John H. McFadden and His Age
By Richard CarreñoFully Illustrated
In a city permeated by Benjamin Franklin’s legacy, it is easy to believe that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is another of Philadelphia’s ancient and legendary cultural institutions. But unlike the Library Company (1731, thanks to Franklin’s inspiration), the American Philosophical Society (1743, Franklin again), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1805), the Athenaeum of Philadelphia (1814), and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1887), the Philadelphia Museum of Art—as we perceive it today—is a relative youngblood: its colossal building atop Fairmount Hill opened in 1928. Yet the museum’s roots in fact are in the late nineteenth century, in the institution’s first incarnation as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, chartered in 1876—making it among the defining institutions in the museology in the United States.
The
1928 iteration of the Philadelphia Museum of Art was born in a time
of tumultuous municipal transitional change. In a period of no more
than thirty years, Philadelphia had reconsidered how money changed
hands, who lived where, and how immigrant Americans would shape the
city’s landscape. The museum’s founding was likewise messy:
contentious, public, and expensive.
Unlike the city’s other venerable cultural institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was not the product of a single visionary, nor that of a coterie of affluent connoisseurs. Yet, one Philadelphian figured prominently in shaping the institution’s transformation: John H. McFadden. As the city’s—indeed, the country’s—grandest cotton king, McFadden is well-known as the donor of an important collection of British paintings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Focusing on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits and landscapes, the John Howard McFadden Memorial Collection comprises a rich and unified group of forty-three paintings by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and George Romney.
Unlike the city’s other venerable cultural institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was not the product of a single visionary, nor that of a coterie of affluent connoisseurs. Yet, one Philadelphian figured prominently in shaping the institution’s transformation: John H. McFadden. As the city’s—indeed, the country’s—grandest cotton king, McFadden is well-known as the donor of an important collection of British paintings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Focusing on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits and landscapes, the John Howard McFadden Memorial Collection comprises a rich and unified group of forty-three paintings by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and George Romney.
Although McFadden’s collection was first published in 1917, no book has focused on his mantel as philanthropist, rare book collector, real-estate developer, museum administrator, and founder of possibly the world’s first multimedia news café, among other high-minded pursuits. This comes as little surprise: with the exception of Albert C. Barnes, Philadelphia’s great art collectors—including P. A. B. Widener, William L. Elkins, and John G. Johnson—have received little, if any, biographical attention. Moreover, McFadden himself contributed to his low profile: He left no diaries, nor any summaries setting forth his strategies in forming his collection. Besides his will, very little epistolary record exists. Given this, it is not unexpected that little is known about McFadden as an art connoisseur and collector, and even less so about how he formed his massive wealth as a cotton trader in Liverpool or how he became Philadelphia’s unofficial arts czar.
Industry and will drove McFadden to become one of the most prominent governing mandarins of Philadelphia’s arts community. He was a board member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and president of the Art Club; and, through stipulations attached to the donation of his art collection—at the time, the largest grouping of British art in the United States—he was instrumental in advancing the construction of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new building, today the capstone of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
McFadden did not invent Philadelphia’s great museum. John D. McIlhenny, Eli Kirk Price II, and Fiske Kimball also harnessed the museum’s mounting synergy, finally creating the neoclassical masterpiece in brick and mortar. But like no other early twentieth-century Philadelphian, McFadden helped lay the museum’s foundation. By situating him within the context of the city’s major players, McFadden is revealed as the driving force behind many of Philadelphia’s foremost cultural institutions.
—Sarah Noreika