John Kerry cashes in on art

How unsurprising that the John Kerry campaign isn't eager to provide additional details about the senator's second-largest source of income in 2003: the $145,000 capital gain from the sale of his one-quarter ownership of a famous Dutch masterpiece, Adam Willaerts's "The Arrival of Frederick and Elizabeth, Prince and Princess of the Palatinate, at Flushing, 29th April 1613." Is selling 17th-century artwork for profit perhaps too . . . aristocratic for the friend-of-the-people image our junior senator would like to project?

In his 2003 tax filing, released last week, Kerry reported $147,000 of income from his day job in the US Senate and the hefty capital gain from the sale of the Willaerts. The form indicated that his share of the painting was acquired by Kerry in 1996. The facts are even more complicated. Teresa Heinz Kerry was a one-half owner of the painting, with art dealer Peter Tillou, when she assigned one half of her interest to Kerry, whom she married in 1995.

"She and I bought it in London about 10 years ago," says Tillou, whose base of operations is now in Litchfield, Conn. "We're very good friends, and she said, `Peter, let's buy it together.' It was an investment for her." The painting never hung in any of Kerry's or Heinz Kerry's domiciles in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Washington, D.C. Tillou kept it in Litchfield or in New York, or showed it at exhibitions, like one held at the Chrysler Museum in Virginia four years ago.

Tillou says he contacted Heinz about buying back the painting, with an eye to reselling it, a few years ago. Over time, he reimbursed her $1 million, her original one-half stake in the purchase price. When he sold it last year to a private collector for $2.7 million, he shared the $700,000 profit with her. One-quarter of the profit, or $175,000, showed up on Senator Kerry's tax return as a capital gain. Kerry reduced the reported gain to $145,000 using offsetting losses.

Tillou and three other art experts contacted characterized "Arrival," painted in 1623, as a breathtaking masterpiece of the golden age of Dutch art. "It is a drop-dead gorgeous picture," commented New York art dealer Otto Naumann, who specializes in Dutch paintings. Naumann's office was once next door to Tillou's, and he saw the painting often. "I offered a million dollars on this thing," he said.

Heinz Kerry and her first husband, the late Senator John Heinz, were famous art collectors, specializing in 17th-century Dutch works, primarily still lifes. Kerry, too, has become quite knowledgeable about art during his second marriage. "He's fairly intellectual," one dealer noted, admiringly.

Tillou said the painting had been sold to a private collector, whom he declined to name. He had no idea whether the new owner planned to exhibit the picture publicly. "My guess is that it is not going to surface for a while," one expert opined.

Fair Haarvaard

Was president Larry Summers joking when he told Harvard students that "instituting A-pluses and A-plus-pluses into the grading scale could be one way of ameliorating the problems caused by grade inflation at the College,"as the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, reported in mid-March? "Larry was outlining some proposals," a spokeswoman explains. "He was speaking very much illustratively and certainly not on the record about various things that people could take into consideration. He wasn't speaking specifically or making any suggestions that this is the sort of thing we should do here at Harvard."

I'm glad we got that cleared up.

Strike two

It was a chipper-sounding Fay Vincent who picked up the phone last week to accept my apology for burying him in my column. Yes, I know that some dictionaries define "late" as "having recently occupied a position or place" (American Heritage), but when I called him the late commissioner of baseball, I was clearly confusing him with his deceased predecessor, Bart Giamatti.

Vincent was very gracious, mentioning that errors do get made. "That's why pencils have erasers," he said. Mine seems particularly well-worn.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His
e-dress is beam@globe.com.