Outlaw Marriages (6 page)

John Marshall and Ned Warren began their romantic relationship in 1884, when they were both twenty-four years old. Warren told a friend that he was attracted to Marshall because his lover was “unpretentious and very touching in his affections.”
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After the two young men had been together for almost four years, Warren's father died. Now independently wealthy, Warren decided to devote his life to collecting classical antiquities that he'd send to Boston so the country of his birth would begin to understand the importance of the Greek and Roman cultures.
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Warren wanted his lover to join him in this work, but Marshall wasn't so sure. His reluctance came mainly from the fact that Marshall's parents expected him to spend his life as an Anglican priest and scholar, not as an antiquities collector.
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Warren then set out to change Marshall's mind. The wealthy young man knew that his lover dreamed of living in a historic manor house, so he tried to find such a home for them to share. After Warren bought an eighteenth-century residence in the Sussex area on the southeastern coast of England in 1889, Marshall agreed to join him in the collecting venture, writing, “Now everything you say and do seems inseparable from my love for you.”
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The couple then settled into Lewes House. Interior features of the impressive residence included a flagstone entrance hall and a grand staircase. The imposing structure was surrounded by several acres of gardens and pastures. One visitor would later say, “The grounds of Lewes House rolled away toward Brighton. When we rode our horses up there on a fine day, we could see the English Channel glistening in the distance like a great silver shield.”
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After settling into their home, the men were now prepared to begin, in earnest, their life as antiquities collectors. Their timing was perfect, as it coincided with the directors of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston deciding to assemble the best collection of Greek and Roman objects in the United States. Because the original building on Copley Square wasn't large enough to house such a collection, the directors built a larger facility on Huntington Avenue. The new museum had seven times as much display space as the original, so there was plenty of room for additional items.
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Marshall and Warren traveled to Boston in 1891 to meet with the museum's new curator of antiquities, Edward Robinson. He initially opposed the men's proposal that they buy works of art and then sell them to the museum for the price they'd paid plus 20 percent to cover their expenses. Robinson was fine with the financial part of the plan, but he wasn't willing to let Marshall and Warren decide which items would make up the museum's collection.
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It was at this point that Marshall demonstrated one of the strengths he brought to his professional partnership with Warren. Specifically, after the curator rejected the men's proposal, Marshall went back to talk with Robinson by himself. The congenial Marshall was willing to negotiate and compromise—two things Warren refused to do. In this instance, Marshall persuaded Robinson to give the two men a chance to prove their abilities as collectors and then revisit his decision about the terms of their arrangement with the museum.
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The test that Marshall suggested was one involving a French estate. In 1892, he and Warren traveled to Paris and examined items that had belonged to the Van Branteghem family. Despite competition from several other collectors, the couple came away with the best of the Greek terra-cotta pieces. The Boston curator then inspected the purchases, confirmed their high quality, and immediately put them on display at the museum. Most significant among the items was a large drinking cup that dated back to the sixth century B.C. and was signed by Euphronios, widely recognized as “the Michelangelo” of terra-cotta painting. After Marshall and Warren's initial success, the curator agreed to let the two men purchase whatever objects they wanted.
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The duo's next major acquisition was of several ancient bronze statues and terra-cotta vases from Italy's Count Tyskiewicz—this time, they had to outbid agents of the Russian czar who wanted the items for the Hermitage Museum. This purchase revealed another signature trait of the two men's professional partnership. Warren had highly refined taste and an exceptional aesthetic eye, instinctively knowing which items would look good in the museum setting where they'd eventually be displayed. He didn't, however, have either
the patience or the scholarly aptitude that were needed to undertake the research necessary to determine the exact age and origins of such works. Marshall did.
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Although Marshall and Warren's initial acquisitions were from members of wealthy families, later ones moved them into what were labeled “gray areas.” That is, they bought directly from men who worked outside the law to unearth ancient artworks and then sell them to the highest bidder, while always steering clear of European authorities. “The material on the market came mostly from illegal excavations,” one scholar noted. “The antiquities market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a complicated and treacherous world.” Marshall and Warren used their combined skills to overcome the challenges.
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By 1894, the two men had become so immersed in collecting that they set up a second home in Rome so they could be closer to the Italian middlemen who were unearthing and selling antiquities. It was also at this point that the couple decided to focus most of their attention on securing ancient marble sculptures, which they believed were the dazzling items that could establish the Boston museum, without question, as the premier one in the United States.
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Among the purchases the couple soon made were a large Greek lion that dated back to the fourth century B.C., a Roman torso of Hermes that dated back to A.D. 30, and the bust of a Roman woman that dated back to the second century A.D.—the couple gave the last item as a donation rather than charging the museum for it. Another of their notable acquisitions was the Boston Throne, which consisted of three panels and dated back to the fifth century B.C.
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Marshall and Warren's most significant acquisition of all was the head of a Greek goddess that dated back to the fourth century B.C. and became known as the Chios Head. Many critics would come to identify this piece, with its exquisitely detailed facial features, as the finest item in the museum's entire collection of artwork.
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The backstory about another marble piece speaks to Marshall's ability to detect forgeries. While on a trip to Greece, the men heard about a marble sculpture of the Greek god Apollo that a dealer had for sale. When they saw the item, Warren instantly wanted to buy it, but Marshall questioned the item's authenticity, writing to a friend that the statue had no patina “save a yellow stain here and there—such as forgers add to their work.” Marshall had to beg his partner to reject the statue, but he ultimately triumphed and they didn't buy it. Scholars later determined that the item was, indeed, a fake.
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Not only were the two men very good at collecting, but it also brought
them great pleasure. Warren wrote his brother Henry, “As we get behind the scenes, and into the intrigues—for the antiquity business is full of intrigues—we have something to laugh at every day. We learn the polite evasive answer, the wily silence. It is so entertaining that if we were dealing in pig-iron, instead of in beautiful things, the work would still be enjoyable.”
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Within a decade after they'd entered the field, the couple had become the most widely respected antiquities collectors in the world, with Warren receiving most of the recognition because of his wealth and the prominence of his family. For example, Charles Eliot Norton, the most widely regarded art historian of the time, wrote of Warren, “There is not and never has been in America or in Europe a man with such capacities, will, and circumstances for collecting, and the Museum of Fine Arts is entirely dependent upon him.”
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On the final point in that statement, by 1902, officials in Boston had decided that the section of their museum devoted to classical works was complete, with 90 percent of the items having been secured by Marshall and Warren.
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In the early 1900s, family matters became a high priority in Warren's life. His mother died in 1901, and soon after that he became increasingly concerned about his oldest brother's management of the estate, which had a value of about $5 million.
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Warren went to Boston in 1902 and hired a lawyer to look into the financial aspects of how Samuel D. Warren Jr. was running the family's paper business. Although Marshall initially supported his partner going to the United States, he soon became frustrated because he was living in Europe while Warren was making lengthy trips to Boston. Marshall refused to stay in the United States for more than a few days at a time, telling Warren, “The place is dreadful and the people worse.” But Marshall also quickly tired of Warren spending so much time away from him. “I am sick of being alone and, Puppy dear, it is bad for me,” he wrote to Warren during one separation. “I would sooner do anything than live alone.”
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Marshall's displeasure with Warren escalated as the trips to Boston sometimes stretched into several months. In one letter, Marshall complained to his partner, “You run your own affairs and expect me to follow like a slave any move you make. You think your duty lies in Boston, and I know you too well to try to stop you.”
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Part of Marshall's frustration came from the fact that he questioned his partner's motivation for spending so much time in Boston. Warren claimed it was solely to take care of family business, but Marshall suspected that his
partner also relished the celebrity status that his work with the Museum of Fine Arts gave him among wealthy Bostonians.
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In 1903, Marshall decided to busy himself by becoming involved in a new collecting project. He traveled to New York City and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, finding that the institution was “hopeless with respect to antiquities.” He then returned to Europe and began an effort to persuade the museum's directors to hire him to improve their holdings of Greek and Roman pieces.
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Marshall was also becoming involved in a platonic relationship that would evolve into a huge element of his life. Since 1901, Warren's unmarried cousin, Mary Bliss, had been living at Lewes House. Determined to rid herself of the stigma that came with being labeled a “spinster,” Bliss soon announced that she wanted to marry Marshall. When the Met hired Marshall to be its European purchasing agent, Bliss set about becoming—in the words of one observer—“just the right help-mate John Marshall needed to meet his new challenge.”
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Mary Bliss knew that her major bargaining chip was her aesthetic eye. That is, she had the ability to select which antiquities would create an attractive museum exhibit—a talent that Marshall had failed to develop. In 1907, she gave Marshall an ultimatum, saying she'd no longer help him with his collecting unless he married her. Marshall then agreed to make her his wife, although he stipulated that the marriage wouldn't involve sexual activities of any kind. The wedding soon followed.
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Ned Warren fully supported the marriage. Indeed, he'd encouraged Marshall and Bliss to become husband and wife because he hoped the arrangement would make his partner more content, and therefore less likely to complain about Warren's lengthy stays in Boston.
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One early item that Marshall, with his wife's help, added to the Met's collection was a Roman jug that dated back to the first century A.D. The item was important because it was signed by Ennion, the most famous and gifted craftsman of the Julio-Claudian era.
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Another significant piece the Marshalls obtained for the museum was an Etruscan safety pin that had been made in 500 B.C. and was decorated with tiny carvings of a reclining woman, a youth, and a bird. Other major acquisitions included thirty-two gold plaques that had been created during the Bosporan Kingdom between the fifth century B.C. and the third century A.D.
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John Marshall eventually amassed enough money, through his salary, to donate one item to the museum in his own name. That piece was a sandaled
ivory foot that had been carved during the Roman Empire and was dated to between 31 B.C. and 14 A.D.
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By 1910, Warren was able to resume collecting. This turn of events occurred because his lawyers documented that his oldest brother had, indeed, mishandled more than $1 million in family funds. After that revelation, another of Warren's brothers assumed control of the business, so he returned to Europe and to his life with John Marshall.
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The fact that Marshall and his wife were, by this point, working well together to secure works for the Met meant that Warren was free to focus on a category of artwork he'd been interested in for many years. As far back as the 1890s, he'd wanted to buy antiquities showcasing homoerotic content, but museum officials had refused to be associated in any way with such items, labeling them “obscene” and, therefore, unacceptable for public viewing.
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But when Warren returned to collecting in the second decade of the twentieth century, he decided to try a different tactic. He spent his own money to create a personal collection of homoerotic antiquities that he initially displayed at Lewes House. But his long-term plan was to build a collection of such exceptional quality that, once he'd assembled the items, officials at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston would want it for their museum.
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