Belle Da Costa Greene: A Portrait Gallery

As part of its ongoing project to illuminate the career of librarian, curator, scholar, and cultural executive Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950), the Morgan presents this digital gallery of all known photographs and portraits depicting her. Appropriately, both the earliest surviving life portrait (a 1900 photograph of her summer school library course at Amherst College) and the last (a photograph taken in the late 1940s after her retirement) depict Greene in a library-related setting, surrounded by budding librarians as well as the books and manuscripts to which she devoted her four-decade career.

There is no known film footage of Greene and there are no known audio recordings of her voice.

Credits
Portrait Gallery text by Philip S. Palmer (Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts) and Christine Nelson (former Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts), with additional research by Daria Rose Foner, former Research Associate. The Morgan is grateful to colleagues at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, for permission to share images from their collection, and to Dr. Anne McCauley, the David H. McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University, for her research on Clarence White’s portraits of Greene.