Biography
Mathilda Loeser Calnan was the daughter of German Jewish parents Charles Alexander Loeser (died 1928) and Olga Loeser (née Kaufmann-Lebert) and heiress to a fortune derived from the Frederick Loeser Co. Department Store of Brooklyn, New York (founded by her paternal grandfather). Her father, a Harvard graduate, was an art collector of international stature and a wealthy American expatriate in Florence, Italy. The Loeser family donated eight Cézanne paintings (out of his collection of 15 such paintings) to the U.S. government, to be hung in the White House "Green Room".
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy signed a thank you letter to Matilda (Mrs. Ronald) Calnan, dated May 2, 1961. The following month, Calnan's daughter, Philippa Calnan (later a public affairs director at the J. Paul Getty Trust), responded to the First Lady's invitation and came, in her mother's place, to the White House to view the paintings in their new setting. However, John Walker III (died 1995), chief curator of the National Gallery of Art, had surreptitiously diverted some or most of the artwork from the White House to boost the collection of the National Gallery of Art, of which he was curator.
To get them, Walker admitted he had bamboozled Matilda Calnan and former President Harry S. Truman. Walker visited Mrs. Calnan in Florence in 1950 and quizzed her on whether the Cézannes were being properly cared for, and claimed if anything happened to valuable government property, she was liable, adding that, as National Gallery curator, failure to protect the federal government's art could cause him to "end up in Leavenworth prison" for negligence, prompting Mrs. Calnan to divest herself of the paintings. Today, three of the Cézannes hang in the National Gallery and five are in the White House family quarters.
According to the White House curator's office, the eight have never been installed together as an ensemble, as the Loeser bequest directs. Mrs. Kennedy herself wrote, in an eight page missive (which she requested "Please please this letter is always to be secret", underlining the first words twice), to the curator in her final days in the White House following her husband's assassination, about how Walker had "violated poor Mr. Loeser's will."
Walker's account is contained in a 14-page brief, "My Most Infamous Intrigue: The White House Cézannes", which is now kept in the archives of the National Gallery. The events were kept quiet until 2008, when Margaret Leslie Davis' "Mona Lisa in Camelot" revealed the affair in its entirety but it never became the nationwide scandal Mrs. Kennedy had feared.
