Morgan

by Jean Strouse

  Each party to this elaborate folie à deux played out the flirtation while calmly pursuing more practical ends: ready cash on one side, authentic treasures on the other. It is hard to say which half of the well-matched pair comes off worse—Victoria in her silly narcissism, feigned innocence, and spurious claims of financial disinterest, or Morgan in his (hardly unique) professions of undying love, crocodile tears over Memie, and eagerness to believe that Victoria was not after his money.

  He was “most amusing” the day he brought Aldrich to Knole, reported Lady S.—“Vita says she liked him immensely; he … talked such a lot & sat down on all the best chairs! & ordered us about & went where he liked.… As he did not want Senator A. to notice anything” about their secret, he spent little time with her alone. He did want two paintings by Hoppner, the best Persian carpet in her Reynolds Room, some tapestries from the Venetian Room, and the silver dogs—“but he won’t get them.” When he hurried off to finish up a £35 million bond deal (“What a wonderful personality!”), Aldrich stayed behind to see the gardens.

  Morgan returned the next day at four, alone. “I made him send away his big Rolls-Royce which he ordered back at 5:30. People must not notice his visits.” Bringing up Seery’s will, Victoria asked whether, if she became rich, she could buy Miss Linley back, since she missed the picture terribly.

  Her seasoned admirer was not about to be hornswoggled by a pair of pretty eyes: “I don’t think, dear, I shld like to part with it now.”

  Lady S: “Then do you like Miss Linley better than you like me?”

  JPM: “No, dear, I don’t; and I shall think about your proposal; but I hate parting with her.”

  Victoria crossed the room to pick up a book. When she returned, Morgan took her hand and promised not to take the painting to America. It would not go to his son, he said, or to the Metropolitan; it would never leave his hands except to come into hers. She silently held out the book—it was a biography of him—opened to a passage that said Mr. Morgan never breaks his word.c

  On the subject of his art, he asked her whether she thought it better than the Wallace Collection, which had been managed until recently by Seery: “Of course it is better,” she agreeably replied. When he told her he had been religious all his life, and firmly “believed,” she was surprised. He parried a suggestion that she come to America, saying it would be “too dangerous”—“He is very careful not to get me talked about.” Then “the big cigar came out and he tells me little phrases now & then, so brusquely and so nicely, too, and holds my hand with so much affection and said he wd never care for me in any way I shld not approve of, that he was very sorry to be so old (and yet he is so vigorous) but I was the one woman he loved & wld never change.” She urged herself not to “talk about Miss Linley or money with him. I hate it. Our friendship must be free from any sordid motive.”

  At a dinner given by the Whitelaw Reids a few days later, Morgan sat with Lady Sackville all evening, and surreptitiously held her hand. The whole party seemed to revolve around him, she reported. When the conversation turned to love, one of the guests announced that no one ever stayed in love with the same person for more than two years—at which Morgan shot Lady Sackville a look, and said: “On the contrary, when it is sincere, love increases all the time, especially if much sentiment is mixed up with it.”

  She noted that night, “He deplores all the time being so old, but I don’t mind.”

  They saw each other every few days. When he asked her what people thought of him, and whether she considered his manner rough and brusque, she replied: “Yes, very, but corrected by great kindness; and that made him smile.” He often alluded to his death, especially in connection with shipping his art to New York, a subject that made Victoria “tremble for Miss Linley. I must screw up my courage & speak to him about her returning to Knole some day! But how horrid for me to ask for any favour from him. But I must.”

  Once she had secured Morgan’s affection, she concentrated on getting Miss Linley back. Her septuagenarian lover put her off by saying that returning the painting would give them away: “he wants to protect me against gossip and scandal of which he has a morbid fear; he says, [‘]I am so much discussed that we must take every precaution.[’]” In the days of his confidential correspondence with Jim Goodwin and his engagement to Fanny, Morgan’s sense that the world’s eyes were trained on his romantic interests signaled his youthful self-importance; now, the world’s real avidity for such news helped him keep Lady Sackville at bay. She offered to buy the Gainsborough when she got her legacy from Seery’s estate. That, he said, would not be for a long time. Perhaps he might give it to her anyway, she calculated in private: “I see how utterly devoted he is to me and he knows that I never make up to him for any presents etc. I have certainly become very dear to him”—then reminded herself, “after all, his friendship is much more precious than Miss L.”

  Morgan went off on Corsair in late June with Teddy Grenfell, the Markoes, and the Morton Patons, to attend the Kiel regatta at the invitation of Kaiser Wilhelm. Grenfell found the German Emperor “most attractive & manly & up in everything … & does not show the mailed fist. He turned up [on board Corsair] at 9:45 this morning as we were finishing breakfast which was rather disturbing.” On June 26, Morgan sailed with the Kaiser in a five-hour race, which they won by twenty seconds: “They got so excited in a tight place rounding the buoy,” reported Grenfell, “that the Emperor & old JPM were hauling on the main sheet with the crew like boys & sweating at every pore.… As the Emperor had lost 7 races before, he looked on JPM as a mascotte & was as elated as a child.”

  At the end of this trip, Grenfell reflected: “To an artist of humour, the games of JPM & his surroundings wd provide endless food. He is the most thoughtful of hosts & though appearing not to notice things, he sees everything & a chance remark with a twinkle in his eye makes one find the old fox has not missed a trick in the game. He is splendid & at 75 years of age can tire out the youngest.”

  That fall, the Kaiser sent Morgan a life-size marble bust of himself in full military decorations. “Unaccountably,” noted Satterlee later with no apparent sarcasm, “it disappeared in 1914.”

  From Germany, in July, Morgan went to Rome. He had transferred title to his properties on the Janiculum to the American Academy, and raised money for a building, designed by McKim’s firm, to house the fellows, a library, and a small museum. He turned the soil for the new building.

  While he was on the Continent, Lady Sackville took friends to see his silver at Princes Gate. She found most of the art being packed up, and learned from the butler that even Miss Linley was under “marching orders” for America: “I could have fainted,” she told her diary. Instead of fainting, she refused to see Morgan when he returned to town. Running into him at a Court Ball—he said he had come hoping to find her there—“I asked him not to call again, which seemed to distress him; but I know in my heart of hearts that … goodbye in public is much better.” She promised to write. “I could see he was extremely gêné [upset] … but we parted the very best of friends. I wore green dress & emeralds.”

  In mid-July, Morgan sailed for New York on the Titanic’s sister, the Olympic, taking with him the Duchess of Devonshire and several other paintings. Just before he left, he sent Victoria a book about his life (no doubt the Hovey volume, which she already had), inscribed “To Lady Sackville from J. Pierpont Morgan with his affectionate regards.” She concluded: “So this judgment is closed and we remain the very best of friends, bless him.”

  She never saw him again. A few days after Morgan left London, an artist named Philip Lazlo came to Knole for lunch. He wanted to paint Morgan’s portrait, and asked Victoria to intercede. She refused, she noted in her diary, “as he wants to do my old friend’s nose true to life!! which is really an exaggerated idea of faithfulness to his art.”d

  The painters who did get commissions to immortalize Morgan’s features knew better than to display any such “exaggerated faithfulness” to art. A German
portraitist named Fedor Encke produced an idealized image in 1903 that gave Morgan more hair, larger eyes, a smaller nose, and darker mustache than he actually had, taking ten years off his age—only the eyebrows and clothes look true to life. (The painting is now at the Metropolitan Club in New York.)

  John Singer Sargent agreed to paint Morgan’s portrait a few years later, then changed his mind, saying in answer to an inquiry from the banker’s partners in 1909 that he had “entirely given up portrait painting, which I hate. I hope Mr. Morgan will let me off, he probably knows I have refused commissions for two years past.”e The artist had in fact sworn to a friend in 1907: “No more paugh-traits.… I abhore and abjure them and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes.” He made exceptions—notably for his good friend Henry James (1913) and John D. Rockefeller (1915).

  By far the best-known portrait of Morgan came about by chance. When the financier would not sit still for the Encke painting in 1903, the artist’s friend Alfred Stieglitz, leader of the avant-garde Photo-Secession group, recommended that the young Edward Steichen take a photograph for Encke to work from. Steichen agreed to do the job if he could also make a negative for himself.

  On the appointed day he set up his shot with a janitor in the banker’s chair. When Morgan arrived and assumed his usual pose, Steichen quickly snapped the first exposure. Then, putting a new plate into the camera, he suggested that his subject slightly move his head and hands. Morgan complied, but said he was uncomfortable. Steichen asked him to find a natural pose. According to Steichen, Morgan then settled on his own into the posture the photographer had proposed, “but his expression had sharpened and his body posture became tense, possibly a reflex of his irritation at the suggestion I had made. I saw that a dynamic self-assertion had taken place, whatever its cause, and I quickly made the second exposure, saying ‘Thank you, Mr. Morgan,’ as I took the plate holder out of the camera.

  “He said, ‘Is that all?’

  “ ‘Yes, sir,’ I answered.

  “He snorted a reply, “I like you, young man. I think we’ll get along first-rate together.’ Then he clapped his large hat on his massive head, took up his big cigar, and stormed out of the room.” On his way to the elevator, Morgan peeled off five $100 bills and told Encke to give them to “that young man.”

  Steichen claimed that in the studio he saw only Morgan’s riveting eyes, and did not notice the “huge, more or less deformed, sick, bulbous nose” until he developed the negatives. He retouched the one he had taken for Encke. On the second shot, his own, he made the nose just “a little more vague,” and removed “spots that were repulsive.”

  The differences between the two photographs have to do with more than Morgan’s nose. In the first, “official” head-and-shoulders shot, Morgan looks like a big ship about to embark under triumphant sails. The light picks up the rich textures of his jacket, silk cravat, starched white collar, and gold watch and chain. His face, half in shadow, has an imposing force, and with his body angled slightly to the right, head left, he gazes past the camera—we can’t really catch his eye. When Steichen showed him the proofs, Morgan liked this one immediately, and ordered a dozen prints.

  The second exposure, taken from another angle, captures the “dynamic self-assertion” Steichen was after. Unsettled by the change in posture, Morgan seems to have puffed out his feathers like an angry eagle. His eyes glare straight at the viewer with terrifying intensity, eyebrows arching, jaw tense. As his body disappears in the blackness, the light catches only his head, the watch and chain, and his hand on the gleaming metal arm of his chair: this last detail looks like the blade of a dagger, and Morgan appears about to stride out of the frame slashing—the ruthless capitalist pirate of popular myth.

  According to Steichen, the banker took one look at this picture, pronounced it “Terrible,” and tore it up. The photographer was understandably furious. He sent Morgan twelve copies of the first shot, and made an exquisite print of the second. Eventually he gave the latter to Stieglitz, who published it in a special “Steichen Supplement” of his magazine, Camera Work, in 1906 (which helped launch Steichen’s career), and three years later exhibited the original at his gallery, “291” Fifth Avenue. Belle Greene saw it there in the fall of 1909.

  She considered it the finest portrait of Morgan she had ever seen, and asked Stieglitz for copies: “I think Mr. Steichen and yourself are to be much congratulated,” she wrote, “on the impetus you have given to photography in America.” She apparently changed her Big Chief’s mind about the “dagger” photo as well, since Morgan offered to buy the original for $5,000. Stieglitz refused to sell, and Steichen kept the banker waiting three years for an order of new prints—“my rather childish way of getting even with [him] for tearing up that first proof.”f

  Photographs did not satisfy Morgan’s desire for “the real thing,” however, and after Sargent turned him down in 1909, the banker commissioned a Peruvian named Carlos Baca-Flor to paint another official portrait. Since Baca-Flor, like Encke, could not get his subject to sit still, he also worked from the Steichen photo (in Camera Work). Depicting Morgan in a stately academic pose, with gleaming black satin lapels, one hand resting on leather-bound books, the other hooked in his waistcoat pocket, the painting is utterly empty and stiff. An aspiring young artist named George Biddle described it as “built up with many timid brush strokes—like the encrusted Christmas cards which had a renewed vogue some years ago—until it had achieved an undulating papier-maché vulgarity, the more incredible for its very lifelike unreality.”

  Biddle, brought by a friend to have tea with Morgan at his library, where the recently completed portrait hung, later recalled that for a while “the great bear of a financier sat staring at his effigy, which stared back dully at the original.” Then the original announced: “ ‘It is the finest portrait he has ever painted, and Baca-Flor is the most significant portrait painter since Romney.’

  “Never,” concluded Biddle, “did a great man open his guard more completely to an art student’s scorn.”

  Morgan paid Baca-Flor $56,000 for this canvas and two replicas—he gave one to the Metropolitan Museum and one to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford—and an additional $23,000 to paint portraits of his friends John Bigelow and Joseph Choate. He was not alone in admiring his likeness. President Taft came to the library to see it early in 1910 and went away, Belle told her traveling Chief, “most enthusiastic”—he wanted Baca-Flor to paint him at the White House that spring. A former president of the Stock Exchange pronounced the Morgan canvas “the work of a reincarnated Velasquez,” and said no finer piece of portraiture or painting had “been given to the world for 200 years”—to which Belle added a fervent “Amen!” She herself, Henry Walters, and Jack Morgan signed up for sittings.g

  The most interesting of the writers who drew literary sketches of Morgan during his lifetime are E. M. Forster and Henry James. The art drain that was transferring the contents of ancestral English houses to the collections of American millionaires reached a peak in 1909–10—the value of exported art works that year exceeded £1 million—and the “larger morality” of this international drama fascinated James.

  Late in 1909, a British public protest prevented the sale of the Duke of Norfolk’s Holbein masterpiece, The Duchess of Milan, to Henry Clay Frick. The English raised £72,000 to buy the painting for the National Gallery, and the incident gave James the idea for a play he wrote that fall called The Outcry. It was never produced. Two years later he turned it into a novel. Slight, witty, charming (James called it an “inferior little product”), and far more successful with the public than his serious late work, it went through five printings within weeks of publication.

  James’s fine comic sense plays in this novel over questions of value—as discerned by the “new” connoisseurship in art, as accruing more to the names of certain artists than to others, as contained (or not) in aristocratic lineage, as measured by large sums of cash, as inherent in intelligence, imagi
native perception, and unselfish love.

  There is no record of a meeting between Henry James and Pierpont Morgan, but the author often visited Junius at Dover House in the 1880s, usually with Alice Mason, sometimes with his friend Jonathan Sturges, occasionally on his own. He toured the art collections at Princes Gate by invitation in 1906, and visited Morgan’s library in New York early in 1911. In The Outcry he drew an oblique portrait of Morgan as Breckenridge Bender, a rich American collector with two last names. The physiognomy of this character seems unmistakable, although James pointedly omitted the glaring, overgrown nose and substituted a face remarkable for its lack of feature.

  Mr. Bender, writes James,

  had six feet of stature and an air as of having received benefits at the hand of fortune. Substantial, powerful, easy, he shone as with a glorious cleanness, a supplied and equipped and appointed sanity and security; aids to action that might have figured a pair of very ample wings—wide pinions for the present conveniently folded, but that he would certainly on occasion agitate for great efforts and spread for great flights. These things would have made him quite an admirable, even a worshipful, image of full-blown life and character, had not the affirmation and the emphasis halted in one important particular. Fortune, felicity, nature, the perverse or interfering old fairy at his cradle-side—whatever the ministering power might have been—had simply overlooked and neglected his vast wholly-shaven face.… Nothing seemed to have been done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and the looking-glass could officiously do.… It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled ‘mug’ rather than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; though we must at the same time add that its wearer carried this featureless disk as with the warranted confidence that might have attended a warning headlight or a glaring motor-lamp. The object, however one named it, showed you at least where he was, and most often that he was straight upon you.