Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (23 March 1869 - 20 July 1955) was an Ottoman-born Armenian financier and collector who became, by the time of his death in Lisbon, one of the wealthiest men in the world and assembled one of the most celebrated private art collections of the twentieth century. From 1910 to 1930 he acquired Art Deco jewellery from Parisian jewellers, including Cartier, as part of a collecting programme that spanned ancient sculpture, European painting, Islamic carpets, East Asian ceramics, and the decorative arts.
Background and oil
Born in Scutari (Üsküdar) on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, he was the son of an Armenian oil trader who supplied kerosene to the Ottoman court. After schooling in Istanbul and Marseille, he read petroleum engineering at King's College London, graduating in 1887, and the following year travelled to Baku to study the Russian oil industry at first hand. His account of that journey, La Transcaucasie et la péninsule d'Apchéron, appeared in Paris in 1891 and remains his only book.
He made his career as a broker between governments and oil companies. In 1907 he helped engineer the merger that created Royal Dutch Shell, in which he became a major shareholder. After the First World War he negotiated his way into the Red Line Agreement of 31 July 1928, by which the Turkish Petroleum Company (renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1929) was divided between Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, Compagnie Française des Pétroles, the American Near East Development Corporation, and Gulbenkian himself, who retained the five per cent stake that gave him his nickname, "Mr Five Per Cent."
The Gulbenkian Museum
Gulbenkian followed the French government to Vichy in 1940 as economic adviser to the Persian legation and was briefly declared an enemy alien by Britain, his UK oil assets sequestered until the end of the war. In late 1942 he moved to neutral Lisbon, where he lived in a suite at the Hotel Aviz until his death in 1955, aged 86. His will established the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1956, today among the largest charitable foundations in Europe.
The Foundation dedicated his collection, around six thousand objects, to a purpose-built museum on Avenida de Berna in Lisbon. The Museu Calouste Gulbenkian opened on 2 October 1969, with a dedicated room for the more than 140 works he had commissioned over nearly thirty years from his friend René Lalique. Cartier pieces from his holdings remain in the museum's permanent collection.
In 2007 the museum hosted the exhibition Cartier 1899-1949: The Journey of a Style, which brought together 230 jewels, watches, and objects from the Cartier Collection alongside Art Deco jewellery from Gulbenkian's own acquisitions.
Sources
- Vassallo e Silva, Nuno, and João Carvalho Dias, eds. Cartier 1899-1949: The Journey of a Style (Skira, 2007)
- Jonathan Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man (Profile Books, 2019)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Calouste Gulbenkian
- Le Journal des Arts, "La Collection Cartier à Lisbonne" (confirms Gulbenkian acquired Art Deco jewellery from Cartier, 1910-1930)
- Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, exhibition page
- US Office of the Historian: The 1928 Red Line Agreement
- Wikipedia: Calouste Gulbenkian
