Background
William Riggs Henry was born on March 22, 1837 at Bowling Green, New York City, the son of Elisha Riggs, merchant and banker, sometime partner of George Peabody, by his second wife, Mary Ann Karrick.
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William Henry Riggs
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He was educated at the Bacon School in New York, and continued his training abroad at Sillig's Institute, Vevey, Switzerland, at the Technische Hochschule, Dresden, where he studied mining to enable him to take charge of his father's coal and iron property in the Alleghanies, and at the University of Heidelberg. At Sillig's school he was a fellow student of J. Pierpont Morgan, and they became devoted and lifelong friends. Both became ardent collectors, pursuing the hobbies begun during their student years.
Career
From about 1857, he made his home in Paris, where he was one of a group of enthusiastic armor collectors chief among whom was the Emperor Napoleon III.
In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Riggs moved his collection to a new home, in the rue Murillo near the Parc Monceau, which he had bought from Count de Nieuwerkerke, commissioner of fine arts under Napoleon III. Many of the finest pieces from his collection were exhibited at the Trocadero in 1878 at the Exposition Universelle Internationale at Paris in 1889, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.
In 1913 he made his first visit in forty-three years to his native city, to supervise the installation of his armor and art collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In choosing the New York museum as the permanent home for his collection he had been influenced by his friend, J. Pierpont Morgan, who was then president of the Museum, of which Riggs himself, who was, like Morgan, one of the first great American collectors of objects of art, had served as vice-president from 1870 to 1874.
When he announced his great gift to the Museum he pointed out that his purpose in forming the collection had been "the education of the American public in a branch of European art which was little known or appreciated in our country". In addition to his main collection, he had assembled a notable collection of portraits of men in armor, wall hangings, stained glass, and furniture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
In 1917 he sent to the Museum the armor of regal splendor ascribed to Jacques Gourdon de Genouillac, called Galiot, master of artillery of Louis XII and Francis I. Riggs's reminiscences of early collecting and of great collectors were an inspiration to all students who had the opportunity of knowing him. The armor sections of Violett-le-Duc's classic Dictionnaire Raisonné du Mobilier Français de l'Époque Carlovingienne . .. la Renaissance (1854 - 75) and of Victor Gay's Glossaire Archéologique du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance (1882 - 1928) were written in part in Riggs's gallery.
He was the preceptor in armor matters of Bashford Dean, founder and curator of the department of arms and armor at the Metropolitan Museum, and was thus indirectly responsible for the formation of Dean's great private collection, which is now exhibited as a memorial in a gallery adjacent to the Riggs Armor Hall. A portrait of Riggs at the age of thirty-three, by Ferdinand Humbert, hangs in the armor gallery of the Metropolitan.
Achievements
Connections
He never married.
