Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (56 page)

On December 18, 1888, the Metropolitan Museum of Art threw a lavish reception to inaugurate the opening of the new south wing that had been added to its decade-old building on Fifth Avenue. The mayor, representatives of the Park Department, and museum trustees sat on the platform; the Mendelssohn Glee Club, selected to provide music for the occasion, stood in the north gallery; and crammed into the halls were ten thousand invited guests, many of them from the upper rungs of New York high society. The new wing had been necessitated by the Met’s vast holdings, which, as one newspaper report put it, had been expanding at a rapid rate ever since Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s bequest at her death in 1887 had “broken forth … the flood-gates of personal generosity.”
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At the opening, Wolfe’s portrait painted by Alexandre Cabanel in 1876 was prominently displayed. According to one reviewer:

There is something inexpressively lovely about the expression of her face that marks her as one of nature’s queens. Through all her life she scattered along her pathway the golden sheaves of charity and blessing, and now, though the gentle heart is still and her tongue is silent, yet each day, in a language, more eloquent than words, she speaks to the thousands who, visiting this splendid collection, have cause to bless her memory and her bounty.
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Catharine Lorillard Wolfe was more than nature’s queen. Incredibly wealthy, she gave generously to many causes. Her greatest sacred charity was Grace Episcopal Church, but her secular passion was art and its altar the Metropolitan Museum, which she was intimately involved with from its inception.

Composed of 120 paintings and 22 watercolors, Wolfe’s collection was almost exclusively European, drawn primarily from the French Academic, Munich, and Dusseldorf schools with some representation
from the Barbizon painters. As the daughter and granddaughter of merchants, Wolfe was savvy enough to spell out the terms of her donation, setting a precedent that continues to this day: the Met was to designate her artworks as “the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection,” and “provide and set apart exclusively for said collection a suitable, well-lighted fire-proof apartment, gallery, or separate space.” In return, Wolfe left the museum an endowment of $200,000, the interest on which would be used to preserve the collection and also purchase “modern oil paintings either by native or foreign artists.”
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Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887), painting by Alexandre Cabanel, 1876 (Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

I wondered whether even this late in the century I had come across yet another example of an interaction between a Lorillard and a member of my family.

The Metropolitan Museum was the brainchild of John Jay II, the very same abolitionist activist who had helped St. Philip’s gain admission to the Episcopal Diocesan Convention in the 1850s and who, as a member of the Union League Club, had rushed to the defense of New York’s black population during the draft riots. In the museum’s Act of Incorporation in 1870, Jay and the other founders wrote of “establishing and maintaining in said city a museum and library of art” that would encourage the serious study of the fine arts while also offering “popular instruction and recreation.”
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The undertaking cost money, so the trustees launched a subscription campaign to raise (a paltry) $250,000. Inviting New York’s elite to become members of the museum corporation, they appealed as much to the pride of potential subscribers as to their pocketbooks: “Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets,” trustee Joseph Choate perorated,

what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble, and railroad shares and mining stocks—things which perish without the using, and which in the next financial panic shall surely shrivel like parched scrolls—into the glorified canvas of the world’s masters, that shall adorn these walls for centuries.

One hundred five men and one woman answered the trustees’ call. The one female subscriber was Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, who gave $2,500.

The Met’s first buildings were located downtown and its first collections were of European masters. Soon thereafter, it acquired the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Art. From an impoverished but distinguished
northern Italian family, Luigi Cesnola had immigrated to the United States in 1860. He served in a New York regiment during the Civil War, then promptly left to become U.S. consul in Cyprus. There he became obsessed with classical archaeology, digging whatever he could, accumulating approximately 10,000 items, which he then sold to the Met for the inflated sum of $110,000. The price tag appeared even more excessive when Cesnola was later charged with fakery—attaching unrelated hands and heads on torsos to make statues appear whole.
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If the Met was to continue turning pork into porcelain at such a rapid rate, it needed a new and permanent building. With the help of the Park Department, the trustees settled on the present Fifth Avenue site, which at the time was little more than a semi-rural suburb. Then they addressed the question of fund-raising.

Financing the museum had been an ongoing worry. From its inception, the Met had decided not to charge admission but to rely on its members as well as an annual appropriation from the Park Department. But when those funds proved insufficient, the museum began charging an admission fee. These were paltry measures, so in 1875 the trustees implemented a new membership category. For an annual fee of ten dollars a subscribing member received the following privileges: entrance (with family and friends) to the museum on days closed to the public (Mondays and Tuesdays); ten complimentary tickets for Monday and Tuesday visits to distribute to others; invitation to all receptions given by trustees; tickets to all lectures sponsored by trustees; copies of annual reports; a set of handbooks published by the museum; the privilege of becoming a fellow.
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The annual reports list Philip as a subscribing member from the first year it was offered until his death in 1891. The trustees’ minutes made no mention of his admission. Was it an issue? Did they care? Had he met Catharine Lorillard Wolfe by 1874, and had she put in a good word for him and smoothed his way? Or perhaps it was John Jay? I found no evidence of either, but it’s hard to believe that two members of the Lorillard, Wolfe, and Jay families, who had been directly or indirectly tied to the fate of St. Philip’s parishioners, would not have been aware of Philip White’s application for Met membership. Certainly after his admission there would be many opportunities for all to
meet: receptions in the spring and in the fall, openings for collections on loan, for new acquisitions, for the move from downtown to Fifth Avenue in 1880, and more.

Philip’s annual membership would have included an invitation to the opening reception of the Met’s new wing, so I want to imagine that he attended, accompanied by Elizabeth and perhaps his oldest daughter, Ellie. The Met was now filled with so many treasures that it was impossible to see everything. Philip and his family started with the collections in the new wing, proceeding first to the Wolfe Collection. Pausing to admire her portrait, Philip must have silently thanked the woman who had made St. Philip’s move uptown possible. The Whites then stopped to examine Camille Corot’s
Ville d’Avray
and Pierre Cot’s
The Storm.
In a nearby gallery, they chanced upon many objects from the Cesnola collection, and spent considerable time tracing the development of Cypriote art from the late Bronze Age to the archaic and classical periods, and finally to the Hellenistic and Roman eras; they might even have looked for the controversial statues on which it had been whispered that Cesnola had glued a random head or hand. Then they wandered into the old building in search of American art—paintings from the Hudson River school, copperplates engraved for Audubon’s
Birds of America
, and the like. To end the evening, they returned to the new wing to look at the Met’s latest acquisitions: Henry G. Marquand’s gift of Old Masters (and some more recent ones) that included paintings by Van Dyck, Franz Hals, Manet, and Turner, as well as works attributed to Rembrandt, Rubens, and Gainsborough.

My great-grandfather’s membership in the museum was certainly an anomaly, but what was
not
anomalous about the Met in those early days? In a way, Philip’s presence illustrated the very tensions that existed among the museum trustees and between their stated mission and actual practice. To begin with, the Met sat uneasily on the borderline of public and private institution. Although it received substantial funds from the city government, it was run like a private club or, as the
Tribune
put it, “an exclusive social toy” of the city’s elite.
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When the trustees deemed it necessary to emphasize the museum’s public nature, they proclaimed loud and wide their goal of uplifting the lower orders—especially the mass of immigrants streaming into America’s cities—by “furnishing popular education and recreation.” Such a civilizing process, they claimed, would assimilate immigrants into their new country and produce a new kind of citizen—middle class, educated, respectable—and a new national unity formed around common cultural values. The United States would finally be able to prove to the rest of the world that it had at last fulfilled its own self-civilizing mission and now stood on a par with the European nations from which it descended.

Yet, in an era of increasing nativist sentiment, New York’s ruling class could not rid itself of its firm belief in “Anglo-Saxonism,” its conviction that white Protestant elites were meant to rule the nation and define its identity. The Met’s trustees really didn’t think the masses could be civilized and really didn’t want to try; the museum, they were convinced, was their domain. Proof of this attitude was the long war they waged against both city government and public opinion to keep the Met closed on Sundays, the one day working people could visit. Their excuses—the need to preserve the Sabbath, the fear of loss of donors, and so forth—rang hollow. When Sunday openings finally became a reality in 1891, Cesnola lamented that the new visitors entered as they would a dime museum on the Bowery, “fully expecting to see freaks and monstrosities similar to those found there.” Many, he went on to complain, had gone “to the length of marring, scratching, and breaking articles unprotected by glass” and some had even proved to be pickpockets.
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Ironies abound. Many of the trustees, Cesnola included, were themselves of recent immigrant stock. None were aristocrats (in the European sense) but, just as in the 1850s, constituted a class of shopkeepers who had made their fortunes in tobacco, varnish, hardware, and so on. Despite their much-vaunted Anglo-Saxonism, they still felt the need to prove to Europe (especially France and Italy) that the United States was a civilized nation whose citizens were capable of achieving high culture. And until the late 1880s, their taste was uncertain, unformed; all too often they put quantity over quality.

How different was New York’s black elite? They too were a shop-
keeping aristocracy. They too relied on “civilizationist” language to prove to white Americans that they were capable of uplifting themselves, achieving high culture, and assimilating into the national body politic. In addition, some (like Crummell) advanced nativist, anti-immigrant arguments, even going so far as to adopt the appellation “black Saxons.”

I was left with one question. Why did the Met’s trustees accept Philip as a member? I’m convinced that here class did indeed trump race. Philip was a prosperous businessman, monied, educated, cultured, and well-mannered; he was not an immigrant and, while “colored,” so light-skinned that the trustees could claim him as white. Maybe some even understood how little difference there was between them.

Undoubtedly aware of all these ironies, Philip must have smiled to himself and enjoyed the social joke. I’m sure he felt fully entitled to the Met’s privileges. And he certainly didn’t need any lectures on the significance of high culture. From his many years of study and observation, Philip was able to draw his own conclusions. Claiming a dual British and African diaspora heritage and living among individuals who were also of diverse multiracial, multiethnic backgrounds, he must have looked askance at notions of “purity”—whether of races, cultures, or nations. In the early 1850s, he had followed the debates among Communipaw, Ethiop, and Cosmopolite in
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
asserting that cultures, like races, were forms of “mingling.” In the 1870s, he heard his good friend Alexander Crummell apply the same concept to the great civilizations of Greece and Rome, referring to their creators as “cosmopolitan thieves” who “stole from every quarter.” So Philip was not about to listen to assertions of a pure European culture or a pure Anglo-Saxonism that were the sole property of one people, one race, or one nation. No indeed, civilization derived from everywhere and belonged to everyone.