Dwight was summoned to tea. As far as he knew, the portraits were genuine Reynoldses, and the armoire and the secretary were Flemish antiques. The seller, a friend of his, was an elderly woman in straitened circumstances.
Clover hurried back to the house and bought everything, paying for her purchases with money Dr. Hooper had sent her for Christmas. The portraits, priced at $150 apiece, were dirty and cracked, and Clover wondered whether they could be restored. As for their provenance, she had learned only that the subjects were the seller’s ancestors, named something like Grover or Grove or Groves. “Do you think I’ve wasted your cheque?” she asked her father.
Two weeks later, Clover was flushed with triumph. “Eureka! Eureka!” she wrote to Dr. Hooper. Dwight had unearthed a biography of Sir Joshua which revealed that a Mr. and Mrs. Groves sat for the painter in August 1755. It was also clear that the paintings had been in the family ever since. “I am their first purchaser!” Clover exulted.
Once the restorers wiped away a century of grime, even Henry, who disliked portraits, conceded that the pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Groves were “charmingly modelled and very dignified.” Clover hung them side by side between the windows of the library. “Henry,” she teased, “can look the other way.”
H. H. Richardson, a celebrated architect who had known Henry Adams since their days at Harvard, was building a house in Washington for another college friend, and he gave Clover the double-edged thrill of praising her eye while damning his client, who had been offered the paintings a few months earlier. Though Clover basked in Richardson’s blessing, she hardly needed it to bolster the confidence she felt in her artistic judgment. A true connoisseur, she recognized genius with or without the stamp of fame. She had met John Singer Sargent when he was twenty-three and immediately understood his promise. Also capable of appreciating the merits of art she disliked, she once urged her father to alert the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to the availability of a macabre Audubon oil painting of “dead birds, some in an overturned basket, some on the ground, a spray of purple convulvulus on the left background.” Even as she jested that neither she nor Henry cared for “still life,” she could admire the painting’s delicacy of execution.
The rest of the Five of Hearts shared Clover’s love of art, but only Clarence King fancied himself her equal as a connoisseur. He wrote her about his purchases of paintings and bric-a-brac, discussed artworks for sale, and occasionally engaged her in his fantasies of feminine adornment. He had a special fondness for peignoirs, which, he told Clover, he had learned to love “on a female in the overland Pullman: she was the wife of a French banker in San Francisco. She had parted from her lover (as she informed me) but three weeks before and was consoling herself mornings by the most becoming imaginable peignoirs. Since then I have always striven to introduce them into my family. Lately my Mother has had three separate dress makers cut them but all were failures. The back seam, which must be straight from one end to the other and float off in a captivating curve, flops hither and yon … and spoils the effect.” He hoped that his Mexican wanderings would turn up a sufficiently “loose jointed” fabric for a more successful attempt, and when he found the right material, he would give some to Clover.
Though King said he associated peignoirs with the “gilded vice” of French short stories, his lack of self-consciousness in discussing them with Clover suggests that he meant to speak to her as one aesthete to another. Clover took a deep pleasure in the artistry of her gowns from the Parisian house of Worth, and she grew lyrical over a large turquoise that reminded her of a summer sky. In a single breath she could speak of reading the Iliad in Greek and trimming her new spring bonnet, conveying the impression that she valued both as aesthetic experiences.
Clover also responded intensely to the beauty of flowers. During her first spring at 1607 H Street, she designed a garden with advice from historian George Bancroft, an avid amateur horticulturalist who had developed the American Beauty rose in his backyard near Lafayette Square. By planting lilies of the valley and daffodils for early spring, chrysanthemums for fall, and roses that bloomed until Christmas, Clover had flowers for most of the months she and Henry spent in Washington. Each spring she eagerly waited for the capital’s magnolias to flower and combed the wilds of Rock Creek Park in search of the first dogwood petals.
But the more Clover indulged her aesthetic side, the less she cared for the social life she had cherished when the Five of Hearts assembled at her hearth. “Life is like a prolonged circus here now,” she told Dr. Hooper early in 1882. “[P]lease copy at once the following on a post-card and mail to me: ‘My dear child: Let me beg of you not to make calls and as few new acquaintances as possible. I know better than you the delicacy of your constitution. Ride on horseback daily but avoid visiting and evening parties. Medicus.’” A few months later, amid birdsong and wildflowers, she wished that “the sap which makes the trees and bushes so lively in the springtime ran as gaily in human legs and arms.” She and Henry seldom dined alone at home, but Clover ventured out less and less. Picnics were deemed too strenuous, musical parties seemed pointless since no one listened to the music, and she complained that ladies’ luncheons were “a style of killing time which I detest.”
Even politics ceased to amuse. “Congress bumbles on,” she sourly observed. “Everyone laughs at its assumed spasms of virtue, no one is deceived by any reform pretenses.” Portly President Arthur, a coxcomb from his impeccable cravat to the tips of his gleaming shoes, was an object of particular derision. “There goes our chuckle-headed sovereign on his way from church!” Clover scoffed one Sunday morning as the parishioners of St. John’s streamed into Lafayette Square. “He doesn’t look as if he fed only on spiritual food.”
Chester Arthur appointed the Adamses’ friend Frederick T. Frelinghuysen as secretary of state, and in the spring of 1882, Frelinghuysen offered Henry the post of minister to Costa Rica, which included responsibility for most of Central America. Clover wistfully said she wished they wanted it—“it would be so new and fresh.” But they did not want it. Henry was engrossed in what he called his “little historical mud-pie,” doing his best to give it “shape and cohesion.” A happy prisoner of routine, he rode for two hours a day, wrote for five, and then allowed himself to “chatter all I can with all who care to waste their eternal souls in that frivolity,” he told a friend. “Nothing surprises me more, as time goes on, than to find how little the world seems to object to me, or indeed to interfere in any way with my concerns.”
Clover’s happiness proved more elusive. Society could still furnish unexpected delights, such as the dinner party at which General Sherman recreated his march to the sea on the host’s tablecloth. Pushing battalions of silverware this way and that, the fiery general sent the rebel army clattering to the floor with the sweep of a pudding knife. But the prospect of more of these charming moments meant little to Clover as she pondered invitations during the winter of 1882-83, and her peevishness grew with her boredom. After meeting most of the diplomatic corps at a British Legation dinner, she declared that centuries of aristocratic breeding had left the “little secretaries” with brains “attenuated to a startling degree.” When her sister Ellen asked if Washingtonians would contribute money for a women’s annex to Harvard, Clover said it was useless “to expect anything from ‘Washington nabobs’…. No one here cares for higher education—for women or men either; they’d laugh in one’s face. I wouldn’t even hint at it.” Sending Henry alone to a large party, Clover justified her absence by noting that “hot rooms and crowds always take so much more from one than they give.” A chronic ear infection furnished a perennial excuse for avoiding other social occasions though it did not seem to rule out her daily rides.
In that trying winter, Clover found her greatest pleasures in the autobiography of George Sand. She raced through all twenty volumes, in French, in the space of a few weeks, intrigued by the exploits of Madame Sand, who donned men’s clothes and boldly explored Paris. Clover particularly en
joyed the thought that Dr. Hooper and George Sand might have crossed paths during his days as a medical student in the Latin Quarter. “She must have jostled you daily,” Clover told him. She quizzed her guests about Sand and passed along all tidbits to her father, who had begun reading the work at Clover’s suggestion. “Madame Sand looked like a sheep,” she reported after meeting someone who had known her; she “had no conversation, scarcely talked at all, but watched others.”
Striding through the allées of Paris in a man’s suit and the most comfortable boots she ever owned, Sand had not wished to be a man but to observe without being observed, an impulse Clover shared. Writing to her father, Clover kept a voyeur’s distance from her window: close enough to see who passed by on H Street but far enough back to avoid being seen. “I’m sitting by an open window behind a screen of roses and heliotrope,” she confided one Sunday morning, “partly writing to you and keeping my left eye on the ‘miserable sinners’ who are going by to church in very good clothes.” Sand also touched a deeper current in Clover Adams. “Escape oblivion,” Sand urged her readers, many of whom were peasants and laborers. “Write your own history, all of you who have understood your life and sounded your heart.” Sand knew that their facts were facts, too.
With the spring of 1883 came an invitation to visit Clover’s friend Anne Palmer in New York. Henry was close to finishing the first quarter of his history, covering Jefferson’s first administration, and did not want to interrupt his work. In eleven years of marriage, the Adamses had never been apart, but Henry encouraged Clover to go to New York alone. She did, telling her hostess that she was making the trip to test his affection.
“How I did enjoy my outing!” she bubbled on her return. “… It has taken me one week to unpack my mental trunk—and set my new ideas in order.” She and Anne had stayed out from early morning until late at night, visiting an exhibit of contemporary American art, dropping by the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens to see his sculptures, attending P. T. Barnum’s “very fine” circus, and dining with Henry’s friend E. L. Godkin, editor of the Nation. Clover also met with Clarence King’s mother, who had come to New York from Newport to raise funds for a new art school in the South. Intending to stay for three days, Clover wired Henry that she would be gone for four. Even the train ride home was a lark, passed mostly in conversation with Washington acquaintances.
Henry was waiting at the station. As soon as he found Clover, he took her on a long drive. They stopped to pick wildflowers, and he sweetly said he was glad she had enjoyed herself, but he also made it clear that such a trip would never happen again. Next time he meant to go along rather than “stay behind in a big lonely house.”
Finished with the first part of his history, Henry planned to have a few copies printed and send them to friends for comment. As usual, he and Clover would summer in the quiet of Beverly Farms, and while waiting for his critics, he planned to entertain himself by writing another novel in secret. Clover seemed not to mind that Henry preferred a solitary diversion to one they could enjoy together, perhaps because she had at last found a diversion of her own. “Am going to take a photo with my new machine this P.M. at Rock Creek,” she reported to her father a few weeks after coming home from New York. She had taken photographs in the past but not with the fervor she now showed.
Photography in the 1880s demanded fathomless patience—not one of Clover’s hallmarks—and for their patience practitioners were rewarded with one frustration after another. The expedition to Rock Creek Park, required a carriage as well as a servant to help with the heavy camera, the glass plates that served as negatives, and the requisite array of chemicals. In order to register an image, a plate had to be exposed to the light for several seconds, which limited photographers to stationary subjects; even a small motion, like the rustle of leaves in the wind, blurred the image. And with no accurate instrument for measuring light, overexposure and underexposure were constant hazards.
Since Clover said no more of her Rock Creek excursion, she may have been unhappy with the results. Certainly the starkness of black and white would have disappointed someone with her love of color. But whatever the discouragements of photographing nature, she was determined to succeed at portraiture. She sought advice from H. H. Richardson and from a friend and fellow amateur named Clifford Richardson. A chemist, Clifford Richardson helped Clover with the technical side of the craft and took her to a demonstration of a new process for printing photographs. She could not help noticing that she was the only woman present.
In a small notebook with a marbled cover, Clover kept instructions for various photographic processes and recorded the details of her experiments. “John Hay,” a typical entry begins. “‘Democracy’ in hand near window. 12 sec. Good.” The portrait, which showed a mischievously solemn Hay holding the French edition, with Démocratie emblazoned on the cover, was one more Five of Hearts jape about the authorship of Henry’s first novel. In the months that followed, Clover photographed H. H. Richardson, the painter John La Farge, the historian Francis Parkman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Hay children, generals, and senators. Henry sat for her, as did his parents, her father, and the family terriers.
“[M]y wife does nothing except take photographs,” Henry wrote Lizzie Cameron from Beverly Farms in the summer of 1883. Lugging her camera to every corner of their twenty-five acres, Clover framed their house with trees and sky, posed Henry’s cousins against outcroppings of granite, and arranged visitors before the sea. Indoors, she caught the sunny comfort of the parlor and ventured into Henry’s study to photograph him, pen poised above a manuscript, his soft hand manacled by a stiffly starched cuff. Clover also made notes on a self-portrait: “Marian Adams in study—15 sec—hideous but good photo.” (Unfortunately, it has not survived.)
With the practiced eye of the connoisseur, Clover was quick to master the art of composition, and a pair of portraits taken on porches show her command of the subtleties of point of view. To photograph Betsy Wilder, the housekeeper who had helped to raise Clover and her brother and sister after their mother’s death, Clover placed the eye of the camera slightly below Betsy and asked her to concentrate on the knitting in her lap. The relationship of camera to subject conveys deep respect. But when Clover photographed Henry’s parents, she positioned herself steeply below them. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Francis Adams gaze sternly into the lens, looking down on Clover in the photograph as the Adams family did in life.
One of Clover Adams’s portraits of her father, Robert Hooper, M.D.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
In the fall of 1883, Clover captured the elderly historian George Bancroft in half-profile, his white hair and long white beard glowing against a dark background. Struck by the incandescent beauty of the picture, John Hay took it upon himself to get it published. Writing to his friend R. W. Gilder, editor of the Century magazine, Hay noted that Bancroft was eighty-three and “one of these days will be gone. I suggest that you get a copy of it and put it in the hand of your engraver—in time.” As an afterthought, Hay told Adams what he had done. If “Our Lady of Lafayette Square … be angered at my blabbing of her Bancroft, tell her I did not do it, or some such fiction,” he begged, afraid that he had overstepped his bounds. The Century wanted Henry to write an essay on Bancroft to accompany the photograph, and Hay hoped the Adamses would “think it worthwhile to comply with Gilder’s prayer.”
As a photographer, Clover Adams mastered the subtleties of point of view. By placing the camera slightly below Betsy Wilder, the housekeeper who helped to raise Clover and her siblings after their mother’s death, Clover puts herself in a position of respect, but the sleeping dog and Betsy’s knitting imbue the scene with a sense of warmth and comfort. By positioning herself steeply below Henry’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Francis Adams, Sr., Clover forced them to look down upon her, which she felt they in fact did.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
George Bancroft, one of America’s most popular historians, photographed by Clover Adams in 1883. Captivated b
y the portrait, John Hay thought it should be published. Henry vetoed the idea.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
They did not. “As for flaunting our photographs in the ‘Century,’ we should expect to experience the curses of all our unphotographed friends,” Henry told Hay, sounding a strangely proprietary note considering that he had expressed no interest in Clover’s photography before Gilder’s offer. Henry added that he despised the practice of praising one’s friends in print, as Howells and Hay had done in their Tribune reviews of The Prince and the Pauper and The Portrait of a Lady. “Between ourselves, there is in it always an air of fatuous self-satisfaction fatal to the most grovelling genius.” Clover, convinced that Henry was right, willingly suppressed whatever desire she might have felt to see one of her photographs in the pages of a national magazine. “The mutual admiration game is about played out or ought to be,” she told her father.
Henry concealed a deeper motive for refusing the Century: as much as he liked Bancroft personally, he was not a wholehearted admirer of the historian’s work. He had pummeled the final volume of Bancroft’s popular History of the United States in the North American Review, and when Bancroft wrote a book about the Constitution, Henry confessed to a friend that he had found it unreadable. By declining Gilder’s proposition, Henry spared himself the squirms of writing false praise.
The Five of Hearts Page 11