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Who was Albert Henry Wiggin?
He
was a banker born in 1868, Medfield, Mass., USA.
Considered somewhat of a Wunderkind when he became youngest vice president ever at Chase National Bank at 36, he had already helped to organise the Banker's Trust Company (1903) and had been vice-president of the National Park Bank in New York City for five years.
He climbed steadily in rank and influence, becoming president of Chase (1911); chairman (1917), then chairman of the governing board (1930), while serving on some 59 corporate boards. Under his reign, the Chase National Bank and its holdings, including the Mercantile Trust Company and the Chase Securities Corporation, grew significantly.
A Congressional probe (1933) into the company's holdings revealed that Chase (among others) had skirted laws prohibiting banks from operating as a trust and from handling securities in doing so through its affiliates. Wiggin personally was found to have used his “official and fiduciary position for private profit,” leading to an out-of-court settlement of a stockholder suit. He died in 1951.
Albert Wiggin retired from banking in December 1932. In his personal life, beginning in 1911 he started assembling a collection art prints, drawings, watercolors, and books. Among the French, British, and American works of art on paper that Wiggin acquired were prints by Henri Fantin-Latour, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, George Bellows, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Thomas Rowlandson, Jean-Louis Forain, Alphonse Legros, and many others. In 1941 he donated his collection of several thousand pieces to the Boston Public Library. Other works from his assemblage can be found at the New York Public Library and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
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