Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Clover’s photographs were not like the snapshots Kodak would later popularize. The size of her camera and extended exposure times didn’t allow her to sneak a picture. Most of her images are highly formal and composed. She experimented with tone and style, but nonetheless each photograph required careful forethought and decision making concerning camera placement, the relationship of foreground to background, exposure times, and the processes for developing the prints. Portraits are in a sense collaborations—they record something, always, of the working relationship between subject and photographer. Clover’s portraits reflect what she saw, what she found interesting, compelling, and worthy of a picture, but also something more elusive: her feelings.

  This is particularly true of a series of photographs Clover took on August 8 near Beverly Farms. The first two exposures are of Mrs. James Scott at Manchester Beach (which is now called Singing Beach). Mrs. Scott’s identity remains obscure—Clover made no mention of her in letters, nor did she give the woman’s first name in her notebook. Presumably, Mrs. Scott was either a neighbor or a friend of a neighbor who had come along for the day at the beach. In any case, Clover’s photographs of her capture the woman’s direct, candid demeanor. In the first, Mrs. Scott, dressed in cool white vacation clothes, with her dark hair a striking contrast to her white cap, sits low to the ground. She is turned slightly away from the shore, looks directly into Clover’s camera, and clasps her hands easily together, with her parasol to her right and Boojum lying at her feet to her left. A large boulder directly to her right emphasizes the stability of her pose. The next exposure has a subtly different effect. Mrs. Scott is standing this time, with her body turned to the shore and leaning against the large boulder. Boojum is out of the picture, but the parasol leans at a diagonal across her leg. Again, she looks directly at Clover’s camera.

  These are somewhat conventional images of the seashore. Clover borrowed the painterly convention of filling one side of her image, the left in this instance, with sand, rock, and plants, with the other side opening up to sea and sky. Mrs. Scott is seated on rocks, with the beach’s most distinctive and identifying feature—Eagle Head, a rocky promontory that juts out to the sea on the eastern end of the beach—directly in the background. This view of the beach, looking east to Eagle Head, had been painted numerous times in the 1860s and 1870s by several American painters, including Winslow Homer, and Clover, of course, would have known this.

  The next two exposures, however, have a significant difference. Clover and her friends move from Singing Beach west to a granite headland, Smith’s Point. In the first photograph, Helen Choate Bell, the widow of the Boston lawyer Joshua Bell, sits by herself on a rock surrounded by sea grasses and brush, with Singing Beach barely visible off in the distance. She’s not on the beach but placed above it, overlooking the sea. The scene is as calm as a sleepy summer afternoon, its tranquility complicated only by the way Mrs. Bell’s shoulders seem to slump, as if she’s ill at ease on her rocky perch. Clover positioned Mrs. Bell with her back three-quarters to the camera, a placement that invites the viewer to identify with the figure as she gazes at the sea. Yet the viewer is prevented from seeing what a photograph of a person usually provides: the subject’s face. Mrs. Bell seems to have no visual link to any other person—not to Clover taking the picture nor to viewers of the image. Mrs. Bell becomes, in effect, a woman at sea, or a woman lost at sea.

  Clover’s photograph of Mrs. Bell is strikingly similar in composition and mood to Woman on the Beach of Rügen (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, whose work embodies much of what is associated with German Romanticism—a love of nature, an emphasis on individual feeling, and what E.T.A. Hoffman has called an “infinite longing.” In fact, the way Clover positions her figures within the landscape is evocative of Friedrich’s Romantic trope of Rückenfiguren, translated as “turned-away figures.” Though Clover never stated in her letters that she had seen a painting by Friedrich, she was, undoubtedly, familiar with the painter’s work.

  If the photograph of Mrs. Bell was a borrowing of Romantic imagery, the next image turns Friedrich’s Romanticism in a new direction. It is an artfully composed photograph of two women and a young girl on the rocks at Smith’s Point, with the seashore in the background. Clover identifies her subjects in her notebook—“Mrs. Ellston Pratt—Mrs. George D. Howe & Alice Pratt—on rock.” Mrs. Ellston Pratt was Miriam Choate Pratt, the younger sister of Helen Bell, the subject of Clover’s previous photograph, and both were daughters of the powerful Boston lawyer and former Massachusetts senator Rufus Choate. Noted for their charm, the Choate sisters were well ensconced in Beacon Hill society. The second woman, Alice Greenwood Howe, was a friend of the sisters, and all three were close friends with the author Sarah Orne Jewett—who would, in fact, dedicate her novel The Country of Pointed Firs to Alice Greenwood Howe. The third name in Clover’s list, Alice Pratt, was Miriam Pratt’s young daughter.

  What kind of friendship did Clover have with the women she photographed on that August day? She made mention of Helen Bell and her sister, Miriam Pratt, several times in her letters, always complimentary, on one occasion telling her father that their visit to Washington was socially successful: “It was charming to see Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Pratt . . . It’s well that folks here should see that Bostonians can be decent and well-bred.” Alice Howe, older than Clover by half a generation, was prominent in Boston society—one of the founders of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a member of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Humane Society. She and her husband, George D. Howe, the wealthy owner of a cotton mill, had a summer estate on Lobster Cove, near Smith’s Point. Even so, Clover and Alice Howe were more like neighborly acquaintances than close friends.

  Certainly, Clover’s photograph of Mrs. Pratt, Mrs. Howe, and Alice Pratt on Smith’s Point is not a straightforward portrait intended simply to capture the likenesses of three specific women. Instead, Clover carefully stage-managed the composition, creating a mood not of friendship and connection, but of lost possibility. Alice Pratt sits near the bottom right of the frame, her summery white dress suggesting a life of leisure infused with optimism. Her body faces the camera, her hands fold easily on her lap, and her young face—open and faintly smiling—is caught turning a bit to her right. Next to her sits Alice Howe, dressed all in black and turned in the other direction, with her back to the camera, her right earring glimmering above her high collar, her hair just visible through the netting that obscures her face. She is more ghost than living woman. Miriam Pratt stands in the middle of the frame in a three-quarter position, with her elaborate bustle clearly visible. Her strong posture anchors the image, but her head is downcast and her hands are held almost too deliberately in front of her. The figures of the two older women are turned away, yet their stance differs from that of Romantic Rückenfiguren. The women are connected neither to one another nor to the sea, which might otherwise open up their visual world, and their turned-away position shuts out the viewer.

  Clover was a month away from her fortieth birthday. While she had seldom shown an inclination in her letters or conversation to critique her social position, there is evidence she had grown into a clearer understanding of the strictures that limited a woman’s horizons. And if, in the process of making photographs, Clover transformed herself from a passive woman to an active one—she was both composer and viewer—this image nonetheless evokes an undeniable feeling of isolation, loss, and constraint. It pictures exactly what the photographer did not have: a mother figure and a daughter, women from the previous generation and the succeeding one, who might have otherwise accompanied Clover.

  CHAPTER 15

  Esther

  IN MID-AUGUST of 1883 Clover took her camera to her father’s home in Beverly Farms. She photographed Betsey, her father’s housekeeper, wearing a lace cap and doing handwork on the front porch, as the dog, Doudy, lay at her feet. Clover next took two exposures of her father sitting in his open buggy, holding the reins of his horse, Kitty, harnessed and ready for a r
ide. She paired a print from one of these exposures with her photograph of Betsey, to form a kind of parental portrait in the album—these were the two people who had most directly raised her. The character of her father is further emphasized in the print that follows. In this second image, Dr. Hooper stands upright, directly in front of a tree. His white hair and mustache frame a distinguished visage; his long legs and slender frame echo the slender trunk of the tree. Still a vigorous man, he anchors the composition, twinned with an equally stabilizing element, the tree. In her portrait of him, Clover made clear what she relied on—her father’s quiet strength.

  That August, Clover also took a series of photographs of Henry. In May she had captured his image on the back stairs of their Washington home on the very first day she tried out her camera. Later in the summer, she took two exposures of him holding their dogs Marquis and Possum in the window of the playhouse built for her nieces behind Pitch Pine Hill. She listed these photographs in her notebook and sent copies to Lizzie Cameron but never included them in her albums. Clover’s most well- known portraits of her husband were taken six days later, on the morning of August 19, 1883. She seated Henry at his desk, where he directs his gaze downward to the paper he’s writing on. Light pours in through French doors that faced south and opened out to the front yard. The neatly stacked papers to his left are most likely manuscript pages of the first volumes of his History. In her notebook Clover stated that Henry’s face was “good” in the first exposure, but she didn’t like his black coat. So in the next exposure, Henry now wears a lighter tweed coat, which she likes much “better.” The last exposure of the morning was a self-portrait. She wrote in her notebook that it was a “hideous but good photo”; she hated the way she looked. It is unlikely she made a print from its glass negative, and if she did, she didn’t include a copy in her album.

  The portraits of Henry are rather conventionally composed. But Clover chose to display them in an unconventional way. When it came time to put the portraits of Henry in her album, she didn’t place the two prints on facing pages, as she had done with her two exposures of Francis Parkman, or even in sequence, as she had done with her father’s portraits. Nor did she mount her self-portrait next to his, as might be expected. Instead, Clover chose to put Henry’s portraits next to prints of a lone umbrella pine tree clinging to a rocky bank at Smith’s Point, which she had photographed later in August. And she did this not once, but twice, in the album. By pairing her husband with a desolate tree, Clover perhaps portrayed him as holding on to the rocky cliffs of his intellectual pursuits—alone, brave, a survivor in the face of implacable nature. But the doubling also amplifies what’s already apparent in the portraits: the solitude demanded by Henry’s work was of a piece with a pervasive solitariness in his personality.

  Clover seems to have understood this aspect of Henry. She didn’t rebel against it in the way that Mrs. Adams had pounded on the closed gates of Charles Francis Adams’s fastidious nature, nor did Clover echo the frustrated complaints her mother-in-law hurled at her father-in-law: “You judge me by yourself, you might not—we feel things so utterly unlike”; “You can’t understand my feelings.” At the same time, Clover made clear that loneliness permeated her life with Henry. She took pictures of him, alone, while she remained behind the camera, and in her album, her image never appears alongside his. Even while alive, Clover made herself a missing presence beside her husband.

  Henry found Clover’s continuing absorption in photography unsettling, unnerving. As Clover refined her skills, he began a second novel, Esther, which would be published in March 1884, with a title character, an amateur painter, who “was audacious only by starts” and who had “not the patience to be thorough.” Esther’s struggle to develop her own visual vocabulary, her wanting to know if she could be something more than an amateur painter, matched Clover’s own efforts. Part of what Henry did in the novel was to try to sort out what all this might mean. As with Madeleine Lee in Democracy, only more so this time, Henry borrowed from Clover for his eponymous Esther, beginning with Esther’s looks and comportment. His description of his lead character carries startling similarities to his undermining description of Clover in his letter to Charles Gaskell reporting his engagement, more than ten years before:

  She is too slight, too thin; she looks fragile, willowy as the cheap novels call it, as though you could break her in halves like a switch. She dresses to suit her figure and sometimes overdoes it. Her features are imperfect. Except her ears, her voice, and her eyes which have a sort of brown depth like a trout brook, she has no very good points. . . . Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity.

  But the resemblance went further. Both women had adoring fathers; both had lost their mothers early on; both were strong-minded, with a quick wit and an interest in and talent for the fine arts; and both relished nature, finding more purpose and meaning there than in conventional religious belief. Esther’s lament—that she could not “hold my tongue or pretend to be pious”—was Clover’s own. Clarence King thought the resemblance between Esther and Clover so complete that he speculated to John Hay that Henry harbored “regret at having exposed” his wife, particularly her “religious experiences.”

  As Henry drafted the manuscript in the late summer and early fall of 1883, he in effect composed his side of the coded conversation that he and Clover carried on inside their marriage. He told no one he was writing a second novel—in fact, his authorship would not be publicly confirmed until much later. But Clover knew. While she was making photographic portraits of Henry that made oblique comment on their marriage, he was doing the literary equivalent. These two exchanged few letters over the course of their years together because they were so infrequently separated. But in her photographs and in his novel, each created a portrait of the other, showing each other their thoughts and feelings in eloquent, troubling form.

  Esther Dudley is a privileged young woman of New York City, the only child of William Dudley, a widower rich enough from a family inheritance that he can afford to ignore his law practice. Ill with a weak heart, he worries that his daughter, now twenty-five, is not yet married and is pursuing her interest in art and painting instead of seeking an appropriate match. “Poor Esther!” exclaims her father. “If things go wrong she will rebel, and a woman who rebels is lost.” The novel begins in the fall of 1880 at the newly built Saint John’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, its decoration as yet unfinished by an artist identified only as Wharton. Esther and her cousin George Strong, a geologist, attend the church’s opening service, interested more in Wharton’s art than the high-minded sermon delivered by the renowned preacher, the Reverend Stephen Hazard, who intones: “You were and are and ever will be only part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.” When the impressionable Catherine Brooke arrives in the city from Colorado, she is everything Esther is not: a younger, beautifully composed child of nature, “fresh as a summer’s morning.” As the narrator enthuses, “No one could resist her hazel eyes or the curve of her neck, or her pure complexion which had the transparency of a Colorado sunrise.”

  As he had done in Democracy, Henry closely fashioned his characters after his intimates: Esther is Clover; Mr. Dudley is Dr. Hooper; Catherine Brooke is Lizzie Cameron; George Strong is Clarence King. Stephen Hazard at Saint John’s is Phillips Brooks of Boston’s Trinity Church, while Wharton’s battles with Hazard mirror the frequent conversations John La Farge, the muralist of Trinity Church, had with Brooks. But the overarching theme of the novel—the clashing and competing assertions of artistic expression, Darwinian science, and religious faith— obscures the characters, too often making them stand-ins for abstract ideas. As one early critic noted, the characters talk like “embodied doctrines.”

  The plot revolves around the romance between Esther and Stephen Hazard, who are introduced by the geologist, George Strong. They begin as friends, talking of art and science, politics and faith. When her father dies of heart failure midway through
the narrative, Esther feels “languid, weary, listless. She could not sleep . . . She could not get back to her usual interests.” Her friends and family fear a breakdown. In mourning, she sees only one person besides the members of her family: Stephen, who takes charge and, shortly thereafter, proposes marriage. Esther accepts, now “saturated with the elixir of love.” But conflicts arise almost immediately. Though Esther genuinely loves Stephen, she does not share his religious beliefs. She discovers she is unable to do the one thing that faith, and her marriage, would require of her: submit. “Some people are made with faith. I am made without it,” she laments. The harder Stephen tries to convince her to accept his love, the more she resists, fearing marriage would force him to choose between the woman he loves and the church he serves, and she knows who would win such a contest. Stephen and his profession “are one” and she is honest enough with herself to know that to be “half-married must be the worst torture.”

  This conflict between love and religious faith, very much at the center of the novel, was not what most preoccupied its author. Henry was not troubled by Clover’s aversion to Christianity, but by her increasingly obvious artistic ambitions. Like Clover, Esther is stirred by art, while religious faith leaves her feeling at sea, “in mid-ocean.” Though she wants to love and be loved, she also wants to paint. This is the conflict Henry revealed, discussing it most overtly at the start of the novel, but then shunting it off to the plot’s periphery.