America’s Gilded Age crested in the year 1900. Not only was the economy buoyant, but from its commanding heights few clouds were visible on the new century’s horizon. Abroad, the Stars and Stripes were ascendant, even as the Union Jack was embattled. In October 1899, the British initiated a war in South Africa that was supposed to end by Christmas; instead, it took a half-million imperial troops three years to subdue as few as 88,000 Boer irregulars. By contrast, in 1898 American forces needed only five months to humble Spain in “a splendid little war,” the jubilant expression of John Hay, then U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. As Hay later wrote to President William McKinley, “We have never in all our history had the standing in the world we have now.” The swift victory led to the acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, signaling America’s debut as a global power willing and able to pry open doors, especially in Asia. With the passing of Queen Victoria in 1901, it seemed to many that the United States might rightly share, or even inherit, her expansionist scepter.
Many Americans, but by no means all, were believers. Prominent dissenters included Mark Twain, William James, Andrew Carnegie, and William Jennings Bryan. So divided was the Senate over ratifying the Spanish peace treaty that the nays were but two votes shy of the one-third margin needed to block ratification. (What helped tip the balance was a poem by Rudyard Kipling appealing to Americans to “Take up the White Man’s burden,” especially in the Philippines; the bard of empire had shrewdly mailed his verse to Theodore Roosevelt, who forwarded it for prompt publication in the ardently expansionist New York Sun.)
God of Wealth, famille verte enameled porcelain, Kangxi period, bequest of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to the Metropolitan Museum.
The celebratory mood was given full-throated expression in Philadelphia by New York Senator Chauncey Depew at the Republican National Convention in 1900. “There is not a man here that does not feel 400 percent bigger than he did in 1896,” the senator asserted, pausing, one safely assumes, for roars of approval: “Bigger intellectually, bigger hopefully, bigger patriotically, bigger in the breast from the fact that he is a citizen of a country that has been a world power for peace, for civilization, and for the expansion of its industries and products of its labor.” (As chief legal henchman to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Depew himself was president or board member of a dozen railroads.) By acclamation, the delegates nominated President William McKinley for a second term, although misgivings were expressed about his brash running mate, Governor Theodore Roosevelt. “Don’t any of you realize,” confided a worried Mark Hanna, an Ohio industrialist and leading party fund-raiser, “there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?”
However, by 1901 the horizon no longer seemed so cloudless. The act that Hanna feared occurred in September when a deranged anarchist fatally shot McKinley in Buffalo, New York, elevating “that damned cowboy” (Hanna’s phrase) to the presidency. An activist reformer as well as fervent neoimperialist now reigned in the White House (a term popularized by Roosevelt). Theodore Roosevelt’s seven years in the bully pulpit (his coinage) coincided with the peak years of journalistic muckraking (also his coinage), during which popular national magazines published reams of articles assailing suspected malefactors of great wealth (ditto).
Moreover, in 1901, two mergers occurred that quickened doubts about the new plutocracy, yet soon proved beneficial to collectors and sellers of the fine arts, including Chinese porcelain. On March 3, J. Pierpont Morgan informed Wall Street that he had assembled the U.S. Steel Corporation, capitalized at $1.4 billion, the world’s first enterprise to surpass the billion-dollar mark. This meant, as Jean Strouse notes in her comprehensive biography, that Morgan’s “giant holding company would own steel mills, blast furnaces, coke ovens, ore mines, barges, steamships, thousands of acres of coke and coal land, and several railroads.” U.S. Steel would thus control and produce almost half of America’s steelmaking output—the equivalent of 7 percent of the country’s gross national product in 1901. (In present-day values, its capitalization would be as much as $500 billion.)
On October 9, in a very different but likewise auspicious merger, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the sole heir to his father’s petroleum fortune, married Abby Greene Aldrich, daughter of Senator Nelson Aldrich, at a modest church in her father’s hometown of Warwick, Rhode Island. This allied the Standard Oil dynasty with the acknowledged Republican master of the U.S. Senate. As the muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips (author of “The Treason of the Senate,” an article published in Cosmopolitan in March 1906) saw it, “Thus the chief exploiter of the American people is closely allied by marriage with the chief schemer in the service of their exploiters.” No doubt hyperbolic, but it is relevant to our subject that the aging Morgan and the young Rockefeller shared a common passion for collecting Chinese porcelain. With their encouragement, and to the benefit of all collectors, dealers, and museums, Congress in 1909 approved the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act.
As crafted by the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Nelson Aldrich, this otherwise protectionist measure simultaneously eliminated all tariffs on artworks more than a century old. When critics objected that such art was mainly purchased by the rich, who could afford the duties, a rejoinder was offered by Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. of Massachusetts: “These works of art, brought in by individuals, have in the history of all countries inevitably found their way to museums and other places where great works of art are preserved for the benefit of the entire public.” Less predictable was the approving comment of Senator Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina Democrat and sometime populist known as “Pitchfork Ben”:
I had the opportunity to visit the great art galleries of Florence, Paris and London. . . . I saw enough to convince me that the American people can afford to encourage the importation of some of those masterpieces, something we can get as a means of elevating the thought and inspiring the artistic genius of our people. . . . If you want to whack these multimillionaires, cut out some of the special privileges you are giving them elsewhere in the getting of money, but if they want to bring anything from abroad here which is worthwhile, let them do it. They will in time die out, and an art gallery will become, in all probability, the legatee of their collection.
So it proved, and the flow of gifts to museums was further widened by the Revenue Act of 1917, which permitted a special exemption from the recently introduced federal income tax for donations to nonprofit institutions “operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes.” Every American museum thereafter benefited; similar exemptions were then approved from federal inheritance taxes. Whatever the objective merits of these distinctly American incentives, it surely mattered that John D. Jr. and Abby were in family contact with Senator Nelson Aldrich, also known as “The General Manager of the Nation” (David Rockefeller’s version) or as “The Political Boss of the United States” (the muckraker Lincoln Steffens’s phrase). For his part, J. P. Morgan had long made clear that the bulk of his art collection would remain in Europe until it could enter American ports duty-free. When Payne-Aldrich was approved, Morgan invited customs inspectors to appraise his works as they were packed and shipped directly for storage at the Metropolitan Museum, of which he was then president. Under the supervision of the prominent dealer Jacques Seligmann, 351 cases of duty-free works arrived at the museum in 1912–13. Indisputably, these tariff and tax incentives approved by Congress became the vital propellant for the dramatic ascent of America’s fledgling public galleries.
If the Internal Revenue Service figuratively became the Maecenas of the republic’s art museums, in a parallel phenomenon a single family emerged as America’s Medici—the apt title of Suzanne Loebl’s chronicle of the dynasty and its benefactions. As she reminds us, the landscape of New York City would be very different minus the dynasty’s creations, which include the sleek Chase Manhattan Bank in downtown Manhattan and midtown’s Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller Center, the United Nations headquarters, the Asia Society, Lincoln Center, and Rockefeller University, continuing uptown to the medieval Cloisters and Riverside Church. All bear the dynasty’s stamp. Museums elsewhere that the family helped create or assisted can be found in California, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia (including its reborn colonial capital, Williamsburg). To this list, we would add Olana, the evocative riverside home of the master landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church, preserved intact in the Hudson Valley owing to the personal intervention of then-governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.
In the same seignorial tradition, the family jointly created Kykuit (Dutch for “lookout”), an imposing estate crowning 250 hilltop acres in the Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow in the Hudson Valley. John D. Rockefeller Sr. acquired the land in the 1890s, and Junior and Abby gained his consent to build, beginning in 1904, a three-story Georgian manor house amid elaborate Italianate gardens, designed chiefly by William Welles Bosworth, the eminent Beaux Arts architect. When completed, the gardens included fountains, grottoes, pergolas, temples, running streams, classic statuary, topiary bushes, and a Japanese teahouse—a list that conveys the couple’s commitment to any arts project that engaged their enthusiasm. To furnish their manor, Junior and Abby turned for advice to Ogden Codman Jr., coauthor with Edith Wharton of the contemporary handbook for the wealthy householder, The Decoration of Houses (1902). Over time, the woods and gardens became the Rockefeller State Park, while the residential complex passed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Hillcrest, a more recent mansion and once the home of Martha Baird Rockefeller, the widowed Junior’s second wife, now houses the Rockefeller Archives, where the family’s papers are accessible to researchers (who by arrangement are whisked by minibus to Kykuit from the Tarrytown rail station).
There, in meticulously sorted folders, one can trace, invoice by invoice, nearly every purchase made by Junior and Abby, and the extensive correspondence that led to the many benefactions that followed. Both the spending and the giving reflected the bipolar morality of what is remembered as the Progressive Era. On the one hand, the lords of industry and finance flourished as never before, yet on the other hand—also as never before—they were beset by a barrage of critical journalism and indignant oratory. In the case of the Rockefellers, one event in particular proved a powerful catalyst: the Ludlow Massacre, as it was commonly known.
In September 1913, some nine thousand miners went on strike in the southern Colorado town of Ludlow, their principal adversary being Colorado Fuel & Iron, a company whose principal shareholder (40 percent) was John D. Rockefeller Sr. Months of violence followed; the state governor summoned the National Guard, and in the ensuing pitched battle, scores on both sides were killed, including eleven women and children who suffocated in a burning tent. “It was a terrible tragedy,” David Rockefeller writes in his memoirs, “and because the name Rockefeller evoked such powerful emotions, Grandfather and Father were dragged into the middle of the conflict. There were even demonstrations outside our West 54th Street home denouncing the Rockefellers for the ‘crimes’ of Ludlow.” Junior spoke vigorously in the family’s defense and turned for counsel to Ivy Lee (cofounder, with Edward Bernays, of modern public relations), who advised candidly addressing the grievances of the strikers. “Ludlow was a rite of passage for Father,” affirms his son David. “Although not a businessman by talent or inclination, he had demonstrated his skill and courage. What must have impressed Grandfather most was Father’s determination and strength of character under very trying circumstances.” As a result, Grandfather changed his will; he had intended to bequeath the bulk of his estate to philanthropic purposes, but in succeeding years he transferred most of his wealth directly to his son.
All this was in the foreground while John and Abby furnished their residences in New York City and the Hudson Valley, to which a third domicile was added in 1911: the sixty-six-room Eyrie “cottage” in the Norman French style on Mount Desert Island in Maine. As Joseph Duveen, the prince of art dealers, liked to remind his colleagues, nothing sharpened buying appetites more keenly than an empty living room.
Both Junior and his wife, Abby, lived on an ample but fixed budget after they moved in 1911 into what was (then) the largest private residence in New York City. Its nine floors on 10 West Fifty-Fourth Street included a squash court, a gymnasium, and a private infirmary, as well as ample quarters for their multiplying offspring. “The house was filled with art from many parts of the world,” recalls David Rockefeller, the youngest of their six children, “the style and period of which reflected my parents’ very different tastes and personalities. Mother’s taste was eclectic and ranged from the art of the ancient world to contemporary work from Europe and the United States. . . . Father disliked modern art. He considered it ‘unlifelike,’ ugly, and disturbing, and discouraged Mother from hanging contemporary art in those areas of the house he frequented.” With an irony that Junior probably did not savor, the Rockefeller residence was razed in 1938 and its land made available for the outdoor gardens of the Museum of Modern Art (known in the family as “Mother’s Museum,” since Abby was its single most consequential patron).
What kind of art appealed to Junior? “Father’s pride and joy,” reminisces David Rockefeller, “was his comprehensive collection of Chinese porcelains from the Ming and K’ang-hsi dynasties. . . . To this day I have a picture of him in my mind, examining the porcelains he was thinking of buying with a magnifying glass to ensure they had not been broken and restored. Mother also loved Asian art, but she preferred the ceramics and sculptures of the earlier Chinese and Korean dynasties, as well as Buddhist art from other parts of Asia. She had what we called ‘the Buddha room’ in Number 12, filled with many statues of the Buddha and the goddess Kuan-Yin, where the lights were kept dim and the air heavily scented with burning incense.”
This fairly defines the aesthetics of the most formidable American couple to gather and treasure Asian art in the last century. Each had moments of fulfillment that helped define prevailing American tastes, as well as the market value of a then-exotic species of art. Their different tastes reflected their temperaments. Abby was the second of eleven children, and she bonded closely with Lucy, the eldest. The two traveled periodically to Europe during Senator Aldrich’s holiday voyages, and early on they shared a fascination with Asia and its art. As adolescents, the sisters began collecting Japanese prints, along with Chinese, Japanese, and Indian textiles—and Persian and Mughal miniatures. As a member of a large and voluble family, Abby was gregarious and impulsive. By contrast, as the sole male heir of a controlling father known for his boundless wealth, Junior was reserved and cautious.
This difference was evident in the objects they collected. Together Abby and John searched for furniture and ornaments for their just-built brownstone. It chanced that the New York showroom of the Duveen Brothers was but a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue. Junior frequently dropped in at the fashionable gallery. As Suzanne Loebl writes, “One day, as he was searching for objects with which to decorate a large mantelpiece, he was offered two tall Black Hawthorn vases, created in China during the Kang-hsi period, between the 16th and 17th centuries.” It was the spark; over a fifty-year period, Junior would purchase more than four hundred Chinese porcelains, continually sifting and upgrading, spending in excess of $10 million.
Most especially, young Rockefeller was enthralled by the peerless collection assembled by J. Pierpont Morgan, then on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1915, it developed that the late J. P. Morgan’s vast collection of Chinese porcelains, then on loan to the Metropolitan, had been sold in its entirety for more than $3 million to the Duveen Brothers. Junior wished to buy its choicest specimens and appealed to his father for a substantial loan: “I have made many visits to the Museum, and I have studied carefully the important pieces. I have also sought expert advice regarding them. Such an opportunity to secure the finest examples of Chinese porcelains can never occur again, and I want to avail myself of it.” Father was not persuaded: “I feel afraid of it. This may be in part because I am not so well informed in regard to their value. It would seem to me wiser not to make this investment now.”
In defending his request for a one-million-dollar-plus loan, Junior’s justification is both a credible definition of his own character, while more generally expressing the serious collector’s eternal cry for understanding in a philistine world:
I have never squandered money on horses, yachts, automobiles or other foolish extravagances. A fondness for these porcelains is my only hobby—the only thing on which I have cared to spend money. I have found their study a great recreation and diversion; and I have become very fond of them. This hobby, while a costly one, is quiet and unostentatious and not sensational. I am sure that if I had the actual cash on hand, you would encourage rather than discourage my development of so innocent and educative an interest. The money put into these porcelains is not lost or squandered. It is all there, and while not income-producing, I have every reason to believe that even at a forced sale, I could get within ten percent of what these things would cost, while a sale under ordinary circumstances would certainly realize their full cost value, and as years go by, more. . . .
Is it unwise for me to gratify a desire for beautiful things, which will be a constant joy to my friends and to my children as they grow to appreciate them, as well as myself, when it is done in so quiet and unostentatious a manner? . . . Much as I want to do this thing—and I think you do not realize how much I should like to do it, for you do not know the beauty and charms of these works of art—I want more to do what you fully approve, so I have ventured to write this long letter, hoping that perhaps this fuller statement of the situation may lead you to see it in a somewhat different light.
Deeply moved, Father relented, and $2,000,000 worth of securities was forthcoming. When Junior approached Senior to arrange the terms for the loan, he was told that the money for the porcelains would be a gift. As David Rockefeller relates, following the purchase of a substantial portion of the Morgan collection, “Father maintained his interest in these beautiful objects for the rest of his life. Many of the K’ang-hsi pieces were huge beakers, taller than I was as a boy. They stood on specially made stands and were conspicuously displayed in several rooms on the second floor of Number 10. They looked very imposing—and overwhelming. He also bought many smaller pieces, including figures of mythical animals and human figures that were delicately painted and beautifully wrought.”
Concerning the appeal of Chinese porcelains, Ron Chernow, Senior’s recent biographer, offers a plausible insight: “For Junior, they represented an ideal art form, for they were expertly crafted and devoid of any subversive themes or sensuality.” Yet their allure did have a certain sensuality, Chernow also notes: “When Junior received the porcelains at West 54th Street, he sat down on the floor, rolled them about, fondly studying them and searching for cracks or marks of repair.” At the same time, reflecting his rigorous Baptist upbringing, Junior confessed to feeling guilty about his hobby: “I had a feeling that perhaps it was a little selfish. I was buying for myself instead of giving to public need.” To this, Chernow adds an interesting observation: “Had Junior not established at this point his right to collect art, free of parental interference, he might never have been emboldened to create The Cloisters or Colonial Williamsburg.”
In retracing John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s efforts to upgrade his Chinese porcelain family, no episode is more intriguing than the Affair of the Yellow Beaker. It is a mostly forgotten story, with a sadly dramatic ending. It began in early 1915, when Junior was invited to examine a yellow-ground vase of the Kang-hsi period, then deemed the acme of the genre. Along with the vase came a letter signed by Edgar Gorer who shared premises with Dreicer & Co., a luxury jeweler. “When studying it,” Gorer wrote, “I suggest that you walk slowly around the vase and you will find three distinct subjects, yet all harmonize splendidly. I regard the rocks with pheasants as the front of the vase. Going around to the right of it, you will find the large double cherry tree, and on the back the imposing magnolia. Standing a little distance from the vase and regarding the branch of double cherry which extends over the neck, you will find it gives a distinct feeling that the blossoms are absolutely on their stem in the air.”
“I hope I am right in thinking that you and Mrs. Rockefeller will spend quite an enjoyable time in the company of this treasure,” Gorer concluded. They were indeed fascinated. But who was Gorer? And how did he acquire this prize? Born in Brighton, England, in 1872, Edgar was the son of a Jewish-Dutch silversmith (origins similar to Joseph Duveen’s) who specialized in jewelry, so successfully that Solomon Gorer & Son in 1895 moved their showroom from London’s Strand to New Bond Street, the Grand Bazaar for financially privileged shoppers. As the new century commenced, Edgar flourished as a specialist in Chinese art and interior design.
Fine, but were his wares genuine? On February 19, Junior asked Gorer “to state all that you know with reference to the history of the yellow beaker . . . giving the name of the owner from whom you bought it, how long it had been in his possession, where he obtained it, and any further point with reference to its history which you have?” The following day, Gorer replied that he first learned about the beaker from another dealer just eighteen months earlier and was told it belonged to an old French family. When it was shown to him in England, “after a careful examination, I at once purchased it. This is all I can give you as regards the source of its origin.”
Unsatisfied and wary, Junior on February 24 informed Gorer that his asking price ($125,000) was excessive. “The large yellow beaker is interesting,” he acknowledged, adding, “The color of this glaze is yellow rather than white. This seems unusual; it suggests re-firing. The vase is so perfect in many respects that I cannot rid myself of the feeling that there is a bare possibility of its being modern.” Thus prompted, Gorer then sent a copy of this cable to the dealer who sold it to him, Alfred DePinna, at 12 Devonshire Place, London: “Can you give name and former owner of yellow beaker. Also history and further information.” On March 8, he forwarded to Junior the response from DePinna, asserting that the beaker came from the Imperial Palace of Jehol, and had been spirited to England following the outbreak of the Great War. As Gorer elaborated:
On Saturday I consulted two Chinese dealers, namely Mr. Loo and Mr. Kuan Fu-Ts’u, men of the greatest experience in old Chinese porcelains, and whilst I knew the former, I have never met the latter till two or three days ago . . . and [every] statement I have made to you will bear the strictest investigation. Do please forgive me if you find that I am rather strong in this statement, but I really feel that my own character is being attacked and I have done all in my power to establish my bona fides in every way.
By this time, Gorer was incensed to discover that he apparently was being accused of peddling fakes by his archrival, Joseph Duveen. Possibly as a result, Junior then wrote on March 16 that it was hard to have confidence in someone who tells such different stories about the origin of the yellow beaker: “If at any later time its origin and history were to be established satisfactorily, the question would take on a different aspect. I am sure you understand that I do not for a moment question your belief in the genuineness of the beaker. You know, however, as well as I do, that even the ablest experts may sometimes make mistakes, and where any doubt exists, one’s enjoyment of the article in question would be greatly diminished.”
Gorer’s response was twofold: he secured from John C. Ferguson, a longtime resident of China then living in Massachusetts and an authority of acknowledged expertise, a letter attesting to the yellow beaker’s authenticity. The matter was still in the air as Gorer made arrangements for returning by passenger liner to Great Britain. Before departing, the dealer filed suit against the Duveens, claiming $575,000 in damages for uttering allegedly slanderous statements about his expertise, such as this remark reputedly made to Henry Clay Frick by Joseph Duveen: “Gorer knows nothing about porcelains. The real judges are ourselves, my uncle Henry and me, and we intend stopping Gorer putting these fakes on the market.” (Frick, too, had been offered the yellow beaker, which Duveen purportedly dismissed as a modern copy.)
News of the lawsuit made the front page of The New York Times on May 7, 1915, attesting both to the prominence of the House of Duveen and to the amount sought in damages. However, by grim coincidence, the same day the story appeared, Gorer was among the 1,201 passengers who perished when a German U-boat torpedoed the Lusitania as the great passenger liner neared the Irish coast. He was among nine art dealers on the fatal voyage, of whom only four survived. According to witnesses, as the ship began sinking, Gorer gave his own lifebelt to the opera singer Josephine Brandell, saying, “Be brave.”
So what happened to the yellow beaker? It remains an unsolved mystery.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who had a better eye for timeless quality than her husband, with one of his Qing vases.
As all this was occurring, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was making her own and very different mark. Junior was outwardly impeccably orthodox in his opinions and habits, so much so that H. L. Mencken, then the country’s licensed heretic, wrote of him in 1926: “So far as the records show, he has never said anything in his life that was beyond the talents of a Rotary Club orator or a newspaper editorial writer. [Yet] if he fell ill of gallstones tomorrow, or eloped with a lady Ph.D., or fell off the roof of his house . . . at least a billion human beings would show some interest in it [since] he happens to be the son of old John and hence heir to a large fortune.” Still, this does less than justice to Junior, who during the Ludlow Massacre sought to empathize with Colorado’s genuinely exploited miners, who took an informed interest in everything Asian, and who took care to share his masterworks of art with ordinary citizens.
Moreover, even Mencken might have allowed that the tired cliché about the attraction of opposites was interestingly confirmed by Junior’s marriage to Abby, a social, aesthetic, and political liberal. Concerning their differing taste in art, a truce prevailed. Influenced by her adolescent trips to Europe, and by her exploration of New York’s adventurous art world (a highlight being the unsettling 1913 Armory Show), Abby became an early recruit to the avant-garde. She tried repeatedly to open Junior’s eyes to the merits of the modernists, a memorable instance being a dinner party she arranged for Henri Matisse during the artist’s 1931 visit to America. Frank Crowninshield, a collector and Francophile as well as editor of Vanity Fair, was among the guests and later described this singular encounter in an article for Vogue (of which he later would become editor). In his account, Matisse was impressed by Junior’s excellent French and by his splendid Chinese porcelains and Polonaise rugs in the spacious dining room. Then, after coffee, Matisse turned to Junior and “began half-seriously to plead his cause, to explain that the men who had created the incredibly beautiful green, yellow, red and black porcelains [that surrounded them] were really in pursuit of exactly the same aesthetic goals as those to which Matisse had personally dedicated himself. He tried to persuade him that Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris . . . had merely followed the decorative designs and emotive experience of the Persians who had designed what Matisse called Mr. Rockefeller’s ‘modern’ rugs.”
In sum, Matisse concluded, “there was no such thing as modern art or ancient art.” Indeed, the “deadliest art imaginable was that of the hack painters who now flourish in so many of our academies.” One can imagine the expectant hush as the guests looked to their host for a response. According to Crowninshield, Junior declined to be convinced, but said that Matisse “must not altogether despair because . . . he suspected that Mrs. Rockefeller, thanks to her very special gifts of persuasion, would eventually wear him down to the consistency of jelly.”
Let it be added in Junior’s behalf that although their tastes differed, he did not oppose Abby’s choice of artworks that he disliked. A revealing instance occurred following the couple’s 1921 far-ranging Asian trip that took them to China (to dedicate the Peking Union Medical College, partly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation) and to Japan, Hong Kong, Manchuria, and Manila. As Loebl writes, their trip “proved immensely satisfying and would kindle a multigenerational passion for Asian art. In China, Junior immersed himself in viewing and buying more porcelain. The party visited the Ming tombs, whose majestic Spirit Path was in disrepair. Upon his return to the United States, Junior contributed funds for its restoration.”
Also on their return, Abby expanded her Asian collection, much of it acquired from Yamanaka & Co., which had showrooms in both New York and nearby Bar Harbor. In 1924, she persuaded Junior to approve her choice of two Buddhist figures offered by the New York gallery. Abby was captivated by an armless and headless white marble Tang dynasty bodhisattva, said to have been found in the Ling Yen Temple in the Ling Yen Mountains in the province of Chi-li. However, Junior balked at the $30,000 asking price for the pair. As he put it in a letter to Yamanaka, “While Mrs. Rockefeller would like to buy these statues and while I am somewhat drawn to the standing figure of Quan [sic] Yin, I have never enjoyed a mutilated statue, and therefore find it hard to reconcile myself to the other figure, without arms or legs.” He then offered a net price of $25,000 in cash for both, “in deference to Mrs. Rockefeller’s feeling.” The offer was accepted.
This single purchase helps define the couple’s contrasting approach to Asian art. Junior’s preference for porcelain with an imperial pedigree reflected his admiration for the Confucian valuation of rules, hierarchy, and workmanship, while Abby tended to Buddhist elasticity, sensuality, and universality. Not only did the headless bodhisattva fuse these qualities, but its aesthetic harmonized with modern art.
Indeed, the tantalizing Tang figure was special, and it caught the eye of every visitor to the couple’s home in Manhattan. In 1935–36, it was put on public display for the first time when it was shipped to London on loan to the Royal Academy Exhibition of Chinese Art at Burlington House. After examining the sculpture, the Academy’s distinguished board of experts informed Abby that it was “without doubt the most beautiful Chinese figure in existence.” In the view of one of the board’s members, Sir Percival David, the leading Western collector of Chinese ceramics, the bodhisattva’s grace and movement owed much to the artistic heritage of Greece: “It is from Greece that it derives the clinging folds of its drapery; it is India which has inspired the swaying poise of the body and its sensuous modeling. But it is the genius of China which has breathed into the figure its vitalizing spirit.”
When the Metropolitan’s curator of Asian art, Alan Priest, reviewed Junior and Abby’s holdings, he singled out the headless sculpture as a work he especially hoped they might donate to the museum. Instead, it was bequeathed to Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, a fervent admirer, who enthroned it where it now reigns, high above the Hudson River on a pedestal facing the entry to Kykuit. Yet judgments change, and Duke University’s Stanley Abe, an expert on Buddhist sculpture, wonders whether the figure is too good to be true. Writing in 2011, he acknowledged that the sculpture is “dazzling,” but also claimed that it has been insufficiently examined by specialists. It has no parallel with other known examples of Tang sculptures and thus is indeed “absolutely unique,” just as its admirers claim. “The work is a fascinating and breathtakingly beautiful sculpture on its own terms, but not typically Tang by any means. Rather, its appeal to the early twentieth century taste for classical forms belies a modern conception, if not origin.”
To which one can justly add that these are familiar shoals that beset art collectors fishing for prize works in muddy waters. Moreover, standards of expertise, no less than of taste, change with passing decades, an example being the porcelains that Junior prized. In Professor Abe’s judgment, “No art collection is made without misgivings. In the case of the headless, armless bodhisattva, Junior’s lack of enthusiasm may have been as unconsciously prescient as Senior’s discomfort regarding Chinese porcelains. Thus, while their misgivings were not based on ‘skill made up of cultivation and judgment,’ each expressed uncanny doubts about objects that experts with a ‘feeling for beauty’ touted as masterpieces. It is at such moments that the construction of social distinction through home decoration and art collecting flounders on the inconstancy of judgments of beauty, authenticity, and value—hence the often short-lived appeal and peripatetic lives of so many objects of art.”
Thus do monetary as well as aesthetic values fluctuate erratically, no matter how prudent the buyer, as Junior himself discovered. Once embarked on the collector’s winding journey, he was wary of attribution, was suspicious of puffery, and continuously sought the best available advice—in his case, his longtime counselor was Theodore Hobby, the former advisor to Benjamin Altman and the Metropolitan’s associate curator of Asian art. (For his services, Hobby received an annual honorarium from Junior in the form of shares; from 1915 to 1955, their total value was reckoned as $40,500.) All Junior’s purchases were subject to negotiation regarding prices, with the option of exchanges or returns.
A letter to Mr. Miya at Yamanaka, dated January 20, 1925, is typical of hundreds that a researcher is likely to encounter at the Rockefeller Family Archives:
My offer of $175,000 for two Chinese Gilt Bronzes was net. This figure is, I am led to believe, above what any museum would pay. Moreover, I think you will agree that another buyer at that price would be difficult to find. I feel sure that if your associates in Japan understood that it is a cash offer and that I will draw immediately my check to your order for the full amount should you find that you can accept my proposition, they will not let the five per cent Government tax cause the trade to fail. As you know, the bronzes do not appeal to me as they do to Mrs. Rockefeller, but I have been willing to buy them at this price to please her. My offer of $175,000 will hold good until Monday.
Yamanaka caved; their response was immediate: “Thanks you for this and congratulating Mrs. Rockefeller on securing these world-treasures for her already wonderful collection.” Despite his prudence and bargaining skills, Junior’s porcelain collection had, so to speak, a measureable shelf life. A research report on the market’s mutability was recently compiled by Daisy Yiyou Wang, for the Rockefeller Archive Center. From the 1910s onward, she found, Junior and Abby were wooed by a network of international dealers of Chinese artworks, including Duveen Brothers Inc., C. T. Loo & Co., Ralph M. Chait, Yamanaka & Co., Dikran G. Kelekian, Ton-Ying & Co., Edgar Worch, Parish-Watson & Co., and the ill-fated Edgar Gorer.
Objects were frequently sent for approval with the hope that familiarity would breed covetousness. To inflate asking prices, dealers provided what appeared to be reputable origins for an offered object, playing down likely looting and adding optimistic imperial pedigrees. Knowing dealers were often short of cash, the Rockefellers for their part sought discounts, paid in full immediately, and helped publicize and on occasion finance their business; indeed, as Dr. Wang writes, “C. T. Loo ingeniously turned the Rockefellers’ impressive family gallery into his show room by placing his objects in their collection and by bringing the buyers to visit their home. Dealers also took advantage of the visibility of the Rockefellers’ important art acquisitions; their purchase of a rare bronze from C. T. Loo stirred a media sensation.” On one occasion, Loo delivered two choice bronzes to the Hotel Plaza-Athénée, where John and Abby customarily stayed while in Paris, for their study and enjoyment over a weekend. The dealer’s romancing of the Rockefellers was accompanied by doses of flattery and hints of his legal difficulties. Thus in 1930, he described a pair of objects with animal motifs, then noted that “because of our troubles last year with the Chinese government, we have kept them without showing to anybody [yet], but they are so rare and great as art. I will be happy to show them to you when I will be in New York; they are in the storage unpacked.” As to flattery, in a letter to John Jr. in 1926, he thus lauded the family’s collection: “[I]n preserving them for the posterity, you are doing a welfare for the world. I hope [that] rare works will be preciously kept in your great family for ten thousand years.”
Still, even though Junior bargained firmly, studied seriously, and kept abreast of changing taste, the sale value of his collections grievously slumped. His most celebrated single acquisition was his purchase in 1915 of the choicest items in the J. P. Morgan Collection for $1,657,234.50. Yet when he had the same objects appraised for estate purposes in 1944, Junior acknowledged that no dealer then would pay more than $25,000 for vases valued at $100,000 or $75,000 three decades earlier. Both prices and taste had changed; collectors were bidding less for highly decorated Ming and Qing vases, and more for simpler, purer, and far older porcelains or stoneware.
This in no way diminishes Junior and Abby’s collecting instincts, or the enduring worth of their donations, which enrich the Chinese collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Asia Society (among others). Among the porcelains in the Metropolitan are figures said to represent the civil and military aspects of the Daoist god of wealth, Tsai Shen (Caishen). As Fong Chow, then an assistant curator, wrote in the museum’s Art Bulletin, “There is no deity more worshiped than Tsai Chen, for his shrine is found in many homes in China. In a Chinese color woodcut, the civil and military gods of wealth are depicted enthroned; the military god holds a whip-like weapon while the civil god holds the scepter which grants every wish.” Thus in a temple consecrated to the synergy of art and wealth, one can sense both aspects in these royally garbed, shrewdly smiling divinities that gaze cryptically at the museumgoer through the veil of a vitrine. These godlike figurines were said to be among Abby’s favorites. And deservedly so.