Clover continued learning, borrowing here and there from the visual vocabulary of past and contemporary fine art painting. For instance, one winter afternoon, Rebecca Dodge stopped by for a visit, bringing along her banjo. Using a new Dallmeyer wide-angle lens, Clover positioned Rebecca in the corner of a room near a window, holding her banjo as if she were playing. A soft northern light casts a flattering glow on Rebecca’s face, which is turned toward the window and tilted slightly downward. Clover exposed the negative for a full fifteen seconds. Rebecca’s ease in front of the camera is obvious in the relaxed way she holds her banjo and in her slight smile, creating a charming image of feminine leisure that is not easy to categorize: it is not quite a genre image of everyday life and not quite a portrait. Clover experimented further with Rebecca, taking another exposure of her, this time wearing lace around her head and a rose at her shoulder. For this shot, Clover tried a rapid lens. But she didn’t like the glass negative enough to make a print. Nor did she develop a self-portrait from an exposure she took that afternoon, with a Dallmeyer lens held open for a full twenty-five seconds. She jotted down the reason in her notebook: “Marian, expression not good.” But Clover declared in her notebook the first exposure of Rebecca with her banjo “very good” and sent a copy to her father, telling him proudly that Rebecca’s mother had been “enchanted with it, and thinks it perfect.”
In February 1884, Rebecca Dodge came back for another day of photography, this time joined by Elizabeth, wife of the American painter and illustrator F. D. Millet. The Millets, whom Clover had met on her trip to New York to visit Anne Palmer the previous year, had traveled to Washington because the artist was testifying about art tariffs before the congressional Ways and Means Committee.
The three women spent a rainy afternoon experimenting with Clover’s camera. Clover positioned Rebecca and Elizabeth in “different poses as statuary,” draping them in free-flowing garments that they’d found in the art trunk Millet took with him when he traveled. The images look more like a classical fantasy than traditional portraiture. The style of drapery, which Clover had called an “Eden-like costume” in her description of her visit to Millet’s studio the previous spring, and the poses themselves reflect those of Millet’s work, including his Reading the Story of Oenone (1882), which she had seen at the Society of Artists show in New York. In that painting, five women gather on a low bench to listen to the story of Oenone, the first wife of the warrior Paris, whom he abandoned for the fabled Helen of Troy; the tableau conveys a strong sense of solidarity among the young women, as they listen to the legend of a man betraying a woman. Clover, by contrast, pictured her own classically dressed figures alone, each to inhabit her own visual frame. Unlike Millet’s highly decorative work, she included little detail other than the elaborate drapery, and her images evoke none of the emotional closeness present in Millet’s piece, which had garnered excellent reviews.
Because of the dreary, dim February weather, an extended exposure time was needed for each image, and two of the four photographs Clover printed are blurry with movement because the women couldn’t remain still long enough. Even so, Clover declared in her notebook that some of her experiments were “very nice.” Shortly thereafter, she announced to her father she intended to buy a camera specifically for portraits, once she had decided “which one I want.” Her current camera was made for “out of doors work,” and she wanted to keep taking photographs when cold or rainy weather drove her indoors.
As Clover’s skill improved, her reputation grew, and she began fielding requests for what she began calling her “photographic work.” Madame Bonaparte stopped in one morning with her young son and daughter, wanting Clover to photograph her children for prints to send to the duchesse de Mouchy. Clover kept for her own album a clear print of Jerome Bonaparte IV, age six, proudly sitting “astride a chair blowing a trumpet.” She posed the “little brown-eyed boy” in profile to better suggest the imperious features of his “dim ancestors in Corsica of 100 years ago.” She didn’t make for herself a print of her portrait of the younger sister, though she hoped the family would find her photographs “worth keeping.”
In the winter of 1884, after she had printed “photos for nearly two hours,” Clover and Henry traveled to C Street near the Capitol to the offices of their friend the Mississippi senator L.Q.C. Lamar, a former Confederate envoy to Russia, who was a frequent dinner guest and, according to Henry, one of the “most genial and sympathetic of all Senators.” Lamar wanted Clover to take his photograph. She placed him on a plain chair against a blank wall, seated in profile and facing to the right of the frame, with the masthead of the newspaper the Daily Democrat clearly visible in his right hand. Shot from a low angle, Senator Lamar looms large in the photograph. He had wanted to “brush his long hair to the regulation smoothness,” but Clover refused to take his picture “until he had rumpled it all up.” She was right to insist. What shines in her portrait is the senator’s notable geniality, his remarkably even temperament, which would serve him well in his later duties as secretary of the interior and eventually as a justice of the Supreme Court.
That same day, she took a companion portrait of Lamar’s colleague J. B. Gordon, a former senator of Georgia and one of Robert E. Lee’s prized generals, who’d been badly wounded at Antietam, surviving numerous bullets, including one that went through his left cheek and jaw. Clover positioned Gordon so as to display his left profile, showing the scar from the bullet wound to its best advantage. This gift for finding just such a detail—one that would reveal character or allude to a personal story—had long been nurtured by Clover. In her letters to her father she created many vivid portraits-in-words, and she now imported this skill into the visual realm of photography.
In thanks for his portrait, Senator Lamar gave Clover an ideal gift—a photographic print depicting the ship Proteus a few minutes before sinking off the Arctic coast while on a relief expedition to find the explorer Adolphus Washington Greely and his lost men. “It is dim and technically not good,” Clover enthused to her father, “but is very curious and interesting.”
Though Clover adopted the conventions of portraiture she was familiar with—women holding flowers or an opened letter, men holding a newspaper or sitting at a desk, children playing with a toy—she also allowed the artifice involved in picture making to appear in her work. For instance, she hung a white sheet, with its fold marks clearly visible, behind the bearded Spanish minister Señor Don Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, who grasps in his left hand a copy of the Congressional Record. This touch of domestic improvisation imbues the image with a jaunty, unfussy feeling and contrasts with the elaborate backgrounds often used in contemporary portraiture. Clover thought de Lôme a “funny, dark-haired copy of Clarence King,” and she captured this jovial quality in his portrait. she found the minister’s wife, Adela, equally charming, asking her to come by three times a week to read aloud from Spanish novels—“a rare chance,” Clover told her father, “as she is very intelligent and has a most bewitching accent.” Clover’s portrait of Señora de Lôme records her new friend’s lively spirit and intellect; again, the backdrop of the wrinkled white sheet appears, this time showcasing the woman’s lace shawl and the open fan in her right hand. For indoor portraits like these, she carefully considered how light and shadow could together bring out the distinct features of a face: the focal point of a portrait.
Clover was also interested in portraying modern life and sometimes borrowed aesthetic ideas from the contemporary painters who challenged conventions. Using a plain backdrop for a portrait is one instance of such experimentation. Her two portraits of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future chief justice of the Supreme Court, also lean toward the future in their complete lack of decoration and their meticulous composition; they even suggest comparison with James Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother (1871), which Clover had seen on her honeymoon in 1872. If Clover thought Whistler’s painting technique “mad,” she’d nonetheless been influence
d by his spare, modern principles of composition.
And sometimes Clover reached for an evocation of deeply held values and unnamed longing, as she did in her portraits of two older women, Eliza Field and Elizabeth Bancroft. Eliza Field, wife of the industrialist John Field from Philadelphia, had had her portrait painted by some of the leading artists of her day, including Thomas Sully in 1841, when she was twenty-one, and John Singer Sargent in 1882, in a joint portrait with her husband. The Fields had started frequenting Clover’s tea table since moving to Washington in 1883, and Clover probably saw for herself the Sully and Sargent portraits when she paid the Fields a visit at their newly built home. Sully had emphasized the feminine qualities of the beautiful young Eliza, showing off her long graceful neck and her black hair sharply parted down the middle in the antebellum fashion. Forty years later, Sargent drew attention to the intimacy of her marriage, posing the Fields so that they almost faced each other, their arms entangled and their affection obvious. Clover places Mrs. Field, still striking at sixty-four years, in front of a painted screen and seated on a wooden chair, which points a bit to the right; her black cloak and flattering hat are flooded with light. She wears her dark hair just as she had in her youth—parted in the middle, drawn down over her ears, then back on either side. But Mrs. Field looks to her left, as if noticing that someone had just appeared through a door. This position puts her face in a three-quarter profile and gives the image an immediacy and energy absent in the Sully or Sargent portraits. Clover’s portrait emphasizes neither Mrs. Field’s beauty nor her marriage but rather the older woman’s keen intelligence and engagement with life.
Clover’s longtime H Street neighbor Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, born in 1803, was a woman of large experience and subtle intellect. Henry was to give Mrs. Bancroft a copy of the first volumes of his History to critique, once commenting that she was “by long odds the most intelligent woman in Washington.” Mrs. Bancroft had known Clover all of her life, meeting up with her in Boston and Egypt and Washington too, ever since the Adamses’ early days there. In the spring of 1884, Clover reported to her father, “Mrs. Bancroft looks very frail and has been in her room for six months but reads and discusses everything from Henry’s history to the Supreme Court decisions.” Clover admired Mrs. Bancroft’s attitude toward life and death and captured it brilliantly in a portrait she made that spring of 1884. Sitting upright, Mrs. Bancroft gazes directly into Clover’s camera, a bright light shining on one side of her face, casting the other into almost complete darkness, a compelling chiaroscuro. Mrs. Bancroft is wrapped in a fine patterned blanket and a white lace shawl, accouterments of a privileged old age, and her gray hair is carefully combed. Clover had written to her father about this woman’s compelling ability to endure all: “Her will bids fair to keep her alive as long as she chooses, unless death catches her in a nap, and that I believe she is on her guard against by dozing with one eye open.” To underscore such determination, Clover put Mrs. Bancroft’s portrait in her album next to a photograph of an ancient pine tree growing beside Tenleytown Road, north of Washington. But to balance this quality with necessary knowledge of mortality, she placed on the following page a platinum print copy of an exposure she’d taken the previous autumn of Arlington National Cemetery. Strength, life, and death—Clover linked these themes in her portrayal of her mother’s old friend and the photograph’s visual companions in the album.
Despite all the activity of 1884—election-year politics, house planning, photography—the creeping sense of isolation that had begun to encroach on Clover’s marriage had become more palpable. Clover wondered aloud to Lizzie Cameron “how any man or woman dares to take the plunge” into marriage. In February, Henry complained to Charles Gaskell that high society in Washington, with its endless round of dinners and rituals, had become “a mob almost as uninteresting and quite as crowded as in any other city.” While Clover was busy photographing her friends, Henry said they’d been “rather more solitary now than at any other season.”
As Clover looked ahead to another summer at Beverly Farms, she wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be lonely. She wrote to Anne Palmer, asking her to come for a two-week stay at Pitch Pine Hill. Clover spent an enormous amount of time alone, admitting to Anne that Henry James had told her recently she “spelled solitude with a large S.” Though Clover called her picture making “photographic work,” she knew full well it was more like a pastime, something for her to do with her day. Her retreat from Gilder’s offer to publish her portrait of George Bancroft in Century magazine had avoided direct conflict with Henry, but it had also robbed her of the chance to garner a wider appreciation for her photography. She would never be recognized as an artist in her own right.
All of this was complicated by Lizzie Cameron’s unexpected return to Washington in May 1884 from her European tour. Clover had reported receiving a dreary letter from Lizzie earlier in the year: “Poor little Mrs. Cameron is very homesick and bored in Europe,” Clover told her father. Evidently, things were not going well between Lizzie and her husband. As Clover dryly observed, “I wish Don would get well or something, but I fear he’s not wanted above.” Clover had answered Lizzie, wanting to cheer her up. She described her excitement about Richardson’s design for the new house, but she also provided what a forlorn woman might need to hear most. Addressing Lizzie affectionately as “Perdita, perdita,” after the abandoned baby girl in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, Clover tried to console her by telling her, “We miss you, miss you, miss you” and that Washington was “always pleasant” but “pleasanter when you’re around.”
Henry thought so too. From the beginning, Henry’s connection to Lizzie was something different from his habitual admiration for pretty young women who, as he wrote to Charles Gaskell, “chatter” and “smile on my gray beard.” Lizzie flattered Henry, looked up to him, and found him fascinating. Her youth and beauty gave her a social power almost equal to his, and this intensified their mutual attraction. But he concealed his feelings in the guise of an acceptable sympathy for a young woman in a terrible marriage. He could assure himself, and anyone else who might have noticed, that his attentions to her were chivalrous, honorable.
Clover noted Lizzie’s premature return to Washington in a letter to her father. Retelling the previous day’s events, of guests coming and going, she included that Lizzie had stopped by “all in white muslin and blue ribbons, looking very young and pretty, just back from 1 year of Europe and enchanted to get back.” Henry meanwhile wrote to John Hay with relief that “Mrs. Don has come home, which consoles me for much. The society of this village is charming with the mercury at 90°.” But even with the blistering heat, Henry was “loath to go off to the sea-side.” He didn’t want to leave Washington so soon after Lizzie had returned home.
How could Clover not have been unnerved as she saw Henry’s eager attentions move away from her and toward a much younger woman? In Esther, Clover’s fictional doppelganger frets that the younger Catherine, modeled after Lizzie, has taken “a fancy” to the artist Wharton, one of several fictional disguises Henry adopted for himself in the novel. Wharton comes to see Catherine “or sends for her every day,” Esther worries. Feeling helpless, she asks, “What can I do about it?” Henry would write much later that a woman goes “shipwreck” because “when she loves, when she hates, when she is jealous, she does not know it until someone tells her, and then she is furiously angry at being told, and won’t believe it.” Perhaps he was remembering a moment when he pointed out to Clover her jealousy of Lizzie, and Clover flared up in anger to deny it.
For all the times Lizzie came over for tea, for dinner, or for a horseback ride, Clover never once took her photograph. There were other missing portraits. Anne Palmer never sat for Clover’s camera, though Anne too was a photographer. Henry James had portrayed Clover as Mrs. Bonnycastle in his 1884 short story “Pandora” as a gracious, savvy woman who grasped the Washington social game, but Clover never photographed her friend Harry. Many others eluded Clove
r’s lens—Clarence King, Clara Hay, Clover’s brother Ned Hooper, and her sister and brother-in-law, Ellen and Whitman Gurney. Yet one of Clover’s photographs is strongly suggestive of Lizzie, albeit in a disguised, hieroglyphic way. In a photograph taken on October 9, 1883, which Clover placed in her first red-leather album, a beautiful young woman, Grace Minot, sits at Henry’s desk at Pitch Pine Hill, reading page proofs. Clover’s entry in her notebook reads: “Miss Minot as ‘Muse of American History’—in H’s study/reading proof—time 1.30 p.m.—/16—or 17 seconds—/very charming—little over timed/making neck & hands dead white & not enough modeling.” Either at that time or later, Henry labeled the image on the lower left-hand corner of the album page as “Miss Minot in study at Beverly Farms.” But Clover added her own title on the right-hand corner, the title she also used in her notebook: “Muse of American History.” If Clover never fashioned herself as Henry’s muse, it must have been unnerving for her to see attentions exchanged between Mr. American History and his bevy of young female admirers—most especially Lizzie Cameron.
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