I consider to be a honour to have the chance to visit different places around the world.
It is a pleasure to learn about people's history and philosophy of life, to see beautiful art and beautiful buildings, gardens and scenery .
Monday, February 3, 2020
J. P Morgan Life, Money and The Morgan Library & Museum New York
The Morgan Library & Museum—formerly the
Pierpont Morgan Library—is a museum and research library located at 225
Madison Avenue at East 36th Street in the Murray Hill neighbourhood of
Manhattan, New York City.
Money
Unlike his legendary contemporaries, J.P. Morgan never claimed to be self-made. In fact, in TheHouse of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise to Modern Finance,
it explains that Morgan once told New York governor Grover Cleveland,
"If I have been able to succeed in the station of life [...] I attribute
it more than anything to the endorsement of my father's friends."
His father, Junius Morgan, was a successful merchant banker in
London, and the connection to British money would be the defining factor
in J.P. Morgan's career.
J.P. Morgan's first job was an internship for Duncan, Sherman, and
Co.; an affiliate of his father's in New York. He graduated to Dabney,
Morgan, and Co., and it was there he grew his wealth to $350,000
investing British money into the booming post-war U.S. economy. He even
considered retiring, but the thought was quickly squashed by his father,
and in 1871, Junius connected his son with Anthony Drexel. With this
alliance, J.P. Morgan would build the company that would bear his name
for more than a century.
The U.S. economy was lawless and
rampant with rate wars among railroads. It was in this chaos that J.P.
Morgan would find the tool he would later harness to build his fortune.
In the early 1870s, the Erie railroad went bankrupt and "irate
bondholders shackled the road with a 'voting trust' that would run the
operation." The voting trust allowed a group of investors to pool their
shares, effectively takeover a company, and leave a trustee to vote
their proxies. The shrewd use of this device would convert J.P. Morgan
into the most powerful man in America.
J. P. Morgan Life
One of the most powerful bankers of his era, J.P. (John Pierpont) Morgan (1837-1913) financed railroads and helped organize U.S. Steel, General Electric and other major corporations. ... Morgan used his influence to help stabilize American financial markets during several economic crises, including the panic of 1907.
John Pierpont Morgan was born into a distinguished New England family on April 17, 1837, in Hartford, Connecticut.
One of his maternal relatives, James Pierpont (1659-1714), was a
founder of Yale University; his paternal grandfather was a founder of
the Aetna Insurance Company; and his father, Junius Spencer Morgan
(1813-1890), ran a successful Hartford dry-goods company before becoming a
partner in a London-based merchant banking firm. After graduating from
high school in Boston in 1854, Pierpont, as he was known, studied in
Europe, where he learned French and German, then returned to New York in 1857 to begin his finance career.
In
1861, Morgan married Amelia Sturges, the daughter of a wealthy New York
businessman. Amelia Morgan died of tuberculosis four months after the
couple’s wedding. In 1865, Morgan married Frances Louisa Tracy
(1842-1924), the daughter of a New York lawyer, and the pair eventually
had four children.
Children and Personal Life
Marriages and children
In
1861, Morgan married Amelia Sturges, called Mimi (1835–1862). She died
the following year. He married Frances Louisa Tracy, known as Fanny
(1842–1924), on May 31, 1865. They had four children:
Louisa Pierpont Morgan (1866–1946), who married Herbert L. Satterlee; (1863–1947)
J. P. Morgan Jr. (1867–1943), who married Jane Norton Grew
Juliet Pierpont Morgan (1870–1952), who married William Pierson Hamilton (1869–1950)
Anne Tracy Morgan (1873–1952), philanthropist
J. P Morgan Later Years
After the death of his father in 1890, Morgan gained control of J. S. Morgan & Co (renamed Morgan, Grenfell & Company in 1910). Morgan began negotiations with Charles M. Schwab, president of Carnegie Co., and businessman Andrew Carnegie
in 1900 with the intention of buying Carnegie's business and several
other steel and iron businesses to consolidate them to create the United States Steel Corporation. Carnegie agreed to sell the business to Morgan for $480 millionThe deal was closed without lawyers and without a written contract.
News of the industrial consolidation arrived to newspapers in
mid-January 1901. U.S. Steel was founded later that year and was the
first billion-dollar company in the world with an authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion.
Morgan was a member of the Union Club in New York City. When his friend, Erie Railroad president John King, was black-balled, Morgan resigned and organized the Metropolitan Club of New York. He donated the land on 5th Avenue and 60th Street at a cost of $125,000, and commanded Stanford White to "...build me a club fit for gentlemen, forget the expense..."He invited King in as a charter member and served as club president from 1891 to 1900.
Morgan died while traveling abroad on March 31, 1913, just shy of his
76th birthday. He died in his sleep at the Grand Hotel Plaza inRome,
Italy. His body was brought back to America aboard the SS France, a French Line passenger ship. Flags on Wall Street flew at half-staff,
and in an honor usually reserved for heads of state, the stock market
closed for two hours when his body passed through New York City.
His body was brought to lie in his home and adjacent library the first
night of arrival in New York City. His remains were interred in the Cedar Hill Cemetery in his birthplace of Hartford, Connecticut.
J.P. Morgan inherited his father's $12 million estate, as well as assuming his father's role in the banking empire, which doubled Morgan's fortune overnight. Drexel died not long after, leaving the firm completely under Morgan's control. He renamed the firm to J.P. Morgan and Co.
The son, John Pierpont "Jack" Morgan Jr., inherited the banking business. He bequeathed his mansion and large book collections to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
His estate was worth $68.3 million ($1.39 billion in today's dollars based on CPI,
or $25.2 billion based on share of GDP), of which about $30 million
represented his share in the New York and Philadelphia banks. The value
of his art collection was estimated at $50 million.
J.P. Morgan: Banking Titan
During
the late 19th century, a period when the U.S. railroad industry
experienced rapid overexpansion and heated competition (the nation’s
first transcontinental rail line was completed in 1869), Morgan was
heavily involved in reorganizing and consolidating a number of
financially troubled railroads. In the process, he gained control of
significant portions of these railroads’ stock and eventually controlled
an estimated one-sixth of America’s rail lines. Titanic,
owned by one of the IMM companies, White Star, sank on its maiden
voyage after hitting an iceberg. Morgan, who attended the ship’s
christening in 1911, was booked on the ill-fated April 1912 voyage but
had to cancel.
J.P. Morgan: Congressional Investigation
During
Morgan’s era, the United States had no central bank so he used his
influence to help save the nation from disaster during several economic
crises. In 1895, Morgan assisted in rescuing America’s gold standard
when he headed a banking syndicate that loaned the federal government
more than $60 million. In another instance, the financial panic of 1907,
Morgan held a meeting of the country’s top financiers at his New York City home and convinced them to bail out various faltering financial institutions in order to stabilize the markets.
Morgan
initially was widely commended for leading Wall Street out of the 1907
financial crisis; however, in the ensuing years the portly banker with
the handlebar mustache and gruff manner faced increasing criticism from
muckraking journalists, progressive politicians and others that he had
too much power and could manipulate the financial system for his own
gain. In 1912, Morgan was called to testify before a congressional
committee chaired by U.S. Representative Arsene Pujo (1861-1939) of Louisiana
that was investigating the existence of a “money trust,” a small cabal
of elite Wall Street financiers, including Morgan, who allegedly
colluded to control American banking and industry. The Pujo Committee
hearings helped bring about the creation of the Federal Reserve System
in December 1913 and spurred passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act of
1914.
J.P. Morgan: Art Collection and Final Years
The
famous financier died at age 75 on March 31, 1913, in Rome, Italy. On
April 14, the day of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange closed in
his honour until noon. He was buried in the Morgan family mausoleum at a
Hartford cemetery.
By one estimate, J. P. Morgan
(1837–1913) is believed to have been the 24th richest American in
history, inflation adjusted. His fortune is believed to have grown to
about $38 billion (2007 USD).
Collections
The Morgan is home to some of the world's finest collections of medieval
manuscripts, literary and historical manuscripts, printed books and
bindings, letters, and autograph music manuscripts. A select group of
objects from these departments is always on display in the sumptuous
setting of J. Pierpont Morgan's Library.
Featured items in the current rotation include two manuscripts written seven hundred years apart: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1885) and an eleventh-century “lectionary” of readings from the four
Gospels in Greek. The latter was inscribed in Constantinople, though
marginal notes in Arabic suggest it was likely exported to
Arabic-speaking regions of the Byzantine empire. Other items displayed
in manuscript include a letter from Jane Austen to her sister and a poem
by Jay Wright (1934–) from his collection, Elaine’s Book.
Wright, a winner of the prestigious Bollingen Prize, invokes the Mexican
revolutionary and the long history of colonialism and slavery in the
New World in his poem, “Zapata and the Egúngún Mask.”
At thirteen years of age, Franz Schubert was attending a Viennese boarding school. He was also writing the Fantasie
in G major for piano, for four hands. The Morgan’s manuscript of the
work is Schubert’s earliest extant composition. Also on view is the
first publication of “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s ninth symphony and a
pop-up book created by contemporary artist, Kara Walker, entitled Freedom.
Walker, best known for her installations and large murals using black
cut-out paper silhouettes, interrogates complex issues of race and
sexual violence in her fable about an emancipated slave.
The items featured in Treasures from the Vault rotate every four months,
but there are three permanent objects on display in the three-tiered
library: the first printed book, known as The Gutenberg Bible; one of
Mr. Morgan’s greatest treasures, the jewel-encrusted binding on the
ninth-century Lindau Gospels; and a terra-cotta bust by the artist Jo
Davidson of the Morgan’s first librarian and director, Belle da Costa
Greene (1879–1950). The manuscript for Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was on view for the holidays, from December 3, 2019 through January 5, 2020.
Biblia latina, [Mainz]: [Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust], ca. 1454–1455. Purchased by Pierpont
Morgan with the Irwin collection, 1900.
Ancient Near Eastern Seals & Tablets
The Morgan's seals collection is one of the most distinguished in the
United States and among the best known in the world. Generally only an
inch in height, engraved seals are among the smallest objects ever
produced by sculptors. They were carved in great detail with simple
tools on semiprecious stones. These engraved objects provide a
continuous artistic and chronological sequence of more than three
thousand years. The seals collection covers all the significant styles
of Mesopotamian engraving from the end of the fifth millennium B.C. to the fourth century B.C.
as well as most of the styles of other countries of the ancient Near
East. Areas of particular strength include seals of the second
millennium B.C. made outside southern
Mesopotamia (Cappadocia, Syria, and Mitannia) as well as Old Babylonian
and Neo-Assyrian seals. The Middle Assyrian seals are among the finest
in any collection.
Because the seals were carved using negative relief, the seal will make a positive impression in the clay.
Pierpont Morgan collected nearly three thousand cuneiform tablets,
the bulk of which are now in the Yale Babylonian Collection, which he
founded. The Morgan's collection also includes cuneiform tablets and a
few outstanding art objects from the ancient Near East.
Between
1885 and 1908, the American collector William Hayes Ward assembled,
probably on Pierpont Morgan's behalf, a collection of 1,157 seals. This
became the core of the Morgan's holdings. Two additional major gifts—the
collection of Robert F. Kelley, given by his sister Caroline M. Burns
in 1977, and that of Jonathan P. Rosen, a study collection, given in
1986—have enhanced the Morgan's holdings in this area. Ancient Near Eastern seals on display in The North Room of J. Pierpont Morgan's Library »
Stone Bowl With a Dedication Inscription in Sumerian 4500 Years Old
Stone Bowl With a Dedication Inscription in Sumerian
Inscribed: (To) [a deity], Megirimta, child born to Lugal-kisalsi (and) wife of Muni-hursag, presented (this bowl).
Item description:
It
is not certain whether the Lugal-kisalsi mentioned in the inscription
was the king of Uruk of that name because the inscription states only
his name. Whatever his position, Lugal-kisalsi's daughter must have been
highly placed because the stone vessel that she dedicated belongs to a
type of object valued and preserved over many centuries. The stone was
probably imported from the northern mountain chains of Iran, which are
thought to have been the source of the materials for the stone vessels
excavated at the site of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, where this bowl
was found before 1904.
Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts
When
Pierpont Morgan acquired his first medieval manuscripts at the end of
the nineteenth century, he laid the foundation for a collection whose
quality would rank among the greatest in the world. Since Morgan's death
in 1913, the collection has more than doubled. Spanning some ten
centuries of Western illumination, it includes more than eleven hundred
manuscripts as well as papyri. To this should be added the Glazier,
Heineman, Bühler, Stillman, and Wightman manuscripts, which include more
than two hundred more items. Although the collection was formed to
illustrate the history of manuscript illumination and includes
significant masterpieces from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, there
are also some important textual manuscripts.
The Morgan's collection is made up primarily of Western manuscripts,
with French being the largest single national group, followed by
Italian, English, German, Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish. There are also
examples of Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Arabic, Persian, and
Indian manuscripts. More than fifty Coptic manuscripts from Hamouli,
Egypt, nearly all of which were found in their original bindings,
form the oldest and most important group of Sahidic manuscripts from a
single provenance, the Monastery of St. Michael at Sôpehes.
The majority of these books are of a religious nature, but the
collection also includes important classical works, scientific
manuscripts dealing with astronomy and medicine, and practical works on
agriculture, hunting, and warfare. Notable are the ninth-century
bejeweled Lindau Gospels, the tenth-century Beatus, the Hours of
Catherine of Cleves, and the celebrated Hours of Cardinal Alessandro
Farnese, the best-known Italian Renaissance manuscript.
Music Manuscripts & Printed Music
The Morgan Library & Museum houses one of the finest collections
of music manuscripts in the country. In addition to a large collection
of musicians' letters and first editions of scores and librettos, it has
the world's largest collection of Mahler manuscripts and substantial
holdings of Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Mozart, Schubert, and Richard
Strauss. The collection spans six centuries and many countries. The
Morgan's holdings of material relating to the lives and works of the
dramatist William S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur S. Sullivan form
the most extensive archive of its kind in the world.
Although Pierpont Morgan is not on record as evincing any notable
interest in music, he did make two important purchases: the two earliest
dated letters of the thirteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the
manuscript of Ludwig van Beethoven's Violin Sonata no. 10, op. 96, in G
Major.
The Morgan's music collection is the result of the generosity of
several donors and lenders. In 1962 the Dannie and Hettie Heineman
Collection, a small but exceedingly well-chosen selection of music
manuscripts, was placed on deposit and then formally given to the Morgan
in 1977.
In 1968 the institution became a major repository of music
manuscripts with the donation of Mary Flagler Cary's extraordinary
collection of manuscripts, letters, and printed scores. In 1972 Robert
Owen Lehman put on deposit his collection of manuscript scores, the
greatest private collection of its kind. In 2008 the Morgan acquired the
James Fuld Collection, by all accounts the finest private collection of
printed music in the world.
JPMorgan Chase & Co
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American
multinational investment bank and financial services holding company
headquartered in New York City. JPMorgan Chase is ranked by S&P
Global as the largest bank in the United States and the sixth largest
bank in the world by total assets, with total assets of US$2.687
trillion.
JPMorgan Chase & Company (NYSE: JPM)
is one of the world's leading financial services companies, providing
consumer and commercial banking and credit services as well as financial
asset management, investment banking, and insurance products.
It had a market capitalization of nearly $366 billion as of mid-2019, making it one of the world's largest companies.
In fact, JPMorgan Chase's five largest institutional shareholders are
all major financial companies. Jointly, they own about a quarter of the
banking behemoth.
Number six on the list, however, is Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
The Vanguard Group Inc. is JPMorgan's largest shareholder as of late November 2019, with 7.90% of total outstanding shares.
BlackRock owns about 216.4 million shares of JPMorgan for an ownership stake of about 6.77% of the company.
BlackRock, which was founded in 1988 by Laurence D. Fink, is one of
the largest asset managers in the world with $6.84 trillion in assets
under management as of November 2019.
State Street Corp. owns about 4.68% of JP Morgan's total outstanding stock as of late 2019, making it the third-largest holder.
State Street is a financial services firm with nearly $2.5 trillion
assets in assets under management as of the end of 2018. The company
offers investment management, trading, research, and related services,
with mutual funds and ETFs among the firm's products.
Capital Research and Management Co., Capital World Investors is based
in Los Angeles. Its portfolio value was estimated at about $426 billion
in late 2019.
FMR LLC, better known as Fidelity Management and Research, owns 1.93% of
JPMorgan Chase's total shares, making it the company's fourth-largest
stockholder.
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