William B. Osgood Field

William Bradhurst Osgood Field. [Born] 1870. Amateur of everything.

This was a fabulous, jereboam of a man. He had family, wealth, and zest for life. He was scholar, connoisseur, sportsman, author, engineer, photographer. He was friendly, outgiving, and always simply kind.

He collected a library of 18,000 books, manuscripts and prints unrivaled in its riches of English and American nineteenth-century caricature and illustration, which he gave to the Harvard College library. His coin collection, an important one specializing in Massachusetts issues of the seventeenth century, he gave to the Numismatic Society in New York.

He played good games of billiards, tennis, curling and golf. He was president of the Grolier Club for a number of years. He spoke several languages fluently, travelled from Ceylon to Alaska, shot all kinds of game and did considerable fishing off the coast of Florida.

A six-foot-two healthy athlete, an expert shot and good horseman, he lived until he was seventy-five in practically continuous good health; but the last five years were hard.

He was generous to a fault and that statement, in his case, is not a cliché. He liked to help people, anonymously, and, by the same token, little was known of the many expeditions, scientific and other, that never would have been possible without his backing.

He had friends all over the world among the great and the lowly. He was a friend of Whistler, the Duc d’Orleans, the Prince of Wales who later was Edward VII, the Metternichs and no less of his guides in Montana and on the Gaspé and the humblest workmen.

I hope you have marked well what I have said of Bill Field: you are not likely to hear again of a man of his achievements. Income taxes will make such a man, however talented, impossible.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1949 Memorials