In the case of this picture of the Spanish child, when the dealer came back and said, “Well, Mr. Morgan, what do you think?” he answered, “You cannot prove the picture is Velasquez’s, and I feel quite sure it is not.”
“All right,” said the dealer. “I will take it away.” And he started to pick it up.
“No,” said Mr. Morgan. “Leave it right where it is. No matter who painted it, I have become very fond of it and I am going to keep it.”
To this anecdote, which not only illuminates Morgan’s method of collecting but suggests that he may have been moved by a personal love for exquisite things, whether or not attributable to recognized masters, Satterlee adds the unconsciously devastating comment, “It might be a Velasquez after all!”—thereby apparently demolishing Morgan the amateur and substituting for him Morgan the mere speculator in attributions, or at any rate Morgan the assembler of a collection which must carry the most imposing labels. Let us go a little further, and call the most adverse witness of all.
5
Roger Fry, who in his later years became famous as a critic and connoisseur of art, served as curator of paintings and then as European adviser on paintings for the Metropolitan Museum from 1906 to 1910, when his connection with the museum was terminated. According to Virginia Woolf’s life of Fry, it was terminated only because he tried to buy for the museum a picture which Morgan—who was then president of the museum—wanted for his own personal collection; and certain it is that during the summer of 1909 something happened which deeply offended Morgan. Only a few of the directors of the museum were told of this episode—whatever it was—and they considered it discreditable to Fry. Perhaps it is true that Fry had merely tried to buy for the Metropolitan a picture that Morgan wanted for himself, but that he had gone about the negotiation in a way that—rightly or wrongly—seemed to Morgan underhanded. But at any rate Fry had long tried the patience of the officers of the museum; his connection with it had been a chapter of misunderstandings, mistakes, differences of judgment, inefficiencies, and cross-purposes.
From the outset Fry had resented Morgan’s vast influence at the Metropolitan. He had described him as “the most repulsively ugly” man, “with a great strawberry nose,” and had said that he “behaved like a crowned head.” Fry had written home from New York, “I don’t think he wants anything but flattery. He is quite indifferent as to the real value of things. All he wants experts for is to give him a sense of his own wonderful sagacity. I shall never be able to dance to that tune.… The man is so swollen with pride and a sense of his own power that it never occurs to him that other people have any rights.” And years later Fry, writing an account of a trip which he took with Morgan in Italy in the summer of 1907, described the financier with venom.
He recounted in detail how Morgan—who at the age of seventy was accompanied on his travels by his close friend, the “stately and enameled” Mrs. Douglas, by his sister, Mrs. Burns,* and by a courier, “a lank, hungry Italian cadger”—was beset by dealers and cringing aristocrats who had things that they wanted to sell him; how the banker was rude to two Italian ladies who wanted to sell him a service of majolica; and what lavish pains were taken by all and sundry to please Morgan in the hope that some of his money might be enticed in their direction.
I was asleep at the Grand Hotel in Perugia one morning in May 1907 [wrote Fry] when a knock at the door woke me and the Cameriera entered with a card. The Count Torelli urgently requested a short interview. I sent word I would be down soon, dressed, and went into an empty room on the ground floor where the Count, young, dandified, and weakly sympathetic, greeted me with anxious effusiveness. What did he want? I knew the answer beforehand—family heirlooms to be offered to Pierpont Morgan.… What were they? Chinese pictures rather recently imported and an immense eighteenth-century carpet spread all over the floor. The poor count had rushed from Rome to Perugia to catch some of the golden shower and there they were displayed. Would I do what I could? The family fortunes depended on his success. He would be eternally and even perhaps practically grateful if only I would intercede successfully with il Morgan. I could hold out very little hope but said I would see what could be done.
Before I could get away from him there jumped out from a dark corner of the room a little Levantine or Maltese gibbering in broken English and broken Italian. He had in his hands a large seventeenth-century crucifix which he handed me with feverish gestures. It was not a remarkable work of art and [I] was beginning the usual process of getting out when he whipped out a stiletto from the shaft of the cross. This was the clou of the piece and I knew my Morgan well enough to guess how likely he was to be taken by it. “Shows what the fellows did in those days! Stick a man while he was praying! Yes, very interesting.” For a crude historical imagination was the only flaw in his otherwise perfect insensibility.
That is a damning judgment upon Morgan the collector. Its harshness may be attributed in part to the fact that Fry’s employment by the museum had been from the outset uncomfortable; to the probability that Fry, a sensitive man not immune to self-pity, hated to be under the domination of a millionaire, who knew less about Renaissance art than he did; and to the fact that anyhow the two men were utterly dissimilar in temperament. Fry was complex, articulate, humorous, fastidious, and a student of minutiae; Morgan by contrast was simple, a man of a few short words, lacking in humor, and impatient of fine discriminations. One may guess that when Morgan asked for advice he wanted a plain yes-or-no answer, that Fry preferred to instruct him in historical backgrounds and aesthetic values, and that the conflict between them had in it something of the perennial conflict between the executive and the intellectual. Fry’s judgment upon Morgan may therefore be likened to the judgment of a cavalryman upon a thirty-ton tank. Yet Fry was a genuine connoisseur who lived for art, and such explanations by no means explain his comment wholly away.
6
Perhaps the truth about Morgan the collector embraces both the Satterlee and Fry findings and also that of Edward P. Mitchell, editor of the New York Sun, who found in the banker “a genuine affection and hunger for the rarest and finest and most beautiful achievements in the arts.” Unquestionably Morgan had such an affection and hunger. We need not doubt that his appreciation of the “Portrait of a Child” was real. He had in him nothing of the creative artist; though as a boy he drew a few graceful pencil sketches which showed a neat sense of form, there is no record of his ever having wanted thereafter to produce art for himself. Not even into the building of his Library, the apple of his eye, did he throw the sort of intense creative zest which Isabella Stewart Gardner threw into every detail of the planning and construction of Fenway Court. Nor did he take any noticeable interest in encouraging contemporary artists. He thought of art in the past tense, not the future.
Furthermore, when he approached the art of bygone days, he did not do so as a student; he did not even read much. He approached it, rather, as a venerator of old and choice and lovely things. What turned him to collecting was a romantic reverence for the archaic, the traditional, the remote, for things whose beauty took him far away from prosaic, industrial America—the same feeling, in essence, which made him delight in the ceremonies of the Church.
Morgan was also a man who did not do things by halves. (You may remember that in his earliest days in business, when he bought coffee in New Orleans, he bought the whole shipload.) Once he became enamored of collecting, he went at it in the same overwhelming way in which he went at a business reorganization. As the Burlington magazine said of him after his death, “Having become the greatest financier of his age, he determined to be the greatest collector.” When Morgan decided to build a yacht, he wanted it to be the biggest one. When he bred collies, he wanted them to win the best blue ribbons. He was the sort of man who, when he takes up a sport, at once dreams of becoming the champion. When he went into collecting, nothing would satisfy him but the complete conquest of the marts of beauty—annihilating competition, taking his various objectives
by frontal assault.
So completely did this ambition occupy him that, as the Burlington said, he “had little leisure left for contemplation”—or even, one might add, for studious personal examination of works of art. He relied rather upon the quick verdicts of experts, upon his own instinct for quality (which seems on the whole to have become in time very good), and upon a strategy of concentrated attack—buying a whole collection rather than picking and choosing among its component parts, and coming instantly to his decision, cost what it might, without wearisome bargaining. For he had begun collecting late, and he had at his disposal less of time than money.
It may be that the editorial in the Burlington magazine was the soundest witness as to Morgan the collector:
… In the world of art quite as much as in the world of finance, Mr. Morgan was above everything a man of action. His successful raids upon the private collections of Europe were organized and carried out with the rapid decisive energy of a great general. He believed in military methods; he regarded rapidity and irrevocability of decision as more important than accuracy of judgment; he considered discipline more effective than a nice discrimination. And in spite of many instances of failure it would be rash to say that for the end he had in view his choice of means was a wrong one.
7
Morgan never made money on any such gigantic scale as did John D. Rockefeller, who during his lifetime was able to give away something like 500 million dollars without by any means dissipating the family fortune; or as did Andrew Carnegie, whose benefactions totaled some 350 millions. Even so, when Morgan died in 1913 the public—which had thought of his wealth as limitless—was somewhat surprised at the comparatively modest size of the estate he left. If one excluded his art collections, which were variously estimated to be worth from 20 to 50 millions, the amount was only a little over 68 millions—a smaller amount than was left by Frick, or Harriman, or George F. Baker, or Richard B. Mellon, to name only a few of the multimillionaires of the time, and considerably smaller than the 135 millions left by Thomas Fortune Ryan in 1928 or the 186 millions left by Payne Whitney in 1927. For Morgan not only made less money than many other multimillionaires; he spent most of what he earned. He lived on an increasingly magnificent scale; his collecting during the last fifteen years or so of his life must have cost him millions a year; and he was also a lavish giver.
The nature and manner of his giving followed a highly personal pattern. In the first place, many of his gifts went quite unpublicized. (You may recall his setting up a trust fund for Dr. Rainsford and telling him to mention it only to Mrs. Rainsford.) None of them involved naming a building for him. Morgan felt that a gentleman should not advertise his benefactions. The chief reason why it is difficult for a biographer to estimate whether the total of Morgan’s gifts was nearer five millions or ten is that so many of them were made so quietly.
In the second place, most of his gifts were closely connected with his personal loyalties and affections. He felt a close link with Hartford, where he had been born and brought up, and gave over a million dollars to its museum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum. He was long a vestryman and then senior warden of St. George’s Church, and Rainsford was his loved and trusted friend; hence his gifts to it of a Memorial House, a building for its Trade School, a Deaconess House, a new organ. Another close friend was Dr. James Markoe; it was Dr. Markoe who aroused his intense interest in the work of the Lying-in Hospital, to which, after several previous gifts, he presented a million dollars (later increased to a million and a quarter) for the construction of a modern hospital building. He was an energetic Episcopal layman, zealous of the dignity of the Church’s establishment; hence many large gifts toward the construction of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and its Synod House. He was the president of the Metropolitan Museum; hence not only his many gifts to it of works of art, but his contributions toward its excavations in Egypt and other enterprises, and his plan (largely carried out after his death by his son) to turn over to it the bulk of his collections. There were quantities of other gifts—to the American Museum of Natural History, of which he was for fifteen years the treasurer; to the Metropolitan Opera, of which he was a director; to the American Academy in his beloved Rome; to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the city where his father had lived and in which he had inherited his father’s house and business; to a hospital in Aix-les-Bains, a resort which he enjoyed visiting; and so forth. Not all, but most, of these involved some tribute to loyalty.
But perhaps the most striking thing about Morgan’s giving was the speed with which it was consummated. Unlike other men of wealth—especially today’s men of wealth—he did not ask committees of experts to study appeals made to him. He had no truck with surveys of needs. Just as he hated haggling, so he hated undue deliberation. When he saw something worth giving to, he liked to do it without delay or ceremony.
To complete our brief triangulation of Morgan’s nature, let us turn to Joseph B. Gilder’s account, in the Century Magazine, of how Morgan made one of his major gifts. The story may be exaggerated, but at least it is characteristic.
Harvard University wanted to build a new group of buildings in Boston for its Medical School. Morgan liked the idea. Harvard was a good place; his son Jack had gone there and the results had seemed satisfactory. President Eliot was an excellent man. Medicine was a good thing, and the Harvard Medical School was well spoken of. So when Morgan was approached for a gift he said he would be glad to see the plans for the new group of buildings.
According to Gilder, John D. Rockefeller had taken six months to have the school’s needs investigated. Morgan, when two or three representatives of the school came to see him at 23 Wall Street, and were shown into an inside room, walked in watch in hand.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “I am pressed for time and can give you but a moment. Have you any plans to show me?”
The plans were unrolled.
Said Morgan, moving his finger quickly from point to point, “I will build that—and that—and that. Good morning, gentlemen.” And he departed, having committed himself to the construction of three buildings at a cost of over a million dollars.
* Samuel Spencer was never a partner, nor, apparently, on the salary list of the firm. But as a railroad expert he was in the office a great deal, and he had a procuration for the signing of checks. At 23 Wall Street they insist today that Morgan would not have “rapped for” Spencer as he is later represented as doing. If not, this is a minor flaw in the accuracy of a revealing anecdote.
* Fry says his sister-in-law, Miss Burns, but on this point I follow Satterlee.
IX
BILLION-DOLLAR ADVENTURE
1
During the summer and autumn of 1897 there came a change in the economic weather. It was something like the change which comes when, after many a day of rain and wind and fitful sunshine and renewed storm, suddenly the wind veers into another quarter, the clouds begin to break and scatter, patches of deep blue sky appear, and men and women walk with a fresh briskness. For more than four years America had been beset with depression, unemployment, unrest, and uncertainty. Brief recoveries had been followed by renewed distress. Now all at once men began to look ahead with lively hope. An immense change was beginning—a change which, in the words of the sober financial chronicler Alexander Dana Noyes, transformed within half a dozen years “the crippled industrial and financial state of 1894, with the country’s principal industries declining, its great corporations drifting into bankruptcy, and its government forced to borrow on usurious terms from Europe to maintain the public credit” into “a community whose prosperity had become the wonder of the outside world.”
On this new tide of confidence Pierpont Morgan was to rise to the crest of his power and prestige. Up to this moment, he had been an important figure in international finance, the most powerful of all bankers in United States Government finance, the greatest railroad reorganizer in the United States, and a mighty, if not determining, influence in the management of many
American railroads. But only in a limited way had he been concerned with manufacturing. He was now about to move into a new domain.
The prospect in the fall of 1897 was heartening for business men. The sober and conservative William McKinley, having demolished William Jennings Bryan the preceding autumn in a political campaign of unprecedented bitterness, now sat in the White House, with Mark Hanna, the friend of the corporations, at his elbow to guide him. The silver heresy was no longer a menace; the government’s gold reserve was once again adequate; the world supply of gold was increasing and helping to lift prices the world over; a bumper wheat crop on the Plains was bringing good prices for export because of a wheat famine in Europe, and as the revenues of railroads and manufacturing companies and all manner of other businesses began slowly to swell, confidence at last returned. Plans for new enterprises were taken off the shelf where they had lain year after year because of the uncertain prospects for trade, and men began to sense that a new era of growth and activity for American business was beginning.
The Great Pierpont Morgan Page 14