Confronting the Past, Hanging Together: Charles Stewart Carstairs’s Campaign for Modern Art

Charles Stewart Carstairs (1865–1928) was a world-renowned art dealer and adviser to eminent collectors like Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) and Andrew W. Mellon (1855–1937). As a principal member of M. Knoedler and Company—an art-dealing firm founded in about 1848 as the New York branch of the French Goupil and Company that remained active until its closure in 2011—and the director of its London headquarters for more than two decades, Carstairs was a key figure in the art market of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Although his fundamental role in creating a market for Old Master paintings in the United States is now being acknowledged, his advocacy of modern and contemporary art and especially modern French painting remains largely unexplored. This article discusses his personal art collection and shows how the promotional methods he employed—including displaying Old Masters and modern and contemporary works together, a strategy being increasingly adopted by museums, galleries, and auction houses today—encouraged collector and public appreciation of modern painting.