Henry G. Marquand,

1896

Among the most discerning collectors of his time, Henry Marquand amassed a fortune in railroads before serving for many years as a trustee of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, becoming one of its greatest patrons. Marquand also was a generous benefactor to Princeton University, as was his son, Allan, the institution’s first professor of art history, whose books formed the nucleus of its Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology. Society portraitist John White Alexander, who taught drawing at Princeton in the 1880s, depicted the elder Marquand as a discriminating man of culture, positioned with glasses in hand before a framed picture. He holds what likely were intended to be recognized as plans for the Metropolitan’s signature central structure, undertaken during Marquand’s tenure as the museum’s second president.