time and distance from Scotland and England to New York, Boston and San Francisco, as well as Williamstown and Washington. Throughout the journey, one question has lingered: Were earlier experts hasty in de-attributing Carroll’s Mrs. Yates from Gilbert Stuart? Is the second version also the product of the man himself? At the center of this query is the painting’s owner, a man who signs his correspondence “The Honorable Joseph P. Carroll” and in conversation invites you to call him “Joe.” Carroll is retired from a career in international finance, investment banking, and government; when he inventories his background, it is meant to impress, and does. After serving in the Coast Guard, he graduated in 1964 from Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, followed by a business degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Economics, and one in advanced management from a joint program at Harvard
and M. I.T. While at Columbia, Carroll was mentored by future-Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. In 1972, he was named a White House Fellow, in the same class as future-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and served as both Staff Assistant and Special Assistant to Treasury Secretary George Shultz. (It is from this government service he added the honorarium to his name.) After finishing his Washington service, he worked for Chase Manhattan Bank, setting up the institutional mechanisms for managing, as he explains, “the excess monetary reserves of both Saudi Arabia and Venezuela”—two of the world’s richest oil countries. A prominent collector and dealer, Carroll began buying art in the 1970s, when, he explains, critic Dore Ashton turned him on to Pollock, De Kooning, and the rest of the New York School. A Korean painting he received as a gift touched off a lifelong passion; he began to collect and study art from that country, eventually becoming an
Yates portraits (2): Andrew W. Mellon Collection, courtesy the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington
6 | Art Conservator | Fall 2009