William Church Osborn

William Church Osborn (December 21, 1862 – January 3, 1951)

Early life Osborn was born in 1862 in Chicago. His older brother was Henry Fairfield Osborn, a paleontologist who served as president of the American Museum of Natural History for twenty-five years. and from Harvard Law School in 1889.

For fifty years, he served as the president or chairman of the board of the Children's Aid Society and was a trustee of Princeton University for almost forty years.

Art collection Osborn was an art collector who focused on impressionist, post-impressionist, and American art of the 1800s and 1900s. His personal collection included artworks by Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Édouard Manet. He also inherited works from his father's collection of American art, including paintings by his father's close friend Frederic Edwin Church,

Osborn served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1941 to 1947 and sat on its board of trustees for forty-five years. Alice was a daughter of William E. Dodge, Jr. and the younger sister of Grace Hoadley Dodge, William E. Dodge III, and Cleveland Hoadley Dodge. Together, they lived at 135 East 36th Street (which was owned by J.P. Morgan) in Murray Hill, Manhattan, and were the parents of:

Grace Dodge Osborn (b. 1887) Aileen Hoadley Osborn (1892–1979), who became an arts patron and who married Vanderbilt Webb in 1912. He was a son of Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, grandson of William Henry Vanderbilt and great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Earl Dodge Osborn (1893–1988), who founded the EDO Corporation, and donated 1,003 acres to New York, for an expansion of the Fahnstock Park. a founder of Scenic Hudson. where he had a larger summer estate in the town of Garrison, New York near his father's estate, known as Castle Rock, which was inherited by his elder brother Henry. After a funeral at the Brick Presbyterian Church on the Upper East Side (which was attended by John D. Rockefeller Jr., Archibald Roosevelt, Bayard Dodge, Henry Sturgis Morgan, Junius S. Morgan, Frederick H. Ecker, and John F. Curry among others), he was buried at Saint Philip's Church Cemetery in Garrison.

Honors and legacy In 1939, he received a gold medal from the National Institute of Social Sciences for "distinguished services to humanity." In 1942, he received an honorary LL.D. from his alma mater Princeton University as well as an honorary LL.D. from Columbia University in 1943.