by Jean Strouse
One of Morgan’s most significant and least conspicuous art advisers was his friend William M. Laffan, whose fields of expertise included engravings and Oriental ceramics—he had compiled the catalogue of Morgan’s Chinese porcelains. Morgan helped Laffan buy the New York Evening Sun in 1902, and three years later appointed him to the Metropolitan Museum board. In 1906 Laffan encouraged Morgan to set up a Department of Egyptian Art at the Met, and to sponsor archaeological field excavations.
Western interest in the ancient Near East had steadily grown after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. Schliemann had captured the public’s imagination with his claim to have found treasures from Homeric Troy, and other archaeologists discovered cuneiform tablets, buried Sumerian cities, mummies, papyri, and early Christian texts. Arguments about the theory of evolution, between biblical fundamentalists and the intellectual heirs of Darwin, added to late-nineteenth-century interest in the literary and material evidence that lay buried in the countries of the eastern Mediterranean, and American academic journals devoted to biblical archaeology, classical studies, Oriental studies, and Semitic languages and literature began to appear in the 1880s. The University of Pennsylvania sponsored an expedition to the biblical Babylon (now Iraq) in 1888, and a group of U.S. universities set up the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem in 1900.
In Egypt, local thieves who looted pharaonic-period tombs found avid markets in the tourist trade, while the rise of western “Orientalism” created a huge traffic in forgeries. German scholars and a British Egyptologist named William Flinders Petrie, aided by new scientific techniques and the professionalization of archaeology, began to set standards for excavation in the nineties. The Egyptian government tried to impose a measure of control by outlawing unlicensed digging and granting concessions to qualified foreign excavators on condition that they offer half of what they found to the Cairo Museum (the Boulaq Museum’s collections had been transferred to the Cairo Museum, which opened in 1902). This policy only slightly reduced the flow of objects to foreign institutions—the Cairo Museum rarely took more than a third—and it fostered intense competition among museums and collectors in the West.
Archaeological studies were expensive. They entailed setting up excavation facilities, sending researchers to live and work at remote sites, and publishing scholarly findings. Most of the American cultural institutions that developed first-rate departments of Near Eastern art had wealthy private patrons behind them. In the 1890s a San Francisco widow named Phoebe Apperson Hearst—the mother of William Randolph Hearst—sponsored an expedition in Egypt for the University of California at Berkeley. John D. Rockefeller financed an Oriental Exploration Fund for the University of Chicago in 1903, and later endowed the Oriental Institute there. Jacob Schiff helped pay for Harvard’s Semitic Museum, dedicated in 1903. Gardiner Martin Lane, a partner at Lee, Higginson & Co., supported archaeological work in Egypt for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Harvard published the scholarly findings.
Early in 1906 Laffan visited the site of a prolific MFA/Harvard excavation at the Giza pyramids, and in Paris that April had no trouble persuading Morgan that the New York museum ought to fund expeditions of its own. They hired the Boston project’s chief field officer, Harvard professor Albert M. Lythgoe, to come to the Met as curator of Egyptian art.
From Paris in April Laffan wrote to the editor of the Sun, Edward Page Mitchell: “I see Morgan daily and have spent a million or more of his money since I arrived.… What a whale of a man!… the Egyptian business is all due to his big way of looking at things and doing them.”
Lythgoe urged his New York patrons to hurry, since the combination of other excavators clearing ancient sites and raids by local thieves meant that the best material would be gone in fifteen years. Morgan set up a $16,000 fund for a Metropolitan Museum expedition, and at the beginning of 1907 Lythgoe began work in Egypt. Morgan visited the project for the first time in 1909. (See Chapter 29.)
In addition, he fostered the study of ancient civilizations at his own library, Princeton, and Yale. He personally gave $25,000 on the Met’s behalf to a Princeton expedition at Sardis. For the Met in 1908 he bought 1,157 ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seals that had been assembled, probably on his account, by the American collector William Hayes Ward. These tiny, potent artifacts of the first civilizations in the Near East to invent a form of writing record a history that dates from about 5000 to 330 B.C. When the Metropolitan’s trustees rejected the seals as beyond the museum’s scope, Morgan purchased them for his own library; its collection of cylinder seals is now one of the best known in the world.‡
Morgan was also acquiring ancient cuneiform tablets, and through Laffan in 1907 he hired a British Assyriologist named C.H.W. Johns to advise him. Morgan had apparently been cheated on a recent purchase, and Johns told Laffan, “I hope that little deal will not put you and Mr. Morgan off Babylonian things. I think them most important for the study of early humanities and if you follow my advice and buy through me, you will pay top price as is right to get the plums, but you will not be ‘had’ again.”
Through Laffan, Morgan commissioned Dr. Johns—an Anglican minister, master of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and canon of Norwich—to edit the catalogues of his “Babylonian things.” After Laffan died at the end of 1909, Johns questioned Belle Greene by mail about Morgan’s intentions with regard to his own work; then in the spring of 1910 he came to the United States, demanded more money, and resigned as editor of the catalogues. Belle told him in a huff that Morgan’s interest was “only to place material here at the service of Assyriological scholars,” and that her employer would bear the entire expense involved, “including your time and eminent knowledge.… I am so devoted to Mr. Morgan myself, and have such an admiration for his unselfish, and too often unappreciated, efforts to further knowledge in every way, that I assume (perhaps unwarrantably) that every one else who is at all lifted above the plane of mere money making, feels the same way, and that we are all anxious to help in so far as we are able.” From France, Morgan cabled Belle: “Perhaps as well pay him what he asks and have done with him. Will settle with him very quickly when I reach London if he appears.”
To replace Johns they hired Professor Albert T. Clay, an Assyriologist at the University of Pennsylvania (who told Belle that Johns had come “to work the Americans, as so many foreigners do, for the yellow-metal”). Morgan endowed a chair and purchase fund at Yale in Laffan’s memory, with $100,000 of U.S. Steel stock. Albert Clay, the first Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature, built Yale’s Babylonian Collection into one of the finest in the world. He also prepared a catalogue of Morgan’s cuneiform inscriptions. One of the inscriptions, on a tablet made of sun-dried Mesopotamian river mud, is the earliest surviving version of a flood myth, from 1966 B.C.—antedating the story of Noah in the Book of Genesis by about a thousand years.
Several of Morgan’s gifts to the Metropolitan, like his sponsorship of the Egyptian expeditions, reflected his personal tastes. In 1906 he gave the museum an exceptional collection of decorative arts made in eighteenth-century France, which he bought from a Parisian architect and designer named Georges Hoentschel. The museum set up a Department of Decorative Arts to accommodate this gift of ornately carved woodwork, furniture, porcelains, ormolu, and faïence, and McKim designed a new north-central wing for it. (In 1911 Morgan bought and lent to the museum a set of six Italianate landscape paintings by Hubert Robert. Completed in 1779, they had been commissioned for the brother of Louis XVI, the court of Artois, and formed part of the decoration at Bagatelle, his pavilion near Paris.)
A second collection Morgan bought from Georges Hoentschel in 1906, of medieval art works, included superb Gothic sculptures, choir stalls, tapestries, church columns, ivories, Limoges enamels, and a bronze angel of 1475 by Jean Barbet from the Château du Lude. The Met did not yet have a medieval collection, and Morgan installed these objects in the museum’s galleries as a loan. He paid about $1.5 million for both Hoen
tschel collections, which came with illustrated catalogues documenting their caliber and provenance. Jack Morgan converted the loan of medieval objects into a gift after his father’s death.§
Morgan also gave the museum its first medieval tapestry—five handsome fragments from a large mid-fifteenth-century south Netherlandish work, The Story of the Seven Sacraments and their Prefiguration in the Old Testament—immediately after he bought it from a New York dealer early in 1907.
He had refused to give up his support of the Natural History Museum to join the Met board in 1888, and continued to play a vital role in the “other” museum’s affairs. When its long-term president, Morris K. Jesup, died in 1908, the trustees appointed Henry Fairfield Osborn, Morgan’s vertebrate-paleontologist nephew, to succeed him. Morgan contributed $16,000 a year to Osborn’s fossil department, and set up a fund for the publication of Osborn’s two-volume monograph on Proboscidea, which weighed forty pounds and cost $280,000 to produce, partly because of its lavish illustrations, partly because of the author’s proclivity for rewriting in page proof. Running the museum for the next twenty-five years, Osborn enlarged its building, staff, endowment, and attendance, and made its collection of fossil vertebrates—especially dinosaurs—the finest in the world.‖ The value of Morgan’s lifetime gifts to the American Museum of Natural History amounted to more than $700,000.
Morgan’s social landscape was changing as he aged. Between 1904 and 1908 William C. Whitney, Grover Cleveland, and Henry Codman Potter died—the Reverend David H. Greer succeeded Potter as bishop of New York—and Dr. Rainsford resigned from St. George’s Church.
Dr. Markoe had replaced Rainsford as Morgan’s closest male confidant in the 1890s, and over the next few years the rector’s contentious character, religious doubts, and alternating spells of depression and “superabundant” energy had intensified. Rainsford suffered a nervous breakdown in 1903. After he recovered, he went off to Africa on a tour that was probably funded by Morgan. He submitted his resignation to the St. George’s vestry from Cairo in January 1906.
This news came as a “painful surprise” to Louisa, but her father had probably seen it coming. Rainsford went back to Africa on safari (“quite alone,” he said—except for seventy-five black porters and a missionary-trained translator), then traveled in Europe with his wife. He returned to the United States early in 1910. Morgan was at Aix that April when his secretary asked him by cable whether Rainsford should be invited to preach at St. George’s. “Would advise talk matter over confidentially with Bishop Greer,” Morgan replied. “Cable result to me.”
Two years later Rainsford was deposed from the Episcopal Church. He had been suffering from depression and nervous exhaustion before he left New York, but he had also been having an affair with a parishioner, and it somehow came to light. This was not a sin at which Morgan would cast stones, even in a man of the cloth, but it required discretion.
Rainsford’s affair had probably been the cause of his resignation. At the rector’s request, Bishop Greer deposed him at the See House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in May 1912. Church canon held that if a minister resigned for reasons not having to do with morality, the Bishop would suspend him for six months, and at the end of that period announce that the deposition was “for causes which do not affect the man’s moral character.” Rainsford received no six-month suspension and no tribute to his moral character.
Gossip for the rest of the century said that he had taken up with one of Morgan’s women. That seems possible but unlikely, as the woman in question played no apparent role in Morgan’s life, and after the deposition Morgan helped underwrite another Rainsford expedition to Africa, through the Museum of Natural History. He cabled Jack that though the cost of the trip appeared to be twice the figure originally proposed, “am willing myself to pay as much as all others subscribe.”
Six months after Rainsford resigned in 1906, Stanford White was murdered. Morgan had not chosen White to design his library, and had kept his distance as the increasingly ill and improvident architect went so deeply into debt that he gave up his partnership with McKim and worked as a salaried employee. White’s notorious sexual conquests had included a chorus girl named Evelyn Nesbit, who later married the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw. Her retrospectively jealous husband tracked White down on the roof garden of Madison Square Garden one night in June 1906 and shot him. The press played up the story for months: STANFORD WHITE, VOLUPTUARY AND PERVERT, DIES THE DEATH OF A DOG, ran a headline in Vanity Fair. New York high and low followed every word of the “trial of the century.” Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a New Jersey hospital. Elsie de Wolfe pronounced Evelyn pretty but not worth dying for.
A different kind of sensation upset New York’s cultural elite in January of 1907 when the Metropolitan Opera first performed Richard Strauss’s Salome, based on the play by Oscar Wilde. This sexually explicit tale about Herod’s daughter and John the Baptist had already caused an uproar in Europe. Its controversial features included the erotic “Dance of the Seven Veils” and Salome’s lustful fondling of John’s severed head. The premiere took place on January 22. Four days later the Opera’s board, on which Morgan sat, notified its director that the production was “objectionable and detrimental to the best interests of the Metropolitan,” and asked that it not be performed again.
According to front-page news stories that occasionally appeared next to items about Harry Thaw, the instigator of this protest was “a daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan” (Louisa), who saw the premiere from her father’s box, and urged him “to get the Opera House Directors” to cancel its run. On January 27 the Times reported that Morgan had called a meeting of the directors and persuaded them to order the performances stopped. The next day the Times said there had been no meeting, just a telephone call from board president George G. Haven polling members about terminating the production. The Met canceled the remaining performances of Salome. Oscar Hammerstein staged a new production at the Manhattan Opera House in 1909, with Mary Garden in the title role.
Morgan was not puritanical about culture, but if Louisa came to him horrified at the spectacle of Salome embracing the severed head, and if the Met board shared her alarm (its members included George Bowdoin, George Baker, Charles Lanier, D. O. Mills, William K. Vanderbilt, and August Belmont), he may well have advocated the production’s termination. There is no mention of the incident in the Morgan family papers.
Morgan’s usual winter depression was especially acute that January. He had come down with influenza after Christmas, and “the poison seems to have got into his spirit worse than I have ever known it to do,” Jack reported to Walter Burns: “I am in great hope that he will shortly go away as he does not seem able to shake off the depression.” The junior Morgan had broached the subject of his father’s heavy spending for art, observing that it reduced the bank’s available capital and prevented “our making as much as we might otherwise have done. I was not asking for apologies or excuses on his part,” Jack told Walter Burns, “but I think he fully appreciated the point. At any rate he did not object to my mentioning it, which surprised me somewhat.”
The conversation had no effect on Morgan’s purchases of art. A month later he paid $100,000 for a painting by Johannes Vermeer—A Lady Writing—in which a young woman in a yellow jacket with white fur trim looks up from her writing table. The exquisitely lucid, deceptively simple work of this enigmatic seventeenth-century Dutch master, with its brilliant effects of color, stillness, and light, had been in eclipse for nearly two centuries until the French critic Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré rediscovered Vermeer in the 1860s. Henry Marquand had given Young Woman with a Water Pitcher to the Met in 1889, Isabella Stewart Gardner bought The Concert in 1892, Collis P. Huntington gave Woman with a Lute to the Met in 1900, and Henry Clay Frick acquired Girl Interrupted at her Music in 1901. There are about thirty-five known paintings by Vermeer; with Morgan’s acquisition in 1907, the United States had five.
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sp; Morgan seemed no more willing to resolve the problems created by his semiretirement than to cut back on his “heavy spending.” Jack complained to Grenfell in January 1907 that “it makes work a little complicated to have [father] out of the office when he wishes to decide many questions himself.” Though the elder Morgan cheered up later in the month, he refused to leave his library. He had not been downtown in ten weeks, when, at the end of February, his partners began calling the library “the Up-Town Branch.”
Certain things were going well without his full attention. A notable success for the firm during this troubled period was the resuscitation of the ailing American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which had been financed primarily by Kidder, Peabody in Boston. The manager of the predecessor Bell Company, Theodore N. Vail, had argued for structural centralization and vertical integration in the eighties, and when his conservative New England investors rejected those changes, Vail resigned. In 1902 AT&T’s Boston bankers turned for new financing to a consortium led by J. P. Morgan & Co. and Baker’s First National. The New Yorkers brought Vail back and, following his advice, began a major expansion in 1906: they underwrote a $100 million issue of bonds, and reorganized the company to operate on a national scale. Jack described it as “the best business I’ve seen in a long time.” After 1906 the house of Morgan served as principal banker to AT&T.
In the wake of the 1904 Northern Securities decision, large systems of allied roads had continued to extend their territorial dominion. Men approved by Morgan managed major rail networks in the South, the Northwest, Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal territory, and New England—Charles Mellen had left the Northern Pacific for the New York, New Haven, & Hartford in 1903, to build a community of transportation interests in the Northeast. By 1906 two thirds of the country’s total track mileage was under the control of seven groups, and Morgan played a supervisory role in the affairs of four of the Big Seven—his own, and the systems headed by the Vanderbilts, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and James J. Hill.