During the 1880s, the Manhattan home of J. Pierpont Morgan and his second wife, Frances (Fanny), was featured in a lavish volume depicting the domestic interiors of wealthy Americans. This photograph shows their home library, which was luxuriously outfitted by decorator Christian Herter and illuminated with Thomas Edison’s new electric lighting. But the library is curiously short on books. Only a sliver of low shelving is visible to the right of the windows. In the freestanding library Morgan would commission two decades later, fine volumes would be very much in evidence.
The house pictured here, later demolished, was located at the corner of 36th Street and Madison Avenue, on the site of the building you are in now.
“Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library”
Modern reproduction of a photograph published in Artistic Houses: Being a Series of Interior Views of a Number of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes in the United States; With a Description of the Art Treasures Contained Therein, vol. 1
New York: D. Appleton, 1883
The Morgan Library & Museum; PML 127667