western mass. Archives - New England Historical Society

By the time she died in 1875, people knew Henriette Desportes as a minister’s wife in Stockbridge, Mass. But behind that staid image was the story of a scandal that helped topple the King of France.

Henriette Desportes was a French girl, born illegitimately in 1813. By 1840 she had been educated at French boarding schools, developed a talent for art and traveled to Britain where she worked as a governess before returning to France.

L to r, clockwise: Henry Field, Charles Theobold, Fanny Theobold, Henriette Desportes.

Henriette Desportes, Nanny

At age 27, in 1841, she found work with the family of a French duke, Charles Laure Hugues Théobald. Her job was to be nanny to the duke’s children. But the duke’s wife, Françoise Altarice Rosalba Sebastiani, thought more was going on.

Fanny and Theo had nine children. They ran through a string of nannies until Henriette Desportes arrived. She would last six years at the job. But Fanny accused her of alienating the children from their mother. What’s worse, she believed Theo and Henriette were having an affair.

Descriptions of their marriage tend to flatter one at the expense of the other depending on the teller of the tale. Supporters of Theo paint him as a harassed figure, putting up with a wife with an explosive temper. He endured her pepperings of long letters that alternated between complaining and apologizing.

Supporters of Fanny describe Theo as distant, uncaring and unfaithful to his wife. Fanny put up with much of his misbehavior, they say, until the affair between Theo and Henriette became public knowledge. This so scandalized her, she had no choice but to force Theo to fire Henriette the nanny.

The evidence of an affair between Theo and Henriette Desportes is circumstantial. She wrote long, emotional letters to him after being fired. And he did pay for her rent for a time after her separation. But the letters reveal no smoking gun, and he urged her to move on and meet people.

Murder

All this might have gone into the history books as just another tumultuous marriage among the aristocracy, but for the events of August 17, 1847.

Duke Theo and Duchess Fanny had traveled to their Paris home. On that morning, the servants awoke to sounds of a struggle, and they discovered Fanny dead. Someone had stabbed and bludgeoned her. The logical suspect: her husband. The duke was in the house, armed with a pistol.

He said that an intruder came into the home and attacked his wife. He tried to repel the prowler. Theo showed signs of a fight, but could not explain anything more about the assailant. A servant said she witnessed the duke washing blood from his hands.

The police arrested the duke, and he awaited trial in a special court that handled matters involving royalty. Henriette Desportes, meanwhile, got swept up in the affair. Police arrested her and charged her with some sort of involvement in the crime.

Theo faced limited choices. He could confess, he could stand by his story or he could blame Henriette. Instead, he chose option 4: Suicide. He went to the grave declaring his innocence. With no husband to prosecute and no evidence against Henriette Desportes, the police dropped the case.

Abdication

France, in 1847, was in the midst of a financial crisis. Wealth had accumulated at the top of society for decades, while poverty was rampant. This double standard, the critics said, extended beyond money and into the justice system. Some suggested the duke had been allowed to swallow poison to avoid disgrace to the royal families of France. Still others insisted that he hadn’t died at all. Authorities let him fake his death and slip away, they said.

In 1848, France’s King Louis Philippe I faced a full-on revolt. Aware of the precedent for the French citizenry dealing roughly with its royal class, Louis quickly abdicated his throne – handing it to his nine-year-old grandson. The boy, showing he had as many brains as his grandfather, fled the country as well, setting the stage for the rise of Napoleon III.

Louis Philippe

All This and Heaven

But what of the nanny Henriette Desportes? She moved to the United States and met a young minister from Stockbridge, Mass.

Henry Martyn Field was nine years younger than Henriette. He came from an accomplished family of four brothers, all of whom would distinguish themselves in law or business. Henry was also a writer and editor, as well as a respected minister.

He took a liking to Henriette Desportes. Henry had travelled in France in 1847 and 1848, and was delighted by the country. After Henriette migrated to New York, in the wake of the scandal, she went to work as a school teacher.

Henry and Henriette married in 1851. They divided their time between New York and East Springfield and Stockbridge, Mass. By all accounts they had a happy marriage and a respected place in society.

Henry remarried following Henriette’s death in 1875. And the story of Henriette’s harrowing Paris life might have faded into history, but for Henry’s great niece, Rachel Field.

Rachel Field and her Scottish terrier, Spriggen.

The Story Lives On

Rachel was a writer. She wrote successful children’s books and plays, as well as adult fiction. She loved New England, and her first novel, Time Out of Mind, told the story of a Maine village wrestling with decline as the age of sail gave way to modern shipping.

For the second novel, in 1938, she chose to update and retell Henriette’s tale under the title, All This and Heaven, Too. The novel was a best seller and established Rachel as a national author. Though airing the family’s dirty laundry raised some eyebrows, it paved the way for her continued writing success.

In 1940, All This and Heaven, Too was made into a film starring Bette Davis. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, but lost. Critics faulted it for being over-long at 141 minutes. Today the film has an 83 percent positive rating at movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes.

This story about Henriette Desportes was updated in 2022.

Ammi Phillips, a masterful folk artist, was forgotten for decades until his work came to light in a Kent, Conn., antique show in 1924.

Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog

Today, Ammi Phillips’ most famous painting, Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog, highlights the American Folk Art Museum collection.

A New York Times art critic called it ‘one of the most beautiful paintings made by any American artist ever.’ He also called it ‘heartbreakingly lovely.’ Many people have reproduced it, the U.S. postal service featured it on a stamp and a novelist wrote a book about it.

Ammi Phillips

Ammi (pronounced AM-eye) Phillips was born on April 24, 1788 in Colebrook, Conn. As a young man in 1809 he advertised in the Berkshire Record his ability to paint ‘correct likenesses’ with ‘perfect shadows and elegantly dressed in the prevailing fashions of the day.’

Unlike contemporaries like John Singleton Copley of Boston, Phillips worked on the sparsely populated frontier. He roamed the countryside with his family to find customers. Apparently, he found it a romantic and satisfying way to live.

People then viewed portraits as status symbols, and Phillips soon earned commissions from influential people in Berkshire County, Mass. He painted for the next 50 years. That meant moving to western Massachusetts, Connecticut and the Hudson River Valley in search of new customers.

He painted Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog in Dutchess County, N.Y., in 1830.

And he probably influenced a younger itinerant painter in the region, Erastus Salisbury Field.

The Kent Limner

Ammi Phillips died on July 11, 1865, in Curtisville (now Interlaken), Mass., near Stockbridge. For the next 60 years people forgot about him. Then came the antique show in 1924. It displayed a group of 1830s-era portraits of women in dark dresses. The unknown painter of the strongly colored works got the nickname ‘The Kent Limner.’

Ammi Phillips, ‘Portrait of a Lady in an Elaborate Lace Bonnet’

Finding Ammi

About 15 years later, another group of folk portraits came to light near the border of New York and Connecticut. These were painted earlier, with pastel coloring and tentative rendering. The unknown artist of those works was called the “Border Limner.”

Ammi Phillips, ‘Mrs. Wilbur Sherman and Daughter Sarah’

Two folk art collectors, Barbara and Larry Holdridge, bought one of the few paintings Ammi Phillips signed, “George Sunderland,” in 1958. They believed the Kent Limner and the Border Limner had painted it.

For decades they searched for his work, pored over Census records and interviewed Phillips’ still-living relatives and subjects. In 1965, the Holdridges organized an exhibit of 219 Ammi Phillips’ paintings. Three years later, art historians established that Ammi Phillips had painted both groups.

By 1976, art historians identified more than 400 paintings as his work.

Blond Boy with Primer, Peach, and Dog

In 1985, an anonymous donor paid more than $1 million for Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog. The secret benefactor then gave it to the American Folk Art Museum.

Hilton Kramer, the starchy New York Times art critic, called Phillips “amazing” in a 1970 review of an exhibit of Phillips’ work. The portrait of Mrs. Isaac Cox, he wrote, was of “superb quality.”

To the modern eye, the portrait of Mrs. Cox particularly speaks with a clarity, precision, and sympathy that places it considerably nearer to our own standards of artistic probity than anything to be found in the common run of ‘serious’ painting at the time. If this is ‘innocent’ painting, it is innocent only of those flatulent academic pretensions which remained the curse of so much of our art in the 19th century.

Mrs. Isaac Cox by Ammi Phillips

This story about Ammi Phillips was updated in 2022.

western mass.

Henriette Desportes Leaves the Scandals of Paris for a Stockbridge Minister