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159 SEVEN While Garden and Forest Lived t In 1894, buoyed up by a doctor’s report that Gris would be able to return to New York with her in May, Van Rensselaer began writing again for Garden and Forest and completed “People in New York” for Century. In a letter of transmittal to Gilder on 15 January, she was relaxed after a long afternoon drive up into “the red and purple mountains, with the thermometer at 60, the sun like May and the breeze a delicious zephyr.” The description was the most appreciative yet of the Colorado landscape, but the next line revealed her true feelings: “I would change places gladly with you and your mud and your horrid smells. Such is the mixture of cockneyism and love for my friends which composes what I am obliged to call my soul.”1 Throughout the winter, Van Rensselaer continued to complain to Gilder about Colorado Springs; in one letter she described the town as a “barbaric place where there is nothing to balance one’s mind or keep one’s pen in serious paths.” In late February, she sent the introductory chapter of the French church series and told Gilder she was leaving the next day for Denver. She was excited at the prospect of the trip, for she had not stirred from Colorado Springs since October. She wrote to Gilder on her return that Denver had been a surprise, especially her hotel: “It is the finest I have ever seen in any part of the world, and the internal architecture and decorations in much better taste than any hotel in N.Y. And think of coming to the Rockies to have all clean linen on your bed every night! Only crowned heads have that in Europe.” She would have much preferred to be in Denver than in Colorado Springs, because, as she repeated to Gilder, she was a cockney and inclined to like busy rather than pleasure-seeking people.2 y mariana griswold van rensselaer 160 In March the doctor told Van Rensselaer that she could return home with Gris in the middle of May and stay all summer. It was not wise advice, she thought, and decided that they would avoid the New York City summer and return to Colorado before the heat set in. In April they made plans to go to Glenwood Springs on the other side of the Rockies to have several quiet weeks before starting eastward. She hoped to be home by the third week of May, she told Gilder, and wrote on 19 April: “My kid is well and so am I.” Three days later, Gris was dead.3 “It Is No Time for Amazons” Within a month of Gris’s death, Van Rensselaer was back in New York City, where the suffrage revival was under way as part of a general politicalreform movement. Much has been made of Van Rensselaer’s opposition to woman suffrage. How to explain what certainly seems like a contradiction? William Morgan, in the introduction to the Dover edition of Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, uses Van Rensselaer’s position on suffrage to reduce her to a “gentlewoman,” when in fact Ellen Carol DuBois has found that elite New York women were about equally divided between the Downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1890s, photograph by W. E. Hook. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, 1x–14839) 161 While Garden and Forest Lived pro- and anti-suffrage camps. Does her stance inevitably mean that she was an “amateur,” as Morgan claims, and “neither an outstanding scholar nor a brilliant researcher”?4 Cynthia Kinnard writes that Van Rensselaer was “decidedly not a feminist ” and asks, “How can one be a lady and an art critic at the same time?” She suggests that this contradiction remains “to confound appreciation of her to this day.” Kinnard takes Van Rensselaer to account for having definite ideas about the role of women that colored her writing as an art critic. Van Rensselaer believed that it was a woman’s role to influence and to educate, but these aims also define the role of a critic, as was spelled out by the latenineteenth -century English art critic Sir Sidney Colvin: “it is the business of criticism to teach people how to look.” Thus, the mission of the critic cannot be differentiated by gender. Her opinion on suffrage had nothing to do with her professionalism or her scholarship.5 In 1893 Colorado became the first state...

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