Prologue
Will
1917
On an unusually balmy December day in 1917, John H. McFadden signed his will with a sense of success and modesty. His valet Robert Potts dutifully added his name as one of several witnesses. In 21st-century dollars, the Philadelphia cotton grandee and art patron was a multimillionaire; his estate, at more than $5.2-million ($73-million), [1] was bequeathed to his ‘beloved’ wife Florence and their three adult children. The eldest, Philip, was a high-goal polo player. Alice, the middle child, had a dilettante’s interest in the theatre. The youngest, John H. McFadden, Jr., or ‘Jack,’ was a former U.S. Army officer.
Despite his immense wealth, McFadden was a man of probity. He once told a friend that his aim in life was to create ‘lasting good.’ ‘Then I could die happy.’[2] On 2 December, a day before his 67th birthday, McFadden had that last mission in mind when he put a pen from his favorite stationer, Bailey, Banks & Biddle, to foolscap, and forever sealed the fate of his art collection as a gift to Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. Or, maybe.
McFadden was an international ‘cotton man.’[3] Among only a handful of such commodity moguls in the late 19th century, he and his older brother, George, reigned over an empire that brokered and shipped raw American and Egyptian cotton worldwide. Millions of cotton bales made their way to mills in England and in New England, and millions of dollars made their way to the coffers of their family firm, Geo. H. McFadden & Bro., Cotton Merchants. [4] By the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the McFadden partnership, headed by George as managing director, had become the country’s largest cotton trading venture.
It further established itself as one of America’s first truly multi-national conglomerates,
with shipping and trading interests in Europe, Africa, and in South America. As the otherwise anonymous ‘Bro.,’ John McFadden headed the company’s key Liverpool subsidiary. A third brother, the youngest, got no billing. J. Franklin McFadden, was, like George, Philadelphia based. Like his nephew Philip, Frank, as he was known, was a poloist, enjoying the sport in the city’s Main Line suburbs and in Florida. Whatever their individual contribution, Geo. H. McFadden & Bro. ballooned into a prodigiously remunerative entity, making the three siblings millionaires many times over.
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4. Despite the arcane spelling of the company name and its distinct Dickensian flavor, it was the form favored in newspaper advertising in public documents. The name has been cited as ‘George H. McFadden and Brother,’ and ‘George H. McFadden & Brothers,’ among other variants.
The Philadelphia press, never shy of hyperbole, singled out John McFadden for the most glowing superlative: ‘[T]he richest cotton broker in the world.’[5] Actually, George edged out his brother. When George died in 1927, six years after John’s death in 1921, he left an estate of $8-million ($116-million).
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The cotton magnate indulged in the perquisites of wealth. He was a yachtsman and epicure. He saw wealth as a means to embrace beauty in art (portraiture, in particular), and as a way to forever freeze the face of nobility, accomplishment, and dignity. His canvasses, collected over more than two decades, idealized these virtues in the artist’s painterly vision. Reflected in this glory was, as he saw it, part of himself.
The Philadelphian maintained an almost boyish fascination with adventure and derring
do, and was a champion of historical and contemporary figures embodying those attributes. He was an obsessive, atavistic anglophile, comforted in the knowledge that he was only one generation from being a British subject himself. He admired such disparate English personalities as the beau ideal, merchant prince Edward Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, to the more rough-hewn Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest H. Shackleton.
Against a backdrop of fabulous wealth and luxury, McFadden was also a manic traveler,
often undertaking six transatlantic round-trips a year and spending up to two months at sea.
He found validation as a compulsive joiner of clubs. Even some in which he had no particular interest. In later years, he suffered from anxiety; he might well have been haunted that his prosperity bore the stain of slavery. His relations with his brothers were never warm. George and Frank were sportsmen, highly-accomplished polo and racquet ball players. John indulged in less strenuous pursuits. The brothers were good-looking and fit. John was fat. They were graduates of the University of Pennsylvania. With limited high school training, John surged into the art field as an autodidact. Art set him apart in his sibling rivalry, and he acquired a gravitas that neither brother could project.
From his choice perch in London, the Philadelphian assembled the largest group of 18th-
and 19th-century British paintings in private hands in the United States. The collection of forty three pictures was a passion twenty-five-years in the making, and flowered into a multi-layered creation. Over time, some pictures came. Some went. The fevered atmosphere of American collecting in the late 19th century was no deterrent in his amassing his works. In 1917, despite the dangers of a wartime sea crossing, he made the final formal addition to his holdings.
McFadden favored the most respected of the great and the good of the British art
establishment, including Constable, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Hogarth, and Turner. His catalogue underscored the magnitude and magnificence of his ‘boutique’ formation of drawing room-sized pictures. He left full-sized magni opi to his rivals, the ‘grand magazin’ tycoons. Conservatively estimated, his paintings were worth more than $2-million ($29-million).[6]
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6. Exact values for artwork, be they individual pieces or collections, are impossible to determine unless the marketplace ‘speaks’ when the art is sold and a price is affixed. The figure here is based solely on inflation, from 1917 to 2018.
The collection’s first cataloguer, the early 20th English art critic William Roberts, summed up the group as the ‘largest’ of its kind, the ‘most interesting,’ and ‘without a rival.’ [7] One of America’s most widely-read art critics, James Huneker, thought so much of McFadden that in 1913 he dedicated his art tome The Pathos of Distance: A Book of a Thousand and One Moments to his friend. The inscription read, ‘To John McFadden: A Lover of Fine Arts.’ [8]
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The middle brother was an unmistakable Proper Philadelphian. He was club-man. A family man. A pillar of rectitude, who radiated confidence and an engaging, felicitous charm.
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7. William Roberts mentioned how prices could spiral out of control. In the preface (Appendix II) to his catalogue raisonné, he calculated that Lady Rodney by Thomas Gainsborough, acquired by McFadden in 1893 for $469,425, was ‘commercially’ worth about $2.4-million fifteen years later. ‘The same may be said, indeed, of the other pictures which were acquired before the great rise in prices of the last few years,’ he added. ‘Whilst no wise man buys pictures with the same motives as he buys stocks and shares—solely in the hope of profitable dividends—yet it is always a satisfaction to know that one’s hobby is not an unprofitable one even in the mere matter of money.’
He had a passing resemblance to a well-nourished, aging putto. His mustache was customary for a man of his station. He was vain, it was said, in dress. He wore bespoke, English-styled apparel, and, some claimed, he was one of the best-attired men in the Exchange Flags premises of the Liverpool cotton trade. In public, he was never seen without a silk top hat, ‘always carefully ironed.’ [9] Rounding out the ‘Robber Baron’ look, in look only, was a ‘fat’ cigar, usually unlit. [10] Otherwise, McFadden conformed to Philadelphia’s conservative, pecuniary, and inbred tribal ethic. His only lapse, some might whisper, was a worldly, cosmopolitan air, foreign to the city’s insular élite. He was as much at home in the boardrooms of Wall Street and in the salons and galleries of upmarket Mayfair, as he was in the parlors of parochial Rittenhouse Square.
There was also something, in Philadelphia at least, curious, if not downright suspicious, about his public life, at once a mercantile power broker and, equally, an eminent art connoisseur.
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McFadden contributed to his low profile. In England, his home for long stretches, and in his often-reluctant residence in his native America, he eschewed the celebrity that many of his art collecting contemporaries attracted. (His promotional skills were more subtle). He left no diaries.
No summaries setting forth his strategies in forming his collection. Besides his will, very little epistolary record exists. Fortunately, others have made up for his reticence.
What is previously known about McFadden, to his death at 71, has been largely confined
to fewer than a dozen biographical briefs. Many of these accounts are contemporaneous with his era; each, never amounting to more than a few hundred words. Their accuracy, without confirmation from other sources, has always been in doubt.
McFadden’s portrayal as connoisseur and collector has been woefully one dimensional.
Less-known was the middle-aged polymath whose life was a composite of numerous interests and causes. His multi-faceted life tracked a public side (his art collection had renown on two continents) and a shadow existence as a virtually unknown progressive philanthropist.
Largely unrecorded has been his advocacy of medical research and scientific exploration.
New research has also revealed his interest in rare book collecting.
He defied being pigeonholed as a stereotypical period capitalist who hoarded art to
engineer social acceptance and prominence. Industry and will drove him to become late in life one of the most prominent governing mandarins of the city’s arts community. He was a board member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, president of the Art Club of Philadelphia and oversaw the early development of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, then known as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art.
In a mercurial time, McFadden offered the embryonic institution a steady hand and
prescient guidance, holding out his art collection as a dangling, irresistible draw to drive the museum to achievement and stature. A fevered seven-year period of wait-and-see legal intrigue ensued, ending with the new art museum transformed from a prim, 19th-century artifact to a 20th-century cultural dynamo.
McFadden’s contributions as an art connoisseur and as an unlikely real estate developer
placed him in the forefront of those managing cultural, social, and demographic reconstruction in early 20th-century Philadelphia. For a brief, fraught time, from 1917 to his death, McFadden was one of Philadelphia’s chief change agents. For a first-rank Proper Philadelphian, McFadden wound up curiously enough as one of its most ‘improper.’