Overview

One of the most well-known American librarians and experts in illuminated manuscripts (incunabula) in the early-mid twentieth century, Belle da Costa Greene helped build the collections of the renowned Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Indeed, she was known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.” Greene also summered annually with the Vanderbilts in their “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1905, she began her career as the personal librarian of financier John Pierpont Morgan, one of the wealthiest men in Gilded Age America. She ended it as the library’s first director from 1924-48.

Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879, the green-eyed Greene was the daughter of the first African American graduate of Harvard College. She also belonged to the colored elite in Washington, D.C. She accessed the rarefied worlds of the Morgans and Vanderbilts by “passing” as a white woman. In exploring Belle da Costa Greene’s reinvented life, this exhibition will engage questions of race, color, class, gender, and passing.