Jules Bache

Jules Bache
Born	(1861-11-09)November 9, 1861 New York City
Died	March 24, 1944(1944-03-24) (aged 82) Palm Beach, Florida
Nationality	American
Occupation	Banker
Spouse	Florence R. Scheftel ​ ​ (m. 1892)​
Children	Kathryn Bache Miller
Family	Gilbert Miller (son-in-law)
Signature

Jules Semon Bache (November 9, 1861 – March 24, 1944) was an American banker, art collector and philanthropist.

Early life

Jules Bache was born into a Jewish family^[1][2] in New York City.^[3] His father, Semon Bache [né Bach], emigrated to the United States from his native Nuremberg, Bavaria,^[4] settling in New York City, where he started the glassmaking firm Semon Bache & Company.^[5]

Career

In 1881, he started work as a cashier at Leopold Cahn & Co., a stockbrokerage firm founded by his uncle. In 1886, he was made a minority partner, and in 1892, he took full control of the business, renaming it J. S. Bache & Co. Jules Bache built the company into one of the top brokerage houses in the United States, outranked only by Merrill Lynch. In the process, he became an immensely wealthy individual, a patron of the arts, and a philanthropist.

During World War I, Jules Bache donated money to the American Field Service in France, and his wife was the honorary treasurer of the "War Babies' Cradle," a charity that provided aid for mothers and children in distress in war-torn Northern France and Belgium to provide them with food, clothing, heating fuel, and medical care.

In the 1920 presidential election, Bache was a presidential elector for Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.^[6]

Jules Bache was a shareholder of a number of prominent corporations and sat on the boards of directors of many of them. Among his personal holdings, Bache had sizeable interests in Canadian mining companies. His equity in these companies was held by his Bahamas-based corporation, which allowed him to legally avoid some of the high personal U.S. surtaxes, a fact for which he would be publicly criticized as a result of the Federal investigations during the 1930s into the causes of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Bache, however, believed that high taxation was a hindrance to economic growth and published a booklet titled "Release business from the slavery of taxation." A major shareholder in Dome Mines Limited, Bache served as company president from 1919 until 1942 and was Chairman of the Board at the time of his passing. After the brokerage firm of Dillon, Read & Co. acquired the Dodge Brothers Automobile Company in 1923, Jules Bache acquired a substantial position in Chrysler Corporation.

A supporter of American theatre and Broadway, Jules Bache helped found the New York branch of the Escholier Club in 1941.

The mausoleum of Jules Bache

Personal life and death

Bache married Florence R. Scheftel on May 23, 1892, and they had two daughters.^[7]

Jules Bache died in 1944 in Palm Beach, Florida, and was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. His tomb is a replica of Trajan's Kiosk at Philae. In 1927, his daughter, Kathryn Bache Miller, married the theatrical producer Gilbert Miller in Paris, France.^[8][9] His granddaughter, Muriel Bache Richards, married Francis Warren Pershing, the son of General John J. Pershing.^[10]

He told the Literary Digest his name was pronounced Baitch, "A rhyme with aitch." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)

Art collection

In addition to his high profile in the business world, Jules Bache would also become well known for his art collecting, which received much press attention in 1929 when he purchased the portrait of "Giuliano de Medici," then attributed to Raphael. He would acquire numerous other important works, including those by or attributed to Rembrandt, Titian (including The Bache Madonna), Albrecht Dürer, Diego Velázquez, Gerard David, Giovanni Bellini, and Sandro Botticelli, amongst others.

In 1937, he opened his magnificent art collection to the public. In 1943 the Second World War forced closure of his museum and the collection was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which had put its own masterworks into protective storage.^[11] In 1943, he donated some of his works to the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Bache was a major donor to the Department of Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[12]

At the time of his death in 1944, most of his picture collection, up until that time gifted to the Jules Bache Foundation, was given to the Museum; the remaining works of art from his estate at 814 Fifth Avenue were sold at auction.^[13]

image	title	painter	date	accession number	The Met url
	Madonna and Child with Saints	Giovanni Bellini		49.7.1	MET
	Madonna and Child	Workshop of Giovanni Bellini	1510	49.7.2	MET
	Portrait of a Young Man	Jacometto Veneziano		49.7.3	MET
	The Coronation of the Virgin	Follower of Botticelli	1500s	49.7.4	MET
	Madonna Lenti	Carlo Crivelli	1472	49.7.5	MET
	Portrait of a Woman	Master of the Nativity of Castello	1450s	49.7.6	MET
	Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro	Domenico Ghirlandaio	1488s	49.7.7	MET
	Descent from the Cross	Girolamo da Cremona		49.7.8	MET
	Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Angels	Filippo Lippi	1440s	49.7.9	MET
	Madonna and Child	Filippino Lippi	1483s	49.7.10	MET
	Rodolfo Gonzaga (1451–1495)	Style of Andrea Mantegna	1500s	49.7.11	MET
	Giuliano de' Medici (1479–1516), Duke of Nemours	Copy after Raphael	1600s	49.7.12	MET
	Madonna and Child	Luca Signorelli		49.7.13	MET
	Portrait of a Man	Lambert Sustris		49.7.14	MET
	Madonna and Child	Titian	1510	49.7.15	MET
	Venus and Adonis	Titian	1560	49.7.16	MET
	The Flight into Egypt	Cosimo Tura		49.7.17	MET
	Virgin and Child	Workshop of Dieric Bouts	1475	49.7.18	MET
	Portrait of a Carthusian	Petrus Christus	1446	49.7.19	MET
	The Nativity with Donors and Saints Jerome and Leonard	Gerard David		49.7.20a–c	MET
	The Rest on the Flight into Egypt	Gerard David	1513s	49.7.21	MET
	Virgin and Child	Workshop of Hans Memling	1490	49.7.22	MET
	Young Woman with a Pink	Hans Memling	1485	49.7.23	MET
	Portrait of a Man in a Turban	Netherlandish Painter	1460s	49.7.24	MET
	Anthony van Dyck self portrait (Metropolitan Museum of Art)	Anthony van Dyck	1620	49.7.25	MET
	Portrait of Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick	Anthony van Dyck	1634	49.7.26	MET
	Portrait of an Italian Woman	German painter	1600s	49.7.27	MET
	Portrait of a Man (Sir Ralph Sadler?)	Workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger	1535	49.7.28	MET
	Derick Berck of Cologne	Hans Holbein	1536	49.7.29	MET
	Portrait of a Young Woman	Workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger	1540	49.7.30	MET
	Edward VI (1537–1553), When Duke of Cornwall	Workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger	1545	49.7.31	MET
	Portrait of a Young Woman	an anonymous Netherlandish painter	1535	49.7.32	MET
	Portrait of Claes Duyst van Voorhout	Frans Hals	1638	49.7.33	MET
	Portrait of a Bearded Man with a Ruff	Frans Hals	1625	49.7.34	MET
	Portrait of Floris Soop	Rembrandt	1654	49.7.35	MET
	Man in a Red Cloak	Rembrandt	1650s	49.7.36	MET
	Christ with a Staff	Rembrandt	1661	49.7.37	MET
	The Curious	Gerard ter Borch	1660	49.7.38	MET
	Portrait of a Young Boy	Sébastien Bourdon	1700s	49.7.39	MET
	A Young Woman Reading	Han van Meegeren	1926s	49.7.40	MET
	Don Manuel Osorio de Zúñiga	Francisco de Goya	1787	49.7.41	MET
	Portrait of a Man	Diego Velázquez	1630s	49.7.42	MET
	María Teresa (1638–1683), Infanta of Spain	Diego Velázquez	1651	49.7.43	MET
	Charles de Cossé (1506–1563), Comte de Brissac	Corneille de Lyon	1600s	49.7.44	MET
	Portrait of a Man with a Black-Plumed Hat	Corneille de Lyon	1535	49.7.45	MET
	The Interrupted Sleep	François Boucher	1750	49.7.46	MET
	Marie Rinteau, called Mademoiselle de Verrières	François-Hubert Drouais	1761	49.7.47	MET
	Boy with a Black Spaniel	François-Hubert Drouais		49.7.48	MET
	The Love Letter	Jean-Honoré Fragonard	1770s	49.7.49	MET
	The Cascade	Jean-Honoré Fragonard		49.7.50	MET
	A Shaded Avenue	Jean-Honoré Fragonard		49.7.51	MET
	The Fair at Bezons	Jean-Baptiste Pater		49.7.52	MET
	Alexandre Charles Emmanuel de Crussol-Florensac (1743–1815)	Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun	1787	49.7.53	MET
	The French Comedians	Antoine Watteau		49.7.54	MET
	Queen Charlotte	Thomas Gainsborough		49.7.55	MET
	Anne Elizabeth Cholmley (1769–1788), Later Lady Mulgrave	Gainsborough Dupont		49.7.56	MET
	Lady Elizabeth Hamilton (1753–1797), Countess of Derby	George Romney		49.7.57	MET
	Henri d'Albret (1503–55), King of Navarre	enamels highlighted in The MET collection	1556	49.7.108	MET
	Jules Semon Bache	Jo Davidson	1936	49.7.120	MET

References

1. New York Social Diary: "Best Friends: Jewish Society in Old Palm Beach" 2008
2. The American Hebrew: "Jule S. Bache Operated On February 17, 1922
3. "Jules Bache". 20th Century American Leaders Database. Harvard University. Retrieved December 17, 2013.
4. "semon BACHE b. 1826 nuremberg,bavaria d. 1891 new york". www.neilpiwovar.com. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved February 1, 2015.
5. Hall, Henry (1895). America's Successful Men of Affairs: The city of New York. New York Tribune. p. 52. bache.
6. Proceedings of the Electoral College of the State of New York, 1921. Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company. 1921. p. 6.
7. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. XIV. James T. White & Company. 1910. pp. 263–264. Retrieved December 16, 2020 – via Google Books.
8. "Kathryn B. Miller, Philanthropist, 83". The New York Times. October 16, 1979.
9. "Miss Bache Weds Gilbert Miller". The New York Times. July 17, 1927.
10. "The General Attends a Wedding - His Son Marries Muriel Bache Richards". Time. May 2, 1938.
11. Anne Hilker. "The art of rivalry: The Jules S. Bache collection, its formation and its donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1919–44." Journal of the History of Collections, 36, Issue 2, July 2024: 319–338. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhad044
12. Finding aid for the Preston Remington records, 1925–1970, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 25 July 2014.
13. New York Herald Tribune, Sunday, April 1, 1945, p. 20 "Jules S. Bache Art Collection is Going on Sale: Works Not Donated to the Metropolitan Museum To Be Sold April 19, 20, 21." The auction was held at the Kende Galleries of Gimbel Brothers. The New York Times, Sunday, April 1, 1945 adds that 'oil paintings and terracotta statuary' were to be sold on April 25.