Julius Bache was born November 9, 1861, to a Jewish family in New York City. His father, a native of Fürth, Bavaria, had emigrated to the United States in the 1840's and founded what was to become one of the country's leading firms dealing in quality mirrors and glass fabrication.
Jules Bache was educated at Charlier Institute in New York City and in Frankfurt, Germany, and supplemented his studies in Europe by extensive travel.
Upon his return to the United States, he entered his father's firm as a submanager, but left in 1880 to become a cashier in his uncle's New York brokerage house of Leopold Cahn & Company. He was promoted to treasurer in 1881, admitted to partnership in 1886, and became head of the firm in 1892, at which time its name was changed to J. S. Bache & Company. Shortly after Bache had become a partner in Leopold Cahn & Company, the governing committee of the New York Stock Exchange suspended the firm from trading for one year for splitting commissions. In 1893 J. S. Bache & Company was tried on a similar charge, and although the committee delivered a verdict of "not proven, " Bache sold his seat on the exchange. Yet the firm prospered. It financed numerous large enterprises, handling the reorganization of the American Spirits Manufacturing Company (1895), the Glucose Sugar Refining Company (1897), the Distilling and Cattle Feeding Company (1905), popularly known as the "Whiskey Trust, " and the Cosmopolitan Fire Insurance Company (1906). At the same time Bache expanded rapidly into the branch brokerage business. An innovative banker, he was notably successful in tapping the middle-class market.
By 1905, with branch offices in Albany, Troy, Philadelphia, Rochester, Newark, Montreal, and Liverpool, England, J. S. Bache & Company had one of the most extensive private wire systems in the United States. It several times handled more than 200, 000 shares in a single day. Continuing to expand after World War I, by 1945 it had thirty-seven branches and more than 800 employees. Among his other business activities, Bache was especially active in the Chrysler Corporation, of which he was a vice-president from 1929 to 1943, and in Dome Mines, Ltd. , of which he was president from 1918 to 1943 and chairman of the board from 1943 until his death.
Bache's career as an art collector paralleled his success on Wall Street. It began largely through the influence of two friends - the investment bankers Philip Lehman and George Blumenthal - who were then forming their own collections. Bache started with decorative arts, but though his collection eventually included excellent examples of medieval enamels, early English and French silver, French eighteenth-century furniture, and sculpture, he turned his main interest to painting. Between 1919 and 1929 he acquired one of the greatest collections of old masters ever formed in this country. The initial purchases were Rembrandt's "Young Man in a Red Cloak" and "Le Billet Doux" by Jean Fragonard. In 1924 he acquired Van Dyck's magnificent "Portrait of the Artist, " but the source of the purchase was perhaps more significant than the object, for with this transaction Bache entered into a relationship, both personal and commercial, with one of history's great art dealers, Joseph Duveen. Of his later acquisitions, which included works by Bellini, Botticelli, Crivelli, Raphael, Titian, Holbein, Hals, Vermeer, Goya, Velßzquez, Watteau, Gainsborough, and Reynolds, some three-fourths were purchased from Duveen, and Bache freely acknowledged the dealer as his mentor.
As Bache grew older, he became concerned about the possible dispersal of his paintings. Tentative negotiations in 1936 with the Metropolitan Museum of Art foundered on his insistence that the collection be kept intact in contiguous galleries and labeled as the Jules Bache Collection; and the next year he set up a museum in his own home. The Metropolitan Museum, however, ultimately agreed to his terms and five years after Bache's death came into formal possession of his collection - fifty-four paintings, twenty pieces of sculpture, nine enamels, five pieces of furniture, eighteen pieces of silver, two tapestries, and four porcelains.
He died in Palm Beach, at the age of eighty-two of chronic nephritis and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City.
Bache is remembered as a major donor to the Department of Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time of his death in 1944, most of his picture collection – up to that time gifted to the Jules Bache Foundation, was given to the Museum; the remaining works of art from his estate from his house at 814 Fifth Avenue were sold at auction.
Although of Jewish descent, he was an Episcopalian in religion.
A man of definite opinions and quick decisions, tending to abruptness in his youth but mellowing with age, Jules Bache had an engaging personality, a zest for life, and a distinguished appearance.
On May 23, 1892, he married Florence Rosalee Scheftel, daughter of a wealthy leather merchant of New York City. They had two daughters, Hazel Joy and Kathryn King. His wife divorced him in Paris on August 11, 1925, for desertion.
