(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
Adolph Lewisohn was a German-born American art collector, philanthropist, businessman and banker.
Background
Adolph Lewisohn was born on May 27, 1849 in Hamburg, Germany, the youngest of seven children--four boys, three girls--of Samuel and Julie (Nathan) Lewisohn. His mother died when he was six. His father remarried in 1862 and had four more sons. The Lewisohns were the descendants of a family of Dutch Jews who came to Germany from Holland in 1609. Their name, Levy, was later modified to Levysohn and then to Lewisohn. Samuel Lewisohn was a well-to-do merchant, a partner in a family importing business established in Hamburg in 1740, which dealt originally in bristles and feathers and later came to include horsehair, wool, and metals.
Education
The boy began to receive instructions in Hebrew at five. From six until fifteen he attended private schools, where he learned French and English to continue his education at the local Gymnasium.
Career
Lewisohn entered his family business on a part-time basis while at his studies. Between 1865 and 1867 he traveled on business in Germany and Switzerland. His father had in 1858 established a selling agency in New York, at first called Magnus & Israel, later renamed Lewisohn Brothers in 1866 when it was taken over by two of Adolph's brothers, Julius and Leonard. In the summer of 1867 Adolph persuaded his father to let him enter this New York branch. Julius subsequently returned to Europe, leaving the New York firm in the hands of Leonard and Adolph.
Carrying on at first in the family tradition, they imported ostrich feathers from Egypt and the Cape of Good Hope and wool from Russia, which they sold to carpet manufacturers. In the horsehair and bristle industries, they began to shift in the 1870's from European importation to American manufacture, contracting with the Armours and other Chicago packers for the purchase of pig-hair and bristles, hitherto discarded as waste in this country, and then preparing the hair for use in mattresses and furniture and the bristles for brushes. They bought an interest in the Pawtucket Hair-Cloth Company of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and with its proprietors, Daniel Littlefield and Henry B. Metcalf, founded the American Curled Hair Cloth Company. The profits from these various enterprises enabled them to develop the metal end of their business on a large scale.
In 1879 Lewisohn Brothers, until then merely traders in lead, zinc, and copper, were offered some copper mines in Montana. Adolph went out to Butte to look them over. He and Leonard formed the Montana Copper Company (later the Boston & Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company), with a capital of $75, 000, to purchase and develop various claims there. In addition to the Montana mines, they acquired mines in Tennessee, organized the Miami Copper Company in Arizona, and acted as agents for the sale of copper for other concerns. Recognizing the commercial future of electricity and the need of copper for conducting-wires, they built a number of electrolytic copper refineries, including one at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, at an initial cost of $1, 500, 000.
In 1887 they severed their connection with the Hamburg house, and two years later, deciding to concentrate on copper, they turned over the rest of their business to their half-brothers Philip and Albert. In 1898, to handle their sales, Adolph and Leonard, along with H. H. Rogers and William Rockefeller, organized the United Metals Selling Company with a capital of $5, 000, 000, a company which at one time sold fifty-five per cent of all the copper produced in the United States. In 1899 the two brothers and Rogers formed the American Smelting & Refining Company, a merger of eighteen leading smelting concerns, though two years later, after a bitter struggle, they lost control to the interests controlled by Meyer Guggenheim. In 1901 Leonard withdrew from Lewisohn Brothers in order to run his own affairs independently; he died in 1902. Of the two brothers, he had concerned himself largely with the initiation of projects and their financing, while Adolph, more cautious, was the business-getter who carried ideas into actual operation.
Between 1887 and 1910 Adolph visited Europe nearly every year to obtain copper contracts. He was the president of and a principal stockholder in the Tennessee Copper and Chemical Corporation, the Miami Copper Company, and the South American Gold & Platinum Company, which owned mines in Colombia; and he was the senior member of Adolph Lewisohn & Sons, a brokerage and investment house.
After 1916 he devoted himself increasingly to philanthropy, prison reform, and the cultivation of a taste for music and modern French paintings. Never in a financial class with Rogers and the Guggenheims, he nevertheless lived like a potentate. He bought the E. H. Harriman house on Fifth Avenue, with a private ballroom, and in it built an art gallery to house his Cézannes, Picassos, Monets, Degases, Gauguins, and Renoirs. He had other houses in Westchester County and Elberon, on the Jersey coast, and a vast camp in the Adirondacks on Upper Saranac Lake. In his latter decades, preceded by an army of servants and accompanied by a retinue of friends, relatives, barbers, and singing teachers, he rotated among these places, with time off for Saratoga and Palm Beach.
In his ninetieth year, his last, he danced in his ballroom, sang French, German, Italian, and Hebrew songs, and entertained on a tremendous scale. Never changing his way of life during the depression, he drew on his capital, and when he died, of a heart attack, at his Adirondacks camp he left only three million dollars--a fraction of what he once had had. He was buried from Temple Emanu-El in the Lewisohn mausoleum at Salem Fields Cemetery, Brooklyn.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
Religion
His father was orthodox in religion, but orthodoxy never sat well on Adolph and in his mature life he joined the Reform branch of the Jewish religion.
Membership
He was president of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society and of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor.
Personality
Lewisohn was a short, animated man with a shrewd, philosophical air, a humanitarian outlook, and an equable temper.
Connections
In 1878 Lewis married Emma M. Cahn of New York, by whom he had five children: Florence, Clara, Adele, Samuel Adolph, and Julius. After his wife's death in 1916 he began to turn his business interests over to his son Sam.