J. Horace Harding

James Horace Harding (July 13, 1863 – January 4, 1929) Among his siblings was sister Jessie Harding (wife of Alfred Hennen Morris), and brothers Edward Harding and William G. Harding, After his grandfather retired from publishing in 1859, his father became publisher and changed the paper's name to The Philadelphia Inquirer. His uncle, George Harding, became a patent lawyer and argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. His maternal grandparents were James Hankinson Hart and Catherine Louise (née Badger) Hart. and Charles S. Phillips. In 1919, he stepped down as senior partner and became a special partner. In 1938, Charles D. Barney & Co. and Edward B. Smith & Co. merged to form Smith, Barney & Co.

In November 1923, he succeeded Burns D. Caldwell (former president of Wells Fargo & Company) as chairman of the board of the American Express Company, having been closely associated with George C. Taylor during the founding of the company and being a member of the board of the executive committee ever since. They were the parents of four children:

Charles Barney Harding (1899–1979), who married Marion Choate, a daughter of Joseph H. Choate Jr. in 1921. His younger half-brother was Rupert Baring, 4th Baron Revelstoke. From 1932 until her death, she was the partner of Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty. Laura Barney Harding (1902–1994), a socialite and philanthropist who was a close friend of actress Katharine Hepburn. William Barclay Harding (1907–1967), who married Constance Fox, a granddaughter of Judge Morgan J. O'Brien, in 1929. They divorced in 1943 and he remarried to Mary Newbold (née Reed) Dodge.

Harding died of influenza on January 4, 1929, at 955 Fifth Avenue, his townhouse in Manhattan (later replaced by a Rosario Candela designed apartment building). After a funeral at St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue, he was buried at Saint Paul's Episcopal Churchyard in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. His widow died in 1935.

Art collection

Harding "was long interested in art and devoted considerable of his time to the work of the Frick collection," In 1912, the Hardings returned to New York from Liverpool aboard the Mauretania after touring Egypt with Frick. Frick, who was supposed to sail with them, relinquished his berth at the last moment and decided to stay in London where he purchased two Paolo Veronese canvases, Allegory of Virtue and Vice and Allegory of Wisdom and Strength, for which Frick paid Knoedler & Co $200,000.

They owned the Portrait of Mrs. Freeman Jr. by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Margaretta Henrietta, Lady Hepburn (wife of Sir George Buchan-Hepburn) by Sir Henry Raeburn, St. Paul by Doménikos Theotokópoulos (known as El Greco), and Miss Julia Mott by Thomas Gainsborough In 1916, Harding purchased the 1810 portrait of Victor Guye by Francisco de Goya. In 1941, this painting, and others from his collection were sold in 1941 by his children via Parke-Bernet. The Goya portrait was bought by William Nelson Cromwell for the National Gallery of Art.

In 1927, he commissioned Oswald Birley to make a portrait of President Plutarco Elías Calles of Mexico, which he presented to the Mexican government.

In 1917, he paid $100,000 for the construction of Harding Road, to connect Broad Street in Red Bank with Ridge Road in Rumson, in Monmouth County, New Jersey. He was also a member of the board of governors of the Long Branch Hospital since 1914.

In May 1929, four months after Harding's death, the road was named Horace Harding Boulevard in his honor. In 1939, the New York City Council proposed renaming Horace Harding Boulevard to Worlds Fair Boulevard due to the New York World's Fair, but Mayor Fiorello La Guardia refused to remove the name of his friend. Today, it is the section between Queens Boulevard and the Queens-Nassau county line of the Long Island Expressway and is known as New York State Route 25D.

He was also the namesake of the Horace Harding Hospital in Elmhurst, Queens (later renamed St. John's Hospital before it closed in March 2009) There is also a bas-relief bust of Harding on a three-sided parcel of land at the intersection of Harding Road and Ridge Road in Little Silver, near Thornton, Harding's summer home in Rumson, New Jersey.