Word: pierpont
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Hartford has this unique kind of collection largely because in the art market it is outgunned by Boston and New York. Although it is the oldest incorporated U.S. public art museum (founded 1842), it had only provincial rating until J. Pierpont Morgan's bequest put it on the map in 1917 with handsome bronzes, silver and porcelain, including the largest collection of 18th century Meissen figurines in the U.S. A surprise $2,000,000 in 1927 from Hartford Banker Frank C. Sumner ("He used to drive out in a purple Rolls-Royce to see the Hartford Chiefs play baseball...
...collecting, however, was once an institution of another character. That era which produced the collection of Pierpont Morgan is gone forever. It was a period in which a taste for art came hand-in-hand with a quaint, baroque conception known as "objects d'art," a period surviving more than one generation and producing a few diversified and immense collections. Such a phenomenon is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Boston, the Frick collection of New York, and even, to some extent, the still inaccessible treasures of that formidable eccentric, Alfred Barnes of Philadelphia...
...collection, no less fine for its subdued key. So grotesque an aesthetic faux paus as the acquisitions of the William Randolph Hearst dynasty, or even as sincere but visionless an affair as the John Ringling Museum testifies to how far wrong the best intentioned affluence can go. But J. Pierpont Morgan, caring not at all for magnitude, sought quality alone...
...Portrait of an Elderly Man, Goya's Countess Altamira, and two matching portraits by 15th century painter Francesco del Cossa. Their first modest plunge, which today would strain most museum budgets, barely caused a ripple in an art world then dominated by such high, wide spenders as J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick and Benjamin Altman...
This to be the last year of the booming, shouting, rollicking twenties, and seemingly to mark the peak of the boom, the Harvard Alumni Association chose as its president financial magnate J. Pierpont Morgan, symbolizing in a way what was often attacked as the American "worship of business." Hotels bought full page ads in the Crimson, advertising their "exclusive Fall Dansants," warning the wavering sophomore that "the smart folk will attend," or that "you'll find the best crowd in the college there." Boston was the center of Harvard social life, and for many this social life was the center...