The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 86

William Mackay Laffan
American, b. Ireland, 1848–1909
William Mackay Laffan was born in Dublin in 1848. By the
time he was twenty, he was working in San Francisco, eventually
becoming an editor for the Chronicle and the Bulletin. In 1870,
he moved to the East Coast, settling in Baltimore. There, he was
a reporter, and soon editor, for both the Daily Bulletin and the
Sunday Bulletin. He married Georginia Tompkins Radcliffe in
1872, daughter of a Washington, D.C. judge. Laffan then moved
to New York, taking a position as a passenger agent for the Long
Island Railroad and began writing for Scribner’s Monthly. Yet, he
was back in the newspaper business by 1877 when New York Sun
owner Charles Anderson Dana asked Laffan to join the staff as a
general writer and critic. Upon Dana’s death, Laffan, with the fi-
nancial backing of John Pierpont Morgan, purchased the Morning
Sun, and in 1902 Laffan became the Sun’s owner. A keen busi-
nessman and an excellent journalist, “a New York newspaper once
remarked of Laffan that ‘he never drove any man to drink, but he
drove many a man to the dictionary’” (O’Brien, 197–198).
William M. Laffan, Owner of The Sun, 1902–1909. Image
from Frank Michael O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, New York,
1833–1928. New York: D. Appleton, 1928.
Laffan was also an artist, dabbling in ceramics, painting, and
printmaking, and an art advisor to William and Henry Walters
of Baltimore and J. P. Morgan and Charles A. Dana of New York.
With a taste for Asian pottery, he penned the preface for Orien-
tal Ceramic Art, Illustrated by Examples from the Collection of W. T.
Walters (1897), and in 1907, Laffan and Stephen W. Bushell wrote
a Catalogue of the Morgan Collection of Chinese Porcelains. Over
time, Laffan, too, assembled a remarkable art collection. Upon
his death, he owned works by Tile Club member’s Boughton,
Frost, and Weir as well as Old Master paintings by German and
Italian masters Lucas Cranach and Fra Filippo Lippi; he also had
acquired a fine collection of Chinese, Japanese, and European
decorative arts and furniture.
REFERENCES:
Catalogue of the Ancient and Modern Paintings and Other Objects
of Art Collected by the Late William M. Laffan. New York: The
American Art Association, 1911.
Downs, Robert B., and Jane B. Downs. Journalists of the United
States: Biographical Sketches of Print and Broadcast News
Shapers from the Late 17th Century to the Present. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Co., 1992.
Johnston, William R. William and Henry Walters, The Reticent
Collectors. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press in
association with the Walters Art Museum, 1999.
O’Brien, Frank Michael. The Story of the Sun. New York, 1833-
1928. New York: D. Appleton, 1928.
“Two Contrasting Personalities” and “Obituary: William M.
Laffan.” American Art News 3, no. 19 (February 19, 1910): 4.
80 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting