ABSTRACT
Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902), banker, railroad financier, and member of Gilded Age New York’s burgeoning class of prosperous business magnates, was an ambitious art collector and a civic-minded patron. Marquand was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, later treasurer, and president. This essay explores his acquisitions and aspirations as a private collector in late nineteenth-century New York and as a leading donor to the Metropolitan Museum. Focusing on Marquand’s 1889 gift of thirty-seven Old Masters to the museum—the first of its kind—this essay considers the gift’s effect on New York’s evolving cultural landscape.
