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Clover Adams Takes Pictures of Grief (Her Own)

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The famous statue “Grief” memorializes Clover Adams, a talented photographer whose husband wouldn’t let her work be published.

She committed suicide in 1885 by drinking the chemicals she used to develop photographs.

Her husband, historian Henry Adams, commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the draped figure to portray nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

So why did Clover Adams commit suicide? Do her photographs suggest the reason why?

Clover Adams, Photographer

New techniques gave women a chance to explore photography after the Civil War, and Clover Adams went all in. Her photographs convey isolation and limitation. Many of her settings evoke the claustrophobia she may have felt as a woman in Gilded Age America. Others express isolation and the distance between people.

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Brooks Adams, Henry’s brother. Photo by Clover Adams.

She lost her mother at an early age, and married a man descended from the famously remote John Quincy Adams. Though they longed for children, they never had any.

“Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable,” wrote her biographer, Natalie Dykstra.

Clover Adams, Brahmin

Clover Adams was born Marian Hooper on Sept. 13, 1843 into a Boston Brahmin family. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, won acclaim for her Transcendentalist poetry. Her father, Robert William Hooper, achieved prominence as a Boston physician. The wealthy Hooper family lived at 114 Beacon St. in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay.

The Hoopers had a history of mental illness.

Self-portrait by Clover Adams.

“I am a ‘Hooper, and if a feeling is very pleasant I feel as if it were wrong,’ Clover Adams wrote to her sister.

Grief marred her pampered childhood. her mother died when she was five, and her Aunt Susan, a surrogate mother, killed herself when she was nine. She grow close to her father—too close for her future husband’s liking.

Marriage

In 1872 at her father’s summer home at Beverly Farms in Massachusetts, she married Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of diplomat and historian Charles Francis Adams. Henry Adams described himself as ‘absurdly in love’ with her, but his brother Charles warned him about the family’s mental instability. “Heavens!–no!–they’re all crazy as coots,” he said when his brother told him he intended to marry Clover.

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Henry Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Henry, a workaholic writer and historian, told her how he’d ‘improve’ her once they married. He discouraged her artistic pursuits. In one of his novels, he wrote that a woman ‘cannot both enjoy love and be truly herself in her creative ambition or beliefs.’

When Clover Adams got interested in photography on a trip to New York, he told her that wouldn’t happen again. And when a prestigious magazine wanted to use one of her photographs on the cover, he said no.

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Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Washington, D.C.

Five years into their marriage in 1877, Henry and Clover Adams moved to Washington, D.C. She belonged to the literary circle called the Five of Hearts, along with her husband, John Hay, Hay’s wife Clara and Clarence King, the famous geologist who led a double life pretending to be a West Indian railroad porter with a secret family in New York City.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., friend of the Adamses. Photo by Clover Adams.

Her world was a clubby little one: her friend John Hay had an affair with her brother-in-law Brooks Adams’ sister-in-law, Nannie Cabot Lodge.

Her friends viewed her as witty, clever, athletic. Perhaps they sensed her troubled nature. She inspired Henry James to write Daisy Miller in 1878 and Portrait of a Lady in 1881. When she died, James wrote, ‘poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence.’

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Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

Grief

She remained close to her father, to her husband’s dismay. When he died in April 1885, she lapsed into a depression.

In 1885, the Adamses were building a baronial mansion on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and living in temporary housing on H Street.

On Dec. 6, 1885, Clover Adams drank half a vial of potassium cyanide in the bedroom of their rented home. Henry then found her lying on the floor in front of the fire in the fireplace.

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Henry Adams with the family dog. Photo by Clover Adams.

He never mentioned her, not once, in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and he destroyed all her letters and photographs of her. A year after he died her wrote a friend that he hadn’t had the good luck to attend his own funeral. But, he wrote, “I have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.”

With thanks to Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life by Natalie Dykstra. Featured image of the Adams Memorial By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “red_herring” – Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7821686. This story was updated in 2023.

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Seven Fun Facts About John Hay, Winner of All of Life’s Great Prizes

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The name “John Hay” pops up frequently in American history, especially during the second half of the 19th century.

John Hay was one of President Abraham Lincoln’s two secretaries, or “Lincoln’s boys.” A John Hay also ran the New York Tribune, the biggest and most influential U.S. newspaper of its day. Another John Hay served as U.S. secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. And still another belonged to an elite literary circle, an author of bestselling fiction and poetry.

Actually, they were all the same person.

John Hay, by John Singer argent

John Hay during his lifetime won political influence, great wealth, literary renown and the love of his family and friends. With the exception of a tragedy that befell him in 1901, everything went his way.  Shortly before he died in 1905, he acknowledged that he had won “all of the great prizes” in life.

He may, in fact, have spent more time in the White House than any of his contemporaries, first as Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and last as Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state.

Though he grew up in the Midwest, John Hay had a foot in New England. He graduated from Brown University, where the library bears his name. He also had a summer home in Newbury, N.H., called the Fells.

John Hay

His mother’s family came from Assonet, Mass., and her father had graduated from Brown. He died while moving his family west, and Hay’s mother taught school in Salem, Ind. There she met and married Hay’s father, a country doctor. Their son John was born there on Oct 8, 1838, but they moved to Warsaw, Ill., when he was a young boy.

By sheer chance, John Hay got the job as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary. After Lincoln’s assassination, he embarked on a diplomatic career. He traveled widely, learned four languages and made influential friends.

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John Hay in 1862

Hay kept his hand in politics and in writing. He and John Nicolay, Lincoln’s other secretary, wrote a 10-volume biography of the president that no one has surpassed.

In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes named him assistant secretary of State. Two decades later, President William McKinley named him U.S. secretary of state. Theodore Roosevelt kept him on in the job after McKinley’s assassination. John Hay died on July 1, 1905.

Here are seven fun facts about John Hay

  1. John Hay, A Great Wit

His contemporaries called him the best letter writer and best dining companion they knew. His letters ‘come nearer than any others to Byron’s, which are the best in English,’ wrote William Roscoe Thayer in The Life and Letters of John Hay. “He was at his best at a dinner table or in a drawing room, and in neither place have I ever seen anyone’s best that was better than his,” wrote Roosevelt.

A sampling of his letter reveals a playful and sophisticated wit.

“Of all vices I hold patriotism the worst when it meddles with matters of taste,” he wrote to William Dean Howells in 1882.

In criticizing French writer Alphonse Daudet to Henry James, Hay wrote, “The “Evangeliste” is dreary, the work of a genius smitten with locomotor ataxia; (if I had known that word was so long, I should never have begun upon it).”

”Dear Reid,” he wrote to his former editor Whitelaw Reid, “It is painful, but I must tell you. My wife says, when you come to the house, that you have got to hold the baby.”

  1. Hay-Adams Hotel

Hay’s best friend was John Quincy Adams’ grandson, historian Henry Adams. Together with their wives and geologist Clarence King (who led a double life married to an African-American woman in New York City), they socialized frequently and called themselves the Five of Hearts.

When Adams in 1880 anonymously published a best-selling novel called Democracy, people speculated that the Five of Hearts had collaborated on it.

Adams and Hay were so close they built adjoining mansions on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. Eventually, a luxury hotel known as the Hay-Adams replaced the two houses.

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Henry Adams lived on the left, John Hay on the right. Image courtesy Colgate Public Library.

  1. Three Funerals

John Hay attended the vigil of three presidents, all of whom he knew well. He stood next to Lincoln on his deathbed.

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John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln, John Hay

His friend James Garfield, when elected president, had asked him to serve as his private secretary. Hay chose instead to work as an editor for the New York Tribune, supporting Garfield’s policies. Then a deranged office seeker shot the president in a Washington, D.C., railroad station. Hay covered Garfield’s 79-day slide into death.

Twenty years later, an assassin killed another presidential friend.  When William McKinley ran for president, Hay gave his campaign $4,000 a month. McKinley named him his secretary of state, and trusted him implicitly in foreign affairs.

When an anarchist shot McKinley in Buffalo, John Hay visited him at his bedside. After McKinley’s funeral, Hay wrote to a friend, “what a strange and tragic fate it has been of mine—to stand by the bier of three of my dearest friends, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, three of the gentlest of men, all risen to be head of the State, and all done to death by assassins.”

  1. The Great Chicago Fire

John Hay was working for the New York Tribune in 1871 when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow allegedly kicked over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire.

His editor, Whitelaw Reid, sent him to Chicago. Two days after the fire broke out, Hay arrived after in the devastated city after a 38-hour train ride. He described the smoldering ruins, interviewed the victims and visited Mr. O’Leary as he watched the cow through the window.

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The Great Chicago Fire by Currier & Ives

Hay’s versatility as critic, reporter and editor pleased Reid so much he gave him a raise to $65 a week. That made him one of the highest paid editorial writers in the country, which annoyed Mark Twain, who also wrote for the New York Tribune.

  1. Layabout

His diplomatic career began when he was in his 20s and lasted until his death at the age of 66. He negotiated 50 treaties, including the treaty that gave the United States canal rights to the Isthmus of Panama. He also gets credit for fashioning the Open Door Policy.

Despite his many accomplishments, he had a tendency to laziness and hypochondria. After he married Clara, he wrote a letter to a friend saying, “I do nothing but read and yawn.” He complained to John Bigelow, U.S. ambassador to France, that he was ‘growing more indolent and scatterbrained day by day.’ And in a letter to Henry Adams, he wrote in 1895 that ‘time goes by imperceptibly in indolence and solitude, and there’s nothing to do, or think, or write about. I have developed two or three more mortal disease…’

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Hay’s best friend, Henry Adams

He also visited doctors frequently for advice about his imagined illnesses. When doctors prescribed rest, he readily followed their orders.

  1. Lucky Fellow

He had an abundance of luck throughout his life. The best stroke of good fortune that befell him was to graduate from Brown without an idea of what to do with his life. So he went to work for his Uncle Milton, a lawyer with an office next door to Abraham Lincoln’s.

Along with his good friend John George Nicolay, Hay threw himself into Lincoln’s campaign for president. Lincoln then brought them both to Washington, where they roomed together in a shabby bedroom in the White House. Lincoln visited them at all hours of the day and night. The unparalleled access to the president informed the 10-volume biography the two “Lincoln’s boys” wrote together.

Clara Stone

His luck continued in love. He courted and in 1876 married Clara Stone, daughter of a wealthy Cleveland industrialist. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one, and they had four healthy children. His father-in-law gave him fabulous mansion and a job in Cleveland managing his considerable investments, which Hay, it turned out, was good at. The job gave him plenty of money and freedom to travel.

The only time his luck ran out was in 1901, when his son Adelbert died at the age of 24. The young man had just been appointed McKinley’s personal secretary when he fell 60 feet to his death from a New Haven hotel window.

  1. Grandchildren of John Hay

Two of his grandchildren achieved fame in their own right. His daughter Helen married Payne Whitney, son of another Cabinet member, William Whitney. President Eisenhower named Helen’s son John Hay Whitney ambassador to the United Kingdom, 60 years after his grandfather held the post.

Helen’s daughter Joan Whitney Payson in 1962 bought an expansion baseball team, the New York Mets, and brought Willie Mays back to New York.

 

Joan Whitney Payson

With thanks to All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt by John Taliaferro, Also to The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism by Mark Zwonitze and William Roscoe Thayer in The Life and Letters of J0hn Hay, Volume 2.

Images: Joan Whitney Payson By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49601215. This story was updated in 2023.

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Gordon Bennett, the Madcap, Scandal-Mongering Publisher Who Built the Newport Casino

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Today in Britain people utter ‘Gordon Bennett’ when someone says something unbelievable, disgusting, surprising or outrageous.

They probably don’t know they’re referring to the man who gave Newport one of its most iconic buildings, the Casino.

He did it as a result of a bet. He also liked to drive carriages wearing nothing but a white silk top hat, and he nearly killed Winston Churchill’s mother doing it.

His exploits earned a headline in the UK Daily Mail as recently as 2016. “Meet the rogue whose exploits were so outrageous we STILL cry out his name when we are shocked,” it ran.

James Gordon Bennett

He was born James Gordon Bennett, Jr., on May 10, 1841, the son of a Scottish immigrant who founded the New York Herald. Bennett Senior changed the newspaper industry with such innovations as the presidential interview, woodcut illustrations and cash-in-advance for advertisers. He acquired great wealth, which he passed down to his son.

When Gordon Bennett, Jr., turned 16, his father gave him a 70-foot yacht. He turned into an avid yachtsman, winning the first transatlantic yacht race in 1866. Though his detractors said he just stood on the deck drinking booze while his crew did all the work.

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Bennett’s friend Julius LeBlanc Steward was a guest on Gordon Bennett’s yacht Namouna. He painted Bennett, in white suit, and guests on the yacht.

Among his peccadillos were an inordinate fascination with owls and Pekingese dogs. He collected both, and penned editorials extolling owl conservation. When he built a new Herald building, he had his architect include 26 owl sculptures along the roof.

He depended on his Pekingese dogs to vet job applicants. If his dogs liked a candidate, he got the job. One candidate hid veal in his clothes to win a spot on the newspaper.

James Gordon Bennett spent recklessly on mansions in Newport, R.I., New York, the English countryside and Paris. Once he met with a reporter in a hotel bar, and the thick wad of banknotes in his back pocket made sitting uncomfortable. So he threw it in the fire.

Newspaperman

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James Gordon Bennett

With his father’s blessing, he started the Evening Telegram, a gossipy tabloid that became the New York World Telegram.

At 26, his father turned over the Herald to him. He ran it ably, raising the newspaper’s profile by sponsoring explorers. It was the Herald that sent explorer Henry Morton Stanley to find the missing missionary, David Livingstone. After Stanley immortalized himself by saying, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Gordon Bennett cabled him to stop talking. He wanted the press attention for himself.

Less successful was his sponsorship of the USS Jeanette expedition to the North Pole, which resulted in the deaths of 20 people from starvation. The tragedy increased the newspaper’s circulation, though.

He also sponsored sports trophies for ballooning, international yachting, auto, soccer and airplane racing.

Like many Gilded Age millionaires, he pursued sports avidly. Gordon Bennett is credited with organizing the first polo match in the United States. He also served as the youngest commodore of the New York Yacht Club.

He especially liked to drive carriages four-in-hand, though without his clothes on. One night he was driving his coach at breakneck speed with his friend Leonard Jerome and his young daughter Jennie. The coach rounded a sharp bend and he lost control. Jennie survived the accident, grew up and gave birth to Winston Churchill.

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Gordon Bennett with his Pekingese

Paris

In 1877, at 36, he got engaged to Caroline May, a wealthy socialite, but she called it off. He had shown up at her house party drunk – probably on razzle dazzles, a potent concoction of brandy and absinthe. Before all the guests, he urinated into either the fireplace or the grand piano.

Her brother Fred then followed him into the street the next day and whipped him. Then he challenged Gordon Bennett to a duel, which they fought. But both missed.

Humiliated, Gordon Bennett moved to Paris, where he ran the Paris Herald. It eventually morphed into the International Herald Tribune.

The incident with Caroline May put him off marriage until he was 73. Or maybe he had another reason.

Newport Casino

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Newport Casino, 1900

He founded the Newport Casino, according to legend, because he bet his friend Augustus “Sugar” Candy that he wouldn’t ride his horse into Newport Rhode Island’s exclusive Reading Room. Candy took the bet and the horse thumped its way into the library.

Banned from the Reading Room, Gordon bought an estate across the street from a vacant lot in Newport. He then hired Stanford White to design his own personal club.

White combined elements of the Shingle Style and the Japanese Pavilion at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The Casino featured the new sports of tennis and polo. It ended up being the site of the first U.S. Open, and now houses the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Gordon Bennett!

Gordon Bennett married Maud Potter, widow of the son of the founder of the Reuters news agency. The marriage lasted five years, until his death on May 14, 1918.

He named James Stillman as executor of his will, but he died weeks later. Stillman named his friend James O. Bloss as his executor, and Bloss died suddenly weeks later. Bloss named his companion and housemate, John William Sterling, as his executor, and he also died in a matter of weeks. Together, their estates amounted to $76 million.

Painting: On the Yacht “Namouna”, Venice, by Julius LeBlanc Stewart. This story was updated in 2022.

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William Whitney Swaps a Mistress With J.P. Morgan

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Bar Harbor in its Gilded Age heyday was a place where the moneyed class could fool around without the prying eyes of New York or Washington, D.C. In 1893, William Whitney and J.P. Morgan took full advantage of the summer resort’s freewheeling atmosphere.

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Bar Harbor

They weren’t the first, by any means. Willie K. Vanderbilt sulked in his yacht off the coast of Bar Harbor after his divorce made front page news. Joseph Pulitzer hid in a soundproof tower at his Bar Harbor estate, unable to bear the slightest noise. And J.P. Morgan stashed his mistresses on Bar Harbor’s High Street in between his pious visits to St. Saviour’s Episcopal Churcch.

J.P. Morgan was the most powerful financier of his day, and probably would have been the richest if he hadn’t spent all his money on his spectacular art collection. He had a nose that looked like a purple cauliflower due to rosacea, which exacerbated his social awkwardness. That didn’t hurt him with the ladies, who he liked – a lot.

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J.P. Morgan in a retouched photo

They like him too, and were more than willing to look past his facial deformity. Mrs. Morgan by and large tolerated her husband’s infidelities. He made it easier for her by keeping a continent between them. When he went to Europe, she stayed in the United States, and vice versa.

But one woman she couldn’t tolerate: Edith May Randolph.

A newspaper described Edith May Randolph as ‘one of the leaders in the smart set’ and ‘a great favorite among the diplomatic circles.’ A beautiful widow in her 30s, she had family connections to The 400, New York’s social elite.

Mrs. Morgan told Morgan, who she called Pierpont, to drop the widow. “Spoke to P about Mrs. R,” she wrote in her diary in 1894.

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Edith May Randolph

William Whitney

Edith May Randolph had already attracted the attention of someone else in her social set, the smart, charming and very married William Whitney.

Whitney’s career got a boost from his best friend, Oliver Hazard Payne. They roomed together at Yale and joined Skull and Bones. Whitney had money, but Payne had real money. When William Whitney married Oliver Payne’s beloved sister Flora, Payne bought them a New York City mansion as a wedding present.

William Whitney’s charm, brains and brother-in-law propelled him to a successful career as a lawyer, financier and politician. When President Grover Cleveland named him Secretary of the Navy in 1885, rumor had it that Oliver Payne paid a bribe to get his brother-in-law the job.

During his four years as Secretary of the Navy, Flora and William Whitney dominated Washington’s social scene with an estimated 60,000 guests visiting their home. And when he sailed into Bar Harbor, crowds came out to greet him. Newspapers touted him as a potential candidate for president of the United States.

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Flora Payne Whitney

But William Whitney had a roving eye, and in 1890 his eye roved toward Edith May Randolph. Oliver Payne got wind that his brother-in-law was straying from Flora. He told Bill Whitney in no uncertain terms to stay away from the widow.

Whitney complied. Then in 1893, Flora Payne Whitney died suddenly at the age of 51. William Whitney went into mourning for two years.

Yachting

Then one August day in 1895, William Whitney sailed his yacht Columbia to Bar Harbor, where both Edith May Randolph and J. P. Morgan were summering. Morgan invited Whitney and the widow onto his yacht, Corsair.  Mrs. Morgan had already kicked up a fuss about Edith May Randolph, so by the end of the summer idyll William Whitney and Edith May Randolph were an item.

Edith May boarded as Morgan’s mistress; she disembarked as Whitney’s paramour. A year later, they married in St. Saviour’s; none of the four Whitney children attended the wedding.

Nor did Oliver Hazard Payne. William Whitney so infuriated his former brother-in-law that Payne threatened to ruin him. He also went to Whitney’s children and demanded they choose between him and their father.

Two – Harry and Dorothy — chose their father. Two — William and Pauline — chose Uncle Oliver.

Harry and Dorothy didn’t suffer from want. Harry inherited $24 million from his father and $12 million from Uncle Oliver. But William, who started going by his middle name, Payne, did much better. He inherited $63 million from his uncle and $25 million from his father. When he died, he bequeathed part of his $100 million-plus fortune to the world-famous Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

Endings

William Whitney and Edith May Randolph may have had a happy marriage, but it didn’t last long. Both were avid equestrians, and William Whitney invested heavily in thoroughbred horse racing.

One day in 1898, Edith May Randolph Whitney was horseback riding in Aiken, S.C., when she misjudged the height of a low stone bridge. When her horse galloped the bridge, she struck her head and fell from the horse.  The accident left her paralyzed below the neck. After a 15-month struggle, she died on May 6, 1899, aged 41.

William Whitney died less than five years later at the age of 61. Rumors circulated that Oliver Payne had killed him.


This story was updated in 2022.

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Bar Harbor Babylon: Billionaires Behaving Badly in Maine’s Premier Resort

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Bar Harbor Babylon, just released by Down East Books, takes you inside Maine’s premier summer resort during its heyday. What happened there wasn’t always pretty, but it was usually entertaining. At least in the telling.

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(Help support the New England Historical Society by ordering your copy of Bar Harbor Babylon here.)

Take Mary Roberts Rinehart, America’s Agatha Christie. She coined the cliché, “The butler did it,” in her 1930 mystery novel, The Door. Seventeen years later, while summering at her Bar Harbor estate, her cook really did try to kill her – in a dispute over the butler. While terrifying at the time, it made for a good story.

Written by Dan and Leslie Landrigan, the co-writers of the New England Historical Society, Bar Harbor Babylon exposes the secrets behind the mansion walls. The authors focus on the newly rich who started coming to Mount Desert Island in the Gilded Age. They sought status, relaxation and chances to misbehave – if misbehavior hadn’t gotten them there in the first place.

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The cook almost did it to Mary Roberts Rinehart.

As Dan said to the Mount Desert Islander, “When rich people get together, bad things happen.”

You can now buy Bar Harbor Babylon online from the usual vendors. Or you can support The New England Historical Society with your purchase. Just click here.

Bar Harbor Babylon

In Bar Harbor, the fabulously wealthy Evalyn Walsh McLean hung the Hope diamond from her dog’s neck. Willie K. Vanderbilt sulked in his yacht off Bar Harbor after his sensational divorce. And Joseph Pulitzer, crusader for the working class, hid out in a soundproof Bar Harbor tower, unable to bear the slightest noise.

 

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Evalyn Walsh McLean wearing the Hope diamond.

The authors intended the book as a breezy summer read and as a reminder that the rich and famous aren’t always what they seem. J.P. Morgan, for example, regularly attended and financially supported the island’s Episcopal churches. But he also stashed his mistresses on High Street. And Clarence Cook Little, the man behind Jackson Labs, did more to cure cancer – and to kill people from it – than anyone else on the planet.

Bar Harbor Babylon also delves into Prohibition, politics and the relentless theft of land belonging to indigenous people. The book begins with Abraham Somes, who swindled the Indians, and ends with the dashed presidential hopes of serial philanderer Nelson Rockefeller.

The Cutting Room Floor

Bar Harbor offered up so many juicy scandals the authors couldn’t include them all. Take Cobina Wright, Sr., and Cobina Wright, Jr. These two lively ladies didn’t quite make the cut for Bar Harbor Babylon.  But they came close.

Mother and daughter, they were minor film actresses. Cobina Wright, Sr., had a small role in the acclaimed film, The Razor’s Edge. Junior acted in some not-so-acclaimed films like Charlie Chan in Rio and Moon Over Miami.

Cobina Wright, Sr.’s, real avocation was social climbing. Well known for her parties, she married several rich men. She had a hard time, though, holding on to them or their money.

When she learned that one husband married his manicurist in Bar Harbor, she went ballistic, and threatened to have him seized for bigamy. (Never happened.)

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The Cobina Wrights

Cobina Wright, Sr., had to work as a cabaret singer in New York. She complained she was ‘working like a Trojan’ to support her daughter while he went deep-sea fishing in Bar Harbor.

She had a plan, though: to arrange a spectacular marriage for her beautiful daughter. So when Cobina Wright, Jr., turned 17, Senior took her to Venice to rub elbows with the beautiful people.

A handsome, eligible naval officer, also 17, fell head over heels in love with young Cobina Wright.

For several weeks they were inseparable. They held hands through the streets of Venice and necked in gondolas by moonlight. He even followed her to London for a week and asked her to marry him.

But, as the story goes, Cobina Wright, Jr., resented her mother pushing her into marriage. So she dumped him. He was devastated for weeks. But then he took consolation by marrying a pretty young lady named Elizabeth, and now he is known as Prince Philip of England.

Maine Fires of 1947

Bar Harbor today is very different than it was back in the day. It’s still busy in the summer, attracting crowds of visitors to nearby Acadia National Park. And wealthy summer people still populate parts of Mount Desert Island, especially Northeast Harbor.

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Harry Oakes’ mansion, The Willows, survived the fire of 1947 and is now the Atlantic Oceanside Hotel & Conference.

But most of the mansions along Millionaire’s Row in Bar Harbor are gone, either consumed in the Maine fires of 1947 or torn down by their owners. A few still stand, mostly repurposed to new uses. Sonogee, formerly home of Frederick Vanderbilt and Lyman Kendall, housed a residential rehabilitation facility until closing its doors in April 2019.  The Atlantic Oceanside Hotel & Event Center was once the home to mining tycoon Harry Oakes — before he was murdered, perhaps by the Duke of Windsor.

This story was updated in 2022.Click here to see Leslie Landrigan talk about the book on a podcast.

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Six More Artist Homes In New England

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The creative spirit that moves people to sculpt and paint also tends to inspire an interesting artist home. Lucrative commissions in the days before the income tax meant some artists could live in country estates befitting a Gilded Age gentleman.

New England has quite a few artist homes now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

We bring you six artist homes, one in each New England state. They all open to the public, at least seasonally.

Weir Farm

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J Alden Weir studio. You can also visit the artist home on the Wilton farm.

Weir Farm, the home of J. Alden Weir, was a magnet for American artists such as John Twachtman, John Singer Sargent and Albert Pinkham Ryder. It probably helped that the farm was only 20 miles from the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich.

There are two stories about how J. Alden Weir ended up owning the Weir Farm in Wilton, Conn. One is that Weir had a Manet painting that a collector wanted so badly he offered Weir $10 and his farm for it. According to the other, his wife’s family owned the farm.

As an art student in Paris, J. Alden Weir hated the new school of painting known as French Impressionism, until he didn’t. Eventually he became one of the most beloved American impressionist.

He was born in 1852, the 14th of 16 children, the son of Robert Walker Weir, who taught drawing at the Military Academy at West Point.

Weir befriended many other painters, eventually co-founding The Ten, a group of artists unhappy with the conservative U.S. art establishment.

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Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge by J. Alden Weir. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Weir’s paintings are on display in major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. The 60-acre grounds of Weir Farm National Historic Site open every day of the year to visitors. The farm also has an ongoing artist-in-residence program. Look for Weir Farm on the back of quarters issued in 2020.

Weir Farm National Historic Site, 735 Nod Hill Rd, Wilton, Conn.

Winslow Homer Studio

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Where Winslow Homer painted and lived.

Winslow Homer, one of the greatest U.S. artists of the 19th century, left the bright lights of New York City for Prout’s Neck, Maine. Then in his mid-40s, he moved partly to be near his family, partly to work in solitude and partly to paint the sea.

His family owned an estate on Prout’s Neck, and Homer moved into the carriage house. He painted the sea in Maine, traveling to the Caribbean during the winter and sometimes to the Adirondacks.

Though he also painted in oil, Winslow Homer knew he’d done something transcendent with his watercolors.

‘You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors,” Homer once said. He hung some of his exquisite watercolors on the walls of the rental cottages. Now they’re in museums or private collections.

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Salt Kettle, Bermuda, by Winslow Homer. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

Maine architect John Calvin Stevens transformed the carriage house into a studio and designed the Winslow Homer house. He took as payment a painting, Afternoon Fog. The Portland Museum of Art bought the studio in 2006, restored it and now offers tours in the summer months.

Winslow Homer Studio, 5 Winslow Homer Rd., Scarborough, Maine

Chesterwood

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The house that Daniel Chester French built in Stockbridge, Mass.

Daniel Chester French, like his contemporary Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was no starving artist. He won lucrative commissions, including one for the Lincoln Memorial, and could afford a summer artist home — an estate, really, called Chesterwood.

He bought the Stockbridge, Mass., farm in 1896, and had a studio built on the property. Then in 1901, he rebuilt the farmhouse. For the rest of his life he divided his time between New York and Stockbridge, but used his Chesterwood estate as his primary workspace.

Born in Exeter, N.H., his family moved to Concord, Mass., when he was xxx. His father befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. Young Daniel took art lessons from Louisa May Alcott’s little sister, May. She encouraged him to study art.

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The Lincoln Memorial, courtesy National Park Service.

He launched his career by winning the commission to design the Minute Man statue in Concord.

Other works include The John Harvard Monument, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Mass. Commodore George H. Perkins monument at the New Hampshire State House

The statue of General Joseph Hooker in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation now runs the home as a museum and sculpture garden.

Chesterwood opens weekends in May.

Chesterwood, 4 Williamsville Rd, Stockbridge, Mass.

Saint-Gaudens National Park

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Augustus Saint-Gaudens home in Cornish, N.H.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the center of the Cornish colony, which included about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. President Woodrow Wilson rented a summer White House there, among such artistic luminaries as Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

Saint-Gaudens, born in Ireland, emigrated with his family to New York City in 1848 as a baby. Apprenticed as a cameo cutter, he eventually won lucrative commissions for public statues. Some of his most famous work includes an equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in Central Park, a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Chicago’s Lincoln Park and the gold double eagle $20 coin.

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The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, on Boston Common.

His masterpiece, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, took him 14 years to create. The bronze bas relief commemorates the African-American 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment and its leader, Robert Gould Shaw, who died in battle. Since 1897 years it has stood across from the Massachusetts Statehouse on Boston Common.

Today Saint-Gaudens artist home, studio and gardens belongs to the National Park Service as the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park. The park service has some of his sculpture on display, as well as reproductions of some of his masterpiece.

Saint-Gaudens National Park, 139 Saint Gaudens Rd., Cornish, N.H.

Gilbert Stuart Birthplace

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Gilbert Stuart Birthplace, an artist home and snuff mill.

The Gilbert Stuart birthplace is unusual for an artist home, mostly because it’s also a snuff mill.

Gilbert Stuart’s father, Gilbert Stewart, was a Scottish immigrant who worked in the first snuff mill in America. His mother, Elizabeth Anthony Stewart, belonged to a prominent Middletown, R.I., family that owned large tracts of land. The house-and mill had stood in Saunderstown, R.I., for five years when Stuart was born in 1755. Stuart only lived there for six years because his family moved to Newport.

Gilbert Stuart showed early promise and studied painting in England, where he made a name for himself at 26 with his painting The Skater. His work commanded high prices in England, but he spent money carelessly and almost ended up in debtor’s prison.

The Athenaeum, by Gilbert Stuart

His most famous work, the portrait of George Washington, has appeared on the U.S. dollar for more than a century. He painted many famous people of the day, including John and Abigail Adams.

He died in 1828, leaving his wife and daughters so poor they couldn’t afford a gravesite. They buried him in an unmarked grave in the Old South Burying Ground.

Gilbert Stuart Birthplace, 815 Gilbert Stuart Rd, Saunderstown, R.I. 

Rokeby

An artist home for several painters, Rachael Robinson Elmer and her parents.

Rokeby, the artist home we chose in Vermont, was also a prominent stop on the underground railroad.

Rachael Robinson Elmer was born at Rokeby in Ferrisburgh, Vt., the granddaughter of Quaker abolitionists, on July 28, 1878.

Her father, Rowland Robinson, was an author and illustrator, and her mother, Anna Stevens Robinson, was a painter. They encouraged her interest in art, and let teenaged Rachael study art in New York City for three summers. She fell in love with New York City as a young girl and moved there after graduating from Goddard College. Rachael continued to take art classes, and Childe Hassam taught her to paint scenes of city life.

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Trinity Church and Wall Street by Rachael Robinson Elmer.

Rachael succeeded as a commercial artist and married an older man named Robert Elmer. She painted 12 “Art Lover’s New York” postcards showing famous scenes around the city and published them in 1914. They sold like wildfire, and other artists began producing impressionistic postcards. She was said to have changed postcards forever.

She died in 1919 in the flu pandemic of 1918 at the age of 40.

Today Rokeby is a historic farm property and museum that includes a 1780s farmstead, eight agricultural outbuildings with permanent exhibits, and hiking trails that cover more than 50 acres

Rokeby, 4334 U.S. Route 7 in Ferrisburgh, Vt.

End Notes

If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about an artist home you can sleep in n each New England state here. 

Artist Home images: Weir Farm studio By Noroton – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4960283; Winslow Homer studio By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28919316; Chesterwood by I, Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2414120;  Augustus Saint-Gaudens artist home, By Ser Amantio di Nicolao – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35171636; Robert Gould Shaw Memorial By Carptrash at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27154774; Gilbert Stuart birthplace By Gibbystuart – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40114851; Rokeby By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11310696.

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