Julian de Cordova

de Cordova became a successful tea broker, wholesale merchant and investor. He lost his fortune in the financial panic of 1884, but managed to build it back up again.[1]

In 1893, he bought the Union Glass Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was its president until 1924, when it closed.[2]

Julian de Cordova was born in 1851, to Raphael Joshua de Cordova, a Jamaican merchant, and Fanny Blume Nathan, an Englishwoman.[1] They were wed three years earlier.

He attended Harvard University between 1880 and 1882.[2]

In 1876, de Cordova married Mary Elizabeth Dana, with whom he had one child: Julian Dana de Cordova, who was born on Christmas Day 1877.[3]

The family summered in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where in 1910 they remodeled their home of twenty-seven years to resemble a European castle.[1]

In 1930, de Cordova donated his home and 22 acres (8.9 ha) of land to the Town of Lincoln on the condition that a museum be founded upon his death. Although his collection of paintings was substantial, they were not altogether valuable. Their sale did help fund today's DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, however.[1]

de Cordova's cousin was Rudolph de Cordova, the Jamaican-born British writer and actor.

de Cordova died at Ring Sanatorium in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1945, aged 94.[1] He had been ill for some time.[2] He was interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, alongside his wife, who preceded him in death by twenty-three years, and son, who died the year after his mother.[1]