Belle da Costa Greene: Rediscovering the Black Woman Who Made the Morgan Library

Greene, born Belle Marion Greener in 1879, came from a prominent African American family in the Washington, DC, area. Her father, Richard Theodore Greener, was the first Black graduate of Harvard University, the first Black professor at the University of South Carolina, and a diplomat to Russia. When she was a child, her parents separated. The Greener children afterward lived with their mother, who gave music lessons to support them. Belle later dropped the “r” from Greener and adopted the middle name “da Costa,” attributing her complexion to Portuguese ancestry.

“Greene willfully created archival gaps in her biography by destroying her personal papers and diaries,” Ciallela said. “In what survives, there is very little writing about race and nothing about her family’s decision to pass as white.” 

In 2021, art historian Daria Rose Foner located 1896 correspondence that discussed Greene’s potential matriculation at the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in Massachusetts, where she spent three years. Greene may have started working as a library assistant in the New York Public Library system around this time. In July 1900, she attended Amherst College’s Summer School of Library Economy, which led to a job at Princeton University’s library. 

While at Princeton, Junius Spencer Morgan introduced her to his uncle. Greene must have thoroughly impressed them, as, although virtually unknown, in 1905 she became the caretaker of J. P. Morgan’s collection. At the time, he was building a structure in Manhattan to contain it. Greene used her new position to cultivate expertise in everything worth collecting. As she grew the collection, she also grew her reputation through bold purchases and a shrewd eye. Armed with Morgan’s vast wealth, she routinely outbid her competitors. During the 1911 sale of printing press manufacturer Robert Hoe’s private collection, Greene set the collecting world abuzz by bidding a whopping $42,800 for English printer William Caxton’s 1485 edition of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur. Today, the Morgan possesses the third-largest collection of Caxton’s imprints in the world. 

J. P. Morgan’s investment of such power in a young woman was unusual for the time, especially if he were aware she was Black—historians don’t know if he was. His great faith in Greene speaks to her immense talent and innovative practices, such as inspecting material condition and quality, at a time when collectors were largely making purchases based on photographs. In addition to subsidizing trips that could take her overseas, Morgan paid Greene well. By 1913, she was earning about $10,000 a year, when the average household income was $3,900.

Greene became the inaugural director of the Morgan when it opened to the public in 1924. When she announced her intention to retire in 1948, the New York Times reported that her “wide range of interest in cultural treasures is reflected in the library’s fine paintings, its unusual selection of illuminated manuscripts, its rare volumes and letters, its etchings, stained glass and pottery.” The Times also praised Greene’s bibliographical work and interactions with researchers, which “enriched scholarship everywhere.” Ciallela noted that “her views on access to original books and manuscripts were pioneering at the time. She believed that collections should be open to researchers and enjoyed by the public in major exhibitions.”

Deborah Parker, author of the forthcoming Becoming Belle da Costa Greene (2024), explained why she was so successful: “Throughout her more than forty years at the Morgan, Greene showed agility and opportunism: she seized upon situations and improved them. She is a model for someone working in a fluid and emerging workplace—she changed when the workspace changed and, in the process, transformed it.”

The Morgan’s exhibition on Greene explores her life and highlights the acquisitions that she made. “We are proud of the sections that discuss her family history, particularly the role of her mother, Genevieve, in shaping her daughter’s identity, as well as a section that places Greene in the context of Black librarianship in the early twentieth century,” Ciallela said. “New research has led us to exciting objects that will be on display, including the earliest known photograph and letter of Belle Greene.”

A digital project in collaboration with Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies complements the exhibition with images and transcriptions of around 600 letters written from 1909 to 1949 between Greene and art historian Bernard Berenson. This cache is, according to Philip Palmer, co-curator of A Librarian’s Legacy, “one of the key sources for understanding her biography, particularly in the 1910s and ’20s when she cemented her international reputation as a librarian, curator, and force in the auction room.”

Parker elaborated that Berenson, whom she identified as the love of Greene’s life, “considered Greene one of the most vitalizing persons he had ever known. This vitality emerges in her letters. We need to listen to her voice and understand its inflections—not make her speak in predetermined ways.”