Carrying the Torch: Maud Howe Elliott and the American Renaissance

Preface

ix pr eface It was the striking photograph by Bachrach of the beautiful yet formidable older woman that introduced me to Maud Howe Elliott, a historical figure at the Newport Art Museum where I arrived as curator in 1998.The portrait from 1928 shows her clad in black mourning attire, adorned with various medals, while through a veil her clear, intelligent and lovely eyes meet the viewer head on. A Pulitzer prizewinning author and recognized arts advocate in her day, Elliott was the co-founder of the institution that began in 1912 as the Art Association of Newport and is now the Newport Art Museum and Art Association. Interested in Newport’s art history and a student of women’s history, I had never heard of Elliott. Maud Howe Elliott,like many of history’s “lost”women,was respected and well known during her lifetime, which spanned almost a hundred years in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Elliott gained prominence as the literary daughter of two of Boston’s great historical figures, Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe. Her first forays into the world of writing included art reviews and “letters”for the BostonTranscipt.She went on to author twenty-one popular books of fiction and non-fiction, as well as countless articles and stories.She shared the first Pulitzer Prize for biography with her sister Laura Elizabeth Richards, for Julia Ward Howe,1819–1910.She visited artists’studios and lectured on artists of both sexes to a variety of American audiences beginning in the late 1880s in Chicago, where she played a prominent role in the woman’s building at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. She firmly believed that the x Preface United States was fertile ground for great art; she wrote “The best work with few exceptions,done by American artists has been done in America: Copley, Stuart, Allston, Hunt, La Farge, Fuller, Saint Gaudens, Alden Weir, Winslow Homer, George Inness have all painted at home.”1 Elliott was not confined to the arts in her interests, however; she was a suffragist as well as a passionate supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, forming the Rhode Island Women’s Progressive Party in 1912 and giving lectures across the nation in support of the 1916 candidate, Charles Evans Hughes.Elliott was also a journalist of stature,writing syndicated columns in a number of American newspapers and indeed, was often an investigative reporter. In a career that encompassed six decades, five wars and great social upheaval, Elliott used her pen, her voice and her persuasive personality to advocate for a progressive agenda of cultural and political reform. Elliott’s adopted city of Newport, Rhode Island, has long recognized her many cultural and civic contributions. When she died at the age of ninety-three in 1948, Maxim Karolik, the great patron of American art and benefactor of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, sent a letter to the Newport Daily News.He wrote,“I am not sure whether we all realize what the passing of Maud Howe Elliott means to us Newporters. I think she epitomized the cultural life of Newport…If we are interested in Newport as a progressive New England town, we must keep Mrs. Elliott’s torch burning for our cultural life here.”2 Karolik,credited with influencing the renaissance of American nineteenth century painting in the twentieth century, recognized a kindred spirit in Elliott, who focused on raising not only Newport’s,but the nation’s consciousness about the importance of American art and artists. A strong adherent to the classical ideals of the Greeks and Romans, as well as the humanism of the Renaissance, Elliott believed that the American nation contained these same seeds of greatness. Maud Howe was born in 1854, the fifth child of Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe. Her mother’s name is familiar to earlier students of American history primarily for authoring the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic during the Civil War and following that coup with decades of activism on behalf of women’s rights, world peace and social reform. Her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe—nicknamed “The Preface xi Chevalier,” “Chev” for short—was a Brown University and Harvardeducated physician,Greek freedom fighter,abolitionist,advocate for the physically and mentally disabled, first director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind and pioneer in education for the blind. An early opponent of tax breaks...