Joseph Duveen

British-American art dealer who sold Old Master paintings to American Gilded Age industrialists — Frick, Mellon, Morgan, Kress — and who built the US National Gallery of Art, the Frick Collection, and many other American museum collections through his sales.

Invented the luxury goods sales technique for art — creating scarcity, cultivating rivalry between collectors, making the buyer feel that owning the object was a social necessity rather than a luxury — and understood that selling to the ultra-wealthy requires making them feel they need the object for status rather than beauty.