committeewoman philanthropist patroness of art
Abby Greene Aldrich Rockefeller was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the second of three daughters and third of eight children of Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich and Abby (Chapman) Aldrich. The warm family environment of her childhood was dominated by her father, a self-made businessman who later became an influential United States senator.
She was educated by a private teacher at home and then attended Miss Abbott's School in Providence, graduating in 1893. As a debutante, she traveled frequently in the United States and Europe, often accompanying her father, who stimulated her interests in art collecting and public affairs.
She managed the family's nine-story house in New York City and homes at Pocantico Hills, New York, and Seal Harbor, Maine. She was a prominent committeewoman and organizer in various social welfare causes. Among her most important affiliations were the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the Girl Scouts, and the American Red Cross. Notable projects under her leadership included planning and organizing a modelhome and community-center project for Standard Oil employees in New Jersey, helping to build and furnish International House near Columbia University, and sparking the housing and community service efforts of the YWCA during World War I. Her projects were characterized by the union of social and aesthetic concerns. The model home, for example, was designed to be both attractive and economical and was coupled with such services as a baby clinic and organized social activities. She lent energy and prestige to carefully selected, and not always popular, causes; the improvement of working conditions for women, the defense of civil liberties for minority groups, the legitimacy of birth control within marriage, and the rehabilitation of war veterans. Although reared as a Congregationalist, some of her activities were extensions of her membership in the Park Avenue Baptist Church, which she joined after her marriage. Her most notable public role was that of a patroness of art. With her husband, she participated in planning the restoration of colonial Williamsburg, and she initiated the unique collection of American folk art later housed in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Collection there. She developed a personal art collection, mainly of drawings and watercolors, purchased almost entirely with her own funds. This collection began with works of European and Chinese art but after 1920 was extended to American artists. The collection included works by Renoir, Cuzanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Toulouse-Lautrec among Europeans; the Mexicans Orozco and Rivera; and the Americans Bellows, Sloan, and Weber. In addition, she commissioned works by American artists--for instance, Charles Sheeler and Ben Shahn. Most of this collection was given to colleges and, more important, to the Museum of Modern Art. Mrs. Rockefeller's central role in the founding (in 1929) and early history of the Museum of Modern Art made her one of the small number of creators of a new cultural institution, the patronage museum. Unlike traditional art museums, patronage museums aim to stimulate and justify investment in the works of living artists. Helping to form the committee to organize the museum, she worked to develop the institution in collaboration with, among others, Lizzie P. Bliss, Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Frank Crowninshield, A. Conger Goodyear, Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan, and Paul Sachs; she served as its treasurer, first vice-president, and vicechairman of the board. With her son Nelson, she set up an unrestricted purchase fund. Moreover, she donated more than 2, 000 art objects from her personal collection to the museum, including some 190 paintings and 1, 600 prints. In the last years of her life, she spent considerable time with her seventeen grandchildren and in travel for pleasure and health.
Although reared as a Congregationalist, some of her activities were extensions of her membership in the Park Avenue Baptist Church, which she joined after her marriage.
Quotations: In a revealing letter published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1920, she declared, "The rich are given what they are expected to want. . It may be flattering but it is not stimulating or wholesome" (Chase, p. 54).
member of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA),
sponsor of the the Girl Scouts,
sponsor of the American Red Cross
Her warmth, articulateness, scrupulousness, and vivid sense of detail are exemplified in her letters to her children and the extensive published correspondence with her sister Lucy.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller united concern for art and life in her philanthropic career. Like other wealthy Americans of her generation, many of them, not only of them, but also of the people of the United States, she was the union of social welfare and aesthetics as logical and necessary, the result of a sense of duty in which desires for sensory and spiritual satisfaction were unified and embodied in activities and institutions.
Abby Aldrich was married to John Davison Rockefeller, Jr. , son of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company, on October 9, 1901, following a long courtship begun when the younger Rockefeller was an undergraduate at Brown University. The marriage was a successful union of his reserved personality and her more impulsive and outgoing temperament. They had six children: Abigail, John Davison, Nelson Aldrich, Laurance Spelman, Winthrop, and David. Enormous wealth and efforts to spend it wisely conditioned Mrs. Rockefeller's life, both within and outside her family.
After several years of poor health, she suffered a heart attack and died in New York City, at the age of seventy-three.
