Skip to content

Joseph Duveen Quotes

8 quotes from Joseph Duveen — Art dealer who dominated the international art market in the early 20th century, selling Old Master paintings to Americ….

When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap.

Value

Europe has the art, America has the money.

Business

You can get all the pictures you want at fifty thousand dollars apiece — that's easy. But to get pictures at a quarter of a million apiece — that wants doing!

Joseph Duveen

Well, I fooled 'em for five years.

Joseph Duveen, last words, May 25, 1939

Ah, yes. The pictures always look better when you are here.

Andrew Mellon, to Duveen

One can only say again how utterly duveen.

Lytton Strachey, telegram to Osbert Sitwell

He's not ready for me yet. Let him go on buying. Someday he'll be big enough for me.

Joseph Duveen, on Edsel Ford

Art works don't rise and fall in value like pig iron or sheet copper or tin mines. They have a value and that is all there is to it.

Joseph Duveen, to Robert Jackson at the Mellon tax hearings

Continue exploring