‘I am the master’

Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to ask the tour guide: ‘How did the family make its money in the first place?’ For some reason, this almost always astonishes and bewilders. It’s as if the devotion of capital to bricks and mortar, acres of commemorative canvas and fresco, marble and landscaping, covers up any roots in the slave trade or the amassing of bribes from Indian nawabs. Money is made, and then it sets about dignifying itself.

The Gulbenkian Foundation is a solid organisation based in Lisbon. It dispenses money in improving ways and possesses a very handsome art gallery, full of treasures. It is a blameless thing. But why is it in Lisbon? Why does it have so much money? And how was that money made?

No doubt in a couple of centuries hardly anyone will pose these questions, and the Gulbenkian Foundation will appear as innocuous as Kedleston Hall. Jonathan Conlin’s riveting life of its founder, Calouste Gulbenkian, lays bare the savage origins of this expensive tranquillity. Yeats said it best: ‘Some violent bitter man, some powerful man/Called architect and artist in, that they,/Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone/ The sweetness that all longed for night and day.’

Like many obscenely rich men, Calouste was from an already very wealthy family. His origins were in the close-knit Armenian community in Constantinople. A favourite anecdote has his father, Sarkis, complaining that his coffee-servant had fallen asleep on the job; the other servants, over-zealously, beat him to death. His father’s angry complaint, ‘I told you to beat him, not to kill him,’ forms the punchline. When Sarkis died, he left the equivalent of £80 million. Calouste, who had been educated abroad, a rootless commander of money, set about transforming this to an inconceivable extent.