Management: The Corporate Cezanne

The most engaging new celebrity in Washington last week was a 320-year-old boy dressed in a grey-brown tunic and a plumed velvet hat. In a chastely simple lobby of the National Gallery of Art, where the Mona Lisa hung last year on its visit to the U.S., Rembrandt's delicate 251 inch by 22 inch portrait of his son Titus was unveiled for a six-week-long stay before moving on to its permanent home in the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Art lovers flocked to see the study that Rembrandt lovingly painted shortly after the death of the child's mother, and the lines were lengthened by those who were as curious about the painting's price tag as about its ageless beauty. Two months ago, at a controversial auction at Christie's auction house in London (TIME, March 26), Titus was hammered down for $2,234,400, a record price for Britain and only $65,000 less than the historic price that New York's Metropolitan Museum paid four years ago for Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

Money & Desire. The man who bought Titus and brought it to the U.S., after a year of stalking it, is perhaps the only man in the world who could and would execute such a coup. As head of California's rapidly expanding Hunt Foods & Industries, Inc., Norton Winfred Simon is the ruler of a business complex that embraces two dozen companies in fields as diverse as publishing and steel. A comfortable millionaire—about $100 million at latest count—who grew rich primarily by canning tomato products, Simon in recent years has leaped from catsup to culture by assembling a $45 million assortment of art that ranks as one of the U.S.'s most impressive private collections. He is thus not only one of the few individual collectors with the money and desire for a first-class Rembrandt, but also that even rarer creature: a man who pursues great paintings and additional companies with equal vigor, thereby establishing a collector's reputation in both business and art.

In Washington last week, Simon was the guest of honor at a pre-unveiling luncheon (filet of sole espagnole) given by National Gallery Director John Walker and attended by such notables as Navy Secretary Paul Nitze, Dutch Ambassador Carl Schurmann, Pittsburgh Art Patron Paul Mellon and William Walton, chairman of the Federal Government's Commission of Fine Arts. Then Titus was ceremoniously brought from the gallery's basement, and while flashbulbs popped and TV cameras whirred, hung before red velvet in its place of honor. Yet, for all the trouble and cost he had incurred to acquire Titus, the lean, craggy six-footer with the deepset eyes and anguished look clearly did not savor the glare of publicity.