Inscrutable are the crosswinds that drive the art market. A short list in Great Britain, for example, would include the vagaries of fashion, the confederacy of dealers, the rivalry of collectors, and, less obviously, the price of grain. The last item played an offstage role in the surge of spectacular art sales during the twilight of the Victorian era. Beginning in the 1880s, as the market for British farm produce waned, so did the income and the electoral authority of the titled families who owned as much as four-fifths of the land in the British Isles. Pressed for cash, the landed nobility began selling ancestral art collections, one by-product being a surge in the supply of Chinese porcelains. What was the underlying catalyst? An informed answer was advanced in 1931 by Lewis Namier, then Oxford’s leading anatomist of power: “On a careful inquiry, it will be found that the coming of American wheat wrought a greater change in the composition of the British House of Commons than the first two Reform Acts” (the laws meant to trim back overrepresentation of rural areas).
This was true. As American railroads reached the Western prairies in the 1870s, carloads of cheaper wheat flooded the world’s grain markets. Together with bad weather and crop diseases, imported grain undermined the economic base of Great Britain’s “senatorial order,” an apt phrase devised by the Cambridge-bred historian David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990). Great swaths of territory in the United Kingdom, averaging between ten thousand and thirty thousand acres, were then owned by as few as 750 families and their neighboring gentry. In 1880, as calculated by Cannadine, two-thirds of the elected members of Parliament belonged to the rural oligarchy, but by the 1920s only a tenth had landed roots.
As farm income and legislative power waned, taxes waxed. Death duties rose by incremental jumps, from 8 percent in 1894 to 40 percent in 1930–39. Taxes on landed income and capital gains were introduced in 1909, and during the Great War, a super tax was added to incomes in excess of £10,000. The plaint of a declining caste was pithily expressed by Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895): “What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.”
For beleaguered patricians, an obvious and tempting way to rebalance accounts was to sell ancestral art collections whose market value rose even as land values diminished. Leading the way in 1882, the Duke of Hamilton sold 2,213 lots of paintings, glass, enamel, and furniture for an unprecedented £397,562. This was followed by the Duke of Marlborough (uncle to young Winston Churchill), who in 1884–86 sold a pride of Old Master paintings, many going abroad, thus provoking a spirited debate on their loss to the nation. A bevy of art dealers flocked to these sales, the path blazed in 1886 by Henry Duveen and his teenage nephew, the formidable Joseph.
Of all potential buyers, none was more closely watched than the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, who commuted regularly to Europe, initially as a student and then as a young financier, becoming fluent in French and German. Beginning in 1890, Morgan devoted most of his vast earnings in steel, banking, and railroads to collecting masterworks of art and letters. “The American domination of the world art market in the early 1900’s was the work of a single man,” judges Gerald Reitlinger, author of an encyclopedic study of prices paid for art in the modern era: “It cannot be doubted that J. P. Morgan formed the greatest single collection comprehending all ages that there has ever been.”
Imperious in gaze and words, flourishing his cane like a saber, and averse to haggling, Morgan preferred to buy en bloc collections of rare manuscripts, Old Master paintings or drawings, and especially Chinese porcelains. As a winner’s bonus in imperial trade and Asian wars, the ducal estates of Great Britain abounded in this special art of ancient lineage. For buyers like Morgan, it can be surmised that Oriental ceramics exerted an added appeal owing to their supreme craftsmanship, obvious to sight and touch, and to their association with royalty, since an object’s imperial provenance was frequently noted in imperial marks. Nor did it hurt that among the divinities depicted on regal pottery were the plump and cheerful gods of wealth and longevity.
Yet there is a downside. In the Western tradition, high value is ascribed to authenticity, whereas Chinese potters commonly viewed imitation as a form of respect. The fear of being taken in by fakes has long proved a prime source of Western collectors’ anxiety, especially since modern technology has sharpened the forger’s tools. Moreover, just as Biblical iconography may mean little to those steeped in Confucian or Buddhist creeds, the reverse also holds: many subtle cultural and religious allusions in Chinese art are lost in translation. Imagine, for example, how little visual allusions would mean to an Asian collector of Greek vases who knew nothing of Homeric sagas and Olympian gods.
Even so, having noted these downsides, what might be called Five Noble Truths help explain why Chinese ceramics flourished in Western art markets. To begin with, no special knowledge is necessary to appreciate the genre’s outward forms and functions. A Second Truth: age alone confers added prestige; no other civilization has a longer history than China’s of turning clay and metallic ores into alluring objects (not until the eighteenth century did Europeans finally learn the secrets of creating porcelain). As early as the Shang dynasty (1650–1050 BCE), Chinese potters were already firing special clays and glazing their works to create what specialists now call “primitive porcelain.” In the succeeding Qin and Han dynasties (202 BCE–220 CE), not only pots and bowls but also life-size terra-cotta statues were mass-produced. Soon enough, beginning with the Tang dynasty and continuing through the Song, various specialized kilns were designated as “imperial,” meaning, inter alia, that the fierce dragons on their vases could be depicted with four claws, rather than the three authorized for lesser nobility.
In sum, Chinese ceramics by every objective measure constitute the earliest globally prized cultural commodity. More than a millennium ago, China had already developed markets throughout Asia and the Middle East, with Africa and Western Europe soon to follow. Moreover, Chinese potters crafted special wares with an eye to different tastes of foreign buyers—which is why “china” signifies not just a country but the world’s most venerable made-to-order export commodity.
Two practical Noble Truths can be added to the list. Save for statuary, most porcelain objets d’art are portable, readily grabbed during military operations, and convenient for export if carefully packed in diplomatic luggage. This helps explain why Chinese ceramics flooded Western capitals after the 1860 sacking of the Yuanmingyuan (or Summer Palace) and the subsequent occupation of the Forbidden City in 1900. Less obvious is a Fourth Truth: from the late eighteenth century onward, sale prices were recorded by leading auction houses in London, Paris, and New York. This meant that collectors could continuously monitor the changing cash value of their holdings in Chinese porcelains—indeed, a specialized jargon evolved in auction catalogues to distinguish various glazes (i.e., celadon, crackle, or sang de boeuf). Soon, collectors focused on favorite periods, the most popular a century ago being the multicolored porcelain identified with the Qing dynasty (1644–1911 CE), especially the brilliant ware produced during the long reign of the most interesting of Qing rulers, Emperor Kangxi (or Kang-hsi). But taste is fickle, and the black-glazed Qing vases once prized for their elaborate decoration were supplanted in the favor of collectors in recent decades by the simpler, purer, often older white- and yellow-glazed ware, notably those crafted at royal kilns in the Song dynasty.
A Fifth Noble Truth is that the rage for Chinese porcelain coincided with the emergence in the nineteenth century of a new calling to address the needs, and status anxieties, of America’s rising breed of tycoons. The newly rich, and their families, turned for professional advice to interior designers and/or decorators to create an ambience of wealth in their residences. At the turn of the last century, few objects seemed more likely to charm a visitor, or to find a way into their owner’s heart, than a Kangxi blue-and-white garniture of vases and beakers, especially if enthroned on a mantle or displayed in a purpose-built vitrine. (As with much else, the notion of living in harmony with one’s surroundings was anticipated in China three thousand years ago in the science of fengshui, providing guidelines uniting Five Elements—fire, water, wood, metal, and earth—in domestic design.)
So important was this aspect of modern Western collecting that the Duveen Brothers, preeminent among vendors, showcased Chinese ceramics along with furniture and tapestries in the firm’s Fifth Avenue store window, circa 1900. (The window’s novel electrical illumination also excited attention.) Joseph Duveen, soon to succeed his uncle, brothers, and cousins as the firm’s and his century’s leading art dealer, all but dictated the interior design of his client’s homes. As a 2007 essay in the Burlington Magazine recounts, Henry Clay Frick paid five million dollars in 1915 to Duveen for such items as a chimneypiece, French furniture, and Chinese porcelains to provide a suitable setting for a series of panels by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Sir Joseph (as he became in 1919) rarely saw a decorator’s niche that he did not wish to fill.
Given the abundance of vacant niches in the instant mansions that sprang up during America’s Gilded Age, it is small wonder that Chinese porcelain soon became a standard feature in upscale living rooms. As we have related, beginning in the 1790s, Yankee trading vessels commonly returned from Canton laden with export ceramics. Especially popular were blue-and-white ginger jars, serving dishes, teapots, and vases. But in succeeding decades, Asian porcelain became an investment as well as a novelty. As commerce with the Far East increased, so did Western fascination with the classical arts of China and Japan. This was notably promoted at international fairs, a nineteenth-century phenomenon triggered by the success in 1851 of the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace. In just five months, the exhibition drew an astonishing six million visitors. Successful encores ensued, first in London (1862), then Paris (1867), Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Paris again (1878 and 1889), Chicago (1893), and St. Louis (1904), plus a half-dozen other venues. At each gala exposition, American visitors armed with curiosity and dollars could examine, not just the arts and crafts of other Western nations, but also the novel and intriguing arts of Asia displayed in thematic pavilions.
Among visitors so smitten was William T. Walters, a Baltimore merchant who, with his son Henry, pioneered the collecting of high-value East Asian ceramics in post–Civil War America. The senior Walters established another benchmark by commissioning the ten-volume, lavishly illustrated Oriental Ceramic Art, a catalogue of his holdings annotated by Stephen W. Bushell, one of the genre’s preeminent British connoisseurs. And what initially seduced Walters was his first encounter with Sino-Japanese art at London’s 1862 Great International Exhibition. (A catalogue by Bushell would thereafter confirm the status of a serious collector.)
Here a step backward is necessary. Self-made and largely self-taught, William Thompson Walters grew up in Pennsylvania and in 1841 moved to Baltimore, where he married Ellen Harper, the daughter of a successful food wholesaler. Walters prospered as a grain merchant and by selling “the finest and largest stock of Old Rye Whiskey in the United States.” Yet what set him apart from other self-made magnates was his informed interest in the visual arts. In the 1850s, he began collecting artworks by the Hudson River School, turning for advice to Samuel Putnam Avery, soon to become New York’s foremost art dealer. Subsequently, with acquisition funds provided by Walters, Avery agreed to split with his offstage partner the sale profits of European as well as American art displayed in the former’s popular gallery.
Baltimore’s William Walters, a widely traveled entrepreneur who turned his mansion into a museum, as portrayed by the French artist Leon Bonnat (1883).
Thus Walters was already an insider in the art world when the Civil War broke out in 1861, engulfing border-state Maryland in angry discord. Though a Northerner by birth, he sympathized with the South, having friends and business ties on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. So Walters chose voluntary exile in Paris, the world’s art capital, then at the crest of its Second Empire buoyancy. His family, including his wife, Ellen, his son Henry, and daughter Jenny, found suitable quarters in the First Arrondissement, within strolling distance of the Tuileries, the Louvre, and the fashionable cafés in Napoleon III’s glittering capital. Walters found an astute guide to the Parisian beau monde in George A. Lukas, an expatriate West Point graduate who acted as an agent for leading American collectors. Soon William not only met leading artists but also commissioned their works, including the celebrated Daumier watercolor, The Omnibus.
On a frugal traveling budget, the Walters family toured Italy’s canonical cities and then in October 1862 crossed the Channel to inspect the much-discussed London International Exhibition. Here the couple experienced an epiphany, followed by a tragedy. Among the objects showcased in the fair’s Oriental Department were the varied arts of China and newly accessible Japan. The exhibit included objects recently looted by British troops during the sack of Peking’s Summer Palace, among them a painted screen said to be associated with the imperial throne, a backgammon board, and “a human skull richly set in gold, reported to be the skull of Confucius.” Also displayed were Japanese objets d’art assembled by Sir Rutherford Alcock, formerly the British consul in China, then HMG’s Envoy Extraordinary in Japan. His collection featured hundreds of lacquers and inlaid wood products, an array of porcelains from Yokohama, pottery from Osaka, and a miscellany of textiles, bronzes, and basketry. As determined by William R. Johnston, the biographer of William Walters Sr., it was this show in London, “unprecedented in the West,” that prompted “his interest in collecting Far Eastern art, a field that he pioneered in America.”
Yet sadly, it was also during London’s damp November weather that Ellen Walters, always frail, contracted pneumonia and died at age forty. William never remarried, and his artworks figuratively became a surrogate family, as they did for his childless son, Henry. Once back in America, father William prospered as a consolidator of East Coast railroads, policies pursued with vigor by his son. Both not only visited but served as patrons or commissioners at successive international fairs in Vienna, Philadelphia, Paris, and Chicago, adding generously to their expanding collections. Although he shunned publicity, the elder Walters, with his formidable girth and drooping white mustache, became a familiar fixture in New York’s elite clubs, as did the dapper and (then) leaner younger Walters.
In 1886, father and son generated unsought headlines in New York when William Walters was identified as the unnamed victor in an auction duel for a Chinese ceramic vase, glazed in pink but flecked with green, known as the “Peach Bloom Vase.” It was hammered down at $18,000, an eye-widening amount at the time, comparable to around $90,000 in present-day dollars. In the opinion of The New York Times, the sale price was ridiculous since the vase’s pedigree was suspect and it reportedly had been offered for sale in Peking for 250 Mexican silver dollars. After all, The Times commented, “the public does not own peach blow [sic] vases, and is in no hurry to, but it sympathizes with those who, owning one or two, therefore seek, with effrontery truly amusing, to boom the peach blooms as they boom a stock in Wall Street.” The comment was followed days later in the same newspaper by “The Rime of the Peachblow Vase,” a parody of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, this being the message:
Across the ocean, to dealers in notions,
The little red jug then crossed!
And they sold it off at a slight advance
Of fifty times its cost!
Among less amused readers was Charles A. Dana, owner and editor of The New York Sun, himself a collector of Chinese porcelain (indeed one of his prizes was a peach-bloom vase). Warmly defending both the vase and its owner, The Sun noted that William Walters had recently invited the public to visit his ever-burgeoning art gallery adjoining the family mansion on Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Place. Thus the vase was destined to become yet another stellar porcelain in the Walters Art Gallery (as it formally became in 1934), adorning a collection that ranked globally with the very best in the West, private or public.
The sale marked the beginning of what can be termed the Great Porcelain Bubble. On both sides of the Atlantic, wealthy collectors vied for East Asian ceramics, igniting a market that rose and fell along with changing tastes, personal rivalry, and speculative risk-taking. Thousands of objects changed hands. When William Walters died in 1894, his estate included 2,400 pieces of Chinese ceramics. And successive global expositions proved to be the vital catalyst for the porcelain market. In America, as the historian Warren Cohen relates, “The Philadelphia Centennial and the Chicago Columbian Exposition brought Chinese and Japanese art to the attention of a mass audience.”
Yet Cohen importantly adds that East Asian paintings and prints were too rigidly judged by Western standards and prejudices: “The Asian could no more understand perspective than he could understand logic. Generalized contempt for Asians affected perceptions of Asian art. It was different, it was Asian, it was therefore inferior.” Still, in the century’s closing decades, a select group of American collectors grasped two salient facts: not only was Far Eastern art aesthetically undervalued; it was also underpriced.
Beginning in the 1890s, three buyers led the way in collecting Chinese porcelain when the going was auspicious: Benjamin Altman, the soft-spoken founder of his eponymous New York department store; James A. Garland, for thirty years a vice president of the First National Bank in the same city; and John Pierpont Morgan, the only banker whose name is familiar to most literate Americans. All three shopped across the world. Each was counseled by a Duveen—either Uncle Henry, longtime chief of the firm’s Fifth Avenue gallery, or the peripatetic Sir Joseph, who was always en route from or to London and Paris. As a result, save for China itself, the United States can claim the most stellar abundance of Chinese porcelains on public display.
Self-effacing to a fault, Benjamin Altman was the son of Bavarian Jewish immigrants; he came of age in Newark, New Jersey, where he worked in a dry-goods store along with Lyman G. Bloomingdale, founder of Bloomingdale’s, and Abraham Abraham, cofounder of Abraham & Strauss. After opening his own emporium (rated as New York’s second largest in 1876), Altman succumbed to the collector’s bacillus in 1882 after viewing an exhibition of Chinese porcelains arranged by Henry Duveen. He began buying at once. As related in a memoir by Edward Fowles, the long-serving right-hand man to Sir Joseph Duveen, Altman studied every piece carefully before deciding whether to buy: “[E]ach item would be immersed in a bath of water for several days so that any flaws of breakages—often carefully disguised by over painting—would become apparent. The porcelain, once relieved of its accretions of dirt and grease, would be revealed in its original beauty.” On occasions when several items passed his tests, Altman and Uncle Henry would sit together in shared exhilaration while the collector handled and stroked his new prizes, “marveling at their beauty and their texture.” Fowles then offers an insider’s tribute to the art-loving retailer:
Altman’s collection of porcelain alone is sufficient to single him out as one of the great collectors of all time—especially when one recalls that it was made only over a period of twenty-six years: from the day in 1886 when he had paid £35 for a pair of Nanking enamel vases from the young Dutchman, Henry Duveen, who had only recently opened a shop on the other side of Fifth Avenue, down from the Altman establishment itself. And thus with the advice of the “best connoisseur amongst the dealers,” the Altman collection “was formed before the market became flooded with the clever imitations which were later imported from China in large quantities.”
On his death, the reclusive and unmarried Benjamin Altman bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum his 429 Chinese porcelains plus his Old Master paintings, along with provisions for the continued employment of their longtime keeper and future lifetime curator, Theodore Hobby. The porcelain collection became the seed of the museum’s now-encyclopedic holdings. Altman’s total bequest was valued at $20 million (the equivalent of $432 million in 2006, according to Michael Gross’s Rogues’ Gallery, an iconoclastic history of the Metropolitan Museum). Thus, beginning with the two Walters and continuing with Altman, Chinese ceramics began appearing on the art market’s big board. With the advent of James Garland and J. P. Morgan on the trading floor, records were broken, opening the way for John D. Rockefeller Jr., who lived to see the Great Porcelain Bubble deflate.
James A. Garland was an otherwise conventional financier and yachtsman whose fascination with Chinese porcelain evolved into a benign form of megalomania. In 1902, Ivy Lee, later to be remembered as the Rockefeller family’s public relations mentor, summarized a familiar metamorphosis among driven collectors: “When Garland began collecting Oriental porcelains nineteen years ago, his purpose was only to decorate his home. Year by year, his treasures increased in value and number, however, and he became enthused with acquisitiveness. He determined to gather the greatest collection of such objects in all the world . . . [and thereby] get within his firm grasp the rarest and most beautiful porcelains in all the earth.”
Garland’s adroit collaborator was (once again) Henry J. Duveen. Over time, the quiet bank executive reportedly spent as much as one million pre–Great War dollars on Chinese porcelain, usually acting on Uncle Henry’s advice. Initially, owing partly to James McNeil Whistler’s influential enthusiasm, Garland turned to blue-and-white ceramics. However, as the new century neared, a vibrant market developed for Qing dynasty enameled wares known as famille noire, famille verte, and famille jaune (so named and defined by French dealers). Soon Garland encountered a like-minded competitor in George Salting, an Australian-born London merchant. At major London auctions, surrogates for the two aggregators frequently bid for the same prizes. The jewel in the Salting crown was known as the Red Hawthorn Vase, on which sprigs of prunus blossoms were set against a background of lustrous black.
Yet against the odds, Garland contrived to add the coveted vase to his own collection. How it happened, as related by Uncle Henry Duveen to Ivy Lee, casts a revealing light on the backstage maneuvering in the porcelain market:
Mr. Salting is a man who will never sell anything. His hobby is always to exchange things when he gives them up. He will buy, but no money exists which will induce him to sell anything he has collected. Hence it was out of the question to seek to purchase this wonderful vase from him. I knew, however, of a dealer in London who was at that time doing a great deal of business with Mr. Salting. At Mr. Garland’s request, I said to this dealer: “Watch Mr. Salting. Offer him anything you have for that vase. When you get it, let me know. I must have it at any price.” Three years later (in Uncle Henry’s telling), he received a cable reading, “The Red Hawthorn is yours.”
Salting at the time was investing heavily in black enamel ware, which Duveen had provided him in exchange for the vase—and which the collector assumed he could buy back at a later time. “He never dreamed that it would leave England,” continued Uncle Henry. “He begged the dealer and he begged me to let him have it back. But Mr. Garland insisted upon keeping it. Mr. Salting has never forgiven me for this. It cost me a little over $4,000. Mr. Salting would willingly pay more than $25,000 for it today.”
Actually, the vase’s market value was even greater. Owing partly to the interest aroused by Garland’s coup, the banker offered to exhibit his entire collection at the Metropolitan Museum in a named display, marking the Met’s initial turn to the fine arts of China. The loan agreement was reached between Garland and the museum’s founding director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, once an Italian cavalry officer, later a Civil War general and then United States consul in Cyprus. (Having sold his collection of just-unearthed Cypriot antiquities to the newly established Met in 1879, Cesnola became director of the museum as a condition of the sale.) When they discussed the Red Hawthorn Vase, Garland confided to General Cesnola, “I paid more for that vase than you did for your house in Fifty-Seventh Street.” (The general’s house cost $32,000.)
When James A. Garland died in 1902, it was assumed that his collection would be bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum. But he changed his mind and his will. Garland’s heirs—his widow, two sons, and a daughter—now planned to auction the entire collection in London. However, a savior materialized in the imposing form of John Pierpont Morgan, soon to become the Metropolitan’s vice president, and two years later its president. It came about in Morgan’s trademark fashion. First, Henry Duveen bought the entire Garland Collection, comprising two thousand pieces, for $500,000. The following morning, at nine o’clock, the great financier appeared in Uncle Henry’s office, and with a casual flourish repurchased the whole Garland trove for $600,000. As related in a gossipy memoir by another Duveen brother, James Henry Duveen, when the sale was consummated, Morgan said, “I understand that Mr. Garland did not complete the collection.” “That is so, Mr. Morgan,” Uncle Henry replied. “Then I shall be glad if you will complete it for me.” In Henry’s words, “[T]his meant carte blanche.”
According to Jean Strouse, Morgan’s diligent biographer, the financier’s bills from Duveen Brothers in 1902 listed upward of $200,000 for Chinese ceramics, all of which were added to the Garland Collection.
Or so it was called until August 1902, when General Cesnola announced that henceforth it would become “the Morgan Collection” and, thus renamed, would be prominently installed in the museum’s nearly completed new wing. As the director explained to The New York Times, “Mr. Garland was a very nice man, and I know that at one time he intended to leave the collection to the museum. But he left it out of his will, and his action came very near causing us to lose his collection.” Even the labels mentioning Garland’s name were to be removed from the display cases. It was now widely assumed that Morgan would convert his loan into a bequest after he became the Met’s president in 1904. By then, in the words of Jean Strouse, “Morgan was fully caught up in a romance with art that combined his cultural nationalism, interest in history, sensuous response to beauty, and love of acquisition. Operating on an imperial scale in the early twentieth century, he seemed to want all the beautiful things of the world.”
However, his devotion to masterpieces of art and letters was not miserly. J. P. Morgan strove to share, educate, and elevate. He collected not just Oriental ceramics but also paintings, sculpture, ivories, tapestries, carpets, armor, furniture, and antiquities—along with rare books and literary memorabilia. In 1902, the year in which he acquired the Garland Collection, he also approved plans for building a Beaux Arts library and gallery next to his East Side residence. This was done with an eye to its likely future as a public institution and personal monument; true to his wishes, his son Jack donated the library and its collections to New York City in 1924, together with an endowment of $1.5 million.
Morgan lavished particular attention on his Chinese porcelains. Following a precedent set by William Walters, Morgan also published an expensively illustrated catalogue of his ceramics, as annotated by Stephen Bushell and William Mackay Laffan (publisher of The New York Sun, also a devoted collector, and author in 1897 of Oriental Ceramic Art). All the while, Morgan matched his multimillions spent with multimillions earned. In Jean Strouse’s phrase, he served as America’s unofficial central banker. His authority was at once palpable and mysterious, so much so that during the great Wall Street Panic of 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt, ordinarily a critic of financial titans, turned to Morgan for help (successfully).
J. P. Morgan amassing his artworks, as seen by a cartoonist in Puck, an irreverent New York magazine.
Yet what might have been Morgan’s most spectacular coup—the purchase of the very best of China’s imperial art treasures—eluded his grasp when a force beyond even his control intervened. It is a story commonly forgotten, which came to our attention thanks to a Freer Gallery lecture by the connoisseur and dealer James A. Lally. On March 8, 1913, Morgan received this unsigned cable from Francis H. McKnight, an American diplomat posted to China: “Strictly confidential. Imperial family are prepared to sell for own account and in entirety palace collections including pearls, bronzes, porcelains etc.” McKnight said Morgan could get “first option” on the entire treasure and that it was “important we should have an answer as soon as possible.” Overnight, Henry Pomeroy Davison, Morgan’s partner and close confidant, wired back: “Send further particulars.” At the time, Morgan and his entourage were aboard a chartered yacht on the Nile, a favored detour on his European holidays.
Subsequent cables itemized the treasures in three palaces—in Peking, Jehol, and Mukden—and suggested that all three troves could be purchased for $4,000,000, an offer that came a year after the collapse of the Qing dynasty. McKnight then elaborated that Morgan could have the whole trove shipped to London for an appraisal by providing a loan to the now-bereft imperial family equal to half its value and then purchase what he wished. Further telegrams described the credentials of Shi Shu, the Grand Guardian of the Imperial Household during China’s chaotic transition into a republic. A flurry of coded cables from Peking informed Davison that the imperial family had agreed to these terms and that China’s new president and chief warlord Yuan Shikai also went along, subject to approval of the National Assembly. McKnight, who said he was acting as an agent of the imperial family, elaborated with this message on March 12, 1913:
I believe vendors acting in good faith and that they can make delivery of goods but impossible to say whether they can give perfectly clear title as it is understood in America or whether purchase money will be equitably divided among the Imperial Family. Owing to existing conditions in China business cannot be considered more than interesting possibility until goods shipped but expense sending expert here would not be great and I believe there is excellent chance of securing valuable collection. . . . Any estimate value collection must necessarily be guess but impression seems to be that Mukden worth 2,000,000 gold dollars, Jehol Peking 1,000,000 each.
At no point was Morgan’s name mentioned, and the financier, who already contended with chronic nervous disorders, suffered a severe breakdown on the Nile and became feverish and delusional. When rumors of his illness reached Wall Street, the stock market plunged. Although his physicians urged him to return to New York, he insisted on continuing from Egypt to Rome and then to Aix. All the while he followed the excited sequence of cables and memos discussing problems of title, payment, and the role of China’s new National Assembly.
Here the file closes. Morgan had already moved on to Rome, and on March 31, 1913, he died in the Eternal City in his suite at the Grand Hotel, a week after Easter Sunday. During his final days, the hotel lobby swarmed with dealers (as always happened when he traveled) while his staff dealt daily with five hundred or more letters seeking his bounty. His last recorded words were “I’ve got to go up the hill.”
On April 11, the France arrived in New York Harbor bearing his casket, which was taken first to his cherished library and then for burial in Hartford, his birthplace. Memorial rites followed in Manhattan at St. George’s Church on Stuyvesant Square (thereafter known as “the J. P. Morgan Church”). The mourners’ procession and floral offerings paralleled those for a chief of state. (Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, never given to understatement, sent a giant cross of orchids.)
Negotiations thus ceased for the purchase of China’s imperial collection, which then passed through a shadowy procession of keepers. Some of its treasures were sold or dispersed, and others were lost or stolen until 1948, when the crumbling Nationalist regime evacuated part of its remnants to Taiwan. The balance remained in China, becoming the permanent possession of the People’s Republic, its prizes thereafter exhibited in the Forbidden City.
At the Metropolitan Museum, meanwhile, there were gloomy forebodings about the great magnate’s demise. Only the year before, in November 1912, Morgan, who then was the museum’s president, summoned the recently appointed director, Edward Robinson, to a confidential meeting at the financier’s library. There, according to the director, Morgan “told me that he wished it distinctly understood by City authorities and whoever else ought to know that he had no intention of giving or bequeathing his collections to the Metropolitan Museum.” Morgan said that his collection was valued at about $50,000,000, “and he regarded that as much too large an asset to take out of his estate in case it might ever be needed.” Robinson added, “This is the first intimation Mr. Morgan has ever made to me of his ultimate intentions with regard to his collections.” True to his word, when the financier’s will was read, it contained no bequests to the museum from its late president. Instead, John Pierpont Morgan Jr., known as Jack, was instructed to carry out his father’s “desire and intention” to make suitable dispositions of “such portions” of the Morgan collections “which would render them permanently available for the instruction and pleasure of the American people.”
Jack Morgan began donating selective prizes to the Metropolitan, the Hartford Atheneum, and other institutions favored by his father. But what of the Morgan collection of Chinese porcelains? For two years it remained in Gallery D on the second floor of the museum. Then it was sold in February 1915, in its entirety, to the Duveen Brothers for $3,900,000, at the time a record figure. “The museum and the public are losing something that can never be duplicated,” lamented Director Robinson. An allegorical sequel followed; a rescuer materialized in the form of John D. Rockefeller Jr., in most ways save imperious manner Morgan’s successor as a celebrator of Chinese ceramics, blue, white, red, green, or black. In circumstances to be related, John Jr. acquired the best of the collection in a transaction facilitated by its longtime keeper, Theodore Y. Hobby, who would then serve as Rockefeller’s principal advisor on Asian purchases. Yet as the decades passed, Junior became both a principal and a spectator as the market value of Chinese ceramics soared up and then down—with this redeeming constant: neither Rockefeller nor Morgan viewed their collections as an investment.