by Jean Strouse
“But one particular moment alone it was
Defeated us: the longed-for smile, it said,
Was kissed by that most noble lover: at this,
This one, who now will never leave my side,
Kissed my mouth, trembling. A Galeottof that book!
And so was he who wrote it; that day we read
No further.”
Perhaps Morgan “read” his own experiences with love in the context of these celebrated tales—or read stories of earlier lovers with Adelaide, the way Paolo and Francesca did.
The ceiling in the East Room, the library itself, extends the play of personal reference. Above triple-tiered bookcases made of bronze and Circassian walnut, Mowbray had painted into the ceiling a series of twelve hexagonal panels pairing the signs of the zodiac with Roman gods. The idea and some of the layouts were based on ceilings with astral motifs at the Villa Farnesina in Rome, designed by Raphael and painted by Baldassare Peruzzi and Giulio Romano in about 1508–11 for the Roman banker Agostino Chigi. (The villa was acquired by Alessandro Farnese after Chigi’s death; Morgan had acquired the Farnese Book of Hours in 1903.) The constellations in the Farnesina relate to Chigi’s horoscope, and the signs in the East Room apparently refer to Morgan’s. His birth sign, Aries, accompanied by Venus and Cupid, appears above the entrance to the East Room next to Gemini, which may stand for his marriage to Fanny; across from Gemini over the lunette for Tragedy is Aquarius, the sign under which Memie died. And references to Olympian adultery appear in the lunette representing Virgo (Adelaide was born on September 16): Juno tries to seduce her husband, Jupiter, whose attentions have wandered, by exposing her breast, and in the next panel is Vulcan, the lame and ugly god of the forge, who caught his wife, Venus, in bed with Mars.
Above the mantel in the East Room, Morgan hung a sixteenth-century Brussels tapestry, The Triumph of Avarice. One of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, it portrays a winged female Avarice emerging from a flaming Inferno. In the foreground is King Midas, who wished that everything he touched would turn to gold, then found that he could neither eat nor drink and retracted the wish. A Latin inscription at the top reads, “As Tantalus ever thirsts in the midst of water, so the miser hungers always for wealth,” and an angel points a warning finger at the mouth of Hell.
Morgan left no explanation for his choice of this subject. It may have been ironic, since he did not regard himself as avaricious although he knew others did. On the other hand, he probably also knew that in the Middle Ages the Sins were represented to invoke their opposing virtues—in this case, generosity. He intended to leave his collections for the “instruction and pleasure” of the American people, and asked in his will that they be made “permanently available” to the public. His decision to build a library for the manuscripts and rare books meant that the rest of the objects would go elsewhere.
Once the library was complete, Morgan spent part of every day in his private studiolo, the West Room. McKim had installed a sixteenth-century Italian wooden ceiling, stained-glass window panels, red damask walls bearing the Chigi coat of arms, a mantelpiece from the studio of Desiderio da Settignano, a pair of candelabra in the form of kneeling Florentine angels, and a broad Italianate desk, custom-made for the room in England. Over time, Morgan lined the study’s walls with Italian Renaissance paintings and reliefs attributed to Perugino, Botticelli, Cima da Conegliano, Francesco Francia, Antonio Rossellino, and Raphael (neither of the two “Raphaels” he bought after the Colonna altarpiece turned out to be genuine).
In this setting, he placed himself at a distinct remove from the modern industrial world, and from the familial and social discord that lay just beyond his sanctuary’s doors. He held his first meeting at the library in November 1906—of the Metropolitan Museum’s purchasing committee. George Perkins reported to a colleague at the end of February 1907 that “the Senior” had not been to 23 Wall Street since mid-December: “[He] is taking a good deal of comfort in his Library, which we youngsters have dubbed ‘The Up-Town Branch.’ ”
* It turned out not to be by Michelangelo, and is now on display at the Morgan Library as probably seventeenth-century Flemish.
† The Revenue Act of 1897 exempted works of art that were exhibited for educational purposes to the public, and Mrs. Gardner tried to claim that exemption. The Customs Office ruled against her in 1904 on the ground that severe restrictions on admission to her museum—she allowed a limited number of people to view her collections four days a month—disqualified it as a “public” institution.
‡ Lenox had in 1870 commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to design a library for his rare books and manuscripts at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street (now the site of the Frick Collection). Former New York Governor Tilden at his death in 1886 had left twenty thousand books and the bulk of his estate to establish a free library and reading room in New York. These two collections merged with a third, endowed by the will of John Jacob Astor, to form the New York Public Library in 1895. Between 1897 and 1911 the firm of Carrère & Hastings built the Public Library on the former site of the Croton Reservoir at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from Morgan’s house.
§ It is now in the Frick Collection.
‖ The Met did not manage to sell the Grand Hôtel de Luchon et du Casino until 1920, for just 150,000 francs.
a During his tenure George Baker, William Laffan, Henry Clay Frick, Henry Walters, George Blumenthal, John G. Johnson, William Church Osborn, Edward S. Harkness, and Charles Follen McKim joined a board that already included Whitelaw Reid, Elihu Root, E. D. Adams, John Bigelow, Joseph Choate, John Cadwalader, Harris Fahnestock, John S. Kennedy, Darius O. Mills, and Rutherfurd Stuyvesant.
b The figure in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of an Old Man and a Boy had, like Morgan, a grotesque rhinophymous nose. Another observer several years later noticed the resemblance as well. When Wilhelm von Bode took his daughter to see the Morgan collections at Princes Gate, their host personally showed them around. At one point during the tour several grandchildren rushed in, and one climbed into the old man’s lap. Miss Bode, recognizing the scene, whispered, “Ghirlandaio, Father,” but she did not speak softly enough, for Morgan looked up and said, “What’s that about Ghirlandaio, miss?” Bode got them out of this embarrassing moment by saying they were discussing the “magnificent” Ghirlandaio portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni that Morgan had recently acquired.
c Morgan did not substantially add to his Sienese holdings after 1904. The paintings he purchased through Langton Douglas remained in his collection until his death, and most were eventually sold by his heirs. The Duccio is now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Giovanni di Paolo panels—among the artist’s best-known works—at London’s National Gallery. The Romney, purchased from the Morgan family by Andrew Mellon, is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The Perugino remains at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The bronze Virtue, now in the Frick Collection, is not by Cellini.
d The daughter of a surgeon, Elizabeth Farren sat for Lawrence in 1790, just three years after he was admitted to the Royal Academy. She retired from the stage when she married the twelfth earl of Derby in 1797. The painting is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
e I am indebted to William Voelkle, curator of medieval manuscripts at the Morgan Library, for his detective work concerning the ceilings in the rotunda and East Room.
f Galeotto, or Gallehault, served as messenger between Lancelot and Guinevere, and the French word came to serve as a synonym for “pander” or “go-between.”
Chapter 25
SINGULAR WOMEN
As the work on his library neared completion, Morgan decided he needed someone to organize and manage his literary collections, and the indispensable Junius found the right person. Junius served in an advisory capacity at the Princeton University Library, where a young clerk named Belle da Costa Greene had impressed him with her quick intelligence and eager aptitude for knowledge about books. Late in
1905 he introduced her to his uncle. There is no record of that first meeting, but a recommendation from Junius was all Morgan needed. He hired Miss Greene for $75 a month. She had been earning $40 at Princeton.
Small and slender, with dark hair and olive skin dramatically set off by light green eyes, Belle Greene had an extraordinary allure that appealed to both men and women. Men in particular. Bernard Berenson, who met her in 1908, later described her as “the most vitalizing person I have ever known.”
Her middle name and exotic looks came, she said, from her maternal Portuguese grandmother, Genevieve da Costa Van Vliet. Her parents had separated when she was a child, and her mother, “a native of Richmond, Va., and a proud and cultivated lady of old-fashioned dignity, [had] moved with her children to Princeton, New Jersey, where she gave music lessons to support them while they attended local schools.” Belle later told the Evening Sun: “I knew definitely by the time I was twelve years old that I wanted to work with rare books. I loved them even then, the sight of them, the wonderful feel of them, the romance and thrill of them. Before I was sixteen, I had begun my studies, omitting the regular college courses that many girls take before they have found out what they want to do.”
She quickly joined the ranks of gifted deputies to whom Morgan gave large authority and freedom to spend his money. The unique advantages of being female and willing to devote herself almost entirely to his collecting helped her become his agent, accomplice, and personal confidante as well. Returning from Europe one year, she smuggled several of his acquisitions through customs in her suitcase. She let the inspectors find a few things of her own, “with great seeming hesitation,” she told a friend—acting “very indignant” and protesting “to their great joy.” The examiners never noticed the more important items, and “when I landed at the library with all of JP’s treasures—a painting—three bronzes—a special kind of watch he had asked me to get in London & several other things, well he & I did a war dance & laughed in great glee.”
Though young and inexperienced, Miss Greene assumed with Morgan’s backing and her own growing expertise a prominent position in the world of rare books and manuscripts. She met leading art scholars, assimilated their advice, and walked off with the best items at European auctions. Far more voluble and articulate than the man she called (behind his back) her “Big Chief,” she gave offhand glimpses of their shared sensibility—describing an exhibition of “our” medieval illuminated manuscripts as radiating color and light, an effect that emphasized “the luxury and gorgeous barbaric beauty of the Church in the early days.”
Presiding over rare books of hours and Gutenberg Bibles at “Mr. Morgan’s Library,” she added her own insouciant sense of style to the decorous tone of the place. “Just because I am a librarian,” she reportedly once announced, “doesn’t mean I have to dress like one”: she wore couturier gowns and jewels to work. In London she stayed at Claridge’s, and in Paris at the Ritz. She disciplined dealers who tried to charge too much or offered less than top-quality items, and she directed Morgan’s voracious impulses into systematic, scholarly channels. Her one aim, she told him a few years after she settled in, was to make his library “pre-eminent, especially for incunabula, manuscripts, bindings and the classics.” She thought their only rivals were the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale, but hoped “to be able to say some day that there is neither rival nor equal.” No young American library could surpass the great European repositories of culture, but Morgan and Belle Greene in a relatively few years secured individual masterpieces and scholarly collections of the highest quality. In the decades after her patron’s death, Miss Greene became known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.”
And virtually all the information she gave out about her life was false.
Some of the inventions had to do with personal vanity—she was twenty-six when she came to work for Morgan, not, as she said, twenty-two. But forty years after the end of the Civil War, she had a far more compelling motive than feminine guile for obscuring the biographical facts. Her given name was not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener, and she was the daughter of the first black man to graduate from Harvard.
The matrilineal Portuguese/Dutch descent was pure fiction. Belle’s mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet, came from Washington, D.C., not Richmond, Virginia, and was the daughter not of Genevieve da Costa Van Vliet but of the former Hermione C. Peters and a music teacher named James H. Fleet. The 1845 Fleet-Peters wedding appears in a registry of Blacks in the Marriage Records of the District of Columbia, and the 1850 Washington census lists the family as mulattoes. Belle’s birth certificate identifies her as the daughter of Genevieve Fleet and Richard Theodore Greener. Place of birth: 1462 T Street, Washington, D.C. Date: November 26, 1879. Color: “Colored.”
W.E.B. Du Bois considered Richard Greener one of America’s most gifted black intellectuals, a representative of the upper echelon of character and intelligence that Du Bois called the “talented tenth.” Belle Greene belonged to that meritocracy as well, although few people knew she was black. Father and daughter both earned listings in the Dictionary of American Biography, under different names, with no cross-referencing q.v.
Richard T. Greener was born in Philadelphia in 1844 to Richard Wesley Greener and the former Mary Ann Le Brune. His paternal grandfather, Jacob, ran a “colored” school in Baltimore. Richard W. left work as a ship steward in 1853 to dig for gold in California, and never came back. Mary Ann, the daughter of “a Spaniard from Puerto Rico” and a “negress” (her son wrote later), moved in 1853 to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the light-skinned nine-year-old Richard went briefly to school, then worked to support her as an office boy, porter, and clerk. He read constantly, and so impressed one of his Boston employers that the man sent him to a preparatory school at Oberlin, one of the few white colleges to admit black students before the Civil War. Greener wanted to join the first Ohio regiment of black Union army soldiers, but he was underage and his mother refused consent. He spoke at his graduation on “Colorphobia,” then returned to Massachusetts for a senior high school year at the Phillips Andover Academy.
Harvard admitted him in 1865 as an experiment in the education of a Negro. He was twenty-one, and his appearance in Harvard Yard just five months after Appomattox and Lincoln’s death probably seemed to abolitionist Boston a vivid emblem of the victory just won.
Greener had to repeat his freshman year, but his senior dissertation on land tenure in Ireland earned him Harvard’s Bowdoin Prize. In a long essay he wrote just before graduating in 1870, he gave a detailed account of his life to answer rumors that had circulated throughout his undergraduate career—that he had escaped from slavery, come straight from the cotton fields to college, served as a Union army scout, been fathered by a rebel general. He had few pleasant memories of Harvard, he said, and hoped not to hear of the unpleasant incidents ever again. Looking ahead, he wanted not wealth but intellectual distinction—the area in which his race had been most denigrated: “My chief desire is to lead a purely literary life in my own way. I have a great fondness and some knowledge of art, I am particularly interested in metaphysics, general literature, and the Greek and Latin classics when divested of grammatical pedantry. My plans in life are to get all the knowledge I can, make all the reputation I can, and ‘do good’ and make a comfortable competence as the corollaries of the other two.”
Du Bois, who became the first black man to earn a PhD at Harvard in 1895, wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) a famous passage about the double experience of the Negro in America—“a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
Greener looked back at the white world with a combination of ambition and defiance, and resolved to make his own way in the
fields of higher learning. During the Reconstructionist 1870s he taught Greek, Latin, mathematics, and constitutional history at the University of South Carolina—the only institution of higher education in the South to attempt integration—while earning a law degree. Though it is hard to imagine how he had time, he also worked as university librarian, arranging and classifying the library’s twenty-six thousand books. He married Genevieve Ida Fleet in 1874, and moved with her to Washington when Reconstruction came to its inconclusive end.
The Greeners took a house next door to Genevieve’s mother, now a dressmaker, and had six children by 1887—Mary Louise, Russell Lowell, Belle Marion, Ethel Alice, Theodora Genevieve, and a son who died in infancy. While Morgan helped Treasury Secretary Sherman refund the Civil War debt and restore the gold standard in the late seventies, Greener worked as a Treasury clerk. In 1879 he was appointed dean of the Howard University Law School, and over the next few years he taught, practiced law, lectured, wrote, and recruited blacks for the Republican Party. As a reward for political work, Republican officials in 1885 sent him to New York to be secretary of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument and chief examiner of the Municipal Civil Service Board. Greener wrote to a friend from Manhattan: “For the first time in my life I feel that I am working up to something like my ability.”
