Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  The next week Clover was not so lucky. She took two exposures of her garden wall, and both were failures. Her portraits of Aristarchi Bey, taken the following Saturday, were equally disappointing. Bey, the Turkish foreign minister who had been the model for the amusingly cynical Bulgarian minister in Henry’s Democracy, had stopped by at 1607 H Street for lunch to say goodbye after being recalled from service. Clover told her father that “politics is at the bottom of it.” He’d been a guest for tea and dinner many times and was another of Clover’s favorites. She took two exposures of the foreign minister holding her dog Boojum, one exposure for two seconds, the second for four. She pictured him, as she said, “as a ‘dude’—small hat on his head.” Clover was intent, it seems, on creating her own characterization of Bey. But each exposure failed and “will not print.” The next evening she loaded up Henry, their three dogs, and their driver, John Brent, for a carriage ride to Rock Creek Park in order to try out, as she wrote to her father, her “new machine.” Clover carefully made two related entries in her notebook, as if conducting a science experiment: “Waterfall at Rock Creek, 2 seconds, smallest lens” and “3 seconds, next smallest lens.” But she did not make prints from these exposures either. Picture taking was a far more complicated process before George Eastman’s point-and-shoot camera, which would be introduced on the market in five years. Clover had to learn which lenses to use and how to gauge the sunlight and exposure times, as well as how to mix the exact chemical solutions needed for developing. The learning curve was steep.

  But Clover had made a start doing what would distract and absorb her in the coming summer days—she had begun to picture her world.

  Photography itself had become much more popular with amateurs after dry-plate negatives became commercially available in the late 1870s. Instead of drenching a sheet of glass with a mixture of light-sensitive chemicals that stained clothes and hands, then putting the wet plate immediately into the back of the camera to take the picture, Clover could purchase glass negatives that had been treated with a light-sensitive gelatine-bromide coating. This eliminated the need for the dangerous chemicals and cumbersome darkrooms that previous photographers had had to carry with them. Clover still needed to develop the negative and print the photograph on paper treated both before and after the “printing out” process with complicated chemical baths. But with the advent of dry-plate negatives, picture taking was, without doubt, less daunting.

  The new technology made photography more accessible to women, though they had never been wholly excluded from it. Since the beginning, with the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, women had worked in photographic salons and as camera operators. Outing: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation noted that women “have always been employed in some important capacity in the photographic establishments.” But by the early 1880s, amateur photography manuals and guidebooks touted the newer, lighter camera outfits—camera, glass-negative holder, tripod, carrying case—as just right for women. One could make multiple exposures, keep the negatives in a small holder that kept out light, and develop the images later, at one’s leisure. In 1882 Henry Clay Price, in his book How to Make Pictures: Easy Lessons for the Amateur Photographer, declared that “amateur photography is destined to be taken up by ladies of refinement and quick artistic perception.”

  The record created by a photograph—what was made visible in the image itself—seemed to defeat distances between people and to make time stand still. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a long-time friend of Clover’s father, observed that because of photography, “those whom we love no longer leave us in dying, as they did of old. They remain with us just as they appeared in life.” Photography was deemed an appropriate activity for women precisely because of its emotional power, its ability to tie the viewer to “absent loved ones,” claimed The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Amusements, Exercises, Studies, and Pursuits. A photograph registered what people looked like both individually and in relation to one another, making visible the connection between spouses and the heritage passed on from parents to children to grandchildren. Women were expected to bind together relationships in the family, and photography, despite its highly technical aspect, was ideally suited to bolster this emotion-charged responsibility.

  The status of photography in relation to the fine arts also made it more accessible to women. The British art critic John Ruskin argued that a woman’s familial and social duties included cultivating taste, refinement, and beauty, and that she must be educated to enable her to “assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment” of society. This relation between the arts and a woman’s duty encouraged more women to attend art school to learn painting, even sculpture, in the 1870s and 1880s. But a line was drawn. A woman’s primary relation to the fine arts remained that of a viewer. She could visit art museums, be trained in the arts, and even make beautiful objects, but true art and the social identity of being an artist belonged principally to men.

  At the same time, photography itself was not yet considered a fine art. Though critics had made a compelling case for its aesthetic and graphic power, photography would not be recognized as meriting such distinction until the early twentieth century. It would take Alfred Stieglitz, with his journal Camera Work and his New York gallery, known as 291, to change how the medium was viewed, so that it could emerge as a legitimate form of fine art, to be collected by and displayed in museums.

  Until then, photography was deemed inferior to painting. Its dependency on chemical potions and mechanical contraptions made it seem closer to a science than an art, and it was often linked to the decorative arts, with their emphasis on beauty rather than deeply personal artistic expression. In fact, photography met Ruskin’s standards as an appropriate way for a woman to make pictures precisely because of its multiple failures as a fine art. “There has been some discussion whether photography can be called one of the arts,” The Photographic Times noted in 1883, “but there can be no question, we think, that it can be made a recreation.”

  If Clover found photography daunting in that first month, she kept up her courage. She purchased up-to-date equipment and set aside a room in her house where she could develop her negatives and make her own prints. She sought guidance from Clifford Richardson, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who was also interested in photography, and she and Anne Palmer kept in contact, exchanging their photographic prints. Clover’s camera was, as she told Anne Palmer, “a new and small machine,” made of fine-grained mahogany, an ideal wood to keep out moisture; it had brass hinges, closures, and other fittings around the camera lens. At that time, photographs were made like contact prints. The glass negative was placed directly on photographic paper, and then both were exposed to bright sunlight for an allotted amount of time. Clover’s camera used five-by-eight-inch dry-plate glass negatives, and her prints, almost without exception, measured likewise.

  In large letters, Clover wrote “Photography” at the top of the first page of a small lined notebook she had bought for other purposes but now appropriated for her new passion. In its pages she noted the date and time of day of each exposure, listing the numbered exposures in neat rows. When she developed the negative, she used another color of ink to cross through the number, putting an X through entries that proved unsuccessful. The photography manual she chose for advice was Captain Abney’s A Treatise on Photography (1878), which emphasized the scientific aspect of picture taking: chemical reactions and optics. She carefully copied out in the back pages of her notebook recipes for developing solutions, which looked like a kind of chemical poem:

  Pyrogallic acid 6 grains to 2 oz water

  Ammonia—1 oz

  Brom Potass3 oz in graduate

  Water for 5 x 8 negative

  Hypo—5 oz to 20 of water—or

  1 L. to 4—water—Alum saturate solution—ten minutes for negative

  The literary critic Edward Mendelson observes that “as soon as the self commits itself to someone or someth
ing, the fragments converge; they become purposive and whole; you become yourself.” This is what happened with Clover. Restless in the previous months, increasingly uneasy about her marriage, Clover found with photography a polestar around which to focus her considerable energies and interests. She was a superb writer, but her marriage had room for only one author. Photography was a wholly different activity, more active and more social. And it drew on Clover’s natural abilities: her keen eye, her acute powers of observation, and her attuned sense of the distinct features of an individual’s personality. Also, something surfaced in her photographs that was not readily apparent in her witty, sometimes barbed letters, and certainly not in Henry’s rather acid fictional portraits: a richness and subtlety of feeling.

  CHAPTER 14

  At Sea

  CLOVER PUT HER CAMERA down for most of the month of June 1883. She told her father that much of the city had cleared out for the summer, including Lizzie Cameron, who had gone for a two-year tour of Europe. “No society this week,” Clover wrote, sounding a note of loneliness. “We see none of the people who used to drop in to tea.” In early June, her horse Daisy tore her leg so badly she could no longer be used as a saddle horse. Clover bought a thoroughbred horse in Baltimore she named Powhatan, after the father of Pocahontas. He was, she proudly bragged, “beautiful and swift, brave and gentle.” Henry, four years into the project, was steadily at work on his History, rewriting a draft for a private printing; this he would use to solicit comments and give to others for safekeeping. His brother Charles, John Hay, George Bancroft, Carl Schurz, and Abram Hewitt, then a U.S. congressman from New York, were selected as recipients. As Henry wrote to a friend, “You can never tell what you want to do, till you see what you have done.” He also complained about Washington’s beastly hot weather—“the thermometer outside is about 90”—and he was relieved to be going once again to the quiet and cooler weather of Pitch Pine Hill.

  The annual packing up for the summer’s escape usually took a few weeks. Clover and Henry had to make arrangements with servants for both homes, ship by train their horses, and gather up their collection of beloved English watercolors. They didn’t like to live without their art. They left Washington on June 18, arriving at Beverly Farms via Albany. Once there, Clover wrote to Anne Palmer about an exploit in a nearby marsh, as she rode Powhatan and Henry rode his horse, Prince:

  On Friday—in Harding a marsh—slimy green above—he [Powhatan] balked—got in too deep—became terrified—dashed into a tree—which swept me from my saddle—he leapt over me and the young tree—& dashed away—through bog and bush—I in my brand new habit—that unpleasant—he fled to Henry on the far side of the bog and put his bridle into his hands—then I had to wade to him and we led those two beasts thro’ a mile and more of thick woods—through the “Pole Marsh” on planks—Prince slipping and I slipping and he treading on my toes and I on his—Henry and Powhatan in front—my saddle too muddy to mount—& my safety stirrup going—we got home at dusk . . .

  She also described the routine of their midsummer days: “Our days go swiftly riding—Greek o’ evenings—history writing from 9 to 5— breakfast at 12—no dinner—tea at 8.” Perhaps keeping her rival close, she wrote the same story and noted the same routine to Lizzie Cameron, joking that her “husband is working like a belated beaver from 9 to 5 every day in gambling the history of his native land as run by antediluvian bosses—called Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.” She also promised Lizzie she’d send along a photograph of Henry and the dogs, Marquis and Possum, sitting in the window of the children’s playhouse she’d built for the Hooper girls two summers before. After a short time away from her camera due to moving house, she had picked it up again and found herself completely engaged. She wrote to Clara Hay, “I’ve gone in for photography and find it very absorbing.”

  Clover’s pictures that summer focused on those closest at hand: Henry, her father, her nieces, her dogs, her new horse, visitors. When Clover photographed Pitch Pine Hill , she did so from the drive at a distance below the house, which emphasized its hilltop location and gave the image an almost gothic quality. The modest house becomes castle-like, in keeping with the medieval medallions in the red-cement floor of its foyer. In picturing the bucolic scene, Clover aspired to the popular French Barbizon style, a genre of early impressionism she had encountered on her visits to Doll and Richards, Boston’s influential art gallery. The leading promoter of the style, the painter Jean-François Millet, invested rural life with a noble, almost sacred, grandeur. Postwar Boston audiences, troubled by an erratic economy and crowded streets, found such scenes hugely appealing. Clover’s photographs of lazy Holstein cows pasturing near ancient stone fences at her neighbor’s farm were infused with nostalgia, recalling the colonial past.

  She spent a late afternoon photographing three of her older nieces, dressed in matching summery white frocks and straw hats, as they perched on large rocks at the seashore. Nine-year-old Louisa, called Loulie, stands to the right of the frame, gazing soberly at her aunt’s camera and holding a small bucket in her right hand. The other two girls, Ellen and Mabel (Polly), are seated nearby and carefully posed in profile, looking out to the water. Clover didn’t like their expressions in the first exposure, but concerning the second exposure she wrote in her notebook “very nice.” The image links the sisters through their similar clothing, yet each appears to be a distinct individual; the composition, with its inward focus, calls to mind John Singer Sargent’s Daughters of Edward Boit, painted the previous year and shown in Paris, though Clover would not have had the occasion to see it.

  When people stopped for a visit, Clover gave them food and drink and put them in front of her lens. Francis Parkman, the American historian well known for his 1849 book, Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life, and his multivolume France and England in North America, turned up on July 29, and that afternoon he sat for Clover’s camera in a rattan chair against a backdrop evoking his western travels: boulders rising from the ground behind him, sun-dappled branches. The vigorous-looking sixty-year-old sat cross-legged, with his shiny black boots catching the light and a fashionable white-felt derby perched on his head. Clover took two exposures, trying out different compositions and exposure times. She developed the negatives and made prints from both, placing them one after another in her album.

  Parkman was an outspoken opponent of woman suffrage, and Clover couldn’t help but comment on his marked prejudice, an attitude she was beginning to find wearisome. To her father she had mentioned that the Confederate general Richard Taylor “disbelieves in democracy and universal suffrage as firmly as Mr. Frank Parkman.” She also joked that the long-widowed Parkman would never find his “ideal woman” in America and that if she had to talk “much with him, I should take the stump for female suffrage in a short time.” At no point, interestingly, did she mention that Henry and Parkman were closely allied in their views on ideal womanhood. In any case, her photographs of Parkman capture his intelligence and élan as well as his Brahmin pose of casual superiority.

  When Clover and Henry went to Quincy for a visit at the Adams family’s Old Manse the next day, she took her camera with her. One can only imagine her in-laws’ comments. She photographed Henry’s youngest brother, Brooks Adams, standing next to his horse, Snowden; the horse’s tail is a blur of movement against the stable’s brick wall. But the most compelling image of her Quincy visit is her portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Adams. The two are seated on the porch of the manse, on either side of the front door, which is open. Mr. Adams is on the left and Mrs. Adams on the right. The darkened doorway between them admits neither visual nor emotional access. The viewer stays on the porch. Clover heightened this feeling of exclusion by how the two are posed, each facing three-quarters toward the middle, with Mr. Adams’s leg and Mrs. Adams’s cane angled toward each other, to form a strong V-shape. This gives energy and stability to the image even as it emphasizes what the darkened door already communicates: “no entrance.” She
increased this effect by positioning her camera just below eye level so that Mr. and Mrs. Adams are doing in the photograph exactly what she knew they did in life: looking down at her with impassive disdain.

  Clover made a factual comment in her notebook: “no—1. Old house in Quincy Mass. / C.F. Adams & Mrs. Adams / on piazza—Monday p.m. / July 30th 1883—longest stop 4 sec.” Most of her early entries in her small leather-bound notebook are spare and concerned with the technicalities of taking pictures. But she was learning and gaining confidence. By the end of the summer, her observations became more fluid and conversational. She frequently made note of her failures: on July 12, “Parlor Bev. Farms—9 minutes—failed”; on July 15, the second exposure of a catboat “spoiled by not putting in a slide”; on July 25, two exposures of Powhatan were “undertimed.” She also mentioned the mechanical and aesthetic aspects of the picture-making process. She wrote in her notebook that her lenses were manufactured by Dollmayer and that she bought her supply of dry-plate glass negatives from Allan & Rowell, a Boston photography studio and supplier on Beacon Hill since 1874. Her photograph of Lucy Frelinghuysen was a “very good photo—expression not good!” Likewise, her portrait of Grace Minot, in a basket chair on the lawn, is a “good photo—not pleasing likeness.” She took note of backgrounds that were “too dim” and commented on how the camera could make flesh look “dead white,” especially if the plate was overexposed.