by Jean Strouse
The volume was a late ninth-century Latin text of the four Gospels in Latin, preserved within two of the finest surviving Carolingian jeweled covers in the world. Having first come to light in the sixteenth century at the Benedictine monastery of St. Gall, then somewhat mysteriously migrated to a convent in Lindau, Germany, it was known as the Lindau Gospels. The British Museum wanted it but could not meet Lord Ashburnham’s price. Morgan could: he paid £10,000—nearly $50,000—for a volume that would be valued at millions if it came on the market a century later. The Lindau Gospels, numbered M1 once Morgan’s librarian began to organize and catalogue his acquisitions, served as the foundation for his outstanding collection of 630 medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts. The Grolier Club had mounted an exhibition of illuminated manuscripts in 1892, but the art historian Walter S. Cook later observed that before the formation of Morgan’s library no American scholar had “specialized in the field of illuminated manuscripts or recognized their place and importance in the history of painting.” The scholar Charles Rufus Morey said no phase of medieval archaeology could be fully illustrated or understood without reference to the Morgan manuscripts.
There is, unfortunately, little surviving correspondence between Pierpont and his erudite nephew, but Junius appears to have initiated most of Morgan’s important early manuscript purchases. The appeal of these volumes to their new owner probably lay in their sumptuous materials (vellum, gold leaf, brilliant pigments) and religious significance, in the complementary relations between text and decoration, and in the unimpaired quality of the original artwork, rendered with dazzling virtuosity. Unlike frescoes, panel paintings, and canvases, which deteriorate through exposure to light and air, the miniatures of medieval manuscripts tend to be well protected from the elements by their bindings, and to have lost none of their original splendor.
On the eve of the twentieth century, as machine presses and automated typesetting spread the printed word to much of the world, Morgan began with Junius’s guidance to assemble a record of the physical history of the book. His collections eventually documented an evolution that began with Egyptian, Greek, and Latin papyrus rolls, went on to the medieval vellum codex and the first volumes printed with the invention of movable type by Johann Gutenberg, to later literary first editions and masterpieces of fine printing and illustration. The Latin Bible produced by Gutenberg in Mainz in about 1454–55 is universally acknowledged to be the greatest monument in the history of printing. Morgan acquired his first Gutenberg Bible in 1896 from Sotheran & Co. for £2,750 (about $13,500)—a fine copy printed on vellum. On Junius’s recommendation in 1899 he purchased the private library of the London dealer James Toovey, which included a series of books printed by the fifteenth-century Venetian scholar Aldus Manutius, and the Mainz Catholicon of 1460, a massive Latin dictionary that was probably the last book Gutenberg printed. Toovey’s collection, including its examples of European fine bindings from the Renaissance onward, was the most important of its kind to come to America, and provided the broad framework for Morgan’s subsequent book collecting.
In 1900, also at Junius’s urging, Morgan bought the eclectic library of Theodore Irwin of Oswego, New York. It brought him a second Gutenberg Bible—the Old Testament only, on paper, containing unique typesettings of many early leaves. Irwin’s collection also included the first edition in Greek of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Florence, 1489), three volumes printed by Gutenberg’s English counterpart, William Caxton, 270 Rembrandt etchings, a notable collection of Dürer prints, a French Apocalypse manuscript produced in about 1415 for Jean, Duc de Berry, and the priceless seventh-century Golden Gospels of Henry VIII, written in gold letters on purple vellum, thought to have been presented to Henry in 1521 by Pope Leo X when he anointed the English king “Defender of the Faith.” Morgan kept it on a special stand in his manuscript vault. Out of gratitude to his nephew-adviser, he gave Junius the Dürer prints; Junius eventually gave them to the Metropolitan Museum.
There are forty-nine surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible in varying states of completeness. Between 1896 and 1911 Morgan acquired three of them, making his library the only institution in the world to have so many.
He never confined himself to a single scholarly adviser, a specific period, an artistic genre, or a uniform aesthetic. From the London bookseller Pearson, he bought in 1897 the manuscript of Keats’s Endymion, with its famous opening line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” From the heirs of Byron’s mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, he purchased the original autograph manuscripts of Don Juan, Marino Faliero, Manfred, and several shorter poems. And at about this time he acquired the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, written in 1843. The most renowned Christmas story in the English language made the name Scrooge synonymous with “miser,” although the bitter old skinflint is dramatically converted by the Spirits of Christmas and belated self-knowledge into a warmhearted, generous man. If Morgan intended any satirical self-reflection with this important literary prize, he left no record of it.
At Cartier’s in Paris between 1899 and 1901 he spent $200,000 on jewelry, portrait miniatures, jardinières, vases, and Sèvres porcelain. From the Frankfurt antiquities dealers J. & S. Goldschmidt in 1896 he bought a richly embossed silver cup said to be by Cellini (it wasn’t), from the collection of the Earl of Warwick, for £8,000 ($40,000). Morgan especially liked the ornate objects in which Goldschmidt specialized, and through this dealer he bought Limoges enamels, a reliquary casket allegedly containing an arm bone of Catherine of Braganza, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German drinking vessels, a Louis XV chatelaine, a silver tazza said to have been owned by the Aldobrandini family, jewelry, faience, bottles, and bonbonnières.
At the galleries of Duveen Brothers in London and New York, he worked primarily with Henry Duveen, uncle of the more famous Joseph. One day, Joseph reportedly decided that Henry was not taking full advantage of the Morgan millions, and asked permission to try his own hand. He made up a tray of thirty portrait miniatures—six masterpieces, the rest mediocre—and offered them to Morgan. The banker looked them over quickly, then asked, “How much for the lot?” Joseph shot Uncle Henry a look of triumph and named a sum. Morgan selected the six good items off the velvet tray and slipped them into his pocket. He divided the figure Joseph had named by thirty, multiplied by six, said he would pay that price, and left. Uncle Henry smiled. “Joe,” he said, “you’re only a boy. It takes a man to deal with Morgan.”
Morgan knew a great deal about portrait miniatures, and assembled one of the finest private collections of the modern era. First popularized in France at the court of Francis I (1515–47), these tiny paintings served as pledges of loyalty and love, centuries before the invention of photography. They appealed to Morgan’s taste on several counts—artistic merit, historical value, royal associations, rarity, and romance. Usually painted on vellum and set in gold frames or in ravishingly beautiful gold, enamel, glass, and ivory boxes, they were worn in lockets and pendants, kept on mantels and bedside tables, and in secret drawers. Lord Nelson died with an image of Emma Hamilton around his neck. George IV did the same for his secret (Catholic, commoner) wife, Maria Fitzherbert.
Morgan owned a portrait of Emma Hamilton by Richard Cosway, the fashionable English miniaturist of the eighteenth century, and several of George IV and Mrs. Fitzherbert. In the course of a decade he acquired roughly eight hundred portrait miniatures, dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, by most of the important artists in the field—among them Nicholas Hilliard, Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean Baptiste Isabey, and the leading sixteenth-century French painter on a large and small scale, Jean Clouet. Their subjects included Mary, Queen of Scots, Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More, Napoleon, Sir Walter Scott, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (the fetching subject of the painting stolen from Agnew’s before Junius could buy it), and dozens of portraits of French courtesans—Madame de Montespan (mistress of Louis XIV), Ninon de l’Enclos (whose admirers were said to
have included Richelieu, Racine, Molière, and La Rochefoucauld, and whose conquests continued past the age of sixty), Madame de Maintenon, who succeeded de Montespan in the affections of Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, maîtresse to Louis XV, and Madame Du Barry, her successor.
Probably the most famous of the Morgan miniatures was a profile bust of Queen Elizabeth I in relief on an oval gold pendant, called the Armada Jewel. It was unsigned but closely associated with Nicholas Hilliard, and thought to have been presented by the Queen to one of her statesmen after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Fascinated since childhood with European history and royalty, Morgan now owned objects once intimately handled by Elizabeth, Henry VIII, Napoleon, Lord Nelson, and the ladies of the French court.
The late nineties mark the beginning of a love affair with the hedonism, delicacy, and artifice of ancien régime France that lasted the rest of Morgan’s life. Perhaps to complement his miniature collection, he bought autograph letters by several of the figures featured there—Madame de Maintenon, Madame de Pompadour, Marie Antoinette—and marriage contracts for all of the French kings from Louis XIII to Louis XVIII. He commissioned Duveen to furnish an entire Louis XVI drawing room at Princes Gate in 1898, with tables, andirons, tapestry screens, chairs, stools, and a Sèvres bust of the King himself. The following year he bought a commode and secrétaire en suite made in 1790 for Marie Antoinette by Jean-Henri Riesener, the finest French cabinetmaker of the period, and later a superb bleu turquin marble side table with neoclassical mounts made by Pierre Gouthière in 1781 for the Duchesse de Mazarin.
Morgan’s strength as a collector lay in the decorative arts. Not what art historians irreverently refer to as a “flatware” man, he had a greater appreciation of craftsmanship, gorgeous materials, and three-dimensional objects than of painting’s more conceptual pleasures. Joseph Duveen was a flatware man, and in advising buyers such as Benjamin Altman, Jules Bache, and Henry Clay Frick in the early twentieth century, he helped establish major collections of European paintings in the United States. The young, Harvard-educated scholar Bernard Berenson worked closely with Isabella Stewart Gardner, who built a Venetian Gothic palazzo on Boston’s Fenway to house her collection of European paintings. Morgan went his own autocratic way, relying not at all on Berenson and on Duveen chiefly for decorative objects. He acquired several fine paintings through other dealers, but they amounted to a miscellaneous assemblage rather than a coherent collection.
In the late nineties, as wealthy Americans turned from relatively safe and available salon pictures to the work of great masters, Otto Gutekunst at the Colnaghi gallery in London divided paintings into two categories—“angel food and big, BIG, BIG game.” Morgan was now out for BIG game, but he bought cautiously at first, staying close to the landscapes and decorative styles with which he was already familiar.
In 1894 he acquired through Agnew’s (the firm was still pursuing the stolen Duchess of Devonshire) a landscape by John Constable (1776–1837) called The White Horse, A Scene on the River Stour. The artist considered this serene, naturalistic painting of a tow-horse being ferried across a river on a quiet summer morning “one of my happiest efforts on a large scale.” Morgan lent the picture to the Royal Academy in 1895.
Three years later, also through Agnew’s, he bought a series of decorative panels called The Progress of Love, by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. They had been commissioned in 1771 by Madame Du Barry for the new dining pavilion in her château at Louveciennes—a gift from Louis XV. Fragonard’s witty, erotic narrative follows a pair of young lovers from first “Pursuit” to “The Lover Crowned,” but the King’s mistress rejected the paintings once they were completed. Cynics said she did not like the allusion to her own romantic adventures, but a more likely explanation is that the stylistic fashion in France had shifted from the rococo to a more formal neoclassicism, and Fragonard’s sweet young shepherd-lovers looked distinctly passé. Whatever the reason for the rejection, the artist installed the four original paintings at his cousin’s house in Grasse in 1790 and added several more. They remained there until 1898, when Morgan bought all fourteen for £62,000, roughly $300,000. Enchanted by the subject, style, and history of these panels, he had an entire room designed for them at Princes Gate.
He never bargained for things he wanted, and his acquisitions helped drive the art market to new heights. From the London dealer Charles Wertheimer in 1898 he bought a Rembrandt portrait of Nicolaes Ruts, a wealthy Dutch merchant in a white ruff and fur-trimmed cloak, for £6,000 (about $30,000). Dated 1631, the painting had remained in the Ruts family for nearly two centuries, but somehow by 1850, when it was sold from the collection of King Willem II of the Netherlands, it was known as Portrait of a Rabbi. Wilhelm von Bode had identified it as the Dutch trader from a watercolor copy of the original.b
In 1899 Morgan bought a Frans Hals Portrait of a Lady (£5,720), Henry Morland’s The Lady Ironing for £3,767, a John Russell pastel of Mrs. Topham and Her Three Children (£4,400), and Hogarth’s The Lady’s Last Stake for £8,250. These prices suggest how dramatically art-market values change over time. The Rembrandt did not cost significantly more than canvases by artists later considered far less important, and its price was just half of what Morgan paid Duveen in 1899 for a set of Rose du Barri “Coventry Vases.”
Throughout Europe the news that Morgan was in town now brought art dealers, booksellers, and antiquaires flocking to see him. Louisa reported from London one spring to Fanny in New York that “Father gets into the hands of dealers more and more, and his taste and knowledge grow in the most wonderful way.” Her own knowledge, by her own account, did not keep pace. His “curios” did not interest her, she confessed—“I’m not educated up to them.” At a Rembrandt exhibition in London she found some of the paintings “glorious, but you do get so bored with his many likenesses of his coarse and ugly self!”
Louisa proved more useful as social reporter than as art critic. At the end of 1898, Morgan’s niece May Burns announced her engagement to Lewis Harcourt, son of the Liberal Party leader Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt. “May radiantly happy,” noted Louisa in her diary, “engagement really pleases Aunt Mary.” It pleased Louisa’s father as well.
The Harcourts traced their lineage back to the Plantagenets and lived primarily at Nuneham Park, the family seat in Oxfordshire. Lewis, known as Loulou, worked as his father’s private secretary. His mother had died giving birth to him in 1863. In 1876 Sir William had married the widowed Elizabeth Cabot Motley Ives, daughter of the American historian John Lothrop Motley and an old friend of Pierpont’s from Vevey. When Sir William reformed Britain’s death duties as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1894 by imposing a graduated estate tax, he had famously sighed, “We are all Socialists now.” In December 1898, writing to Joseph Chamberlain (who also had an American wife) about Loulou’s forthcoming marriage to Morgan’s niece, Sir William sighed again— “It is another link in the American alliance. We are all Americans now!”
The celebrated weddings that joined American heiresses to titled if often impoverished Europeans in the closing decades of the nineteenth century—exemplified by Maggie Verver and her Italian prince in Henry James’s Golden Bowl—represented another aspect of the transatlantic traffic in wealth and culture, and the announcement of the Harcourt-Burns engagement elicited widespread reflection on the conquest of London by American girls. Queen Victoria’s son-in-law, the Marquess of Lorne, exclaimed to Loulou: “How the American alliance is getting on!” London’s Daily Chronicle described May Burns as “one of the victorious army of Columbia’s daughters which seems to be threatening to carry off the flower of fashionable London’s eligible young men.”
In the winter of 1899, Pierpont and Louisa entertained the Harcourt/Burns clans at Princes Gate and Dover House, and visited Nuneham Park and the Burnses’ estate in Hertfordshire, North Mymms Park. One night at dinner, Sir William boasted that he had been “the first Englishman who dared to marry an American woman!”
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br /> Amused, Morgan reminded him that “there had been early cases.” Harcourt insisted: “Oh that was long long ago! It was I who revived the fashion.”
Whatever Morgan thought of Harcourt as historian or reformist politician, he gave May a diamond chain for her engagement and a string of pearls for her wedding, which took place at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, on July 1, 1899.c
After Sir William died in 1904, May’s uncle gave her, and England, a more significant gift. Nuneham Park needed major repairs, and the young Harcourts did not have enough money to do the work. Morgan opened a £52,000 ($260,000) line of interest-free credit in May’s name at his London bank, telling her not to worry about paying back the loan: “What I want is that you & Loulou should enjoy the place. Life is short & one never knows what may happen.” The couple carefully restored Nuneham’s handsome old buildings and grounds; among the guests at their first house party in 1907 were Pierpont Morgan and Edward VII.
Two years later, Morgan retrieved another piece of Nuneham’s past. Henry Clay Frick owned a portrait of Mary, Countess of Harcourt (1751–1833), by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had written to the Second Earl Harcourt in September 1778: “I thought my holydays were over for this summer, but Nuneham is so pleasant both indoors and outdoors that it is irresistible.” Frick was reluctant to part with his Countess, but Morgan prevailed and gave the painting to May and Loulou in August 1909.
In the midst of the Harcourt-Burns engagement celebrations early in 1899, Morgan met an Oxford-educated foreign service officer named Clinton Dawkins. A protégé of Alfred Milner, the British high commissioner in South Africa whose group of Oxbridge disciples was known as “Milner’s kindergarten,” Dawkins had been Under-Secretary of State for Finance in Egypt in 1895, and in 1899 was about to be posted to India as a financial adviser to the viceroy, his Oxford contemporary George Curzon. Louisa considered Dawkins’s imminent departure unfortunate, as he was not only good-looking but “most interesting and really charming.” He and his “very pretty” wife made “great acquisitions to our circle.”
