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Boston Brahmin

Ellen Day Hale, Brahmin Bohemian, Paints Like a Man

Ellen Day Hale received little recognition for her art during her lifetime, but she did win independence as a new kind of woman who rejected her traditional role.

‘June’ by Ellen Day Hale, courtesy National Museum of Women in the Arts

She was one of eight children of the famous Unitarian minister, Edward Everett Hale and Emily Baldwin Perkins.

Her father won literary renown for short stories like The Man Without A Country, and he served as chaplain of the U.S. Senate from 1904-1909. Ellen often helped him as hostess.

Ellen Day Hale

Born Feb. 11, 1855 in Worcester, Mass., Ellen Day Hale grew up in a family full of accomplished women, including her great aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. Writer and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman was her first cousin. Her brother, Philip Leslie Hale, was also an accomplished artist and art critic.

Though her family belonged to the Boston Brahmin caste, they didn’t have much money. Ellen would have to support herself with her work, not an easy task for a woman in late 19^th century Boston.

She studied painting in Boston and Philadelphia and then, like a thousand other Americans, went to Paris to study art. She studied female anatomy and mastered likenesses of the female form.

Self-Portrait, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Her self-portrait demonstrates her prowess, as well as the influence of French Impressionist Claude Manet.

The painting, which she began in 1884 at the age of 29, tells us a lot about the bold and unconventional Ellen Day Hale. Her bangs, for example, could have connoted promiscuity – or androgyny. Her bold gaze and her fashionable outfit suggest her willingness to push traditional boundaries.

Ellen Day Hale had an art teacher who criticized the central placement of her hands, suggesting she make them smaller and prettier. Ellen refused. When she brought the painting back to show in Boston, one critic said it demonstrated “a man’s strength in the treatment and handling of her subjects.”

Etching

An etching by Ellen Day Hale, ‘Willow Whistle’

Like her brother Philip, Ellen wrote about art. She authored a book, History of Art: A Study of the Lives of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Albrecht Dürer. Unlike her brother, she couldn’t support herself teaching, a profession that offered few opportunities for women.

In 1883, she met the artist Gabrielle de Veaux Clements and they became lifelong partners. Clements taught Hale how to etch while they traveled Europe. Ellen Day Hale saw the commercial possibilities of etching, and sold her images of the European countryside. Later, she and Clements sold etchings of their travels to California, Egypt and Palestine.

Morning News, 1905

They also made money decorating churches. Hale’s niece remembers how they did it:

If a church decoration was under way, Miss Clements and the other old maids might all work on it — painting great oranges, like burning orbs, high on the Tree of Life, or many-colored flowers in the Palestinian grass–while Aunt Nelly worked on the circle of radiance around the Child.

They returned to the United States and moved into a house together in Gloucester, Mass., where they maintained a Boston marriage.

Ellen Day Hale died on her 85^th birthday in 1940 in Brookline, Mass.

With thanks to Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 by Kirsten Swinth.

Images: The Willow Whistle, By Madeleinegb – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47425325; June By Madeleinegb – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47425245. This story was upudated in 2022.

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Fanny and Oliver, The Unlikely Pair Who Secured the Legacy of Walt Whitman

On July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman was first published – to widespread shock and awe. Today’s literary classic was 1855’s obscenity. Amid the furor over Walt Whitman’s explicit sexual imagery, two New England powerhouses conspired to make sure it was never forgotten.

Fanny Fern strongly defended Whitman’s collection of poems. Fern was not a force to be ignored. Born in Portland, Maine in 1811 as Sara Willis, she had plenty of grit. She fought her way out of the poverty that enveloped her after her first husband’s death.

Walt Whitman at 35

Fern became a widely read columnist in the New York Ledger, proving her brother wrong. He was a magazine publisher who rejected Fern’s writing as too provincial. For good measure, she published a best-selling roman-a-clef that pilloried her brother. Her main character ignored any responsibility to a struggling sister while actively working to inhibit her career.

So when Leaves of Grass created a hubbub, Fanny Fern couldn’t resist getting into the thick of it.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman published the book because of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem that called for a new voice to examine American culture and mores.

Leaves of Grass shocked proper society. Emerson praised it, but many others did not. According to some accounts, the New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier threw the book in the fire. Critics decried it as filth. They called Whitman a hack. One even hinted in print that Whitman was homosexual.

Walt Whitman was employed at the U.S. Department of Interior at the time of the initial publication. The Secretary of the Interior thought the work pornographic and summarily fired him. (Whitman would recover with another government job).

Unspeakably Delicious

All this noise focused Fanny Fern’s firepower on the topic in May of 1856:

Fanny Fern

“Leaves of Grass thou art unspeakably delicious,” she wrote. “Walt Whitman, the world needed a “Native American” of thorough, out and out breed—enamored of women not ladies, men not gentlemen; something beside a mere Catholic-hating Know-Nothing; it needed a man who dared speak out his strong, honest thoughts, in the face of pusillanimous, toadying, republican aristocracy; dictionary-men, hypocrites, cliques and creeds; it needed a large-hearted, untainted, self-reliant, fearless son of the Stars and Stripes, who disdains to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage …”

The praise from Fern and other critics helped give publishers the spine-stiffening they needed. They kept Leaves of Grass in print as Walt Whitman revised, expanded and reworked his masterpiece for decades.

Oliver Stevens

Thirty years later, Bostonian Oliver Stevens would give Leaves of Grass another needed boost – but in a very different way.

Stevens was the district attorney for Boston. He rose to prominence in 1875 in the trial of the notorious “belfry murder case.” Warren Avenue Church janitor Jim Piper had killed a young girl, Mabel Young, in the church belfry. The girl’s body and the baseball bat used to kill her were hidden in the belfry.

The case against Piper was a difficult one to prove and the attorney general, who usually prosecuted murders, was ill and unable to handle the case. Stevens, the young Suffolk County district attorney, stepped in. He masterfully procured a conviction that launched his 30-year career.

A fixture on Beacon Hill and his summer estate in North Andover, Stevens was part of a movement to clean up the out-of-control crime in Boston at the time. Liquor, prostitution and vice was severely squelched during his time.

Watch and Ward

Stevens worked closely with the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization formed in 1879 to reduce crime and immoral practices in Massachusetts. It would later change its name to the New England Watch and Ward Society and have a 100-year run as the morality watchdog in Massachusetts.

A who’s who of Brahmin society made up the group’s membership. In 1882 the group persuaded district attorney Stevens to intervene with the publisher and censor Leaves of Grass. So Stevens wrote to the publisher and condemned it as obscene. He insisted that the publisher remove the poems “A Woman Waits for Me” and “To a Common Prostitute.” He also demanded revisions to several other poems.

Whitman’s publisher, feeling the heat, asked the author to approve the changes. Whitman refused, and the publisher backed out of the project. But another publisher stepped in. The “Banned in Boston” label and controversy would step up sales, Whitman’s new publisher theorized. And that’s exactly what happened.

The title found new life, and the 1882 version went through five printings. By then, critics warmed to the work. Walt Whitman would continue to revise and republish it up to his death in 1892.

The book again received a boost when the government distributed it to troops serving in World War II as a celebration of the American way of life for which they fought.

This story about Walt Whitman was updated in 2022.

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The Spanish Sheep Craze That Forever Changed Vermont

In 1809, a man named William Jarvis sent a flock of Spanish sheep to America and altered the landscape and the economy of Vermont. The shipment of prized merino sheep eventually turned Vermont’s subsistence farmers into wealthy ranchers, fed the new woolen mills and deforested the landscape.

William Jarvis

William Jarvis was a Boston Brahmin who built a successful trading house dealing in European commodities. He got to know Lisbon, Portugal, well, and served as Thomas Jefferson’s consul to Portugal from 1802 to 1811.

Spanish Sheep

Jarvis discovered a secret closely guarded by the Spanish: Their merino sheep produced fine, thick wool that was soft, water-resistant and long-fibered.

Merino sheep

When Napoleon invaded Spain, Jarvis took advantage of the resulting chaos and sent thousands of merino sheep out of the country. He was, in a sense, a 19^th century version of Ben & Jerry’s.

He sent a staggering number of sheep to America. According to the Vermont Merino Sheep Breeders Association in 1879, 15,767 merino sheep arrived on the East Coast from Spain from 1810-11. Ships carrying the Spanish sheep arrived in Boston, New Haven, Portland, Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk. Jarvis even sent eight to Jefferson.

Weathersfield, Vt., around 1900

In 1811, Jarvis bought an estate in Weathersfield, Vt., near his relatives in Claremont, N.H. He brought thousands of sheep, along with Spanish shepherds and dogs to tend them. He evolved into a zealot for the merino sheep, giving speeches, lending money to farmers who wanted to raise them and buying an interest in a woolen mill in Quechee, Vt.

His timing was good. The local production of wool simply couldn’t supply the emerging woolen industry. Farmers had tried and failed to figure out how to improve the breed of sheep. Several others attempted to promote the Spanish sheep, but no one really paid attention.

Then came the economic crisis caused by the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Nonintercourse Act of 1809. Wool factories could no longer buy wool from Britain, and farmers could no longer sell their grain overseas.

A flock of Vermont merinos

Merino Mania

Merino mania then seized Northern New England, especially Vermont. Textile manufacturers paid farmers $2.00 for a pound of merino wool, while common wool sold for 37.5 cents a pound. Common sheep sold for $2, while Merino rams sold for as much as $1,500 each.

Farmers stopped growing wheat and grain and started raising the Spanish sheep. They cut down thousands of acres of trees because the sheep needed the land for grazing.

The craze subsided by 1823. Isaac Holmes wrote, in An Account of the United States of America, derived from actual observation, during a residence of four uears in that Republic; including Original communications,

The sheep or Merino mania has now subsided. Four or five years ago, the sum of 1500 dollars was paid for a ram of the Merino breed. One thousand dollars was a very common price for an animal which would not now sell for fifty.

Boom and Bust

But the Spanish sheep, now known as the Vermont Merino, was here to stay. By 1830, Merino sheep were Vermont’s principal livestock, and Weathersfield was one of the richest towns in New England. The character of the sheep changed, too. In 1812, the average fleece of a Vermont sheep was 6 percent of the animal’s weight. By 1844, the average fleece of a Vermont sheep – with all those Spanish genes — was 15 percent of its weight, and by 1865 it rose to 21 percent.

Over the next decades, sheep farmers were subject to booms and busts. Wool prices plummeted because of competition from huge farms in the western United States, Australia and Argentina. Protective tariffs on wool also declined. Prices fell from 57 cents a pound in 1835 to 25 cents in late 1840, and two-thirds of Vermont’s sheep were killed between 1846 and 1850. Many farmers went out of business.

There were nearly 4 million sheep in New England by 1840, but half as many by 1860.

Civil War

A second wave of Merino mania struck in the 1860s. Cotton was scarce and wool was needed for military uniforms. The sheep population doubled in some places. Some Vermont Merinos rams sold for as much as $5,000. A breeder named George Campbell took his prize Vermont Merinos to Hamburg, Germany, for an agricultural fair in 1863. He brought 12 sheep, the only Americans there, and they beat out 1,761 Merinos, some from the Royal French flock, for two first prizes and one second.

William Jarvis wasn’t alive to witness the second craze for Spanish sheep. He died in 1859 and was buried in Weathersfield. A merino sheep was inscribed on his tombstone.

This story about Spanish sheep last updated in 2023. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about the Guernsey cow and her passionate followers here.

Image of Merino ram: By Cgoodwin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7697403. Flock of merino sheep in snow By Pixture2016 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50266283.

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Nora Saltonstall to Her Dad in WWI: ‘I’m Staying in the Fight’

The day after her 24th birthday in war-torn France, Nora Saltonstall begged her Brahmin father to let her stay in Europe with her generation — the Lost Generation.

Nora Saltonstall in her Red Cross uniform.

Richard Middlecott Saltonstall, a well-to-do lawyer, wanted the second of his four children to come home from France during World War I. Nora had volunteered with the Red Cross in Paris a year earlier. She had moved up from housekeeper and secretary to chauffeur as part of a mobile hospital unit. Her brother Leverett had enlisted in the U.S. Army and also served in France.

Nora Saltonstall

She was having the time of her life in France. Even the death of a maid from the Spanish flu epidemic created an opportunity for an adventure:

The Saltonstall siblings would survive World War I. Nora Saltonstall would earn the Croix de Guerre, but she would die of typhoid at the age of 24 while on a trip to the West Coast. Leverett would have a successful political career as U.S. senator from Massachusetts and governor of the state.

On Oct. 20, 1918, Nora Saltonstall wrote a letter to her father, who she addressed as “Pa.” She’d written him once about staying, but now she had new information. Leverett’s unit was on the move. “Surely you would not want me to come home if I could be of any use to him over here,” she wrote.

Setting that reason aside I feel as if I were just coming into my usefulness & that now having learned the ropes I am far more valuable than a year ago. Anyway the war will probably be over soon so let’s not worry for a little while yet. Do you mind very much my staying?

Belonging

If you knew how much I am getting from this Experience I am sure you would let me finish it out. If I had not come over I would have felt not to have belonged to this generation & would have felt all my life as if there were something lacking to make me on a level with all the up & coming crowd of my own age & thereabouts. I have to admit that there is a lot of fun combined to the work — Simple sort of fun in which Everyone joins because we are all playing the same game & we all look at things in the same way.

Nora Saltonstall

There is much less worry over here because you are near Enough to action to get the result of all the worries of all those behind the lines. It is much more pleasant to receive orders, [&?] [than?] To do what you are told without thinking much one way or the other than have to decide yourself upon the move. Even at this moment we are awaiting orders & are hoping for a big move forward.

Advancing has none of the Excitement of retreat because you can take your time, which we certainly have to do, because the country is so wrecked that it is no Easy job to install a hospital — no water, buildings without windows & roofs etc. — just like the hundreds of pictures you have seen for the last four years.

The Flu Pandemic

Nora reported to her father that they’d had some “gripe” — meaning “grippe,” the colloquial term for influenza, which killed millions during World War I.

“We have had some gripe here but I should not say as badly as at home,” she wrote. “We had a maid die of it & one or two of the others have been sick but not dangerously so, & there has really been no general contagion.”

The maid had a military funeral & I was responsible for getting some flowers. I never knew before what high wire fences I could climb — we looted freely & might Easily have been court martialed for our behavior but the final result was worth it, for we made a large wreath of ivy & roses, a bouquet & wreath of dahlias & some white shrubbery & a cross of roses & ivy — Pretty good for this season in the pouring rain, don’t you think so?

Leverett Saltonstall, later

You need not worry too much over my nursing because we are short chauffeurs just now so that I cannot leave that service. I am not sure whether you would approve of my doing that work either because it is decidedly unladylike. One cannot stand on ceremony when it comes to oiling & greasing Fiat 1 1/2 ton trucks, changing tires & doing all the rest of it. I am clean once a day & that is immediately after my bath in the rubber foot tub — the rest of the time I belong in the stable. I have developed a most enormous muscle in my right arm & I am really rather ashamed of it because it literally stands out.

I’ll have to try to direct it into a tennis stroke after the war.

Much love from

Nora

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Blueblood Nora Saltonstall Writes From the Western Front

After nine months on the Western Front during World War I, Boston blueblood Nora Saltonstall was fed up with housekeeping and glad to take the less responsible — but more exciting– job of chauffeur.

Nora, 23, was a volunteer with the American Red Cross as assistant to Mrs. Charles Daly, head of a mobile hospital unit attached to the French army. As the daughter of a Boston Brahmin family, she loved doing her part for the war.

Leverett Saltonstall, Nora’s older brother serving in the 301st Field Artillery unit of the U.S. Army as a lieutenant. Leverett and Nora Saltonstall would survive World War I. Nora Saltonstall would earn the Croix de Guerre, but she would die of typhoid at the age of 24 while on a trip to the West Coast. Leverett would have a successful political career as U.S. senator from Massachusetts and governor of the state.

Blueblood Nora Saltonstall before the war

Blueblood Nora Saltonstall Writes

On July 26, 1918, Nora wrote to her sister Muriel:

Dear Muriel,

I just got your letter of June 30th with the photos — thanks Ever so much. I think the family group at the Farm very nice. I should like to connect with Leverett & if so we will have to have our picture taken together. If he could only get a few days off he might come to visit us here & I am sure that it would amuse him tremendously to see our unit. I am now learning to run the camion. I went to Paris with Mrs. Daly & Agnes this week & drove both ways. Last night we came out after supper & it was great fun driving in the dark. (We never use back to top lights for fear of showing up the roads.)

Leverett Saltonstall, much later in life

She then tells her sister about having an orangeade with friends she ran into in Paris. And she sounds a theme about a nursing shortage that resonates more than a century later.

The best luck was seeing Rose Peabody who has been having a thrilling time.  I had to laugh at her because she was wearing a French blue tamoshanter with her goggles pushed up over it which made her look very business like & straight from the front. The foolish part of it is that she cannot technically belong to her unit in the American army as a nurse — therefore she does home service work, writing to families etc. Lately when nurses were so badly needed of course she helped out. It is very stupid of the American army not to allow aides — they are very short of nurses & then in the big moments they are obliged to call in absolutely untrained women. Urge Everyone you know to take up nursing — aides are sure to be used before long & the more partially trained the better.

No News

Though Nora was right in the middle of the war, she complained she had no news about it.

….Also I wish you would always write me the news about who is abroad, who is killed, wounded etc. I never hear a word here, & I only just learnt the other day about Pete Sortwell and Bill Willets: it is too bad. You are wonderful about writing me & I hope you continue to be because my friends except for Mary Hunnewell are very bad (you might remind them that I still exist).

I don’t know whether I told you that I am changing my job in the unit & that very shortly a Mrs. Konnin (sister of Mrs. Richard Laurence) is coming to look after the housekeeping & the material. I am changing into a regular chauffeur. I like that better because the managing job is growing so large that to do it well you ought to stay always at home — it came down to getting another person for either one place or the other & I chose the chauffeuring which has more action & variety. It may not be such a Swell job but I am extremely glad to be finished with the house keeping. It was interesting looking after the material but as the chauffeurs always help I expect to do that just about as much as before. Mrs. Daly has a lot of new ideas & we are planning for great things in the future — as soon as they develop into reality I will tell you about them. One great addition to our unit is the advent of a rolling kitchen, a trailer, which is being made for us. We will then be completely independent with our tents, cots, folding tables for Eating etc. We have our own cars so that at a moment’s notice we can pick up stakes & move along. If this good news keeps up we hope to see ourselves advancing again; it is about time, don’t you think? Our hospital has Especially requested to take Americans on account of us — we like having them & of course they like coming to a place where they can be nursed by English Speaking women; I should think it would make a lot of difference.

Bees in the Sugar

Well, Enough for now. I must get back to work. My program has the following choice — mark a tent, clean the Ford, keep the bees out of our sugar, arrange some material, take a nurse to the train, get some green vegetables, do accounts, make the maids clear up, and possibly go on a trip to an out post where some of our nurses are helping out. You see my work is not particularly high toned, but almost any work is on the same order, 2/3 drudgery & 1/3 interesting, exciting or amusing which makes up for the rest.

Much love
from
Nora

This story updated in 2022.

5 comments 1.1K views

Isabella Stewart Gardner Throws a Champagne and Donuts Party on New Year’s Day

At a grand New Year’s Day party in 1903, the legendary Isabella Stewart Gardner served her two favorite foods: donuts and champagne.

She held the party in her lavish new palace, Fenway Court, now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She had spent years perfecting the building, its furnishings and its artwork. The party was supposed to inspire awe in her guests. It didn’t work on one: the novelist Edith Wharton.

Despite Wharton’s snarky comments about the food, Gardner’s party celebrated the crowning achievement of her lifetime.

Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice by Anders Zorn (courtesy Gardner Museum)

Isabella Stewart Gardner

She was born into a well-to-do New York family that indulged all her whims and passions, and she had a lot of them. At 19, she married Boston Brahmin John Lowell ‘Jack’ Gardner. They lived in a large home on Beacon Street, where the young bride made a splash in Boston society.

She paraded down the street with a pet lion on a leash, drank beer and scrubbed church steps for Lent. She showed up at the symphony wearing a headband that said, ‘Oh you Red Sox,’ according to Louise Hall Tharp’s Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. The press called her ‘the Bohemian Millionairess.’

The Gardners traveled all over Europe, Asia and America collecting art. Eventually, their growing collection required larger quarters. They planned to build a museum for their art, but Jack died suddenly in 1898.

Rembrandt, age 23

Isabella then bought land in the undeveloped Fenway neighborhood and started building her dream home, modeled after a 15^th-century Venetian palace. She tormented the architect and builders for years until they achieved her version of perfection. Then she spent a year arranging her artwork.

Fenway Court

Finally in 1903, “Fenway Court” was ready for viewers. She invited more than 150 of her oldest friends to the party, which began at 9 pm, ‘Punctually.’ Fifty musicians from the Boston Symphony Orchestra treated her guests to a concert. When the music stopped, the doors to the Palace Court opened.

The guests gasped and then fell silent, awed by the palatial candle-lit, flower-filled courtyard.

Gardner Museum Courtyard

Isabella Stewart Gardner had dinner served at small tables along with the champagne and donuts. Edith Wharton had arrived by private railcar with other guests from New York. Wharton, not knowing Isabella spoke French, said in that language the food was what you’d expect from a provincial railroad station in France.

When Wharton got up to leave, Isabella said it was nice of her to come, but she needn’t expect another invitation to eat in this railroad restaurant.

Edith Wharton

Isabella Stewart Gardner continued to invite musicians and artists to Fenway Court during her lifetime. She died in 1924, leaving $1 million to continue operating the museum. But she stipulated that nothing at all was to be changed.

On March 18, 1990, two thieves dressed as Boston police officers made an unwelcome change. They stole 13 works of art worth an estimated $500 million. No one has recovered them.

In 2002, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s board of trustees decided to build a new wing. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts agreed in 2009 that their plan agreed with Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will. They added the wing in 2012.

***

A collection of nonfictional love stories from the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy today.

This story about Isabella Stewart Gardner was updated in 2024.

22 comments 5.3K views

Newer Posts

Older Posts

Boston Brahmin

Ellen Day Hale, Brahmin Bohemian, Paints Like a Man

Ellen Day Hale

Etching

Fanny and Oliver, The Unlikely Pair Who Secured the Legacy of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Unspeakably Delicious

Oliver Stevens

Watch and Ward

The Spanish Sheep Craze That Forever Changed Vermont

Spanish Sheep

Merino Mania

Boom and Bust

Civil War

Nora Saltonstall to Her Dad in WWI: ‘I’m Staying in the Fight’

Nora Saltonstall

Belonging

The Flu Pandemic

Blueblood Nora Saltonstall Writes From the Western Front

Blueblood Nora Saltonstall Writes

No News

Bees in the Sugar

Isabella Stewart Gardner Throws a Champagne and Donuts Party on New Year’s Day

Isabella Stewart Gardner

Fenway Court

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