[6] Sturges retired from "mercantile pursuits" in 1868 and left the business in the hands of Benjamin G. Arnold, the founding president of the Coffee Exchange in the 1880s.

[10] The group created the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts for Reed's collection, which eventually went to the New York Historical Society.

[11] Together, they had a house in New York City and a summer residence on Mill Plain Road in Fairfield, a Gothic Revival home designed in 1840 by English architect Joseph Collins Wells, today known as the Jonathan Sturges House (the property remains in the family).

[12][13] Mary and Jonathan were the parents of five children, including: Sturges died on November 28, 1874, at his residence, 40 East 36th Street in Manhattan.

[22] Through his eldest daughter, he was a grandfather of Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), a geologist, paleontologist, and eugenist who served as president of the American Museum of Natural History,[23] and married writer Lucretia Thatcher Perry,[24] daughter of Brigadier General Alexander James Perry and sister of Josephine Adams Perry (who married Junius Spencer Morgan II);[25] and William Church Osborn (1862–1951),[26] who served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[27] and married philanthropist and social reformer Alice Clinton Hoadley Dodge, a daughter of William E. Dodge Jr.[28] His grandson, William Church Osborn, who inherited Sturges' View at Amalfi, Bay of Salerno, from his grandmother, donated the painting by George Loring Brown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1903 (of which Sturges was active in establishing[5]),[29] as well as the 1846 The Flower Girl by Charles Cromwell Ingham, in 1902.