Photograph of Jacques Marchais (1887-1948), 1914

Jacques Marchais Coblentz was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1887. According to Marchais, her father John Coblentz chose the male name, ‘Jacques Marchais’ – a family name of importance to him before her birth, and did not change it to the feminine form of Jacqueline after she was born. Her father died when she was a small child. Jacques Marchais was a precocious child and her mother, Margaret Norman Coblentz, put her on the stage as a child elocutionist, as a way to support the family. Her acting career took her through the Midwest and then to Boston where she was briefly married to Brookings Montgomery and had three children. The marriage was short-lived and the children went to live with their paternal grandparents. With no means of support, Jacques Marchais moved to New York City in 1916 to resume her acting career. While in New York, she surrounded herself with a circle of friends that shared a common interest in art, spirituality and Buddhism.

In 1920, Jacques Marchais married Harry Klauber (1885-1948), a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur in the chemical business. Jacques and Harry moved to Staten Island in 1921, settled on Lighthouse Hill, and she began to collect Tibetan art. She became self-educated on Tibet, at a time when only a few major museums were beginning to collect Asian art. In 1938, she established an art gallery in Manhattan which specialized in the art of India and Tibet. Marchais would often keep the best pieces for herself and sell other objects as a means to continuously build her collection. She was committed to sharing her knowledge of Tibet with the world.