At that age, in that period, most young ladies would not have been permitted to travel—or even, by some lights, to take a turn through the park—without parental supervision. Edith managed to break with tradition to visit the South. The following autumn, she embarked on a second adventure, this time involving driving in “mountain wagons” and riding saddle horses eight hundred miles through the Catskills and the Delaware Valley. Again the group was informal and coed, including, as per the New York Times, a “Miss Kearn, Mr. Julian Kean and Mr. Louis Sands.”
Tempering the exhilarating freedom of her tour, however, were a pair of chaperones, Colonel and Mrs. James Scrymser. Longtime neighbors of the Minturns on Gramercy Park, the Scrymsers enjoyed quite a different level of wealth than Edith and her family. A distinguished Civil War veteran, James Scrymser pioneered the development of undersea telegraph cable lines to Brazil, Cuba and Mexico. With a commission (from a total fee of $7.50 per word) on every message that flowed over his lines, he had already made the first of his many millions by the time of Edith’s mountain-wagon outing.
For now, half a decade later, the girls and their mother had each other. Five years after it disappeared, silk was back in fashion in the Minturn household. The turnaround came too late for Edie’s eighteenth year, but as it happened, disappointment turned to opportunity. Now she was twenty-three, no longer a debutante. But she had somehow slipped out from under the stigma of frustrated maidenhood to become something else, someone different. The end of the century loomed. The cultural atmosphere of the day changed, imperceptibly at first, then more noticeably. Against her mother’s best intentions, a faint air of the bohemian wafted into Edie’s life.
Part of it was an unexpected consequence of Susanna’s decision, just a year after her husband’s sudden passing, to shepherd the whole family to the Continent for an eight-month stay. They found that skilled dressmakers were never in short supply. Neither were interesting (and interested) gentlemen, especially male cousins—Swiss cousins, German cousins, English cousins. In Italy, the girls had adventures on the Grand Canal in Venice with a “naughty” gondolier named Carlo, described in a letter by Edith’s sister Mildred. Susanna hired them an Italian tutor. In Paris, the Louvre, “hideous and vast,” drew them back again and again.
London, Paris, Venice, Rome, Florence, Geneva, Dresden. All over Europe, change hung in the air like wisps of cannon smoke. This was France of the belle époque, Paris of the Moulin Rouge, London of the Gay Nineties. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and George du Maurier’s Trilby popularized the figure of the bohémien, in reaction against Victorian stiffness. Descended from Gypsies, the bohemian symbolized the impoverished artist’s devotion to the trinity of Beauty, Truth and Love. Even proper young ladies traveling en famille, in train with their heavy-handed mother, could not miss the spirit of transition and transformation.
Mildred recounts a visit to an artist friend, one Mr. Hyde, whose studio was on the Left Bank, “way off back of beyond, in a pretty artistic little court, up a steep flight of stairs.”
When we got there we found a prettily set tea table, with good cakes and pretty cups and a very pleasant welcome . . . There was a picture called “Twylight” which was lovely. We drove back over the river. It looks beautiful in the evening, all softened with tender sunset-light, with its lovely bridges spanning it and the towers of the Trochedero indistinctly visible in the haze which falls over Paris at sunset.
During this Continental sojourn, the Minturn girls brushed up against the artistic milieu again and again. Susanna and Edith indulged in a soft and subtle kind of vanity production, hiring the fashionable French miniaturist Fernand Paillet to complete their portraits. The artist rendered their dreamy features in watercolor on three-inch lozenges of ivory. The paintings have survived. Edie holds her hands clasped in her lap and gazes straight ahead in her plum-colored gown. Her expression is difficult to read, serious, unwavering, soulful.
THE PATH THAT led Edie Minturn out from under the protective parasol of her mother and, eventually, into the studio of Daniel Chester French began with the harmlessly risqué Victorian pastime called the tableau vivant. At parties, at dances and especially at benefits, elaborately posed and costumed participants assumed a series of frozen postures, living human dioramas representing a particular theme from literature, art or the Bible. The phenomenon was central to the ball culture of Edith’s time.
The popular silent spectacles skirted the border between the taboo and the decorous. The male gaze and female exposure—the costumes pushed the boundaries of acceptable public dress—lent the tableau a frank sensuality. A sort of parlor game that had mutated from the private drawing rooms of the 1830s to the lavish fancy balls of the 1880s and ’90s, taking on more accoutrements and pretentions as it progressed, the tableau vivant allowed a rare public forum for the erotic. Charades, but with fewer clothes. At times a tableau was just a tableau: the reenactment of the parable of Lot and his wife, for example, could easily be drained of sensual elements. In addition, the tableaux were often presented at charity functions, thereby covering any suggestion of scandal with an eleemosynary glaze.
Other times, sex was exactly the point. Lily Bart’s languorous performance as a close-draped beauty in Wharton’s House of Mirth, where she poses in imitation of a painting by Joshua Reynolds, triggers an exclamation from her ball-going peers.
“The unanimous ‘oh!’ of the spectators,” writes Wharton, “was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds’ ‘Mrs. Lloyd’ but to the flesh-and-blood loveliness of Lily Bart.” The original Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd oil of 1775–76 is a study in décolletage and how the female form may be revealed by a clinging textile. In a buttoned-down age, the unfastening of a single hook and eye can be impossibly powerful. (The scene is portrayed in the 2000 movie adaptation of Wharton’s book, directed by Terence Davies.)
The typical tableau vivant had its genesis when the planner of a party or ball would give an assignment to a chosen coterie of guests. Professional seamstresses at the ready, invitees proceeded over a period of fevered weeks to craft costumes—theatrical, historical or just plain revealing, as the case demanded. A group might be assigned Botticelli’s Primavera, for example, or a society cartoon by Charles Dana Gibson. Selected scenery would help the players impersonate the subject, which usually saw its execution within an oversized wood and canvas frame to be inspected by all assembled.
Among her set, and to some degree in the pages of the popular press, Edith Minturn earned acclaim as an actor in Manhattan’s thriving tableau vivant scene. She inhabited the precise combination of virtue and exhibition that the practice demanded. Tableau subjects such as Lily Bart exposed their flesh to give sensual frisson to their Victorian peers. Edith Minturn did, too, to some extent. But more important was her ability to communicate life and emotion through a succession of frozen poses.
The value that the Gilded Age assigned to holding an expressive pose grew out of another contemporary phenomenon, a philosophy of movement hatched by a midcentury French guru named François Delsarte. A performer at the Opéra Comique, Delsarte undertook to improve acting technique by studying how real people moved in parks and cafés, in hospital wards and at scenes of disasters. His system linked movement, voice, breath, dynamics, line and form as expressive agents of human impulses—a crude, early version of Method acting.
Delsarte, who died in 1871, did not publish a book on his technique, but in 1885 a follower named Genevieve Stebbins imported his ideas to America with a best-selling text that spelled out the essential “decomposing exercises” Delsarteans needed to improve their poise, posture and fitness, and even their emotional and spiritual state. To begin, practitioners must “buy a mirror large enough to reflect your entire figure and faithfully . . . practice many hours a day if you wish rapid results.” Specifically, they should follow such clipped, abrupt directives as: “Drop forearm from elbow as if dead. Shake it. Vital force arrested at elbow.”
The Delsarte System spread far
beyond acting technique. The American hinterlands became steeped in the imported aesthetic. Classes for practicing Delsarte Gymnastics could be found in most cities, along with the Delsartean costumes in which to perform the movements. By the 1890s, when Delsarte clubs were the rage, designers could be hired to implement Delsartean home design or to fashion a wardrobe with a harmonious Delsartean aesthetic. Isadora Duncan was the daughter of a Delsarte devotee. Even manufacturers of shoes and silverware made the claim of advancing Delsarte’s principles.
Edith Minturn and her fellow participants in a tableau vivant learned to stand silent and still, their staged, intermittent gestures properly Delsartean, posed for the edification, amusement and stimulation of their fellow partygoers. Edie would have practiced her moves at home and attended Delsarte classes to get them right.
For her sensitive portrayals as much as her dreamy everyday countenance, Edith Minturn became a sought-after tableau model and something of a celebrity. She was “well known for her beauty,” commented the New York Times, “and her poses . . . have attracted the attention of artists.” Young bon vivants such as Edie would also earn notices in the gossip columns that breathlessly summarized the social lives of young Manhattan blue bloods. The city’s newspapers, in the analysis of society grande dame Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, “devote more space to the entertainments and ceremonies of the few thousands of its residents whose names are in the social register than they do to the proceedings of the Congress of the United States.”
A logical step, then, from the tableaux vivants at social gatherings to the posing platform in Daniel Chester French’s Greenwich Village atelier. But the former might be viewed by dozens, at the most hundreds. The statue that the artist made of Edie Minturn would have an audience of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and finally millions.
FOR ALL THE Minturn letters, diaries and news clippings, history does not record whether Edie Minturn posed for French with her mother’s blessing. Was it simply a natural outgrowth of the socially sanctioned tableaux vivants? Or was it a conscious, rebellious act, a slipping out from beneath Susanna’s thumb? Susanna had artistic pretentions of her own. The tableaux stood at the center of the social scene. But Daniel Chester French’s strange and extravagant project was something else again.
As a celebrated artist, French swam in much the same upper-class waters as the Minturn daughters. Sculptor and model crossed paths at a music salon held once a month and patronized by such highbrows as Mrs. Pierpont Morgan and George Vanderbilt. In the words of Margaret French, the sculptor’s wife, it would be essential to invite “those two tall beautiful Minturn girls, who would lend distinction to any assembly.” William Merritt Chase, a painter of renown in New York, hosted the salon in his studio on West 10th Street, close by French’s own workplace. Chase himself had a reputation for liberality, being one of the few art teachers to allow women in his life study classes, and presided over the salons wearing a soft tie, a narrow French hat and a fingerpiece pince-nez.
The sculptor’s encounter with Edie occurred at the salon when she was twenty-four years old. At that time, French found himself in the midst of a rushed search for a face, a form, a model that somehow could wrap up the entire brash, surging, idealistic American experience in a single solemn symbolic figure. The sculptor was still thirty years from creating his best-known work, the brooding, iconic Abraham Lincoln at the slain president’s Washington memorial. But the art establishment already thought well enough of French to extend him the coveted commission for a monolithic statue of The Republic. The work would be the centerpiece of Chicago’s 1893 world’s fair, the Columbian Exposition, the landmark cultural event of the era.
In Europe receiving a medal when he got the news of the commission, French had to hurry across the Atlantic to accept. Serving as the fair’s artistic adviser, Augustus Saint-Gaudens made the critical decision to hire French. (In 1897, Saint-Gaudens would create the famed bronze bas-relief commemorating Edith’s hero-uncle Robert Gould Shaw.)
As a symbolic figure, The Republic would assume her place in the pantheon of self-consciously created American icons, freely partaking of symbols from ancient Greece and Rome, yes, but also from the French Revolution. Saint-Gaudens provided a general outline, but the contours of the figure would be summoned completely from the imagination of Daniel Chester French. She would wear a Roman stola to symbolize that America, like Rome, was a republic. A crowning wreath of laurel indicated American triumphalism. Hoisted upon a “liberty pole” in her left hand was the Phrygian cap of the French Revolution. In her right hand she held an eagle, wings fully fledged, perched atop a globe, completing the mix-and-match iconography.
Such was the inflated, grandiose figure that young Edie Minturn was asked to model, a patriotic vision, a concrete representation of an abstract concept. In a series of posings in the fall of 1891, Edith stood stock-still on a dais in French’s studio, holding in one upraised hand a crude papier-mâché bird and in the other a wooden broomstick, a Queen Bodicea–style warrior breastplate buckled to her chest, the laurel leaves affixed with pins to the back of her glossy brunette hair. It might have been difficult not to laugh.
“We must get the essentials right,” the sculptor said. “The reason a silhouette is a good likeness is because the essentials are right, even though all the details are left out.”
But Edith had done this before. Standing in French’s atelier, she looked for all the world like the star of an outsize ballroom tableau vivant labeled “The Republic.” As in a tableau, her costume trod the line between the symbolic and the suggestive. French, who often sculpted models posing in the nude, instructed that Edie’s upheld arms be completely bare. This at a time when pound upon pound of multilayered fabric swathed the female form almost like a burka, skirts and petticoats accompanied by big, fluffy, arm-concealing mutton-leg sleeves, always gloves, always a hat.
Edith had the time and freedom a wife might not enjoy to engage in this remarkable adventure. Men were calling, attractive men, now that she was out and available. Suitors would certainly be lined up at the Minturn door for Edith as well as her sisters, given their loveliness and high spirits. But her mother hovered over her social life, too willing to dictate to Edith just what she ought to do and whom she ought to see. Edith had the desire to get out from under Susanna’s bell jar. More than anything, she welcomed the regular excursion to French’s studio as a recreational junket. But it was also a way of telling the world that she was more than just an ingénue, that she was different from the others, different even from her sisters, who would never be daring enough to go into a studio and reveal themselves physically.
It took an independent streak to pull off a pose like that, confidence to bare your flesh in a studio that might include not only the artist but various assistants and friends who might wander through. Edith’s posing for French differed from the kind typically engaged in by the female Vanderbilts or Astors of New York. Denizens of the haute monde might visit an artist’s studio fully clothed in their poshest apparel or, more customarily, bring the artist into their perfectly appointed living rooms, in order to have their likenesses painted against a backdrop that delicately conveyed their fortunes as well as their features. That was one artistic product of the day, the formal portrait.
The other, though, the symbolic creation of the kind for which Edith was posing in her revealing classical finery, required the closest adherence to the human form. Whether the sitter was a Vanderbilt or an art student really did not matter. All the artist needed was a person with beautiful features, be she debutante or servant. Edith’s face and figure made her eligible for the assignment. Her willingness to pose set her apart from others of her class. She had the cheek to envision herself as gigantic and impressive rather than as the diminutive, ladylike Victorian stereotype.
From their previous meeting at Chase’s salon, Edie knew Daniel Chester French. From her going out around town in Paris, London and New York City, she knew the artistic, not to say the bohemia
n, milieu. But she could not have known or imagined the currency, notoriety and acclaim that would greet The Republic when it debuted two years later in Chicago. Edith Minturn writ large, given pride of place, rising from the middle of a decorative lagoon in the Court of Honor at the fair’s entrance.
It took French half a year to convert the thigh-high maquette of Edie Minturn into the monster monument the world would nickname “Big Mary.” The process required replicating the original mockup as a thirteen-foot-high figure, then dividing that figure into five sections and expanding each part five times over in a concoction of wood, jute fiber and plaster, finally inserting an iron framework to secure the whole.
The Republic was the largest statue ever made in America. Pieces of it, each one as large as a house, took shape in the fair’s cavernous Forestry Building. Outside, swales of vegetation, swampland and lakeside sandbars were being transformed into the canals, basins, terraces, islands and palaces of the fair’s magical “White City.” Margaret French thought the pieces of the statue resembled “mushroom growths all about the floor of the Forestry Building.” The assembly teams carried each piece out separately to be “planted in the Lagoon,” with the figure’s head and shoulders hoisted up at the last.
Workers scrambled over the Big Mary sections in order to get the project done in time for the fair’s opening on October 21, 1892. The Forestry Building was so cold that the statue itself froze up. The workers’ fingers went numb. Fair planners accepted physical risk as inevitable. Ambulances dashed to the site at all hours. “The men were always tumbling off” the statue, wrote Margaret French. “The work was rushed.”
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