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 was the son of Dr. George W. Clarke, founder and longtime head master of the old Mount Washington Collegiate Institute, one of the best-known private schools in the East in the years following the Civil War. Young Tom Clarke went into the linen business. His real life, though, was spent buying & selling pictures and furniture. He started the nucleus of his great collection of U. S. portraits in 1872. In 1899, dissatisfied with what he had bought, he sold most of them at auction for $235,000, began collecting all over again. In 1924 a sale of his early American furniture brought $103,679.
In 1892, the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the vogue for early American antiques set up in business as a dealer not in his own personal hobby but in rare Chinese porcelains. Near his home on 35th Street he rented another house, filled it with expensive bric-a-brac which he promptly began to sell to the elder Morgan, Joseph Widener, Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden and other Orientalists. No passer-by would ever know that it was an art shop because Tom Clarke never had a show window, never published an advertisement, never hung out a name plate. His business was conducted entirely through privately circulated catalogs. About six feet tall, bald and pink-cheeked, Tom Clarke was a man of bound less energy, though a childhood attack of diphtheria left him with a lame foot which he dragged all his life. He was one of the founders of the swank Brook Club, also served as Shepherd of the plebeian Lambs. For years he never missed a first night on Broadway, yet was always at work at 8:15 o'clock the following morning, writing all his business letters in longhand. And when he bought pieces of art, he paid cash for them.