JOHN H. McFADDEN AND HIS AGE: PROMOTIONAL PRESENTATION

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'JOHN H. McFADDEN AND HIS AGE: COTTON AND CULTURE IN PHILADELPHIA' NOW AVAILABLE AT BARNES & NOBLE

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Preface: Beau Ideal

In a city where Benjamin Franklin’s legacy permeates the institutional landscape, it is easy to believe that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is another of Philadelphia’s ancient and legendary cultural institutions. Many of them indeed date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in 1805, and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, begun in 1814. And Franklin was in fact associated with two public institutions: the Library Company (1731) and the American Philosophical Society (1743). In contrast, the Philadelphia Museum is a mere youngblood, less than a century from its opening in 1928 as the Pennsylvania Museum of Art. That is, if we are considering it as it is today: the majestic Greek Revival colossus atop Fairmount Hill. 

But the museum’s roots run much deeper, to the late nineteenth century, in its first incarnation in 1877 as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art. By this measure, it is actually older than the iconic Metropolitan Museum of Art (1880) in New York. John H. McFadden and His Age The Pennsylvania Museum of Art was born in a time of tumultuous municipal transition, which tore and remade the fabric of virtually all of Philadelphia’s institutions, from political to cultural, from commercial to societal.

McFADDEN: IN BOOKSHOPS IN LATE JUNE

Greetings Friends,

Many have inquired about the publication schedule of my new book, John H. McFadden and His Age: Cotton and Culture in Philadelphia. Whew, it's been a long and winding road!

Finally we have a firm publication date, 6 July. This means, I'm told by the publisher, Camino Books, that the book will be in bookshops in late June.

If you have any questions, please contact me anytime.

Warmest regards,

Richard

The PJ depends on reader support. Please help us by contributing financially or by contributing editorial content via PhiladelphiaJunto@ymail.com. Empowered by WritersClearinghouse | S.P.Q.R. 1976 Richard Carreño, Editor Copyright MMXXI. All Rights Reserved.

JOHN H. McFADDEN AND HIS AGE By Richard Carreño JUNE 6 PUBLICATION

https://www.caminobooks.com/collections/frontpage/products/john-h-mcfadden-and-his-age

The PJ depends on reader support. Please help us by contributing financially or by contributing editorial content via PhiladelphiaJunto@ymail.com. Empowered by WritersClearinghouse | S.P.Q.R. 1976 Richard Carreño, Editor Copyright MMXXI. All Rights Reserved.

Coming Soon! John H. McFadden and His Age—Cotton and Culture in Philadelphia

John H. McFadden and His Age

Cotton and Culture in Philadelphia

By Richard Carreño

To be published by Camino in early 2020
Fully 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.

John H. McFadden and His Age

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.