Oral history interview with S. Morton Vose, 1986 July 24-1987 April 28

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with S. Morton Vose, 1986 July 24-1987 April 28, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with S. Morton Vose
Conducted by Robert F. Brown
At his home in Brookline, Massachusetts
July 24, 1986-April 28, 1987

July 24, 1986 session
December 9, 1986 session
April 28, 1987 session

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with S. Morton Vose on July 24, 1986-April 28, 1987. The interview took place at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts and was conducted by Robert F. Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

[Tape 1 of 4]

ROBERT BROWN: This is an interview with S. Morton Vose at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. This is July 24, 1986 and I am Robert Brown, the interviewer. Perhaps we can begin at your beginning or at least your recollections of your early years, your immediate family. I guess we are going to concentrate on your career in art, your grandfather and his business. What about your - where was childhood, primarily. You were born here in Brookline weren't you?

S. MORTON VOSE: I was born here in Brookline, yes. I'm a stick in the mud. Both my wife and I were born here, she in this house, so we haven't moved far as my siblings have. What would you like to hear about - how early?

MR. BROWN: I would like to hear what was it like. What were early memories? What kind of a place did you grow up in?

MR. VOSE: We grew up across Beacon Street, starting at Kilsyth Road and then Salisbury Road, but finally and for many, many years, on Gardner Road in Brookline. I know you are more interested in what has to do with the galleries, so I might mention that during those years my father was almost always - it seemed to us as kids - traveling around the country on business. I remember table conversations of all sorts of intriguing far away places that sounded romantic, like St. Louis, even Duluth, where I haven't been yet. Very often, he was away three or four months at one time - I remember even the months over Christmas which were not happy for the kids, but he felt that this was necessary. Of course, in those days there was no plane travel. It was necessary to conserve your time, travel time. He was in California a great deal and he didn't get back in a day after a trip to California, as we do now. Once in awhile he would bring customers with him to dinner. I remember one gentleman who came. I don't remember now whether he was from St. Louis or possibly Detroit. Father had been mentioning that Mr. Ballard was a live wire or so called it. At the dinner table, I looked at him, stood there for awhile and finally said, "Is this the live wire?" which I think probably pleased him.

MR. BROWN: Was your mother involved in the business at all? What was her background?

MR. VOSE: No, she was not involved in the business except in a very supportive way. She had a family of five children to bring up and a house to maintain. She came - both my father and mother came from Providence. There - as you know, I think - our gallery was originally founded by my great grandfather in 1841. Mother was the daughter of a Brown University professor, Alonso Williams, a professor of languages. My parents met because he occasionally invited students of whom my father was one, to the house. The gallery, of course, move to Boston - as I think Bob will have explained - when my father got through college, took a trip to Europe - he finished college in 1896 and two years later, he opened in Boston, under his own name, although it was the same firm.

MR. BROWN: Was your grandfather in Boston occasionally too or did he mainly stay in Providence?

MR. VOSE: He was very definitely up in Boston occasionally. I don't know whether Bob has gone into this but he had a - during the 1880s and '90s he had - instead of galleries, what were called rooms because it was simply a couple of rooms on Bromfield Street at one time and then I think on School Street, where he would come a couple of times a week. He had very good business in Boston with the prominent collectors of those days such a as Messrs. Wigglesworth and Higginson and others. It might be interesting, if not significant, to mention the sort of traveling he did in those days which involved horse and buggy and train. They lived - the family lived on a farm in North Attleboro, Massachusetts - a regular working farm, which I remember as a child. It is gone now. According to my father's recollection, as he grew up there as a child, his father would have the horse and buggy hitched up in the morning. This was perhaps twice a week. He would trot into Pawtucket and put the horse in a livery stable, take the train to Providence - which of course was only a hop, skip, and jump - open up the galleries, give instructions for the day, take the train to Boston. He would perhaps arrive there by 10:30 or so and open up his rooms and perhaps put in three or four hours there, reverse the process, and get home for dinner perhaps seven or eight o'clock. That's an awful lot of motion in a day and I must say it must have taken energy. He was successful. Naturally, it wasn't every day. I well remember, myself, the farm, where my aunts - my father's sister and uncle lived. There were all sorts of regular goings on, chickens, cattle, horses, and so forth. There was another farm in Jamestown, Rhode Island, which we enjoyed as kids. It was a summer place, and which is the base where we used to mount exhibitions in Newport, at the art association. It is just a matter of crossing the ferry. We enjoyed that very much. I, to this day, do enjoy visiting there, doing research and so forth, and maintain my membership in the Redwood Library and Atheneum and the Art Association, which are interesting organizations which I support. That is, perhaps, off the track.

MR. BROWN: Did your mother follow or inherit somewhat from her father, the intellectual interests? Was she rather studious?

MR. VOSE: Yes, she had such a large family to take care of that she didn't have very much spare time. She loved gardening. She was at one time president of the Jamestown, Rhode Island garden club and so forth. During her childhood, her father as I said, was a professor of languages at Brown University. Of course, he would have sabbaticals at appropriate intervals, so that mother studied in Germany on two different occasions for the year, seven years apart. She spoke German well and enjoyed German literature. Her mother had written A Life of Goethe, but she was also a scholar. She died in Germany and was buried there as a matter of fact. Mother was very busy with household affairs, I'm afraid.

MR. BROWN: Were her interests and her influence upon you, were they fairly strong?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, very much so, yes. She was an extraordinary mother and an extraordinary person.

MR. BROWN: What sort of temperament did she have?

MR. VOSE: I would say that it was even, but fairly firm. In later years she enjoyed - when we were all grown and flown, you might say - she enjoyed doing civic work and that kind of thing and finally, taking care of my father when he was quite crippled. Although, he still went to the office every day.

MR. BROWN: Your father, what was his relation with you as small children? He was gone a bit, but when he was there.

MR. VOSE: He was gone and he was - I don't know what to say about that. He was very, very stern, extremely stern and didn't brook any nonsense whatever. When we were in Jamestown, in the summertime at the farm, he made very sure that we were not sitting around and fooling. We were weeding, mowing - mowing the grass - doing things that we should be doing to keep the place looking nice. It was a nice place. We rebelled to the extent of insisting that we wanted to swim when the tide was high. It didn't happen at the same time every day, which annoyed father no end. He felt we should stick to a regular schedule. I think that you might say that he had two great relaxations. One of them was digging rocks out of the field in Jamestown, of which there were more than you needed at all. He would even engage the old oxen, for tractors more or less - a yoke of oxen from down the road and a team of chaps who would dig around great rocks. Then, there was a wonderful machine. I think they were called gallamanders in quarry work. The oxen would move with this machine which had a great arch over it with a derrick and chain around the rock. It was cranked up by two men and carried down to the shore to build the sea wall. That, he enjoyed no end. Weekends - he didn't stay there at all over a week. He never would leave the office that long, but he would come down on Friday night, even staying sometimes until Monday night. The other was fishing off Beaver Tail Point. He loved to fish.

MR. BROWN: The southern tip of the island?

MR. VOSE: Yes. It was a great disappointment to him that I didn't like to eat fish, so I was conscience stricken about catching them. That disappointed father very much. Those two things were his great relaxations. He also was interested in genealogy, researching on genealogy.

MR. BROWN: Was that something you think common in this generation in New England, interest in genealogy?

MR. VOSE: Yes, I think it is something that has a resurgence today, don't you?

MR. BROWN: Yes.

MR. VOSE: I really do. It is a puzzle, rather fascinating if you have the time, to dig into your past. He had assembled a tremendous amount - all the publications of the New England Historic Genealogical Society during his lifetime. He had them bound and Bob has them now. That is getting away a little bit from the subject of our business.

MR. BROWN: He had been helping his father in the business since he was a young man?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, yes. He thoroughly idolized his father. He was always holding him up to us.

MR. BROWN: You didn't meet your grandfather did you? No?

MR. VOSE: Yes, I did, but I don't remember it. - I did. I was two years old or a year and a half when he died. Having been told that I sat in his lap and pulled his beard, I used to believe that I remembered that, but I think that is fancy - fantasy. I didn't meet him, no.

MR. BROWN: Your father, did he ever discuss the nature of his father and the way his father ran the business? Did he describe him?

MR. VOSE: Yes, he did. He had some very hard times as we later did in the Depression ourselves. He was often urged during those times to go into bankruptcy. He was adamant that he would never do any such thing. He would always pay off what he owed, eventually, somehow and he always did, which was a subject of admiration for his son. He was very strong minded. My father had a number of stories about his father - he used to say, "Of course father was the gentlest man imaginable." I think that may have been slightly overstated. When he felt that someone had done wrong, he let them know it in no uncertain terms. There are a number of anecdotes which I think support that.

MR. BROWN: What kind of training did your father ever indicate that he received from his father? I guess it was implied that you father would go into the business once he was through college.

MR. VOSE: There was no question about it as there was no question that his sons would also. There was no questions whatever about that. It made it very easy. You didn't have to struggle choosing a career. He simply followed his father. He used to go inn after school, which apparently was nearby in Providence. He stayed there in the gallery to see what was going on and of course, later, to assist his father. His father had very strong ideas about what he believed in the way of art, always quite conservative.

MR. BROWN: What were some of those that you recall that your grandfather held - some of his ideas?

MR. VOSE: He was very conservative, but - he was before his time in appreciating the Barbizon school of French painting. I'm sure Bob has mentioned this.

MR. BROWN: He was truly one of the greater dealers in American in the Barbizon school.

MR. VOSE: Yes, oh yes, he was. Many of the Barbizon school paintings in the museums especially Corot and Millet and other Barbizon painters Daubigny, Diaz - would have come from him, through his Boston connections, with his rooms in Boston and his friendship with William Morris Hunt. They were great friends. Hunt, of course was the - as you know - the person to introduce appreciation of French Barbizon painting to Boston. There were a number of stories. I'm sure Bob told you the story about their first meeting.

MR. BROWN: No.

MR. VOSE: I wish that there had been recording television at that time, so one could see this episode. According to father - this was before his birth actually - for some extraordinary reason, my grandfather purchased - didn't take on consignment or memo, but purchased about ten Corots. I hope I have the number right. I think that's it. I'm not sure. He was exhibiting them in his gallery in Providence - the Westminster Art Gallery, he called it. People were staying away in droves. They never heard of this wild Frenchman and didn't care for his work. My grandfather was quite depressed. On one occasion, he was sitting at his desk near the door, when a gentleman walked in, a stranger. He was bearded, as my grandfather was, which was the customary fashion in that day. He just said, "May I look around?" He said, "Certainly." If I understand it correctly, there were two galleries, one beyond the other and it was in the further one that the Corots were exhibited. This man poked around the first gallery and finally went to the second one, and came galloping out in high excitement. He seized my grandfather, by both shoulders and tried to kiss him on both cheeks in the manner that was customary in France. You can imagine an old Yankee being a little bit put off. This was William Morris Hunt. He had not realized that anybody, any dealer, in the United States knew anything about Corot or Barbizon paintings. He said, "Where did you get them? I didn't know anyone had them." It was the start of a friendship that lasted until his death.

MR. BROWN: Do you know how your grandfather had gotten them?

MR. VOSE: I haven't the slightest idea and I never heard any explanation on how he happened to do this. Excepting - well, of course there is the probability that the painter Thomas Robinson, who later on became his agent, may have influenced him. - I suppose it is the only possible explanation - may have talked to him about Corot because they knew each other and later on worked together.

MR. BROWN: Robinson had been in Europe.

MR. VOSE: Robinson had trained in Europe. Of course today, he is more or less forgotten, as being one of the typical late nineteenth century painters of cows and fields and so forth. He was a darn good painter. He started really as an animal painter, but then went on to landscape, using the cattle as was so customary then. I think it was a very amusing story at least. I'm sure it was the truth.

MR. BROWN: It is a fact that Robinson did become an agent to France for your grandfather.

MR. VOSE: He did. That's true.

MR. BROWN: That went sour in the end as I understand.

MR. VOSE: It sadly did, yes. Robinson made an extraordinary number of trips abroad for my grandfather. I think there is mention of an astronomical number like 29 or something like that. Grandfather would advance him money to purchase for him on a share basis and so forth. I think one of the unfortunate things was that various customers of my father's finally heard about Robinson and persuaded him to accept money from them to purchase. Although he had a contract, a very distinct contract, that he was to purchase only for my grandfather in return for what he was getting. They persuaded him to do the same for them. That was one of the things that caused a rift.

MR. BROWN: At this time there was sort of a precautionary lesson to be learned which I suppose your father imbibed from his father. You have to be careful about business associates, taking things on trust.

MR. VOSE: Indeed yes. My grandfather had several partners which my father never did. The firm was - Vose and Gillespie - Gillespie and Vose and it was Vose and Huxford as the last one. I, myself, remember meeting Mr. Huxford many years after my grandfather died, in Providence when I was a young boy. He reminded me of Santa Clause at that time.

MR. BROWN: He, apparently did a lot of the framing and the practical sort of thing.

MR. VOSE: Yes, he was really a woodworking specialist. I think when he left - when they parted company, his main business then was making shutters, blinds, window frames, that kind of thing. I saw the machine shop that he still kept - he was 98, I think, when I saw him. He had not used it in many years, but it was still there. He took my father and me - I was just accompanying him as a child - to see it, to see if father wanted to buy any of the woodworking equipment, which he didn't as I remember. But, I recall that Mr. Huxford turned on the power and the thing hadn't been used for a long time. Dust flew everywhere. Sparks flew out of things. Frayed belts snapped. My father kept shouting, "Turn off the power." I recall that as a child.

MR. BROWN: That was quite an experience.

MR. VOSE: Again, I think we are getting off the track.

MR. BROWN: No, this is absolutely good to hear. Your childhood was mainly spent out of Jamestown or in Brookline? You mentioned that you did have - I think it was your grandfather and then your father's bookkeeper - Sibbie Marsh?

MR. VOSE: Sibbie Horn Marsh was just simply a member of the family as Elsie is today, perhaps.

MR. BROWN: Elsie Oliver at the gallery?

MR. VOSE: Yes. Although, Sibbie actually lived with us at certain times. She wasn't married. - She came to my grandfather's family as a seamstress to sew as was the custom then, wedding clothes for my aunt, my eldest aunt, father's oldest sister, and then stayed on as bookkeeper and really was with the firm for fifty - oh, it must have been more than fifty years - it must have been sixty years. She was still coming to the gallery when my brothers and I were first there. Eventually, of course, of usefulness, she really was beyond the age, but you didn't discharge somebody like that. She was not about to retire so she would often come sit and go to sleep, when she was over eighty, at the desk, but she was welcome to come. She was really an influence on us.

MR. BROWN: Why would you say?

MR. VOSE: She had high standards which she would always inculcate. She even took three of my father's children, namely my two brothers and me, three years in succession on vacations with her and her school teacher sister, to an island off the coast of Maine. I don't know how that could be arranged, but she must be wearing a halo now, I think. I can't imagine taking your boss's kids on your vacation.

MR. BROWN: How many of you would be going on that?

MR. VOSE: I first went alone, the first year. Bob and I the second and then Herbert, and Bob, and I.

MR. BROWN: Did your sisters ever go?

MR. VOSE: No, they were much, much younger.

MR. BROWN: Were there any incidents up in Maine that you can recall or that stands out?

MR. VOSE: Yes, they do indeed.

MR. BROWN: That's good. I'd like to know.

MR. VOSE: I recall - something did happen later, which was surprising. Years and years later, I was approached by somebody who wanted to sell a collection of paintings which were, as they said, in a farm house on an island off the coast of Maine. They asked if I would go and look at them. It sounded interesting. I had business in Rockland and stayed overnight with my friends the Wendell Hadlocks. He was director of the Farnsworth Museum and a great friend both of Ruth's and mine. When he heard what I was going to do the next day, he said he was not about to let anything slip through his fingers which had to do with paintings and in his bailiwick. He said, "Hey, I'll go with you." Well, I was very glad to have him. It turned out this was the same island. By now, it was connected with a bridge. It hadn't been before. I began to recognize, dimly, landmarks of twenty or thirty years ago. Finally, following directions which they gave me, I said, "Wendell, this should be the place. There is a house down by the water, but this is not the house. I don't understand this. I just am certain that this was where the first house we stayed in was and this is an old house. Something is wrong, but never mind." We went down and went to work. These paintings were stored in the basement. It was a dirt cellar. Can you imagine? They had been there, thank goodness, only one winter, but that was long enough. Wendell and I stationed ourselves at the entrance and the family had a bucket brigade going. They would bring a painting out and we would either put our thumbs up or down and put them in different stacks. In the middle of things, we were invited to stop and join the family for lunch. I still couldn't understand this business of location and the different house. We were sitting at the table and the elderly grandmother was present. She hadn't heard any of the conversation. She was very deaf. Finally, she reached down to her purse on the floor by her side and pulled out a photograph and said, "Perhaps Mr. Vose would like to see a picture of this house when my husband and I first bought it." There was the house that I remembered! It had been changed all around. The porch that I remembered had been taken off and a few shrubs and things changed. There was only one trouble. It was not the same house inside either. Then, she went on to say, "Of course we removed partitions inside and enlarged rooms." The mystery was solved. It was the same house, which I thought was an amusing coincidence. The experience was interesting, too. It was one of those things that happen that turn out interestingly in our business. There were all sorts of paintings - American, foreign, all periods. It was just an extraordinary mishmash, and a few very good ones. It ended up that I bought quite a number. I left the house very delighted with several China trade port pictures. Two of them were signed by Sung Qua which was a rarity and a delight to me. I suggested the others be sent to auction and arranged with Louis Joseph, in those days head of an auction gallery on Commonwealth Avenue. He stipulated that no junk be sent. I told them that and left it to them. Awhile later I got a missive on Louis Joseph stationary. All that appeared on the paper was a rough sketch of a devil, flames coming out of his mouth and his initials underneath. Apparently they had dumped everything on poor Louis. The episode was interesting and it was an example of how you run into things unexpectedly.

MR. BROWN: It sounds like that was a rather idyllic place for you as children, when you went with Sibbie Marsh.

MR. VOSE: Oh, it was, very much so.

MR. BROWN: You said she inculcated standards.

MR. VOSE: Oh, yes.

MR. BROWN: Was she rather strict in your daily routine?

MR. VOSE: She was a very sweet lady, but she saw that standards were maintained and didn't let anybody get away too far with things.

MR. BROWN: Were your brothers apt to be rather rambunctious I suppose?

MR. VOSE: I suppose so. - I suppose that Herbert was the most rambunctious. He had the most vim and vigor, maybe and I have probably the least, but we enjoyed it.

MR. BROWN: As a young man - coming into say teenage - were you quite bookish or did you read a lot?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, I did. I suppose I am one of the bookish types. I enjoyed reading, yes, surely.

MR. BROWN: You began school here in Brookline, I suppose.

MR. VOSE: Yes, right here in public school in Brookline, the Runkle School and then one year at the high school here. After that, three years at the Newton Country Day School before going to Harvard.

MR. BROWN: Did you concentrate in any particular thing in high school?

MR. VOSE: No, in those days, you didn't concentrate very much. Now, you can. In those days it was just the regular curriculum. Of course, I was expected to go on to college and concentrate on fine arts, but my father was thoroughly disgusted because the Fogg Museum had no interest in American painting at all. I'm kind of glad because I never would have had much contact with seventeenth century Dutch painting, renaissance Italian, if I had not concentrated in fine arts at Harvard. I was fortunate in having some very interesting lecturers.

MR. BROWN: Who were some of them? Can you describe some of them?

MR. VOSE: Oh surely. One that I remember particularly well because I knew him later in different guise was George Harold Edgehill. I'm not sure you know him. He really was a professor of architecture at Harvard, but he also lectured in fine arts and perfectly charmingly. He was a rapid speaker, but a very distinct and very charming one. I'm told that he lectured in Italian and French equally well and had perfect diction and accent. Of course later on he directed the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston and I did business with him there, very pleasantly indeed. Another interesting lecturer there, was professor Chandler R. Post, who had the overwhelming title of Professor of Greek and the Fine Arts. He was just simply the epitome of a scholar. He had interesting theories on lecturing and teaching. I thought about it afterwards, I think he made a point of sounding outrageous sometimes, which sticks in your memory. Sometimes his questions on examinations were most unusual. He would force you to prove that you had paid attention, although the particular incident that he might require was very unimportant, such as, "What renaissance Italian Florentine painter was captured by Barbary pirates while fishing off the coast of Sicily," or something like that, which you could perhaps not connect very much with his painting career. But did you pay attention to it and had you read the biography and so forth?

MR. BROWN: He was a fairly stern teacher, was he?

MR. VOSE: Oh, indeed he was. I came to like him very much and we got along well.

MR. BROWN: At that point did you think you might want to go on in a scholarly career?

MR. VOSE: Well, it never occurred to me because I knew perfectly well I wasn't going to. I might just go on a little bit with Professor Post as an example. This happened, I understand, every year, but of course it always seemed new to the successive classes. On one occasion he finished a lecture and he would say, "And that concludes my remarks for today, Gentlemen. On Monday, I shall commence my annual vituperation of Leonardo da Vinci." On Monday, he would start off, "Leonardo da Vinci was a bastard." He meant that literally, which he was. "And like all illegitimate children, he had a nasty disposition." Then he would go on - [missing dialogue] - about the life of da Vinci. I understand this happened every year, the same comment.

MR. BROWN: This is pretty strong stuff. It is a pretty vivid presentation for you as a young student, wasn't it?

MR. VOSE: Very much so.

MR. BROWN: They were mostly lectures then, were they not?

MR. VOSE: Oh, no you had - well, examinations and lectures. You have probably heard of Professor Arthur Pope, who was a painter and who taught the preliminary course in fine arts. You had to take that. You had to do some painting; I was persuaded that I was not a painter by that course. But Professor Post -

MR. BROWN: Pope or Post?

MR. VOSE: No, I'm thinking back to Post - was not to be fooled with at all. Professor Pope was a very gentle person. I recall the difference between him and, for instance, Professor Merriman, who was a famous history teacher. He used to stand and lecture on a platform. If anyone came in with his hat on in the winter, he would knock it off with his pointer. I remember Professor Pope having to deal with a very stupid, hopeless student, who would always arrive later, and instead of entering from the rear as he could have done, would enter from the front. Pope would be lecturing, standing by the door and this student would open the door and squash him against the wall, then amble to his seat and sit down. Pope never said a word.

MR. BROWN: He was a gentle soul.

MR. VOSE: Which is more effective, I thought. That's an interesting thought.

MR. BROWN: Pope's course, what did you derive from that?

MR. VOSE: It was theoretical in the sense that he spoke a great deal about color relations. He was an authority on that sort of thing. He had devised a color cone and so forth and so on, which I must say, I didn't find very interesting. I had to pass it, but this was intended for people who were going to be much more technical than I intended to be. I liked him very much.

MR. BROWN: But was the theoretical course or content of this, not particularly appealing to you?

MR. VOSE: Simply that I was just glad to get through with it. I was more interested in the history of painting and also in the paintings themselves.

MR. BROWN: Did his introductory course also include lectures on the old history of painting?

MR. VOSE: Yes, but it was skimpy. He hadn't time.

MR. BROWN: Once over lightly?

MR. VOSE: Yes, that's right, exactly. Fine Arts 1A, it was the first thing you have to take.

MR. BROWN: Did you also work with the museum where they had courses where people made frescos and that sort of thing or was that for more advanced students?

MR. VOSE: That would be for more advanced students, although as a senior, you know, you had a tutor, but it didn't necessarily mean you were dumb. It just meant that - you were always assigned a tutor as a senior, who would supervise what you were doing in preparation for getting a degree. He would often assign you something, some object or some painting in the museum to write about.

MR. BROWN: Who did you have as a tutor?

MR. VOSE: I had two. It's getting so far back, I'm almost forgetting.

MR. BROWN: One of your tutors was Charles Kuhn?

MR. VOSE: Yes, he - for some reason I didn't relate quite as well with him as I did with another, A. K. McComb, who helped me a great deal. He afterwards retired from the Fogg and became a dealer. He used to come in and borrow things from me occasionally. But in the beginning there, I found him very helpful.

MR. BROWN: Would you meet almost weekly with this person?

MR. VOSE: No, it probably was monthly. It didn't seem to be as many as that as I recall now.

MR. BROWN: You would write an essay for them or something of that sort?

MR. VOSE: Yes, that's right. I remember being scandalized. Kuhn asked me to examine a figure, a Hellenistic head, which was - a sculpted head which was there - and write something about its origins and so forth, where it came out. I could find absolutely nothing about it. I went to him and confessed. I said, "Well, what is the story?" He said, "I don't know." Which was perfectly alright, but at the moment it just scandalized me that he would ask me to do something that he did not know. I have never gone into that area at all anyway. I didn't do that well in that particular case.

MR. BROWN: What about other well known professors at the time that you had contact with? Have you met Kingsley Porter, for example?

MR. VOSE: Kingsley Porter, I never studied with him. I used to see him. I knew him a little bit. He was very ethereal sort of man. As I remember he had a strange mysterious end. He was drowned off the coast of Ireland, sailing. There were strange rumors that he wanted to get away from it all and staged the thing, and that he was somewhere else. I don't know about that. Then there was Professor Chase, whom I liked very much. He was described as "the great little man." He was a very nice lecturer and a very understanding teacher.

MR. BROWN: What did he teach you? What were your classes with him?

MR. VOSE: I forget exactly what the courses were I took with him. It was 56 years ago. But I remember that they were meaningful and I enjoyed them. I enjoyed him very much.

MR. BROWN: Would you have worked at all with Edward Forbes or Paul Sacks?

MR. VOSE: Yes. I am perhaps a renegade, but I disliked Paul Sacks intensely, personally, and I liked Edward Forbes very much indeed. Sacks, to my mind, was overbearing and top lofty. I thought then, he used to treat the employees who worked the slide machines and so forth, in a very unpleasant and disagreeable manner. I did not like him. He certainly was a scholar and I probably missed something by disliking him. But, I thought Edward Forbes was a loveable person, quite delightful. I didn't have any courses with him, but I knew him quite well. I was invited to his house a couple of times and so forth.

MR. BROWN: You were fairly - it was a fairly small group so you would get to know, to a degree, even people with whom you did not have courses.

MR. VOSE: That's true, yes.

MR. BROWN: The matter of inviting students to their houses was fairly common wasn't it?

MR. VOSE: Yes, I wouldn't say extremely common, but once in a while, yes. That's right. Those were interesting experiences for me. I didn't do very much in the way of extracurricular things there because I was so busy trying to run the Boy Scout troop at the First Parish Church over here and so forth. I made that my extracurricular activity.

MR. BROWN: While you were in college?

MR. VOSE: Yes. Then, I came to the gallery with father in '31.

MR. BROWN: Were there classmates in the fine arts that you were close to and some that went on to careers in the arts?

MR. VOSE: Yes, there were. There were three museum directors who came out of our class. One of them is still living, Lesley Cheek. The Cheek career was at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, although, he had been at Baltimore before that. Lesley has been living in retirement. He sent me an extraordinary book, which somebody put together on his career, illustrated, just because of our 55th anniversary reunion which took place this year. There was also Hermann Warner Williams - Bill, we called him - who was the director of the Corcoran Gallery for many years, who was a very good friend of mine. Frederick Robinson, Frederick Bruce Robinson, who was the director of the Springfield, Massachusetts, museum for most of his career and he was a very good friend of mine too. I saw more of them than I did of Lesley. I keep in touch with Lesley now. We correspond and so forth. There was at least one other art dealer. I can't think of his name. He only just recently died. He hasn't been in Boston for many years, but he did take over the Grace Horn Gallery in Boston. Oh, Richard Rideout, his name was. He ran the Grace Horn Gallery.

MR. BROWN: Were these - as young men, did you have many discussions of art or things of that sort?

MR. VOSE: No.

MR. BROWN: It wasn't taken so seriously.

MR. VOSE: I don't think we did really.

MR. BROWN: You were just general chums of that time.

MR. VOSE: That's right. Of course, a good many of my friends there were not in the art field at all so it doesn't perhaps relate.

MR. BROWN: You lived at home, didn't you?

MR. VOSE: No, I didn't.

MR. BROWN: You lived at Harvard?

MR. VOSE: My parents thought that it would be better for future relationships if I lived there. I could have lived at home -. No, I lived all four years at Harvard, starting with the freshman dorms, which were very nice. They are on the river. Those buildings are all now part of the house plan, which only came in in my last year. I didn't get into that and I'm glad really because I lived three years in the Yard, I lived in Stoughton Hall my senior year.

MR. BROWN: Your last year, you lived…

MR. VOSE: My last year was in Stoughton, which is one of the very old buildings in the Yard. I was very glad for that experience.

MR. BROWN: Was that because you were more in the center of things?

MR. VOSE: Yes. It was more traditional. That was what college was in the old days. The two previous years I had lived in Weld.

MR. BROWN: What other kinds of studies did you undertake besides fine arts?

MR. VOSE: I was…

MR. BROWN: Was there anything else on which you spent some time?

MR. VOSE: I was much interested in languages and I did take the French, German, Spanish literature courses and so forth and enjoyed those very much. You have to diversify. I took one course in philosophy in which I didn't do very well. Probably because of that - the professor committed suicide towards the end of the course.

[END OF TAPE ONE SIDE A]

MR. BROWN: You had graduated then from Harvard.

MR. VOSE: In '31.

MR. BROWN: In '31. Did you then take a little time off?

MR. VOSE: No, my father would not have been interested in that one little bit.

MR. BROWN: He had been given a year of travel after graduating.

MR. VOSE: He had, but he wanted help right away. In fact, as you probably know, my cousin, Charles Thompson, had been with the firm quite awhile before that. He was a much older first cousin.

MR. BROWN: He was your aunt's - your father's older sister's child.

MR. VOSE: One of his older sisters. My grandfather's children came over a span of 23 years. The eldest, in other words, was 23 years older than my uncle, my father's younger brother. The boys were the two last to arrive. It was my - Hattie Thompson - who was Charlie's mother. She grew up on the farm there in North Attleboro where my father had grown up.

MR. BROWN: Thompson was - when you graduated from Harvard, then you were going to say something about Charles Thompson.

MR. VOSE: Simply that he had been there, with the firm, for quite a long - quite a number of years before we came along because he was quite a lot older than my brothers and I. For instance, my father's brother Nat, had also been with the firm. It was R.C. and N.M. Vose for a number of years, until 1923, when they separated and the new gallery in Copley Square was built for father.

MR. BROWN: You had gone in during summers while you were at college and helped in some way?

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: What sort of things would you do in those days, I guess about 1927, you said?

MR. VOSE: Yes, all sorts of things that had to be done in a place like that, running errands to begin with, manning the gallery. It was a very large third floor gallery. In fact, it was one large gallery and two smaller ones. It was the largest exhibition gallery in Boston outside of the Museum in those days.

MR. BROWN: Perhaps you can describe the Copley Square building, the facilities there?

MR. VOSE: Yes, it was quite interesting. It was built to father's specifications. He was very friendly with an art dealer in Minneapolis by the name of Beard. Mr. Beard helped him design the gallery. It was a four story building, but the top story was only on the front part so as to leave skylight space for the big gallery at the rear. The first floor was always rented out. - Actually, father did not own it.

MR. BROWN: He rented it as well?

MR. VOSE: It was built to his specifications by a landlord. He didn't want the first floor, which I think may have been a mistake. He felt that you get continual coming and going if people are just curious. It may be true, but I think that perhaps it was unwise because the necessity of going up an elevator or stairs, sometimes is annoying to people. The gallery space was on the second, third, and fourth floors. On the second floor, which you came to first, was the office space in front, two offices in front. Then, there was a long corridor toward the back, paralleled by stockrooms, which were where paintings were stored in racks. That opened out into a private gallery, a private showroom, where customers could be brought down to look at things in private, which was very convenient. Although, perhaps as an after thought, one might say it would have been better to have the gallery in front and the office behind, especially from the point of view of light. Then, on the third floor, was the main exhibition gallery. At the rear, the whole rear half of the building, was a very large modern gallery, which at the time was the most modern in Boston. When the new Fogg Museum was built, architects came over to look at that.

MR. BROWN: How was it? What made it so modern?

MR. VOSE: It had all sorts of controls for light and ventilation, which were considered quite modern at that time. The skylight, of course, provided daylight, but sometimes we didn't' want bright sun and so forth. There were louvers which could be controlled at each corner of the gallery by opening a little door. It was like a closet door and there was a great big crank to crank the louvers up and down to control the light. Also, there were huge shades, like window shades, only horizontal, which could be drawn across - horizontally, across the ceiling, if you wanted to, across the glass. This really worked very well. Then, the elevator opened into the center, where there was a big reception area, a fireplace and so forth, and then, two smaller galleries, one much smaller than the other, opening out above the street on the third floor. - It had French windows. One was called the etching room. In those days we did carry prints, which we haven't for many years now. My cousin, Charles Thompson, was the print man. When he died, my brothers and I felt that that really was a specialty and that it was a little late for us to go into it. We discontinued the prints. The fourth floor was the studio, which again had a skylight, north light. It was intended for visiting artists. There also was a work room. There was room for that.

MR. BROWN: Visiting artist, by that you mean, excuse me, people who wished to work there?

MR. VOSE: The portrait painters. We were continually being asked to commission portraits by an artist whom we had recommended. Very often the portrait would be done right there. As a result, a great many very interesting people came through the doors. Many of the governors of Massachusetts - the State Capital, the State House, has a collection of portraits of governors. Many of these were done through us - painted upstairs there and done through our gallery. There were interesting commissions such as the one for Mr. DiFerarri, who at the time, was rather celebrated as being the son of an Italian street vendor, who started out that way with a push cart and ended up being a millionaire. He gave a huge sum to the Boston Public Library. They say he had never been to school, but he educated himself at the Boston Public Library. He was a character. Even at that time, it was said that he never slept in the same place twice. He had various beds in basements, and so forth, all around Boston. Leopold Seyffert was an artist we used a great deal. He was an excellent portrait painter. Seyffert started painting him in a rather majestic pose, seated in a big arm chair, with his arms on the sides of the chair, looking rather grand. He got about halfway through and DiFerarri suddenly jumped up and shouted, "This is no good. People will think I'm a feeble old man and can't stand up. Destroy that and paint me standing up," which he did. It's over at the library now. This sort of thing, of course, is just amusing.

MR. BROWN: Did you meet these people and these artists as a young man before you came on with the firm?

MR. VOSE: Well, this was during the time I was with the firm. This is what went on. I remember that very well.

MR. BROWN: Seyffert then was quite a character.

MR. VOSE: He was.

MR. BROWN: He was strong with the bottle. What about the incident when Curley came around, James Michael Curley?

MR. VOSE: James Michael Curley, himself, was a character of course. I remember a number of things about him that were amusing. He was a great speaker, though, no question about it. I heard him speak at the dedication of the DiFerarri portraits at the Boston Public Library, which Seyffert had painted. There were also the president of Boston University and the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts and the director of the library. They spoke and then Curley spoke. He put them all to shame. It was extraordinary, the way he out did them in his speaking.

MR. BROWN: He was very eloquent?

MR. VOSE: Eloquent, yes. He was one of those who was painted by Seyffert, in our studio upstairs on the top floor. Mr. Seyffert did like the bottle quite well. On one occasion, Curley arrived and Mr. Seyffert was not in a condition to paint him. This amused Mr. Curley. It didn't annoy him at all. He went back and said he would come tomorrow.

MR. BROWN: Curley is someone who you got to know off and on or see off and on over the years?

MR. VOSE: In that connection and in other places, such as that dedication and so forth, I used to see him. Yes, he came there one time and it was some - I guess, perhaps Seyffert hadn't been able to come or something, and he thought he would like to speak with my father, but Dad was busy. He sat down and told me a story, which he apparently expected me to believe. It was the most outrageous thing I had ever heard about how President Conant of Harvard tried to bribe him by subtle means to make the - how did that go. I've got to have it straight. Yes, he said he wanted Curley to appoint a young nephew of Conant's who had just finished medical school, to be director of the Boston City Hospital. In return, Harvard Medical School would use the Boston City Hospital. It was sort of a bribe situation and he invited Curley to lunch, at his home in Cambridge to make this proposal. According to Curley, he said, "Why Mr. Conant, I couldn't possibly do that. We already have a properly qualified director," and so forth and so on. According to him the President said, "What? You won't do it," and he threw down his napkin and jumped up and left the room. Curley said, "I simply finished my first course. I was brought dessert. Then, I said to the butler, 'And now my good man, you may bring me coffee and a good cigar.'" This was told seriously as though I was supposed to believe it, but this was Mr. Curley all over.

MR. BROWN: He would perhaps embroider or fashion out of whole cloth to make certain points?

MR. VOSE: I just don't know how he would have expected anyone to believe that, but he delivered it in great detail.

MR. BROWN: You had returned to Jamestown - into the '30s you had the farm.

MR. VOSE: Yes, actually into the early '40s.

MR. BROWN: You mentioned that down there there was another artist, a woman, Catherine Morris Wright.

MR. VOSE: Catherine Morris Wright, yes. ANA - she was an associate of the National Academy. She was - is an extraordinary woman. She was a Quaker. In fact, she rescued the huge old Quaker meeting house in Newport from destruction and presented it to the Newport Historical Society, which keeps it open to visitors. She also supported the little one in Jamestown which is still there. The incident I think I may have mentioned was that she and her husband were between my parents and us children, - and friendly to both. They appeared with their children at Casacet as our farm was called, one Sunday afternoon to visit. We were all - the kids were all dressed in our Sunday afternoon togs and sitting well behaved on the porch. Her twin sons, who were very young, got into a squabble out on the lawn. Remember that she was a Quaker. She called out, "Ellicot, Ellicot, what ails thee? Has thee no guts," which I always remembered as a wonderful nonresistant Quaker remark. That was typical of Kit. She was a very good painter and is represented in museums. She is still living at the present time, but as I say, extremely elderly, not well.

MR. BROWN: What were your duties when you came in full time? Your father knew you had the fine arts background. You still handled a lot of European work didn't you?

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: Did he expect you, perhaps, to show some expertise or develop some in that?

MR. VOSE: He expected us to develop some, yes. He was not thoroughly thrilled with the curriculum at Harvard because he thought that it didn't give nearly enough attention to American painting and also to more contemporary things. Not contemporary in the way of modern, which he loathed, but…

MR. BROWN: At least of this century.

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: By the way, did he have a great interest in American art by the '20s?

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: Were they selling a good deal? American art was by then, quite a prominent part of the inventory wasn't it?

MR. VOSE: It was, yes - actually, eighteenth century American art. He didn't care much of what was being done. Although, up until the New York school became prominent, he handled living American artists very prominently and knew many of them, too. People who were working in New York at that time and around the country.

MR. BROWN: But he felt that your Harvard education hadn't equipped you for what he wanted you to develop.

MR. VOSE: I think he felt that I hadn't developed very well in that respect. We simply went into everything that had to be done there, from as I say, running errands to manning the gallery upstairs, taking care of people who come in. Hopefully, making sales.

MR. BROWN: Did your father school you in how to approach people?

MR. VOSE: Oh, yes.

MR. BROWN: Can you describe what his suggestions were?

MR. VOSE: He had criticism quite often as to how we had done things. He would sometimes criticize - "You shouldn't have said that. That's not the way to approach a customer," and so forth and so on, this kind of thing.

MR. BROWN: Did you ever see him in action? You must have.

MR. VOSE: Continually.

MR. BROWN: What was his approach? How would he persuade someone, even someone fairly reluctant?

MR. VOSE: He had a great facility for talking somebody down. I remember particularly, many years after the period we are talking about, I had sold a magnificent Albert Bierstadt painting to a collector here in the Boston area. The next day, after I had hung it, and they had agreed to purchase it, they called up and said it was overpowering and they were afraid they were going to have to cancel the sale. Awhile later, my father said to me, "I hope you don't mind, but I called them up and persuaded them differently." I said, "How did you do that?" He said, "I told them how disappointed I was and how thrilled I had been that this painting was going to stay in Boston and be part of such a prominent collection and so forth and how disappointed I was." It ended up that they decided to keep it. It was something that I probably would not have been able to do. I'm not sure that I would not be able to now.

MR. BROWN: He could be quite eloquent.

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, yes indeed. I remember in that same vein, in those days the city of Boston quite often would send around a tax expert who would usually - we didn't think always on the up and up - try to persuade the city that you owed a great deal more on the taxes on your inventory, then you thought you did. I recall a man coming one time and father explained to him the difficulties which, as he claimed, a really serious art dealer had these days. He had a whole pile of catalogues which he kept ready - sales catalogues. These were all New York school paintings. There would be abstractions, nonobjective things, and so forth. Then, he would start showing these things and go on showing. This fellow would get more, and more exhausted, "Yes, I understand, Mr. Vose." "But look, but look." This went on until the poor fellow was completely exhausted and would leave. I used to watch this with mouth open, but it really succeeded.

MR. BROWN: He also knew how to - had wonderful stalling tactics.

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, he did.

MR. BROWN: His office, and I suppose yours, were on the second floor. Is that right?

MR. VOSE: The second floor.

MR. BROWN: Near that was the smaller gallery? Was that the one -?

MR. VOSE: That was way at the back.

MR. BROWN: That was one that he used to present paintings to special customers?

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: Who was taken there, important customers?

MR. VOSE: Customers who wanted to discuss something privately. There was no reason to do that openly with a lot of other people around.

MR. BROWN: How was that set up?

MR. VOSE: It had hangings, of course, around the walls, with paintings behind the hangings. You could part them. But, it also had a number of easels, free standing easels, with paintings covered with a drape that you could simply flip it over the back to reveal the painting, with a cluster light in the ceiling, which I now have upstairs. It was very ancient then. It was moved from the gallery at 398 Boylston in 1923, when that was demolished. People would be taken down there, down the corridor from the elevator. You could part the curtains, go in, and close them again and be completely private. There were a number of other amusing incidents that happened in that connection, but - if you want me to speak of those.

MR. BROWN: Yes.

MR. VOSE: Karolik was later, of course.

MR. BROWN: Give some of those incidents.

MR. VOSE: Later on, after I had been there for a number of years, one of the most interesting customers that I ever had put in an appearance. That was Maxim Karolik. Anybody who is interested in the Museum in Boston knows about him. He was a character of the first order of course, a Russian musician, a Russian singer, who had come penniless to this country and had the good fortune to marry a very wealthy Boston and Newport lady, who financed him from then on in his collecting. There was some little talk about her reason for doing this. Perhaps to guide him away from certain other interests he might have had, but he went into it with enthusiasm. Dealing with him was certainly the most interesting experience I have ever had in my dealing career, but it was not the easiest by any means. It was sort of a regular routine that he went through. If he was somewhat interested in the painting he would say, "Ha! Now how much costs such a painting?" I would perhaps say, "Well, Mr. Karolik, we have to ask so much for it." "Aha, so that is your price? Now, commences the beating down." I would say, "Mr. Karolik, the beating down always has taken place beforehand. I told you the price. We quote you lowest we can." Well, that didn't go over. This would go on for a long time. Finally, he would perhaps agree. "Ha, that's lovely. Now, you give me the measurement." It took me a long time to realize that in his vocabulary the measurement was the literal ruler, not the dimension. He insisted on measuring it himself. He would say, "Now, you hold it so." He would measure it. "Now, you hold it so." He turned it over. He would, in the meantime, be holding forth his sometimes slightly off color comments, such as his reason for doing it himself: "As one lady said to me. I believe you, but I don't trust you." This kind of thing was part of his repertoire. Of course, he was thinking of the Museum of Fine Arts and the eventual destination of this painting.

MR. BROWN: Why did he have to measure each one? For his own -

MR. VOSE: He insisted and he never had a notebook. He kept old envelopes in his pocket. He would write on the back of the envelope. I never knew why it was necessary to measure it then, but it seemed to be. Perhaps, because he wanted to report to the Museum. The Mooseum, he would call it. Sometimes, he had to consult the Museum. Mr. W.E. Constable, the curator of paintings was his guide in this case. On one occasion or on some occasions, he would say, "Ha, lovely. Now, you bring it to the Museum. You bring it at eleven o'clock, to the painting department." Then if - by that time, I was saying goodbye to him on the sidewalk, and there was a good enough audience around, he would turn and say, "You bring it in the name of Karolik," in loud tones so that people knew who he was and what he was doing. I would get to the Museum at eleven o'clock, take the picture to the painting department, and he would be there with Mr. Constable. He would say, "Ha, that's lovely. Go and observe the collections. It will improve your mind," thus dismissing me. This is what I had to put up with for years. It paid and the whole thing was rather interesting.

MR. BROWN: These would begin in that private viewing room.

MR. VOSE: Oh, yes.

MR. BROWN: You had the lighting, the cluster lighting and drapery and all. Was this to dramatize the presentation?

MR. VOSE: It was really to make it look - well, to see the pictures better.

MR. BROWN: It was very intense light, wasn't it?

MR. VOSE: Yes, it was quite intense. We speak about the gallery on the second floor being private and it mostly was, but on one occasion a rather comical episode took place. There was a rather gushy lady who wanted to see my father. She said she had heard so much about Mr. Vose. She was looking forward to seeing him. I escorted her back there. At that time, my father was quite crippled and he preferred to wait until people were seated and the curtains were drawn, so he wouldn't have to be seen hobbling down the long corridor on his crutches. Just after I got her seated, I said, "I'll go and get my father." At that point, Maxim Karolik came out of the elevator. There was no "by your leave," in his case. He came striding down the corridor. I started to say, "Mr. Karolik, there is someone there." But it didn't make any difference at all. He barged through the curtain. This lady, mistaking him for my father, said, "Oh, what a handsome man and young too," having been told that he was quite old, you see. Mr. Karolik said, "Madame, you are a woman of discernment." "Oh," she said, "I thought that was your father," to me. "No," says Karolik, "He is illegitimate." This was the kind of thing he delighted in saying. It seems a little silly, but it was his trademark. In general, this system worked very well, this private gallery.

MR. BROWN: When you were starting there was it your father who did the presentations and then you would assist?

MR. VOSE: Yes, usually in bringing out paintings from the stockroom and back again. When father got really going, he wasn't satisfied with one person bringing him paintings. It would first be two and then three. All three of us boys would be rushing around, bringing paintings out, getting them from the top floor or wherever they were.

MR. BROWN: He liked assistants, didn't he?

MR. VOSE: He would sit and talk about the paintings.

MR. BROWN: But he liked to have things done for him.

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, he did indeed. He was very energetic himself, but I guess he felt it went better if things were brought in. He could sit there and talk about them. If not, he would do it himself, but there usually was someone there. On the road traveling, of course, he did a great deal himself. When he had one of us with him, there were often as many as 50 or 60 pictures to be unpacked and packed and so forth. We would be doing that. I spent an awful lot of time in the basement of the Statler in Detroit, un-boxing paintings and boxing them again. The same with Atlanta and Savannah.

MR. BROWN: These exhibitions, these traveling exhibitions were standard work - part of the procedure for your father for many years.

MR. VOSE: Yes, indeed they were.

MR. BROWN: They were held in hotels and rooms and also, I think, weren't they in museums?

MR. VOSE: Yes, in those days, a small museum would often welcome - if the standard was high, it would welcome a collection of paintings from an art dealer and would allow them to be hung for sale in the gallery, with a commission to the museum on any sale that was made. This happened, for instance, in Atlanta. I think the first trip I took with my father was to Atlanta, to the High Museum. That went on to the Telfair Academy Museum in Savannah. - I got very ill and stayed in the hospital there. My brother Herbert had to come and take over and go on with Father to Milwaukee and other places.

MR. BROWN: You would travel. You were constantly with your father then on these tours at this time.

MR. VOSE: Yes, but we would take turns. My brother Bob or Herbert would alternate with me. Then, eventually, of course, each one of us would be on our own. I went a great deal to Atlanta, Savannah, to Charlotte, to Memphis, Tennessee.

MR. BROWN: You would have formal openings then, would you?

MR. VOSE: Yes, that's right. The first I recall - one of things, to go back just a moment - perhaps one of the weaknesses in the design of that gallery in Copley Square was, as I look back on it, the entrance and the elevator that one had to take to the second floor. It was too small for one thing. Very often, it would blow a fuse with a load of people aboard. Then, you would have to get ladders and lower them. It just didn't please people very much. I remember a young man - a young artist who had been in Boston and been present when that happened once, and had moved to Savannah. On the first occasion that I went there with my father, they had a grand opening at the Telfair Academy Museum. In the middle of the thing the lights all went out. This fellow called out, "I didn't do it." He remembered the same thing happening in Boston. The fuses sometimes blew. It was very embarrassing.

MR. BROWN: But you had formal openings in Boston, too.

MR. VOSE: Oh, very much so. Yes, we did. They were quite some occasions.

MR. BROWN: Can you recall some of those in your early years there?

MR. VOSE: They went on for a great many years, yes. Father had several very important exhibitions very early, a couple before I came with him. One was the Spanish painter, Ignacio Zuloaga, which made a great splash in Boston. Then, there were several British painters. Sir John Lavery was one exhibition which resulted in a lot of portraits painted here in Boston.

MR. BROWN: Was this before you came?

MR. VOSE: Yes. Of course, I saw them, but before I came there.

MR. BROWN: Did you get to meet him at all, Lavery?

MR. VOSE: I don't recall that I did. I think I would have, but I don't recall that I did. I don't recall meeting Zuloaga either. I met many of the others of course, later on, who came there.

MR. BROWN: How were the openings arranged? What took place? What was your role and your brothers'?

MR. VOSE: There would be a table set up in the reception area of the third floor. Of course, tea, coffee - never until very late did my father have anything to do with any alcoholic beverages. Finally, he agreed to have sherry, but that was later. There were sandwiches that my mother often provided. That was one of the few things she did do with the gallery. - My father was always anxious to have young ladies from the Junior League [missing dialogue]. This was pleasant. We got to meet very interesting people. Then, the exhibition would be in the very large gallery. It was a big one which could accommodate a large number of people. We had a regular role or list of folks who always came. Whether or not they were interested in buying paintings, they enjoyed the festivity and seeing things in the way of paintings. They were pleasant occasions and sometimes they were worthwhile, not always.

MR. BROWN: Yes, I've heard that they weren't always - the receptionists themselves, weren't really your prime means of selling paintings.

MR. VOSE: No, actually of course by that time - the time we are speaking of, the Depression had set in very seriously. I happened to be in the gallery for the summer in 1929. I was still in college. I recall very well standing with my cousin, Charles Thompson, at the window - at the front gallery window on the third floor and the big French windows were open because it was warm - the hearing newsboys shouting, "Bank holiday!" Roosevelt had closed the banks. I remember that very well. Sort of a panic had set in as a result. From then on, of course, sales were very, very tenuous.

MR. BROWN: But they had been. - Into the early '30s, the sales had been quite good.

MR. VOSE: '32 was about the last of the good ones. For some reason, there seemed to be a lag, a lag in recovery too, at the other end. All through the years from then on until the early '40s, it was very difficult. It amazes me today, to go into the galleries and see what my nephews are doing. Terry mentioned to me yesterday that they had sold 44 paintings in June. If we had sold that many in a year in those days, we would have been quite astonished. I remember having very important paintings still in stock several years after we had purchased them. This doesn't happen today. It's difficult to find paintings now.

MR. BROWN: In the '30s can you recall what did sell? What was desired?

MR. VOSE: It is difficult to say. It was pretty general, but very sparse. As to what we handled, at first when I came to the gallery, there was quite a good deal of importation of English portraits of the great school, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney, Lawrence, others. One of the first things we were supposed to learn was to distinguish those artists. Dad used to point out that hair, the treatment of hair, was one way in which you could often distinguish Gainsborough. Of course you can, Gainsborough and Reynolds, Romney, and Raeburn. Then, as far as landscape went, we carried the important ones until a little later on and then, you couldn't afford to buy them and you couldn't sell them. We imported a great many of the later nineteenth century English landscape school which were very pleasant and decorative to live with and more affordable, such as William Shayer and Sydney Percy, the Meadows family, the Williamses. I don't know how many of them. Year after year we would import a number of those. These sold fairly well, slowly. Later on, much later on we were much interested in marine paintings, ship portraits and so forth, which perhaps is not as much a fine art thing as an historical thing, but there is quite a market for such things today and has been for years.

MR. BROWN: In the '30s did the Barbizon school people still maintain some fashion?

MR. VOSE: Yes, you could usually sell something like that, but you also would have a hard time buying it in those days.

MR. BROWN: It was hard to find them in Europe or here?

MR. VOSE: Yes, it was hard to buy them - they were not affordable. Then, of course, we were also selling American paintings of the nineteenth century. When possible colonial portraits too, we did a lot of that. Museums were always a large percentage of our customers. Now, I would say we are perhaps more evenly divided.

MR. BROWN: But then it was heavily institutions.

MR. VOSE: Yes, quite a lot.

MR. BROWN: Were people like Ryder or Blakelock and so forth, were they still being sold in the '30s?

MR. VOSE: Oh, they were indeed, yes, much more than now. Ryder still is. Blakelock seems to be out of fashion. I don't know why.

MR. BROWN: With each of them there were problems of fakes and forgeries and the like, weren't there?

MR. VOSE: With both of those and with George Inness also.

MR. BROWN: Inness continued to be a steady seller.

MR. VOSE: Absolutely. My father was enthusiastic, as I have been, always with Inness. But, well, Inness actually is so faked that you have to be tremendously careful. I think it is easier to fake a Ryder than anything else, probably. It is fairly difficult to tell a good fake Ryder from a genuine one. Blakelock, as you say, was much faked. Even, sorry to say, by one of his children. Marian of course, was a painter herself.

MR. BROWN: His wife?

MR. VOSE: No, his daughter.

MR. BROWN: His daughter, Marian?

MR. VOSE: Yes. I believe that I have heard that one of his sons sometimes faked Marian's - obliterated Marian's signature and added Ralph's signature to them. They were very similar.

MR. BROWN: Would you in those days, find experts? Did you have experts you could call on who would look things over that you were considering purchasing?

MR. VOSE: Yes, but one had to rely pretty well on one's own judgment.

MR. BROWN: But there were some people, some experts?

MR. VOSE: In the case of Ryder there was - oh, a gentleman still living.

MR. BROWN: Lloyd Goodrich?

MR. VOSE: Yes, Lloyd Goodrich. He was a very well considered expert of Ryder. For Blakelock, my father, I think really was the top expert. Now, of course, Norman Geskey in Nebraska has done a great deal. I see that other people are writing on Blakelock. Although, as far as sales go, Blakelock does not seem to be talked about now as he was. Father sold a great many of them.

MR. BROWN: What about the French Impressionists? Were they ever handled by your father?

MR. VOSE: Father's idea of modernism included the Impressionists. He didn't like them at all. He said - what he used to say was that their method was too obvious. He didn't care for that. It is very interesting to consider that he didn't care for the Impressionists and yet - he liked Benson and Tarbell, Decamp. He didn't care for Paxton at all. He thought he was too slick.

MR. BROWN: These various Americans were somewhat derived from French Impressionism.

MR. VOSE: But now they think that Paxton - you know Impressionism is a term that has been expanded, in my estimation, way beyond what it was originally intended to be. My father would be astounded if anyone referred to Frank Benson as an Impressionist. This was not his idea of Impressionism. Impressionist was a bad word in his vocabulary. I might mention one little anecdote which would seem astonishing today. I happened to be up in the gallery one day, the big gallery, on duty. A lady came in. She said, "I'm Mrs. Paxton." It was Elizabeth Oakie Paxton, the wife of the painter, who was a painter, of course, herself. "I'd like to speak with Mr. Vose." I had heard about her and I was very impressed. I went down to see my father on the next floor. He was busy writing at his desk. I said, "Mrs. Paxton is upstairs to see you." He kept right on writing and wasn't paying much attention. I said, "You know, Mrs. Paxton is waiting for you." He finally put down his pen, sat back and said, "If there is one worse painter in Boston than she, that's her husband." I don't know whether you want to keep that remark or not.

MR. BROWN: He had really little respect for some of these prominent Boston painters.

MR. VOSE: He used to like to quote a derogatory remark that was made especially about Paxton. "A near Vermeer is a mere veneer." Father used to quote that.

[END OF TAPE ONE SIDE B]

[S.M. VOSE, TAPE TWO SIDE A]

MR. BROWN: The inventory then when you came into the firm was still a thorough mix of English, French, and early American, and a few recent, or even contemporary.

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: Do you recall some of the contemporary artists who came around in the '30s? You've mentioned Seyffert the portrait painter.

MR. VOSE: Yes, indeed. Of course, Alfred Jonniaux was one my father was very enthused about, the Belgian painter.

MR. BROWN: A portrait painter, right?

MR. VOSE: Yes, he did a great many portraits in Boston for us. I think only one governor, but a great many others. We had a number of exhibitions and openings for him. For instance, Paul Sample was one we handled a great deal.

MR. BROWN: And you got to know him in the '30s, as early as the '30s?

MR. VOSE: Yes and then up through - he didn't die until the '60s some time. He was a good friend of mine. John Whorf, for instance, we handled. We were his agents for a number of years.

MR. BROWN: Was he easy to work with?

MR. VOSE: Yes, if you went along with his ideas. John was nobody to be fooled with. Did you know him at all?

MR. BROWN: No. What ideas were there that -

MR. VOSE: No, I'll just give you an anecdote which will give you some idea. Hermann Dudley Murphy was one of my father's great friends, the artist. Of course, he was the founder of the Carrig-Rohane Shop, which we took over afterwards. We used to be the agents for the Boston Society of water color painters for a number of years because we had the biggest available gallery for exhibitions. This meant that it was usually I who had to come in on a Sunday morning and open the place up so that the hanging committee could arrange the exhibition. We had to hang it, but they would arrange it and also decide on the prices and so forth. On a particular occasion, the hanging committee consisted of Hermann Dudley Murphy, who was the chairman and John Whorf and I've forgotten who the others were. They arrived there and then waited. John Whorf did not appear. It got to be half an hour late and finally Mr. Murphy said, "Here, get me Whorf on the phone." I called John Whorf's number and he answered apparently quite sleepily. Mr. Murphy in quite an irate tone said, "We've been kept waiting half an hour already. What time are you going to get here?" Whorf said something, and Murphy exclaimed, "What? - What!" and hung the phone up. Apparently, Mr. Whorf was not about to be told to come and hang the exhibition. He was his own master. He was a very excellent water colorist, but of course, he was also eclectic, shall we say.

MR. BROWN: He is known to have derived or looked at other people, for example - Sargent's work.

MR. VOSE: Yes, and a number of others too, you could almost recognize, but you didn't say that to John.

MR. BROWN: Nevertheless, he was a steady seller wasn't he?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, right along, steadily. He finally left us for another gallery when they told him they would guarantee him sales which would amount to so much each year. He said, "Well, how about it boys?" to us. We said, "Well, we've done better than that usually, but not always. We can't predict." He said, "Okay, good-bye," and he left us.

MR. BROWN: He was a little prickly to deal with at times.

MR. VOSE: If he didn't have his own way he was angry. There were a number of others of course.

MR. BROWN: What about Murphy? You just mentioned your father's good friend.

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, we saw a great deal of him.

MR. BROWN: He was considerably older.

MR. VOSE: Yes, that's right. He was a fine painter as you probably know. He used to bother me as a small child very much. I didn't think that it was appropriate that a great Irish giant with a red beard should paint delicate still life paintings, peonies in crystal vases and so forth. It didn't seem appropriate.

MR. BROWN: It seemed very peculiar.

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: Of course, you would never dare ask him, I guess as a small child.

MR. VOSE: No.

MR. BROWN: Was he fairly brusque and formidable?

MR. VOSE: Yes, he had his own mind, certainly. He was a strong man. His wife was a nice delicate painter too.

MR. BROWN: Would someone like Murphy come to dinner at your house occasionally?

MR. VOSE: He came down to Jamestown, Rhode Island, over a weekend, I recall, with his wife. Yes, they were quite familiar friends. He was, perhaps, my father's closest Boston artist friend. He had many on the west coast, whom I didn't know because it was always my brother Bob who went to California with him.

MR. BROWN: How about Paul Sample. You mentioned him - a pretty good seller?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, he was. At first my cousin, Charles Thompson, handled his work. After Charlie passed away, I did. I got along very well with Paul and sold a great many things for him. I liked his work.

MR. BROWN: I'd like to get back to when you first came on, the routine of the business day. When did it start? You mentioned the various duties and various things that had to be done. When would you arrive?

MR. VOSE: Well it started - it was a nine to five business day and usually a little extended both ways. Of course, originally we would all four of us take the car and drive to Boston, my father and his three sons. Gradually, we got married and we arrived at work individually. This went on until World War II when my brother Herbert went over seas. Bob and I were mortified being declared 4F's, which I still think was ridiculous, but we were. Herbert decided that he would not return to the art business - he had always been interested in photography. He didn't come back to the gallery. He became a fine-arts photographer. He did all of our gallery work, of course.

MR. BROWN: You mentioned that on the third floor there was a work room. What was that all about?

MR. VOSE: For instance, you might have to set a painting in a frame or perhaps repair damage to frames. That kind of thing was done there.

MR. BROWN: Did you have men who did this?

MR. VOSE: Yes. There was one, a Scotchman, named Huey Cameron, who was with us for many, many years. I don't believe you ever knew him.

MR. BROWN: No, I've heard of him.

MR. VOSE: Later on he and Cliff Speed had a shop together where they did that kind of thing. It was a general work room for taking care of things.

MR. BROWN: Huey Cameron, what was he like, the Scotsman who was with you?

MR. VOSE: Huey Cameron was one of the unforgettable characters of my business career. I'm sure of my brother Bob's, too. Huey was a little Scotsman who had been through a pretty rough experience in World War I with the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, in the British Army. Immediately afterwards he came here and after several tries around, ended up with the Vose Gallery. He was a real cog in the operation for a great many years, doing most everything. He would even do minimal cleaning of pictures. He had had some experience with that, relining pictures and that kind of thing. Setting up and doing all sorts of jobs - he could touch up frames. Of course, we had the frame shop which was in an entirely different location.

MR. BROWN: Yes, I want to maybe talk about that separately a little bit.

MR. VOSE: Now and then Huey would go out on picture hanging exhibitions with one or the other of us.

MR. BROWN: Was he rather colorful of speech?

MR. VOSE: He was, he was indeed. He and another chap who really was sort of the building superintendent - we called him Butch Raymond - they teamed up together. They were really a comical pair. You had them together - I remember one time I was out hanging some paintings for a lady who had bought them, with this Butch Raymond along to assist me. The lady had a little lap dog, which was kind of yappy, that she was continually talking to in a loving way. She went off to get something out of the room. Butch Raymond whacked his thigh with a loud whack and said, "Morton, stop hitting that dog." She comes running back in to defend her dog. It was this kind of thing. It sort of lightened the day, even if it perhaps, interrupted things a bit.

MR. BROWN: But they were very skilled, both men.

MR. VOSE: Oh, indeed.

MR. BROWN: Packing and shipping.

MR. VOSE: Butch was a skilled packer. He did all that sort of thing. We did almost everything there at that time - packing, shipping and with the shop, frame making.

MR. BROWN: Did your father keep close tabs on everything? Would he go down occasionally to see to the job or the workmen?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes.

MR. BROWN: He was sort of a captain on the bridge.

MR. VOSE: Very much so. He was very meticulous about packing. For instance you might have 40 or 50 paintings to be packed. It was a large shipping room downstairs and a big back up of boxes - empty boxes to be used. My father had them all numbered, one, two, three and so forth. There must have been 20 or 30 of them there. Some would have to be built new. He would have a list with the numbers and the sizes for the boxes. During packing of an exhibition like that, it would be quite a wild situation. Father would sometimes say to me, "Don't go out to lunch. Don't have any lunch today. Just keep right on packing."

MR. BROWN: This was when you were going on the road?

MR. VOSE: Yes. He would be sitting at his desk upstairs and continually getting on the intercom and saying, "Don't put this picture in that box. You better take another one." Huey and Butch would go absolutely wild. They had to go through everything and unpack. Then, he would be annoyed because they hadn't got as much done as he expected. I remember one time Huey came up and delivered himself of what he thought was his objection to injustice.

MR. BROWN: To your father?

MR. VOSE: They hadn't really got much work done. He said, "How could we? You kept stopping us and starting us up again."

MR. BROWN: You would assist in some of this?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes.

MR. BROWN: You and your brothers.

MR. VOSE: Yes, I spent a lot of time in the basement packing. The facilities were really quite well planned there for that sort of thing. There was a huge table with an enormous guillotine-like knife, with which you could cut the cardboards that were to fit in the boxes. Then, the back door opened out to the alley where the railway express trucks - which we always used in those days, would come and load them. Since there were some quite steep and short stairs that went up there, there was a big slide, which you could move over - which you could move over the stairs and then block and tackle above with hooks. You simply hooked onto -

MR. BROWN: The crate?

MR. VOSE: The crate, with a sling around it, and then haul and you could take the thing up to the back alley, were the express men would get it. Otherwise, coming down, you had to be careful that the express men wouldn't just leave the crate at the top and shoot it down the slide. You would be there to greet him and hook the sling on and let it down gently. I recall one horrible occasion when we got the box all packed and we couldn't find a hammer that somebody had been using. The next day, the truck arrived and we started to heave this big crate end over end to get it to the slide. There seemed to be a clank, clank inside. We realized where the hammer had gone. This was not what you wanted. Of course, over the years this sort of thing did happen. I recall an occasion on the top floor where we had the little studio and the work room. Between the studio and the work room was a very small stockroom, where we had some paintings and racks. There was a door at each end. You would come from the work room and go through this little stock room and out another door into the studio. On this occasion, it was perhaps while my brother Herbert was overseas - he hadn't started to photograph then - we had a professional photographer come in. As I recall, it was a Gainsborough portrait and it had glass on it, in the old fashioned way. I happened to go up there and he had set it up on an easel chair, right back to the - in the studio - back up to the door, which opened from the stock room. I ventured to say, "Don't you think we might move it one way or the other a little bit because someone might come through that door." He said, "Am I doing this or are you?" I, stupidly, let it go at that. I was down on the next floor when I heard a great crash. It turned out that he had gone to get a drink of water in the lavatory, which is off the work room and then he came through these two doors and had done exactly what I thought would happen. The glass was smashed. Fortunately, nothing did happen to the painting.

MR. BROWN: Your way of - the firm's way then of doing business - with customers you would spend a good deal of time explaining the merits of something?

MR. VOSE: Yes, and then very often, take the painting to the customer's home and hang it up and then I would be prepared with a light to place over it.

MR. BROWN: Was most of the stock owned by the galleries or was some on consignment?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, there was always a good deal on consignment as well as a good deal owned. There was quite a mix of things. Usually, the more contemporary pictures were consigned by the artists and we sold them on commission. Older things we usually purchased. Although, very expensive ones, you very often would simply have on consignment, to sell on commission.

MR. BROWN: Was the commission fairly small on consignment? You had the risk of a fairly high ticket item didn't you?

MR. VOSE: Yes, it depended. Twenty-five percent was a fairly standard thing. Although, if it got to be a very large price, then it would go down. You couldn't ask 25 percent of thousands of dollars. It did go down to ten percent, sometimes depending. We had originally been doing business at 20 percent and our auditors told us we were not making any money with the overhead and the taxes and so forth at that rate.

MR. BROWN: Was this back in the '30s that they told you this?

MR. VOSE: Yes, right.

MR. BROWN: Was your father willing to go up or did he realize he had to?

MR. VOSE: Yes, he really had to.

MR. BROWN: What about - apart from consignments from the contemporary artists, who would they come from primarily?

MR. VOSE: From owners very often - even the museums that were de-accessioning would sometimes do this.

MR. BROWN: Did they do that very quietly in those days?

MR. VOSE: Yes, as you well know, there was quite a little feeling about that. You would try to be discreet, shall we say, about that.

MR. BROWN: What about arrangements with other dealers, both in Boston and elsewhere? Can you mention some of those that you recall from the '30s? Were they fairly frequent?

MR. VOSE: You mean to say dealings with other dealers"

MR. BROWN: Other dealers, yes.

MR. VOSE: Yes, oh yes. That was very common as a matter of fact. If you had a customer for something which you didn't have, you might very well have inquired around, both in Boston and New York to see whether someone else had one they were willing to consign. This happened very frequently as a matter of fact. Mostly - I guess I should say that our relations with the dealers in Boston were perfectly friendly in most cases, but there were rivals. Father, in the early days, was convinced that you really should be quite secretive about your business - much more than we feel necessary to do today. I remember that Miss Sibbie Marsh, whom we mentioned earlier, who had been with my grandfather, was serious about it. If she heard any member of the firm mention a customer or a price in someone else's hearing, someone from outside, she would say, "Shhh, you don't do that." Things that we, today, don't feel you have to be secretive about at all.

MR. BROWN: But your father felt that that was a good way to protect the firm.

MR. VOSE: Yes, very much so. Then, in New York - or for instance, in Boston there were, after my father had the Copley Square gallery built, I would say we were the leading firm in Boston for quite a while. There had been, of course, firms earlier in Boston, at least before we had any building there except my grandfather's rather temporary place. There was Williams and Everett, and J. Eastman Chase, and then Doll & Richards had been there for years. Williams and Everett and Chase of course, were gone by the time I came on the scene.

MR. BROWN: They were gone by the time you were there?

MR. VOSE: Yes, they were gone.

MR. BROWN: Doll & Richards, was that something of a rival to Vose?

MR. VOSE: That was something of a rival, but they were older in Boston, not older in history.

MR. BROWN: But in Boston, they had been there longer?

MR. VOSE: They had been much longer. When I was first at the gallery, there was only Dudley Richards, Mr. Doll had died. Dudley Richards I guess was the older man who died soon afterwards. His son, I've forgotten his first name, was a forester. He owned the business, but it was run by others. He used to come in occasionally. I remember, they said - the forester used to come in and throw all the windows open and freeze them all to death.

MR. BROWN: Were they doing - was their stock in trade parallel to your own?

MR. VOSE: Very parallel, yes.

MR. BROWN: European and American.

MR. VOSE: Yes, a good deal - I think more of a percentage of American things. They were always doing good business. Then, very shortly afterwards the Childs Gallery started with Charles Childs himself, Charlie.

MR. BROWN: He was a major salesman wasn't he?

MR. VOSE: He certainly was and he was a very considerable rival. Then, I would say as the Depression deepened, Childs was perhaps equal, certainly equal, to Doll & Richards. For some reason, I suppose it was because of a succession of owners, Doll & Richards finally disappeared. In New York, we had good relations with a number of galleries. Others we didn't care for quite as much.

MR. BROWN: Who were some of the people you dealt with very amicably in New York?

MR. VOSE: Certainly, there was M. Knoedler & Co. it was - pronounced differently, we always called it Nodler. Others use the German Knoedler pronunciation. It is still going, but a very different firm then it was when I knew it and different owners entirely. It was a very, very fine firm. Their gallery, their building was a beautiful place.

MR. BROWN: With whom did you work there in the 1930s?

MR. VOSE: The director there was Mr. Henschel at that time, but there were a number of others - they had quite a large staff of people. I'm trying to think - Bill Davidson was the one whom I saw more than any other, although there were quite a few other people there. There were other dealers. The Milch Gallery was a prominent dealer in American paintings, as was Macbeth. Macbeth is of course famous for being one of the first dealers in purely American art.

MR. BROWN: Did you know the younger Macbeth?

MR. VOSE: No, well, yes. I knew Bob Macbeth. I knew Bob Macbeth and Bob McIntyre who, was his partner, and who succeeded him.

MR. BROWN: What was Bob Macbeth like? Can you describe him?

MR. VOSE: Physically?

MR. BROWN: Temperamentally, personality.

MR. VOSE: He was a fairly short, round faced fellow. That's about all I can tell you because most of my dealing there was with Bob McIntyre because it was just about the end of Bob Macbeth's life that I began to know the place.

MR. BROWN: McIntyre, what was he like?

MR. VOSE: He was somewhat similar. They went well together. He was a fairly crusty guy actually. I did business with him. My father didn't like him as I remember. I think he expressed that fact at one time.

MR. BROWN: Why, because he was too brusque?

MR. VOSE: I think that probably was it. He just expressed the fact that he didn't like him. I got on well with him. It was, I think too bad that that firm was allowed to go under, but it did.

MR. BROWN: Their dealing with your firm were very straight and straight forward?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, surely.

MR. BROWN: The same applied to Knoedler as well?

MR. VOSE: Knoedler's was just top notch.

MR. BROWN: What was Bill Davidson like? Can you describe him?

MR. VOSE: He was a short guy. He was very, very humorous, a nice fellow. There were others we did some business with.

MR. BROWN: Was Milch a good gallery to work with?

MR. VOSE: Yes, indeed. There were two brothers there. One of them concentrated more on prints. I never can remember - Eddie and Albert - which was which. I knew them both quite well. In later days, the surviving Milch boy - I don't know whether the other one died, but he retired anyway, was like my father. He very much enjoyed sitting and talking about old times. I learned quite a lot by listening to him. He had a most wonderful Brooklyn Hungarian Jewish accent, which made it colorful. I remember his remarking that somebody had suggested that - I've forgotten the exact - I really don't remember the exact story except that a museum committee, after seeing a picture at Milch's gallery, later went directly to the artist to buy it, avoiding Milch's commission. - He said, "I told him, 'Yous is thieves already.'" He really had a wonderful eye for American paintings.

MR. BROWN: Earlier as well as recent?

MR. VOSE: Yes, but he dealt mainly with the living artists. He tried to deal with Winslow Homer. He told me about that, but he said that Homer was stand offish. He said, "When I heard that he was holed up at Prout's Neck, I went up there in the middle of the winter. I got a cab. I went out on Prout's Neck in the cab until the cab was stuck in the snow. Then, I waded through the snow up to my hips. I pounded on the door. 'Who is there?' I said, 'It's Mr. Milch from the Milch Gallery. I want to talk to you, Mr. Homer.' He said, 'Go away.' That was the last I heard of him."

MR. BROWN: Was the New York gallery scene and the kinds of things they delved in, do you think a bit different from Boston? Can you compare the two in the '30s?

MR. VOSE: There were, of course, galleries -

MR. BROWN: Were the tastes different? There were many more in New York.

MR. VOSE: There were many more and they also differed in their specialties. It is so entirely different today that I don't recognize it. I was very familiar with New York in the '30s, and '40s, and '50s. 57th Street, East and West were the places you went for art dealers. Now, of course, it is all way up on 82nd Street and beyond.

MR. BROWN: But then you probably knew or were acquainted with a very high percentage of the galleries.

MR. VOSE: That's true, yes. I didn't mention - I started to say something - I can't.

MR. BROWN: Graham was a gallery that you worked with.

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: That's been a family firm for some time.

MR. VOSE: Indeed it has. We still see them. I was in there recently. Lesley Larkin of our staff and I went in there last season to talk with Bob Graham. I've written him about things, research and such.

MR. BROWN: Did you in your dealings, way back when you were in the '30s - in the '30s, I assume of course, your father was initiating a lot of this.

MR. VOSE: Oh yes.

MR. BROWN: Were there a number of dealers that he warned you to stay shy of?

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: And that he had gotten burned?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, but I don't know that one should go into that.

MR. BROWN: You can mention a bit about it, I hope. This is mainly where they reneged on arrangements and agreements, I suppose.

MR. VOSE: He had one particular hatred in the art field and that was for - we shouldn't go into these things.

MR. BROWN: This is years later.

MR. VOSE: I could tell you what the thing was. He had consigned a large number of paintings to a New York dealer who - if I can get this straight in my mind - the idea was that anyway, he failed. He went bankrupt. His pictures were all sold off at a bankruptcy sale. Why it wasn't possible to recover those, I don't know. I think, I remember my father saying that I came out under a cloud because the day I was born he read that this man had gone bankrupt and that one of his chief clients had died. He never forgot this.

MR. BROWN: He would throw this back.

MR. VOSE: You could probably cut this out if you want to, but he always blamed a man - I can't think of his name - who purchased a whole lot of those pictures.

MR. BROWN: Including ones that had been consigned by your father?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, he never forgot that. I was with my father one day in New York to attend an auction. Father was very serious about attending important auctions in New York. Of course, when I first started here it was the American Art Association, then eventually Park Bernett. Both of those gentlemen I knew very well. Then, Sotheby took over. A group of dealers, including father and I, stopped at a little restaurant, to get some supper before we went to the auction.

MR. VOSE: That particular dealer walked in. My father said, "Come on," and we got up and walked out. He would never have anything to do with him at all.

MR. BROWN: It seems that I was right, where somebody had burned him once, there was no telling whether they might not do it again. Is that right?

MR. VOSE: Of course, the thing was that - I'm not so sure because I once heard that dealer defend it, saying that he just went to an auction where pictures were sold and he bought them. He didn't know whose they were or anything. I think that that was a little bit - he should have - on finding out about it, there should have been something done. That was one thing my father would never forgive. He did lose really a large amount of money on that particular bankruptcy.

MR. BROWN: Auctions were something that you would go to with your father fairly early?

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: What was the reasoning? Why did he go to auctions? Was it simply a chance to find more things?

MR. VOSE: Oh indeed, yes.

MR. BROWN: Good prices, usually?

MR. VOSE: Yes. To give you an idea, he often told me that when his father died, he had to have the funeral in the morning because there was an important auction that night in New York and he knew that his father would have been very distressed if he hadn't attended it. So he did. He felt that to let any important auction go by was a great mistake. - I remember one time that for some reason I was in New York and there was going to be an important auction, but there was another thing. I've forgotten what it was entirely - some business thing that I thought it would be wiser to do. Father was very annoyed. "You should have been at the auction."

MR. BROWN: Was he an aggressive bidder?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes.

MR. BROWN: How does he proceed in an auction?

MR. VOSE: Yes, he was an aggressive bidder.

MR. BROWN: He would have looked very carefully and discussed and thought about it?

MR. VOSE: He would have gone beforehand to the -

MR. BROWN: Viewings.

MR. VOSE: And discussed it. Often, I went with him or my brothers did. He would explain what he felt. It was very embarrassing sometimes to me to go with him to museums because he was very often interested in explaining something. "Do you see this? This has a repainting." He would be waving his hand and pointing. A guard would rush up and say, "Sir, you are not allowed to touch the paintings." Of course, he wasn't, but he was pointing out various aspects of the work.

MR. BROWN: Very close.

MR. VOSE: Yes, that sort of thing. This happened very often. I remember at the Fogg Museum one time, he was doing that and the guard had just rushed up and - I don't know whether it was Forbes. No - it was Mr. Sax who walked in and said, "How do you do, Mr. Vose," and the guard disappeared. He was very, very anxious to have us understand exactly. I remember one of the very early things - and I've used this in lectures sometimes - to indicate the extraordinary advance that has been made in research in American art history since I first went into business there. My father took me to a well known Museum one time, of which I now have been a member for many years. I use this in showing slides. They would have to be, of course, slides of similar paintings of the same artists. These were portraits. My father said, "Now, read the captions on the name plates on the paintings. Almost all of them are John Singleton Copley. John Singleton Copley. John Singleton Copley. Now, go back and walk down and tell me if you think the same artist painted all these." I thought now. He said, "Of course not." Today, that museum is a wonderful repository of scholarship, but it wasn't then. These paintings were done by people like Blackburn and Smibert and even Badger, and so forth. They were all labeled John Singleton Copley. It was the easiest thing to do at that time.

MR. BROWN: I suppose for an institution such as that, in those days, their art holdings were merely ancillary weren't they?

MR. VOSE: I think that is the reason that no attention had been given to them. Today, of course, it is not true. It is a wonderful - their catalogues are -

MR. BROWN: In the '30s, the study of American art was still very limited wasn't it?

MR. VOSE: Absolutely, yes.

MR. BROWN: I asked you about what experts you called upon. There could have been probably very few at that time.

MR. VOSE: Very few. Fred Sweet probably was the first person to put on an exhibition, a scholarly exhibition of - the Hudson River School - at that time.

MR. BROWN: What about for colonial portraits, a then young Louisa Dresser had made some breakthroughs at Worcester.

MR. VOSE: She certainly did.

MR. BROWN: Did you rely on her?

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: Would you call on her for advice?

MR. VOSE: Yes. At that time, Frank Bailey was very active in Boston.

MR. BROWN: Did you ever meet him?

MR. VOSE: I knew him very well. I remember my father telling me that Bailey had a big reputation - and of course, he had done some interesting work. He made a breakthrough on Joseph Blackburn, the portrait painter. Nobody knew his first name, J. Blackman. They thought it was John. He had actually discovered in Newburyport the advertisement of a letter in an old newspaper. People would write just to Newburyport and then the paper would advertise that there was a letter waiting. He found one there waiting for Joseph Blackburn the painter and that established his name.

MR. BROWN: So he had done some serious work.

MR. VOSE: Oh yes. My father mentioned that he had been offered a Blackburn by somebody and he consulted him to see if - consulted - whom?

MR. BROWN: Frank Bailey.

MR. VOSE: Frank Bailey, to see if he agreed and he did. He said yes, so my father bought it. Then, he had it hanging in the gallery and Bailey came in. My father said, "It is a fine Blackburn isn't it?" He said, "No." He said, "Why?" "Because Blackburn never saw it." Father said, "I didn't say anything to Bailey." You had to watch out for some people, unfortunately.

MR. BROWN: Bailey would attribute something and then he would forget what he had said.

MR. VOSE: He must have forgotten, but - his expertise was not very good if that is the case. I'm sorry to say that he didn't have a good reputation in general, after a while. Talking about Karolik. There was one other client who was very much out of the ordinary and of whom I guess we haven't spoken much about at all. His name was James N. B. Hill. You may know the name.

MR. BROWN: Yes.

MR. VOSE: He was a rather unusual person. He was extremely wealthy. He was a grandson of the empire builder, James J. Hill, of Minneapolis, the railroad builder and so forth. He had inherited a tremendous sum of money. He was a bachelor, at least by any legal connections. He was a great Francophile, particularly a lover of French military history and anything to do with the French military. I think this started when he was in the Naval Reserve - he had lived in France for some time. He spoke French perfectly. During World War I, he was an American naval reserve officer. I don't know how this happened but he was attached as a liaison to a French infantry unit and became very familiar with French military practice and so forth. He became a great collector of what I used to call the French military school of the red pants - the Franco-Prussian war uniforms and history. For some extraordinary reason - considering that the Franco-Prussian war didn't go very happily for the French - the French painters produced a tremendous number of documentary paintings of that episode and he collected those avidly. Artists such as Berne-Bellecour, Detaille, Alphonse de Neuville - Meissonier, of course, comes a little earlier than that. There were others, too, whom he cherished and collected. The strange thing was that he didn't keep them himself. Having assembled a group, he would ship them to France as a gift to the Musee de l'Armee in Paris and he would receive a beautiful letter in French from Monsieur le General, who happened to be the director - a retired general and the director at that time. I guess I must have sold him close to one hundred of these paintings which were quite affordable. They were not tremendously popular as collector's items in American at that time. Many of them were in museum basements in storage spaces. He realized that and he urged me to explore those areas, which I did with some success and he himself did also. He would come to see us whenever I had one to show him and buy it if he liked it, and direct us to put it aside until he had a number. Then, we packed them up and sent them abroad. Of course, he could not take any sort of tax deduction for a gift to a foreign museum, so it didn't do him any good. But, he didn't have to worry because he was immensely wealthy. He was a character. Not in the same way that Maxim Karolik was, but he loved to tell all sorts of stories about interesting exploits, which had occurred and in which he was involved in France. Most of them I swallowed with a whole cloth at the time, only to find out later, that some of them you could find in books in his library. However, he had inherited some really fine paintings from his grandfather, French paintings, not of a military nature. He had - let's see - a beautiful Corot, a really fine Corot, a small portrait of a peasant woman at a well, which was extremely valuable even then and would be tremendously so now. He had some landscapes - a great big Daubigny. There were two or three others, I forget which ones - which he didn't have any personal interest in at all. He felt that since they were his grandfather's he ought to keep them. He paid me to keep them in storage for him. I kept urging him to put them on loan, at least, to a museum or somewhere where they would be appreciated. He didn't see any point in that.

[END OF TAPE TWO SIDE A]

[S.M. VOSE, TAPE TWO SIDE B]

MR. VOSE: The very strange thing is that at his death, it was found that he had left all his paintings, all his French paintings, to the Louvre, which needed them about like a hole in the head. He might have done something quite nice by leaving them either to the Museum of Fine Arts or other museums here in this country, but no, he left them to the Louvre. There was quite a little talk about this. I've forgotten exactly how it worked, but there was some doubt that this really was his intention. I had to make the deposition that I had known Mr. Hill for a number of years and represented him in a business way and had very frequently heard him speak of his affection for France and so forth, so there was no doubt about is intentions. He was a strange man and an unfortunate one. I think he was not a very happy person, but he did enjoy giving these paintings especially to the Musee de l'Armee. I supposed that perhaps they put them in the basement there, but when my older daughter was to travel in France one time, I asked if she would make a point of calling at the museum. She dropped me a line saying that yes indeed, they had a whole wall of these with a placard in the middle saying that they were "Don de Monsieur J.M.B. Hill de Boston." At least his wish was carried out.

MR. BROWN: He was extraordinary in the sense that he was a very different and a good customer.

MR. VOSE: He was a good customer from my point of view. I didn't always agree with his ideas. I wish he had given the Corot to the Museum, but he didn't even see any reason for doing other than storing those paintings. It didn't interest him.

MR. BROWN: Did people like John Spaulding the Boston collector and impressionist - did he come around the gallery at all?

MR. VOSE: Yes, we used to see him quite often. Unfortunately, we didn't usually have much of what was of interest to him. He and people like Desmond Fitzgerald of Brookline - who is quite forgotten today unfortunately - his little museum is still right down here in Brookline and now a church.

MR. BROWN: He had his own museum here?

MR. VOSE: In my childhood very often, we'd be driving by that little building and my father would say, "There is Mr. Fitzgerald's museum." There is another case for, I think, some regret. He offered that collection to the Town of Brookline if they would maintain it - agree to maintain it. The Brookline Selectmen had no interest whatever in doing it. It was dispersed, which is too bad. He was one of the very early Boston collectors who was interested in the French Impressionists and post Impressionists, too, actually. He was one of those along with several others who were farsighted as far as collecting went in Boston.

MR. BROWN: Do you recall other clients of your early years who were similarly farsighted or fairly adventurous?

MR. VOSE: There were certainly others. I'm trying to think. They don't come to mind immediately as to names. I can think of one other gentleman - I can't think of his name at the moment - I used to see him with Mr. Spaulding. I don't remember his name unfortunately.

MR. BROWN: Did you ever know Denman Ross?

MR. VOSE: Very well.

MR. BROWN: He taught at Harvard still at the time you were there.

MR. VOSE: Yes. Of course, he was a painter, too.

MR. BROWN: And a major collector.

MR. VOSE: Yes. I remember very well that the Museum of Fine Arts had a celebration party for his eightieth birthday. My father was very anxious - he was invited - very anxious to be present indeed. He kept telling me in the morning, "Now, don't forget. Keep the time in mind. Tell me when I should start to go up there." I don't know what time it was, but he went. About half an hour later, Denman Ross came strolling into the gallery. I said, "Why, Mr. Ross, isn't this the day for your birthday party?" "Oh yes. That's the last place I want to be."

MR. BROWN: What was he like? Can you describe him?

MR. VOSE: Yes, he was a very quiet man and of course, very elderly when I knew him. We had an exhibition of still lifes by the Armenian artist Hovsep Pushman, painted here in this country - pictures which to our mind were extremely beautiful and very meticulous still lifes. My father was anxious to have Mr. Ross look at them. This was when he was very, very old. He did appear with a young man who used to go around with him. After looking around he said, "Well, considering what has been done with still life, I don't see much to say about these," which disappointed us very much. I still think that Pushman had really extraordinary abilities.

MR. BROWN: Was Pushman an artist you knew?

MR. VOSE: Yes. We made, I think, two or three exhibitions of his work in the gallery, in the big gallery in Copley Square. He used to be there. Yes, I think I did know most of the - certainly most of the Boston artists of that era and many of the New York ones too.

MR. BROWN: In the '30s when he came to this country, you began showing the paintings of the Russian, Iacovleff.

MR. VOSE: Iacovleff, he was one of my great enthusiasms.

MR. BROWN: Why was that?

MR. VOSE: He was an extraordinary draughtsman, to my mind. You probably know his work. He had been engaged by William James, who was then the head of the Museum School, to teach drawing and painting there, which he did for about three years to great acclaim. People who were his pupils still talk about what an extraordinary teacher he was. He also was very much of a rage in Boston for portraits done in conté crayon, peoples' heads and so forth. It seems to me regrettable that he is very little heard of today. There is a little revival, I think, of interest in him, but not very much. He had been the artist engaged by the Citroen Motor Company expedition across Asia, which later was published in the National Geographic, almost a whole issue. He did the most wonderful life portraits of ethnic characters in central Asia, Afghanistan and so forth, which I found fascinating. Later on, he changed his style somewhat and became quite modern, but died just after he left Boston, a year afterwards in Paris, of cancer. I remember him very well. He was an interesting man.

MR. BROWN: Did he sell fairly well?

MR. VOSE: Yes, at that time he did. Yes, indeed. I was delighted when I was able to buy, very recently, from an antique shop, only just a few years ago, two of those studies of Afghan characters which I had admired tremendously, when we had the exhibition I couldn't think of affording them. I have them now here in the living room, a reminder of those days.

MR. BROWN: You said a little earlier that a great percentage of your customers were museums.

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: Were there particular museum people that you got to know even in your early days or was your father mainly the person who mostly dealt with them?

MR. VOSE: No, we dealt with them also. We got to know personnel all over the country as a matter of fact, during the time that I was with the business. Bob, my brother, continued to travel quite a bit, though he is now retired. I think his retirement is only semi.

MR. BROWN: In the '30s, you were traveling in the southeastern states, fairly small museums there, but you mentioned also Detroit.

MR. VOSE: That's right.

MR. BROWN: That was a large new museum. Did you get to know its director and so forth quite well?

MR. VOSE: Yes, a succession of them. When we first used to go there, Wilhelm Valentiner was the director. He was a German museum man, who had left this country to go back and to fight in the German army in World War I and then returned and continued as director of the Detroit museum. He, I remember as a man who had a tremendous eye for Dutch seventeenth century painting. I recall that on one occasion my father and I had among other things taken a Dutch seventeenth century painting by a very obscure small - so called "little" - master, whose name I don't remember. Dr. Valentiner walked into the room. The painting was at the far end of the room. He looked at it from the door and said, "What a beautiful so and so," and named the artist. It didn't take him a second to recognize it. - I knew him later on, too, when he had a semiretirement job at the Museum of Art in Raleigh, N. C. He died while he was there. Later on, I knew most of the personnel at Detroit up until within ten years or so.

MR. BROWN: In the earlier days you would actually travel there quite a bit.

MR. VOSE: Oh yes, truly. Yes, I was in Detroit a great deal.

MR. BROWN: What was it like as a museum in the '30s? Was it very competent?

MR. VOSE: Oh yes.

MR. BROWN: Of course, it was the Depression and it was heavily city supported wasn't it?

MR. VOSE: Yes, they had a little trouble that way, but it was an excellent museum. It is a great museum today. I've been there fairly recently, because I attended the American Association of Museums meeting there two years ago. I sort of reacquainted myself with the museum. The city has changed a great deal, but the museum is a fine one. When we first used to go there the city impressed you as being a beehive of active. There was a tremendous going and coming all the time. Of course, the auto industry was at a high point then. Then, it faded away.

MR. BROWN: Did you know Cleveland, too?

MR. VOSE: Yes, yes, not quite as well, but yes, I used to go there. The Cleveland Museum of Art was one of my particular favorite customers. There, again, you've got a tremendous change in the city. Euclid Avenue which was a very busy and prominent place, now really is not. It has gone down hill tremendously. It is not one of the fine parts of the city. Although, the museum way out there is. Of course, there is also the Natural History Museum in the same complex. It is very fine.

MR. BROWN: Did you know Millican there?

MR. VOSE: No, that was - my father did. That was a little bit before my time. But, of course, more recently, a long time -

MR. BROWN: Sherman Lee?

MR. VOSE: Yes, I was going to say Sherman Lee. I couldn't think of his name. Yes, I knew him very well. Sherman was an interesting man. He was a very forceful man. He was interesting to know. You would pass him on the street one day and he would not even speak. The next day, he would ask you to lunch. It depended on how he happened to feel and what side of the bed he got out of, I guess. But he was a tremendously erudite person, especially in Oriental art but if you had a painting that had anything to do with fishing, that he would buy for himself, personally.

MR. BROWN: But there were various dealers in those Middle Western cities that you also either went to see or you were sending certain things too, weren't you?

MR. VOSE: Yes. I mentioned the Beard Gallery in Minneapolis. My father used to - Mr. Beard was dead by the time I got very active. I know he used to come to Jamestown, Rhode Island and stay with us for a weekend, in Cleveland and Vixseboxse Gallery. It's a very strange name. You probably know it, Vixseboxse. It's a Dutch name. We did a lot with them. That's still going, although it is another generation of the family.

MR. BROWN: By doing a lot, you mean you would send them things on consignment?

MR. VOSE: Yes, or we would buy things from them.

MR. BROWN: What primarily did they have?

MR. VOSE: Old American paintings. Bernard Vixseboxse used to come to Boston quite a lot. - I liked him very much - or I would go there. My father had been there earlier with the Gage Gallery, which had been - which was in the same premises that the Vixseboxse later had on Euclid Avenue. He did a great deal of business with George Gage. In fact, a tremendous amount of business really. He would go take paintings and exhibit them in Gage's gallery and then they would share the profits that might be made.

MR. BROWN: These Middle Western cities were very much on the up - on the rise, culturally at that time.

MR. VOSE: Yes, I think that is true. Although, I may have mentioned earlier that my father - just to tell about his first great success when he was traveling - had an experience in St. Louis. Did I mention that? He used to take with him at that time, a man who was his frame shop assistant. He was the frame shop manager, by the name of Eckberg whose son is still living and later on was a chief carver and gilder at our gallery. Adrian Eckberg used to travel with my father and assist him. The story he told was this - I suppose it was about 1920 or so, maybe it was 1918 - maybe even earlier than that - he had taken some rooms in a hotel in St. Louis and had sent out a few letters notifying people that he was coming. Eckberg went out to breakfast - Father was just getting ready to. He just started turning the door handle and somebody was turning on the other side. This gentleman, the stranger, said, "May I come in." He said, "Yes." He handed him a card. This was Mr. Bixby who was one of the leading collectors in the city, whom he had never met. He sat there looking at the paintings. There were a large number of them. Finally, he would ask, "How much is this, this, this?" He would jot them down on an envelope or something he had. Finally he would say, "Take that away. Take that away. Now what would be the total of these? Alright. If I buy all these together, I should have discount. What would that amount to? Then, take this away." My father said he never felt more like an adding machine than he did that day, but it ended up that Mr. Bixby said, "Very well, I'll take," - it was something like ten - "Take them out to my home on Kings Highway." I should know the address, because it is where the big hotel now stands that I used to stay in. But he and Eckberg had to hire a wagon to take these paintings out. First, Mr. Bixby had asked my Father to go around and give his opinion of the ones he had. My father went along and he would comment on each one. Then, he would go by one and not say anything. Bixby would say, "Wait a minute. What do you say about this?" "Well, I don't care for it." Which meant several of them were fakes. Finally, Bixby said, "Take them down." Then, Bixby said, "Alright, what discount will you give me for these paintings that you took down." My father said, "Mr. Bixby, you wouldn't have bought the paintings you have from me today, if you thought that I would handle paintings such as those." Bixby said, "I don't care what you do with them. Take them away." This was a very important sale which started his Middle Western routine, which he carried on for many years.

MR. BROWN: St. Louis became a good place to visit.

MR. VOSE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: You continued that over a number of years.

MR. VOSE: I used to go to St. Louis, not carrying an exhibition of paintings there, but going and calling on customers and so forth, and especially the museum. During the time that Charles Buckley was director there, I used to deal with him very frequently. I got to know a number of the people there. I've had some interesting experiences too, with appraisals later on there, including the one of the mercantile library, which I may have mentioned to you before. The mercantile library is a very interesting, almost unique institution which is quite old. It is a proprietary library like the Atheneum here. I guess as a bequest, it had received quite a number of George Caleb Bingham works. Three of them were enormous, great, and now also very famous paintings, such as the "Verdict of the People," "Canvassing for a Vote," - I've forgotten the other one, but it was similar. It was an electioneering painting. Perry Rathbone told me that when he was director there, those were offered to the Museum for sale and that the chairman of his board said that he wasn't going to have the Museum's money spent just on illustrations like that. They did not buy them, but the Boatmen's bank now has them hanging in the lobby. They are very spectacular. But, there also was a collection of drawings, a collection of wonderful Bingham drawings, over 100 which he had made simply from people on the waterfront, many people he knew, I'm sure along the riverfro