John M. Crawford, Jr. papers (Ms.2011.014)

Biographical/Historical note

John M. Crawford Jr., a prominent collector of Oriental art and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He was the son of a manufacturer of oil-drilling equipment. Mr. Crawford graduated from Brown University in 1937. In 1941, Mr. Crawford went into publishing in Manhattan and began collecting books. He began collecting art in 1946. In 1962, when the Morgan Library exhibited his collection, Mr. Crawford noted that he was then the only such collector of calligraphy.

Mr. Crawford also collected fine books, including medieval manuscripts and bindings done by William Morris, the leader of the English crafts movement of the 19th century. In 1975, Mr. Crawford gave his Morris collection to the Morgan Library.

In 1981, Mr. Crawford gave 60 works, then estimated to be worth $18 million, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which considerably enhanced the quality of the museum's collection. Among the significant works were paintings from the Sung Dynasty, one of the highest periods of Chinese landscapes and flower paintings. In addition, he promised the museum the remainder of his collection, more than 200 works.

Scholars and art critics have described Mr. Crawford's collection as the largest and finest private assemblage of Chinese painting and calligraphy in the West. It has been compared with the collection formed by Charles Freer, which constitutes the Freer Gallery in Washington. Works from Mr. Crawford's collection have been exhibited in many museums, including the J. Pierpont Morgan Library and the Fogg Museum in Cambridge.

His legacy continues at Brown today through his bequest and the John M. Crawford, Jr. Book Fund. His generosity has helped to build collections of books and teaching materials that form the core of undergraduate study and graduate student training in the arts of East Asia at Brown. Among the Crawford Fund acquisitions, superb facsimiles of important Chinese paintings—like Zhao Mengfu’s revolutionary Autumn Colors, dated 1296 and 10 calligraphy notebooks.

Mr. Crawford was a former member of the board of trustees of Brown University, from which he had an honorary doctorate, and an associate of John Howard Benson, some of whose works he commissioned.

Mr. Crawford died of cardiac arrest on Wednesday, December 24, 1988 at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 75 years old.