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Groton School

Isabella Stewart Gardner, Early Gay Icon?

Isabella Stewart Gardner is known to most for Fenway Court, her palatial Boston museum from which $500 million in art was stolen in 1990. To some she is remembered for her unconventional behavior. She smoked cigarettes, walked a lion on a leash down the street, scrubbed church steps for Lent and showed up at the symphony with a headband that said, ‘Oh you Red Sox.’

And to even others she is thought of as a leader of Boston’s fin-de-siecle gay subculture. Though she had a high place in Brahmin society, she chose to surround herself with arty young men.

Douglass Shand-Tucci, chronicler of Bohemian Boston, wrote, “The gay mist that surrounded the chatelaine of Fenway Court is unmistakable.” And, he argued, she had a compelling reason for sympathizing with gay men. At least two of the three nephews she adopted were gay.

Isabella Stewart Gardner

Portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner by John Singer Sargent

Isabella Stewart Gardner was born into a wealthy family in 1840 in New York City, a descendant of the royal house of Stewart.

In 1860, she married Boston’s most eligible bachelor, Jack Gardner, also wealthy and also pedigreed. He was a Peabody, a Gardner and a Lowell.

The Gardners had a son, who died before his second birthday. Isabella then had a miscarriage, and doctors advised her not to get pregnant. To deal with their grief, the Gardners traveled extensively and collected art. She also collected artists, esthetes, professors and suffragists as friends.

The scandal sheet Town Topics called them “Mrs. Jack Gardner’s Little Brothers of the Rich.” They were also characterized as “Mrs. Gardner’s bachelors destined never to marry.’

The society press told only part of the story: Isabella Stewart Gardner led Boston’s new Bohemian set, which left an intellectual legacy on Boston and on American culture.

She closely associated with art critics Bernard Berenson and Charles Loeser, philosopher George Santayana and essayist Logan Pearsall Smith. The first two were Jewish, Smith a Quaker and Santayana half Spanish and Catholic. All but Berenson were gay.

She made friends with several men believed closeted: architect Ralph Adams Cram, curator Matthew Prichard and artist Dennis Bunker. She was close friends with John Singer Sargent. Novelist Henry James, another friend, based some of his most memorable characters on her: Milly Theale, Charlotte Stant and Adam Verver.

Nephews

Shand-Tucci argues her sympathy for gay men stemmed from her love for her gay nephews. “Isabella Stewart Gardner’s experience of homosexuality was neither social nor trivial,” he wrote.

Her husband’s brother, Joseph Peabody Gardner, committed suicide in 1875, leaving three orphaned boys: Joseph Peabody, William Amory and Augustus Peabody. Jack and Isabella raised them as their own children.

William Amory Gardner by Anders Zorn, courtesy American School of Classical Studies at Athens

In 1886, Joseph Peabody Gardner, Jr., committed suicide like his father. Shand-Tucci believes he killed himself because of his unrequited love for another man.

Augustus Peabody Gardner became a military officer, a U.S. congressman and son-in-law of Henry Cabot Lodge.

William Amory Gardner was probably the lover of Ned Warren, the benefactor of the Museum of Fine Arts. And Shand-Tucci recounts this anecdote about Amory, when he was a don at the then-new Groton School. A young boy brought a minister to William Amory Gardner’s room for a visit after chapel.

The visitors having arrived at what turned out to be Gardner’s bedroom, it was at once clear that not only was W.A.G. stark naked before the fireplace (except for a pair of voluptuous bedroom slippers) but also so was the young man reclining on the sofa…

Isabella Stewart Gardner died July 17, 1924.

With thanks to Boston Bohemia 1881-1900: Ralph Adams Cram Life and Architecture by Douglass Shand-Tucci. This story was updated in 2022.

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Frederick Law Olmsted Plans A Cemetery or a Hundred

Chances are good you’ve encountered the work of Frederick Law Olmsted more than once in your lifetime. You’ve probably set foot in his parks or on his school campuses, or maybe you read his magazine. Quite possibly you also had some interaction with the Red Cross.

Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent

Olmsted was born in Hartford on April 26, 1822, to a modestly prosperous family. He worked as a seaman, a farmer, a surveyor, a social reformer and a journalist. Then he found his niche as a landscape architect. He also helped found the weekly magazine The Nation.

Olmsted co-designed Central Park, headed the first Yosemite commission and led the campaign to protect Niagara Falls. He designed the U.S. Capitol Grounds and planned both the Great White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” of green space.

The list goes on. He designed Elm Park in Worcester, Mass., considered by many to be the first municipal park in America. He also designed the 735-acre Forest Park in Springfield, Mass.

Groton School, campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm

His firm designed dozens of academic campuses, including Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, the Groton School, Berwick Academy, Pomfret School, the University of Maine and Phillips Academy. They also designed Shelburne Farms in Vermont, Providence Butler Hospital in Rhode Island, Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts and Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Conn.

Olmsted Goes South

Frederick Law Olmsted spent five years traveling the South for the New York Times (then the New York Daily Times), reporting on the slave economy.

He didn’t like what he saw. Olmsted concluded the cotton monopoly did more harm than good. He then reported that slavery made the slave states inefficient and backward. His observations had a big impact on the national debate about slavery.

Central Park in 1901, lower end of the mall

Then he co-designed Central Park with Calvin Vaux – the largest public works project in the country. When the Civil War broke out, Olmsted became executive director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. He administered medical relief, setting up field hospitals and hospital ships. Olmsted also distributed food and hospital supplies along the entire battlefront.

He had an almost maniacal belief in system and organization, for which he received much criticism.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Planner

Witold Rybczynski credits Olmsted with pioneering the concept of planning in a big industrializing country. “This recognition was not yet widely shared, which is why he was often misunderstood,” wrote Rybczynski. In A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century, Rybczynski quoted Olmsted’s mentor.

“He looks far ahead, & his plans & methods are sometimes mysterious,” wrote the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows.

“[His critics] think him impracticable, expensive, slow — when he is only long-headed, with broader, deeper notions of economy than themselves, & with no disposition to hurry what, if done satisfactorily, must be thoroughly.

Olmsted designed Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn.

Rybczynski also offered an anecdote that demonstrated Olmsted’s farsightedness. Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, wrote him a letter five years after the Civil War. Meigs, who respected Olmsted, asked his advice in landscaping national cemeteries.

Olmsted then replied the cemeteries should be designed to establish dignity and tranquility. He warned Meigs to avoid the current fashion for elaborate and artificial gardening because it would disappear.

To create a sacred grove for the war dead, he recommended just two things. First, building a simple wall to enclose the cemetery. Second, he told Meigs to plant trees indigenous to the cemetery’s region. To save money, he should plant nurseries next to the cemeteries. And if land weren’t available for nurseries, he suggested planting seedlings between the tiers of graves.

Olmsted died on Aug. 28, 1903, and is buried in Old North Cemetery in Hartford.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Central Park By …trialsanderrors – Lower end of mall, Central Park, New York City, 1901, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11159061. Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn., By Jllm06 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56543924.

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Edie Sedgwick, Poor Little Rich Girl

In 1965, Edie Sedgwick appeared in one of Andy Warhol’s underground films in 1965. In it, she said, “I’ve never been anywhere where I haven’t been known.”

Edie Sedgwick (center), with Pat Hartley, from Ciao! Manhattan.

The iconography of her aristocratic family litters the New England landscape. You can find it in sculpture, paintings, gravestones, government records, schools and even the name of a town.

Edie Sedgwick was a different kind of Sedgwick icon.

She was a celebrity within a year of moving to New York City. People, especially Warhol, were fascinated by her fragile beauty, her offbeat clothes and makeup, her upper-class poise, her charm and her wealth. During her short life she appeared on film, in magazines and on television. She also inspired some of the greatest rock ‘n roll songs ever written and recorded.

But Edie Sedgwick had troubles. She attributed her messed-up head to the suicides of two of her brothers within 18 months of each other. As a young teenager, she developed an eating disorder and spent two years in a mental hospital. She was dead at the age of 28.

The Sedgwick Family

I.N. Phelps Stokes and Edith Minturn Stokes by John Singer Sargent. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Edie Sedgwick was named for her father’s aunt, Edith Minturn, whose portrait by John Singer Sargent hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Theodore Sedgwick

A portrait of another ancestor, Theodore Sedgwick, by Gilbert Stuart, hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He was a U.S. Senator and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives under President George Washington. Theodore Sedgwick also brought the lawsuit that freed Elizabeth Freeman and helped eliminate slavery in Massachusetts.

Detail from the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

The “Hope and Glory” bas relief across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts Statehouse is a memorial to the 54^th Infantry Regiment led by her great-great uncle, Robert Gould Shaw.

William Ellery

The signature of another ancestor, William Ellery, is on the Declaration of Independence.

Groton School

Her maternal ancestor, Ephraim Williams, founded Williams College. Her great-grandfather, Endicott Peabody, founded the Groton School in Groton, Mass., and tutored young Franklin Roosevelt.

Chapin Hall, Williams College

Sedgwick, Maine, is named for her ancestor, Maj. Robert Sedgwick, who in 1654 captured the fort Pentagoet (now Castine) from the French.

Edie Sedgwick

Bagheera Fountain

Though descended from an old New England family, she was born in Santa Barbara, Calif., on April 20, 1943, and raised on a ranch. The seventh of eight children, her parents home-schooled her. They also taught her about her superiority to others.

Her mother, Alice DeForest Sedgwick, was the daughter of Henry DeForest, chairman of the Southern Pacific Railroad and a descendant of Jesse DeForest, who founded New York City.

Edie Sedgwick developed an eating disorder as a young teenager, so her family sent her to Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn., in 1962. The next year she moved to Cambridge, Mass. There she studied sculpture with her cousin Lily Saarinen. (A Saarinan work, Bagheera Fountain, sits in Boston’s Public Garden.)

She moved to New York in 1964 because she wanted to pursue a career in modeling. Then in March 1965, she met Andy Warhol and began a yearlong relationship with him. She took him to parties in her Mercedes and he began to dress like her.

Edie and Andy appeared on the Merv Griffin Show together. She also hung out at his studio, The Factory, and met such counterculture stars as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. Warhol filmed her in short pieces like Vinyl (see it here) and Poor Little Rich Girl (see it here).

Really Bad Effect

“Miss New York, Girl of the Year, socialite, millionairess bullshit, Andy Warhol superstar,” she later said. “All this had a really bad effect.”

Edie Sedgwick also said her two brothers’ suicides upset her. “It kind of screwed up my head,” she said. “I blossomed into a healthy young drug addict.”

Andy Warhol asked Lou Reed to write a song about her. The result, Femme Fatale, appeared on the Velvet Underground’s debut album.

In Bob Dylan’s Visions of Johanna she’s Louise, and she’s Miss Lonely in Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. In Dylan’s Just Like A Woman he describes “your fog, your amphetamine and your pearls.” And she may be the “you” in Dylan’s Won’t You Please Crawl Out Your Window, interpreted as a plea for her to leave Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Andy Warhol

On Nov. 16, 1971, three months after she finished her final film, Ciao, Manhattan, Edie Sedgwick died of an overdose of barbiturates.

Writers have since published several biographies about her. Edie: American Girl, climbed to the bestseller list. Another movie, Factory Girl, was produced about her life and released in 2006. Her cousin, Kyra Sedgwick, is also a film star.

She was not buried in the family burial ground, the Sedgwick Pie, in Stockbridge, Mass., but in California.

Photos: Bagheera, by Lily Saarinan. By Susan Saarinen, Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia. Williams College photo By SERSeanCrane, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia. Groton School photo By Jplayforth – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia. Andy Warhol By Jack Mitchell, CC BY-SA 4.0–3.0–2.5-2.0–1.0. Wikimedia. Edie filming Ciao Manhattan! By fluctuat.net, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6800141.

This story about Edie Sedgwick was updated in 2023.

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