Joseph Duveen, 1st Baron Duveen
Person
Old masters, London and New York. Duveen, from a family of Dutch-Jewish decorative art dealers in Hull, saw that Europe had the art and America had the money, and from the 1900s sold European paintings to American industrialists such as Frick, Mellon and Huntington at enormous mark-ups. He relied on the art historian Bernard Berenson's attributions, some of them shaped by their secret commission deal. Many of those sales now hang in American public museums.
More about Joseph Duveen, 1st Baron Duveen