Marquand Collection

In the late 1840s, after the sale of his family's jewelry business and store (which was renamed to Ball, Tompkins & Black), Marquand traveled to Europe where he met Henry Kirke Brown and other expatriate American sculptors in Rome.

[1] In 1889, he became the second president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[2] and made many significant gifts to the Metropolitan Museum,[3][4] including works by Filippo Lippi, Lucas van Leyden, Frans Hals, Anthony van Dyck, Rembrandt, Diego Velázquez, Thomas Gainsborough, John Trumbull and John Singer Sargent.

He was the most eager purchaser of a single newly found gem of antique art; he would chase the elusive thing with more energy than another, and therefore he secured the price.

He felt also the impossibility of understanding a branch of art, or a special manufacture, or mode of design, without having many pieces to represent and explain it, and so he bought largely along some chosen lines.

"[10]The sale of his collection brought $197,070 for 93 paintings (including A Reading from Homer by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema which sold for $30,300[a]),[12] $22,637 for "255 vases, jars, dishes, bowls, beakers, incense burners, water-vases, wine cups, and writer's water jars",[13] and $234,564 for rugs and tapestries, including a 15th or early 16th-century Persian rug that brought $38,000.