Steinway's harmonious collection.

• Author: Ferling, Rhona L.
• Position: Steinway and Sons Inc. - Corporate Gallery - Cover Story

If you stand still and listen, you can almost hear the strains of a lyrical Mozart concerto or a passionate Beethoven sonata drifting down from the portraits in the Steinway & Sons collection. The subjects of the collection are mainly classical musicians and composers, a fitting theme for a piano manufacturer that's long been a household name. But to Henry Steinway, great-grandson of founder Henry Engelhart Steinway, some of the faces gazing down at him aren't just great artists. They're old friends, too, because many of them were Steinway musicians.

In the late 19th century and early decades of this century, arts management didn't exist as an industry. As a result, the task of promoting musicians often fell to corporate sponsors, and Steinway & Sons was no exception. In 1872, it sponsored the American debut of Anton Rubinstein, who played more than 200 concerts before deciding to return to Russia, where he founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Twenty years later, Jan Paderewski arrived on the scene for his American debut. "He was very different from Rubinstein," Henry Steinway says. "He loved to play in the United States."

Given these close business and personal ties, it's hardly surprising that Steinway & Sons decided to focus on collecting portraits. Henry Steinway says the collection began around the turn of the century. At the time, Steinway & Sons was based on the lower east side of New York City, where it had a huge marble showroom and an adjoining auditorium that served as its concert hall. (In 1925, the company moved to its current location in midtown New York.) Nahum Stetson, a Steinway sales manager, convinced the company that Steinway Hall needed a facelift.

That's when the company began to acquire and commission portraits of its most stellar musicians. The accent was on American artists, says Henry Steinway, because the arts community at the time believed strongly in supporting American rather than European art.

The next big buying period was during the 1920s, when Steinway commissioned a portrait of Paderewski. During this period, it also acquired three Rockwell Kent paintings, a portrait of Sergei Rachmaninoff and a piece called "Rubinstein Plays for the Czar" by F. Luis Mora.

Steinway & Sons put its collection to work by using the portraits in the advertising campaigns it conducted through magazines and the rotogravure section of the New York Times. In fact, the company was one of the...