Word: shrewd
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...traveling exhibition is testimony to Collector Chrysler's far-ranging tastes and shrewd buying. An art connoisseur since he first started saving up his allowance at 14 to buy a Renoir landscape with nude (a Hotchkiss master tore it off the wall as unsuitable for schoolboy eyes), Chrysler eased into collecting by searching out the buyers' markets: "When other collectors bought large canvases, I would buy small pictures. Later, when smaller paintings were more readily hung I acquired large ones. When interest lagged in English, Dutch and Flemish schools, I added them." In 1939 Collector Chrysler also...
...history have struck a happier balance with their age or won richer rewards in return than Flemish Artist Peter Paul Rubens, master of Europe's baroque style at its 17th century peak. A staunch Roman Catholic, unquestioning Royalist, shrewd businessman, Rubens was both a spectacularly successful diplomat, the trusted adviser of kings, and the most sought-after painter of his day, whose masterpieces today are treasured by every major museum of Europe. In an exhibition of his oil sketches and drawings, collected by Harvard's Fogg Museum and Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library and on display...
...eventual proposal of marriage and his subsequent visit to London Jeweler Theodore Williams. For, like everything Major Woodfall did. the purchase of a suitable wedding gift for his bride was consummated in style. It began with a ?70 ($196) dinner at the Ritz for Jeweler Williams, ended with the shrewd selection of some ?6,800 worth of gems at Williams' place of business. Paying for the lot by check. Major Woodfall pocketed a particularly appealing brooch (worth ?585) with the words that Miss Hackman wished to wear it over the weekend. He strode out of the jewelry store...
...Shrewd observors soon noted, however, that while drunkenness and vice proposed without difficulty on all other Saturdays, football weekends included House Dances. This fact made it clear that the Master's real motive was to drive students to the dances and thereby make them more profitable rather than encouraging virtue. This deduction was supported by the subsequent appearance on Official Bulletin Boards of little white notices proclaiming the eight o'clock curfew for every Saturday night on which the House Committee sponsored a co-educational function...
...dark days after the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune of 1871, French Banker Gustave Dreyfus, 35, sought out Paris Art Critic Charles Timbal. Taking shrewd advantage of the general despair, Dreyfus coolly offered to buy the collection of Italian Renaissance art works that Timbal had spent 19 years assembling. Timbal sold, thus making Dreyfus overnight the possessor of a small private museum of Renaissance sculpture and painting...