James Loeb

James Loeb was born August 6, 1867, in New York City, the son of Solomon and Betty (Gallenberg) Loeb. Solomon was a partner and founder of the banking firm of Kuhn Loeb & Company. Betty, the daughter of a professional musician, loved music and learning and instilled these interests in her children through diverse lessons and family musical events like evening chamber music concerts at home.

Entering Harvard College in 1884, James Loeb concentrated in Greek and Latin. He was also involved in music at Harvard as vice president of the Pierian Sodality, Harvard’s music club and orchestra. His fellow students remembered his musical gifts: “How well some of us remember afternoons in his room when he entertained us with his cello, played with a sympathy and skill rarely attained by an amateur,” wrote one. On graduation, he received an offer through his teacher and friend Charles Eliot Norton to study Egyptology in Paris and London.

Instead, he acceded to his father’s wish, entering Kuhn Loeb & Company in 1888 and becoming a partner in January 1894. The years in New York City were full of heavy business obligations and civic involvement. In the winter of 1891 a severe illness (possibly depression) obliged him to give up business and he spent the summer traveling in Scandinavia, returning to banking again only until January 1, 1902, when he retired because of renewed health problems. This latest breakdown in his health he attributed to overwork in the banking business, amateur politics, and music. He retired to a quieter place, his farm at Shrewsbury, New Jersey, moving to Germany in 1905, where he stayed (except for a period during World War I) until his death in 1933.

His philanthropy in the classics and the arts began before this retirement and continued throughout his lifetime. His efforts to make classical knowledge more accessible are best illustrated in the Loeb Classical Library, which made classical writers available in a format that anyone can enjoy. On March 13, 1925, he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Cambridge. The Public Orator praised his work: “Our guest has given Paradise back to us all by furnishing, both for the learned and the unlearned, Greek and Latin literature, well edited, beautifully translated, and distinguished by all that the best skill and printing and typography can accomplish.” He also left a large endowment to Harvard for the Classics Department, became a trustee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, took great interest in the excavations undertaken by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Archaeological Institute of America, and donated to the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich his collection of bronzes and vases of the classical period.

His support of the arts moved in several directions. His own interest in music led him to contribute a large sum to found in New York the American Institute of Musical Art (later The Juilliard School), making it the first endowed music school in the country and allowing it to offer music instruction at a nominal fee. He also helped bail out the Philharmonic Society of New York in the early 1900s and donated money for the Harvard Music Department’s building and concert hall, Paine Hall.

Archival photo: James Loeb working at his desk

In a preface included in early editions of the Loeb Classical Library, James Loeb explains why he felt it was important to focus so much of his philanthropy in art, music, and classical knowledge:

“In an age when the Humanities are being neglected more perhaps than at any time since the Middle Ages, and when men’s minds are turning more than ever before to the practical and the material, it does not suffice to make pleas, however eloquent and convincing, for the safeguarding and further enjoyment of our greatest heritage from the past. Means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life.”

By 1905 Loeb had moved to Munich, living quietly and studying. In alumni notes he refers to himself as “an idler who keeps busy, spending time with the interests which are dearest to me: Art, Literature and Music.” His closer study of classical archaeology and literature during this time led him to publish several things, including a translation into English of Couat’s Alexandrian Poetry under the First Three Ptolemies; Decharme’s Euripides and the Spirit of His Dramas; and catalogs of his collection of ancient bronzes and pottery.

It was during this time in Munich that Loeb’s enormous interest in and support of medical and psychiatric institutions became evident. In the early 1900s he stayed for some time with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, who recommended him to Emil Kraepelin in Munich. His association with Kraepelin led to the founding of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich. This German Research Institute for Psychiatry received the largest combined benefaction from Loeb: one million marks to establish it, further gifts until his death, and one million dollars at his death. Loeb also supported other medical institutions, including the gift of a 60-bed hospital in Murnau and the establishment of the Solomon and Betty Loeb Home for Convalescents in White Plains, New York.

James Loeb suffered another severe breakdown in 1917, recovering in 1921. The year of his recovery, he married Marie Antonie Hambueschen—a widow with two sons and the faithful nurse who had cared for him for so long. In the same year, he moved permanently to his country estate, Hochried, at Murnau near Oberammergau, and died there on May 27, 1933, just four months after the death of his wife. An editorial in the New York Times read: “It seems not too much to say that James Loeb was a restorer of the humanities, a reviver of learning, a continuer in his way of the tradition of the Renaissance.” A niece remembered him as “the most vivid, brilliant personality. As handsome as a Greek god, he charmed everyone, was an excellent scholar, a fine musician and an esthete in the best sense of the word.”

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/loeb/founder.html accessed 8/23/2017

Loeb, James (6 Aug. 1867-27 May 1933), philanthropist and classicist, was born in New York City, the son of Solomon Loeb, a banker, and Betty Gallenberg. He was the brother-in-law of Jacob H. Schiff and Paul M. Warburg, whose brother was the art historian Aby Warburg. Loeb learned Greek and Latin at Julius Sachs's Collegiate Institute in New York and earned his A.B. at Harvard in 1888, where his most influential teachers were the classical scholar John Williams White and the art historian Charles Eliot Norton. His courses in business and economics he later dismissed as wasted time; he was set on a career in classics. Norton candidly advised him that a university career in classics was not open to a Jew. In spite of this humiliating disappointment, Loeb became the greatest benefactor of classics in America and particularly at Harvard.

Upon graduation he joined his father's investment banking firm, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., becoming a partner, not unexpectedly, in 1894. The work was never congenial. He retired in 1901 to begin the career of a Maecenas. His practical business experience made his endowments secure. He instructed lawyers; he was not at their mercy. In 1902 he founded the Charles Eliot Norton Fellowship for a Harvard or Radcliffe student to attend the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. An accomplished cellist, Loeb founded and endowed in 1905 the Institute of Musical Art in New York, absorbed in 1926 by the Juilliard Musical Foundation.

For reasons that remain unclear, Loeb suffered a nervous breakdown in 1905 and (allegedly on the advice of Sigmund Freud) by 1906 was in Munich under the care of Emil Kraepelin. For the rest of his life Loeb was subject to recurrent depression. His gratitude to the psychiatric clinic at Munich was demonstrated by the considerable bequest he was to make to it. Also in 1906, the architect Carl Settler designed Loeb's estate "Hochried" at Murnau in Bavaria, where he would live as a recluse, devoting his remaining years to art, music, philanthropy, and scholarship, what he called "res dulciores et humaniores." He passed World War I in Germany. Between 1906 and 1931 he published his translations into English of four French scholarly books on Greek literature. In 1921 Loeb married Marie Antonie (Schmidt) Hambuechen, his nurse and the widow of his parents' physician.

In 1912, alarmed by the rising neglect of the Greek and Latin authors, Loeb, at the suggestion of the wealthy French Jewish scholar Solomon Reinach, provided the considerable capital to establish the Loeb Classical Library, which in his words was "to include all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature from the time of Homer to the Fall of Constantinople." Each volume would contain an authoritative text and facing English translation with introduction and minimal notes. Numerous American and English scholars contributed. Often the Americans did better: one need only recall H. W. Smyth's Aeschylus, William Abbott Oldfather's Epictetus, and Paul Shorey's Republic of Plato. Surely his most enduring memorial, the library has been a commercial and cultural success. Profits pour into the Harvard Classics Department annually and finance the prestigious Loeb Lectures and Loeb Classical Monographs. By 1990 there were 473 volumes, including numerous revised reprints.

Loeb received honorary degrees from Cambridge (1925) and Munich (1923), never from his alma mater. He left generous bequests to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (this eased purchase of the agora, the ancient marketplace of Athens, which became the most famous excavation in Europe), the Loeb Library, the Harvard Classics Department, and $1 million to the German Institute for Psychiatric Research. He endowed the Norton Lectureship for the Archaeological Institute of America (the organization of professional classical archaeologists). His magnificent collection of Greek vases, bronzes, jewelry and terra-cottas went to Munich, where today it may be seen in the Glyptothek.

Loeb was a shy, enigmatic, sensitive, modest aristocrat. In 1927 the city of Munich presented him with a gold medal that bore his portrait and the inscription: "vir hum. lacobus Loeb artium et literarum cultor fautor conservator pauperum patronus dignatatis honestae probitat. modestae exemplar." ("James Loeb, a humane man, who cultivated, encouraged and preserved arts and letters, a patron of the poor, an exemplar of honest worth and modest probity.") There could not be a finer or a more sincere epitaph. Loeb died in Murnau.

Bibliography

Loeb translated the following from French into English: Paul Decharme, Euripides and the Spirit of His Dramas (1906); Maurice Croiset, Aristophanes and the Political Parties at Athens (1909; repr. 1973); Philippe E. Legrand, The New Greek Comedy (1917); and Auguste Couat, Alexandrian Poetry under the First Three Ptolemies 324-222 B.C. (1931). The most revealing autobiographical document is a letter of Loeb published in F. W. Kelsey, ed., Latin and Greek in American Education (1911), pp. 211-17. Two letters of Charles Eliot Norton to Loeb are published in Sara Norton and M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton with Biographical Comment, vol. 2 (1913), pp. 375-76, 389-90. Other published sources for Loeb's life include William M. Calder III, "Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to James Loeb: Two Unpublished Letters," Illinois Classical Studies, vol. 2 (1977), pp. 315-32; Friedrich Wilhelm Hamdorf, James Loeb, Mäzen von Beruf (1983); James Loeb, Our Father: A Memorial (1929); and "The Loeb Classical Library: A Word about Its Purpose and Its Scope," in St. Augustine's Confessions with an English Translation by William Watts 1631, vol. 1 (1912), pp. i-vii; Paul Shorey, "The Loeb Classics," Harvard Graduates Magazine 36, no. 143 (1928): 333-43; Frieda Schiff Warburg, Reminiscences of a Long Life (1956), pp. 19-20. Other valuable sources of information are Ron Chernow, The Warbugs: A Family Saga (1993), and Max Hall, Harvard University Press: A History (1986). Obituaries are in the New York Times, 29 May 1933, and the London Times, 2 June 1933.

William M. Calder

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