Belle da Costa Greene: A Portrait Gallery | Photographs

Greene’s earliest known reference to a photographic sitting appears in a letter of June 21, 1909 to art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), her friend, lover, and confidant. She acknowledges receipt of his gift of a copy of Dante’s autobiography (“greatest joy of all the Vita Nuova – a most excellent edition with the Italian text and the English of Rossetti”) as well as some “photographs of my bacchanalian self.” While those prints (by an unnamed photographer) do not appear to survive, Greene began sending other portraits of herself to Berenson the following year, and those he retained are now among his papers at Villa I Tatti, Florence (now I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies). Additional prints survive in the Morgan’s collection and in a handful of other repositories.

The earliest known photograph of Greene is a group photograph of the Amherst College summer school course in "Library Economy," taken in the summer of 1900. Greene posed for several photographers when she was in her early thirties and employed as J. Pierpont Morgan’s private librarian. The earliest known solo photograph is a 1910 portrait by Ernest Walter Histed (1862–1947); she sat for noted photographers Clarence H. White (1871–1925), Adolph de Meyer (1868–1946), and Theodore C. Marceau (1859–1922) at about the same time. In 1915, she wrote to Berenson about another lost photograph of her, " a small 'lumière' plate that had been taken of me in the orange tea gown you hate so much—the color scheme was really wonderful very 'Matissey' and I knew you would love it." Though she was acquainted with Edward Steichen (1879–1973) and Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), she is not known to have sat for either.

There are only a few known photographs of Greene from the twenty-four-year period when she was director of the Pierpont Morgan Library (1924–48). One is a 1929 candid photograph by Bain News Service. Another shows her at an auction in 1941, and a newspaper article from the 1930s shows one of the only images of her from that decade. Another from the 1940s—the only known photograph of Greene at the Library—is a portrait of her seated at Morgan’s desk in the West Room, taken after her retirement and published in Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene, a Festschrift published posthumously in 1954.

There are no known photographs of Greene as a child or teenager; with her father, the prominent Black American activist, scholar, and diplomat Richard T. Greener (1844–1922), or with other members of her family; with J. Pierpont Morgan or any other Morgan family members; or with staff of the Pierpont Morgan Library.