West Room of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library

This is the only known photograph of Greene in the Library she ran for more than four decades. Likely taken shortly after her 1948 retirement, the photograph depicts her in the West Room of J. Pierpont Morgan's Library, seated at the desk that was once Morgan's. (Greene’s own former desk, in the Library's North Room, was by this time occupied by Frederick B. Adams, who had succeeded Greene as director of the Pierpont Morgan Library.) The photograph served as the frontispiece to Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene, a Festschrift (a tribute volume of scholarly essays) edited by Dorothy Miner and published by Princeton University Press in 1954, four years after Greene’s death. Greene had hired Miner (1904–1973), a fellow woman scholar of the medieval period, as a manuscripts cataloguer for the Morgan Library during the 1930s. Soon after, however, Greene recommended Miner for the new position of Keeper of Manuscripts at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, where Miner went on to have a long and distinguished career. Based on a high-resolution enlargement of the image, Joshua O'Driscoll, Assistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan, has been able to determine that the volume Greene was examining is almost certainly MS M.827, a late tenth-century manuscript known as the Anhalt-Morgan Gospels. It was one of the last acquisitions made for the department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts during Greene’s tenure as Director. Even in her retirement, Greene remained deeply engaged with the collection she had spent forty-three years building, studying, interpreting, and making available to researchers and visitors.