At the point where Hull’s immemorial military road—that which connected Fort Findlay on the Blanchard to the stockade at Lower Sandusky—crosses the Defiance and Tiffin state pike, is situated Fostoria, a railroad nexus platted at the convergence of three counties. The Baltimore & Ohio, Lake Erie & Louisville, Nickel Plate, Columbus & Toledo, Lake Erie & Western, Chesapeake & Ohio, and the Ohio Central (successor to the Atlantic & Lake Erie railroad) at one time operated mainline trains running through Fostoria; today one hundred CSX and Norfolk Southern hotshots run the lines each day at a confluence of freight known as the Iron Triangle. Amid the clamor of railcars, a patina of rust clings to Fostoria like an unbearable humidity. The termination of many of Fostoria’s industrial vocations late in the last century commenced an epoch of rot and decay. The disappearance of jobs in steel, lumber, glass, and automotive parts left the citizens in disarray and it is in a ceaseless decline that the populace suffers the trials of opium and overdose. A signal feature of this blight is Fostoria’s respite homes packed with their casualties; drugs spiked with animal tranquilizers led to disfiguring wounds that harrowed their victims’ flesh. Amputations followed. These souls line the porches in wheelchairs, catching sunlight in their maimed states, dazed and pallid, stumps of amputated limbs surreally waxen, as if legs and forearms melted away in the heat, the flush of vitality drained from them. Beleaguered Fostoria, even in this state of reduction, has its boosters, those cradle-to-grave natives possessing a singular opti-mism concerning the prospects of their town, unyielding in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
On the country drive to Fostoria my route was marked by a familiar roster of florists—North Dixie Cemetery Flowers, Memorial Inspirations, Greenhouse Acres—these specialists in exequies each advertising upon large, illuminated boards the grave sad-dles and casket sprays on offer, appropriate in a fashion, when the destination is itself well on the way to final ruin. Fitting all the more when the purpose of my stop was a brief visit to a dead man. When I arrived at the cemetery of St. Wendelin parish I walked through the iron gate, each pick-et capped by a finial crucifix, and commenced navigating the rows of plutonic rocks harboring the grave which counts us all. My attention was immediately arrested by the many robins hopping about the lawns. Some stood motionless in postures of strabismus, heads crooked to one side. With unblinking intensity, the birds looked as if they were perceiving the trespasses of the underworld. Now and then, displaying a violent quickness, one of the robins pierced the black earth with its beak, emerging with a worm, which it proceeded to gobble up in muscular swallows. Suddenly, all the birds departed in unison, a scatter of black against the blue sky, seemingly in response to some unseen malevolence. Disquieted by the abrupt fright of the robins, I continued my inspection of the names of the dead, soon coming upon a graven angel, whose every crevice was pervaded by a luster of moss. Her marble wings were parted across the shoulders, right arm extended; the hand was missing, cleaved from her angelic form who could say how long ago, leaving only conjectures as to what this sentinel bore. Glad tidings? Was she showing the way toward truth and light? Perhaps, unsettlingly, a stance of accusation? Or, if the blank milky orbs indicated that her eyes had been put out, was she Justice conveying weighted scales of judgment?
Walking the plots, I read surnames of Irish and German Catholics, immigrants grouped in their tribes of the faithful. Kurz sind des Menschen Tage read the epitaph on one grave: Short are the days of man. Among the gravestones were countless lambs, indicative of the eras in which childhood death was a common blight. These flocks of pint-sized Agnus Dei were benign symbols belying a monstrous reality: the imposition of Abrahamic sacrifice, bowing to a cosmos cruel in its indifference. Shadows of dead children trafficked my mind’s eye. I felt the weight of early death, the im-mensity of mortality. In the older sections of the cemetery I observed tomb-markers here and there leaning as if in defensive stances against an onslaught of rain. The ground had warped by imperceptible movements over decades until the present state in which many slate stones pitched untidily, this way and that. I found myself unsteady on my feet, each step unsure of firm purchase. Among these older graves, some harboring souls deceased nearly two hundred years, the etched names on numerous headstones had been rendered indecipherable, washed away by time, almost as if by the application of some chemical agent, yielding to eternity the identities of their charges. The operation of ruinous years reveals the nature of the world, geologic in every respect—carvings eroded by rain, wind and sand, a reminder that any attempt by mankind to assert a measure of permanence will be met with resistance. Long after the vibrations of human vocal cords have been stilled the stones, too, are eventually smoothed and silenced. What hubristic folly, the perpetual warranties sold by funeral directors and their grave cutters: the mutable granite, marble, slate and sandstone inevitably come to share in our oblivion. I could almost perceive from the many untended graves a yearning for recognition, these forgotten dead, breaking bread at the common table of anonymity.
After an hour beneath a brooding sky, I came upon an Irish Cross, the headstone for a family plot, the Quinns. Interred beneath its cruciform shadow were the remains of James and Molly Quinn who operated a bakery in Fostoria during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Five of their children repose beside them, includ-ing their son, John, who at one point was the subject of international renown as the great accumulator of modern art. There being no Museé Quinn in Fostoria, and likewise no memorials—no John B. Quinn Foundation, no Quinn Trust, no beneficent orders, no testament at all, save the solitary grass marker, flat to the surface of the earth, ensconced by encroaching thistle and white clover flowers, the stone measuring not more than eighteen inches by twelve and emblazoned, simply, JOHN—one is left to ponder attorney Quinn’s dearth of final intentions. There are certainly displays of surpassing ostentation within St. Wendelin churchyard. John Quinn’s modest grave would never indicate to a visitor that this man at one time had amassed an assortment of art pieces now considered the blue chips of modern art, a collection that today would be valued at several billions of dollars.

John Quinn was born in 1870 and had a childhood typical of first-generation Irish Catholics in America, with family life, insular and clannish as it was, revolving around St. Wendelin parish and the church calendar. The icons and rites, the choreographed pageantry and mysteries of the Latin Mass—those aspects of Catholicism so casually reduced to beautiful ceremonies—flourish in the fecund young mind, churning grist within an aesthetic mill. Quinn enrolled at the University of Michigan at seventeen; soon enough the rising scion of Fostoria was taken up by Charles Foster, former governor of Ohio, son of Fostoria’s namesake, and then-appointee in the Harrison administration as Secretary of the Treasury. In 1891 Quinn traveled to Washington, D.C. as Foster’s secretary, where he juggled his duties with the expansion of his education, enrolling in a course of law at Georgetown, and entered the New York bar. New York City was then in its heyday of obstreperous young capitalism, ample territory for a man of Quinn’s intelligence to build a reputation. The sensations were many, the fortunes immense, and John Quinn invariably engaged in all the high-profile legal battles of the era. His success as a Wall Street lawyer of finance led to the founding of his own firm, and the money poured in.
Quinn employed that ample cash to satisfy a collecting impulse bordering on mania. His apartment at 58 Central Park West became one-part tribute to European modern art, one-part shrine to excess, jam-packed as it ultimately was with over twenty-five hundred art pieces representing one hundred fifty artists. Paintings were hung from all available wall space; below them, canvasses were piled deep on the floors, lining the baseboards. The halls were a welter of statuary, scarcely navigable. When the closets had been stuffed full with paintings, Quinn’s trove spilled out, covering every conceivable surface and cramming his living space. It is said that until his dismissal for inefficiency, Quinn’s Japanese houseboy Moto was the only soul who could effectively traverse the hoard. There were nineteen Matisse works; Quinn cornered the market on oil paintings by Seurat and owned over two dozen Brancusi sculptures; art pieces by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gris, Gaugin, Duchamp, and Picabia were collected over the years. Henri Rousseau’s master-piece, Sleeping Gypsy, may very well have been the crown jewel of Quinn’s ambitious accumulation. Or perhaps it was Seurat’s La Cirque. Or maybe it was one of the fifty-two Picassos that Quinn collected, headlined by his Three Musicians. Naming the masterworks of modernity that John Quinn amassed is an encyclopedic effort.
I recall a study of Quinn that described his quixotic personality, known as he was to be variously irritable, sentimental, generous, and prone to extended fits of enthusiasm. It was his habit to dictate to three secretaries simultaneously; he had a reputation for berating hapless assistants to tears. Quinn is said to have dismissed five partners from his practice in a single year; his formidable seven-day work schedule included dictating late into the night on the Sabbath. He was called the noble buyer, the man from New York, and the kindly tyrant. Physically, Quinn was described as having an eager, intellectual face which called to mind the portraits of Cardinal statesman who ruled Italy when the Mediterranean was still the center of the world. His was the visage of an intellectual cleric: fine Aquiline nose, soft mouth, bald head held alertly erect. A commanding eagle-eyed presence. With his personal capacity for melancholy, John Quinn affiliated himself with the sufferings of Ireland. As a proponent of Irish nationalism, his initial burst of collecting was borne of a desire to patronize and promote the Irish cause. He utilized his fortune for the benefit of creatives, considering the height of patronage to be the support of living artists. He went so far as to pay for the molding of a pair of dentures for the destitute painter John Butler Yeats. In addition to his art purchases, Quinn supported authors by acquiring original manuscripts, advancing funds to Conrad, Joyce, and Pound in return for completed work. His library swelled to twelve-thousand volumes. Quinn’s loyalty was exemplified by his assistance of Roger Casement, organizing support in the United States and cabling influential contacts within the British government up until the hour of Casement’s execution for treason. After Casement’s death, Quinn wrote an extended piece in the Times decrying the injustice. The demands of patronage occasionally preyed upon his nerves, however, as a peevish Quinn is said to have remarked to a correspondent this business of shepherding geniuses in trouble gets very irksome. It was John Quinn’s mission to legitimize the art movements derided as authors of degenerate, modernistic works. He was a combative defender of his chosen milieu, engaging in the arena of ideas, lambasting the puritanism he saw within the United States, the country’s banality, its crudeness, the insanity of its idea of speed, its lack of taste. Overwrought, his relentless campaign taxed the nerves and drove Quinn to multiple periods of nervous exhaustion. By way of a remedy, the sensitive Quinn sought relief in the bucolic life. In 1916 he undertook great pains in restoring Purchase Street, a rambling country home situated on an estate of eighty acres. At Quinn’s insistence, his sister Julia Quinn Anderson, who had married a pharmacist in Fostoria, decamped with her daughter and summered with him at Purchase Street. The experiment did not last, the place too far from the city, making for inefficiencies in work habit, so Quinn placed the property on the market at the onset of autumn. At his urging, however, the Andersons made permanent their move to New York in order to be available to Quinn. He spent the better part of his life in cycles of neurotic workaholism, periods of intense labor followed by collapse and a need for remove from the vulgar and sinister city.
A scrupulous sentry to his vitality, Quinn is said to have maintained a lifelong fear of death, manifested in a troubling hypochondria; he drove his doctors mad with streams of inquiry and malady. He suffered from constant dyspepsia. In 1918 Quinn had surgery for an intestinal cancer located ten inches up the rectum. He detailed the operation in his correspondence, at a dispassionate anatomical remove, writing of splicing and suturing, the slicing away of his appendix, and the surgeon’s account of briefly bearing Quinn’s gallbladder in his hands, gleaming in the light of the surgical theatre, before thinking better of it and replacing the organ within the patient’s abdomen. The brush with death catalyzed a strident pace to Quinn’s collecting. Tense and thin, digesting the little he could, a diet of milk and eggs, eschewing all else save for the occasional bowl of mashed prunes, Quinn conducted his cam-paign with what time remained to him. He made the first of multiple extended excursions to continental Europe, guided by the Dadaist Henri-Pierre Roché, who served as talent scout and occasional alter ego. Quinn now had a keen focus on French creatives, the European vanguard of modern art. Antics of champagne and golf at Fountainebleu were contrasted with weeks of walking in slime & sewers in Paris. Fastidious and fusty, Quinn endured these trying aspects of the journeys, the aim of piling his trove ever higher trumping personal disdain. Pallets of sculpture and canvasses made the return voyages across the Atlantic with Quinn, whose ardor for art moderne ceased to abate. Preoccupied by pains in the tongue of the liver and a tender and swollen abdomen, in early 1924 it was discovered that Quinn’s cancer had returned, quickly metastasizing. He purchased Seurat’s Sleeping Gypsy that spring, but enjoyed the masterpiece for only a short time, dying July 28, 1924 at the age of fifty-four. Lying prostrate like a Pharoah surrounded by his baubles, the grim knowledge arrived that possessions outlast the possessors, a lesson buried within the memento mori, that each of us must remember to die. Attended at his deathbed by Mrs. Jeanne Robert Foster, his companion of several years (marriage an unspoken impossibility), she described his final form as a skull with yellow skin drawn taut over it, a mask of pain. His arms are flails of bone, his poor body a skin swelled with water. If I remember rightly, it is said that Mrs. Foster remained at his call until the end, reading to him from Bulfin’s Rambles in Eirinn, filling Quinn’s last days with emerald prisms of quaint Irish country life.
There would be no post-mortal existence for Quinn’s collection. He foresaw the futility of the continuation of the project after his death. Rather than add to the pile of adornments of our civilization bequeathed to the public by others possessed of a certain noblesse oblige such as Frick, Guggenheim, and Sackler, Quinn’s concerns were entirely earthbound. Beyond the limit of his life’s timeline, it seems, bachelor Quinn made no claim on posterity, save for the provision for his sisters, leaving his entire estate for the benefit of Julia Quinn Anderson, with a smaller bequest to his sister Clara, an Ursuline nun cloistered in Tiffin, Ohio. It is intriguing that a man so passionately and combatively involved in the collecting and promotion of modern art would allow for the complete dispersal of that which he so painstakingly curated. Quinn was a great admirer of the collector Edmond de Goncourt, whose will called for his collection’s sale rather than see his beloved artworks relegated to the cold tomb of a museum. Goncourt’s final intentions stated that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of them has given me shall be given again, in each case, to some in-heritor of my own taste – at public auction. Indeed, in the fashion modeled by Goncourt, Quinn’s collection died with him. At his demise the estate was deemed compromised due to its leviathan volume of art pieces and the absence of a market in modern art to absorb the largesse. Quinn’s ultimate inability as apostle to expand the reach of modernity to the masses created this dilemma. One art critic likened the failure of Quinn’s colossal project to that of the ill-fated Le Cousin Pons, Balzac’s passionate aesthete hostilely-received by those within his orbit. Quinn’s project was too monumental in scope, doomed to failure from the outset. He lived at a time when Old

Masters and Italian Renaissance works encompassed acceptable art, when Picasso was nothing more than a mongrel Spaniard laboring in obscurity. Convincing art world gatekeepers of the merits of the barbarous output of Cubists, Vorticists, Futurists, and Dadaists was im-possible. His taste was thirty-to-fifty years ahead of the popular consciousness, his purchases had coalesced into a stubborn statement almost political in nature. The result was the organization of a memorial exhibition held in January 1926 in order to drum-up interest in the impending dispersal. Opportunistic vultures of the art world circled the New York Art Center, not unlike Wall Street barons sniffing out a bargain from the fire sale of a distressed enterprise. The dissolution of Quinn’s collection was accomplished over a period of three years at a series of sales public and private, conducted in New York and Paris.

Roughly $350,000 was netted, the proceeds representing a capital loss to the deceased Quinn of as much as fifty percent. Some works sold for less than a sawbuck. There was much despair from the Quinn camp, Roché labeling the sales a massacre. It was said that the magnificent unity of the John Quinn Collection was destroyed in the Parisian auction rooms of the Hotel Drouet. With the final stroke of the auctioneer’s gavel the artworks Quinn assembled over decades were scattered, passed to the hands of dozens of buyers. The collection ceased to exist, no more than a memory. It has been estimated that today seventy-five percent of Quinn’s collection cannot be located. Indeed, as I write these lines, I am leafing the photo-graveur catalogs, page upon page, which over the years have attempted to recreate the scope of Quinn’s assemblage, particularly the handsome volume compiled by Zilczer and printed at government expense. With only five hundred works presently identifiable, any attempt to restore the comprehensive vision of Quinn’s accumulation would be woefully incomplete. His collecting was spurred by an impulse to impose order upon the world. As a substitute for the primal need to hunt and subdue, collecting served for him to briefly sublimate the reality of death. In what proved to be a brute of a year, Quinn lost his mother, and sisters Annie and Jessie, one after another, in 1902. His mother’s death came as a shock, succumbing to an acute illness before Quinn could reach her bedside in Fostoria, train-bound as he was from distant New York; Annie’s heart failed; and within months sister Jessie perished of a uterine hemorrhage. James Quinn had died in 1897, and his namesake, Jim, died of tuberculosis in 1906. The Quinns have been described as a family passionately close in their relation, and these successive shocks, the relentless reduction of those who numbered largest in his sphere, proved a major blow to the already high-keyed John Quinn. This season of death left him, aged thirty-six, with Julia and Clara as his sole living relations. At that time his collecting was restricted to manuscripts and minor artworks from undistinguished Irishmen, part and parcel of his quest to support Irish Home Rule. The passing of Quinn’s family shifted his allegiance from Ireland to the fancies of possibility presented by modern art, collecting with the zealotry of an obsessive convinced of the righteousness of his idée fixe. The entropy of his life, the decay of all he had ever known, the terrible revelation that all is loss and the securities of youth can so quickly be obliviated, crowded the labyrinth of Quinn’s mind. Proving the merits of modernity through the ballooning excess of his collection was merely a byproduct of a longing quite unbeknownst to him: an unconscious expression of desire for familial comfort. In response to the demise of his family Quinn chose as proxy an intimacy with artists and their artworks, thronging his life with them as some eccentrics collect stray cats; and as any good paterfamilias would for his offspring, he doted upon them and vigorously defended their works and reputations, until the arrival of his own death, when he resigned himself to the embrace of eternity. From the outset the sole possible design of John Quinn’s project was the reunion of his family within the cold beds of St. Wendelin churchyard.

I heard a distant whistle echo over the glade, muffled by a sprawl of basswood trees: the approach of the engine a familiar portent. Its mournful wail grew to a stentorian resonance unlike that issued by any creature of the wild. Within minutes St. Wendelin cemetery was smothered in sound. The great mass of the onrushing train rattled the earth; the locomotive, burdened with freight tonnage of automobiles of grains of petrochemicals, seemed to create a vortex as it rum-bled past, a breakthrough entirely outside of nature, willing its own breezes by sheer might. I departed John Quinn’s graveside for the confines of my car, where I sat for some time considering the heaving menace moving toward a destination unknown.