by Jean Strouse
On arriving in Washington, Morgan checked his guests into the New Willard Hotel. A few hours later the entire party proceeded to the AIA dinner in evening dress. The Arlington did not admit women at formal events, but McKim had persuaded its management to improvise a special ladies’ “box,” which he placed at the disposal of the President’s wife. When Edith Roosevelt and her guests, including Anne Morgan and Adelaide Douglas, arrived, a male quartet sang “Hail to the Fairest.”
The dining room had been draped in white, with green festoons and branches of palm. Morgan sat at the high table with Roosevelt, Root, the French Ambassador Jules Jusserand, and the Secretaries of State and War, John Hay and William Howard Taft. McKim had “dragooned” John LaFarge and Augustus Saint-Gaudens into attending, and crowed to the latter in his excitement, “Henry James is coming; in fact, everybody, and more than we want!” “Everybody” included Finley Peter Dunne; Charles Dana Gibson; Henry Siddons Mowbray; McKim’s partners Mead, White, and William Kendall; the architects Thomas Hastings, Charles Lang Freer, and Charles Moore; Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt; Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler; University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper; Senators Nelson Aldrich, George Peabody Wetmore, and Henry Cabot Lodge; House Speaker Joseph Cannon; Supreme Court Justice James Harlan; and Navy Secretary William H. Moody.
The evening’s theme was the marriage of high culture and nationalist ideals. Root, the principal speaker, surveyed America’s architectural history and praised his contemporaries who, touring Europe to see “the great examples of art in the ancient and modern world, have come back with new standards.” No longer content to let wealthy individuals and institutions “be the sole inheritors” of beauty and art, Americans and their political representatives wanted “the art of our fathers, the art of our private citizens … to be the art of … our whole people.” To that end, Root announced, McKim had secured a site for the American Academy in Rome, the Villa Mirafiori on the Janiculum, and Walters and Morgan had each given $100,000 to start an endowment: “It was one of Jefferson’s cherished ideas that young men of America might become saturated with the ideas of classical art by study in Rome; and now we are beginning the enterprise through which America will no longer be obliged to take her ideas of classic art at second hand, but will go directly to the fountain source at the home of art, under the direction and cherishing care of an American institution maintained by American munificence.”
Henry James described the evening to a friend as a “big success and beautifully done,” but found its flagrant chauvinism “quaint and queer.… The Eagle screamed in the speeches as I didn’t know that that Fowl was still (after all these years and improvements) permitted to do.”
Roger Fry expressed no such reservations. To his wife he reported that “The journey back [to New York] in a special train crowded with the big architects of the country was full of importance … really fine intelligent men all working together with a big idea of the future of art, full of enthusiasm and good sense and with the knowledge that they can carry out their schemes without any difficulty.” What impressed him even more than American money was this “real power to shape things”—and also the American response to him: “It is extraordinary to find oneself looked up to and one’s opinion regarded as it is here. I think that is really the thing that inclines me most.”
Fry’s sense of his own importance got him into trouble. Having been offered £1,600 a year to serve as assistant director at the Met, plus traveling expenses abroad and support for the Burlington, he decided that “for so big a job for which I am fitted, and for which they couldn’t well get anyone else so fitted, I ought to be paid really well.” He asked for £2,400. Morgan dropped the negotiations. Fry’s appraisals of the “big man” tended to rise and fall with the tides of his own fortunes, and when the job offer was withdrawn his enthusiasm turned to contempt. “I don’t regret that I stood up to Morgan,” he told his wife. “He’s not quite a man; he’s a sort of financial steam-engine and I should have been in the position of watching the cranks work and dancing attendance.”
Fry was wrong about fitting the job better than anyone else. Later that year the Met board hired Edward Robinson, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to serve as assistant director and curator of classical art in New York. Purdon Clarke was “only a figurehead.” Robinson quietly did the director’s real work for five years, then took over the position after Clarke retired in 1910, and ran the museum brilliantly until 1931. Early in 1906 Roger Fry accepted a lesser post at the Met, as curator of paintings for £500 a year, and worked uneasily around Morgan.
Congress voted to charter the American Academy in Rome seven weeks after the AIA dinner, and in New York that spring McKim hosted another celebratory evening, at his University Club. Unable to resist addressing his audience as “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” he proposed a toast “To Mr. Morgan, who headed the list and became our first founder, and those who followed him, all honor, and I ask you to rise once again and drink with me the health and long life of these Medicean benefactors.”
Public responsibilities at the Met did not slow the progress of Morgan’s private acquisitions, and in the spring of 1904 he ventured off in a new direction with an expert who suited him better than Roger Fry. The Oxford-trained art historian and former Anglican clergyman Robert Langton Douglas, author of a History of Siena (1902), had just mounted a major exhibition of Sienese paintings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, and when Morgan arrived in London with Adelaide that April he asked Langton Douglas to take them on a tour of the galleries.
Unlike Florentine artists of the early fourteenth century, Giotto in particular, the painters of Siena had not rejected the Byzantine tradition; instead, following Duccio (1278–1318), they gave graceful, emotional dimension to medieval forms. After seeing the Burlington exhibition, Morgan commissioned Langton Douglas to find him works from Siena, and gave the scholar £1,000 for his own research.
Langton Douglas thanked his new patron for “enabling me to continue and complete my historical and artistic researches,” and ten days later sold him several Sienese paintings for £1,705, some of them out of the Burlington show; they included a Duccio triptych of the Crucifixion, four predella panels depicting scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist by Giovanni di Paolo, and a Virgin and Child by Matteo di Giovanni, which Morgan hung in his bedroom.
When word of this purchase got out, the price of Sienese art soared. A delighted Langton Douglas continued to advise his American patron—among the works he procured for him over the next several years were a Romney portrait (Mrs. Scott Jackson) and a Lorenzo Costa Annunciation in 1905, a Perugino Virgin and Child with Two Saints from Sir George Sitwell in 1911, and a bronze Virtue Overcoming Vice attributed to Cellini.c Langton Douglas also counseled the purchasing committee at the Metropolitan Museum, and eventually inherited Fry’s advisory role.
From London in May of 1904, Morgan went as usual to Paris, where Adelaide served as his collecting accomplice. He ordered several objects from Cartier at 13 Rue de la Paix, including a porcelain flask, “vieux Saxe, representant ‘Les trois Grâces,’ ” and a little porcelain box, “Mennecy, ‘Femme couchée.’ ” When they arrived at Princes Gate in June, he did not recall having bought them. Cartier’s clerk wrote: “I take the liberty to remind you that Mrs. Douglas, who was present when you were purchasing the two articles you refer to, made a jocular remark about the word ‘Mennecy’ and that she also greatly advised you to add the said articles to your collection of boxes and flacons.”
That spring Morgan also acquired the ink-smudged manuscript used by Milton’s printer to set type for Book I of Paradise Lost—the only surviving manuscript of the poem. And he made the first of several diplomatic gestures designed in part to counter Europe’s concern about American appropriation of its cultural heritage. He had bought a beautiful embroidered textile, reportedly for $15,000, and lent it to the South Kensington Museum, where scholars rec
ognized it as a thirteenth-century ecclesiastical cloak that had been given to the Italian cathedral at Ascoli by Pope Nicholas IV and recently stolen. In 1904 Morgan returned the “Ascoli Cope” to Italy. In Rome the following spring, King Victor Emmanuel gave a dinner in his honor as official thanks, and Pope Pius X granted him a private audience in the Vatican Library; pontiff and banker conversed through a translator about paintings and books, and Morgan was invited to call at the Vatican whenever he visited Rome.
In order to make room for his growing collections of paintings and objects of decorative art, Morgan bought the house next door to No. 13 Princes Gate in 1904 and opened the interior walls to join the two buildings, converting the first two floors into galleries. Jack told Fanny the following summer: “Father has got the new French rooms furnished properly and they are most entirely satisfactory to him and to everyone. I haven’t seen the bedroom and housekeeping part of the house but presume it is not as good as the show part.”
For his “new French rooms” Morgan had ordered voluptuous furnishings from Duveen Brothers. There were four Louis XVI X-frame benches with matching armchairs covered in blue silk and a pair of Louis XV andirons for the Fragonard Room; in a Louis XVI Drawing Room were Beauvais tapestries, a marquetry commode by Riesener, tables and secrétaires decorated with Sèvres porcelain plaques, and candlesticks made by Pierre Gouthière. In addition, the “show part” of the house featured a Regency Room, a Louis XV Sitting Room, and a Louis XVI Marble Hall.
A few years later Morgan’s friend William Lawrence, the bishop of Massachusetts (and the son of Junius’s Boston landlord, A. A. Lawrence), stayed at Princes Gate and described its interior in his memoirs. “As one entered the front door, he was still in a conventional London house,” wrote Lawrence, “until passing along three or four yards, his eye turned and looked through the door on the left into the dining-room—in size an ample city dining-room, but in glory of color such as few other domestic dining-rooms ever enjoyed. The visitor was amazed and thrilled at the pictures: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ masterpiece, Madame Delmé and Children, a great full-length portrait of a lady by Gainsborough, another by Romney [Mrs. Scott Johnson]. One’s eye seemed to pierce the wall into the outer world through the landscapes of Constable [The White Horse] and Hobbema. Behind Mr. Morgan’s chair at the end of the table hung a lovely Hoppner of three children [The Godsall Children], a beautiful boy standing in the center, full of grace.”
Lawrence wondered why Morgan had placed this last picture behind him until he noted that a narrow mirror between two windows on the opposite wall enabled the financier to see the figure in reflection. He did not point out that Morgan would see himself in the mirror as well—“portrait of beautiful boy with owner”—or that anyone facing Morgan would see him in conjunction with Hoppner’s figures.
Upstairs in a large drawing room on the second floor hung Gainsborough’s well-traveled Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. “Turning from her,” Lawrence continued (accepting the attributions assigned by his host), “one’s eye glanced about the room and recognized portraits made familiar through prints and engravings of a Rembrandt, a Frans Hals, a child by Velázquez, and the magnificent Van Dyck Woman in Red and Child.… Across the hall to the front, we entered the Fragonard Room, whose walls were drawn in by the builder to meet the exact dimensions and designs of the panels.” The bishop’s survey took in more Gainsboroughs and Raeburns, Louis XV furniture, Sèvres porcelain, objects from Egypt and Rome, glass cabinets filled with jeweled boxes, drawers of fine portrait miniatures by Holbein, Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac Oliver—and Juliet Pierpont Morgan’s collection of china pug dogs.
One night at Princes Gate, Lawrence’s dinner companion, the wife of the bishop of Southwark, remarked, “What a mass of interesting things are in this house!”
“Mrs. Talbot,” replied Lawrence, “the most interesting thing in this house is the host.”
The most eminent visitor who came to see the new galleries at Princes Gate was Edward VII. Morgan showed his guest through the house in July of 1906—the King recognized several portraits as having belonged to his friends—then offered him iced coffee and cigars in the library. A portrait of Junius hung over the mantel between Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Miss Croker and Romney’s Lady Hamilton. Across the room was Lawrence’s full-length portrait of the beautiful actress Elizabeth Farren dressed in white silk and furs, which Morgan had just bought from Agnew’s for $200,000.d The King, speaking as one connoisseur of femininity to another, objected that Miss Farren looked cramped: “The ceiling is too low in this room for that picture,” he observed. “Why do you hang it there?” Morgan looked at the portrait for a long time, then said, “Because I like it there, sir.”
A more critical observer than Edward VII or Bishop Lawrence toured No. 13–14 Princes Gate later that year. “This afternoon I visited J. P. Morgan’s house,” reported Bernard Berenson to Isabella Stewart Gardner in November, 1906—implicitly comparing Morgan’s collections to her own, largely selected by him: he liked one of Morgan’s Van Dycks, and loved the Fragonard Room, but thought the house looked “like a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesuses.”
Morgan’s ecumenical appetites did give the house a look of expensive jumble, but Berenson’s scorn was partly designed to reinforce his own intellectual distinction. Relatively new at what he called “expertising,” he was earning a living by working as both dealer and critic, and the lines between aesthetic judgment and commerce were not always clear. Other scholars accused him of “selling” attributions. The American journalist and arts editor August Jaccaci reported with relief in 1903: “I have actually found an apparently honest man—Langton Douglas; he is a dealer, though an art critic, and frankly says so. No Berenson business about him.”
Taste and knowledge constantly revise valuations in art, and the combination of steep prices and questionable authenticity creates an uneasy mutual dependence between wealthy collectors and scholarly experts. Knowledge, as Henry Adams bitterly pointed out all his life, brings one kind of power, but generally not the kind that makes things happen in the world or moves art from one continent to another. Scholars such as Berenson and Roger Fry—but apparently not Langton Douglas, Bode, or Bashford Dean—tended to denigrate money and worldly power as ranking far below knowledge on the scale of ultimate values, especially when collectors did not do their bidding. Morgan wielded the power of his checkbook, while Berenson and Fry plied their educated intelligence and sometimes used connoisseurship as a weapon. If they had to suffer the humiliation of kowtowing to wealth, they exacted revenge by sneering at its taste.
Charles McKim had a nervous breakdown in the summer of 1905, just a few months after thanking his “Medicean benefactors” for funding the American Academy in Rome. His doctors ordered him to rest. Almost finished with the library on 36th Street, he suggested that Stanford White complete the job. Morgan told McKim to take a vacation and forget about the building: “When you go, work on the library will stop until you return. No one else shall touch it.”
McKim did not stay away long, and early in 1906 he reported to White with relief that his client seemed pleased: “The sky is blue and there is no cause for worry. [Morgan] expressed great pride and satisfaction in the building.”
On a quiet side street in Murray Hill, McKim had built an Italianate villa that paid gracious tribute to the High Renaissance, drawing on the palaces and churches of sixteenth-century Rome. Everything about the building expressed its owner’s sense of grandeur and aesthetic privilege, his deliberate, personal enunciation of America’s claim to a place among the great cultures of the world. Known as Mr. Morgan’s Library, it had a luxurious formal gravitas, and spoke with silent authority of high scholarly standards and patrician tastes.
A private underground tunnel connected the library to Morgan’s house. At the entrance on 36th Street a flight of broad marble stairs led up between a pair of lionesses (sculpted by E. C. Potter, who later created the famous lions on the steps of the New York Public Librar
y) and two sets of Ionic columns to an august Palladian portal. Heavily ornamented bronze doors opened from this recessed portico into a vaulted rotunda. Inside, above lapis columns and Roman marble floors, Mowbray’s ceiling decorations invoked the literary arts and the library’s identification with the Italian Renaissance.
More interesting for its iconography than for its aesthetic qualities, the ceiling drew heavily on quattrocento compositions, particularly on Pinturicchio’s representations of the seven liberal arts in the Borgia Apartments, and on Raphael’s vault decorations for the Stanza della Segnatura—both in the Vatican. Mowbray had proposed a general design for these decorations, but Morgan made several alterations. As completed, the ceiling’s elaborate schematic allegory combines reverence for learning—four female figures represent philosophy, religion, science, and art—with a literary history of love.e If Morgan as collector was writing himself into the record of beautiful objects, he may with these images have been placing himself in a lineage of famous lovers—and humanizing the library’s baronial solemnity by paying sly homage to the anarchic vitality of Eros and art.
Three painted lunettes over the doors leading out of the rotunda contain figurative references to great works of literature from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Among the lovers represented here are Orpheus and Eurydice, Odysseus and Circe, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Tasso and Leonora d’Este: only the first pair are married to each other, and Eurydice, like Memie Sturges, died shortly after her wedding. Behind Dante and Beatrice, in the lunette referring to romances of the Middle Ages, Paolo reads to Francesca da Rimini, his lover and his brother’s wife, about the first kiss of Lancelot and Guinevere (who was married to King Arthur). Paolo and Francesca were put to death for their transgression and consigned to the second circle of Hell (“they suffer here who sinned in carnal things”). In the fifth canto of the Inferno, Francesca tells Dante how the story of the Arthurian lovers prompted her fall: “One day, for pleasure, / We read of Lancelot, by love constrained.” She and her own “constrained” lover sometimes looked up from the book into each other’s eyes—