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loved Impressionists but Impressionists began to have moderately big prices, although we sold a painting by Van Gogh to the Lewisohns for $35,000 called “L'Arlesienne” and that would now sell probably for $250,000, if not more. So it was a high price-- no one had ever heard of such a fantastic price for a Van Gogh-- but it was nothing compared to what it is now.

Renoir already brought large prices for a very good example, like the picture “The Boating Party,” but a moderately good Renoir one could still buy for maybe $15,000 to $20,000, which now would be maybe $100,000. So they were still going to be of more value than they were then, although I thought by that time they had reached their peak. I was interested in Picasso and Matisse and Braque and Utrillo and Modigliani, and contemporary painters, because they seemed exciting and interesting to me. And we did buy them. I remember Dufys for $70 or $80, watercolors, which now sell for $5,000 to $8,000. The only thing to do was to keep all the pictures and never sell them, and if you lived 30 years you made a fortune. But when you have to make money out of it every day, you have to have an awful lot of them and turn over a great many pictures in order to make any money, that is, out of modern pictures. Whereas in old pictures, if you were successful, you made much much more on each individual thing.

What sort of gross business did you do at that time?