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January 17th, 1939.

Dear Bob:-
This letter will have to be marked "Personal" because it is going to be filled with corruption. As I am in something of a hurry today, I shall be as brief as possible: you will recall that I mentioned the possibility of getting Nicol (and Moira) - Moira in parenthesis be - cause all she does is pay the bills - interested in your marvelous Ingres drawing. Well, the other evening we gave a dinner for the Smiths (I believe that it was either the 53rd or 83rd since their triumph connubial return to S.F last September - and the figures are, as you might guess, Nicol's!) and on that occasion Nicol admired extravagantly the lithograph of the Ingres drawing at Smith College - the one Jere Abbott bought. (You may recall that he got the lithographic stone and and from it prints

[[Line connects this sentence to another written on the side of the page]]: [unitelligable] when I was [?] and had if [?] in chaste but elegant fashion- [?] Agnes [?] you had fra[?] one the Gad.

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copies of the drawing which can be bought for the munificent sum of $1.50.) The drawing was done in Rome and represents two men. Now, some time back I had told Nicol that if he were interested in collecting drawings - and he is - he should by all mean own a lovely Ingres. I also indicated the chances of his getting a good one were slight. (That of course piqued him - as I intended that it should.) I then told him that about a year ago your firm had a beauty but that in all probability it had come to rest in some museum or great private collection by this time ("this time" was a few weeks ago when we were together at a dinner in Burlingame). But the other night I told him that you still had the drawing and were lending it to Neumeyer for the exhibition to which Nicol and Moira are lending their three drawings. (The Man Gogh sepia, the watercolor drawing by Gauguin and the pen sketches by Delacroix- I think I wrote you that they had bought these from Rosengart last summer in Lucerne.) I said what a pity it was that he would be away when the drawing came out here and that if I could g[?] hold of a photo of it before he left for the east (on Jan 27th) I would show it to him. And failing that I hoped he would come to see you in New York. He said he definitely wanted to do that. Now, my suggestion is this: send me a photo if you have one. And second: please be careful not to let Nicol know about the ruse we played on him at [?] our house. You see he thinks that our lithograph is an original and is simply baffled at our owning an original Ingred. I realize this is all extremely unethical (unethical, hell-it's positively dishonest!) Nicol being Nicol, he of course wanted to know how much a drawing like ours cost! Do you think I told him $1.50? No, you do not. What you think is that I replied with adroit sophistry that any Ingres drawing would cost a museum [[the phrase "cost a museum" is underlined]] at least 3000 dollars- if it were a bargain. (I said this because we were offered one three years ago for that sum.) I went on to say that a really fine drawing would probably be around 6000 or 7500. Is that more or less correct? I might add that we saw Nicol again on Saturday night and he was still all of a twit about our having that "divine Ingres". As you might suspect, Nicol is just as much consumed with curiosity to find out where we got three thousand dollars to buy an Ingres as he is at our having at all. I feel pretty low at having staged this little "act" - but the only redeeming feature of it is that it might very well lead to your placing that marvellous d[?]ing in the Nicol Smith collection. After all, he and Moira have about 16,000 a month with which to gratify