by Jean Strouse
To which Jack replied: “… unless you feel it very desirable hope you will not buy the earth.”
Echoing Perkins at the end of 1909, Belle Greene told Berenson that her Big Chief had “succeeded in acquiring all the world here now and most of the world without and it keeps us very busy every minute. I cannot understand his unfailing energy and grasp.” Morgan was deploying cultural experts for his own and the Met’s collections much the way he had utilized the junior trio during the 1907 panic.
Belle had begun to discipline dealers accustomed to her patron’s liberality about price. She rejected scores of items offered by the Florentine bookseller Leo Olschki, marking “price too high,” “do not want,” and “have already” in the margins of his lists. Olschki’s fawning manner annoyed her, and his fractured English didn’t help. When she turned down a 1468 copy of Cicero’s De Oratore as too expensive (8,000 francs—$1,600), the dealer protested: “… I permit to say that I am always endeavoring to content in the best possible manner Mr. Morgan whom I consider now my most influential customer, and to be worth of his esteem I should never try to make for him higher prices than for any other one.” He got around Belle by selling directly to Morgan in Europe, reporting to her triumphantly in the spring of 1908 that his latest offerings had “enthusiasmed [Morgan] very much.”
Belle warned Morgan by mail one spring about charges that he was throwing money recklessly around, and put her own loyalty on display: “I know perfectly well, as I write this, that it will hurt you almost as much as it hurt and angered me, also that you in your ‘bigness,’ which I adore, will ignore it, but really I could not.…” He did ignore it, just as he ignored criticism of his “overcapitalized” trusts. He was spending large amounts of money.
London’s leading book dealer, Bernard Quaritch, learned in the spring of 1907 that Lord Amherst of Hackney was willing to sell a library that Quaritch had helped him assemble, and Belle forwarded the news to Morgan in Paris. The collection included a number of books from the press of William Caxton, which Belle described as “most exceptional as they are perfect copies (almost unheard of) and would make your Caxton collection unique au monde!” Junius, who had seen the library, sent his uncle a copy of its catalogue with marks next to books he “would like you to have.”
Belle went to London for the Amherst Library auction in December 1908. The London Times reported that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would contribute £30,000 (roughly $150,000) to the British Museum for the purchase of Lord Amherst’s books. Morgan authorized Belle to bid £32,500 for the Caxtons. Instead, she made a private offer through Quaritch of £25,000 cash, payable at once. At a dinner with some of her competitors from the British Museum the night before the sale, she learned that Amherst had accepted her offer. One scholar asked her not to bid against him for a particular volume the next day. She promised: she had already secured it. With the help of Quaritch and Junius, she took home seventeen extraordinarily fine Caxtons for Morgan’s library, including the first two books printed in English, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and The Game and Play of Chess (1474).
As president of the Metropolitan Museum in 1907, Morgan asked Wilhelm Bode in Berlin to find a man who could organize and install the Hoentschel collections. Bode nominated “the most gifted and best equipped young student of art that I have ever had in the [Kaiser Friedrich] Museum,” William R. Valentiner. Bode said he hated to lose this promising scholar, an authority on Rembrandt and the early Dutch and Flemish schools, but liked giving him the opportunity to work at the Met, “where works of art are now coming together more than anywhere else.”
Valentiner arrived in New York to become the museum’s first curator of Decorative Arts early in 1908. Morgan immediately invited him to dinner with Edward Robinson, the Met’s de facto director. (Purdon Clarke did not leave until 1910—Belle Greene called him “Sir Burden.”) Exhausted from his trip and worried about his “bad English,” Valentiner was reassured to learn from Robinson that their host spoke German. It turned out not to matter, he later recalled: “After shaking hands with me—[Morgan] had very soft, big hands—in a very hearty way, he did not utter a single word, sitting like a big and powerful Buddha at the head of the table, saying at intervals a couple of unfinished sentences I could not understand. This silence was characteristic of him—it sufficed to impose his will on those around him, who were numb with awe.”
The new curator began to arrange the medieval objects from the Hoentschel collection in the Met’s entrance hall, and hung early French tapestries behind magnificent sculptures of the Entombment and Pietà from the Château de Biron. Morgan often stopped by with Adelaide to watch. One day he observed, “It looks like a junk shop” (which was just what Berenson had said to Mrs. Gardner about the house at Princes Gate). Valentiner changed nothing. He got along well with Morgan, whose wide-ranging interests he appreciated, and whom he called “the most important art collector I ever met.”‡ Hoping to bid $60,000 for an important group of early Oriental rugs owned by Charles Tyson Yerkes (the model for the central character in Theodore Dreiser’s 1912 novel, The Financier), Valentiner secured the museum president’s approval, and “it was done, although at that time Morgan was probably the only one [on the Met board] who had an inkling of their value.”
When Valentiner described a recent museum acquisition—a bronze putto by the fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor, painter, and goldsmith, Andrea del Verrocchio—as the first authentic work by that master in the United States, “Morgan told me irritably that I was wrong,” that there were several Verrocchio pieces in his own library. Morgan also observed, not inaccurately, that “museum curators believe only those things to be genuine which they themselves have purchased.” Valentiner decided that a pair of andirons at Morgan’s library were not in fact by Verrocchio, but that a female terra-cotta bust was—and made amends by publishing an article about it.§
Early in February 1909, while the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony about the U.S. Steel takeover of TC&I, Morgan went to Egypt to see the excavations he was sponsoring for the Met. He took along Mary Burns, his middle daughter, Juliet, and Charles Hercules Read, the British Museum’s keeper of Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography. Albert Lythgoe, who was supervising this work as the Met’s curator of Egyptian art, served as tour guide. Edward Robinson urged Lythgoe not to be modest about recommending purchases once Morgan arrived in Egypt, and to remember “that nobody enjoys the fun of buying more than he when he is in the right mood.”
Lythgoe skillfully coordinated the work of his scholars in the field with the interests and resources of his patrons in New York. He liked Morgan, whom he saw not only as a source of artifacts, money, and organization, but also as a key figure in the international competition over the study of Egypt’s past. Lythgoe and his wife met the travelers at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo in late February 1909. The American minister, Lewis Iddings, had made arrangements as if for a visiting head of state—he gave a dinner one night for Morgan to meet various European ministers, and introduced his guest to the Khedive. Morgan called on the French director-general of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, Gaston Maspero, and went twice to the Cairo Museum to examine the collections of the Newport millionaire Theodore M. Davis, who had been financing excavations in the Valley of the Kings since 1903.‖
In early March he rented a large houseboat called a dehabiyeh—the word means “thing of gold”—and took his party thirty-five miles up the Nile to see the museum’s excavations at Lisht. Lythgoe showed the group the site of the pyramid of Senwosret I, where three hundred men were clearing away mounds of debris and sand, gradually exposing wall remains and brilliantly painted, scattered temple relief blocks dating back to almost 2000 B.C. The following day, at the pyramid complex of Senwosret’s predecessor, Amenemhat I, Morgan watched the work for some time (Lythgoe reported to Robinson) and listened intently to explanations about digging methods, equipment, the recording of scientific findings, and the project’s general aims. That night h
e said, “It was perfectly magnificent. I don’t think I ever enjoyed anything so much before in my life.”
From Lisht the party went on another hundred and twenty miles south and then west to the Great Oasis at Khargeh. They rode donkeys up to the expedition camp built on the slope of a ridge, with a wide view of palm trees, villages, and cultivated fields. Museum archaeologists were finding remnants of the great temple at Hibis, which was thought to have been built by the Persian Emperor Darius in the fifth century B.C., as well as evidence of Egypt’s early Christian era at Khargeh—domed tomb-chapels decorated with frescoes of biblical scenes, and houses datable to the period of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who adopted Christianity in the early fourth century A.D. Morgan said to Lythgoe as they boarded the train the next day, “I don’t like to leave all this. I never imagined I would see so many interesting things in my life.” He cabled Jack when they reached Luxor: “Returned from desert all well, trip most extraordinarily delightful.” Lythgoe was delighted as well. He told Robinson the trip had been “perfect from beginning to end,” and that Morgan’s interest in the Met’s work “so vigorous that it has put things on the best possible basis.”
In the spring of 1909, Congress debated a tariff bill sponsored by Senator Aldrich and Representative Sereno E. Payne that would, among other things, eliminate the 20 percent import duty on works of art more than a hundred years old. Jack sent news of its terms to his father in Cairo that March, and Davison reported the passage of the bill in June. The customs collector for the Port of New York told an Assistant Treasury Secretary that Aldrich had “put the free art paragraph in the tariff bill especially in the interest” of the Morgan collections.a
In May, out of gratitude to Wilhelm Bode for preparing the catalogue of his bronze collection (and perhaps for the “gift” of Valentiner as well), Morgan gave Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum a predella by Fra Angelico, but did not want his name as donor known. Bode wrote back: “I need not mention that we are, in spite of your incognito, very much obliged to you for your noble gift.”
Morgan returned to the United States in mid-July, and was in Maine on Corsair when his nephew Junius told Josie, his wife of eighteen years, that their situation had become “impossible,” and moved to Europe. Louisa reported to Fanny the gossip about Junius’s “unnatural” behavior, and predicted that if he stayed in Europe he would “fall into the hands of some woman,” though she didn’t think there had been one yet. Belle told Berenson that Junius confided more of his troubles to her than to anyone else, “yet I knew nothing.”
If Pierpont Morgan “knew” anything he left no record of it. Once Junius settled in Europe he divided his time between Paris and Fiesole, outside Florence. His uncle continued to consult him about purchases, but after Junius decamped, Morgan relied more on other advisers, including Valentiner, Lythgoe, Bode, Hercules Read, and Belle.
For his library that fall he acquired for £50,000 ($250,000) an outstanding collection of Old Master drawings that had been assembled by the English connoisseur and artist Charles Fairfax Murray. It was the first great European drawings collection to come to the United States, and the addition of these fifteen hundred sheets to works Morgan already owned made his library the finest American repository of drawings for the Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century schools, and for seventeenth-century Holland (Rembrandt in particular) and Flanders. Morgan had rejected this collection, however, at a lower price, two years earlier. The dealer Sotheran had offered him Murray’s “remarkably fine and well known” Old Master drawings at the beginning of 1907 for £45,000, but Belle Greene, in the first year of her employment at the library, replied: “Mr. Morgan wishes me to say … that he does not care to purchase the Murray Fairfax [sic] collection.” When the collection was offered again in 1909, she consulted Berenson and Hercules Read at the British Museum. Read replied: “as to Fairfax Murray … If it is the whole of his collection of drawings, it is certainly well worth having. He is about the best judge of such things here, and has been buying quietly for years past.”
Also in 1909 Morgan bought the manuscripts of Pudd’nhead Wilson and Life on the Mississippi directly from the author. Twain told him, “One of my highest ambitions is gratified—which was, to have something of mine placed elbow to elbow with that august company which you have gathered together to remain indestructible in a perishable world.”b
And for the Metropolitan Museum that fall, Morgan presided over a month of celebrations honoring Henry Hudson’s discovery of the “North” River and Robert Fulton’s first commercial steamboat. The museum mounted two major loan exhibitions for the occasion—one of seventeenth-century Dutch masters drawn from collections in the United States, the other of American paintings, furniture, and industrial arts. The latter show went up only after a controversy within the museum, but proved enormously popular with the public. The Old Masters exhibition, organized by Valentiner, honored New York’s Dutch heritage and new stature as a center of world art. Morgan headed the Exhibition Committee, and contributed $25,000 to the production of a catalogue written by Valentiner. Among the 149 works shown, according to the 1909 attributions, were 37 by Rembrandt, 20 by Frans Hals, and 6 by Vermeer. Three of the Rembrandts belonged to Morgan, as did four works by Hals, Vermeer’s Lady Writing, two Hobbemas, a Cuyp, and paintings by Gabriel Metsu, Jacob van Ruisdael, Pieter de Hooch, and Dirk Hals.c Foreign visitors were impressed, and not entirely pleased: Max Friedlander of the Prussian Royal Art Museums complained that America had more paintings by Frans Hals than Germany did, and 70 of the world’s 650 known Rembrandts.
“We are launched on the Hudson-Fulton delirium,” Belle told Berenson with a characteristic mix of irreverence and exhilaration, “and I am already a wreck. We receive daily delegations of all sorts of ‘furriners’ at the Library—Saturday I spent on the Corsair from ten in the morning until the wee small hours. The River was enchanting at night – all the foreign & our own warships were decked out in electric lights from bow to stern. There were eighty yachts in line with the Corsair leading & tugs, floats & excursion boats galore. Even although I find the whole performance disgusting I was perforce amused & a tiny wee bit excited by the electrical display. Every building in NY & the entire Fifth Avenue is draped in a hideous combination of orange & blue & red white & blue and at night it is a fairyland thoroughfare of electric lights. The Exhibition of Dutch masters at the Museum is a great success.”
Though Belle regaled Berenson with gossip about Morgan’s “dames” (see Chapter 30), she had little to say about Adelaide Douglas. Perhaps she did not consider Adelaide a “dame.” Perhaps she knew less than she thought she did about her Big Chief’s private life. Or perhaps this affair, begun in about 1895, had cooled into friendship.
At Morgan’s request between 1907 and 1909, Belle sent Adelaide magazines, opera tickets, pictures of paintings from the Wallace Collection, framed mezzotints and engravings of Morgan’s own paintings, and books—on Fragonard, Raeburn, Watteau, on tapestries, English porcelains, old English silver, a volume of Queen Victoria’s letters, a history of portrait miniatures, the catalogue of the Siennese exhibition Adelaide and Morgan had seen with Langton Douglas in 1904, and catalogues of the Morgan collections printed on vellum. Belle had charge of the dealers’ bills that recorded Morgan’s larger gifts to Adelaide—a Louis XV secrétaire with ormulu mounts, signed “Migeon,” the little red morocco casket that had been a wedding gift to Marie Antoinette, and objects that had belonged to historical Adelaides. From Cartier in Paris there was a blue and green enameled box with a garland of gold laurels laced through the initials “ADL” (her middle name was Louise), and a circle brooch with kittens surrounding the letter “A.”
Adelaide’s last trip to Europe with Morgan appears to have been in the spring of 1908. Her son, J. Gordon Douglas, married that year and moved out of his mother’s house on East 46th Street. In 1909, Adelaide’s husband moved from 71 Central Park West to 12 West 76th, and the couple’s separation was final
ly acknowledged by separate listings in the Social Register. (Douglas’s move to the Upper West Side in 1903 appeared only in the New York City street directories.) Then, in 1910, Adelaide began to build a house near Morgan’s, on Park Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets, for herself and her daughter, Sybil. According to her grandson, Morgan paid for it.
The architect was Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia, who had designed Peter Widener’s Lynnewood Hall and was just beginning his most important decade of work, on the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Duke University, and a mansion for James B. Duke at 1 East 78th (now the Institute of Fine Arts). Trumbauer built Adelaide’s house at 57 Park Avenue in the style of eighteenth-century France.d Six stories high and 25 feet wide, faced with granite and limestone, it has a quiet, feminine elegance—Louis XVI in New York—with wrought-iron railings, French doors, casement windows, colonnades, balconies, sculptured spandrels, a mansard roof, pedimented dormers, copper coping, and decorative flowers, urns, and swags. Behind the marble entrance hall and wide staircase on the first floor was the dining room, with Morgan’s silver-plated “Temple of Love” at the center of the table. Two eighteenth-century French salons occupied the second floor, and on the third were the master bedroom in the rear and a library facing Park Avenue. Mr. Morgan had a private entrance at the back of the house, reported Adelaide’s grandson, and the children were instructed to vanish when their grandmother’s eminent friend arrived.
