Jacob H. Lazarus (1822-1891)
Oil on canvas, 1890
Gift of the Partnership for New York City, Inc.
NYSM 2003.41.106

Grandson of fur trader John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), and part of the Astor mercantile dynasty, John Jacob Astor III was one of the wealthiest men of his generation in America. Through vast real estate holdings in New York City he was notable as a developer of the urban landscape and notorious as a parsimonious landlord. His philanthropic activities, however, included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Trinity Church, the Astor Library, and the Astor Pavilion of the New York Cancer Hospital.

Jacob Hart Lazarus was born in New York City and established a profitable career there as a portrait painter, having studied under Henry Inman. He was the paternal uncle of poet Emma Lazarus, whose sonnet “The New Colossus,” written in 1883, contained the now-iconic phrase “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”