by Jean Strouse
This afternoon I visited J. P. Morgan’s [London] house. It looks like a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesuses.
Bernard Berenson to Isabella Stewart Gardner,
November 1906
Chapter 24
COLLECTOR
Cinton Dawkins had sketched a vivid picture of Morgan’s “inclination to pull out of business” in the summer of 1902: all facts had to be put before him in “small concentrated doses like patent medicine.” Leaving his partners to do most of the firm’s work in London and New York, Morgan was fully caught up in a romance with art that combined his cultural nationalism, interest in history, sensuous response to beauty, and love of acquisition. Operating on an imperial scale in the early twentieth century, he seemed to want all the beautiful things in the world. There was what the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard has called “a strong whiff of the harem” about this kind of collecting—a sense of intimacy “bounded by seriality,” a wish to stand alone surrounded by exquisite objects like the “sultan of a secret seraglio.”
There was also a charged relationship to past and future. Ownership of art, like intense romantic love, is inherently transitory. As Morgan appropriated treasures of the world’s great civilizations, he seemed to be engaged in a drama of rescue, gathering works that had been widely dispersed and giving them orderly new contexts under his own name. Royal patrons and the Church had owned these objects in the past; in the twentieth century they would be housed in American galleries and museums. Inscribing himself into the lineage of art, Morgan followed Medicis, Chigis, Hapsburgs, Bonapartes, pharaohs, popes, and kings. The objects he acquired would be known as Morgan’s Gutenbergs, the Morgan Apocalypse, the Morgan Fragonards—until someone else acquired them. The fleeting nature of possession enhanced its potent appeal.
His choices for acquisition seemed modeled to some extent on the Royal Library at Windsor and the Wallace Collection. The library of the British royal family had taken its modern form in the 1830s, when William IV concentrated on early printed books (Caxton’s 1484 edition of Aesop’s Fables, the Mainz Psalter of 1457), maps, portrait miniatures, herbals, watches, clocks, Old Master drawings, and Napoleonic memorabilia. The Wallace Collection, formed largely by the fourth Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870) and supplemented by his illegitimate son, Sir Richard Wallace, opened to the public in 1900, but Morgan had probably seen it earlier; exhibited at Hertford House on London’s Manchester Square were room after room of paintings, porcelains, tapestries, Renaissance bronzes, eighteenth-century French furniture and decorative arts, majolica, ivories, portrait miniatures, arms and armor, and gold- and silversmiths’ work. The Windsor and Wallace collections had been assembled by many hands over the course of decades. Morgan amassed his collections, with the help of scholarly advisers, in twenty years.
He bought with such avidity that there was no time, even had he had the inclination, for studious contemplation of individual pieces. One winter he came across a receipt for a bust of the infant Hercules, ostensibly by Michelangelo, for which he had paid £10,000. He sent the bill to his librarian with a note asking where the sculpture was. “This bronze Bust is in your library,” she wrote in green ink across the bill, “and faces you when sitting in your chair. It has been there about a year.”*
Beyond the “lifetime of organized self-indulgence” that found its fullest expression in collecting was Morgan’s larger project—to harvest “the best” of the world’s cultural past for the American future. In stocking U.S. institutions with great works of literature and art, he was providing historical records, setting scholarly standards, and marking directions for future research.
In the early 1900s Morgan kept most of his acquisitions in England—some on loan to museums, others at Princes Gate. He had opened the house for private viewing in 1901: among the first visitors to see his collections were Lady Victoria Sackville-West, the Duchesses of Wellington and Westminster, Baron Rothschild, the Duke of Marlborough, the Harcourts, Alice Mason, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Duveen, P.A.B. Widener, George Baker, and James Bryce. In the 1870s Morgan had toured the art galleries of England’s great country houses, including the Sackvilles’ Knole Park in Kent; thirty years later he invited British aristocrats to examine his own collections in town.
He had financial as well as cultural reasons for keeping the collections abroad. The U.S. government’s 1897 Revenue Act had imposed a 20 percent tariff on imported works of art. After the Treasury charged Isabella Stewart Gardner $200,000 on $1 million worth of art she brought to the United States in 1898, other collectors and the dealers who sold to them went to great lengths to avoid the customs “dragnet.”†
The Revenue Act contained a significant exception, however. Books and manuscripts could come to America duty-free as long as they were used for religious, educational, scientific, philosophical, or literary purposes. Not more than two copies could be listed in any one invoice, and the items could not be offered for sale. Since Morgan was buying single copies of rare books and manuscripts that he did not intend to sell, he could bring his literary collections to the United States without paying the import tax.
His scholarly nephew, Junius, may have encouraged him to concentrate his New York holdings on manuscripts and books. Though Morgan probably regarded himself as heir to the Italian Renaissance patrons who commissioned illuminated manuscripts and built magnificent libraries to house their collections of classical, humanistic, and religious texts, he had American predecessors in book collecting as well—among them the Drexels, Theodore Irwin (whose library he had bought in 1900), Robert Hoe, Henry Walters, James Lenox, and Samuel Tilden.‡
By the turn of the century Morgan had brought to New York more books and manuscripts than his study at 219 could hold. He stored some of them in his cellar and others at the Lenox Library uptown, but saw no point in having all these precious materials locked inaccessibly away. In 1900 he had begun to think about building a private library, and asked Whitney Warren, the designer of the New York Yacht Club, to draw up plans. When Warren submitted a set of florid Beaux Arts sketches, however, Morgan shelved the project.
Then one night in late March 1902—as he was in the midst of lobbying Congress for a shipping subsidy, putting together the provisional IMM syndicate, testifying about Northern Securities, and authorizing Perkins to set up the bond-conversion plan for U.S. Steel—he telephoned Charles Follen McKim, the leading proponent of Italian Renaissance architecture in the United States, and asked him to stop by 219 the next morning.
McKim lived nearby, at 9 East 35th Street. When he arrived at Morgan’s for breakfast on Thursday, March 27, his host said that he had bought most of the land on the north side of 36th Street between his own house and Park Avenue, and wanted to build a private library in the middle and a house for the Satterlees at the far end. The library should be a simple, classical structure set in a garden, with ample space for his growing collections and a study in which he could meet with business colleagues, art dealers, and friends. Would McKim design both buildings?
Like countless other sudden Morgan commissions, this one took its recipient by surprise. McKim had been expecting to discuss a project of his own, the fledgling American Academy in Rome, for which he had just secured the banker’s patronage. Still, he accepted the double assignment. “You can imagine my pleasure,” he wrote to a friend that night, “not so much for this expression of confidence on [Morgan’s] part, as for the assurance which it gives of his support of the Academy.”
Morgan chose McKim, whom he had only recently met, over his partner, Stanford White, although White had designed two previous “Morgan” projects, Madison Square Garden and the Metropolitan Club. By 1902 McKim was widely regarded as the dean of American architecture: his style infused classical discipline with measured grandeur and opulence—perhaps better suited to Morgan’s evolving taste than White’s buildings, which gave rein to a lyrical, exuberant imagination. White’s failing health (kidney disease) and extravagant lifestyle may have influenc
ed Morgan’s decision as well. The diligent, sober McKim had designed the Harvard Club, the University Club, and the new Columbia University campus on Morningside Heights; in 1902 he contracted to build a monumental Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal at Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street in New York, and to restore the White House for the Roosevelts (who changed its name from Executive Mansion to the term most Americans already used). Moreover, his aims for America’s cultural education were very much in line with Morgan’s own.
Having been been trained in the language of classical architecture, McKim wanted to establish a residential colony in Rome at which American artists and scholars could study the aesthetic achievements of the past. “We were starving for standards within reach to stimulate our taste and inspire emulation,” he told a friend. “It is a pity that more artists will not consent momentarily to become students, and endeavor to grasp the spirit that produced Rome.” The colony of American artists that made William Wetmore Story’s Palazzo Barberini its informal headquarters had been studying the “spirit that produced Rome” for decades, sometimes with Morgan’s financial help. Germany, France, Belgium, and Spain all sponsored academies in Rome—Louis XIV had established the French Academy at the Villa Medici in 1666. Unlike its nationally subsidized predecessors, however, the American study center would have to be privately financed, which was why McKim had asked Charles Lanier for an introduction to Morgan.
Morgan added his name to that of the Baltimore art collector Henry Walters on a fund-raising letter for the academy late in 1901. By the time he had breakfast with McKim in March of 1902, the list of supporters included John Hay, Elihu Root, Marshall Field, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., John LaFarge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago.
On April 2, five days after Morgan made his proposal to McKim, he sailed to Europe with Anne. Junius would oversee the library plans in his absence. Morgan stayed abroad for nearly five months, traveling with Adelaide and the Markoes, negotiating over the IMM, visiting the Kaiser and Bode, attending the coronation of Edward VII.
In Paris that April he bought a rare and magnificent longcase regulator clock made by the finest artisans of eighteenth-century France—the ébéniste Balthazar Lieutaud, the horloger Ferdinand Berthoud, and the bronzemaker Philippe Caffiéri, whose plaques and sculpture on the case represent Ovid’s story of Apollo.§ In May, through the Frankfurt dealers J. &. S. Goldschmidt, he purchased a collection of works by seventeenth-century German goldsmiths—including a sumptuously whimsical nautilus shell with a silver-gilt mount in the shape of a snail and an ostrich-shaped ewer with an ostrich egg for the belly, elaborate feathered goldwork for the neck, wings, and tail, and a detachable head for pouring wine. Goldschmidt assured Morgan that the owner of this collection, a director of the Dresdener Bank in Berlin named Gutmann, “never would have consented to sell … to such a low price except to Mr. Morgan, on account of the ready money, because dealers or Museums are not able to pay at once as Mr. Pierpont Morgan!” The “ready money” in this case was £75,000 ($375,000).
From Duveen in London that spring Morgan bought a tapestry that had belonged to Cardinal Mazarin for $340,000, a marble bas-relief of the Virgin and Child attributed to Donatello ($74,000), Dresden figures, and Louis XV and XVI gold and enameled snuffboxes. He acquired another Gainsborough portrait, Mrs. Tennant, from Charles Wertheimer for $150,000, and from Durlacher Brothers a Dürer drawing dated 1509, a Clodion statuette, and a superb collection of bronzes, for about $64,000. From the publisher George Allen he purchased major Ruskin manuscripts, including The Stones of Venice, for $82,000.
His forays in the cultural markets met with no more favor in England than his acquisition of shipping lines. During the uproar over the IMM that May, Gaspard Farrer at Barings wrote to James J. Hill: “Curiously enough [Morgan’s] operations in pictures, tapestries & curios have done him more harm with the general public than steel or shipbuilding. Of the value of the latter they do not pretend to judge: but their imagination is struck when they hear of 2 to 10 times as much being given for curios as has ever been paid before. It is pathetic to see a man who has proved himself a real big man losing the respect of those to whom he should be a guide. One can only explain his recent operations on the ground that ‘summat has gone wrong i’ his head.”
Morgan did not care how much he had to pay for important works of art—he once said that the three most expensive words in any language were unique au monde. He was throwing large sums of money around. He was also acquiring extraordinarily fine things. Just when his British critics concluded there was “summat wrong” with his head in June of 1902, he made the greatest of his en bloc book purchases (once again on the advice of Junius), the library of William Bennett of Manchester, for $700,000. Bennett himself had built on the work of other collectors, assembling incomparable illuminated manuscripts and six hundred early printed books—including thirty-two Caxtons and the Abbeville edition of Augustine’s City of God (1486)—largely from the libraries of the Earl of Ashburnham and William Morris. Morgan eventually had a four-volume illustrated catalogue of this collection printed by the Chiswick Press in London, with commentary by scholar-experts: the palaeographer, medievalist, and biblical scholar M. R. James edited the volume on manuscripts, and the keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, Alfred W. Pollard, prepared three volumes on early printed books.
Given the interest Morgan took in his possessions and surroundings, it is surprising that he never commissioned a house. Instead, as in his business consolidations and collecting, he built on foundations established by others. He completely remodeled Cragston and 219, closely supervising the architects and interior designers. For properties he did not use often—Camp Uncas, the Newport “fishing box,” the apartment at Jekyl Island—he assumed ownership without much modification. The two English houses he inherited from his father he eventually altered to suit his own tastes. He did not even commission the initial design for his yachts, but hired engineers who gradually improved on the model of the first Corsair. The only structures he built de novo were his private library and Louisa’s house.
For the library, as for the renovations at 219 and Cragston, he proved to be an exacting client who paid close attention to every detail of execution and design. Junius explained to McKim in May 1902 that his uncle wanted low bookcases with space for “bric-a-brac” on top and a librarian’s office fitted out with shelves for catalogues and reference books. The building would not house a “reading library” but a collection of rare volumes—about ten thousand as of 1902, with more to come.
McKim sent preliminary sketches to England with the Satterlees when they left for the coronation in late July. Inspecting the drawings in haste, Morgan said that he wanted more light and air between the library and its surroundings, no part of the structure more than forty feet high, and greater use made of interior space, since he had twice as many books as initially calculated and might bring some of his art collections to the library as well—although he explicitly did not want it designed as a “picture gallery.” Satterlee apologized to McKim for his “brutal brevity” in relaying these instructions, adding that Morgan “liked the dignity of your building & its purity of design & your ingenuity.”
After Morgan returned to New York that August, he conferred regularly with his architect over breakfast at 219. McKim proposed to grind and file the structure’s Tennessee marble blocks so that they fit together without mortar, like those of the Erechtheum on the Athenian Acropolis, which Morgan had just seen. Dry mortice and tenon joints would enhance the building’s strength and durability, he told his client, but would be invisible and more expensive than conventional joints.
How much more expensive? Morgan asked.
Fifty thousand dollars, said McKim.
Fine, Morgan nodded: go ahead.
In the end, the extremes of the New York climate required McKim to introduce a film of lead one sixty-fourth of an i
nch thick into the horizontal beds, which made the seams somewhat more conspicuous than those of the Erechtheum. Still, the architect pronounced the vertical joints almost as good as “the best of the Greek, it being impossible to insert a knife blade into them.”
Early estimates set the library’s cost at about $850,000, but by the time the building was completed in 1906 the total came to $1.2 million. Morgan wanted the finest materials and techniques, and McKim was impressed at the “extraordinary and unexpected manner in which … Mr. Morgan closed his contracts for everything” from an antique wooden ceiling and Roman marble floors to lapis lazuli columns, bronze bookcases, Istrian marble mantelpieces, and a pair of sixteenth-century Paduan andirons. McKim himself went to Rome to find the mantelpieces and ceiling. When he could not travel, he relied on his and Morgan’s mutual friend Waldo Story, who ordered antique marble slabs and a large porphyry disk for the library’s floor, reported in detail on measurements, prices, and varieties of stone, and photographed the gardens and Roman buildings McKim was using as models.
Morgan kept making adjustments. He ordered a balustrade lowered, issued “blasts on the subject of the rear cornice,” demanded the removal of five stones from the outer edge of the steps. Regarding the Satterlee house at 37 East 36th Street, Louisa noted in her diary at the end of 1903, “Father much upset by plan of stairs at 37. McKim apologetic as usual.”
Augustus Saint-Gaudens warned McKim “not to allow J.P.M. to bully you; I think if you were to sass him back, he would respect you more … that’s been my experience and you will thereby be more able to work in peace.”
McKim probably never “sassed” his imperious client—whom he referred to as Lorenzo the Magnificent—but did on occasion curtail his eclecticism. He diplomatically reminded the traveling banker of their aesthetic theme by cable in the spring of 1904: “While fully recognizing great merit of Chateau D’Arnay chimney piece we should strongly recommend consistent Italian marble example in building of Italian Renaissance design.”