Addicted to Art (1911)
A Tycoon’s Shopaholic Approach to Collecting
Gilded Age tycoon J.P. Morgan was one of America’s most prolific art and book collectors, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and founder of New York’s Morgan Library.
He was the ultimate American art collector, using his vast wealth to purchase artwork on a scale only matched by Renaissance Princes and Russian Empresses.
“No price is too great,” John Pierpont Morgan once declared, “for a work of unquestioned beauty and known authenticity.” Indeed, the financier spent half his fortune on art: Chinese porcelains, Byzantine reliquaries, Renaissance bronzes.
His London house was so decked out a critic said it resembled “a pawnbrokers’ shop for Croesuses.” ~ Smithsonian Magazine
“He’s got to be stopped” was, you imagine, a phrase never far from the lips of J. P. Morgan’s business partners. Morgan, they knew, was an addicted shopper. His drug of choice was art. And because his appetite was bottomless, his habit cost a lot.
In 1901 he paid a Paris dealer $400,000 - a king’s ransom at the time - for Raphael’s “Colonna Madonna.” Then, in a fit of impulse buying, he grabbed a Rubens portrait, a Titian “Holy Family” and an English hunting scene on his way out the door.
And painting wasn’t even his thing. What he really craved were exquisitely worked decorative objects, the more ornate the better. These he tended to collect in bulk: roomfuls of furniture, porcelains by the crate, and books by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, from hand-painted medieval manuscripts to modern deluxe editions.
Some of this he stored at a family home in London, and some at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was president of the board. The rest ended up at his neo-Renaissance library-pavilion on Madison Avenue.
To visit him there, surrounded by Madonnas, missals and brocaded walls, must have been some kind of papal experience. ~ J. P. Morgan’s Shopaholic Approach to Art Collecting
More cartoons by Keppler
Next! (1904)
Illustration shows a “Standard Oil” storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House—President Teddy Roosevel…
Wall Street bubbles; Always the same (1901)
Title: Wall Street bubbles; - Always the same Artist: Udo J Keppler Published: Puck Magazine Date Created/Published: 1901 May 22. Library of Congress: LC-USZC4-7880
Title: The Magnet / Keppler.
Creator: Udo J. Keppler, 1872-1956, artist
Created / Published: June 21, 1911.
Publication: Puck, centerfold
Library of Congress: LC-USZC4-6403
There is a limit to the price I will pay for Byzantine reliquaries...but if you've purloined a third of a nation's wealth, go for it.