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The Met's Backhanded
Benefactor
In his hometown of Paterson, Jacob Rogers was known as the meanest man in town. He made a fortune building locomotives but had a reputation for being something of a scrooge. He was always feuding with the city fathers and seemed to take particular pleasure in turning down requests for charitable donations. By all accounts, he had little interest in art. His mansion on Paterson's Park and Madison Avenues had a few paintings on the walls, mostly mediocre works by unknown artists. Rogers once told a friend that his great ambition was to do something wholly unexpected of him. It would be an understatement to say he succeeded. Today, this irascible, choleric man who disliked philanthropy and ignored aesthetics has become, in death, one of the great art benefactors of all time. Take a walk through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and you will find countless masterpieces bearing his name as donor - works by Van Gogh, Velasquez, Degas, Bellini, DiPaolo, Bruegel. In fact, Rogers' name can be found on significant works in just about every collection of the museum: European, American, Egyptian, Near Eastern, Far Eastern, Greek and Roman, Islamic, Medieval, Arms and Armor, and European Decorative Arts. When Rogers died in 1901, he left almost his entire fortune to the Metropolitan, an act that came as a complete surprise to everyone, both his would-be heirs and museum trustees. About eight years before his death, Rogers became a Metropolitan Museum of Art member. He was in the habit of paying the annual $10 fee in person, to the museum director, and once requested a copy of the museum's charter and bylaws. But no one at the Metropolitan knew how wealthy Rogers was, and no one expected such a bequest from a $10-a-year member. At the turn of the century, the Metropolitan was still a struggling institution with a small collection and practically no endowment. Rogers changed that situation overnight. After litigation - a nephew and two nieces contested the will - his bequest came to just under $5 million. In its first year, the newly named Rogers Fund earned $200,000 in interest, an amount which made the Metropolitan Museum of Art a major force in the art market at that time. "The Rogers Fund has been the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum," says John Ross, a museum spokesman. "There have been other bequests over the years, but the Rogers Fund is considered the great fund." Museum policy is to spend only a portion of the interest every year, so that the fund continues to grow. Over the years, millions and millions of dollars have gone toward art purchases, and the value of the fund now stands at $25 million. In the first quarter of this century, the Rogers Fund bought countless Greek pots and Roman statues, building the classical department from nothing into the great collection it is today. In the 1920's, the Rogers Fund bankrolled the museum's famous archeological expeditions to Egypt. When the museum made headlines in 1961 for paying $2.3 million for Rembrandt's "Aristotle with a Bust of Homer," the Rogers Fund was listed as one of the sources of the money. And 10 years later, when it bought Velasquez' "Juan de Pareja" for $5.5 million - at that time the highest price paid for a work of art - the Rogers Fund was once again a major source of the money. Most museum donors have a particular field of interest. They either give their own collections or earmark contributions for certain types of purchases. What's unusual about the works bought by the Rogers Fund is that they are so encyclopedic in range, a quality that reflects the Metropolitan itself. Rogers would have certainly been amused to see his name appended to such esoteric objects as a Roman sarcophagus, a bookstand from West Turkestan, an Iranian incense burner, an 11th century statue of a Japanese deity, a granite head of an Egyptian queen dating back to 1503 B.C., or a copper ibex from Sumeria circa 2600 B.C. What would make a man give all his money to a museum when he cared so little about art? "He was the ultimate eccentric," says Giacomo DeStefano, acting director of the Paterson Museum and a historian with a particular interest in the Rogers family. "He didn't believe in inheritance. He felt there was no secret to earning money." Whether or not he believed in it for others, Rogers himself was far from a self-made man. He inherited the locomotive works from his father, Thomas Rogers, whose inventive mind and perfectionist ways had made Rogers locomotives world-famous for quality. Under Jacob Rogers, the business became so successful that Rogers was able to spend 19 long sojourns in Europe. There are endless stories to explain why he never married including some that have him spurned by a girl he met in Paris and swearing off women for life. He held a lifelong grudge against Paterson because city authorities had once blocked his acquisition for a plot of land near his factory. The city had also passed an ordinance that prohibited Rogers from firing up any of his locomotives within the city limits. Consequently, each locomotive had to be mounted on a flatbed trolley and pulled out of the factory by huge teams of horses. Some of the most colorful stories about Rogers concern the way he handled requests from charitable organizations. In a book of local history by Charles A. Shriner, the story is told of how a nun at St. Joseph's Hospital had once written to Rogers concerning his $100-a-month donation to the hospital. After passing the locomotive works and seeing how prosperous it was, she suggested he up his donation to the price of an engine every month. Rogers was never heard from again. Once, some boys petitioned Rogers about using a tract of land he owned for a ball field. Rogers responded that he would lease the land to them for two years at a cost of $2,000 providing they erected a $5,000 iron fence around the plot that would revert to him at the end of the lease. On another occasion, writes Calvin Tomkins in his history of the Metropolitan Museum, a woman came to his door asking for money for a religious movement. "I prayed fervently for money, and God almighty appeared to me and told me to go to Mr. Rogers and ask him for $5,000, and God Almighty said that you would give it to me." Rogers eyed her thoughtfully. "By God almighty," he said, "you mean the Being who created these trees and all this around here?" "Certainly," she agreed. "Then go back to your God almighty," Rogers said, "and tell Him that for once He made a mistake." Rogers was so universally unpopular that when he died, the Paterson Guardian described its wealthiest citizen as "a pure animal man, with no sentiments born of human love or human sympathy." Another irony of Rogers' life is that the former Rogers Locomotive Works now houses the Paterson Museum. The building was acquired by the city after it had passed through other hands, and the museum was installed in the renovated building in 1982. Today, it is the focal point of the Great Falls Historic District and exhibits materials relating to Paterson's' industrial history. "Rogers would have hated the idea that his factory was a city museum," says DeStefano. "He would have preferred to see it burn to the ground." |