Samuel Gray Ward (1817-1907)

He was born in Portland, Maine. After graduating from Harvard (1836) he travelled throughout Europe returning to America in 1838. He contributed poems and art critiques to the transcendentalist journal The Dial and very quickly became much admired by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. In 1840, Ellery Channing published a book of his poems but they were not well received and from then on he focused his attention on banking to the deep disappointment of his fellow transcendentalists. He started his banking career with his future father-in-law, Jacob Barker, and then in 1853, with his brother, John, took over the Boston agency of Baring Brothers from their father. He first lived in Boston and then moved to New York City in 1862 where he co-founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1869, serving as a trustee from 1870 to 1889. In 1840, he married Anna Hazard Barker and they had four children. They lived in New York City and first summered at Land's End in Newport (later famous as the summer home of Edith Wharton) before building Oakwood in Lenox, Mass.