After such a loss, what remained? Newton lived on as a ghost. He still acted as a prominent denizen of the city he loved, but his circumstances were much diminished. He moved to a two-room-and-kitchenette apartment in Hampton House, a small residential hotel at Madison and 70th Street. He learned to appreciate the forty-cent breakfasts at Schrafft’s.
Newton was then into his seventies. Time magazine described him around this time as being “as long, as ascetic, as elegantly bearded as an El Greco cardinal.” A profile chronicled his efforts as president of New York’s Art Commission and as a New York Public Library board member to fill the empty panels on the third floor of the library with murals. A leading luminary among collectors of Americana, he no longer owned the collection to back up his reputation. The Iconography was a bulwark, but it remained obscure. Newton’s personal relation to his great work was tinged with regret. In his private memoir, penned at the close of Edith’s life, he speaks sadly of the “narrowing influence” his monumental work had on his life. The Iconography “occupied more than my leisure during nineteen years, and interfered, more than a little, with my professional career, as well as making sad inroads upon my ‘fortune.’”
Everything appeared haunted to him: the Book, Study D, the very streets on which he walked. Some of his closest siblings had died, although his brother Graham would outlive him, lasting until the age of eighty-eight, having split with the Socialist Party of America over the issue of American participation in World War I.
Beyond the Iconography, Newton had sought to leave behind only good, worthy works. Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel. The Settlement House. Turk’s Head in Providence. But his legacy remains most intricately linked to the New York Public Library, the single Manhattan institution identified with the kind of serious, bookish life he led. In 1930, he bequeathed to the institution the prints from his collection, now much more valuable than the maps and pictures he had paid a few dollars for back at the turn of the century. The library dedicated the north end of its third floor as the Phelps Stokes Gallery, mounting a rotating display drawn from the thousand-print Phelps Stokes Collection.
By that time the main research library already sheltered plenty of Stokesiana, in the form of thirty boxes of Iconography research, notes and drafts. Newton petitioned the library to store the dead matter for him. He received permission from Harry Lydenberg, then assistant director, to stash the whole mess “in the space between the blowers and next to the garage.”
Also in the library are four murals sponsored by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration: The Story of the Recorded Word, whose creation Newton oversaw in the years after Edith’s death. Alone and lonely, he had all the time in the world to mentor Edward Laning, the twenty-eight-year-old artist whom the WPA had put forward to paint the murals. Newton took an interest in Laning and liked the sketches the young man showed him, then shepherded the project through the board’s approval process. Laning inserted a personal dedication in the scene of the last panel, with I. N. Phelps Stokes on a scroll in the lower right corner, like a miniature graffiti tag.
Newton especially loved this last panel, wherein Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Linotype machine, sits at his keyboard in the offices of the New York Herald. The scene depicted New York in 1886, Newton’s Manhattan glory days, when he was nineteen and everything was possible. He admired the mural’s view of the Brooklyn Bridge, which in 1886 was just three years old, visible out the window of the room where Mergenthaler sat at the Linotype.
“You know, I was the first person to cross the Brooklyn Bridge,” Newton told Laning, an old man turning garrulous when reminiscing about his youth. “I was about fifteen years old, and I stood all night at the Manhattan approach to the bridge. A great crowd gathered, but I was in the forefront, and when the ribbon was cut, I made a dash for it and reached Brooklyn ahead of anyone else!”
Later, Laning recalled approaching his benefactor for an additional two hundred dollars in payment for the murals. Newton sat in silence for a long moment, then said quietly, “If I had the two hundred dollars I would put it up myself. But I don’t have it.” He enumerated his fellow board members: “I would go to Mr. Baker for it, but unfortunately Mr. Baker is dead. I would ask Mr. Harkness, but Mr. Harkness is dead.”
Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes died in 1944, seven years after Edith, at the age of seventy-seven. The couple’s ashes occupy twin vaults beside the chancel of St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia, beneath the perfectly balanced Guastavino arches.
An extensive collection of Stokes memoirs, letters and papers exists at the library of the New-York Historical Society. As I delved into these pages, I looked up to see an oil portrait of its author hanging on the wall in front of me. A spooky, synchronous moment, since here was an image not of the young, brash dandy of the Sargent painting, but the older, emeritus scholar. The artist, DeWitt Lockman, painted Newton in 1930 without Edith, distinguished, penetrating and at the same time (it seemed to me) forlorn from having been battered around a bit by life.
The Iconography of Manhattan Island can be found in a number of private collections, but primarily in university libraries around the country, usually in either of two reprintings, that of the Arno Press in 1967 or the Martino Publishing version from 1998. None of the classic or contemporary histories of New York could have been written without the Iconography as a source. On the rare-book market, the reprintings may be had for something less than a thousand dollars. Much rarer, more prized and more expensive are the 402 copies of the original. In the uncommon instances that one comes onto the market, the original commands a hefty, book collector’s price, upward of fifteen thousand dollars, depending on its condition.
The New York Public Research Library holds four of the originals, their near-transparent onionskin paper and pristine printing values displaying Newton’s obsessive approach to quality. All told, the library catalog lists eleven copies of the Iconography, including both the 1967 and 1998 reprints, partial copies, microforms and originals. The trove is only fitting, given the long-standing relationship between the author and the institution. The whole of the Iconography has now been digitized by the library, so a visitor to the institution’s website need only click once or twice to summon up, say, Volume Two of the work and its Castello Plan frontispiece.
Helen Stokes inherited none of the physical infirmities of her adoptive parents, passing away in 2004, at age ninety-nine, after leading a full life of family and society. She made a home for most of her life in Bedford Hills, New York, twenty miles from her parents’ estate at Khakum Wood. After the death of her first husband she married the banker and investment manager, Donald Bush. She had four children and numerous grandchildren, among them scientists, bankers, lawyers, and schoolteachers.
John Singer Sargent’s reputation has waxed and waned with trends in the art world, but his lush realism currently enjoys huge favor. At Edith’s bequest, Sargent’s Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes became part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938. Feminist art historians in particular hail the portrayal of Edith as a milestone in the public presentation of the female form. Other viewers simply appreciate the woman’s dazzling, energetic beauty, caught in a fountain-of-youth moment, with the sober shadow of the husband by her side.
The portrait of Edith by Cecilia Beaux remains privately held by Edith’s descendants.