Nationality German
American Parents Solomon Loeb Role Banker | Name James Loeb Occupation Banker Education Harvard University | |
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Born August 6, 1867 ( 1867-08-06 ) Hamburg, Germany Died May 27, 1933, Munich, Germany | ||
Nachmittags Grüße aus der Villa James Loeb
For the 20th-century American politician and activist, see James I. Loeb
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James Loeb (; German: [løːp]; August 6, 1867 – May 27, 1933) was a German-born American banker, Hellenist and philanthropist.
Biography
James Loeb was the second born son of Solomon Loeb and Betty Loeb. He joined his father at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in 1888 and was made partner in 1894, but he retired from the bank in 1901 due to severe illnesses.
In memory of his former lecturer and friend Charles Eliot Norton, in 1907 Loeb created The Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship. In 1911 he founded and endowed the Loeb Classical Library, and founded the Institute of Musical Art, which later became part of the Juilliard School of Music. That year he also turned over his collection of Aretine pottery to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.
He donated a large amount of funds to what is now called the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, which helped his former psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin to establish and maintain the Institute in its early days. Nevertheless, presumably unknown to Loeb, Kraepelin held racist views about Jews, and his student who took over the Institute, Ernst Rudin, was a leading advocate of racial hygiene and forced sterilization or killing of psychiatric inpatients for which he was personally honoured by Adolf Hitler.
A large portion of his significant art collection he left to the Museum Antiker Kleinkunst in Munich (today the Staatliche Antikensammlungen) ("Sammlung James Loeb"). He was a member of the English Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.