Morgan the Collector

Edited by Vanessa Sigalas & Jennifer Tonkovich

MORGAN THE COLLECTOR

arnoldsche

MORGAN THE COLLECTOR

ESSAYS IN HONOR OF LINDA ROTH’S 40TH ANNIVERSARY AT THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM

MUSEUM OF ART

Edited by Vanessa Sigalas & Jennifer Tonkovich

arnoldsche

NEIL

MORE THAN a hundred years later Morgan remains America’s most celebrated art collector. Others may have been richer, traveled further, collected longer, even spent more money, but Morgan is quintessential. His fame rests on several sources. The country’s leading banker, his fierce visage, enigmatic persona, extravagant lifestyle, and delight in the dazzling all combined to make him news. Novelists, journalists, photographers, biographers, historians, and above all cartoonists jostled one another acknowledging Morgan—or sharply satirizing him (FIG. 1). Larger than life, even presidents were pictured doing his bidding, seated at typewriters, taking dictation, or just dwarfed by his power. Morgan’s face is recognizable even while the features of other tycoon collectors—Huntington, Altman, Freer, Widener, Frick, Yerkes, Johnson, Walters— are obscured by time’s passing. Certainly no other great art collector has had his face placed on a tea tin.

COLLECTOR MORGAN’S all-embracing acquisitions pleased cultural nationalists, reassured critics of personal consumption, and licensed accumulated wealth as a social good (FIG. 2). Until Morgan’s day some Americans viewed collecting expensive foreign art as something of an egocentric sport.1 Useful for separating the wealthy from their money, foolish because of the prevalence of fraud, and largely irrelevant to social needs. Morgan helped change

that impression. The American press, so hostile in other ways, extolled him as a benefactor promising a magnificent inheritance and foresaw his posthumous fame as a cultural patron rather than a banker. Morgan’s art sucked the poison from his great wealth, an antidote to the toxins being released. 2

ALL THIS is about reputation. How do we understand Morgan as an actual collector, who were his models, what made him special—beyond mere scale and cost—what accounted for his taste, his decisions, his methods? Was he a disinterested donor, a true art lover, an obsessive acquisitor, or, as one critic charged, a “peremptory and impersonal” market force, buying “what competent advisers approved.” 3 Evidence is mixed. Anecdotes speak variously of Morgan’s deep knowledge, connoisseurship, ignorance, rapacity, piety, egotism, refinement, generosity, coarseness, or zeal. Who was right? Morgan, declared the German museum director Wilhelm von Bode, was one of those who put their art collections together “like they do their trusts.” 4 Though Morgan was “not a great collector,” wrote the Italian art dealer Riccardo Nobili, in a surprising and somewhat unusual judgment, he was a collector of taste and courage. Figuring out Morgan the Collector is the aim of this volume.5

MY PRESENT TASK is to summarize Morgan’s collecting life. Given his exuberant, global, multimedia reach, no survey can be leisurely. It is more like “Shooting Niagara,” a promissory note for the essays that follow. This debt my colleagues will pay in more focused analyses of his massive accumulations, institutional interventions, and professional partnerships.

23

The Magnet, editorial cartoon by Joseph Keppler Jr. (1872–1956), Puck magazine, New York, vol. 69, no. 1790, June 21, 1911, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (ARC 2650).

Morgan and Posterity: The Financier/The Patron of Art, editorial cartoon by Joseph Keppler Jr. (1872–1956), Puck magazine, New York, vol. 73, no. 1886, April 23, 1913, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

24 1

NEIL HARRIS

2

I START by noting Morgan’s passage through three grand cycles of American collecting history. Two hundred years is too much to condense, but some critics have proposed four large divisions.6 First, a nationalistic absorption with domestic art, reflecting pride in the landscape and new country. Next, after the Civil War, a turn to the latest European fashions, indulgence in academically approved French and German artists. Third, toward the century’s end, a more ambitious surge, as genuine Old Masters and historic treasures came on the market and some perceptive collectors awoke to the glories of impressionism and the appeals of Asia. And finally, starting in the 1910s and 1920s, an era Morgan never saw, a returning interest in American things and above all enthusiasm for the modern, the vernacular, the avant-garde, and the ethnographic. These tastes remain.

PIERPONT MORGAN experienced three of these eras. To the first age of American art collecting, patronage of landscape and portraiture emergent in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, he was related by marriage. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1837—this photograph reminds us that everyone was young once (FIG. 3)—Morgan was sent to Europe for schooling, language instruction, and a brief banking apprenticeship under his father’s auspices. He returned home in 1858, aged twenty-one. There he was introduced to American art through his romance and marriage to Amelia Sturges of New York City, known as “Memie” (FIG. 4). Memie’s father, Jonathan Sturges, a wealthy businessman, was the partner and son-in-law of Luman Reed, patron of our Hudson River School and possibly the greatest art patron of his day. Reed himself, Memie’s grandfather, had befriended Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, whose work can be seen at the Wadsworth Atheneum. In the 1830s Reed helped finance Cole’s famous series of five paintings, Course of Empire , now at the New-York Historical Society. Sturges inherited some of his father- in-law’s art and, more than that, his taste for it. He was a special supporter of Frederic Church, Thomas Cole’s only student. Sturges personally commissioned Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits , a portrait of Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant, which hung for many years in the New York Public Library. He owned pictures by the most popular painters in America: Durand, Cole, Mount, Ingham. The summer house in Fairfield, CT, built for Jonathan Sturges in 1840, remains one of this area’s

3

Disderi & Co., Carte-de-visite with photographicportrait of Pierpont Morgan as a young man, seated backwards on a chair, Paris, undated, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (ARC 2327).

4

A PRIVATEER’S MISSION 25

Portrait of Amelia “Memie” Sturges (1835–1862), photograph.

MORGAN’S ANCIENT BRONZES

THE GREEK WARRIOR AT THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM

LISA R. BRODY

LB

THE MORGAN FAMILY was one of the most elite of the Gilded Age. Although not specifically educated in art history or connoisseurship, J. Pierpont Morgan accumulated a taste for acquiring works of fine art and antiquities through his classical education, global travels, and lavish lifestyle.

MORGAN’S DRIVING collecting principle was quality; he allegedly said, “No price is too great for an object of unquestioned beauty and known authenticity.” 1 He would acquire almost anything as long as it fulfilled his primary requirements of rarity, quality, and aesthetics. He “took pleasure in acquisition.”2

MORGAN WAS PURCHASING ancient bronzes by at least 1904. His collection contains examples from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Etruria and includes a variety of figure and vessel types: males and females, gods and mortals, humans, animals, and hybrid mythological creatures, free-standing statuettes, and furniture embellishments. He acquired them for their exquisite craftsmanship, quality of composition and execution, and preservation. They represent the very best of ancient bronzeworking, with carefully rendered clothing, hair, and fur and adorned with inlays of silver and other luxury materials. The collection of Morgan bronzes at the Wadsworth Atheneum is one of the museum’s treasures.

ARGUABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT of these bronzes is a figure of a man whose diminutive size (about fifteen centimeters in height, or just under six inches) belies a sense of monumentality (FIGS. 1–4). On the figure’s head and covering his face is a Corinthian-style helmet with a transverse crest. A cloak conceals the body from neck to ankles, with long folds that sweep diagonally across the figure and create a sense of movement. The man’s weight is balanced evenly on both feet, with the left slightly advanced. His right hand rests on his hip, creating a dramatic pyramidal form that emphasizes the linear and angular rendering of the body. The extended left hand

may originally have held an object. The long hair is shown in a manner typical of archaic Greece, with locks marked by horizontal grooves falling in front of his shoulders and a mass of long hair gathered at the back.

THE FIGURE’S IDENTIFICATION as a “Spartan warrior” has become so ingrained in the literature that it appears in general Greek history books, websites, and artistic renderings as an illustration of a Spartan officer. It is described thus, for example, in Charles Seltman’s Approach to Greek Art :

But of all Spartan bronzes the best … seems to belong to the early years of the fifth century. You see a hard-bitten Spartan soldier, helmeted, his long curls hanging over his shoulders; he is wrapped from neck to ankles in a cloak, the folds of which gave the artist evident delight. … We think we see Leonidas, silent in the Pass the night before Thermopylae, and if the man who made this little figure did not intend us to have this thought, his work is still so good that we are very moved by it.3

IT IS TIME, HOWEVER, to reconsider the figure and determine what evidence actually exists for its identification.

THE OBJECT’S earliest certain documentation comes from the 1913 catalogue of Morgan’s ancient bronzes.4 It may be the “Greek hoplite” listed in a 1906 inventory of antiquities bought from the Canessa brothers (wellknown New York antiquities dealers of the early twentieth century and the source of many of Morgan’s acquisitions). Given to the Wadsworth in 1917, the figure has since been on permanent display as well as featuring in

69

1

Draped Warrior (front), 510–500 BCE, bronze, h. 5 15⁄16 in. (15.08 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan (1917.815).

71

MORGAN'S ANCIENT BRONZES

15

View looking northeast,

May

New York.

16

View looking northwest,

June 5, 1918, photograph,

New York.

17 →

View of Gothic and Renaissance sculpture installation with the Altar Predella at the west end, The John Pierpont Morgan Wing, Wing F, Floor 1, Central Hall, Room 7, May 29, 1918, photograph, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

IN 1918 in the museum’s effort to publicize the opening of the renamed John Pierpont Morgan Wing, formerly the Wing of Decorative Arts, the Entombment and Pietà were again praised. 59 The sculptures remained in the same locations as in 1910, in a gallery adjoining the space displaying fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ivories, metalwork, enamels, and small sculpture in marble and stone. The installation had changed, however, with the Entombment exhibited with a few pieces of sculpture and furniture against bare walls and with the Pietà placed on a plain base without any other works exhibited nearby (FIGS. 15, 16)

IN “ART OF THE RENAISSANCE,” published in The Keystone in August 1918, Joseph Breck described that the visitor’s attention was immediately attracted to the large Spanish altar upon entering the first gallery of The John Pierpont Morgan Wing.60 This was probably due to its new

location on the west end of the wing’s central hall (FIG. 17)

Despite its prominence in the medieval galleries, the Saragossa altar received considerably less press than the Biron sculptures. The altar’s size continued to be featured whereas the Biron sculptures were repeatedly referred to as masterpieces.61 Indeed when The Met decided to make a formal statement concerning the great service rendered to the institution by J.Pierpont Morgan, the sculptures from the château de Biron were once again featured among the highlights of Gothic art and the greatest treasures of the collection. 62 No mention was made of the Spanish altar which Morgan had given in 1909.

IN 1935 the museum clarified its intentions with regard to its medieval collections, in the wake of financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s gift of the George Grey Barnard Collection of medieval art and the funding to endow a branch museum to be called the new

CHRISTINE E. BRENNAN

including the Entombment, The John Pierpont Morgan Wing, Wing F, Floor 1, Room 5, 18, 1918, photograph, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including the Pietà, The John Pierpont Morgan Wing, Wing F, Floor 1, Room 5, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

90

LATE MEDIEVAL MONUMENTAL SCULPTURE AT THE MET 91

Chromolithographs of no. 78 from the manuscripts volume of the Bennett catalogue, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (MS M.46, fols. 17v and 23v).

Marguerite d’Orléans. It was not, however, so much the artistry of the miniatures that was behind its multiple illustrations but the book’s purported provenance. It was thought to have belonged to PhilippeII, duc d’Orléans, who was regent of France during the childhood of King Louis XV, and its provenance was proudly repeated under each chromolithograph. Delisle, in his review of the Bennett catalogue mentioned above, pointed out that this was not the case, but that the crowned monograms and arms of the seventeenth-century red morocco binding belong to Philippe de Béthune, comte de Selles and

Charost, a diplomat and collector who later became a cardinal.11

THE FOURTH BOOK OF HOURS to be illustrated is the one from “North-Eastern France,” with which we opened our discussion (MS M.82; see FIGS. 3, 4). Its single chromolithograph was chosen, as touched on above, because James was so fond of its borders, calling the miniatures themselves “not particularly good or interesting.”12

THE NEXT BOOK OF HOURS gets two pictures (MS M.46; FIG. 10). James called it “Anglo-Flemish,” by which he meant that it was “written in Flanders or by a Fleming 10

S.

106

ROGER

WIECK

11

Chromolithograph of no. 92 from the manuscripts volume of the Bennett catalogue, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (MS M.80, fol. 13).

12

Chromolithograph of no. 94 from the manuscripts volume of the Bennett catalogue, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (MS M.105, fol. 92).

for English use.” 13 James continues: “There are several varieties of borders in the book, as well as of pictures. The most noteworthy borders are of ivy-leaf work with the central projection of each leaf very much prolonged, so as to give the whole a somewhat arrowy appearance. This shall be designated by the letter A. Class B is of line and leaf work, with coloured and gold leaves at intervals. Class C consists of a broad frame of checque work with lines or lozenges of colours. Class D accompanies the purely English pictures, and is of feathery lines with conventional flowers.” 14 The two chromolithographs

include James’s Border type B around the image of Saint Christopher and Border type C surrounding John the Baptist. There are three English miniatures in the book about which James comments, “The purely English pictures are, as we said, distinguished by the Border D. They are vigorous but ugly.”15

ONLY ONE ITALIAN BOOK OF HOURS was singled out for illustration, with one reproduction (now Morgan MS M.80; FIG. 11). The book was perhaps selected because, as James tells us, “A printed slip suggests that the work may be that of Sigismundo dei Sigismundi of Carpi.”16

MORGAN AND MANUSCRIPTS 107

1 (back and detail) + 2 (front) Jug, 1513, Montelupo, tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica), h. 17 in. (43.2 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, Gift of J.Pierpont Morgan (1917.435).

Bought for £3,200 from Jacques Seligmann, 19079 Provenance: Hollingworth Magniac (1786–1867); Magniac sale,Christie’s, London, July, 2–15, 1892, lot 482 Bibliography: Alinari 2014

THIS MONUMENTAL PIECE (FIGS. 1, 2) of early sixteenthcentury Montelupo maiolica is a rare dated example: on a tablet among the grotesques is “1513.”

THE JUG was excluded from the 1986 catalogue because Rasmussen doubted its authenticity. Having seen it in 2012 and not sharing his doubts, I notified the Florentine scholar Alessandro Alinari, who published a detailed explication in 2014. John Mallet had come to the same conclusion independently.10

THE ARMS ON THE FRONT, as identified by Alinari, are Medici impaling Lotteringhi Della Stufa, both of

Florence, for Bernardo di Jacopo de’ Medici and Girolama Della Stufa, who had married in 1509. Girolama’s family members were Medici supporters. The papal tiara above and the fleur-de-lis roundel in the Medici arms (indicating the senior branch of the family rather than Bernardo’s) refer, in a heraldically eccentric way, to Giovanni de’ Medici, who became Pope Leo X in 1513. Parallel to the handle is painted a broncone (trimmed log), a Medici family device. Under the handle is a coat of arms identified as Canacci, with a bunch of flowers and the initials “RR,” perhaps indicating a person who gave the jug to Bernardo and Girolama.

TIMOTHY WILSON 132

THREE STARS AND A STUD 133

142

DARIA R. FONER

WITHIN A YEAR, Berenson gave Greene a second early Italian Renaissance work: a Madonna Lactans then attributed to Margaritone d’Arezzo.8 After spending over a month in Customs House purgatory, the small panel arrived at her apartment in May 1911. Greene followed Berenson’s suggestion and placed it by her bed so that she could “lie and look at it for hours.” 9 “How splendid the coloring is and how majestic the Virgin,” she enthused. “I am so thrilled to have it for my very own—just think I now have two real paintings.” Greene concluded the letter: “My pre-Duccio is standing before me as I write and looks wonderful in the fading light—I could hug you for sending it to me.”10

SOON AFTER, Berenson shipped Greene another work, an Angel of the Annunciation (FIG. 1),11 which occupied the “place of honour” in her collection. 12 Likely purchased from Dowdeswell Galleries during the summer of 1911, when Berenson was in London, 13 the panel originally formed a diptych with a Virgin Annunciate now in the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow (inv. 1628). 14 In May of that year, his wife, Mary Berenson, complained to her sister Alys Russell that he was giving away “some of his loveliest pictures.”15

IN LATE 1912 Berenson gave Greene a fourth smallscale gold-ground painting. Now in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum (F.1970.06.2.P), the Bernardo Daddi work depicts the Madonna and Child alongside Saints John Gualbertus, John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi, and Nicholas of Bari (FIG. 2) The gift delighted Greene: “You can imagine how wildly excited I am at the thought of having it.”16 As with the Angel of the Annunciation, Berenson had purchased the work from Dowdeswell earlier in the year. 17 Upon receiving the painting in early December, Greene rhapsodized, “I am quite, quite overwhelmed by my Daddi.… I have it at presenton my dressing table (don’t be horrified) for then I can quietly look at it all the time Marie [Greene’s Swiss maid] is doing my hair + other beautifying.”18 Her concern for careful placement recalls the many curated tableaux at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court. No love was lost between the two women—Gardner called Greene a “half-breed” who “can’t help lying.”19 Greene, for her part, called Gardner “a horrid, ugly, little beast,” nicknaming her “Bosabella.”20 At the same time, Greene described Gardner’s palazzo as “one of the finest ‘ensemble’ I have ever seen.”21 ← 1

Bernardo Daddi (active c. 1320–1348), Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints John Gualbertus, John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi, and Nicholas of Bari, c. 1334, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 18 ×9 ⅝ in. (45.7 × 24.4 cm), Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, The Norton Simon Foundation (F.1970.06.2.P).

Andrea di Bartolo Cini (1358/64–1428), Angel of the Annunciation, c.1400, detail, tempera and gold ground on panel, 14 1∕5×91∕5 in. (36 × 23.3 cm), private collection.

BELLE DA COSTA

143

GREENE

2

who spurred Hamon’s production of pictures for the American market.13

MORGAN, whose first trip to his beloved Egypt was in 1871, also owned an 1873 painting by Tomás Moragas y Torras (1837–1906) depicting an Arab tribunal, which later hung among the works in Morgan’s personal rooms at 219 Madison Avenue.14 Torras spent fourteen years in Italy before returning to Barcelona, where he became president of the Centre Artistic and served as artistic advisor to the 1888 World’s Fair held there. The whereabouts of the original are unknown, but the composition is recorded in a print reproduced by Strahan and a sketch in oils of the scene kept by the artist. Adding to this, as was standard for American collectors at the time, Morgan had an 1874 Corot landscape that came from the 1878 Jean-Baptiste Faure sale in Paris and was in Morgan’s hands by 1879. 15

NATURALLY WHEN the Morgans moved to their remodeled home at 219 Madison Avenue in 1882, they brought their growing paintings collection with them. They now had more space and so Morgan’s buying continued apace. The new home was included in the 1883–84 publication Artistic Houses , and those photographs constitute the primary record of the interiors Morgan dwelled in for the remainder of his life.16 A few later photos give us limited glimpses of other rooms. The other key document is an inventory of household effects that was made in 1913 following Morgan’s death and systematically— indeed exhaustively—lists the contents of each room.17

MORGAN HUNG THE Kaulbach cartoon from his father prominently in the stairwell in the foyer along with a bust-length portrait of a woman which had hung in the library at 6 East Fortieth Street. On the first landing, he hung the Durand and the Peralta that were previously in the drawing room (see p. 225, FIG. 6). Only one wall of the library was later imaged, and on it hangs his own portrait that Morgan had commissioned from Frank Holl in 1888 (see frontispiece to this volume).18 The single easily discernible work in the drawing room is a painting of two nuns, to the right of the mirror, by the obscure British painter George Sant, who along with his better-known brother, James Sant, had a specialty depicting nuns (see p. 237, FIG. 18). Although the painting is quite visible, the actual canvas has not yet been located.

THE DRAWING ROOM, with its decorative Pompeiian ceiling, was hung with colorful vertical canvases (see

pp. 230–31, FIG. 12). The Hamon was placed here in 1882, as revealed in the photograph from that year, although we know by 1913 it had been relegated to a guest bedroom on the second floor. We also see two full-length paintings of women in gowns, one pensive, the other with bare arms catching our eye: these are probably works by Auguste Toulmouche or Lucius Rossi. The Catskills landscape on the left, opposite the Hamon, poses a problem. While it would seem quite easily identifiable as one of the versions of Sanford Gifford’s Kauterskill Clove, which we know Morgan owned,the composition is unfortunately painted in reverse to the several known versions of that work, including canvases in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (FIG. 14), and the Art Institute of Chicago.19

← 13

Jean-Louis Hamon (1821–1874), St. Raphael, 1872, oil on canvas, 41 × 31 in. (104.1 cm × 78.7 cm), sold at Sloans & Kenyon, Chevy Chase, MD, June 16, 2013, lot 1418.

14

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880), October in the Catskills (Kauterskill Clove), 1880, oil on canvas, 365⁄16 ×293⁄16 in. (92.23 × 74.14 cm), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Pardee, Mr. and Mrs. John McGreevey, and Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Shoemaker (M.77.141).

251

MORGAN BEFORE THE OLD MASTERS

THE ESSAYS IN THIS LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED VOLUME offer a multifaceted portrait of American financier J.Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) as a collector of art. A riveting exploration of Morgan’s acquisitions from antiquities to medieval manuscripts to Old Master paintings and European decorative arts, Morgan: The Collector introduces the reader to how and why he amassed his vast collection. The lively essays also serve as a tribute to Linda Roth, curator at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, who dedicated much of her forty-year career to researching Morgan and the over 1,500 works from his collection now in the museum.

ISBN 978-3-89790-679-2

97 8389790679 2

arnoldsche

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Morgan the Collector

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CONTENTS

MORGAN’S ANCIENT BRONZES

THE GREEK WARRIOR AT THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM