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There was on view last week far too much for any one brain to appreciate at a single view: six Rembrandt portraits and eight drawings; five Goyas; eight Monets; 20 Courbets; nine Corots (all figure paintings) ; eleven Manets; five Cezannes; 22 Chinese paintings; 820 Japanese prints; 247 pieces of Japanese lacquer; 182 European prints and etchings—critics grew dizzy, ran out of adjectives. What was obvious to everyone was that this collection for all its beauty and value did not represent, like the Morgan and Widener collections or the Huntington collection in California, the purchases of an intelligent man obediently following the advice of a corps of experts, but expressed the very personal tastes of Mr. & Mrs. Havemeyer. Given the money and the opportunity, almost anyone would have bought the superb Rembrandts that grace the Havemeyer collection, but at the same time Mrs. Havemeyer was eagerly following the suggestion of her good friend, the late great Mary Cassatt,* and assembling the 36 pictures and 69 bronzes which make up probably the finest collection of Degas in the world.
There is no prize exhibit in the Havemeyer collection. Outstanding are El Greco's portrait of the Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Fernando Nino de Guevara, a crafty-eyed prelate in thick horn-rimmed spectacles, painted over 300 years ago, just before Inquisitor Fernando burned alive half a hundred heretics in the Toledo market place; Manet's portrait of the redhaired, raffish George Moore; the superb example of Rembrandt's engraving: "Christ Healing the Sick."
*Mary Cassatt, sister of President A. J. Cassatt of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was born in Pittsburgh in 1855, went to Paris in 1875, died there in 1926. Friend and disciple of Manet, Renoir, Degas and the Impressionists she became known as "the painter of Mothers and Children," is avidly collected in France.