Carrying the Torch: Maud Howe Elliott and the American Renaissance

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61 fiv e I could say to any young man or woman at the beginning of the career of an artist—“go to Paris to study your profession but come back to America to practice it.”The best work with few exceptions, done by American artists has been done in America: Copley, Stuart, Allston, Hunt, La Farge, Fuller, St. Gaudens, Alden Weir, Winslow Homer, George Inness have all painted at home. Maud Howe Elliott In marrying Jack Elliott, Maud made a conscious decision to forgo the life of Proper Bostonian society, to put work above leisure, and to actively promote the importance of art. Jack Gardner continued his disapproval of the match: “Maud Howe had a pretty wedding and looked very handsome. She had a number of presents and was very pleased with them, but they were neither so numerous nor so handsome as they ought to have been and nothing like what they would have been if she had been or married rich.”1 The ceremony took place at 241 Beacon Street with longtime Unitarian family minister James Freeman Clarke presiding.The wedding and the dress were “startlingly original,”as promised by Maud,who “in queenly loveliness stepped forth,”emerging from a bamboo curtain parted by nieces Rosalind Richards and Carrie Hall, wearing a gown of white grosgrain satin with duchesse point lace, covered by a tulle veil.The wedding guests stood under a bower of palms 62 Carrying the Torch and laurel designed by Mrs. Jack and the groom. The couple proceeded to the vocals of Integer Vitae, a Horatian ode with lyrics for this occasion by John S. Dwight, Boston’s sage of music:2 With songs of delight, with garlands most bright With blessings and prayer salute we the pair Whom love shall enfold with a circlet of gold These fetters so fine art of metal divine May they bind to a peace that shall ever increase May they pledge to a faith that is perfect til death. To Hymen3 we sing, let the glad echo ring Let the strophe resound and good wishes abound. Hail Hymen! God Given for Earth and for Heaven.4 Maud and Jack went to New York for a brief honeymoon.The city was the center of both the academic and avant-garde American art world, and Maud, initially through Uncle Sam’s contacts, had become very familiar with the Tenth Street Studios, the National Academy of Design, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1870. The home of Mary Cadwalader Jones at 21 East Eleventh Street was a hub of artistic importance where Marion Crawford had been especially welcome. As a child Marion had known Mary in Italy. Mary was the wife of Frederick Rhinelander Jones, brother to Edith Wharton; she was a good friend to John La Farge and held weekly Sunday luncheons that Crawford often attended, as did Maud when in New York. There she dined with such other habitués as John Singer Sargent, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and La Farge, “with his strange myopic eyes,” at a “table with its fine linen cloth, sparkling crystal, ancient silver . . .”5 Another New York haunt frequented by La Farge, St. Gaudens, and architect Stanford White was the carriage-house home of editor Richard Watson Gilder and his wife, the former Helena de Kay, an artist said to have been the muse of Winslow Homer. It was in their studio home on Fifteenth Street, years before Maud and Jack were part of their salon,that a plot to unsettle the National Academy of Design came into being. Maud’s newspaper letters and columns had been focusing increasingly on the arts. “Much of my Transcript work was art reviewing. Among Chapter Five 63 other artists, this brought me in touch with John La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Albert Ryder, and Charles Walter Stetson. I was one of the first writers to cry aloud the excellence of the work of these and many another American artist, and was, in consequence, persona grata at the studios.”6 Work by these and other artists who had absorbed “foreign” influences—looser brushwork, sketchy drawing, indistinct compositions —was sometimes rejected by the strict jury for the National Academy annual exhibitions. Both Julia and Maud Howe were champions of the more “poetic” and natural style, espoused by the paintings of their friend William Morris Hunt, and his sometime student in Newport, La Farge. In 1875...