Architect and Client

While traveling in Europe and meeting with dealers in 1904, Morgan learned of the availability of a sixteenth-century French mantelpiece he had seen illustrated in Claude Sauvageot’s book Palaces, Castles and Residences in France. He wired McKim to alert him. In this response, the architect was deferential but firm: this French component had no place in a building “of Italian Renaissance design.”

McKim prevailed. All the mantels ultimately installed in the Library would be Italian antiques. New York tradespeople initially refused to set them because the stone had not been cut by union laborers, but the matter was resolved.