Chapter Four

               The Civil War had ended a year ago. Four of the friends came to Newport in August for a working holiday. They were staying with Helena’s sister, Katherine. She had a large house that Helena knew well. This was where she hung out with Minnie and Henry as teenagers. Her niece was now five. Her brother-in-law still seemed to wander about and come and go as he pleased. He didn’t need to work.

                Molly was home in Milton with her family and Emma was dealing with her father’s illness in the city, or so they all thought. They weren’t really sure what was up with her. Helena and Katie and Maria and Olivia, Maria’s cousin were there. Olivia was more interested in sculpture than drawing and painting, but she liked to sketch with her friends because they are great company and she really learned a lot from them. Maria convinced her to sit for them all. She was all draped out in a Chinese dressing gown which was crimson lined with light blue and the sleeves were turned up with the gold lining exposed. It belonged to Maria. Olivia thought they all looked so intently artistic this afternoon. Her cousin, Maria, was a cutie, with her little upturned nose. But that she was very very serious. She was sketching away with pastels looking like a stiff school teacher.

               Maria and Helena had rented a studio apartment in New York City and they both were planning to go on to the Academy School of Design. None of them really knew of any women having their own studio separate from their families, but the two were determined. The rest of the women were just going to try to make a living at their art. Olivia was the first one to be engaged. The wedding is set for September when it would be a bit cooler. He was quite the man from Olivia’s description.  And a banker. None of her friends had met him. Her parents were in Morristown New Jersey and he was living there. They were all excited for her. None of them thought Maria would ever attract a beau, but that was generally left unsaid. Helena attracted men like a beehive collects bears. She was a stunning woman and so loving and so involved with everyone. Olivia was secretly hoping she would pass some of her ill fitted suitors on to her studio partner, Maria. Helena looked unhappily at her sketch. She was quite gifted but she hated everything she did. Olivia wished it would be more fun for her.

               Katie always had a worried expression no matter what. Doing art or making dinner or collecting flowers for the table. She had been sickly. Rheumatic fever. Her mother seemed at death’s door just before they came, but now seemed to have survived. She had what Olivia thought of as a plain little worried face, but Katie’s boyfriend, Abbott Thayer, saw something else. He was still back in the city. He was one of the male art students at Cooper Union but would show up in the afternoon to hang around the women’s classes. He had been the one that watched the march down Broadway at the end of the war with Helena and Gus. The men’s classes were in the evening. He believed Katie had the face of an angel and pestered her incessantly to sit for him. She was secretly madly flattered by the attention but was trying to keep cool about it. Thayer was very intense and had acted out from time to time. He had grand changes of mood. One day he put up his sketches in the hallway at Cooper Union with adhesive tape to show everyone how brilliant he was and two days later he took them all down and threw them away.

               Olivia was a little nervous about how her friends’ sketches would turn out. She thought they would make her more handsome than she really was. She thought she had a nice figure but a very boyish face and a nose a bit too large. Joshua, her betrothed, thought her a catch, so she believed she was presentable. She watched them work, imagining busts of them, something small, but all gathered about each other. Maybe including Molly and Emma as well. All of them smiling and laughing. Like they were when they were not so serious.

               “We all went sailing this afternoon. I had never been before and I was scared to death. I held on to Maria’s arm the entire time and I think I might have bruised her, but she denies it. ‘Olivia’ she sighs in exasperation. ‘Deep breath! In and out!’   Of course, Helena is the commander, sitting on the back edge in the windy side, directing us all. Katie helping with the sail. We had to change sides each time the sail was moved and a couple of times the boat leaned and leaned and we had to lean hard the opposite way to keep it above water. Totally scary! Helena’s father was the Commodore De Kay, a great seaman and a hero in some South American naval battle. He also delivered ships for her grandfather who was a great shipbuilder. She said there is no such thing as a De Kay child that doesn’t know how to sail the Hudson.  None of the women in my family have ever been in a small sailing boat. Except for me now!”[1]

               Helena and Marie sent a note to John La Farge who lived in Newport when he wasn’t in Boston or New York City. He had studio space in both cities and in Newport. He was there for the month they were and they asked for lessons. He invited them both to come the same afternoon. Helena had known him slightly when she lived here before. William and Henry James were his students then. They raved about him.

               They were greeted by his wife, Margaret, and offered tea. The two young artists were captivated by her. She tried to show them attention while surrounded by squirming children. She had a new born boy that was fussy and a two year old boy who was trying to walk and a four year old girl that needed her dolly dressed. Maria was helping with the doll. Mrs. La Farge was trying to tell them how wonderful the Arnold translation of The Odyssey was, when her husband appeared to bring one of them back to his studio for a lesson. Helena went first.

               John La Farge was very thin and not very handsome. He had a weak chin and large lips and a tailored moustache. His eyes seemed perpetually watery. Helena was working up a couple drawings for her neighbor in Staten Island, Mrs. Leonowens, as illustrations for her book “The English Governess at the Siamese Court” and had brought the sketches with her. She also brought a drawing of her friend Helen Hunt which Maria had urged her to show him. He placed them before her and gave her a blank sheet of paper and charcoal and asked her to sketch her own drawing. As she began, he placed his hand over hers and directed her flow of drawing. It felt odd, but she didn’t protest, hoping to learn something new.

               He began to expound how, as a woman, she needed to develop the fluidity of her sketching practices. She needed to develop grace and a dainty touch. What he seemed to be forcing her to do was foreign and odd and her new sketch looked like a mess.

               She was told that as a woman, she should be practicing art that focused on her feminine fertility. She should be drawing children and flowers and warm interiors. Certainly not a Siamese prince. She needed to revisit her friend’s book for those images. He finally released her hand, but stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders.

               As she attempted to fix the charcoal sketch, he started off on some observation about New York City, after finding out that was where she was studying. She didn’t quite understand what he was saying.

               “…up and down the city, frequently to be caught; lights and shades of winter and summer air, of the literally ‘finishing’ afternoon in particular, when refinement of modelling descends from the skies…” and on and on.

               She was happy when her time was up. She went out feeling that perhaps she was too dumb to understand what he was teaching her. He was probably a genius though. His paintings in progress were incredibly good.

               She went back to Mrs. La Farge so that Maria could take her turn.

               The disjointed conversation with his wife in between the needs of her fussy children, seemed much more normal. Maria came out as mad as a hornet. Helena helped get them out the front door as quickly as possible. She was sure Maria was about to disparage him in front of his wife.

               “Are you all right?” Helena asked at the sidewalk.

               “I told him to take his sweaty hands off me! It went downhill from there!”

               They walked a bit.

               “Did he give you any criticism of your drawings?” Maria asked.

               “No. It is as if he is writing a book in his head out loud for all to hear and it just goes on and on.”

               “Well, I got none of that. And no criticism either.”

               “I guess I will just send on the sketches to Mrs. Leonowens for her verdict. They were very bad.”

               “They were not,” Maria told her.

               The illustration that Helena tried to get La Farge to help with was published in “The English Governess at the Siamese Court” by Anna Harriette Leonowens.

 

 

[1] Unpublished letter, Olivia Ward, Macculloch Hall Historical Museum