This week the swank Manhattan house of Knoedler & Co. proudly announced the acquisition of the Thomas B. Clarke collection of early U. S. portraits. The sale price was around $1,000,000. In Knoedler's de luxe parlors, the occasion was comparable in excitement to the purchase by that firm two years ago for Andrew William Mellon of Raphael's Madonna of the House of Alba, from the Soviet Government's Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
No collector was ever more beloved by the U. S. art world than Thomas Benedict Clarke. Born in Manhattan in 1848, he...
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