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Eight Fun Facts About the Insanely Talented John Singer Sargent

How did the paintings of John Singer Sargent ever fall out of favor? He created stunning watercolor landscapes and oil portraits that reveal a virtuosity described as “insolent.” Sargent, it was said, could quickly sketch a likeness the way most people sign their names.

John Singer Sargent

As a boy, all he ever wanted to be was an artist. His parents, Americans who roamed around Europe, encouraged him. He showed up at the Carolus Duran studio in Paris and presented his work, hoping for acceptance as a student. He astonished his future classmates, who viewed him as a prodigy.

During his lifetime he created about 3,000 paintings, including 900 in oil and 2,000 in watercolor. They made him rich and they made him famous. But by the time he died in 1925, critics didn’t consider him “modern” enough. He went from prodigy to Gilded Age antique.

Here, then, are eight fun facts about the flamboyantly talented John Singer Sargent.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

1. Roger Fry was his bete noire.

Art critic Roger Fry had no use for John Singer Sargent. That mattered – a lot. Fry had enormous influence over popular taste in art during the early 20^th century. “In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry,” wrote art historian Kenneth Clark. Fry promoted the Parisian avant-garde, painters like Cezanne, Matisse and Van Gogh.

Roger Fry Self Portrait

In 1910, Fry organized an exhibit in London called Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Critics savaged the show, and so Fry responded by listing artists who supported that school of painting. He included John Singer Sargent, whose work he had already criticized. Sargent replied with two letters to the editor of The Nation making it clear he had no use for post-Impressionism. From then on, the two men feuded.

Unfortunately for Sargent, Fry outlived him. The year after Sargent died, the Royal Academy in London held a memorial retrospective of his work. Fry viciously criticized the show, destroying Sargent’s reputation for a good 50 years.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent. Maybe Fry was just jealous.

2. Sargent was not born in the USA.

He considered himself an American, though he didn’t set foot in America until his 20^th year. His parents wandered around Europe for decades. They always sought a better climate or cheaper places to live.

Sargent was born in Florence on Jan. 12, 1856, to Fitzwilliam Sargent, a Philadelphia physician, and Mary Newbold Singer, an heiress. By the time he turned 18 he had lived in London, Paris, Pau, Biarritz, Salzburg, Nice, St. Moritz, Venice, Lake Maggiore, Dresden and various cities in Spain. He spoke English, French, German and Italian, all fluently.

His mother loved Europe and the nomadic life. His father hated it. But she had the money, and they could live inexpensively in Europe. So they did.

El Jaleo, courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Sargent considered Boston his American home. He had his first solo show at the St. Botolph Club in 1888, and won several major mural commissions in the city. Isabella Stewart Gardner, a friend, collected his work (you can see El Jaleo at the Gardner Museum). The Museum of Fine Arts Boston claims to hold the most complete collection of Sargent’s work, as well as his archives. When he died, the Boston Globe ran a front page story, Boston Claims Sargent, Great Master, As Her Own.

3. He preferred painting landscapes.

Sargent painted and drew landscapes since childhood. But making a living as an artist required critical acclaim for work shown at the Paris Salon, then the most important art event in the western world.

An Out of Doors Study, watercolor, by John Singer Sargent

Thousands of people visited the exhibition, and the international press covered it. But the French Academie, which ran the Salon, held landscape painting in low regard. And so portrait paintings defined Sargent from the days of his early success.

He began to exhibit his bold and experimental watercolor landscapes after the turn of the century. They “caused a sensation in Britain and great excitement in America,” according to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. His watercolors still draw a crowd.

4. He had an illustrious family.

He came from an elite New England family. His ancestor Epes Sargent was one of the largest landowners in Gloucester, Mass., before the American Revolution.

Epes Sargent by John Singleton Copley

His well-known relatives include the “merchant prince” Daniel Sargent, author Lucius Manley Sargent, artist Henry Sargent, horticulturist Henry Winthrop Sargent and Mississippi Territory Governor Winthrop Sargent.

The Gloucester home of another ancestor, essayist and women’s rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray, is now a house museum.

5. Was Sargent gay or straight?

No one knows for sure. He had several romances with women, though he never married. And his many sketches of male nudes suggest he was gay. In London, he was friends with his neighbor Oscar Wilde.

But he kept his sexuality to himself. However, one of his clients said that when in Venice, he was only interested in the gondoliers. After he died, one of his former sitters said, “Sargent’s sex life was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.”

Gondoliers’ Siesta by John Singer Sargent

Richard Ormond, Sargent scholar and the painter’s great-grandnephew, argued that no one would ever know. “If [Sargent] had sexual relationships they must have been of a brief and transient nature and they have left no trace,” he wrote. “We simply do not know, and decoding messages from his work is no substitute for evidence.”

6. Sargent was Mr. Popularity.

Everybody liked him (except maybe Roger Fry). He was handsome, well mannered, well dressed and good at conversation, music and dancing. People sought him out to paint their portraits partly because sitting for him was so enjoyable.

He would visit the sitter’s home to see where the portrait would hang, and often went through the subject’s closet to pick out the right outfit. The frame he picked out himself. He earned about $5,000 per painting, or about $130,000. He used no assistants. In the 1890s he averaged about 14 portrait commissions a year.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw

While painting, he would stand back from the canvas, look at his subject, walk to the canvas, paint a few strokes, and then walk back, talking all the while. He estimated he covered four miles a day while painting portraits.

Sometimes he played the piano for his sitter. Eventually, he got tired of shucking and jiving for his wealthy patrons. “Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working…What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched,” he wrote.

In 1907, he vowed not to do any more portraits. “It is to me positive bliss to think that I shall soon be a free man,” he wrote, describing life after portrait painting. He closed his studio, but he did make a few exceptions for friends like Henry James.

7. Madame X was lazy and unpaintable.

His portrait of Mme. Emilie Gautreau, or Madame X, was the talk of the 1884 Paris Salon and not in a good way. A mob of Parisians flocked to the painting to make fun of it. The New York Times called it “absurd and atrocious.” Mme. Gautreau’s mother begged him to take the painting down, something Sargent couldn’t do. “All Paris mocks my daughter,” she cried.

The ridicule came as a shock. For a decade, nobody had said anything bad about Sargent’s work. But Madame X was different.

Madame X

Sargent, usually so deft with the brush, struggled with Virginie Amelie Gautreau. An American married to a French banker, she had a reputation for taking on lovers. Sargent had a hard time getting her just right, and she didn’t like to sit still for long. In a letter, Sargent complained to a friend about “the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau.” When he finished it, he exhibited it only reluctantly at the Salon.

What was so odd, so shocking about a painting of a woman with a heavily powdered face in a low-cut gown? After all, Parisians were used to seeing paintings of nudes.

It was her arrogance, her theatricality, her “come hither” look – something well-bred women did not do. Madame X (for X-rated?) seems about to pop out of her gown into the arms of a man not her husband.

Some people liked it. A French critic, Louis de Fourcaud, called it a masterpiece, as it eventually came to be recognized. Sargent later called it the best thing he’d ever done.

John Singer Sargent in his London studio.

8. His Boston Public Library Murals caused trouble.

He painted many Jewish people, but his mural The Church and the Synagogue got him into trouble with them. In the 1890s, he had a reputation as “the painter of the Jews.” He painted a number of upper-class Jewish subjects, including the family of Asher Wertheimer, the magisterial Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children and Joseph Pulitzer.

Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children

He started working on one of his masterpieces, the Boston Public Library murals, in 1890. He didn’t finish them by the time of his death in 1925. (See them here.) The Church and the Synagogue belong to The Triumph of Religion series on the third floor of the McKim Building in Copley Square. Sargent portrayed Judaism and the synagogue as a grim, austere hag and Christianity and the church as a lovely young woman.

Dr. Israel Abraham wrote that “no Jewish artist would do the Church the artistic wrong which Sargent has done to the Synagogue.” Sargent was hurt and confused by charges of anti-Semitism. He explained that he drew on medieval iconography for his inspiration.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Edith Wharton in Paris During World War I

Life for Edith Wharton in Paris was lived in stimulating freedom and aristocratic luxury until World War I broke out. Shocked by the ravages of the fighting the famous American novelist set to work helping impoverished refugees and wounded French soldiers. She even established work rooms employing displaced women and destitute housewives to make fashionable undergarments.

Edith Wharton

Examining life through her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton wrote that her “years of Paris life were spent entirely in the rue de Varenne; and all those years rise up to meet me whenever I turn the corner of the street. Rich years, crowded and happy years; …I should have been hard to please had I not discovered many compensations in my life in Paris.”

Brought up in privilege on west 23^rd street in New York, Wharton’s greatest enjoyments as a youth were reading and playing make-believe. She travelled widely throughout Europe with her parents and spent many a summer in the verdant countryside and the rolling hills of New England.

Married in 1885, Wharton and her husband built The Mount, a country manor in Lenox, Mass., in 1902. It inspired many of her most poignant novels, such as Ethan Frome and Summer. They tell of life in the New England hill towns.

The Mount

Edith Wharton in Paris

With her husband fighting depression, a disorder hardly better understood today, they traveled to the south of France for the therapeutic relief offered by the warm Mediterranean air. By 1909 they took up their own flat in Paris, at 53 rue de Varenne. Sadly, her husband’s condition grew increasingly difficult, and their living situation became untenable. They divorced in 1913 after 28 years of marriage, and Wharton moved permanently into the Paris apartment.

Edith Wharton in Paris: Her longtime home at 53 rue de Varenne in the 7th arrondissement. Photo courtesy of John Happ.

With the experiences of previous visits and now permanently living in the City of Lights, the author moved among the most fashionable, wealthy and influential of society’s statesmen and journalists alike. In Paris she “”enjoyed a freedom…, not possible to the native born, who were enclosed in the old social pigeon-holes…” As an American of means she could gracefully straddle various social segments. Enthusiasm in France for her writing had been growing. Her latest work, The Custom of the Country had even recently been translated into French along with The House of Mirth. Wharton’s characterization of New England life, then completely unknown to the French, boosted her popularity and reputation.

The Poor Archduke

But old-world diplomatic alliances had created confusion and crisis in Europe. Long unresolved and pent-up hostilities were released. Germany declared war on France in August of 1914.

Of those months immediately preceding the outbreak of war, Wharton recalled, “How happy and safe the future seemed.”

So aloof to the unfolding hostilities were Wharton and her friends that when the trigger was pulled in Sarajevo, and the war was set in motion, “We gave little thought to the poor murdered Archduke…”

The Western Front

France rushed to reclaim the “lost” provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The move put the two armies face-to-face along Germany’s western border – the so-called Western Front.

A French bayonet charge on the Western Front.

People were shocked to learn that the nature and methods of war had changed. Gone were the Victorian-era days of horse cavalry and bayonet combat. Both sides had new and bigger artillery guns, dreadful chemical gases, frightening flame throwers and far-reaching aerial bombs.

The German advance into France scared many people out of Paris. When they continued into Belgium in the fall of 1914, Belgian refugees flooded the city. War engulfed everyone: civilians, women and children alike. The city was swamped by the growing throngs and drowning for the lack of funds to deal with them. Casualties on the French side were legion.

Near to Wharton’s Paris home the sculpture “Charity”,
Square Boucicault on Place le Courbusier, Paris, located on the Boulervard Raspail, Metro Sevres-Babylon. Photo courtesy of John Happ.

Refugees

French service organizations had not, on the one hand, prepared at all for this influx of refugees. On the other, the French army had drained the city of men from all walks of life, conscripted to fill the ranks. With their husbands gone, wives had no money. Nor did they have a way to make any since they were normally bound to their household chores.

Almost all hotels, restaurants, shops and work-rooms had closed with the drafting of the men. There remained large numbers of women and children without means or livelihood for whom immediate provisions had to be made.

A crowd of reservists mobilized at the Gare de l’Est. Photo courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France

In the growing domestic crisis, the French Red Cross asked the now-famous Edith Wharton for help. She hesitated. The war had even frozen her personal money transfers from America. But, once determined that she must help France, she undertook her duty with raw enthusiasm. She helped to set up an American Hostel for Refugees, which managed to provide shelter, meals and clothes. Eventually it offered employment agency services to help the needy find work.

In early 1915, Wharton organized the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which gave shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees.

Underwear Entrepreneur

In lieu of raising money as a traditional charity, she opened a cutting and sewing workroom to make undergarments. In this way she gave meaningful employment to war refugees, underprivileged women and the wives of factory men called to service.

They made lingerie, men’s undershorts and foundation garments. The business engaged some 90 women who received both food and wages.

Of these heady days, Wharton wrote, “There was an ardor in the air which made it seem easy to accomplish whatever one attempted.”

As Wharton’s workshop grew, wealthy friends with spare property to offer gave her space in Paris. She had several skilled workers among her first recruits. That led Wharton to the idea to use finer materials and make “high end” or fashion undergarments that could be sold in America. And with the volunteer support of international agents she received orders from American department stores.

Military Hospitals

Les Invalides military hospital, as seen from Rue de Varenne. Photo courtesy of John Happ.

Fundraising was a constant effort. In order to tap America for funds to aid their relief efforts, the French Red Cross again turned to Wharton. The agency asked her to report on the needs in military hospitals near the front. Journalists were restricted at the war front, but she managed to get the necessary passes and permits to travel there.

Witnessing haunting scenes of desperation as well as valor Wharton created a series of magazine articles for publication in the States. The physical destruction of men’s minds and bodies was unparalleled in history.

By May of 1917 Wharton found the morale of the French army at a low ebb. Men were being sent back to the front instead of to a rest area as they were promised. “More than half of the divisions in the army were in various stages of indiscipline and mutiny.”

Marshall Petain, general and commander of the French Army, empathized with the soldiers. He halted offensive actions and gave soldiers a break, stating, “We shall wait for the Americans and their tanks.”

Wharton’s stirring articles produced an outpouring of support from America. So-called “Edith Wharton” fund raising committees sprang up in New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia and elsewhere. That made it financially possible for the Red Cross to continue its work.

Finally, Peace

Bloody fighting also continued. In July of 1918 the German offensive reached Château-Thierry, only 50 miles from Paris. Bombardments on the city thundered through the various arrondissements. Works of art were evacuated from the Louvre and sandbags were placed around monuments. Blackouts shrouded the city from German night bombers.

Bombs exploding over low buildings, probably the bombing of Paris in 1918. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum.

Then, large numbers of American soldiers began arriving in France. Allied forces turned back the German offensive. By November 1918 one set of church bells after another all over Paris began to ring out peace! The war was over.

The war upended the world in which Wharton once thrived. The First World War brought the innocence of her youth to an end, Years later she wrote, “the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914… ”

Edith Wharton in Paris, Remembered

Photo courtesy of John Happ.

For her heroism, the French posted the following at the door of 53 rue de Varenne:

(Translated as) In this building lived from 1910 to 1920 EDITH WHARTON American Novelist 1862 to 1937. She was the first writer from the United States to expatriate herself to France, for the love of this country and her literature.

Quoting Wharton in English it says,

My years of Paris life were spent entirely in the Rue de Varennes – rich years, crowded and happy years.

Finally it says again in French,

Close to Henry James, the work of Edith Wharton describes the high society from which she came, in ways both delicate and biting.

The Local Memories Association.

The End of the Story

Had she only been the great American novelist, it would have already been quite a lifetime. But the French honored her for the service she extended to the nation in their time of great need.

Edith Wharton died in 1937 and is buried in Versailles, France.

Photo courtesy of John Happ.

John E. Happ, the author of this story about Edith Wharton in Paris, has been immersed in the contrasting narratives of foreign cultures since college in Spain and speaks five languages. His varied assignments in Germany, Switzerland, the Philippines and Japan contribute greatly to his research and perspectives. Happ is a contributing author at the Journal of the American Revolution, has written for the web site The 75^th Artillery C.A.C During World War One and the adventure magazine, Atlantic Coastal Kayaker.

Images: The Mount By Margaret Helminska – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63730387. French bayonet charge By Underwood & Underwood. (US War Dept.) – http://www.dodmedia.osd.mil/DVIC_View/Still_Details.cfm?SDAN=HDSN9902296&JPGPath=/Assets/Still/1999/DoD/HD-SN-99-02296.JPG., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2599594.

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Harriet Hosmer, Pioneering Woman Artist

Harriet Hosmer was one of the best known artists — and one of the best known professional women — of her time. She paved the way for women to become sculptors, while commenting on the status of women through her work.

Harriet Hosmer, engraving by Auguste Rodin

She was also one of the most independent women of her age.

“I honor every woman who has strength enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another,” she once wrote.

Harriet Hosmer

She was born Oct. 9, 1830, in Watertown, Mass. Her father, a prominent physician, deeply mourned the loss of his wife and three other children to tuberculosis. He then determined his surviving child would be free and strong. So he influenced her to build her strength by rowing, skating and riding.

The Prince of Wales at Harriet Hosmer’s studio

Dr. Hiram Hosmer supported his daughter’s early decision to become a sculptor. Barred from studying anatomy on the East Coast because of her sex, he sent her to St. Louis to study anatomy at the Missouri Medical College. On one trip west, she won a footrace to the top of a mountain in Iowa. It’s now called Mount Hosmer in honor of her victory.

By 1851 Harriet Hosmer had earned enough commissions for portrait busts to return to Boston and pursue her art.

She then befriended the writer Lydia Marie Child and the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Cushman. Cushman planned to give up the stage and move to Rome. In 1852, she took 22-year-old Harriet Hosmer with her.

“I am soul-bound and thought-bound in this land of dollars and cents,” Hosmer wrote.

Strange Sisterhood

Harriet Hosmer at work

In Rome, Harriet Hosmer had many relationships with women, including Cushman’s partner Matilda Hays. She was committed for 25 years to Louisa, Lady Ashburton, a widowed Scottish noblewoman who she called her “sposa.” Hosmer, who dressed like a man, called herself “hubbie.”

When she first came to Rome, Hosmer began studying under leading British sculptor John Gibson. As the life of every party, she played a central role in an expatriate group of artists and writers. Those included Edmonia Lewis, sculptor William Wetmore Story and Henry James. James described a “strange sisterhood of lady sculptors” that included Anne Whitney, whose statue of Samuel Adams stands in front of Faneuil Hall. Also belonging to the group: Louisa Lander, the great-granddaughter of Elias Haskett Derby; and Margaret Foley, the daughter of a Vermont farmhand. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about them in The Marble Faun.

Hosmer was probably the only one of the group who earned enough money from her art to support herself. She worked alone in her large studio, lived by herself and went horseback riding without a male escort.

In 1854 Harriet Hosmer made a career breakthrough: a statue of Puck so popular she then replicated it 30 times. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, bought a copy. Today, her Puck and the Owl at the Boston Athenaeum are on the Women’s Heritage Trail.

Hear Me Roar

Most of her subjects were tragic women from myth and literature.

Zenobia in Chains

Her masterpiece, Zenobia in Chains, sold for about $400,000 in 1859. It is a seven-foot-tall sculpture of a 3^rd-century queen captured by a Roman emperor and paraded through the streets in chains. The dignified, clothed statue of Zenobia is Hosmer’s own commentary on the fear of female power. She now stands in the St. Louis Art Museum.

“Zenobia is one of the most famous – and controversial – objects produced during the “golden age” of American classical sculpture,” wrote curator John Murdoch. “Some critics at the time questioned whether a work of such sublime expression, on such a scale, and requiring such power of hand and arm in the carving, could have been done by a woman.”

Her neoclassical style of art fell out of favor after the Civil War, and she devoted more of her time to turning limestone into marble and inventing a perpetual motion machine.

Thomas Hart Benton by Harriet Hosmer

In 1860, the State of Missouri commissioned her to create a monumental bronze statue of Thomas Hart Benton.

Harriet Hosmer then grew more and more involved in the women’s rights movement, befriending Susan B. Anthony and joining with the Chicago women’s rights group, the Queen Isabella Society. The society commissioned her to sculpt Isabella of Castille for the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

She spent the rest of her life in Chicago and Terre Haute, Ind. Harriet Hosmer died at Watertown, Mass., on February 21, 1908.

Photos: Thomas Hart Benton By Whitebox at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15475106; Zenobia in Chains By Harriet Hosmer – Own work by QuartierLatin1968, 2011-05-27, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15381767.

This story last updated in 2022.

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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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Will the Real Annie Adams Fields Please Stand Up?

Publisher and poet James Fields saw his career take off after he married Annie Adams Fields. It was not a coincidence.

Annie Adams Fields, 1890, by John Singer Sargent

Fields’ reputation as a publisher rested on his ability to spot promising authors, but his wife had the eagle eye for talent.

Annie Adams Fields

She was born to a genteel Boston family on June 6, 1834. At 20, she married the 37-year-old Fields. He had just been made a partner at the publishing house Ticknor & Fields. She helped him discover such writers as Horatio Alger, Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter and Emma Lazarus.

James Fields

She presented herself as the perfect hostess and society wife. Charles Dickens called her,‘ “one of the dearest little women in the world.”

Annie and her husband kept a literary salon at their home on Beacon Hill in Boston. The most famous writers of the day congregated at the Fields’ home. They included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, John Greenleaf Whittier, Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. When their friend Nathaniel Hawthorne died, James Fields served as a pallbearer at his funeral.

Ticknor & Fields bought The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and James Fields took over as editor in 1861. With his wife’s help, he turned it into the most influential magazine of its day.

The Atlantic Monthly offices on Tremont Street in Boston, around 1868

Throughout Annie’s life, she stayed out of her husband’s spotlight. In 1902 an anonymous writer described her as “gentle, quiet and reserved.” That writer also sensed something behind her facade, noting, ‘there is no power in Boston to-day like that of Mrs. Fields.’

Behind that facade, Annie Adams Fields was a writer in her own right. She published poetry and biographies and edited collections of letters.

Helping Women and the Poor

She was an ardent, if quiet, supporter of women authors and women’s rights. After her husband died, she lived the rest of her life with her best friend, Sarah Orne Jewett, in a Boston marriage.

Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett in Fields’ Charles Street library.

Annie Fields was a social reformer and a quiet activist who founded the Holly Tree Inns, non-profit restaurants that served inexpensive food (but no liquor) to working women. She also started the Lincoln Street Home, a residence hotel for unmarried working women. She supported local charities, and her book How to Help the Poor served as an unofficial guide to the Associated Charities of Boston.

Annie Adams Fields died on Jan. 5, 1915.

With thanks to Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters by Rita K. Gollin. This story last updated in 2022.

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