March 21 2020

An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (2007)
By Heidi Ardizzone

I visited the JP Morgan Library on Park Ave on a recent visit to Manhattan and was intrigued to learn of the library's first manager, Belle da Costa Greene, who helped build the collection, a very successful collector in a man's world.  Her achievements are all the more remarkable considering her lack of a college education and her African American heritage.  Belle's light-skinned father was the first African-American graduate of Harvard, but, rather than embrace his achievements, Belle Marion Greener distanced herself from him and chose to pass for white, modifying her name and claiming she inherited her olive skin from a Portuguese ancestor.

The Morgan Library, JP's office

Belle was raised mostly in Washington DC in a well-education family.  Her father was a professor at Howard University and her mother a music teacher.  belle got a position at the Princeton Library, where she learned on the job from librarian Junius Morgan.  When his uncle JP Morgan was looking for someone to manage his growing collection of rare books, Junius recommended Belle for the job.  Though initially shaking in her boots when she interviewed for the position in 1905, Belle got the job, developed a strong working relationship with JP, managed to build a world-renowned collection, and became a highly respected collector herself during the 40 years Belle managed the collection.  Her contacts read like a who's who of the literary world: collector Bernard Berenson (with whom Belle carried on a years-long affair), Mary Smith Berenson (Bernard's wife, daughter of writer Hannah Whitall Smith, and an art critic herself), Sarah Bernhardt, Margaret Stillwell, Lawrence Wroth, Edith Wharton, etc.  After  JP died in 1913, his son Jack retained Belle and they opened the library to the public in 1924.   Belle maintained a very active social life, while also supporting her mother and, at various times her siblings, including her sister's son Bobbie, for whom Belle became legal guardian.  Belle was known not just for her librarian's skills, including keeping meticulous records of each purchase (even those that predated her tenure), but also for her acerbic wit and esoteric social circles.  This is a long (nearly 600 pp with notes) biography, much of it taken exclusively from Bernard Berenson's correspondence, and would have been sharper and more riveting had 50-100 pages of the Belle-Bernard story been edited out.  Still Belle was indeed a mysterious and fascinating lady, a scholar and socialite ahead of her time.