A Catalogue of the Collection of Persian Manuscripts: Including Also Some Turkish and Arabic, Presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from A Catalogue of the Collection of Persian Man...)
Excerpt from A Catalogue of the Collection of Persian Manuscripts: Including Also Some Turkish and Arabic, Presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The preparation of this catalogue has been a pleasant task during the past two years, though the appearance of the work has been considerably delayed by the many exactions of univer sity duties. The plan followed in describing the manuscripts was originally adopted in conference with Mr. Cochran while he was collecting them for his own library, and now that he has presented the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in order to make it accessible to the public, the plan then designed seems equally suitable for the purpose of the general exhibition of the collection.
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Alexander Smith Cochran was an American manufacturer, sportsman, and philanthropist. He served as the president and the director of Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet mills from 1902 to 1919.
Background
Alexander Smith Cochran was born on February 28, 1874 in Yonkers, New York, United States where his father, William Francis Cochran, owned an estate of some six hundred acres. His mother, Eva (Smith) Cochran, was the daughter of the founder of Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Company.
Education
Cochran attended St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire, and was graduated from Yale College in 1896. Some years after graduation, he told William Lyon Phelps that “the thing he missed most in his undergraduate days was good conversation”.
Career
For fourteen years Cochran devoted himself to the affairs of the carpet company which had made the fortunes of his family, serving as president from 1902 until 1910. Liberal policies won him the loyalty of his workmen. He shortened their hours of labor and inaugurated a system by which they received semi-annually a bonus of from five to fifteen per cent of their wages. After his resignation from the presidency, he served as a director of the company until 1919. He inherited great wealth from his parents and uncle, and newspaper writers used to refer to him as “the world’s most eligible bachelor. ”
Wealth and leisure enabled him to indulge a taste for travel and to pursue his interests as sportsman and collector. A journey through Persia, in 1907, bore fruit in a collection of illuminated manuscripts of Persian poetry, which he presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Distinction as a sportsman often brought his name before the public. In 1910 he sailed his schooner yacht Westward across the Atlantic, raced her at Cowes, and defeated the Kaiser’s Meteor for the Jubilee prize at Kiel. His yacht Vanitie, built to defend the America’s cup in 1914, did not race against the Shamrock, as he had hoped, for the war prevented the meeting.
Late in 1914, he volunteered to carry dispatches between the American embassies at London and Berlin, but on his first trip he was arrested at Bentheim and spent a night on the guard-room floor. Subsequently he turned his steam yacht Warrior over to the British navy, was commissioned commander in the Royal Naval Reserve in February 1916, and served as captain of the Warrior in West Indian waters and the North Atlantic. He died at Saranac Lake, New York, of pulmonary tuberculosis, which had threatened his life for many years.
He gave large sums for the founding of the Sprain Ridge Memorial Hospital, the Sherman Memorial Dispensary of Saint John’s Riverside Hospital, and the College of Preachers of the Washington Cathedral, to which he left a bequest of $1, 000, 000. His will provided for gifts of from $1, 000 to $10, 000 to employees of the Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Company; and he left a quarter of a million to Saint Paul’s School, Concord. Perhaps his most interesting monument is the Elizabethan Club at Yale, established in 1911 in accordance with ideas formulated by Cochran himself. He provided the club with a house, a generous endowment, and a library consisting of his own magnificent collection of rare editions in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. The club has been an unqualified success, and on every afternoon the portrait of Queen Elizabeth, which was part of the founder’s gift, looks down upon an animated company of undergraduate and faculty members, enjoying the sort of conversation that Alexander Cochran had missed in his own college days.
(Excerpt from A Catalogue of the Collection of Persian Man...)
Membership
Cochran was a member of the New York Yacht Club.
Personality
One of Cochran's classmates has described him as “a reserved, unassuming sort of chap, with a face that may strike you as cold until you see his smile generous but not to be imposed upon; very pleasant; conscientious; decisive; only moderately social; only moderately happy”.
Connections
Cochran was married in September 1920, to Mme. Ganna Walska, the Polish singer. They were divorced in 1922.