Creative Drive
The Drexels were not just patrons of the arts: the family also boasts musicians, painters, and writers. See some of their accomplishments below.
Jump to the following sections:
Fine arts
Theater
Music
Literature
Fine Arts
Francis Martin Drexel was a professional painter before his brokerage firm became a full-time enterprise, and many of his portraits can be found in the Drexel Founding Collection. Discover his paintings and read about his life in his own words. Francis is often credited with instilling in his children an appreciation for music, literature, and art.
His granddaughter Frances Drexel Paul was a talented artist, and one of her landscapes is held in the Drexel Founding Collection.
Theater
Cordelia Frances Biddle worked as an actress in addition to her work as a historian and author. She appeared on stage, directed by Tony Award winner Jerry Zaks in Albert Innaurato’s Gemini, and on the daytime drama One Life to Live.
Music
Francis A. Drexel was a skilled organist and had an instrument installed in his Rittenhouse home. He occasionally filled in for the organist at the Philadelphia Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul when needed. Sisters Frances Drexel Paul and Emilie Drexel Biddle were locally well-known pianists in high society.
In addition to his work with prominent New York museums, Joseph Wilhelm Drexel was enamored with music. He was a director of the New York Metropolitan Opera House and a president of the New York Philharmonic Society.
Literature
Several family members are published authors.
Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, Lady Decies, wrote a sensational tell-all about her marriage to Harry Smyes Lehr, considered the court jester to American high society, called King Lehr and the Gilded Age (1935).
Cordelia Drexel Biddle wrote the book My Philadelphia Father (1955) with Kyle Crichton about her father Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Sr., which inspired the play and Disney movie The Happiest Millionaire. Biddle, Sr. himself wrote a number of books, including The Madeira Islands (1896) and perhaps most notably Do or Die: A Supplementary Manual on Individual Combat (1937) detailing the techniques Biddle used in training U.S. Marines. Visit the Drexel University Archives to read the 1975 reissue of Do or Die.
Besides his work in public art administration, Livingston Ludlow Biddle, Jr. wrote four novels set in Philadelphia between 1950 and 1961, as well as Our Government and the Arts: A Perspective from the Inside, a history of the NEA published in 1988.
Cordelia Frances Biddle has also written many books both fiction and non-fiction. She wrote the biography, Saint Katharine: The Life of Katharine Drexel (2014), detailing the life of the socialite-turned-saint who was the cousin of her great-grandmother, Emilie Drexel Biddle. She has written the “Crossword Mystery” series with her now ex-husband, Steve Zettler, under the joint pseudonym Nero Blanc. Her nonfiction works are Biddle, Jackson, and a Nation in Turmoil. Her fiction works include Sins of Commission, The Actress, Without Fear, Deception’s Daughter, and The Conjurer. The novels are set during the early Victorian era in Philadelphia and explore women’s issues and the chasm between wealth and poverty. A prior novel, Beneath the Wind, examined colonialism during the Edwardian Age. More information can be found on her website.