Corpus Christmas

Prologue

In the mid-1820’s Erich Breul’s grandfather parlayed three leaky river barges and the opening of the Erie Canal into a modest fortune. During the Civil War, Erich Breul’s father added a second fortune running blockades. Erich Breul himself was the first of his family to be sent to Harvard- primarily to learn the art of managing money-and his postgraduate trip to Europe was meant to complete the family’s transformation from flannel cap to silk hat in three generations.

Like many young scions whose lives were destined for the administration of settled wealth, Erich had developed a taste for fine art during his college years and Europe provided an ideal opportunity to pursue that interest.

To the elder Breul’s dismay, young Erich’s proposed year stretched to eight. Fortunately, Mr. Breul was healthy and vigorous at the time and he was prepared, within reason, to indulge his son’s acquisition of culture. Times were changing and Mr. Breul was shrewd enough to change, too.

In Europe Erich immediately grasped what his freebooter father only dimly sensed: Culture could purify and legitimize the crude and occasionally bloody foundations that too often underlay even modest financial empires.

Yet it was more than that.

Young Erich Breul genuinely liked pictures and he made a substantial effort to cultivate an eye for adventurous art, especially since his allowance did not stretch to safely pedigreed old masters. He disdained the stuffy salon painters and also avoided the impressionists, thinking them too superficial. Instead, he was instinctively attracted by that mixture of dignity and daring found in the work of expatriate Americans like Whistler and Sargent. He had his portrait painted that first winter by the young Italian virtuoso, Giovanni Boldini; and although a sympathy for noble sentiment drew him to intimist painters like Tranquillo Cremona and Arcangelo Guidini, his passion for bravura technique led him as far afield as Adolphe Monticelli.

In later years he liked to think he would have bought a Van Gogh had he seen that artist’s work.

For eight years, crates of pictures arrived on the piers of New York with predictable regularity. A bewildered Mr. Breul paid the freight. He might not understand his son’s preoccupation with collecting art but he continued to underwrite the expense since young Erich had, while collecting Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland, also collected Fraulein Sophie Fürst, a distant cousin with a sizable dowry and trim ankles that flashed beneath her proper skirts.

When the newlyweds finally followed their treasures to America in 1887, Mr. Breul established them at 7 Sussex Square. Sophie decorated with late-Victorian opulence and Erich turned the cavernous ballroom into a personal art gallery.

As was the fashion in those days, pictures were hung in the salon style popular in Europe. In frames monumentally carved and gilded, they were stacked on the walls from chair rail to ceiling, one above the other, with little consideration for size or shape and with almost no space between each frame.

The collection spilled into the formal drawing room, leaped the great hall to the library and dining room, and still continued to grow: George Inness; Henry Creswell; William Carver Ewing; and Walter Sickert, a student of Whistler’s with whom Erich had caroused in London before his marriage to Sophie. Almost by accident he acquired a decent Chandler Grooms and a better than average John La Farge.

Old Mr. Breul thought it a deplorable waste of money but he loved his son and for Christmas one year even gave him a set of Winslow Homer’s marine drawings which had caught his eye and reminded him of his blockade-running days.

Despite Erich Breul’s continued passion for pictures, he did not disappoint his father’s hopes once he was home. He may have lacked his grandfather’s gritty pioneer spirit and his father’s ruthless zest and acumen but he eventually shaped himself into a dutiful businessman and, after the crash of 1893, even managed to recoup most of the losses.

Only one child was born of his happy union with Sophie Fürst. In due time Erich Junior grew to manhood, attended Harvard like his father, and departed for his own wander jahr in Europe, where he was struck and killed by a team of runaway horses in a narrow Paris street two days before his twenty-second birthday.

Three months later, still dazed by his death, Sophie stumbled in front of the electric trolley that ran along the bottom of Sussex Square.

When his son’s effects arrived from Europe, Erich Breul was touched to find a few crude pictures in his steamer trunks. It didn’t matter that the pictures were dreadful-Erich could remember some mistakes he himself had made when he first began collecting-the tragedy was that the boy’s life had been cut short before his eye could mature.

Heartbroken, he’d stored his son’s possessions next to the trunk which held his memorial to Sophie: her nightdress, her autograph album, a lace handkerchief that still breathed the faint trace of her toilet water, along with a hundred other intimate bits and scraps that he couldn’t bear to give away.

There was no question of another marriage for him, another child. He drew up a will that would turn 7 Sussex Square into a museum to house in perpetuity the pictures he’d collected; and although he continued to function-to work, to dine with friends at his club, to refine his collection- when the great influenza epidemic of 1918 struck, he succumbed almost gratefully.

“… August and my cycling tour up the Rhône (along with that amusing adventure in Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze with those bohemian chaps) was, until now, my favorite month, although the autumn lectures at Lyons’s Palais des Arts were as edifying as you had hoped, Papa, and my French is much improved. But now I am in Paris, the queen of cities! I still cannot believe I am here, here in the cultural center of the universe with my own snug rooms in Montparnasse. Notre-Dame! Montmartre! Dites-moi, mes parents, however did you force yourselves to leave? And yet, as the days shorten, shall I confess one small misgiving? Will you laugh at your grown-up son for his weakness? How I shall miss our jolly Christmas this year! Should I live to be a hundred, dear Papa and Mama, I shall never forget the roaring fires in every hearth, every room bedecked with garlands of holly and ivy, the smell of cinnamon and ginger and roasted goose wafting from the kitchen below to the nursery on high, and in the main hall, such a tree that to a little lad seemed to tower up to the heavens, each branch a-blaze with candles and bejeweled with Mama’s glass angels…”

Letter from Erich Breul Jr., dated 11.5.1912.

(From the Erich Breul House Collection)