything in life, and when it was all clean and everything came out and we found the signature was absolutely integral with the original paint structure. It was all there, it was all Rembrandt, and the date was the new date that I saw under the magnifying glass. Before all, any object is acquired by the museum, it is brought to the laboratory for a technical examination at which time we try to determine the actual condition and state of the object. If there is any damage, the extent of the damage, and whether it structurally sound, whether it needs any treatment, and to determine exactly what it is we're buying. So, we can generate the painting since the edges had been removed to determine the extent of the original painting, and the x-ray revealed to us swag lines, we call them stretch lines, that show that when the canvas, before he painted it, we call the canvas and stretched it and we tacked here the swag lines, indicate that this was very close to the edge of the painting. So, we feel we're dealing with the original dimensions, and in this case, with this painting, all of the subtle impastels where he put his brush on and pulled it away, and the paint texture was there, has all been preserved.

Right after it came off his palate, just like it was when he completed the work. It is as purely as you can get, first the fantastic perception of Rembrandt, sensitivity of his perception, which then has to go through his mind, and of course, then something else happens, which you have to call his spirit and soul, and then is transmitted to his fingers, and then it has to be transformed into brush strokes and paint. All of which is used with infinite variability, it's impossible to follow or describe it in a technical way that gives you a system or certain names or methods to hang on to.

It is as purely as possible, the penetrating power of Rembrandt into another human visage and soul, as purely as possible, without anything else imposed upon it. What is the responsibility of the curator when a major painting like this comes into the museum collection? Well, it's too fold. The first concern is, is the work of art what it's supposed to be, and specifically in the case of this painting, is this painting to the best of your knowledge, to be proven to be by the artist, by Rembrandt Van Rind, and the second issue is the work as published in various articles and catalogues like all these here. Accurate is the information that's been said about it, true, can you verify it. Like many Rembrandt paintings, its 17th and 18th century history isn't known.

We don't know why it was painted, who the person is. I'd love to find out, maybe it was also. And we know that it was in a collection in Palma de Miorra, the Caterna family, by the 1880s, and it may have entered that family's collection sometime in the 18th century, but we haven't been able to confirm that yet. By about 1897, this painting and a portrait of Andreas Struffles, his mistress, common law wife, was sold, and by 1900 both were in the collection, and a very astute discerning Paris collector, Rudolf Kahn. From the Kahn collection, the painting went by 1999 in the collection of Sir William Van Horn, Montréal County, and the painting remained in the Van Horn collection until very recently, when we acquired it. He was a very mature artist. He was in his mid-50s.

He was certainly highly regarded by his contemporaries. He'd been living in Amsterdam since the early 20s, the mid-20s, during this time, had been a highly successful portrait painter and had painted an extraordinary number of self portraits that were, and still are, very enlightening, investigations of how a person looks at himself and sees himself in different temperaments and different frames of mine. The height of his public acceptance and awareness was certainly in the 1630s and 1640s. He had certainly substantial recognition and income. We promised Mrs. Van Horn, and we promised our young friend here that he would have a loving home, and he does, in our galleries, but aside from that, in relation to the other works of art we have,

it's more than just a loving home. It can become an interesting home in the relationships between this Rembrandt and other pictures, which, in a sense, can sum up the entire human history of the Judeo-Christian Western tradition. For example, over here is a portrait, again, a late portrait, but done somewhat earlier than a portrait by Rembrandt of the young Jew, by El Greco, the great Spanish master, whose life ended when Rembrandt was about eight years old. And this picture shows a person at the opposite end of the social and political and economic spectrum in Europe at that time in the 17th century, this being done about 16, 14, 16, 10. It's a portrait, we believe, of a man, an Italian by the name of Jocomo Bosio, who was the ambassador for the Knights of Malta, that great powerful political and military order, a person who worked as a legged and ambassador for Pope Gregory XIII out of Rome.

And you can see in a picture like this the tremendous support that's behind this man in terms of the central Roman church, the universal church, which had allied itself in a military and political marriage with the then largest empire on Earth, that of Philip II, the Emperor of Spain. Jocomo Bosio, as revealed by El Greco, seems perhaps a bit too uptight, underneath there is this power and this nervousness and this alertness, and he's uptight and even upset because of what was going on in history at that time, which is illustrated by the gentleman we have over here. This is a Dutchman, painted by the Dutch painter Franz Haus, whose life considerably overlapped that of Rembrandt, of course.

And the Dutchman here is a simple businessman, a Dutch burger, and he obviously is an independent individual man who has broken from tradition. He's making money, he's the modern businessman and his first appearance on the stage of modern history. He is the establishment of the new Protestant revolutionary church against which the counter-reformation was formed led by such people as Jocomo Bosio. So you have, on the one hand, the central Roman Catholic figure, allied with the Spanish state, you have the independent businessman from the small new country, newly established incidentally, as the democratic free place where Rembrandt found the freedom he needed and the young Jew found the freedom that he needed. So you have the young Jew sort of hanging in the middle, intellectually, spiritually, between the mighty Church of Rome, the Spanish Empire, the young Dutch Republic, and he becomes, therefore, a kind of symbol of the independent and isolated individual.

And as I said, for whether he came from the troubles in Spain or the troubles in Central Europe, and Rembrandt's treatment of that very sensitive and subtle position in life at that time is not just in the way the young Jew's face looks, which, of course, is marvelously executed by Rembrandt, but also in the understated, even deceptively simple way, the size of the picture, composition, subdued colors, but within which there is an infinite variation, almost imperceptible, but tantalizing changes that seem to reflect what is in the mind of this young scholar living at this time in the middle of the 17th century in Amsterdam. It is really a great thrill for the Kimball Museum on its fifth anniversary, our birthday, to be able to present a masterpiece like this to the people who come to this museum.

I am very happy to be able to present this masterpiece to you all. I am very happy to be able to present this masterpiece to you all.

Thank you very much.