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been interested in contemporary French art at all. I tried to interest him in this and I was gradually successful. It was, however, not at all profitable, because you could go to Paris and buy a Picasso, a blue Picasso, for $900, which I did, and bring it back and sell it for maybe $2,000, or $2500, but by the time you got back the following year, the price of the blue Picasso was again $2500 in Paris. There was no really big source of supply, and the only way to make any real money in the art business is to make a discovery of a great old master in a sale or in a private house.

This was in the day of the Duveen...

Yes, Duveen was absolutely in his heyday. And if you could find a superb Romney that was very dirty and that everybody else had overlooked and good have it cleaned, and if it really was picturesque and of good quality, you could make an enormous killing with it, or with any other fine old master.

Did you search for such things?

We did. We used to go to Europe every summer and search for such paintings. We'd go to country houses in England and looked. But I was always attracted by contemporary French pictures because I thought that they were the new history of art, you know, the mainstream of the history of painting. I