The Great Pierpont Morgan (18 page)

At the time this picture was shown him he told the dealer to leave it until he could study it and consider the matter. This was quite according to his custom. The dealer left it on a chair at Prince's Gate [the Morgan town house in London]. There was no documentary evidence that went with it, but it was a charming little picture, painted undoubtedly in Velasquez's time.… Of course, when a picture like that was left for Mr. Morgan to consider, it was not hidden. The other dealers who came saw it in turn. One of them might say, “Oh, I know where that came from. I was offered that a year ago at such-and-such a price. It is not an original.” Another would remark: “That picture was sold at Christie's ten years ago, but its authenticity is in question. I hope, Mr. Morgan, that you have not bought it as an original, nor paid much for it as a picture.” And so on. Mr. Morgan always listened to it all without comment. Before he made up his mind whether he wanted the picture or not he would get someone from the Berlin Museum who happened to be in London, or an expert connected with one of the great London public galleries, to stop in and look at the picture. If it was not documented and the preponderance of the best opinion was against it, he rejected it.

In the case of this picture of the Spanish child, when the dealer came back and said, “Well, Mr. Morgan, what do you think?” he answered, “You cannot prove the picture is Velasquez's, and I feel quite sure it is not.”

“All right,” said the dealer. “I will take it away.” And he started to pick it up.

“No,” said Mr. Morgan. “Leave it right where it is. No matter who painted it, I have become very fond of it and I am going to keep it.”

To this anecdote, which not only illuminates Morgan's method of collecting but suggests that he may have been moved by a personal love for exquisite things, whether or not attributable to recognized masters, Satterlee adds the unconsciously devastating comment, “It might be a Velasquez after all!”—thereby apparently demolishing Morgan the amateur and substituting for him Morgan the mere speculator in attributions, or at any rate Morgan the assembler of a collection which must carry the most imposing labels. Let us go a little further, and call the most adverse witness of all.

5

Roger Fry, who in his later years became famous as a critic and connoisseur of art, served as curator of paintings and then as European adviser on paintings for the Metropolitan Museum from 1906 to 1910, when his connection with the museum was terminated. According to Virginia Woolf's life of Fry, it was terminated only because he tried to buy for the museum a picture which Morgan—who was then president of the museum—wanted for his own personal collection; and certain it is that during the summer of 1909 something happened which deeply offended Morgan. Only a few of the directors of the museum were told of this episode—whatever it was—and they considered it discreditable to Fry. Perhaps it is true that Fry had merely tried to buy for the Metropolitan a picture that Morgan wanted for himself, but that he had gone about the negotiation in a way that—rightly or wrongly—seemed to Morgan underhanded. But at any rate Fry had long tried the patience of the officers of the museum; his connection with it had been a chapter of misunderstandings
, mistakes, differences of judgment, inefficiencies, and cross-purposes.

From the outset Fry had resented Morgan's vast influence at the Metropolitan. He had described him as “the most repulsively ugly” man, “with a great strawberry nose,” and had said that he “behaved like a crowned head.” Fry had written home from New York, “I don't think he wants anything but flattery. He is quite indifferent as to the real value of things. All he wants experts for is to give him a sense of his own wonderful sagacity. I shall never be able to dance to that tune.… The man is so swollen with pride and a sense of his own power that it never occurs to him that other people have any rights.” And years later Fry, writing an account of a trip which he took with Morgan in Italy in the summer of 1907, described the financier with venom.

He recounted in detail how Morgan—who at the age of seventy was accompanied on his travels by his close friend, the “stately and enameled” Mrs. Douglas, by his sister, Mrs. Burns,
*
and by a courier, “a lank, hungry Italian cadger”—was beset by dealers and cringing aristocrats who had things that they wanted to sell him; how the banker was rude to two Italian ladies who wanted to sell him a service of majolica; and what lavish pains were taken by all and sundry to please Morgan in the hope that some of his money might be enticed in their direction.

I was asleep at the Grand Hotel in Perugia one morning in May 1907 [wrote Fry] when a knock at the door woke me and the Cameriera entered with a card. The Count Torelli urgently requested a short interview. I sent word I would be down soon, dressed, and went into an empty room on the ground floor where the Count, young, dandified, and weakly sympathetic, greeted me with anxious effusiveness. What did he want? I knew the answer beforehand—family heirlooms to be offered to Pierpont Morgan.… What were they? Chinese pictures rather recently imported and an immense eighteenth-century carpet spread all over the floor. The poor count had
rushed from Rome to Perugia to catch some of the golden shower and there they were displayed. Would I do what I could? The family fortunes depended on his success. He would be eternally and even perhaps practically grateful if only I would intercede successfully with il Morgan. I could hold out very little hope but said I would see what could be done.

Before I could get away from him there jumped out from a dark corner of the room a little Levantine or Maltese gibbering in broken English and broken Italian. He had in his hands a large seventeenth-century crucifix which he handed me with feverish gestures. It was not a remarkable work of art and [I] was beginning the usual process of getting out when he whipped out a stiletto from the shaft of the cross. This was the
clou
of the piece and I knew my Morgan well enough to guess how likely he was to be taken by it. “Shows what the fellows did in those days! Stick a man while he was praying! Yes, very interesting.” For a crude historical imagination was the only flaw in his otherwise perfect insensibility.

That is a damning judgment upon Morgan the collector. Its harshness may be attributed in part to the fact that Fry's employment by the museum had been from the outset uncomfortable; to the probability that Fry, a sensitive man not immune to self-pity, hated to be under the domination of a millionaire, who knew less about Renaissance art than he did; and to the fact that anyhow the two men were utterly dissimilar in temperament. Fry was complex, articulate, humorous, fastidious, and a student of
minutiae
; Morgan by contrast was simple, a man of a few short words, lacking in humor, and impatient of fine discriminations. One may guess that when Morgan asked for advice he wanted a plain yes-or-no answer, that Fry preferred to instruct him in historical backgrounds and aesthetic values, and that the conflict between them had in it something of the perennial conflict between the executive and the intellectual. Fry's judgment upon Morgan may therefore be likened to the judgment of a cavalryman upon a thirty-ton tank. Yet Fry was a genuine connoisseur who lived for art, and such explanations by no means explain his comment wholly away.

6

Perhaps the truth about Morgan the collector embraces both the Satterlee and Fry findings and also that of Edward P. Mitchell, editor of the New York
Sun
, who found in the banker “a genuine affection and hunger for the rarest and finest and most beautiful achievements in the arts.” Unquestionably Morgan had such an affection and hunger. We need not doubt that his appreciation of the “Portrait of a Child” was real. He had in him nothing of the creative artist; though as a boy he drew a few graceful pencil sketches which showed a neat sense of form, there is no record of his ever having wanted thereafter to produce art for himself. Not even into the building of his Library, the apple of his eye, did he throw the sort of intense creative zest which Isabella Stewart Gardner threw into every detail of the planning and construction of Fenway Court. Nor did he take any noticeable interest in encouraging contemporary artists. He thought of art in the past tense, not the future.

Furthermore, when he approached the art of bygone days, he did not do so as a student; he did not even read much. He approached it, rather, as a venerator of old and choice and lovely things. What turned him to collecting was a romantic reverence for the archaic, the traditional, the remote, for things whose beauty took him far away from prosaic, industrial America—the same feeling, in essence, which made him delight in the ceremonies of the Church.

Morgan was also a man who did not do things by halves. (You may remember that in his earliest days in business, when he bought coffee in New Orleans, he bought the whole shipload.) Once he became enamored of collecting, he went at it in the same overwhelming way in which he went at a business reorganization. As the
Burlington
magazine said of him after his death, “Having become the greatest financier of his age, he determined to be the greatest collector.” When Morgan decided to build a yacht, he wanted it to be the biggest one. When he bred collies, he wanted them to win the best blue ribbons. He was the sort of man who, when he takes up a sport, at once dreams of becoming the champion. When he went into collecting, nothing would satisfy him but the complete conquest of the marts of beauty—annihilating competition
, taking his various objectives by frontal assault.

So completely did this ambition occupy him that, as the
Burlington
said, he “had little leisure left for contemplation”—or even, one might add, for studious personal examination of works of art. He relied rather upon the quick verdicts of experts, upon his own instinct for quality (which seems on the whole to have become in time very good), and upon a strategy of concentrated attack—buying a whole collection rather than picking and choosing among its component parts, and coming instantly to his decision, cost what it might, without wearisome bargaining. For he had begun collecting late, and he had at his disposal less of time than money.

It may be that the editorial in the
Burlington
magazine was the soundest witness as to Morgan the collector:

… In the world of art quite as much as in the world of finance, Mr. Morgan was above everything a man of action. His successful raids upon the private collections of Europe were organized and carried out with the rapid decisive energy of a great general. He believed in military methods; he regarded rapidity and irrevocability of decision as more important than accuracy of judgment; he considered discipline more effective than a nice discrimination. And in spite of many instances of failure it would be rash to say that for the end he had in view his choice of means was a wrong one.

7

Morgan never made money on any such gigantic scale as did John D. Rockefeller, who during his lifetime was able to give away something like 500 million dollars without by any means dissipating the family fortune; or as did Andrew Carnegie, whose benefactions totaled some 350 millions. Even so, when Morgan died in 1913 the public—which had thought of his wealth as limitless—was somewhat surprised at the comparatively modest size of the estate he left. If one excluded his art collections, which were variously estimated to be worth from 20 to 50 millions, the amount was only a little over 68 millions—a smaller amount than was left by Frick, or Harriman, or George F. Baker, or Richard B. Mellon, to name only a few of the multimillionaires of the time, and considerably
smaller than the 135 millions left by Thomas Fortune Ryan in 1928 or the 186 millions left by Payne Whitney in 1927. For Morgan not only made less money than many other multimillionaires; he spent most of what he earned. He lived on an increasingly magnificent scale; his collecting during the last fifteen years or so of his life must have cost him millions a year; and he was also a lavish giver.

The nature and manner of his giving followed a highly personal pattern. In the first place, many of his gifts went quite unpublicized. (You may recall his setting up a trust fund for Dr. Rainsford and telling him to mention it only to Mrs. Rainsford.) None of them involved naming a building for him. Morgan felt that a gentleman should not advertise his benefactions. The chief reason why it is difficult for a biographer to estimate whether the total of Morgan's gifts was nearer five millions or ten is that so many of them were made so quietly.

In the second place, most of his gifts were closely connected with his personal loyalties and affections. He felt a close link with Hartford, where he had been born and brought up, and gave over a million dollars to its museum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum. He was long a vestryman and then senior warden of St. George's Church, and Rainsford was his loved and trusted friend; hence his gifts to it of a Memorial House, a building for its Trade School, a Deaconess House, a new organ. Another close friend was Dr. James Markoe; it was Dr. Markoe who aroused his intense interest in the work of the Lying-in Hospital, to which, after several previous gifts, he presented a million dollars (later increased to a million and a quarter) for the construction of a modern hospital building. He was an energetic Episcopal layman, zealous of the dignity of the Church's establishment; hence many large gifts toward the construction of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and its Synod House. He was the president of the Metropolitan Museum; hence not only his many gifts to it of works of art, but his contributions toward its excavations in Egypt and other enterprises, and his plan (largely carried out after his death by his son) to turn over to it the bulk of his collections. There were quantities of other gifts—to the American Museum of Natural History, of which he was for fifteen years the treasurer; to the Metropolitan Opera, of which he was a director
; to the American Academy in his beloved Rome; to St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the city where his father had lived and in which he had inherited his father's house and business; to a hospital in Aix-les-Bains, a resort which he enjoyed visiting; and so forth. Not all, but most, of these involved some tribute to loyalty.