Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  On Christmas Eve, 1883, Clover scolded her friend Anne Palmer, also a photographer, insisting that she “send me photos.” She also learned about the platinotype, a new printing process prized for how it produced stunning blacks and grays that did not fade with time. She spent three hours on the morning of December 30 in the “photograph rooms” at the National Museum in order to learn the “wonderful process” from the person who owned the patent. To her delight, her photography friend Cliff Richardson, who still worked as a chemist for the city, had “very kindly smuggled me in as the only woman.”

  In the back of her photography notebook, she folded a sheet of directions published by Willis & Clements of Philadelphia, the primary proprietors of the platinotype process. The list of four steps for developing photographs—sensitizing the paper, exposing it to light, developing the image, and clearing and washing the final photograph—confirmed what Clover told her father: photography was “science pure and simple.” This appealed to her. Photography helped fulfill Clover’s desire to carefully catalog what she saw with her own eyes. She had, in a long letter to her father on Washington politics, asserted something of this when she claimed: “My facts are facts, too.”

  In addition to its interesting technical aspects and its ability to record detail and capture nuance, photography allowed Clover to deepen her passion for art. For her compositions and her choice of subjects, she drew from the rich visual world of nineteenth-century painters: both Europeans, such as Caspar David Friedrich and the painters of the Barbizon school, and Americans, such as F. D. Millet, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer. By trying on ideas that were in wide circulation, she let her private feelings and memories be poured, like clay slip, into the mold of high art. Like her mother a generation before, who had crafted poetry to explore the connections between her private world and wider realms of human expression and experience, Clover had begun reaching for what artists reach for.

  But with Henry’s help, Clover circumscribed her ambition. She had internalized his standards for feminine self-restraint, which her culture emphasized. She didn’t dare stretch these limits in any way that would risk Henry’s disapproval. According to him, a woman’s mind—“thin, wiry, one-stringed”—was not improvable. Or, as Clover’s fictional counterpart, Esther, exclaims, “What is the use of trying to go forward when one feels iron bars across one’s face?”

  CHAPTER 17

  A New Home

  IN MID-DECEMBER of 1883, Clover wrote her father her usual newsy Sunday letter, this time announcing she had sold her thoroughbred horse Powhatan to Anne Bayard, the young daughter of the Delaware senator Thomas Bayard. The horse had become “unmanageable,” particularly for Henry, who had neither Clover’s confidence nor skill with horses. Watching Henry get thrown off Powhatan at Beverly Farms was one thing, Clover decided, but “fighting a balking horse on the slippery asphalt pavements” was too dangerous for “both horse and rider.” She reported happily that Anne would be “a good mistress” for the “handsome beast” because the young girl had decided to buy him even though he had already run away with her, such that she had to “jump from his back to save her head from a tree trunk.” Clover also told how Possum, their Skye terrier, whom she called “our ewe lamb,” had been struck by a carriage on Pennsylvania Avenue earlier in the week. “He was brought home in a wagon in extremis,” Clover reported, and when she and Henry came home, they found him on his back. “He wagged his tail faintly and gasped out ‘I see them beckoning to me.’ I said ‘Possum the angels never take dogs who can wag their tails.’”

  But Clover put the real news of the day in a postscript. She and Henry had decided to build a new house on Lafayette Square. “[John] Hay has bought the vacant lot next to us,” Clover explained, “the whole lot is 98½ feet east to west by 131¼ north to south.” Hay planned to build on the corner, at Sixteenth and H Streets, and she and Henry would build on land between his corner lot and their current house on H Street. The scheme had originated earlier in the fall. The Hays were interested in moving back to Washington, and when they stayed with the Adamses in November, they’d gone real estate shopping, wanting a house close by their two hearts. When it became clear that the corner lot was for sale, Hay gave Henry the go-ahead to purchase the whole lot on his behalf. Hay then turned around and sold to Henry—on Henry’s suggestion—a forty-four-foot portion of the lot for “⅓ the price of the whole tract.” The sale was completed on December 11 for “approximately $73,800” for both lots, with the Adamses paying $25,500 for their portion.

  Clover wrote to Anne Palmer with the news that they wanted to “put up a modest mansion—44 feet wide—43 high.” The building plan was an enormous relief to Clover. The land had been bought previously by a developer who wanted to put up a seven-and-a-half-story apartment building, which would have made the back of the Adamses’ current house “dark and untenable.” She had been dreading losing three large trees that would have been felled to make room for construction. The real estate deal with John Hay had resolved these issues in one stroke, though Clover still wanted approval from her father and brother. “We hope,” Clover admitted, “that you and Ned will not think us unwise.” She talked finances, saying Henry could borrow what funds they needed and reminding her father she still had roughly $27,000 in her trust (in today’s terms more than $600,000). By Christmas week, she announced that she wanted “no more jewelry or bric-à-brac” because all attention had turned now to “drains, plumbing, and bricks.” Three days later she wrote again to her father to thank him for his very generous Christmas gift, telling him she intended to put the money toward “one definite part of the house,” such as “iron wrought grills for the entresol windows on the street.” Henry had already “drawn to scale” the interior rooms, and she promised to photograph their initial plans so her father and Ned could make “suggestions and improvements.”

  No other architect but Henry Hobson Richardson, America’s most influential, was mentioned as a possibility for the Adams house. Frank Lloyd Wright, who would be inspired by Richardson’s profound sensitivity to the relation of buildings to physical space, would later write of him, “Richardson was the grand exteriorist.” Richardson’s Romanesque style, with its rounded arches, thick walls, and clearly articulated parts, a style later described as “quiet and monumental,” was most perfectly expressed in Boston’s Trinity Church, dedicated in February 1877. Clover and Henry likely attended the dedication ceremony.

  Richardson’s prodigious talents were matched by his voracious appetite for food, art, conversation, and music. On weekends, he liked to hire chamber orchestras to play at his Brookline offices outside Boston (which he rented from Clover’s brother, Ned Hooper), inviting clients, neighbors, and friends for a two-day musical salon. When Clover’s father wrote to her about one of these soirees, she replied, “How I wish I could hear Richardson’s concerts!” Richardson suffered most of his adult life from Bright’s disease, which radically elevated his appetite, but even chronic ill health couldn’t dampen his energy and optimism. He had a gift for friendship. To Henry, he scrawled in his large rolling script, “Tomorrow your lamp and two little red jars go to Washington addressed to you. I wish you and Mrs. Adams to accept the jar with plenty of love and my best wishes.” An upstate New York state senator, who observed Richardson’s machinations in getting more funding approved for his completion of the senate chamber in the New York State Capitol at Albany, said of him, “He would charm a bird out of a bush.”

  Though the two Henrys couldn’t have been more different in temperament and physical stature, they had enjoyed a long friendship. They were born the same year, and Richardson, a native of Louisiana, graduated from Harvard a year after Henry, in 1859, with Ned Hooper’s class. Henry said he met no one at Harvard whom he “valued” later in life “so much as Richardson.” The two became close friends—not at Harvard, but in Paris, when Richardson was studying at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in the 1860s, the first American to do so. Henry would s
neak away from his duties at the British Legation in London for a weekend in Paris, and the two young men would walk the neighborhoods, dine at the Palais Royal, and talk history and art.

  Clover also enjoyed Richardson’s company and often commented on his high spirits, once telling her father after a dinner engagement that Richardson “can say truly ‘I am my own music,’ for he carries off any dinner more or less gaily.” And she thought his architecture was extraordinary. She and Henry had traveled to Albany to see Richardson’s State Capitol, and she reported to Lizzie Cameron that the senate chamber, with its red mahogany furniture, wainscoting made of “great slabs of Mexican onyx,” and upper walls of gold leather, was “the handsomest room I ever saw.” But it was Richardson’s commission for General Nicholas Longworth Anderson’s new home at Sixteenth and K Streets that gave Clover and Henry a front-row view of Richardson’s construction methods.

  Even before the Andersons moved in, Henry decided that “Nick Anderson’s new house [is] . . . the handsomest and most ultimate house in America in my opinion, and the only one I’d like to own.” On November 12, 1883, Clover brought her camera and tripod over to the Andersons’ house and, from across the street, on the northwest corner at the intersection of Sixteenth and K Streets, she took its portrait; horse manure is clearly visible on the dusty city street. She also took a close-up exposure of the mansion’s elaborate ironwork door leading to the carriage driveway. She put both prints in the opening pages of her second album, as if to acquaint its viewer with the highlights of her neighborhood; she also sent prints to General Anderson, who forwarded one to his son. Clover, a confirmed fireplace devotee, told her father after a quiet dinner with the Andersons that she didn’t like how the house was “excessively furnace heated” despite the presence of Richardson’s “handsome open fireplaces,” but she found their new house “charming” nonetheless.

  Clover and Henry wanted their own house to be smaller and more quietly grand, what Henry would call later a “Spartan little box.” Clover didn’t want a parlor, but a sunny library instead—she said she could “sit all day in the library.” Henry’s study would be next door. The dining room would be located near the back of the house, with steps leading into the garden. Just as she had once before, at Beverly Farms, Clover aspired to infuse her new home with a New England coziness, though of a high-toned sort, with fireplaces in every room set off with warm-colored marble mantels and subtle decoration.

  Clover also planned a large photography studio of several rooms in the back of the house on the third floor. She wanted an overhead skylight, several sinks, an elaborate ventilation system, shelving for chemicals, and a darkroom. The studio’s large five-foot window would face north to take advantage of consistent daylight, a siting sought by painters of portraits.

  After the New Year, Clover wrote an impatient note to Richardson to “hurry him up,” as Henry reported to John Hay, and by early spring the architect stayed with Clover and Henry in Washington to talk over his ideas and drawings. Clover wanted the best of everything—plumbing, furnace, fixtures, wainscoting, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. But she resisted extras. There would be “no stained glass—no carving,” for she wanted not a “fine house,” but an “unusual one.” Sometimes Richardson pushed back, writing on one drawing that showed his plans for a carved abutment: “These I shall put back again at whatever the cost.” But Clover could not have been more pleased with the eventual plans, writing to her father that Richardson had “worked up something very satisfactory to all of us.” She particularly liked how he managed the scale of the outside windows, saying he “dealt with it like a master.” On hearing of the Adamses’ approval, Richardson wrote to Henry to say “I am glad you are pleased with the drawings,” noting he would be “very glad indeed” to see the “photographs your wife has taken of the elevations.”

  The first photograph Clover took in 1884 was of H. H. Richardson, who sat for his portrait on January 18 at 11:15 A.M. at Henry’s desk in his study. Her notebook reads: “Jan 18—H. H. Richardson—11.15—/in H. A’s study—large stop—/10 seconds/good.” Ten seconds was a long time for someone like Richardson to sit still. Holding an architect’s drafting T-square in his right hand, with drawing plans in front of him, he can’t quite repress a smile, which makes his eyes squint. Clover captured his vivacity and his companionable good nature. As a gesture to his simmering fatal disease and a counterpoint to his energy and push, she situated Richardson in front of Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Dying Lion, a mournful black-and-white chalk drawing that hung on the study’s back wall. Clover knew that’s what Richardson was—a dying lion.

  CHAPTER 18

  Portraits

  CLOVER BEGAN 1884 engrossed in election-year politics, closely following accounts of heated debate in newspapers and the Congressional Record. Congress was in an uproar over high tariffs on imports, which were largely favored by industrialists but despised in other sectors because the policy inflated prices and created an unwieldy surplus in the federal budget. Clover told her father to alert Ned to “expect some very lively tariff discussions in a week or two,” explaining the situation with her usual journalistic brio: “New Jersey in hysterics over its silk, and Ohio split as to wool and Congress with $150,000,000 surplus, a standing temptation to robbery and corruption, each party afraid to touch the matter just before a presidential election and equally afraid not to.” She cheerfully added, “It never was more interesting here than this winter and growing more so every day.”

  She happily reported that Anne Palmer, by now clearly her closest friend, intended to move from New York City to Washington for a season, plans that would “add much to us.” She also enjoyed the company of a new friend, Rebecca Dodge, who lived nearby in the neighborhood. The two women had met the previous autumn when Clover noticed the much younger Rebecca walking by on H Street and asked a mutual acquaintance about her. Rebecca would remember, years later, how Clover’s “generosity knew no bounds,” particularly if she really liked someone. There were other diversions that winter. Passionate as ever about her Skye terriers Boojum, Possum, and Marquis, Clover decided to enter Marquis in a local dog show. After the papers reported he was a contender for a top award, she pledged to donate the prize money to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, an organization she’d supported since its founding after the Civil War. And she found herself surprised by her continued excitement over house plans. As she’d explained to Lizzie Cameron at the beginning of the year, she had “always been utterly opposed to building” but was now the “one who jumped first,” adding, “I like to change my mind all of a sudden.”

  This season, though, Clover had been determined to limit her involvement in Washington’s endless and demanding social obligations. Some occasions were, however, a pleasure; there’d been several enjoyable dinners. At one she sat next to General Philip Sheridan, who gave her “a long account of his experience as eye witness the day after Sedan, where Napoleon 3rd surrendered to Bismarck.” Sheridan answered her many questions about the Franco-Prussian War, which President Grant had ordered Sheridan to observe; he talked with Clover throughout most of the dinner, a conversation she enjoyed “extremely.” But Clover wrote to her father that the “society rabble” wasted her time, that “hardly a day passes that someone doesn’t bring a letter of introduction and that means a dinner time taken and a call at least.” She struck an imperious pose as a defense, explaining that “pushing people who almost force their way in to your house have to be adroitly met—no one is admitted now by my majestic orders if they ask if I ‘receive’ and so only those who walk in without asking come at all.” She also resolved to make the many teas and receptions only “a small part of our existence.” After a week of “quiet evenings and gray days,” despite being invited to innumerable parties, she concluded that the “only way of existing at all is to keep out of it.”

  Clover had something else to occupy her attention and fill her time—photography. She took a remarkable number
of exposures—over fifty—that winter and spring of 1884, the best of which she developed, printed, and carefully pasted into her second red-leather album. She had opened her first album, dated on the inside cover “May 1883,” with a quintessential summer image of catboats becalmed in Manchester Harbor, near Beverly Farms. The following forty-six photographs, most made during the summer and fall, included those of family, friends at the seashore, Henry at his summer writing desk, farm places, the parlor at Pitch Pine Hill, and the view of the treetops from Clover’s upstairs porch. This was Clover’s summer life. The second album is more somber than the first, beginning with a winter scene of Lafayette Square, dusted in snow, followed by the two prints of General Anderson’s new house on the corner of Sixteenth and K Streets. Many of the forty-seven photographs in the second album are figure studies or portraits.

  In the late months of 1883, Clover had experimented with posing her women friends in various ways as she learned about exposure times and how best to use light to highlight features and expressions. In mid-September, she achieved a notable success, taking two exposures of the famous singer Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone, formerly Lillie Greenough, a childhood acquaintance from Cambridge and now the wife of a Danish diplomat. With its plain folding screen and two large potted ferns on either side, the setting replicates something of Madame de Hegermann-Lindencrone’s theatrical milieu, as does her head covering, a shawl of fine black lace, and the pale rose pinned to her bodice, which complements the open fan held in her hand. Madame de Hegermann-Lindencrone’s daughter, Nina Moulton (Lillie had formerly been married to the banker Charles Moulton), is posed in much the same way as her mother, but more simply, with the white rose in her hand, drawing the eye to her wasp waist. Under entries in her notebook about exposure times, Clover wrote simply: “all good.”