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Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: patron of the modern
On October 9, 1901, several hundred statesmen, bankers, and robber barons journeyed by yacht, chartered steamer, and private train to Warwick, Rhode Island, to attend the elaborately choreographed wedding of Abby Aldrich (see Fig. 1), the daughter of Senator Nelson W. Aldrich (1841-1915). to John D. Rockefeller Jr. ("Junior"; 1874-1960), son of the wealthiest man in the world. Armed guards secured the perimeters of the 250-acre waterfront estate--President William McKinley had just been assassinated--and champagne flowed. Junior's mother, who disapproved of ostentatious displays of wealth, not to mention alcohol, declined to attend at the last minute, complaining of illness. Nelson Aldrich, although not as well known as John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937), was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. In a career that spanned three decades in the Senate (1881-1911), Aldrich helped to create an extensive system of tariffs that protected American industries from foreign competition, at the same time amassing a small fortune in sugar, rubber, banking, and public utility investments. As co-author of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, Aldrich removed restrictive import duties on fine art, which enabled friends, such as John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), to bring vast private art collections into the country: and ultimately this enriched or led to the establishment of a number of American museums. (1)
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Abby Aldrich and John D. Rockefeller Jr. met in 1894 when he was an undergraduate at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Growing up at her father's side in Providence and Washington, D.C., Abby was a gracious hostess, comfortable in diverse social gatherings. Marrying into the Rockefeller family, however, must have been a formidable challenge. Leaving aside the obvious differences in wealth, her husband was a pragmatic and pious young man with a tendency to be withdrawn. She was compassionate and spontaneous--a handsome if not conventionally beautiful woman with hazel eyes and a distinctive aquiline nose. They had six children: Abby Aldrich ("Babs"; 1903-1976), John D. III (1906-1978), Nelson A. (1908-1979), Laurance Spelman (1910-2004), Winthrop (1912-1973), and David (1915-). Although Abby was a pioneering collector of American modern and folk art, her greatest cultural legacy was her role as a founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her experiences as an intrepid collector combined with her close observation of the vast array of Rockefeller philanthropies were undoubtedly the foundation for this undertaking. (2)
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Junior and Abby shared the dubious distinction of having parents characterized as public pariahs--the targets of muckraking journalists such as Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) and Ida M. Tarbell (1857-1944). (3) This common experience probably helped to shape their philanthropy, and it certainly forced them to define themselves independently of their parents. Junior moved beyond the doctrinaire Baptist positions of his parents to make a number of remarkably independent decisions, such as his public reversal on Prohibition in 1932. Abby, unlike her father, was a liberal Republican. Interested in progressive social change, she was an early supporter of woman's suffrage and charities that catered to the welfare of women. Encouraged by Abby, Junior gave money to Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) as early as 1924, for her pioneering work on birth control. Although perhaps temperamentally different, Abby and Junior complemented one another as husband and wife. The responsibility of managing his family's vast philanthropic empire at times overwhelmed Junior, and Abby's sympathetic counsel was, he often acknowledged, his greatest source of strength. In a revealing letter after twenty years of marriage, Abby wrote:
our greatest happiness, which is our perfect companionship, has nothing to do with money. I often feel that John and I are less conscious than most people of Mr. Rockefeller's great fortune; we so completely regard it as a trust to be sacredly administered, the by products of which are beautiful places to live in, the opportunity to buy beautiful things, and the great difficulty in making the world take us simply. Being less humble and less conscientious than John and harboring in my heart a secret conviction that most worldly success, political, professional or commercial is of a fleeting and uncertain value, I take life more lightly. (4)
Written in her characteristic style, the letter reveals a subtle sense of humor and a sympathetic, unpretentious manner. Of interest is her reference to John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s fortune, not Junior's, although by then, Junior had already inherited a substantial portion of it. Her reference, therefore, was to Rockefeller's legacy, not his fortune.
In 1910 Abby and Junior hired the architect William Welles Bosworth (1869-1966) to design a seven-story town house on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, completed in 1913. At the same time, they were renovating and building houses in Pocantico Hills, New York, and Seal Harbor, Maine. Decorating and furnishing these houses required thoughtful, carefully orchestrated purchases and may have been the initial impetus to begin collecting art. In 1908 Junior began buying famille verte Chinese porcelain from the dealer Joseph Duveen (1869-1939). (5) They also purchased Persian and Asian antiquities and major European works such as the medieval Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, (6) the ethereal portrait bust of Beatrice of Aragon [1457-1508] by Francesco Laurana (c. 1430-c. 1502), and the pensive but animated Bust of a Young Woman by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488). (7) In the early 1920s Abby began to purchase eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints using the income from her Aldrich inheritance. In 1925 her husband augmented her personal art budget by $25,000, a sum that grew exponentially each year. From a separate art budget, they collected classical art and furnishings. He remained convinced that antique art had the greater merit, but after some deliberation, she became interested in contemporary American art, reflecting later:
