The great works of art, rare printed books, manuscripts and paintings by Italian and Netherlandish masters that adorn Mr. Morgan’s opulent library, are not exactly hidden but scroll further down to discover some really rare gems – usually hidden from view – that were on show at the lower level. 
Thomas Gainsborough
Portrait of Caroline, 4th Duchess of Marlborough, ca. 1770
Inspired thirteen different English translations, printed in more than a hundred editions. This is the first edition in English, a legendary rarity. Why it is so rare, is hard to tell; perhaps the first copies were loved to death or the printing was curtailed by a miscalculation of the publisher. Only one other copy is recorded in an American library. The Morgan also has Heidi in French and German first editions, both in bindings with the same pictorial designs as these volumes.
To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic story “The Little Prince”, the Morgan presents five newly discovered drawings by the author as well as intimate memorabilia from his time in New York during the 1940s. The items belonged to the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), who met Saint-Exupéry at the very moment the French author-aviator was drafting what would become one of the world’s favorite books. Cornell kept a dossier of papers and fragments that served as echoes of their encounters—everything from a marked-up cocktail napkin to an unpublished sketch of the little prince perched at the edge of a rose-covered cliff. Cornell’s Saint-Exupéry dossier was acquired by the Morgan in 2014 and is now shown in its entirety, for the first time, in the Morgan’s lower level lobby gallery.
May 20th, 2018
The Humble Fabulist 