by Jean Strouse
Whitney had built stables and a racetrack at Westbury, and in the spring of 1899 Edith sat up in bed to watch the races of the Meadow Brook Steeplechase Association through a window. She must have known she was losing ground, for she called twelve-year-old Dorothy Whitney in for a confidential talk about the facts of life. A few days later she slipped into a coma, and died on May 6. Among those who sent flowers to her funeral were President McKinley, former President Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt—now Governor of New York—and Pierpont Morgan from Aix-les-Bains.
Morgan had been elected Commodore of the New York Yacht Club in 1897, which meant among other things that Corsair presided over club races and cruises. At the NYYC annual meeting in 1898 he announced that he would donate $150,000 to buy land for a new clubhouse on 44th Street. The architects Warren & Wetmore completed a voluptuous Beaux Arts building at 37 West 44th in 1899, with curved-glass bay windows shaped like the sterns of eighteenth-century ships.
When Ireland’s Royal Ulster Yacht Club issued a challenge for the America’s Cup on behalf of the multimillionaire tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton in 1899, Morgan formed a syndicate to commission a defender from America’s premier yacht designer, Nathanael Herreshoff. Most U.S. Cup contenders had been owned by individuals, but in the nineties Yacht Club members adopted Wall Street syndicating methods to spread the building expenses and the risk. Morgan went into this venture with the elite of American yachting—C. Oliver Iselin, a textile industry banker and fanatical racing sailor well able to handle his own boat (unlike most New York Yacht Club members), and Edwin Denison Morgan, Jr., a cousin of Sarah’s husband, George, who was said to think “no more of buying a yacht than the average man does of picking up a paper as he passes a newsstand.”
The America’s Cup had been in competition since 1870. Under the rules, a foreign club challenged the New York Club and sent a boat to sail against its host-defender. The race did not take place every year, but by 1899 New York had won it eight times, and it had become a major international event as well as a gauge of Anglo-American relations, since most of the challengers were British. A bitter controversy over the 1895 match intensified interest in the 1899 race: the losing British challenger in 1895, the Earl of Dunraven, had accused the American team of cheating, and a blue-ribbon panel that included Morgan, William C. Whitney, and the U.S. naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan investigated the charges, found them false, and barred Dunraven from further competition. That the judges were American may not have struck the British as entirely fair, but they needed a new contender, and Lipton, with Ulster backing, seemed made to order.
The son of Irish grocers, Lipton had come to the United States at fifteen in 1865 and studied marketing and advertising. Returning to Britain four years later, he built a chain of grocery stores, then moved into tea by buying bankrupt plantations in Ceylon on a trip to the Far East. He was well known on both sides of the Atlantic—millions of people drank Lipton’s tea, and he owned enormous stockyards and farms in the American West. Queen Victoria knighted him in 1898 after he made a large contribution to a favorite charity of the Princess of Wales.
When Lipton learned that Morgan would be in London in early 1899, he asked a mutual friend to introduce them. Jack reported to Fanny in New York: “Tonight I am going to dine with Father at Mr. Panmure Gordon’s to meet Sir Thomas Lipton and a lot of old Admirals … to discuss the yachting prospects for next summer.… P. Gordon says, ‘Ah you’ll like Lipton; he’s one of Nature’s noblemen. I love him—of course I do, he brings me business.’ It will probably be amusing.”
Whether or not the elder Morgan found Lipton to be one of Nature’s noblemen (Jack did not issue a follow-up report), the contestants for the America’s Cup met off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, that fall. Lipton had spent about $450,000 on his 128-foot cutter, Shamrock, painted green in honor of his heritage and Ulster sponsor. The American group of Morgan, Iselin, and Morgan had spent $250,000 on their 131-foot sloop, Columbia, the longest Cup defender yet built. Her designer, Nathanael Herreshoff, was Morgan’s kind of nobleman—an engineering genius who was making naval architecture into a science; his firm in Bristol, Rhode Island, designed and built every Cup defender between 1893 and 1920. Morgan paid for the rebuilding of an earlier Herreshoff contestant, Defender, to serve as Columbia’s trial horse.
As the competition got under way in early October, U.S. Coast Guard cutters patrolled the crowded bay, and Guglielmo Marconi reported directly from the course with his new wireless telegraph. Iselin sailed with Columbia’s crew. Morgan watched from the deck of his own yacht with a large party of friends.
The Cup would go to the boat that won three out of five thirty-mile races. For a frustrating two weeks, seven starts had to be canceled on account of bad weather. Finally on October 16, the contestants completed their first race in easterly winds, light fog, and a sloppy sea. Shamrock started well but slowed down in the chop; Columbia passed her and won the race by ten minutes. The second day the rivals stayed more or less even on a thirty-mile triangle until Shamrock’s topmast broke; Columbia completed the course alone. She needed one more victory to win. The third race started on schedule on the nineteenth, then both boats drifted to a halt for lack of wind. On the morning of the twentieth, Shamrock crossed the starting line a minute ahead of Columbia, and the two crews fought for the lead with spinnakers set as they ran before the wind for fifteen miles; returning to windward, Columbia outpaced her opponent to win the race and the Cup by six minutes, thirty-four seconds.
As soon as Columbia crossed the finish line, “Commodore J. P. Morgan and a party of women came over from Corsair in a launch,” reported the Tribune. Morgan and Iselin threw their arms around each other “with a shout of delight … and danced about with joy.” It must have made quite a sight, the 210-pound Commodore gamboling across the deck with Iselin in his arms.
Morgan’s banking partners were not as pleased as his yachting comrades with the amount of time he spent that fall on this personal/national triumph. From London, Jack wrote to Charles Coster, “If the Senior did have to wait a long time for his yacht race, he had a very good one when he got it, so I suppose we must not complain even if his earning powers are somewhat prejudiced by [Jack wrote “the delay,” then crossed it out for] his voyage.”
Lipton sent four more Shamrocks across the Atlantic to compete for the America’s Cup between 1901 and 1930, but never won it. The silver trophy remained in New York until 1983. Morgan concluded his two-year term as commodore of the NYYC in 1899, and was succeeded by his friend Lewis Cass Ledyard, a corporate lawyer and member of the Corsair Club. He did not care about cutting into his “earning powers,” but had something else he wanted to do with his free time. Former heads of yacht clubs tend to be called Commodore for the rest of their lives—which in Morgan’s case was singularly apt.
His taste for beautiful objects had been educated by what the historian Neil Harris has called “a lifetime of organized self-indulgence.” From the kid gloves, leather boots, and copies of Roman statues Pierpont had bought on his first trips abroad, to vintage wines, Herter furnishings, Savile Row suits, French couture, English roses, Steinway pianos, regal yachts, a Stanford White clubhouse, a Herreshoff racer, and several houses, he had always been able to acquire whatever he wanted. In his sixties, he wanted rare books, manuscripts, and art.
As the center of world finance shifted from London to New York in the late nineteenth century, economic necessity was bringing great European collections into the art market, and aristocratic families long on ancestry but short of cash sought to trade with the new American merchant princes who had exactly the opposite problem. Most U.S. collectors earlier in the century had shied away from Old Masters as too risky and expensive, confining themselves to academic genre paintings and sets of books by famous authors. In the nineties, however, encouraged by art dealers and scholars who promised to vouch for quality and value, they ventured into more rarefied realms.
Leading European dealers opened galleries in New
York and flattered novice American collectors. The best of them, presiding over a massive transfer of cultural wealth from the Old World to the New, shaped and refined American tastes. Scholarly experts also advised the new collectors, sometimes working in conjunction with dealers, sometimes superseding them. Popular American critics in the early eighties had shown more enthusiasm than critical judgment (Earl Shinn called the gaudy Vanderbilt house “a more perfect Pompeii”), but well-educated, enormously energetic European scholars were beginning to devise rigorous standards for judgments about art. In the 1870s, the German-educated Italian art historian Giovanni Morelli, trained in medicine and comparative anatomy, substituted scientific methodology for subjective feeling in evaluating art. Discerning specific sets of characters in the language of form, he proposed that individual artistic signatures could be recognized in the execution of details—an earlobe, for instance, or a fold of drapery. Morelli published a study of Italian works in German galleries in 1880. His method of searching for significant, revealing particulars, often compared to Freud’s, influenced all fields of art history. His disciples included Bernard Berenson, Gustavo Frizzoni, the archaeologist J. D. Beazley, and the Leonardo scholar Jean-Paul Richter.
Acting on the belief that knowledge could and should be codified, art historians also began to compile extraordinarily thorough catalogues raisonnés on the works of major artists—Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, published an eight-volume Complete Works of Rembrandt with C. H. de Groot between 1897 and 1906. De Groot completely revised the Dutch section of the standard reference work on Flemish, Dutch, and French painters—publishing ten volumes on forty artists—and assembled an archive of photographs on Dutch paintings. Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker published an authoritative lexicon of artists, with contributions from the leading art historians of the early twentieth century.
Photography made it possible for the first time to compare works of art in different locales. New scientific techniques helped determine date and place of origin for individual objects. A surge in the publication of art journals and books made all this information widely available and stimulated further ideas and research. Yet there remained wide margins of error in the rudimentary “science” of attribution, with fine shades of distinction between what was genuine and what “workshop,” “school of,” copy, or fake. Even experts with the best of intentions could not avoid honest mistakes, and as the American demand for European treasures drove prices up, the risk of fraud radically increased. Skillful forgers made works that passed as genuine for decades. Since collectors with more ambition than knowledge wanted big names (among the biggest in late-Victorian America were Raphael and the Florentine goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini), shady dealers assigned undistinguished works to those artists, and even reputable experts occasionally opted for the more prestigious attribution in the face of doubt, especially when they stood to earn commissions from the dealers.
Partly to guard against fraud, Morgan did not pay for his purchases until the end of the year, and he put them on display at Princes Gate where visiting experts could pass judgment. Wise dealers realized that securing him as a steady client would be far more profitable than cheating him once.
On Wall Street he was a firm believer in professional expertise, constantly on the lookout for qualified men to do specialized work. In risky financial markets he was the connoisseur of quality and value. In the art markets he was an avid amateur. He knew that he did not have a scholar’s deep knowledge of literary or visual culture, and relied much of the time on experts. Still, with his “good eye,” lifelong attraction to beautiful things, and passion for collecting, he wanted to see himself as an authority on artistic merit. When one of his acquisitions was pronounced a forgery, he allegedly said, “Bring me anything else this talented gentleman has made.”
In March 1897 he sent the Metropolitan Museum an enameled shrine he had just bought for $10,000 as a “Chapel Altar Piece.” It stood two feet high, was studded with precious stones, and appeared to represent four saints, including Catherine and her wheel. The museum’s director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, thought it was a pax—an “osculatory” tablet used for the kiss of peace in the celebration of Mass. Thanking Morgan for this “very fine enamelled pax in silver gilt,” Cesnola pronounced it the “best enamel and niello work I have seen in this country.” He had found the initials “BC MDXXIII”—possibly Benvenuto Cellini, 1523—engraved under the enamel on Catherine’s wheel.
Morgan replied: “As regards its authenticity, I have no doubt myself that the initials BC MDXXIII trace its origin to Cellini.” With a deferential nod—“Of course I am not expert enough to decide”—he thought it “well worth a place in the Museum and as such I beg its acceptance.”
Director Cesnola quietly began to check with experts about the object’s provenance and authenticity.a Morgan’s commitment to the museum meant far more than the actual gift, as American’s young cultural institutions depended almost entirely on the sponsorship of wealthy patrons. When the banker tried to resign from the Met board during the depression in 1894 because he had so many other demands on his time, Cesnola refused to let him go, invoking the memory of “the friendship which your good father had for me,” and insisting that “the Museum needs you.” Morgan resigned from the Executive Committee but stayed on as trustee.
In March of 1897, Cesnola told Morgan he was “happy to see you taking so much interest in our often abused Museum but which even Boston is obliged to recognize as the greatest … in the new world.” By the late nineties, the Met was indisputably America’s greatest art museum, and New York the country’s ranking metropolis. When the city’s five boroughs officially consolidated on January 1, 1898, the Tribune announced, “The sun will rise this morning upon the greatest experiment in municipal government that the world has ever known.” Encompassing 359 square miles, with aggregate wealth of nearly $4.5 billion and a population of 3.4 million, Greater New York suddenly became, after London, the second-largest city in the world. The benefits of consolidation may have been less apparent to the inhabitants of Lower East Side tenements than to the upper echelons of the sovereign American city, but in finance, architecture, music, science, education, and art, New York now measured itself not against its domestic rivals but by the gauges of London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome.
As a supporter of the city’s Metropolitan Opera, Museum of Natural History, and art museum, and as a private collector, Morgan was bringing cultural as well as monetary capital across the Atlantic. Like Catherine the Great of Russia, who once said, “I am not a lover of art. It is voracity. I am a glutton,” and like Napoleon who swept through Italy and Egypt taking cartloads of classical art for France, he set out to acquire as much as he could in a relatively short time, often buying entire collections en bloc. As he told a business colleague, his strength lay more in the consolidation of existing projects than in the promotion of new ones—an observation that also held true in the arts.
Fanny, who had little interest in art, once said that her husband would buy anything from a pyramid to Mary Magdalene’s tooth. He did acquire a reliquary monstrance (a receptacle for the Host), probably made in late-fifteenth-century Florence, containing a molar allegedly from the Magdalene’s jaw; two feet tall and made of rock crystal, copper-gilt, silver-gilt, and verre églomisé, this ornate object with its glass-encased tooth is now in the medieval galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Along with a few other wealthy patrons at the turn of the century, Morgan regarded himself as endowing the United States and its leading cities with artistic treasure appropriate to its rising stature in the world—as educating the country’s tastes to European ideals, and introducing the rich patrimony of the past to its American heirs. To expedite this encyclopedic project, he commissioned experts to find him the best works of art and literature in the world. One of the first and most influential of his scholarly advisers was his nephew Junius Spencer Morgan—Sarah’s son. Two years
younger than Jack, Junius often stayed at Cragston or 219 while his parents traveled, and developed an easy, affectionate rapport with his uncle. He went to Princeton, where he studied classics, and by the time he graduated in 1888 had become a connoisseur of rare books, manuscripts, drawings, and prints. That year he was elected to New York’s prestigious society of bibliophiles, the Grolier Club; Pierpont did not become a member until 1897.
Jack had been unattractively pleased, when he and Junius visited their grandfather in the summer of 1887, to find that the Dover House servants treated him as the “heir presumptive,” while his cousin “being only a daughter’s son is comparatively left out.” Of all the men who supplanted Jack as Pierpont’s “heir presumptive,” Junius had the lowest profile and the longest tenure.
In 1891 he married Josephine Adams Perry, a descendant of Oliver Hazard Perry and Commodore Matthew Perry. He had probably met her through her sister, Lucretia, who was married to his close friend (and another of Pierpont’s nephews), Henry Fairfield Osborn—Princeton, ’77. The Junius Morgans spent their honeymoon in England, and in 1897 built a thirty-room Jacobean mansion called Constitution Hill on ninety-two acres in Princeton. Junius worked as a partner in the Wall Street firm of Cuyler, Morgan & Co., but earned a master’s degree at Princeton in 1896, cared more about books and art than business, and spent as much time abroad as he could.
From London on July 4, 1899, he advised his uncle by cable to buy a medieval illuminated manuscript owned by the Earl of Ashburnham. The message, like all international Morgan wires, went in code: “Tambales solmites [can obtain for you] famous gospels ninth or tenth centuries gold and jewel binding of time treasure of great value stomachers [and interest] reported unequalled england or france ashburnhams cogote [price] asked rebullir [£10,000] am told been offered postulante [£8000] parsees triturar [strongly recommend] mailing full description.”