Robert Flynn Johnson, Below the Radar: How a Curator Built a World-Class Collection
Robert Flynn Johnson is an American curator, art historian, author, and collector best known for his long association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. For nearly thirty-two years, he served as Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the museums’ department of prints, drawings, and photography. During his tenure, Johnson helped develop the Achenbach into one of the country’s leading collections of graphic art, encompassing approximately 90,000 works. He retired in 2007 and was named Curator Emeritus. Johnson has organized numerous exhibitions and published extensively on prints, drawings, photography, and artists including Edgar Degas and Lucian Freud. His books include Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers and The Face in the Lens. An active collector himself, Johnson has assembled significant holdings of drawings, prints, anonymous photography, and works connected to Degas, bringing the perspective of both curator and collector to his scholarship.
Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator | Interview by Hugh Leeman
Hugh Leeman: I'm here with Robert Flynn Johnson, collector and curator of the works we're going to be looking at today. Robert was curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for thirty-two years, and we're going to walk through a handful of the works he acquired for the collection. Robert, before we start, give us a bit of context on the importance of collecting — and the difference between collecting as an individual versus collecting for a museum.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Thank you, and thank you for being here. First I want to say that collecting for a museum is both an honor and a responsibility, one I took very seriously during my career — because I knew that long after I was dead and gone, the works of art I acquired would be representative of what I was able to bring to the collection during my time as curator.
There are various criteria for collecting for a museum as opposed to collecting for yourself. A private collector can collect purely according to their own love of art. They can collect just one artist they like very much, or one subject, or one medium — watercolor, drawings, whatever. But for a museum, you have to take in the fullness of the whole collection. So the first thing I did when I was hired away from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1975 to become curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco — the largest print and drawing collection west of Chicago — was to study what we already had. I couldn't collect for the collection unless I knew what was in it. I spent months studying it in depth.
One of the things I found was that we had almost one hundred thousand works of art, most of them acquired by a man named Moore Achenbach. Achenbach was an enthusiastic collector, but something of a magpie: if he could find a very good impression of an important work, he'd buy it — but if he could only find a mediocre impression, he'd often think, "that's good enough," and collect it anyway. So certain artists were represented by superb impressions and others by mediocre ones that really weren't museum quality. I had to note which artists we didn't yet properly represent, and go out in the future to acquire better works for them.
There are five criteria for a work of art coming into a collection. First, quality. Second, condition — it can be a beautiful impression, but if it's damaged, that's not good enough. Third, availability — you can't buy works that aren't for sale. Fourth, appropriateness to the collection — a letter by Mozart might be a wonderful thing to own, but we don't have a music collection at the Achenbach, so it would be inappropriate. And fifth, price — you can't buy what you can't afford, so I always had to tailor my acquisitions to the money I had.
There are also two kinds of purchases. Retrospective purchases are famous, usually expensive works not yet in the collection, where you simply have to spend considerable money. Anticipatory purchases are different. All contemporary art is anticipatory — in a sense you're a venture capitalist, buying a young artist in the hope they become important. But what's interesting is that works by old masters and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists can also be anticipatory, because those artists fall out of fashion. In the 1980s there were beautiful works by older artists that were simply out of style, and I was able to acquire them at nominal prices. In 2026 they're considered quite important and quite valuable. So you collect anticipatorily not just in contemporary art, but sometimes in earlier works that are out of fashion yet important.
I was there for thirty-two years with limited funds. The Achenbachs gave us their collection plus an endowment that produced, at most, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. That sounds like a lot, but when you're collecting across the whole field — old masters, nineteenth century, eighteenth century, contemporary, Japanese prints, Indian miniatures, artists' books, photography — it doesn't go far. I was often criticized for buying works inexpensively, a few hundred dollars here and there, because I found them below the radar of the art market. People said, "Robert Johnson's frittering the money away." But my view was: if I had a hundred thousand dollars, I wouldn't buy one hundred-thousand-dollar work. I'd buy one in the fifty-thousand range, one in the twenty-thousand range, one in the ten-thousand range — all serious retrospective purchases — and with the remaining twenty thousand I'd buy whatever good, important things came along, even if they were inexpensive. Because once a work is matted, framed, and on the wall, nobody knows what you paid for it. If it's museum quality, it deserves to be there. I always saved significant funds for certain works, but I stayed open to opportunities and adventurous purchases. So let's take a look at the first one.
A Michelangelo, Hiding in Plain Sight
Robert Flynn Johnson: I acquired this in the year 2000. I was at an art fair in New York, vetting the fair — going around before it opened to make sure everything was properly ascribed to the artists it was supposed to be by. I came to a dealer friend from Boston who had this particular drawing on the wall. I took one look and knew exactly what it was. I asked, "Is that who I think it is?" They smiled and said yes. Then I asked the important question: "Is it available? Is it for sale?" They said yes — the fair hadn't opened, so no one had seen it except the dealers and me. So I reserved it.
I called the director of the museum, Harry Parker. This was before the internet, so I couldn't send him a picture. I described it and said we had the money — could I buy it? And unbelievably, he said no. I said, "Why?" He said, "It's too inexpensive. If it's by that artist, it couldn't be any good, or it would cost much more." I was shocked.
So I called Dodie Rosekrans, one of the museum's trustees and a dear friend, and explained that it was a Michelangelo drawing — not a Madonna or a holy scene, but a working drawing, inscribed by him, ordering a piece of marble from one of the quarries, probably for a sculpture. An absolute working drawing. Its provenance was impeccable: it came from the Count Bonaparte, from an album descending through the Buonarroti family, direct descendants of Michelangelo, and was given to a Lady Percival in 1842. I said, "Harry Parker's turned it down. Would you buy it for the collection? You have to trust me, because I can't send you a picture — but if you don't say yes, it'll be sold immediately." And she said yes.
When I got back to San Francisco, she'd paid for it. And I went to her and said, "Dodie, can you do me another favor? I know you bought the Michelangelo for yourself and it's yours. But could you give the museum a chance to buy it from you and reimburse you?" She was such a lovely person — she said yes. I presented the drawing to the committee, and we acquired it. One reason I think Harry turned it down: do you know the price, in the year 2000? Seventy-five thousand dollars.
Hugh Leeman: Wow.
Robert Flynn Johnson: For a Michelangelo drawing that was not only drawn but inscribed — a working drawing. When I look at it today, it looks like a Joseph Beuys, like some avant-garde German drawing of the 1970s or '80s. Would I have preferred a beautiful Madonna's head? Of course. But that would have been seventy-five or eighty million dollars, and we'd never have been able to acquire it. Lyndon Johnson once said politics is the art of the possible. Art acquisition is the art of the possible, too. I'm very happy it's in the collection — but if it weren't for dear Dodie Rosekrans, willing to give up her acquisition so we could buy it instead, it wouldn't be there.
Hugh Leeman: It's an incredible story — turned down by Parker, then acquired through a trustee. When you finally showed Parker what it actually was, what was his response?
Robert Flynn Johnson: He allowed it to go ahead, and he was pleased it went into the collection. I'll give Harry a bit of a pass — he was very busy building the new de Young Museum, distracted by many things, and he simply couldn't believe a Michelangelo drawing could cost only seventy-five thousand dollars. One of the things about drawings, especially old master drawings, is that they were made without the intent to sell. They weren't finished works of art; they were means to an end, not ends in themselves. Michelangelo never made this as a presentation piece for display — he made it as a working drawing. It's a little like the difference between a recording of George Gershwin playing Rhapsody in Blue and a recording of Gershwin composing it. So many works in the collection were never intended to be framed and hung. As someone once said about drawings, they're like reading an artist's mail.
Hugh Leeman: Before we move on — what are we actually looking at here? It almost appears there's a stamp or a stain on it.
Robert Flynn Johnson: That's melted wax. The drawing was put into an album back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, with red wax dripped onto the page and the drawing stuck on. They didn't have Scotch tape in those days. So that's what that is.
Hugh Leeman: And how big is it?
Robert Flynn Johnson: It's eight inches wide by two and a half inches high.
Hugh Leeman: Incredible to think you're seeing a little way into the mind of a true genius. I appreciate you sharing it. Let's move on to the next piece — a seventeenth-century work by Rembrandt. What's the story behind how it came into the collection?
Rembrandt's Only Still Life
Robert Flynn Johnson: It's an interesting one. Anybody who knows anything about seventeenth-century Dutch printmaking knows this is a ne plus ultra work of art. It is the only still life Rembrandt ever made in any medium, as far as I can recall, and his only still-life etching. This is 1650. It's the equivalent of Rembrandt making an etching of a moon rock — if something had come back from the moon in 1970. It's a shell from the South Pacific, which was about as far from Holland as you could possibly imagine. Seeing that exotic shell was an absolute curiosity to Rembrandt in the 1650s. He was a magpie collector, fascinated by all sorts of creatures. Once, someone brought an elephant to Amsterdam, and he sketched it and later used it in the background of an etching of the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden.
This print has always been one I adored. What's interesting is how modern it looks — like a Morandi etching, or an Edward Weston photograph. It doesn't have a seventeenth-century feel at all. My chance to acquire it came in 1997. I went to an important dealer in London who showed me a big blue hardcover catalogue of Rembrandt etchings. I went through it and put my finger on a few pages, the works I wanted prices for. The dealer said, "I'm sorry, but we're selling the collection as a whole" — which would have meant millions and millions of dollars. I told him most major museums — San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York, the Met — already have Rembrandt etchings, so we wouldn't be in the market for a whole collection; we'd already own half or two-thirds of it.
The next year he called with good news: the owner had decided to sell the works individually. There was one caveat — the National Gallery of Australia had first dibs, because they were doing a Rembrandt show. So they bought what they wanted. And when the rest became available, this one — the shell — was still there. That was exactly the one I wanted. It was the most expensive print I ever bought for the collection: one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. But it was an absolute masterpiece. And here's the strange thing — the National Gallery of Australia bought their Rembrandt prints, yet this is the only one whose subject came from the South Pacific, near Australia, and for some reason they didn't buy it. Good luck for us. Last year, for the first time in almost thirty years, another impression of this very rare print came up at auction and sold for over a million dollars.
Hugh Leeman: It's really interesting, because I've always been a fan of seventeenth-century Dutch work — I think of still lifes, tulips, and of course Rembrandt. But I'd never put the two together: that this is a still life by Rembrandt, and how rare that is. It never crossed my mind that Rembrandt essentially never did still lifes, even surrounded by an emerging collector class that was doing them constantly. And it speaks to this world of expansion and colonization — these objects being brought back, and here he is fascinated by them, from the elephant to the seashell.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Exactly. There were plenty of seashells on the shores of the Netherlands — commonplace, he didn't bother with those. But this shell he'd never seen before. It came from some seafarer who'd gone all the way to the South Pacific and brought it back as a treasure. Many artists made successful careers doing nothing but still lifes in seventeenth-century Holland. But Rembrandt was a humanist — we know him for his poignant portraits and biblical subjects; that's where his heart led. He obviously couldn't resist etching this wonderful shell that came into his possession. It's a jewel, a one-off. There's nothing like it in Dutch seventeenth-century printmaking.
Hugh Leeman: I want to move to another piece, also connected to Rembrandt — and to one of his pupils. Tell us about it, and how it came into the collection.
Two and a Half Rembrandts
Robert Flynn Johnson: When I came to San Francisco, we didn't own any Rembrandt drawings. We had some fairly good Rembrandt prints, but no drawings. Over the years I acquired two original Rembrandt drawings for the collection — an early drawing of an old woman, and a very rare one in which Rembrandt copied an Indian Mughal miniature. Then I acquired this drawing by one of his pupils, Constantijn van Renesse. I jokingly say that over my years at the Achenbach I acquired two and a half Rembrandt drawings — and the half is this one.
It was done around 1650; I acquired it in 1988. It's a copy of a Rembrandt drawing now in the Morgan Library in New York. What's interesting is the subject: it's after the Fall. They've eaten the apple, and Adam and Eve are being cast out of the Garden of Eden — you can see a little devil behind the tree. Adam is depressed at being cast out, and Eve stands over him, consoling him. But in Van Renesse's version, Eve stands with her breasts exposed. In Eden, before the Fall, her nakedness would have been natural and beautiful. But now that they've been cast out, she's supposed to be embarrassed by it. So Rembrandt — the teacher, in the interest of accuracy — quickly drew a few ink lines over Eve's body to show that her arms should be covering her breasts. It's a correct drawing by a pupil, corrected by the master. This isn't the only drawing of its kind; there are a few others in museum collections around the world. Rembrandt scholars have absolutely attributed the correction to Rembrandt himself.
Hugh Leeman: Incredible. So the part I'm circling would be her forearm, and this other portion, almost a vertical rectangle, would be her other arm — and that's Rembrandt saying, "You need to make an adjustment here, because her arms would be covering her breast."
Robert Flynn Johnson: Correct, absolutely. It's after the Fall, and he's just being accurate, correcting his pupil's drawing. Again, this was never meant to be sold or seen — a working drawing by Van Renesse, with Rembrandt simply correcting his pupil.
Hugh Leeman: When you come across something like this out in the marketplace, what's the feeling? How does it manifest, that sense of "this is something we need to have"?
Robert Flynn Johnson: First, let me be correct: I am not a Rembrandt scholar. I did not discover that it was corrected by Rembrandt — that was already known when I acquired it. For the museum, it had to be by Van Renesse, a Rembrandt pupil. Rembrandt had many excellent pupils — we have works by Ferdinand Bol and others in the collection, and they're very good. The quality was fine, the condition was fine, and the appropriateness was fine, because we had a Rembrandt collection. To my mind it was fascinating as a teaching piece, and it was relatively affordable precisely because it was by Van Renesse, not Rembrandt. Had it been a Rembrandt drawing, it would have cost a fortune.
There's a favorite quote of mine, by Woody Allen: "Ninety percent of success is showing up." As a curator, I didn't buy any of the works we've seen so far on the West Coast. I had to go to London for the Rembrandt shell, to New York for this drawing and the Michelangelo. I bought contemporary works on the West Coast, but for the older works I had to travel to New York three or four times a year, and to London and Paris twice a year, because that's where the art was. Sometimes I'd miss a work, sometimes I'd come across one — but I had to be there. The works of art didn't come to me.
Hugh Leeman: Thank you for that context. This is one of the things I love about the art you bring to life — this insight that it's more than meets the eye, that there's teaching and learning embedded in the piece itself. Let's go to another work you acquired, from the first half of the eighteenth century, by Barbara Regina Dietzsch of Nuremberg. It reminds me, at first glance, of a still life from a century or two before. What's the context for seeing this in eighteenth-century Nuremberg?
Nothing Still: Barbara Regina Dietzsch
Robert Flynn Johnson: Will Rogers said everybody's ignorant, just in different subjects. When I came to San Francisco I had certain specializations, but I was by no means an expert in all things. Suddenly I was faced with the Achenbach, which collected everything — old masters to contemporary, artists' books, Japanese prints, Indian miniatures, and later photography. Coming from Baltimore, I had a good knowledge of Italian and Northern Renaissance art, nineteenth-century art, early twentieth-century and contemporary art, and photography. But I wasn't particularly strong in Italian Renaissance, or eighteenth-century art, or Japanese prints, or Indian miniatures, or artists' books. So I had to educate myself on the ground to cover those areas.
In the case of Barbara Regina Dietzsch, this was an artist I wasn't familiar with. But my dear friend, the artist and collector Joseph Goldyne, owned several of her works, which I admired in his private collection. Once I learned how masterly she was, I kept my eye open for them. About nine years after I arrived, in 1984, I was able to acquire this piece. I'm also very pleased, in retrospect, that it's by a woman artist. I didn't seek out Barbara Regina because she was a woman — I was looking for her because she was good. One of the things I've tried to do over the years is be aware of works by women and by people of color — but always works of genuine museum quality, not simply to fill a quota.
If you look at it: it's a still life, but nothing in it is still. There's a butterfly in midair on the left, a dandelion in the process of floating apart, half its petals gone. A snail crawls up one of the stems; another butterfly rests momentarily in the lower right corner. The work is full of motion. It's a gouache — opaque watercolor on vellum — and it's amazing. And yes, it harks back to Dutch seventeenth-century still-life painting.
Hugh Leeman: Is there a chance this is referential to the ephemerality of life, the vanitas tradition of the seventeenth century? The butterflies have such short lifespans, the dandelion is blowing away — everything lost to the wind and to time. What do you make of that?
Robert Flynn Johnson: Of course. The butterflies give you the brevity of life. The dandelion, whose seeds are floating off to land and regenerate, gives you the potential of new life. And the snail crawling up the stem gives you the sense that life is a struggle. You can make all sorts of associations to the human condition through a work like this. Absolutely.
Hugh Leeman: We've been looking at European art, from Michelangelo to the Rembrandts. Now we go to the other side of the world — to an artist nearly everyone knows, Hokusai, and his wave. But here we have something totally different. Give us some context.
One of the Greatest Draftsmen: Hokusai
Robert Flynn Johnson: This is a Hokusai brush drawing, so it's a unique work of art. I acquired it in 1994, and I love to tell the story. I was sitting with some fellow print and drawing curators, and I said, "I just bought a masterpiece by one of the greatest draftsmen of the last two hundred years for thirteen thousand dollars." They said, "No, you didn't." I said, "Yes, I did." "No — it can't be a good drawing, or it's in bad condition." I said, "No, it's a great drawing by one of the greatest draftsmen of the last two hundred years." They started scratching their heads: "It couldn't be Cézanne... couldn't be Degas... couldn't be Delacroix... couldn't be Ingres... couldn't be Picasso." Finally they gave up and asked, "Well, who did it?" I said, "Hokusai." And they said, "That's not fair — he's Japanese." I said, "So what if he's Japanese? Is he not one of the greatest draftsmen of the last two hundred years?" And they grudgingly had to agree.
So there it was — this great drawing of a horseman by Hokusai, for thirteen thousand dollars. And again, like so many of the drawings I've mentioned, it was never meant to be framed, hung, or sold. It's a stream-of-consciousness drawing. You'll notice there are two other drawings on the same sheet, going in different directions — the figures on the left run completely opposite to the horseman in the middle. This is just Hokusai expressing himself on paper.
I should say something about the Japanese print collection. When I came to San Francisco we had a quite good one — some very good Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Sharaku. But we had no Hokusai drawing. And drawings matter: someone once told me you can have a very good Rembrandt print collection, but the Morgan Library or the British Museum will always have a better one, because they've been collecting for two or three hundred years longer than you. But if you buy a Rembrandt drawing, or a Hokusai drawing, you're buying a unique work. If there's a traveling show of Hokusai or Rembrandt, they'll have to borrow your drawing, because it's unique and no other institution has it. That's what gives drawings their particular value to a collection.
Hugh Leeman: One of the greatest draftsmen of the last couple of centuries — I love that framing. I want to stay in Japan and go to another work you acquired, from the Osaka School, the middle of the nineteenth century. For people familiar with the much better-known Edo counterparts — what is the Osaka School, and who are we looking at here?
Below the Radar: The Osaka School
Robert Flynn Johnson: I'll be honest — when I came to San Francisco I liked Japanese prints, but I was no expert. Two people were very important to my education as a curator. One was the late Roger Keyes, a great Japanese print scholar who helped educate my eye. The other was a dealer named R.E. Lewis, over in Marin County, who specialized in old master prints, Japanese prints, and Indian miniatures.
When I got to the Achenbach, I found our Japanese collection was quite good — Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro — up until around 1850, but almost nothing after. Part of that was the prejudice of American collectors. James Michener wrote a famous book, The Floating World, his great tome in praise of Japanese prints. But in it, Michener goes out of his way to say there were no good Japanese prints after about 1850 — that everything after Hiroshige and Hokusai was essentially garbage. Of course, he was wrong. So one of my roles was to fill in the collection after 1850. R.E. Lewis was a great help: he had beautiful impressions that were readily available.
I acquired this particular print in 1976, less than a year after I arrived — for about one hundred and twenty-five dollars. For nothing. And it's an exquisite print. When I saw the price, I said, "Ray, why is this so inexpensive?" He said, "People don't appreciate Osaka prints because they're from Osaka — not Edo, not Tokyo — so they're less valued, even though the print quality is exquisite." This is a kabuki actor, shown within a faux frame — a Japanese print within a frame, all of it made in woodcut. The quality is absolutely exquisite.
And I didn't buy just this one — I bought about forty of these prints over a couple of years, for very little. I remember bringing them to the acquisitions committee, and some trustees said, "Are you wasting our money on these cheap prints?" I said, "No — in terms of quality and importance these are very valuable. They've simply been undervalued. We're buying them below the radar." About three years ago there was an exhibition at the Achenbach of our Japanese prints, from the early days up to the early twentieth century — about one hundred and fifty works, and over half were works I'd acquired. Essentially all the works after 1850 were mine for the collection — Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi, and other masters of the late nineteenth century, now considered quite important, but in the 1970s and early '80s considered not important at all. We acquired them anticipatorily, and I'm very proud of that.
Hugh Leeman: Thank you for that. I love Japanese Edo prints, and you mentioned The Floating World — but I had no idea about the Osaka School until this work you introduced me to. So thank you. We've been in Europe, then Japan. Let's round things out with a couple of works from the Americas. The first looks, at first glance, like a striking portrait with incredible contrast — but there's something beneath the surface, something that gives us insight into American history, the Civil War, and conspiracy. Tell us about it.
A Lincoln Conspirator, Out of Time
Robert Flynn Johnson: First of all, if you knew nothing about it, you'd say, "My God, this looks like a nineteenth-century Gap t-shirt ad."
Hugh Leeman: Sure.
Robert Flynn Johnson: A very handsome young man with dark hair, in a short t-shirt against a plain background. You'd ask, "Who is this? What is this about?" Well — you can barely see it at the very bottom of the photograph, but his hands are manacled. This is one of the Lincoln conspirators. This is one of the men who conspired with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His role was to go to the house of William Seward, the Secretary of State, and murder him at the same moment Booth was shooting Lincoln. He did burst into Seward's house, ran up the stairs to his bedroom, and tried to kill him. Seward was saved only by the fact that he'd been in a carriage accident a week earlier and had broken his collarbone — he was wearing a cast up to his chin to immobilize it. So when Lewis Powell came at him with a knife to slash his throat, the blade struck the plaster, and he was unable to kill him. Powell ran, Seward survived, and Powell was eventually captured.
Here he is after his arrest, wearing his manacles, posed against the turret of one of the ironclad gunboats in the Potomac. The Lincoln conspirators weren't held in a Washington jail, for fear it would be stormed and they'd be lynched, so they were kept on the ironclads in the middle of the river to protect them from rioters. Powell was tried, convicted, and hanged, along with Mary Surratt and two other conspirators — four in all — after Booth himself was killed. But the photograph has this dreamy quality, in such contrast to the savagery of the man's actions. And another interesting thing: this beautiful photograph, by Alexander Gardner, was in the collection of Robert Mapplethorpe, and we acquired it at auction after Mapplethorpe died.
Hugh Leeman: I love that last detail about Mapplethorpe — because I have to admit, when I first saw this, knowing nothing about it, I thought, "Oh, it's a Mapplethorpe." And then you tell me it actually came from his collection. Incredible.
Robert Flynn Johnson: It doesn't look like a nineteenth-century photograph. It looks out of time. One interesting thing about nineteenth-century photography: ninety-nine percent of it was either scientific or documentary. Very few photographers set out to make an aesthetic photograph. When Gardner took this, he took it as documentation — he was documenting one of the Lincoln conspirators. But because he was such a great photographer, he couldn't help making it a beautiful aesthetic object as well.
Hugh Leeman: This is wonderful, Robert. We've gone around the world — from Europe to Japan to America. I want to close with one final piece that brings us to San Francisco, where you and I find ourselves today: a Muybridge work that lets us see the city from inside a house. Give us some context on its importance, and what we're seeing.
A Circle of Serendipity: Muybridge in San Francisco
Robert Flynn Johnson: This was a discovery of mine. The photograph came from Paris. I was there in 2003, visiting a French photography dealer friend, and he had an album of one hundred and twenty albumen photographs of San Francisco — of three properties: a house at 605 O'Farrell Street in San Francisco, a summer house down in Menlo Park called Heart's Ease, and more. San Francisco, then as now, gets foggy and cold in summer, so a person wealthy enough to own that beautiful city house also had a sunny summer house in Menlo Park — and was rich enough to own the Buena Vista Winery up in Sonoma as well. Clearly very wealthy.
The album was like a time capsule of a person of means in the nineteenth century — the furniture, the rugs, all the accoutrements, and the buildings they owned. A couple of the photographs even showed reflections of the photographer in a mirror. When I asked the dealer who took them, he said he didn't know — it was anonymous. I asked the price: twelve thousand euros, because it was beautiful quality but unattributed. So I called Harry Parker and said, "Harry, there's an album in Paris, twelve thousand euros — I think I can get it for ten. Even if we never find out who did it, it's an amazing time capsule of San Francisco in the 1870s." He said, "Okay, go ahead."
When I got back to San Francisco — where, unlike in Paris, I had access to reference books — it took me ten minutes. I checked two Bay Area artists of real quality it might be by: Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Ten minutes, and I figured out the album was by Eadweard Muybridge — and that the two reflections in the mirrors were, in fact, unintentional self-portraits of Muybridge. Obviously, had the Paris dealer known it was by Muybridge, it would have been much, much more expensive. I took a hunch: even anonymous, it was worth ten thousand euros. That it turned out to be Muybridge is just amazing.
And one last element. This album was clearly brought from San Francisco to someone in Paris as a gift. And guess what the name was of the person who owned the house, the vineyard, and the place in Menlo Park?
Hugh Leeman: Who was it?
Robert Flynn Johnson: Robert Johnson.
Hugh Leeman: There's an incredible circle of serendipity for you.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Something out of the Twilight Zone. And I'm happy to say that when we bought it, a dear friend and collector contributed significant funds toward the purchase — so the album went into the collection in part in my honor. My name has always been associated with it. Wonderful serendipity, and I'm very proud of it.
Hugh Leeman: Robert, that's beautiful — thank you for sharing it. I love how you bring these works to life by telling the context and the story. Years ago I was renting an audio guide in a museum, and it said: if you really want to understand what's happening on the canvas, you have to look at what was happening off it. You've done that beautifully today. You acquired thousands of works over the years, and we've gotten to about eight — but let's make a time to do this again, because the stories are incredible. Thank you so much, Robert.
Robert Flynn Johnson: Wonderful. Take care.
