BURIED TOGETHER
Partner
John Borie, Charles Russell
Hewlett, Roger Quilter, Glyn Philpot,
John Gregg
Queer Places:
Prairie Ave, Chicago, IL, Stati Uniti
The Farms, Robert Allerton Park, 515 Old Timber Rd, Monticello, IL 61856, Stati Uniti
Allerton Garden, 3530 Papalina Rd, Kalaheo, HI 96741, Stati Uniti
Robert Henry Allerton (March 20, 1873 – December 22, 1964), born in
Chicago, Illinois, United States, was the son and heir of First National
Bank of Chicago founder Samuel Allerton.[1]
A philanthropist for most of his life, he left Allerton Garden, the
Honolulu Academy of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Robert Allerton
Park as legacies for the public to enjoy.
Glyn Philpot’s Portrait of a
Man in Black (1913) depicts
Robert Allerton, his then lover, as does
Duncan Grant’s painting of
John Maynard Keynes
(1908). These works show remarkable intimacy, and informed interpretations
of the works are not possible if a viewer is ignorant of the sexual
relations between the men. This is not a concession to prurient interests,
but important art historical data similar to that commonly provided when
the artist is known to have been heterosexual.
Robert Henry Allerton enjoyed traveling to countries around the world.
In these countries he would buy statues of all kinds, which were then
placed in his estate. Most of the statues are no longer on the estate, now
called Robert Henry Allerton Park, but there are still a few left.
Robert Henry Allerton was born on March 20, 1873, as the second child
and only son to Samuel Waters Allerton (1828–1914) and Pamilla Thompson
Allerton (1840–1880). Through an entirely paternal line, Robert Henry
Allerton was descended from Isaac Allerton, an English Puritan who came to
America on the Mayflower in 1620.[2]
Samuel Allerton was a self-made man who made his millions in land,
livestock, banking, and other commercial enterprises. Pamilla Allerton
died in 1880, five days before Robert's 7th birthday. Two years later,
Samuel Allerton married Agnes Thompson, Pamilla's younger sister. Agnes
Thompson Allerton (1858–1924) became mother, friend, and cultural mentor
for her stepson/nephew. She kindled his interests in literature, music,
gardening, and above all, visual arts.
Robert Allerton by Glyn Warren Philpot
Faun and Satyr over-mantle, The Farms, by Glyn Philpot
Robert Allerton by Ellen Emmet Rand
The Allertons lived on Prairie Avenue in Chicago, which was the most
fashionable residential street in that city in the 1800s. The Allertons
were neighbors of Marshall Field, the Pullmans, Kimballs, and Armours.
Robert attended Allen Academy and Harvard School in Chicago, after which
he and friend Frederic Clay Bartlett, were sent east to St. Paul's School,
a prestigious college prep school in Concord, New Hampshire. The young
Chicagoans decided not to go on to college, but rather to study art in
Europe.
The origins of Robert Allerton's almost rabid aestheticism can be
traced to the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, at which he and a
close boyhood companion,
Frederic Clay Bartlett,
were bedazzled by the fair's transformative splendors of architecture,
sculpture, painting - and Bavarian beer. Both were the sons of rough and
tumble frontier millionaires, but they aspired to escape their seemingly
predestined careers in business by pursuing art training in Europe,
pledging their lives (as Bartlett recalled) "to the creation of beauty."
While Paris would be their ultimate destination, the two young men first
received training in Germany during the winter of 1893-1894, which proved
sufficient to gain them admission to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in
Munich (then second only to the salons of the French capital for
excellence and rigor). Two years later, they realized their dream and
relocated to Paris, where they continued their preparation at a number of
different studios, including the Ecole Collin, the Aman-Jean School of
Painting, the Academie Colarossi, and the Academie Julien. But while
Frederic Clay Bartlett would return to Chicago and achieve a modest renown
as a painter and muralist, Allerton suffered a kind of aesthetich
breakdown in Paris (perhaps recognizing the limits of his creative skill);
in December 1897, he destroyed all of his sketches and canvases, renounced
his artistic ambitions and returned to the USA to assume the life of a
gentleman-farmer.
From late autumn through the following spring of 1898–1899,
John Borie toured
the English countryside as the guest of his new patron, Robert Allerton,
soon to be dubbed the “Richest Bachelor in Chicago.” Together they hoped
to find inspiration for the magnificent house and garden estate that this
scion of a stockyard-and-banking tycoon wanted to build among the vast
acres of farmland that his family owned near the town of Monticello in
central Illinois.
When the two young men sailed from New York on the S. S. Campania in
October 1898, Allerton first was inclined to favor a Tudor prototype for
his new mansion; but by the time they returned in March 1899, he and Borie
had settled upon a Stuart model, Ham House (dating from 1610), overlooking
the Thames in Surrey. The final plans modified this prototype with obvious
Georgian influences (such as a tall parapet to conceal the roofline), but
the blueprints also carried the professional stamp of James Gamble Rogers,
a fellow architect who had worked with Borie at Cope and Stewardson in
Philadelphia and since had established his own practice in Chicago.
Construction at Monticello began immediately in the summer of 1899, and
the main house essentially was completed the following year. Borie’s
complementary designs for a series of enclosed garden spaces (which,
eventually, would “stretch for miles”) took shape in the ensuing years, as
several additional outbuildings also were constructed and modifications
made to the central mansion itself, to accommodate Allerton’s rapidly
growing collection of precious furniture, tapestries, porcelain,
sculpture, and other works of art.
Most sources presume that Borie and Allerton struck up their friendship
in Paris, since both were there in 1896; probably, they circulated among
overlapping cadres of expatriate artists and likely would have felt a
certain kinship as aspiring Bohemians. Their paths may have crossed
before, however, as Dickie Borie already had connections in Chicago: in
1889, his older sister
Emily Maria Borie
had married another mid-western millionaire, Arthur Larned Ryerson, which
might have given him pretext for visiting the windy city and socializing
with its most privileged echelon.
Not long after work on “The Farms” was begun at Monticello in 1899,
Allerton and Borie again departed for Europe and the Near East. Their
mission now was to begin acquiring the exquisite furnishings and works of
art needed to embellish and ornament the extraordinary house that was fast
rising on the prairie.
An unexpected feature of the house surely was the pair of sphinxes that
Borie had designed to adorn the stairway leading from the terrace down to
the lake and gardens beyond Possibly, the architect’s inspiration for
these strangely androgynous figures came from an embossed image on the
cover binding of the eponymous poem, The Sphinx, published by Oscar Wilde
in 1894. Tellingly, that design had been executed by another Edwardian
bachelor/aesthete, Charles
Ricketts, who lived openly with his partner,
Charles Shannon,
for all of his adult life. Over the years, works by some of Allerton's
other gay friends and lovers would be added to different garden rooms at
Monticello, most notably the Primitive Man sculptures, done in 1921 by the
English artist Glyn Philpot,
who relied on the nude modeling of his host's butler to accomplish their
design.
Ellen “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.
Jane Emmet de Glehn’s
acquaintance with Robert Allerton and John Borie was first made in Paris
in 1897, and it grew more intimate after all of them had returned to the
USA. Later, when Dickie Borie moved from Philadelphia to New York City in
1902, there was no shortage of occasions for that pair to extend their
friendship.
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.
Earlier in 1907, the von Glehns' salon opened its doors to Robert
Allerton, as he was passing through London on another of his wintertime
sprees of acquisition. Besides commissioning
Wilfrid de Glehn to
design a decorative panel for an overmantle at The Farms, Allerton clearly
was keen on meeting other artists in the von Glehns' circle. Tonight
Percy Grainger is going to have some
of his choruses rehearsed here in the studio," Jane scribbled home. "Victor
Beigel (John Borie's new partner, n.d.r.) is supplying some singers.
John Singer Sargent is
coming."
Besides accumulating an ever-expanding collection of art for his
country estate, Allerton also assembled an astonishing wardrobe of
fantastic costumes—kimonos, cloaks, togas, hats and headdresses, shoes and
sandals, as well as costume jewelry and other accessories—that became
obligatory apparel for his summertime guests, permitting them “to discard
societal conventions and become whoever, whatever, their fantasies could
conjure.” So extensive was this campy collection that in 1912 John Borie
returned to The Farms with plans to repurpose the estate’s large
greenhouse (flanking the stable) as a kind of oversized
wardrobe-and-changing room, linked to the main house through a newly
redesigned entranceway, the Marble Hall.
Allerton began inviting (or attracting) young male artists to stay with
him at Monticello, perhaps thinking of The Farms as a kind of one-man
MacDowell colony, where quietude and devoted companionship would prove
amenable to the Muse. One of the first intended guests was the English
composer Roger Quilter, to whom
Allerton was introduced at the von Glehns' salon in the winter season of
1910-1911. Their relationship soon intensified - it would be the only
homosexual one to which Quilter ever admitted - and Allerton implored his
new lover to stay with him at The Farms in the coming summer months. "I
want to go very much," Quilter revealed to Percy Grainger (another
confidant - and possibly bel ami), "& yet I hate the idea of the journey -
& I don't want to be away from you for very long." In the end, Quilter
never followed Allerton to Monticello; their affair was short-lived. But
it must have left a deep impression, for more than a decade later (in
1928), Quilter dedicated a new composition to Robert Allerton: a complex
scoring (for tenor voice and piano) of one of Shelley's most ardent
lyrics, "I Arise from Dreams of Thee."
Robert Allerton frequently accompanied John Sumner Runnells' unmarried
daughter, Alice, to the theater and other social events, and he enjoyed
the Runnells' hospitality at Willowgate, in Chocorua, New Hampshire, near
the home of William James (Henry
James' brother). By 1911, Alice Runnells had become engaged to young
William "Billy" James, second son of William and Alice James, an aspiring
painter who had often asked her to sit for him in his time at Chocorua.
Perhaps disappointed that Roger Quilter failed to join him that summer at
The Farms, Allerton followed the Runnells to Willowgate and discovered
that the James' youngest child,
Alexander Robertson
James, then not quite 21, also was determined to become a painter of
note. Having apprenticed himself to Abbot Thayer in that artist's Dublin,
New Hampshire, studio for several years, Aleck now wanted more formal
training and, following his brother Billy, had gained admission to the
School at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. When their time in the north
country was up, Allerton offered to escort young James back to the city.
Allerton's interest in young Aleck extended at least through the following
summer, when, in keeping with the pattern already established, the
aspiring painter was invited to stay at The Farms. Aleck was on his way
west to experience the frontier life of a dude ranch in Montana, but, at
Allerton's request, he first stopped at Monticello in June 1912. While in
residence there, Aleck completed a charcoal sketch of his host, now lost,
striking enough to impress his uncle Henry James, to whom it was
dispatched.
After meeting the English painter
Glyn Philpot at the Covent
Garden opera house in the spring of 1913, Allerton invited him to stay
with him later that summer. Philpot eagerly accepted the invitation, but
when he disembarked from his steamer in New York that August, he was
greeted not by his host but instead by some other mutual friends who
informed him that Allerton was then entertaining John Borie at The Farms,
as he had the previous summer. Miffed by this unexpected development,
Philpot crudely villified his rival, whom he seemed already to know.
"Borie - that beast," he ejaculated. But when Philpot finally made his way
to Illinois, the painter had access to a magnificent studio where he
finished, among other works, a striking canvas, The Man in Black - for
which Robert Allerton seems to have posed in one of his many exotich
costumes. In the letters, he wrote back to England (especially those
addressed to his utterly devoted sister, Daisy), Philpot announced that he
was extending his stay at Monticello and implicitly acknowledged his
homosexual attraction to his generous host.
Although The Man in Black was purchased for the Tate Gallery in London
the following year, Philpot left his artistic mark at the Farms with his
later garden sculptures and an interior over-mantle that depicts Allerton
as a lustful Roman faun, staring into the eyes of a satyr: in this queer
allegory, both muscular nudes sprout budding horns and flowing manes,
unmistakable emblems of male virility and sexual appetite.
In 1922 he met John Gregg (1899–1986),
an orphan and aspiring architect, who after the stock market crash of
1929, came to live with Allerton. He was to become his lifelong companion.
After a change in Illinois law in 1959, he legally adopted Gregg as his
son. After their deaths, Allerton and Gregg's mingled ashes were scattered
on Lawai Bay, Kauai, Hawaii.
Allerton's estate began in 1897 when Allerton decided to become a
farmer. By 1914 his "farm" had grown to over 12,000 acres and became known
as "The Farms".[3]
Now called Robert Allerton Park, it is owned and operated by the
University of Illinois near Monticello, Illinois. The botanical journal
Allertonia and the two estate parks are named after Robert Allerton.
The main building of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he served as the
honorary president and trustee, was renamed the Allerton Building in his
honor in 1968.
The former Hawaiian Royal tropical estate, located on the island of
Kauaʻi in Hawaiʻi,
is now called the Allerton Garden. After John Gregg Allerton's death it
became part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, with public tours.
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