John Graver Johnson (1841, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – April 13, 1917, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was an American corporate lawyer and art collector. The Philadelphia law firm that he founded in 1863 continues under the name Saul Ewing. His collection of nearly 1,300 paintings forms the core of early European works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Contents |
The son of a blacksmith, he attended Philadelphia public schools, and apprenticed in the law offices of Benjamin & Murray Rush. He was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in February 1863, and served briefly in the American Civil War. He had an extraordinary memory, reportedly memorizing Shakespeare plays as a youth, and reciting extended citations of law in the courtroom.[1]
He argued 168 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning in 1884, defending the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the American Tobacco Company, and the Northern Securities Company. He was counsel for J. P. Morgan & Company, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central Railroad, the Baldwin Locomotive Company, the United States Steel Corporation, the Amalgamated Copper Company, the American Distilleries Company, and many other corporations and banks.[2]
Johnson declined offers to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court from U.S. Presidents James Garfield and Grover Cleveland. U.S. President William McKinley unsuccessfully sought him to become U.S. Attorney General.[3]
In an April 15, 1917 obituary, The New York Times called him, "the greatest lawyer in the English-speaking world," and, "probably less known to the general public in proportion to his importance than any other man in the United States."[4]
Johnson amassed one of the finest art collections in the United States. Relying on his own judgment and study, he concentrated on early-Renaissance Italian primitives, Spanish, Flemish, and Dutch paintings. He also bought works by artists who were his contemporaries, including Eduard Charlemont, Mariano Fortuny, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, and James Whistler. He wrote a book about his annual trips to Europe: Sight-Seeing in Berlin and Holland among Pictures (1892).
In 1875, he married Ida Powel Morrell, a widow with three small children. They had no children together. He built a house at 506 South Broad Street, and later bought the adjacent house to exhibit his art collection.
In his Will, he left his collection to the City of Philadelphia with the provision that it continue to be exhibited at 510 South Broad Street. This arrangement lasted only until June 1933, when the collection was tranferred to the newly-built Philadelphia Museum of Art, supposedly on a "temporary" basis. Exhibited at PMA for more than 50 years as a separate collection, in the 1980s permission was granted for PMA to integrate Johnson's paintings into its full collection.[5]