In one sense, Paris came through for Edith and Newton. Their extended honeymoon cum escape in the City of Light allowed the young couple to break away from the family fold. By putting a whole ocean between themselves and Susanna, Anson and Helen, they gained license to live their lives differently than their parents. The two years they spent in Paris would prove to be a time of vital development, indeed a period of rebirth for both of them. It would also give them a perspective on New York City that had lasting consequences, especially for Newton.
But in another sense, the golden days in Paris proved disappointing. Edith fully expected to be with child by the time she returned home. That did not happen. The “honey” in “honeymoon” refers to the ancient practice of a newlywed couple drinking mead, which supposedly ensured fertility. The honeymoon’s purpose was to ignite the process of procreation that was the true goal of matrimony. Edith and Newton’s relationship did not lack intimacy. It only lacked result. The two of them marked the milestone of thirty together, an age when many women of the day had whole broods. Edith’s heart remained whole and hopeful. But she heard a niggling voice. Was something wrong?
Edith and Newton’s liner came into the famous harbor, passed the iconic statue, slid into its berth. The no-longer-new newlyweds disembarked. They entered the familiar city. All changed, changed utterly. Edith might more readily accept her hometown’s myriad transformations, but her conservative, sentimental husband felt a deep sense that something valuable had been irretrievably lost. It was a conviction that would alter both their lives.
Edith and Newton moved in temporarily with his parents. Anson and Helen had remained in the brownstone mansion at 229 Madison. So Newton lived all that fall in the home of his childhood, a comforting situation given the city’s flux. Upon the completion of his and Edith’s own house, at 118 East 22nd Street, on Gramercy Park, they found themselves sharing a back yard with Susanna Minturn. Susanna’s home, at 109 East 21st Street, faced the private park. She had supervised the construction of the young couple’s new domicile, based on plans Newton and Edith had worked out in Paris.
Gramercy the park and Gramercy the neighborhood managed to retain its sense of timeless quiet, even as the rest of New York changed pell-mell. In one of the contradictions that distinguished the proudly progressive family, they lived on a park that limited public access to 2 days a year. For the other 363, Gramercy acted as a block-sized private preserve for the residents of the surrounding homes, each of whom possessed a key. It was (and still is) the only sizeable private park in New York, and stood in solitary contrast to the egalitarian acreage of the still new Central Park, which Minturn social reformers had fought to create a generation before.
Susanna Minturn’s fine old townhouse, remodeled according to her wishes by Charles McKim, featured a twenty-foot garden to shield it from the common sidewalk stroller. McKim installed a bank of south-facing windows, making a comfortable, light-filled place for the Minturn clan to land. All very genteel, very sedate, but only a few steps from the artists’ studios and other adventures to be found nearby. This was where Edith had spent most of her days when she modeled Big Mary for Daniel Chester French.
When newly married Edith returned to the bosom of her family, the bosom in question was Susanna’s. Mama Minturn attracted family to herself like iron filings to a magnet. Along with Edith and Newton’s, her townhouse would soon be surrounded by a pair of residences for her other daughters, erected on the Minturn dime and connecting in the rear with her property. Edith had May right next door, and Newton’s sister Sarah Halkett also took a house. Thus Susanna had at least some of her children back near her home if not under her roof. Next door to Susanna, at 107 East 21st, was the ubiquitous family friend James Scrymser, who had to take only a few steps away from the park to see in person the wedding gift he had bestowed upon Newton and Edith, hung in the couple’s freshly minted townhouse after its uptown debut, between showings around the country.
But Gramercy Park represented only a stubborn exception to the rule of change. Old, bucolic Manhattan, the leafy town of Edith and Newton’s childhood, was vanishing, buried in the smooth cement of the new. By the turn of the century, the leafy streets of lower New York had lost their shade. Kitchen gardens and flower beds disappeared, the ponds and streams had been channeled underground, boulders excavated, earth leveled, topography smoothed. Virtually every trace of the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam had long since been erased. It was true what city residents said: the reason they called it New York was that nothing was allowed to grow old there.
The turn of the new century was in many ways the turning point. Late in life, musing on the seismic changes that had hit his beloved Manhattan, Newton would recall a perfect fall day he and Edith spent when they were recently back on American soil. They traveled up to Broadway and 155th Street in their “little runabout” carriage to take a pet cocker spaniel to be trained as a bird dog. They tied their horse to a split-rail fence, which they climbed over to reach their destination, a farmhouse across open cornfields.
Only a dozen years later, Edith and Newton would pass through the same uptown neighborhood, only to find the fence, fields and farmhouse vanished, replaced by blocks of faceless apartment houses stretching in all directions.
THE END OF the century also brought a new portrait of Edith, one that would complement and to some extent comment upon Sargent’s monumental work. The Philadelphia-born, European-trained artist Cecilia Beaux’s painting provided a compelling counterpoint on a subject—female beauty—heretofore treated primarily by men.
As the first female member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Beaux prospered in a nineteenth-century field that could boast only a few women artists. She burst on the New York scene with her debut show at the American Art Galleries. Critics lauded her Sita and Sarita, in which Sarah Leavitt, the wife of the artist’s cousin, a green-eyed young woman in virginal white chiffon, pets a coal-coated kitten perched on her shoulder.
“White contains all the colors,” said Beaux about the painting, but its most arresting detail is Leavitt’s surprisingly muscular hand, veins popping, anatomy on full display. Beaux delivered the kind of textured, psychologically complex image of an ingénue that Sargent might paint. She stood always in the great man’s shadow, but idolized him, and in fact kept near her easel a photo of Sargent in a smock, holding aloft his pigment-weighted brush.
Born to a French father and a mother from the New England gentry, Cecilia Beaux had the sort of upbringing that would turn a Victorian girl into a feminist woman. She was raised by her grandmother and a pair of aunts, who nurtured her love of art and the kind of stubborn independent streak essential to storm the “men-only” citadel of the artistic establishment. Never married but widely romantically involved, by turns domineering and warm, Beaux attracted numerous young male admirers to her summer studio in Eastern Point, Gloucester, Massachusetts, Franklin Delano Roosevelt among them.
Sita and Sarita introduced her to the wealthy Manhattan public. Sargent might be overbooked, but here was an interesting alternative. In 1899, William Merritt Chase hailed Beaux as “not only the greatest woman artist [of the day], but the best that has ever lived”—high praise for a painter who until recently had been known primarily for her genre studies of children. Now, if you wanted to sit to the best, you needn’t travel to London’s Chelsea.
Among the first in line were Newton’s parents, Helen and Anson Stokes. Beaux rendered them in poses uncannily similar to Sargent’s painting of Edith and Newton, the wife devant and the husband receding in the background. In both images the woman dominates the field, strong and rooted. A seated Helen, her coiffure piled atop her head, a black choker around her neck, half turns toward the viewer, looking up from her letter-writing. Behind her, Anson-as-afterthought holds his newspaper, remote and phlegmatic. He looks almost surprised to be there. The formidable presence of Newton’s mother, on the other hand, comes through full blown. Newton, in a letter to Beaux, referred
to the work as “my mother’s portrait.”
Completed in 1898, Mr. and Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes played off Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, which Sargent had recently shipped to the States from Tite Street. A corner of the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition in 1899 had been transformed into a sort of Stokesville, with the two paintings displayed side by side. The positioning did not totally benefit Beaux’s piece, which, one writer judged, “grows tired with renewed acquaintance.” But the Stokes elders were happy enough with their portrait to believe the artist might be able to do justice to their delightful new daughter-in-law. They commissioned Beaux to do Edith.
Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes is recognized as one of Beaux’s finest works. She depicts her subject seated, face turned toward the viewer, directness being the operative and essential element of the portrait. Balancing Edith’s forthright gaze are delicate textures of fabric and flesh. She wears a beautiful dress with layered, diaphanous sleeves, its cream silk only a shade whiter than Edith’s ghost-pale skin. Beaux renders both the dress and the jeweled belt at her sitter’s waist with loose, paint-heavy strokes.
Here we find out that Edith is a reader, a learner. Her left forefinger holds her place in a crimson volume the size of a small prayer book. Behind her figure, some Japonaiserie, a pair of prints showing froth-topped waves and the moon. We no longer feel, as we did with the Sargent, that Edith is about to charge after a tennis ball. Nor does Beaux make her stand in for the American Girl, the New Woman or the Gibson Girl. She possesses an entirely different kind of energy. Here Edith’s intensity is intellectual, not physical. She shares with the girl in Sita and Sarita the wide, lucent eyes that so clearly connote mental acuity, in this case cobalt-hued and gazing levelly, with an almost skeptical expression.
The likeness must have resonated with Newton, since he kept it close at hand throughout his life. In its wide, brightly gilded, reeded frame, the canvas was shown in 1902 at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Afterward it rarely appeared publicly, staying at home with its sitter, displayed for the private pleasure of her husband and family. Edith herself might well have preferred Cecilia Beaux’s more austere, serious portrayal to the flushed sensuality of the Sargent.
THE COUPLE HUSTLED home from Paris not because of a painting, not to follow the Sargent or sit to Beaux. They came because Newton Stokes had entered and won a competition for architectural design. The prize yielded up that singular moment in any architect’s career, similar to a novelist holding his first book or a playwright seeing the curtain rise on his first play. Standing at the corner of Rivington and Eldridge streets in the heart of New York’s Lower East Side in the spring of 1898, Newton Stokes could point to a five-story brick and limestone building as his first completed project as a practicing professional.
The contest was to build a new headquarters for the University Settlement Society. The project marked the beginning of a career-long partnership with Harvard classmate John Mead Howells, son of the novelist William Dean Howells, whom Newton asked to join him on the project. The new firm of Howells & Stokes set up shop in an office in the Stokes Building, the site of all family business activities, at 47 Cedar Street.
A clean and classical creation, still extant, the building at 184 Eldridge rose grandly, and improbably, above the swirl of street life below. On the Lower East Side at the time, Russian and Polish pedestrians jostled speakers of Italian and Yiddish; narrow, cobbled streets teemed with horse-drawn wagons, electric cars and donkey carts; and pushcarts hawked everything from tomatoes to tin cups.
In this dingy neighborhood, among jumbled, decrepit tenements, there now stood a fresh, elegant new structure, Newton’s debut architectural contribution. What made it even more amazing than its appearance, though, was its function. It had been commissioned by people who intended to improve, if not revolutionize, the conditions all around it.
Every day, as many as a thousand neighborhood children and adults entered the portals of the building Stokes designed, to use the public baths, the credit union or the library, or to participate in the English-language and other classes for which the idealistic settlement volunteers served as instructors. Dormitories on the top floor housed the budding reform workers. Like Newton, many of the volunteers came from privileged backgrounds.
The University Settlement Society supported the daily, somewhat intimate relationship between the server and the served. But the organization also accomplished a larger purpose, a political mandate, giving reformers like Carl Schurz, Nicholas Murray Butler and Seth Low a platform to campaign for better housing, improved working conditions, the abolition of child labor, and for more playgrounds and parks. In reality, the Settlement Society was in business to launch a social experiment unprecedented in America.
Completed in time for the Settlement Society’s annual meeting in January 1899, the new building cost a total of $155,000, nearly twice as much as the original estimate. The additional expense seemed not to pose any difficulty for the Settlement’s wealthy donors. Illustrious citizens had by then come on board. Theodore Roosevelt, then secretary of the United States Navy, spoke at the ribbon-cutting. The Settlement had become, in the words of Stephen Coit, its founder, the “most fashionable charity in the city.” Both the outward appearance and interior design conformed to its reputation.
The Women’s Auxiliary of the Settlement, Edith included, decorated the place in the style of a tony men’s club. In the middle of its main floor stood a feature that was almost de rigueur in the day, a Renaissance fireplace, shipped over from Europe by the architects. The monstrosity resembled nothing so much as the mantelpiece Newton had forsworn for his own collection on his Italy trip five years before.
The serious-minded, slightly awkward Newton Stokes had come into his own. Shelter for the poor would be his mission. He would design safe, comfortable apartments for those in need. Yet much as Newton wanted to solicit work in low-income housing, the young firm of Howells & Stokes could not survive with the poor as their only clients. Its second project, a small office structure called the Magdeberg Building, on William Street, came quite literally via Newton’s connections. The building connected with the rear of the Stokes family’s headquarters.
The Magdeberg was, in Newton’s own assessment, an innovation. “It would be the first building in which a stone frame, filled in with cast-iron and glass, was used as a major façade motive.” Soon after, the firm embarked upon a new administration building for Yale University and a parish hall for a church on Madison Square. Inevitably, since the race to the sky was much on the minds of developers throughout Manhattan, skyscrapers became a specialty. Conundrums and paradoxes abounded as Newton thrust his creations higher and higher while mourning the passing of the old, low-profile New York. Howells & Stokes would do a million dollars’ worth of business every year until the firm dissolved in 1917, combining luxe, upscale commissions with reform-minded housing for the poor.
IT WOULD BE natural that Edith wish for children, wish to fulfill the role of wife and mother, universally recognized in her era as the true calling of all women. “The bearing and the training of a child,” quoth Tennyson, “is woman’s wisdom.” Susanna was unstoppable. She communicated with Edith’s sisters in a strange sort of coded dog Latin, referring to fertility as “Conception Fallopian.” The subject of childbearing was always at the fore.
But by the third year of the marriage, the babies still hadn’t come. Edith’s older sister, May, her constant companion throughout her childhood and young adulthood, would soon become a mother. The younger Minturn girls would begin birthing children regularly, on their way to a collective brood of nine. Gertrude married Amos Pinchot in 1900, and Mildred wed Arthur Scott in 1906. The youngest child, Hugh, would have three children with his wife, Ruth Winsor. (Robert, the eldest Minturn child, married Bertha Potter but never had children.) The science of fertility was then in its infancy, so it remains unclear whether the onus fell on Newton or Edith. Regardless, theirs was as yet a child
less union.
In the summer of 1898, when Edith and Newton were still unpacking their bags in their new townhouse on Gramercy Park, the couple set out to consider property in the country.
Now they stood on a promontory above Long Island Sound, considering their options. As with the couple’s quest for the perfect Paris flat, the search required their meticulous, not to say obsessive, consideration of all available properties. It took considerable time to narrow the possibilities down to a specific area. The hamlet of Greenwich, Connecticut, hard by the New York state border, had not yet achieved the status of an upscale bedroom community that it would become. Once the site of an artists’ colony, Greenwich remained relatively undeveloped and mainly agricultural, a sunny haven where green fields and pastures met the blue expanse of the Sound.
After exploring the countryside between Rye, New York, and Darien, Connecticut, Newton and Edith finally decided to purchase Husted Farm on Round Hill Road, in the hilly pastureland northwest of Greenwich. The couple moved into a humble six-room farmhouse left behind by the previous owner. Below them to the south, the fat, blue finger of the Sound crooked itself east and west, its waters dotted with all manner of pleasure craft. Across the Sound spread the coastline of Long Island. A tremendous view, and one comfortingly familiar, too, since it resembled the vista that Edith and Newton had taken in as children on Staten Island: the green belvedere, the busy maritime road, the distant shore.
Round Hill itself represented the most prominent topographical feature of the neighborhood, 550 feet high, used by the Continental Army as a lookout. From its crest, Newton could make out New York’s nascent skyline, thirty miles away.
Not lavish, summering in a country farmhouse, and a far cry from the stupendous cottages of the Berkshires. Still, a home out of the city, allowing respite from the urban hugger-mugger, represented another piece of the domestic puzzle. Even though the prime piece—progeny—remained missing.
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