by Stuart Kells
Returning to New York in 1857, Morgan began his business career under the watchful eye of his father—who thought his son impetuous—and other senior minders such as Charles Dabney and Anthony Drexel. Morgan’s professional peers and business associates portrayed him as brusque and abrupt. He did make friends, though, including with Jonathan Sturges and his pianist wife, Mary. Occupying a fashionable townhouse, the ‘faintly Bohemian’ Sturges household was a gathering place for artists, such as J. F. Kensett, and musicians, such as L. M. Gottschalk. In that environment, Morgan fell in love with the Sturgeses’ ‘high-minded’, ‘refined’, ‘well educated’, ‘sweet-looking’ daughter Amelia, nicknamed Memie. The love affair was doomed from the start.
Amelia’s consumptive illness did not show itself at the beginning of the courtship. But, by the spring of 1861, the deadly disease was in full swing. Morgan still told his friends of the couple’s engagement, and he expressed a determination to press on with the marriage. Perhaps he had an idea of saving Memie’s life by taking her abroad. Whatever his plans, the Sturgeses opposed the match: how could he marry a girl who, in all likelihood, had only a few months to live?
Morgan’s own family refused to attend the melancholy wedding that took place at the Sturges home on 7 October 1862. The bridegroom had to carry the bride downstairs to the back parlour, where Dr Tyng conducted the brief ceremony. Memie was unable to join the guests for the wedding breakfast. As soon as the formalities were over, the couple left for England, then went on to Algiers and Nice. There, just four months after the wedding, Memie died.
When Morgan returned to New York he attended a Sanitary Commission fair and purchased his first oil painting: a portrait by George F. Baker of a ‘young and delicate looking woman’—a reminiscence of Memie that would hang for many years over the mantel in Morgan’s home. Three years after Memie’s death, Morgan married Frances Louisa Tracy, the daughter of a New York lawyer. The marriage produced four children: Louisa, Juliet, Anne and J. P. Junior, known to everyone as Jack.
In his fifth and sixth decades, Morgan was gradually freed of his minders. Charles Dabney died in 1879. In April 1890 Morgan’s father was riding in an open carriage near his Monte Carlo villa while holidaying on the Riviera. A passing train spooked the horses. Junius Spencer Morgan—the man who’d sent Morgan to boarding school and Germany, and who’d boycotted his son’s first wedding—was thrown to the stony roadside and died soon after. Hard upon a third departure—Anthony Drexel died in 1893—Morgan changed the name of his New York business from Drexel, Morgan & Co. to J. P. Morgan & Co. His thirty-year probation was over. Morgan was now his own man, and one of the world’s most powerful bankers and financiers.
From this point on, his annual visits to London and the Continent ceased to be those of a penitential subordinate and became instead a means to indulge what biographer George Wheeler called Morgan’s ‘growing pleasure in collecting great objects of art’. Morgan’s business activities attracted scrutiny from investigators and Senate subcommittees. But patrician Morgan had little patience with ‘the demands of representative government’. The banker’s priorities were obvious to all. In 1896, in the face of a pending congressional summons, he pursued the magical Gutenberg Bible that was once owned by Cardinal Mazarin and curated by Gabriel Naudé. In a ‘lordly response’ to the subcommittee summons, Morgan made clear his frame of mind:
‘My firm cable me of your notice,’ he said in a wire to Senator Isham Harris of Tennessee, the subcommittee chairman, sent from London on May 26. ‘Regret absence from country will delay, but will sail Wednesday next week, Teutonic, and hold myself at the call of your committee.’
Morgan attempted to create an English or European ‘gentleman’s library’ in New York. His buying reflected a Dibdinesque taste: mediaeval and Renaissance manuscripts, early printed books (preferably on vellum), fine bindings, historical autographs, old master drawings, Shakespeare, and modern literary manuscripts such as Hawthorne’s notebooks, Thoreau’s journals, and the manuscripts of Keats’s Endymion, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Zola’s Nana (which Madame Zola later tried to buy back). Morgan was so successful that he far surpassed the libraries he sought to emulate.
Apart from becoming America’s foremost book collector, Morgan also acquired art: Egyptian funerary sculpture, Chinese bronzes, and paintings by Raphael, Vermeer and Fragonard. ‘No price,’ he was reported to have said, ‘is too high for an object of unquestioned beauty and known authenticity.’ Those words carried an unexpected sting. Sometime in the 1890s he showed five of his Chinese porcelain beakers to art dealer Joseph Joel Duveen. In a Chatwinesque ‘it’s a fake’ frame of mind, the visitor looked at the five, then raised his walking stick and smashed two of them.
To assemble his library, Morgan purchased individual items—like the Mainz Psalter of 1459—as well as entire collections. He bought, for example, the libraries formed by James Toovey, Theodore Irwin and Richard Bennett (an eccentric Mancunian who, like Heber, preferred smaller books, even going further and refusing to allow large folios in his library). The latter collection included 100 illuminated manuscripts and thirty-two books printed by Caxton.
Morgan’s ‘inebriate’ collecting forays were likened variously to ‘a sailor on shore leave’; a ‘tipsy dowager with unlimited credit moving down Fifth Avenue on a riotous shopping trip’; and ‘a Medici prince or even a pharaoh’. Morgan pursued artefacts in the same manner in which he chased books. ‘He began emptying Egypt of treasure at such a rate that on one of his visits he was scolded by Lord Kitchener.’
In 1880 Morgan had moved to a large brownstone at Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street. To accommodate his growing library and art collection, he began planning a separate structure to the east of his house. He bought every piece of property on the Thirty-sixth Street block between his home and the Madison Avenue corner. He also bought the home of the architect Cass Canfield, on the Park Avenue corner. He then had the buildings demolished, and engaged Charles F. McKim, of McKim, Mead & White, as principal architect for the library project.
The resulting structure is a beautiful, if architecturally confused, mansion. Completed in 1906 and executed in pinkish white Tennessee marble, the building blended Peloponnesian, Italianate, Elizabethan and Edwardian elements. The facade features Doric pilasters, Ionic columns and an arched portico based on Bartolomeo Ammannati’s garden loggia of the Villa Giulia, and Annibale Lippi’s Villa Medici.
Though McKim expressed the view that the interior of a library should ‘whisper and not shout’, the opulently coloured and ornamented interior makes a certain amount of noise. Three rooms embrace a monumental vaulted foyer known as the Rotunda. McKim conceived the largest room, the East Room, as a space for book storage and display. The West Room was Morgan’s private study, the North Room the librarian’s office. In the Rotunda, Skíros marble pilasters adorn the walls, and columns of cipollino marble flank the doorways. The marble floor was modelled on the Villa Pia in the Vatican gardens. Inspired by Pinturicchio and Raphael, the artist H. Siddons Mowbray decorated the Rotunda and the East Room with Renaissance-style paint and stucco.
The East Room’s walls soar ten metres high and are lined floor to ceiling with triple tiers of bookcases of inlaid Circassian walnut. Hidden spiral staircases give access to the galleries. An enormous sixteenth-century Pieter Coecke van Aelst tapestry—purchased by Morgan in 1906 and depicting, truthfully, the triumph of Avarice—hangs over the fireplace. The elaborate ceiling paintings feature classical imagery and references to Europe’s great artists and thinkers, such as Dante, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Socrates, Herodotus, Galileo, Columbus and Caxton. Zodiac signs on the ceiling correspond to Morgan’s date of birth, the date of his second marriage, the sign Morgan assumed as a member of the New York Zodiac Club, and the sign under which Memie died.
In the West Room, whose ceiling Morgan purchased in Florence, he displayed his collection of porcelain, sculpture, paintings and other objets d’art. Channelling Gabriel
Naudé, Francis Henry Taylor called the Morgan library one of the Seven Wonders of the Edwardian World. It was finished just in time to provide Morgan ‘with a setting of truly anachronistic magnificence’ during the stock market panic of 1907. Hosting a series of all-night meetings, the library served as Morgan’s nocturnal command post during the weeks of panic.
In 1905 Morgan appointed Belle da Costa Greene as his librarian and ‘general aide-de-camp’. The surname ‘da Costa’ was a pseudo-Portuguese fiction. ‘Greene’, too, was a falsity; Belle’s name at birth was Belle Marian Greener. She’d gone straight from public school to a job at the Princeton University library. Morgan’s scholarly nephew Junius may have met her there; it was he who introduced her to Morgan. Exotic Greene was even more bohemian than the Sturgeses. She was also promiscuous; the Renaissance expert Bernard Berenson headed the long list of her lovers. (When later asked if she was Morgan’s mistress, she answered candidly, ‘We tried!’) Designer clothes were another well-known taste. ‘Just because I am a librarian,’ she declared, ‘doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.’
Greene’s goal was to make Morgan’s library one that was renowned for classics, as well as for bindings and manuscripts. From 1908 she travelled regularly to Europe, staying at the Ritz and other deluxe hotels and befriending the leading bookmen of the era. As an acquirer of books, she was startlingly effective. On one successful buying trip to London, she snaffled up Lord Amherst’s seventeen Caxtons in ‘private negotiations’ the night before they were to be sold at auction.
Morgan died in Rome on the doubly unlucky date of 13 March 1913. His legacy, though, was in good shape. His collection of books and art accounted for half the estate’s $128 million value. The great bulk of that estate passed to Morgan’s only son. (Among other specific bequests, Morgan left Belle Greene $50,000.) Jack Morgan sold some of the art to pay taxes and improve cashflow. But he enhanced rather than eroded the book collections. In 1915 Greene wrote to the London bookseller Quaritch. ‘I am glad to tell you that [Jack has] a strong interest in the library and promised that I may go on collecting books and manuscripts when the war is over.’ Jack added 206 illuminated manuscripts as well as important incunabula, one of them an indulgence printed by Gutenberg. Jack’s acquisitions brought the total number of Morgan incunabula to about 2000.
In 1924 Jack turned the book collection into a public reference library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, which he vested in trustees, and gave $1.5 million. His goal was to render the collections permanently available to the American public, so that people could enjoy and learn from them. Belle Greene stayed on as the library’s first director.
One of the Morgan Library’s most intriguing books played a central part in a mediaeval scandal. Jacquemart de Hesdin worked as an illuminator for the Duc de Berry. In 1398 Hesdin accused a rival illuminator of stealing his colours and his pattern sheets. Aided by his brother-in-law Jean Petit, Hesdin murdered the rival. The killers were tried—and pardoned. The pattern-book is now in the Morgan.
Another highlight of the library is an evocative group of manuscripts that came from an unlikely place. In the spring of 1910, villagers were digging for fertiliser at the site of the destroyed Monastery of the Archangel Michael, in Egypt’s Fayyum oasis, near present-day Hamuli. In an old stone cistern the villagers found sixty Coptic manuscripts. The following year, J. P. Morgan acquired fifty-four of them. Written in Sahidic (a Coptic dialect) and ranging in date from 823 to 914 AD, they formed the oldest, largest and most important group of early Coptic manuscripts with a single provenance. Evidently, early in the tenth century, the monks had buried the monastery’s entire library in the cistern for safekeeping, shortly before the monastery closed for good.
The manuscripts feature simple, even crude depictions of the Holy Family; the thought might have crossed Morgan’s mind that they were forgeries. (Chatwin and Duveen would no doubt have denounced them as such.) But the find was well documented and authenticated. The manuscripts passed through the hands of J. Kalebdian and Arthur Sambon, a French numismatist and dealer. Henri Eugene Xavier Louis Hyvernat, a Franco-American Coptologist, Semitist and orientalist, studied and photographed them. Further supporting their authenticity, nearly all the manuscripts were found in their original bindings. About twenty have decorative or pictorial frontispieces, typically a large ornamented cross with interlace patterns. One of the manuscripts—John Chrysostom’s Encomium on the Four Bodiless Beasts, illuminated by Papa Isak and dated 892–93 AD—contains one of the earliest extant images of the Virgin nursing Christ.
Morgan also gathered a treasure of manuscripts from Europe, including examples from St Gall and nearby Lindau. His first major mediaeval acquisition was the ninth-century Lindau Gospels, which rank as one of the great masterpieces of his collection. He acquired the volume in 1901. Its richly jewelled gilt, silver and enamel cover is one of the best surviving examples of a mediaeval treasure binding, and one of several examples of that art-form in the library. The inside covers are lined with precious patterned silks from Byzantium and the Middle East. The book itself was made at St Gall. It features twelve richly illuminated canon tables. Each of the four gospels begins with a marvellous double-page spread featuring the opening words of the gospel text. The copying of the texts involved the work of as many as seven different scribes. A monk named Folchart, one of St Gall’s pre-eminent artists, seems to have been responsible for some of the richer illuminated pages.
Another Morgan prize with a St Gall connection is an illuminated epistle lectionary and missal for Holy Saturday. Purchased by Morgan in 1905, it features ninety-two vellum leaves decorated with three large illuminated interlace-pattern initials and 144 smaller initials. The manuscript was made at St Gall in about 880 AD. Morgan also acquired important printed books, including the Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum, the first English prayer-book (which was also the first English book printed on vellum), the earliest surviving book that was printed in Italy and all four Shakespeare folios.
Helene Hanff, visiting in 1976, was unimpressed with the Pierpont Morgan Library. ‘You enter a dark, airless hall with heavy mahogany doors.’ The red plush and mahogany made the West Room ‘suffocating’, an ‘oppressive mausoleum’ that gave Hanff the cold horrors. The nearby mansion that housed the Frick Collection—assembled by Henry Clay Frick, the Pittsburgh coke and steel industrialist—was a contrast and a relief: ‘white stone outside, white stone and marble inside…almost a shock, coming to it as we did from the sombre darkness of the Morgan. The Frick is all light and air.’
When disaster strikes
A scene from the 1999 film The Mummy is set in a Cairo library in which the hapless librarian causes a shelf to topple over. The falling bookcase causes a chain reaction. In its turn, every bookshelf in the library falls over and loses its books.
Something similar happened in 1968 at Northwestern University. A heavy, freestanding section of empty shelving fell against shelves that were full of books. John Camp and Carl Eckelman reported on the incident in their technical paper on library book stacks: ‘a domino effect toppled twenty-seven ranges, spilling 264,000 volumes, splintering solid oak chairs, flattening steel footstools, shearing books in half, destroying or damaging more than 8000 volumes.’
No one was injured, but an employee was killed in 1983 by the collapse of similar shelving at the Records Storage Center of Ewing Township, New Jersey.
In the same year, at the Coalinga District Library in California, an earthquake scattered the collections. According to Camp and Eckelman’s paper, ‘The card catalogue toppled over, wall shelves collapsed, some stacks twisted, and two-thirds of the library’s 60,000 books spilled to the floor.’ The same tectonic risks led the Huntington Library in San Marino to use bungee cords to restrain the contents of its shelves.
In 1726, King John V of Portugal purchased the manuscript collection of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed many of the valuable manuscripts—including treasures t
hat Sunderland had purchased in Venice in 1720 and, most tragically of all, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini’s handwritten copy of the St Gall Quintilian, which Sunderland had acquired in 1712 from the library of Nicolaas Thomas van der Marck at The Hague.
Ladders were a late arrival in the history of libraries: the number of books had to reach a critical level before high shelves were warranted. (Before resorting to a ladder, Christopher Wren used a stool with safely splayed legs.) The hooked ladder was a nineteenth-century innovation. Melvil Dewey described an example that he first saw in Birmingham and later in the Locust Street branch of the Philadelphia Library, where it was installed in 1880. The ladder was suspended from bronze hooks running along a pipe, which made ‘an annoying metal-on-metal sound whenever the ladder was used’.
As soon as librarians climbed ladders they fell from them. At the Tripitaka Koreana, ladders lead to a perilously narrow suspended plank which gives access to higher shelves. At one eighteenth-century German library, the books were so shelved that, to reach them, librarians needed ‘the agility of a tightrope walker or a roofer’. Tim Munby wrote of a Cambridge library in which a volume of Hansard was shelved high above an entrance door that managed to move the ladder away every time it was opened: ‘It is not for nothing that mountaineering has a major part in the pursuits of the Fellows of the College.’
In 1834 Friedrich Adolph Ebert, formerly head librarian at Wolfenbüttel, returned to his old town of Dresden, where he fell to his death from a library ladder.
CHAPTER 13
For the Glory
