John Quinn

Collector, lawyer, and defender of the avant-garde, John Quinn was born in Tiffin, Ohio, on April 14, 1870. He was a second-generation Irish-American and the eldest son of a baker. A graduate of Georgetown University Law School and Harvard University, Quinn began working in New York as a lawyer in 1895. He opened his own firm in 1906.

Through his participation in local New York politics, Quinn became involved in Irish nationalist causes—corresponding with and donating to significant political and literary leaders of the movement. Through such correspondence, he developed a mutually beneficial relationship with members of the Yeats family, who helped him access intellectual and artistic circles in Ireland and England. Quinn arranged the first US tour of the Abbey Theatre, a project partly founded by W.B. Yeats. Yeats’s father, painter John Butler Yeats, decided to move to New York in 1907. Quinn supported him financially until his death in 1922 in exchange for the literary manuscripts that W.B. Yeats sent him. 

Through his contacts as a chief patron of the Irish literary scene, Quinn was able to acquire autographed manuscripts from the likes of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. With Pound’s encouragement, Quinn provided legal and financial aid to The Little Review, which first published the serialization of Joyce’s Ulysses. For Quinn’s patronage and assistance with publisher negotiations, Eliot gave him the original manuscript of The Waste Land, which included Pound’s editorial suggestions. 

Quinn’s tastes were not limited to the written word; he also collected artwork from a who’s who of premier artists and soon-to-be giants of the avant-garde—Vincent van Gogh, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau, to name a few. He also served as a lawyer for the Association for American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS). Quinn did not regularly display his collection, but the Armory Show was one notable exception. 

Quinn, along with other members of AAPS, opened the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York City. It was the first large-scale American exhibition of modern art, particularly from Europe—approximately 1,400 pieces were displayed. Several exhibitions since then celebrated the show’s success as a watershed moment in art history. 

John Quinn died at the age of 54 without an heir. In 1927, at an auction held in New York City, the bulk of his acquisitions were sold, scattered among an international pool of museums and collectors. The artworks that Quinn first acquired are now admired around the world in museums such as the MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée d'Orsay, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the Bridgestone Museum of Art. On April 4, 1958, Quinn’s niece sold the original manuscript of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library under conditions of strict secrecy; Eliot himself was not aware of the sale. The acquisition wasn’t announced until 1968—three years after Eliot’s own death.