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The eldest, Philip, was a high-goal polo player. Alice, the middle child, had a dilettante’s interest in the theatre. The youngest, John H. McFadden, Jr., or ‘Jack,’ was a former U.S. Army officer. Despite his immense wealth, McFadden was a man of probity.
- We Hate New York
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- True Brit
While Philadelphia made an international splash with the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition, that proved a sort of last hurrah, as civic prominence had been steadily moving northward to New York City. But Philly’s WASP establishment, Carreño writes, was “hardly miffed by the loss of supremacy. An anonymous letter writer to The New York Times ...
John McFadden’s father shelled out for him to attend the most prestigious of local private schools, Episcopal Academy, then at Juniper and Locust streets. (Tuition was $60 a year.) Students learned Latin, algebra, geography, mathematics and French, taught by “none other but a native of France.” An 1864 alumni banquet featured “oysters on the half s...
John’s brother and partner, George McFadden, was wed to one Emily Barclay Kennedy, daughter of the director of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad. Alas, Emily, Carreño notes, “was known for a weak disposition, once so severe that she was hospitalized in ‘critical condition’ after ‘overtaxing her strength’ with robust partying. The New York Timesrepor...
Scorned by the city’s entrenched establishment, McFadden and his Gilded Age Philly peers, including John Graver Johnson, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, and William Lukens Elkins, turned to art collecting in search of “another kind of long-term validation in art’s ageless permanence and cultural luster. To shore up their own legacies as art patrons, t...
McFadden’s initial plan was to convert his apartment in the Wellington into a private house museum for his art collection — until he apparently realized that the collect was “too narrowly curated … to attract the large-scale audience he desired.” A temporary installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts garnered an unheard-of full-page ...
In McFadden’s day, Philadelphia was known for its Anglomania; the architecture was Georgian and late Victorian, and the neighborhoods had familiar names taken from London boroughs: Mayfair, Richmond, Southwark. Cricket was popular “even among the working classes,” Carreño says, and Philly’s residents were the only Americans who called their sidewal...
- Sandy Hingston
John H. McFadden, the American millionaire cotton broker and member of the Liverpool Cotton Association, as depicted by caricaturist J. Wallace Coop in the 1908 book “Bulls and Bears”. Courtesy Liverpool Athenaeum.
John H. McFadden, 1850–1921 Unlike other major art collectors of the day, John Howard McFadden selected a single school of painting—the British School—as the source of his acquisitions, focusing on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits and landscapes.
- 1916
- Portrait of John H. McFadden
- Oil on canvas
May 3, 2021 · John H. McFadden and His Age: Cotton and Culture in Philadelphia By Richard Carreño To be released by Camino Books in 6 July 2021.
Apr 1, 2008 · Raised a nominal Roman Catholic, with no concrete plans for entering the ministry, John McFadden went on to serve as senior pastor of two large United Church of Christ (Congregational) faith communities for a total of 32 years.
Jul 6, 2021 · John H. McFadden (1850–1921) was America’s “Cotton King,” overseeing a multimillion-dollar empire of cotton, from its baling in Memphis to its immensely lucrative sales in Liverpool. In his native Philadelphia, he was the city’s undisputed “cultural czar.”
- Richard Carreño
