Sabin, Frank T.

Biography

"All who knew the late Mr. Frank T. Sabin will have heard of his death...with more than ordinary regret. For, with the keen instincts of a man of business, he possessed a fund of humorous kindness which compelled intercourse with him to ripen into friendship. Though the bulk of his trading was done with America, his name was made familiar throughout England by such notable purchases as the Browning letters and Nelson's Trafalgar memorandum. His generosity in holding this last relic for the British Museum is well known, and it was no solitary act of good nature. Both The Burlington Magazine and the National Portrait Gallery owe something to Mr. Sabin's instinct for doing the right thing, even when, as he would point out with a grim chuckle, what he was doing was not business. Moreover, when, as sometimes happaned with paintings, his courage had exceeded his judgment, he was of all men the readiest to bow to adverse opinion--a virtue uncommon enough even among those who have not Mr. Sabin's inducements to dispense with it. Indeed, under the surface of the keen business man there was a genuine simplicity of nature which compelled others to be equally frank with him, and so may have contributed indirectly to his worldly success at least as much as the multifarious knowledge of prints and books and curios which he possessed."

Bibliography

1915

C.J.H. "A Monthly Chronicle." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 28 (November 1915): 81.

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