Joseph Duveen was born the son of prominent Jewish art dealer Joseph Duveen, who had immigrated from the Netherlands in 1865, in Hull, England in 1869. He became director of the family firm in 1900. His business acumen and promotional skills soon made him one of the world's leading art dealers and he purchased works from aristocratic collections in Britain and Europe to sell to wealthy American clients. He was also a great benefactor to museums in London, and donated pictures to the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, among others, and financed building schemes, including an extension for the National Portrait Gallery and a gallery for the Parthenon Sculptures at the British Museum.
Art dealer and benefactor Joseph Duveen (later Lord Duveen of Millbank), son of prominent Jewish art dealer Joseph Duveen, was born in Hull, England on 14 October 1869. His father had moved to Hull from the Netherlands in 1865. Duveen was educated privately and at the age of 17 he joined his father's business, which by then had branches in London, New York and Paris. He became director of the firm in 1900, taking over the New York office and adding Old Master paintings to the firm's areas of trade. His business acumen and promotional skills soon made him one of the world's leading art dealers. Although, according to some authorities, ‘Duveen’s knowledge of art was conspicuously exceeded by his enthusiasm for it’, he was considered by most of his wealthy American clients ‘as little less than omniscient’ (Behrman 1951). In 1912, Duveen hired the renowned American-Jewish art historian Bernard Berenson to personally authenticate Renaissance artworks, thereby significantly increasing their value. However, this collaboration was considered controversial by some, and the fact that Berenson was given a percentage of Duveen’s sales compromised the art historian’s reputation (Green 2018). Many important paintings passed through Duveen's hands and he purchased works from aristocratic collections in Britain and Europe to sell to wealthy American clients. In 1921 he acquired Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of Jonathan Buttall, The Blue Boy, from the Duke of Westminster and sold it to the Huntingtons in California (it is now in the Huntington Library Collection). At the time, The Blue Boy was one of the most famous paintings in the world. After its sale was made public, it went on view for three weeks at the National Gallery, lines stretching through Trafalgar Square as 90,000 people came to see it. There were even demonstrations in the streets protesting at its sale. At $728,000 (over $10 million today), it was the most expensive painting ever sold (Ludel 2019).
In 1928 Duveen paid for a new gallery at the British Museum to house the Parthenon, or Elgin, Marbles. The new gallery eventually cost over £100,000 and took ten years to complete. In 1937 Duveen bought Giorgione's Adoration of the Shepherds from Lord Allendale, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA. Duveen, who turned to philanthropy ‘as a means of consolidating his position among the nation's elite’, donated William Hogarth's The Graham Children and Correggio's Christ Taking Leave of his Mother to the National Gallery, and John Singer Sargent's Study of Mme Gautreau and Augustus John's Study for Madame Suggia to the Tate Gallery, London (Kehoe 2004, p. 505). He also financed several galleries at the Tate to house contemporary non-British paintings, one devoted to the work of Sargent, and in 1937 a new building comprising three large and two smaller galleries for contemporary sculpture. Furthermore, in 1932 he presented a gallery for early Italian paintings to the National Gallery and in 1933 he paid for an extension to the National Portrait Gallery. He paid for the decorations at the Wallace Collection and for Rex Whistler's mural decorations at the Tate, and was a generous contributor to the National Art Collections Fund (NACF, now the Art Fund). Duveen founded, financed, and organised the British Artists' Exhibitions Organisation for the encouragement of lesser-known British artists, and in 1931 he endowed a Chair for the History of Art at London University. He was a trustee of the Wallace Collection (from 1925), the National Gallery (1929–36), and the National Portrait Gallery (from 1933). He was a honorary member of the council of the NACF and of the council of the British School at Rome.
Duveen was made a baronet in 1927, and raised to the peerage as Baron Duveen of Millbank, commemorating his long association with the Tate Gallery (located on Millbank) in 1933. When in 1939 he sold the Elgin Marbles to the British Museum, he insisted that the once-colourful marbles should be scrubbed clean to their pristine whiteness before their installation in the Duveen Gallery, which caused the loss of all of their colour and much of their detail. In May 1939 Duveen came to London for the official opening of the Marbles at the British Museum, but under the weight of the controversy surrounding their cleaning, the ceremony was cancelled. Duveen died few days later of a cerebral haemorrhage at Claridge's Hotel, London, England on 25 May 1939. After his death, Armand Lowengard (Joseph Duveen's nephew) and Edward Fowles became joint owners of the family firm. When Lowengard died in 1943, Fowles assumed the presidency of Duveen Brothers. The Nazi occupation of France forced Duveen Brothers to evacuate Paris and the London office closed shortly thereafter. Although after the war Duveen Brothers had a number of notable clients, including Henry Ford II and Robert Lehman, the firm never regained its former prominence.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Joseph Duveen]
Publications related to [Joseph Duveen] in the Ben Uri Library