by Jean Strouse
One sweltering day that August, McKim took Morgan to the University Club to see the murals being painted on its ceiling by an American artist named Henry Siddons Mowbray. McKim had sent Mowbray to study in Rome, then persuaded him to stay on for a year as temporary director of the new American Academy. In May 1904 he commissioned the artist to paint the ceilings in Morgan’s library, somewhat along the lines of the work in progress at the University Club. Morgan surveyed the painted bays and scaffolding at the University Club without a word. McKim finally broke the silence: “White is crazy over this work.”
Morgan: “He is always crazy.”
There was another long wait as the banker continued to scrutinize the ceiling. At last, reported McKim, he “expressed his admiration and entire satisfaction with the work, calling it both ‘magnificent’ and ‘superb.’ ” Mowbray began work on the Morgan library ceilings that fall.
Henry Adams reported to Mrs. Cameron on one of his favorite topics early in 1903: “Pierpont’s face is now too terrible to look at; the nose has spread. How our summer-roses fade!”
Morgan was no longer taking pains to keep his wife and Adelaide Douglas on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Adelaide had quietly separated from her husband—she remained at the house on East 46th Street when Mr. Douglas moved in 1903 to 71 Central Park West on the Upper West Side, far from “Morgan Hill.” Morgan took her to Cuba that March, along with the Markoes, Anne, Charles Lanier, and several other friends. Fanny accompanied the party by train to Washington, then went on with her maid and a companion to California.
Cuba had remained an occupied American protectorate between 1898 and 1902, when it signed a treaty granting the United States extensive political and economic control. Morgan, arriving by boat from Key West, told the Havana press he had come for a vacation, but once journalists learned he was staying with the owner of the Havana Steamship line they reported that he must be acquiring Cuban shipping companies for the IMM, buying railroads, or negotiating a government loan.
His bank did become the New York representative of the Banco Nacional de Cuba at about this time. He had a private interview one day with the new, American-educated Cuban President, Tomás Estrada Palma, and the following night dined with high-ranking Cuban politicians at the presidential palace. He and his friends saw a jai alai game and toured the island. No doubt he also stocked up on Cuban cigars. On March 6 he paid a long farewell visit to the President, who assured the Associated Press that there had been no discussion of an impending loan. That night Morgan took his party to a restaurant called El Louvre, and later stuck the menu, with the signatures “Adelaide T. Douglas” and “J. Pierpont Morgan” running down the fold between the wines on the left and food on the right, into a recipe book.
On the way north, the group stopped at Jekyl Island for several days, then went to Washington, where Morgan conferred with President Roosevelt for half an hour. He met as well with Senators Aldrich and Hanna, and lobbied Treasury Secretary Leslie Shaw for a reduction of the import duties on art, pointing out that it would cost him $3 million to bring his collections from London to the United States.
As workmen began construction on his library and the Satterlee house early that April, Morgan bought the Dodge mansion next door to his own, 225 Madison Avenue, for Louisa and Herbert to live in until their new quarters were ready. He celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday at home on April 17—Fanny was still in California—then sailed for Europe with Adelaide and Anne.
At Aix that May he purchased from the firm of the Frankfurt dealer Goldschmidt a manuscript that would become one of the treasures of his collection. It was a small illuminated book of hours by the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, finished in Rome in 1546, for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a grandson of Pope Paul III. Goldschmidt probably realized that everything about this masterpiece would appeal to Morgan: famous, sacred, exquisitely painted, and rich in historical associations, it had taken nine years to complete, and was encased in a dazzling gold and silver cover attributed to Cellini (though later found to be by Antonio Gentili). Vasari had described it in effusive detail as one of the “sights of Rome,” an achievement “with the brush … so stupendous, that it does not appear possible to go so far with the eye or with the hand.” Vasari anointed Clovio “a new, if smaller, Michelangelo.”
According to William Voelkle, curator of medieval manuscripts at the Morgan Library, the Farnese Book of Hours—“justly regarded as the last great Italian manuscript”—is also “a superb mirror of Mannerist art,” with “the figura serpintinata of Michelangelo and the elongated and sinuous forms of Pontormo. Mannerist, too, are the seemingly indefatigable love of surprise, the novelty, ingenuity, virtuosity, rampant complexity, scintillating color, and spatial effects.” Twenty-six full-page miniatures offer pairs of Old and New Testament themes—a scene of the Magi adoring Christ faces the Queen of Sheba on her knees before Solomon. Into the latter page, Clovio has painted a portrait of Cardinal Farnese as Solomon, and another of himself looking out at the viewer as a dwarf in painter’s clothes—a visual pun, Mr. Voelkle points out, since Clovio was a “miniature” painter. Morgan paid Goldschmidt £22,500 ($112,500) for the Farnese Hours and several pieces of Italian majolica. He so prized this new volume that he carried it home himself, and brought it out to show special guests in New York.
Buying more works of art and literature than he could house or even see, Morgan began to donate some of them to American public institutions. In 1899 he gave the nascent New York Public Library a collection of manuscripts, letters, and books that included correspondence by Noah Webster, Horace Greeley, Andrew Jackson, and James Monroe. Two years later he bought three collections of antique textiles for the new Cooper-Hewitt Museum, founded by the daughters of his old friend Abram Hewitt. And in 1902 he gave two thousand Chinese porcelains to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This collection, assembled by the banker James A. Garland with the help of the Duveens, had for years been on loan to the Met. Museum officials hoped the loan would become a gift, but when Garland died in 1902 making no such bequest, Henry Duveen bought all two thousand pieces from the estate for $500,000. Morgan immediately repurchased them for $600,000, asked the dealer to fill out incomplete sequences, and left the Garland—now Morgan—Collection of Chinese porcelains on deposit at the museum without a single vase having been moved. His bills from Duveen Brothers in 1902 list over $200,000 worth of additional Chinese porcelains sent to the museum.
He was elected first vice president of the Met at the beginning of 1904, and immediately helped secure another important collection. That winter, his and Fanny’s old friend Adele Stevens left her second husband, the Duc de Dino. On learning that this high-living French aristocrat, no longer supported by Adele’s fortune, was looking to sell his famous collection of armor, Morgan cabled Rutherfurd Stuyvesant, a museum trustee and armor collector who lived half the year in Paris. Stuyvesant promptly called on Dino, agreed to a purchase price of $240,000, and made out a check, although he did not have that much money in his French bank. He wired Morgan, who called a meeting of the Met board in New York, solicited pledges for the necessary funds, and transferred $240,000 to Stuyvesant’s account in time to cover the check. (The museum eventually repaid the trustees.) In April, Morgan’s English partners shipped forty-three cases of the Duc de Dino’s armor to the Metropolitan at freight rates, labeled “hardware.”
The Metropolitan board elected Morgan president of the museum that fall, formalizing his position as one of the country’s leading patrons of the fine arts. Well aware of the value of expertise in markets where risk ran high, Morgan immediately hired a young scholar named Bashford Dean to install and catalogue the Dino armor.
Dean was an authority on the evolution of fish. At Columbia University he had studied with the patriarch of North American paleontology, John Strong Newberry, and worked closely with Pierpont’s nephew Henry Fairfield Osborn. Together, Dean and Osborn had founded Departments of Zoology at Columbia and of Vertebrate Paleontology at the America
n Museum of Natural History. As knowledgeable about arms and armor as he was about prehistoric fins, Dean specialized in the armored fishes of the early and middle Paleozoic age, particularly the gigantic Devonian Dinichthys, whose articulating, overlapping plates made it look like a direct ancestor of the medieval knight. He recognized the quality of the Dino collection as he began to unpack it in the basement of the Metropolitan, and congratulated Morgan on securing an exceptional prize at low cost.
Morgan assigned Dean to prepare a catalogue of all the armor at the Met, appointed him curator of Arms and Armor in 1906, and supported his courtship of an eccentric expatriate named William H. Riggs, whose armor collection was even larger and finer than Dino’s. Riggs had been a classmate of Morgan’s at Vevey (his father, Elisha, was an early partner of George Peabody’s in Washington), and spent his life in Europe collecting armor. Morgan’s accession to the Metropolitan presidency encouraged Riggs to regard the museum as the ultimate repository for his collection. The board made him an honorary trustee, and Morgan offered him a “magnificent” gallery in a new wing. Nonetheless, Riggs toyed with the Met for years.
In Paris in 1912, on the verge of finally making the gift, Riggs told Dean he was too preoccupied with a hotel he owned at Luchon in the Pyrenees to proceed. Dean crossed the Channel to consult Morgan in London, and reported the conversation to a colleague at the museum. The banker restated the curator’s report: “ ‘So Mr. Riggs can’t pack his collection and catalogue it because his mind is upset by troubles with his hotel property at Luchon?’ (He took his cigar in his fingers, and his eyes blazed). ‘How much would it cost to buy the property at once?’ ” Dean thought it would cost five to six hundred thousand francs ($25–30,000). “Well, buy it,” Morgan ordered: “I’ll take it and lose a couple of hundred thousand francs. Not a bad investment if the Museum gets a collection worth three millions of dollars!” Dean bought the hotel for 400,000 francs—in the end, Morgan charged the property to the museum—and Riggs gave the Met his unparalleled collection in 1913, largely, he said, out of admiration for Morgan.‖
The development of the Arms and Armor Department under Morgan was characteristic of his administrative style—he hired an outstanding scholar, secured two choice collections, and established the department in 1912 (until then Arms and Armor had been part of Decorative Arts). Morgan had in 1907 bought for himself a black steel helmet made in 1543 by the Milanese Filippo Negroli, called the “Michelangelo of armorers.” Jack Morgan gave this burgonet to the museum after his father died, and it ranks among the Arms and Armor Department’s finest single pieces.
During Morgan’s presidency the Metropolitan radically changed its orientation and scope. Its 1905 annual report announced that it would no longer accept random gifts that did not measure up to professional scholarly standards—as many of Morgan’s own early gifts did not—nor would it display copies, casts, or amateur accumulations of unrelated objects. The aim of the institution would be “not merely to assemble beautiful objects and display them harmoniously … but to group together the masterpieces of different countries and times in such relation and sequence as to illustrate the history of art in the broadest sense.”
The museum’s operating budget, not including art purchases, rose under Morgan from $185,000 in 1904—most of which was covered by a $150,000 appropriation from the city—to $363,000 in 1913, which, even with larger city contributions, ran the museum $70,000 into the red. Morgan led the trustees in making up the annual deficit and packed the board with friends and colleagues, which assured him general cooperation, sage advice, and virtually unlimited access to cash.a He oversaw the professionalization of the administrative and curatorial staffs, the creation of new departments, the funding of archaeological excavations, the development and improvement of existing collections, and a major architectural expansion designed by McKim, Mead & White. His own gifts substantially added to the Met’s holdings, accentuating the need for more gallery space, and encouraged other donors to follow suit.
Henry James, who visited America in 1904–5 for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, took note of the new spirit at the museum: “Education, clearly, was going to seat herself in these marble halls … and issue her instructions without regard to cost. The obvious, the beautiful, the thrilling thing was that, without regard to cost either, they were going to be obeyed.” Taking a somewhat facetious view of America’s purchasing power, James went on: “Acquisition—acquisition if need be on the highest terms—may, during the years to come, bask here as in a climate it has never before enjoyed. There was money in the air, ever so much money.… And the money was to be all for the most exquisite things—for all the most exquisite except creation, which was to be off the scene altogether.… The Museum, in short, was going to be great.”
General Cesnola, who had been director of the Met since 1879, died just before Morgan assumed the presidency in the fall of 1904. To replace Cesnola early in 1905, the board hired the director of London’s South Kensington Museum, Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke. Against the background of the IMM and Morgan’s cultural raids, this acquisition gave rise to tales of British chagrin. The secretary at the South Kensington, returning from a leave of absence that winter, is said to have asked whether some porcelains the museum wanted had arrived. “No, sir,” answered a clerk. “J. P. Morgan bought them.” What about a set of tapestries bid on at the same time? “Mr. Morgan got them,” was the reply. “Good God,” said the secretary, “I must talk to Sir Purdon.” “Sorry, sir,” returned the clerk, “Mr. Morgan bought him also.”
A second Englishman with whom Morgan opened negotiations early in 1905 was the art critic Roger Fry. As an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1880s, Fry had belonged to the Apostles, the secret discussion society whose past and future members included Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf. Fry decided at Cambridge to “take up art” as a profession, and after a postgraduate trip to Italy began to write and lecture on the subject, as well as to paint. As his friends Russell, R. C. Trevelyan, and Max Beerbohm launched brilliant careers, Fry grew increasingly dissatisfied with his own: “I loathe art criticism more and more,” he announced, “and long to create.” Lukewarm responses to his paintings sent him back to criticism, however, and by 1905 he was struggling to support two children, a wife who suffered from mental illness, the travel necessary to write about art, and a fine-arts journal he had founded in 1903, the Burlington Magazine. At the urging of Morgan’s friend William Laffan, Fry went to New York to raise money for the Burlington and to be interviewed for a position at the Metropolitan Museum.
At first he felt an exhilarating sense of possibility in America—especially the possibilities open to money: “I am having a roaring good time among these millionaires,” he told his wife in early January, “and what’s more, I find them a sympathetic, agreeable sort.” After touring the Met on January 8, he pronounced Morgan’s Chinese porcelains “marvellous” but the museum’s pictures “a nightmare.” Americans, he concluded, “have a desperate desire to get at real things. They have been kept in the dark so long by dealers and others, and they jump at enlightenment.”
Morgan offered Fry a job as assistant director of the museum—Purdon Clarke “will be more or less of a figurehead,” Fry reported: “I am offered the second place with reversion of headship if I succeed.” He would have £1,600 (about $8,000) a year, plus expenses to travel in Europe half the year and freedom to write and lecture. He felt inclined to accept.
Morgan had invited him to Washington “to dine with him and the President of the U.S.A. It’s alarming and interesting.” The occasion for this trip was an American Institute of Architects dinner at the Arlington Hotel for the American Academy in Rome. McKim, now president of the AIA, hoped the event would pressure Congress to incorporate the academy as a national institution. Henry Walters had pledged $100,000 to start a $1 million endowment fund at the end of 1904, and Morgan had agreed t
o match it.
The Morgan party leaving New York on January 11 included Adelaide, Anne, Elihu Root (who had resigned from the cabinet in 1904 and gone back to the practice of law in New York, accepting a retainer as counsel to Morgan), and Fry, who described the scene to his wife: “I travelled down in the most luxurious way imaginable, that is to say in Pierpont Morgan’s own private car tacked on to the end of a special express.… as it was cold & snowing we had a fire lit in the car. The whole thing is fitted up like a private house in the grandest style and an immaculate luncheon was served on the way.” Morgan was “the most repulsively ugly man with a great strawberry nose,” who would “make a splendid portrait like Ghirlandaio’s Strozzi man in the Louvre.”b He behaved “not like a host but like a crowned head. There’s no doubt he’s a very remarkable and powerful man, and everyone says his ambitions are too big for him to be other than quite straightforward.”
The crowned head/host, surrounded by “lots of smart women,” was in a jovial mood, continued Fry—“making jokes, which I parried, about my becoming an American. After lunch a cigar called the Regalia de Morgan.” In a brief business talk on the train, the banker promised the scholar “a free hand with the [museum’s] pictures,” as well as money for the Burlington—“pretty much whatever I wanted.… I felt, as I sat next him, like a courtier who has at last got an audience, and, as though, for a few minutes, I wielded absolute power.” A little discomfited by his audience with power, Fry went on: “I think I behaved tactfully and indeed why should I not be able to manage, for they’ve not got anything but money to intimidate you with. There’s precious little distinction or cachet about the whole lot, so one ought to be able to hold one’s own. Really, [Morgan] strikes me as a big man all the same and too big in his ambitions to be low or mean or go back on his word. He has guaranteed my salary for five years, but the fact is that they are determined to have a great boom in art here and my salary ought to be indefinitely extensible.”
