Volume 46, Number 7 · April 22, 1999
J.P. Morgan's Last Romance
By Jean Strouse
In the summer of 1911 the financier J. Pierpont Morgan was seventy-four years old and semi-retired. He had spent his professional career raising capital (largely in Europe at first) to build American railroads and industrial corporations. He also served as America's unofficial central banker, trying to stabilize the chaotic US business cycle, keep the Treasury solvent, and stop Wall Street panics. And he had a second major career as a collector of art. Educated in Switzerland and Germany in the 1850s—his family had moved to London in 1854 when his father joined an Anglo-American merchant bank—he was familiar with Europe's great museums by the age of twenty. After he started work in New York in 1857, he took off long periods every year to travel abroad, learning about the history, architecture, and art of Europe and Egypt.
Feature, 5241 words
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