J.P. Morgan on Philanthropy

Morgan's estate was valued at 128 million dollars, over half of it the worth of his collection, and he bequeathed all except one piece to the library, asking that his son make it permanently available for the instruction and pleasure of the American people, the institution's history records. Jack Morgan sold off much of the overseas collection rather than importing it, but kept what was already in his father's library, and in 1924 he incorporated the Pierpont Morgan Library as a public institution with a 1.5-million-dollar endowment, retaining Belle da Costa Greene as director. The library was not a public lending library and initially admitted only researchers, ten at a time; Jack's warning that one soiled thumb could undo the work of nine hundred years expressed its standard of custody. The collection, more than 350,000 objects by the early twenty-first century, includes three Gutenberg Bibles, the manuscript of A Christmas Carol, and the only significant music manuscript Morgan bought in his lifetime, Beethoven's Violin Sonata in G major, Opus 96, acquired in 1907.

Morgan was a wide-ranging collector of books, manuscripts, decorative arts, bronze statuettes, ivories, and clocks, with less interest in paintings than most collectors of his rank, his biography records. He turned seriously to collecting after his father's death in 1891, and as a so-called collector of collections built what ranked among the world's largest and most notable private holdings. A founding member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he served as trustee from 1888 to 1913, became vice-president and then president of the museum in 1904, and directed its emphasis toward the pursuit of important, original works. After the passage of a favorable tariff bill, his collection was shipped from London to the United States and exhibited at the Metropolitan in 1913, filling the second floor of a new wing in 1914; his son Jack donated roughly forty percent of the total to the museum in 1917. Morgan also assembled America's most important gem collections with Tiffany's George Kunz and funded Edward Curtis's photography of American Indians.

Morgan was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and by 1890 one of its most influential lay leaders, his biography records. A founding member of the Church Club of New York, he sat among the first laymen appointed to the committee behind the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, petitioning for a special limited collectible printing that he later financed. In 1910, impressed by Bishop Charles Brent's proposal for a world conference of churches, he contributed one hundred thousand dollars to finance the commission's work. His club life showed the same force of character: when his friend, Erie Railroad president John King, was blackballed by the Union Club, Morgan resigned, organized the Metropolitan Club of New York, donated land on Fifth Avenue that cost one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, and instructed Stanford White to build a club fit for gentlemen and forget the expense, serving as its president from 1891 to 1900. He was also a benefactor of museums, hospitals, and trade schools.