Portrait of Edward S. Harkness
Painter: Frank Salisbury (1874-1962)
Medium: oil on canvas; signed and dated (London, 1936), lower left corner.
Salisbury depicts Edward S. Harkness (1874-1940), seated, wearing robes which appear to be associated with his honorary Degree of Laws from St Andrews University, Scotland (conferred 1926); the Harkness family crest is seen in the upper right (motto: “Trust in God”). Harkness was part of a late 19th and early 20th century wave of wealthy, American philanthropists that included Andrew Carnegie, John Pierpont Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Clay Frick, John D. Rockefeller and others. Harkness attended Yale College and Columbia Law School. He inherited his wealth from his father, Stephen Harkness, a harness-maker who invested in Standard Oil. Harkness’ mother, Anna M. Harkness, established The Commonwealth Fund in 1918, “to do something for the welfare of mankind” and Edward was installed as its first president. Among his known philanthropic recipients (many were given anonymously) were the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia, Yale, Harvard and St Andrews (Scotland) Universities, the excavation project at King Tut’s tomb, and the creation of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, (now Columbia University Irving Medical Center).
Harkness pledged money for an Eye Hospital at the Medical Center in 1933, which was constructed during the Depression and completed in 1931. Subsequent gifts from Harkness in 1936 and 1938 endowed a Director and two full-time ophthalmologists. The Institute was subsequently renamed after Edward S. Harkness.
Francis Owen Salisbury was an English artist who specialized in portraits and large canvases of historical and ceremonial events. He was known as "Britain's Painter Laureate," and his subjects included Franklin Roosevelt, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, and many others.
A photograph of the young E.S. Harkness, left. On the right, a photograph from the Library of Congress Collection, showing another copy of the painting in the Harkness residence on E. 75th Street in Manhattan, c. 1942 (currently the Commonwealth Fund offices). Another copy is present at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.