Nationality United States Name George Blumenthal Net worth $54 million (1937) | Occupation Banker Ethnicity Jewish Role Banker | |
Born 1858 Frankfurt am Main Spouse(s) Florence Meyer Blumenthal (m. 1898; died 1930)
Mary Clews (m. 1935) Died 1941, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States | ||
George Blumenthal (1858 – June 26, 1941) was a German-born banker who served as the head of the U.S branch of Lazard Frères.
Biography
Born to a German Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, George Blumenthal a foreign-exchange banker who had been sent to the United States by Speyer & Co., rose to prominence as the head of the U.S branch of Lazard Frères and was a partner of Lazard Frères in France. Blumenthal was president of the Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, where he donated $2mil and where the Blumenthal auditorium is named after him. He was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years as well as president of the American Hospital of Paris. He served as the seventh president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1934 until his death in 1941, where he gave $1mil and to which he bequeathed the Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco, a colonnaded Spanish Renaissance patio. He retired from Lazard in 1901, giving up his seat on the stock exchange, and returned as a partner in 1906. He returned to the stock exchange in 1916, purchasing a seat for $63,000. With J. P. Morgan the elder, he was one of five bankers who saved Grover Cleveland from giving up specie payments in 1896, with their $65,000,000 gold loans.
His niece, Katharine Graham, in her memoir Personal History, described her uncle as a "difficult man with a big ego." He and Florence also named the Blumenthal Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which contains rare and illustrated books, manuscripts, Haggadot, as a resource for scholarly research.
After the death of Florence Blumenthal, George Blumenthal married Mrs. Mary (Marion) Clews, the former Miss Mary Ann Payne of New York, and widow of James Clews, banker — in December 1935 at age 77. The two later endowed the George and Marion Blumenthal Research Scholarships awarded annually for demonstrated merit in community arts leadership by the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.