(1854-1929)

Oil on Canvas, Signed lower right: Kronstrand 1902

The Union Club

In 1902, Swedish artist Bror Kronstand was commissioned by the union club to paint this portrait of its president at the time, banker Myron T. Herrick, who hasPpresident of the Society for Savings. Herrick went on to serve as governor of Ohio from 1904 to 1906 and was the only person ever to serve twice as U.S. ambassador to France, first from 1912 to 1914 under president William Howard Taft and later from 1921 to 1929 under presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. At the start of World War One, Myron Herrick stayed on as ambassador under president Woodrow Wilson until his replacement could be sent. He and his wife adamantly refused to leave Paris after the start of the war, even as the French government had done, a decision which made them heroes in the eyes of the people of France for ever.

Herrick later went on to become an international celebrity and spokesperson for America's arrival as a world power in 1927. As America's dashing ambassador to France, Herrick was the first person to greet Charles Lindbergh upon landing in Paris at the conclusion of his historic transatlantic flight. Taking the unsophisticated Lindbergh under his wing Herrick turned the aviator's feet into America's triumph, orchestrating a public relations phenomenon equal to the international excitement accompanying Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon in 1968. The heroics were great friends of the McKinley’s. Apparently president McKinley and his wife were on their way to Washington to visit the Herricks at their farm near Canton when McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901.