Archives

The Archives of The Morgan Library & Museum houses personal papers of Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) and his immediate family, early records of the Morgan financial firms, and the records of the Morgan. Comprising correspondence, photographs and albums, documents, scrapbooks, and printed materials, the Archives is an important scholarly resource for the history of the Gilded Age, American economic development, and art collecting and connoisseurship.

A heavily used scholarly resource in the Archives is Morgan Collections Correspondence, which contains nearly eight thousand letters and invoices that document in great detail purchases of works of art, furniture, decorative items, and books and manuscripts made by Morgan from 1887 until his death in 1913. These papers provide essential provenance documentation for tens of thousands of works acquired by Morgan.

Family materials include substantial collections of papers of Pierpont Morgan, his son, J. P. Morgan, Jr., and his daughters Louisa Satterlee and Anne Morgan. The papers of the Rev. John Pierpont, maternal grandfather of Pierpont Morgan, include important resources for the study of nineteenth-century Unitarianism and reform movements, such as temperance, spiritualism, and abolitionism.

Although the Morgan does not hold the complete records of the Morgan financial firms, the Archives does include an important series of record books that document the syndicates formed by Morgan and his firms from 1882 to 1933, covering such key economic developments as the late-nineteenth-century reorganization of the American railroad industry and the 1902 creation of U.S. Steel, at the time the largest corporation ever formed.

Advertisement of an Honest Rumseller, a temperance broadside from the papers of the Rev. John Pierpont, 1851

Cover by Emma Tudor of October Dawn, a wine-making manual published during Prohibition, 1926

Cover editorial cartoon from The Verdict, commenting on the gold crisis of 1895, 4 December 1899

Invoice from Henry Sotheran & Co., London, for a manuscript of Sir Walter Scott's novel St. Ronan's Well, sold to Pierpont Morgan, 1900

Letter from Nikola Tesla to J. P. Morgan, Jr., 10 January 1916

One of the earliest stock certificates of the U.S. Steel Corporation, issued to Pierpont Morgan and signed by Charles Schwab, 1901

Photograph by Clarence White of Belle da Costa Greene, Pierpont Morgan's librarian and first director of the Morgan Library, 1911

Photograph by Davis & Sanford, New York, of Pierpont Morgan's daughters, Louisa, Anne, and Juliet Morgan, ca. 1900

Photograph of an American relief volunteer with French children after World War I, from album of Anne Morgan, ca. 1917

Photograph of Pierpont Morgan at the Temple of Horus at Edfu, Egypt, 1913 or earlier

"The Magnet."