Sir Joseph Duveen (1869–1939)

Joseph Duveen was born in Hull, Yorkshire, the eldest of 15 children of Rosetta and Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, a Dutch-Jewish immigrant who had set up a prosperous ceramics import business in Hull. He was educated at University College School. The Duveen Brothers firm was very successful and became involved in trading valuable antiques. After his father died in 1908, Joseph ran the business, working with his uncle Henry J. Duveen. He moved Duveen
Brothers into the acquisition and sale of Old Master paintings and quickly became one of the world's leading art dealers, due to his good eye and skilled salesmanship.

He made a fortune buying heirloom works of art from declining European aristocrats and selling them to the millionaires of the USA. His clients included Henry Clay Frick, William Randolph Hearst, Henry E. Huntington, Samuel H. Kress, Andrew Mellon, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Edward T. Stotesbury, and Frank Porter Wood. The works that Duveen shipped across the Atlantic make up the core collections of many of the USA's most famous museums. Duveen greatly expanded the market, especially for Renaissance paintings, with the help of his consultant Bernard Berenson, whose ability to put an artistic personality behind paintings helped market them to purchasers with limited perceptions of art history.
With World War I on the horizon, Duveen moved from London to New York City and opened a large new gallery on Fifth Avenue from which he would become the biggest art dealer in the world. He was enormously wealthy and also extremely philanthropic. He donated paintings to the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, among others, and gave considerable sums to build, repair, and expand several galleries and museums. He was knighted in 1919 and raised to the peerage as Baron Duveen of Millbank in the City of Westminster in 1933.
Duveen was married to Elsie Salomon, daughter of Gustav Salomon of New York City, with whom he had a daughter. His sister Florence married the well-known French art dealer René Gimpel.