Queer Places:
Art Students League in New York City
96 Boulevard du Montparnasse, 75014 Paris, France
62 Washington Square S, New York, NY 10012
Barack Matif Farm, Taconic Rd, Salisbury, CT 06068
Hamlet Hill Farm, 79 Prospect Mountain Rd, Salisbury, CT 06068
Ellen
Emmet Rand (née Ellen Gertrude Emmet; March 4, 1875 – December 18, 1941) was a
painter and illustrator. In 1897 Mary Foote
travelled to Paris, France, setting up a studio at 96 Boulevard
Montparnasse with the American painters
Ellen
Emmet Rand, Lydia Field Emmet,
Jane Erin Emmet, and
Edith Leslie Emmet. These
girls, whom she knew through New York relatives, were descendants of Thomas
Addis and Robert Emmet, and were related throught he Temples to
Henry
James, who was a frequent guest at the studio.
Rand specialized in portraits, painting over 500 works during her career
including portraits of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, artist Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, and her cousins Henry James and William James. Rand studied at
the Cowles Art School in Boston and the Art Students League in New York City
and produced illustrations for Vogue Magazine and Harper's Weekly before
traveling to England and then France to study with sculptor Frederick William
MacMonnies. The William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut
owns the largest collection of her painted works and the Archives & Special
Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of
Connecticut and the Archives of American Art within the Smithsonian
Institution both have collections of her papers, photographs, and drawings.
Ellen Gertrude Emmet was the third of six children born to Ellen Gertrude
James Temple Emmet Hunter (1850-1920) and Christopher Temple Emmet
(1823-1884).[1] She
was called "Bay". Her sister was Edith
Leslie Emmet. Ellen was born in San Francisco but moved to New York after
her father's death in 1884.[2] Her
cousins were Lydia Field Emmet (1866-1952), Rosina Emmet Sherwood (1854–1948),
and Jane Emmet de Glehn (1873–1961)
and the writers Henry James (1843 – 1916) and William James (1842-1910). Rand's primary
studio was in New York City but she would also work in Salisbury, Connecticut
where her family lived.
Portrait of Ellen Emmet Rand by Mary Foote
Henry James by Ellen Emmet Rand
Robert Allerton by Ellen Emmet Rand
Portrait of Mary Foote (c. 1898) while a student in Paris and Giverny by
Ellen Emmet Rand.
Rand studied with Dennis Miller Bunker and attended the Cowles Art School in
Boston and then from 1889-93 registered for classes at the Art Students
League of New York. Rand then attended the William Merritt Chase's Shinnecock
Hills Summer School of Art.[3] Harry
McVickar, editor of Vogue Magazine, saw her work in an exhibit for the summer
school and asked her to illustrate for the magazine. She also illustrated
for Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazaar. In 1896 Rand travelled to England.
She returned to the US in 1898 [4] and
then to Paris to study with MacMonnies. Also in France and studying with
MacMonnies was fellow American artist Mary Foote. Rand returned to New York
City in 1900 and began her painting career in earnest. Rand focused her energy
and output on painting portraits of corporate directors, society women,
politicians, scientists, professors, lawyers and artists in the United States.
Her portraits of the singer Susan Metcalfe Casals, her husband celloist Pablo
Casals, and opera singer Charles Gilibert,[5] as
well as her portraits of sculptor Saint-Gaudens and MacMonnies, all attest to
her engagement with the arts in the first decade of the twentieth century.[6] In
terms of politicians she claimed to have started a work on a portrait of
President Theodore Roosevelt but she "had to give it up. 'It was ridiculous,'
she recalled. 'He couldn't sit still—especially with children going in and out
of the studio with snakes and spiders.'"[7] Rand
did, however, complete three portraits of President Franklin Roosevelt,
including his official presidential portrait. She was the second female artist
commissioned to produce a presidential portrait. After his death, the portrait
was moved to the Roosevelt estate and future FDR Library in Hyde Park, NY. It
is unclear exactly why such a move was made, although there are letters
exchanged between President Harry Truman and First Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt concerning the transfer of the portrait. Another portrait was
then used to replace the Rand work in the White House.[8] In
2004 the portrait was reported missing from the Library.[9] Rand
also painted three U.S. Secretaries of State—John Milton Hay, Elihu Root,
and Henry Lewis Stimson.
Bay Emmet returned to New York in 1900, and wrote to a friend that she had
gone to the opera with a man fitting
Robert Allerton's description, and that she had agreed to paint his
portrait. In the late spring of the next year, she arrived in Chicago, where
she completed an imposing canvas of Allerton's father (which for many years
hung in the Board Room of the First National Bank, of which he was chairman),
before coming to "The Farms," where her other commission, on a somewhat
smaller scale, awaited her. A bond of possibly romantic friendship seemed in
the offing. Also present, however, was
John Borie, who was
still drawing up plans for the as-yet-unfinished interior of the main house
and attending to the construction of gardens and outbuildings on the estate.
From a patchwork of letters that survive, it seems that the intrusion of a
woman (and an aesthetic woman at that) profoundly disrupted relations between
the two men, who now began to quarrel about details great and small. By
summertime, Bay Emmet had retreated to New York, where she shuttled between
her studio in Washington Square and a country retreat upstate, where more
commissions were at hand, including one for a portrait of Emily Borie Ryerson,
whose family had just built an enormous summer house (“Ringwood,” also
designed by her brother) in Springfield Center, at the northern end of Lake
Otsego. But the flare-up at “The Farms” followed Bay there and so did John
Borie, who clearly was dividing his attention between the Allerton project and
his sister’s estate, where extensive work on formal landscape gardens had
begun now that the main house was finished.
By 1903, Bay had earned enough money to purchase a country retreat near
Salisbury, Connecticut - Barack Matif Farm - where she could keep a stable and
indulge her love of horseback riding. Just two years later, as a joint
venture, Lydia Emmet and Susan Metcalfe built their own spacious summer house,
"Strawberry Hill", just across the state line in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Work on “The Farms” was hardly completed when John Borie moved his office
to New York; he continued to send blueprints back to Monticello as the estate
gradually took shape, and it is likely that he himself would have had occasion
to return, from time to time, to oversee new construction and the
implementation of his designs. Whatever the source of the friction that had
disturbed Borie’s relationship with his client during the first phases of
construction, Robert Allerton nevertheless nevertheless retained the
architect’s services for at least another dozen years. Travelling in the other
direction, Allerton made regular stops in New York, as the port of departure
for his (almost annual) trips abroad during the winter months, when he scoured
the cities of Europe, the Middle East, and the Orient, acquiring new pieces
for his ever-expanding collection of sculpture, furniture, and objets d'art.
On one of these visits in 1905, he was invited to spend Thanksgiving up in
Connecticut with the Emmets. Bur if there was any hopeful residuum of romance
between Allerton and Bay, the young man's immediate plans would have cast a
pall upon it, as he was about to embark on an around-the-world cruise with
Charles Russell Hewlett,
another bachelor-connoisseur, who would travel as his guest companion.
In 1910, Edith Leslie Emmet and Ellen G. Emmet are living together at 62
Washington Square, New York. Their sister Rosina H. Emmet at this time lived
at 159 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, CT. Lydia Field Emmet was living at 398
Pelham Road, New Rochelle, NY.
Bay Emmet married William Blanchard Rand, a country gentleman and horseman,
11 years her junior, in 1911 and had three sons.
In 1916 Ellen Emmet Rand is living at 15 West 67th Street; at this
time, she also has a summer house at Hamlet Hill Farm, Salisbury, CT.
Rand was the first woman awarded a Beck Gold Medal by the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts.
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