Free The last tycoons: the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co by William D. Cohan

grandson Michel said that except during the war years, he bought or sold one piece of art, either for himself or for a museum, every day of his life. First thing every day, he would stroll through art galleries or arrange to meet an art dealer at the office, often postponing the day's business until the dealer's departure. While eighteenth-century painting was David-Weill's first love, his increasingly eclectic tastes also extended to medieval sculpture, enamels, Asian art, antiquities, textiles, tapestries, and oversized books of birds by the French counterpart of Audubon. He also indulged his love for silver; at one point he had amassed a world-class collection of nine hundred pieces. His wealth and artistic sensibility were such that by 1923, David Weill--no hyphen yet--had become one of the major benefactors of the Louvre Museum in Paris. His name, in gold-leaf lettering, remains sculpted into the marble walls of the museum. He was fifty-two years old.
    In 1926, David Weill was named president of the Council of National Museums and announced a major gift of art to the Louvre to take place at his death. In 1927, Gabriel Henriot, the head of the French Library Association, undertook--with Weill's financial support--a luxurious two-volume catalog of David Weill's extraordinary art collection. Some 155 of Weill's paintings, watercolors, pastels, and gouaches were lovingly reproduced in the volumes, in black and white, and were accompanied by Henriot's descriptions. Included were works by Boucher, Chardin, David, de La Tour, Fragonard, Goya, Ingres, Prud'hon, Reynolds, and Watteau from the eighteenth century, and among the tableaux modernes were works by Corot, Daumier, Degas, Delacroix, Monet, and Renoir.
    It had become nothing less than one of the world's finest art collections in private hands. The catalog showed photographs of David Weill's extraordinary home in Neuilly with nearly every inch of wall space covered with beautifully framed and valuable art. Indeed, the house was like a museum itself. A rarely seen painting of David David-Weill, by Edouard Vuillard, a family friend, shows the nattily dressed banker standing in one of the rooms of his Neuilly home surrounded by his many paintings, sculptures, and candelabras. Not many of these expensive catalogs were printed, probably fewer than a hundred, and David Weill gave them to his friends and a few public libraries. He gave number sixty-one to one of his favorite art dealers, Nathan Wildenstein, the patriarch of the Wildenstein clan, with the handwritten inscription "In remembrance of our so agreeable and friendly relationship--July 7, 1927." David-Weill's art acquisitions continued through the 1930s despite the near-death experiences of the Lazard partnerships in London and Paris. The curator of his collection, Marcelle Minet, became a full-time David-Weill employee. "David Weill was--what you would call in America--a compulsive buyer, yes," said Guy Wildenstein, the scion of the famous art-dealing family.
    But the events of the early 1930s at Lazard and the ongoing lack of dividends from New York began to put the financial squeeze on David David-Weill. In 1936, David-Weill sold half of his "famous" collection of miniatures and enamels--"paintings delicately executed and small in size"--to Nathan Wildenstein, and the other half he donated to the Louvre. This was done after a commission of experts had divided the collection--described at the time as "probably the finest and most complete that exists to this day"--into two parts of equal value. Then, without warning, came the stunning announcement in February 1937 that David-Weill had also sold "a large part" of his "noted" collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures to the Wildensteins, for $5 million. At the time, the $5 million payment was one of the largest ever in the art world--around $70 million today--and a fitting sum it was, too, for the collection was considered one of the world's best of