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what was a good diamond. If he looked at 20 diamonds he could tell you which was the best in the flash of an eye. He just had a great sense of quality in anything. So, he enjoyed himself enormously and he went on to urge his sisters, Lou and Floria, and his daughters, Marion and Frances, to buy pictures, and his friend, Andre Meyer, and anybody else he could influence to buy paintings. And he would go to see dealers and be very amused by their talk and sometimes he'd look at a picture and say, “My, that's a beautiful picture. I'm going to buy it. How much is it?” Well, of course, this would cause brows to rise in an unreasonable way, and people actually came and remonstrated with him and said he was ruining the prices of pictures for everybody else the way he carried on and talked to dealers; he was too enthusiastic and must not raise the prices so by being so enthusiastic. Well, this amused him very much and he carried on just the same. The prices then were absolutely nothing as compared to now; for example, the Matisses are now seven or eight times as high as what he paid for them. “The White Roses” of Van Gogh, which he bought for $135,000 after a great deal of confusion, because he told me to go and look it at

Bank when I was here and he was in California. Bank had it for sale for a private collector, who wanted $100,000 for it. I said that I was going to visit President Truman about health insurance and that I couldn't go to see it right away, and he said, “You must go right away or you'll lose the picture.” I said, “You'll never lose a picture out of a vault in a bank. Nobody