CHAPTER 14
CLOVER PUT HER CAMERA down for most of the month of June 1883. She told her father that much of the city had cleared out for the summer, including Lizzie Cameron, who had gone for a two-year tour of Europe. “No society this week,” Clover wrote, sounding a note of loneliness. “We see none of the people who used to drop in to tea.” In early June, her horse Daisy tore her leg so badly she could no longer be used as a saddle horse. Clover bought a thoroughbred horse in Baltimore she named Powhatan, after the father of Pocahontas. He was, she proudly bragged, “beautiful and swift, brave and gentle.” Henry, four years into the project, was steadily at work on his History, rewriting a draft for a private printing; this he would use to solicit comments and give to others for safekeeping. His brother Charles, John Hay, George Bancroft, Carl Schurz, and Abram Hewitt, then a U.S. congressman from New York, were selected as recipients. As Henry wrote to a friend, “You can never tell what you want to do, till you see what you have done.” He also complained about Washington’s beastly hot weather—“the thermometer outside is about 90”—and he was relieved to be going once again to the quiet and cooler weather of Pitch Pine Hill.
The annual packing up for the summer’s escape usually took a few weeks. Clover and Henry had to make arrangements with servants for both homes, ship by train their horses, and gather up their collection of beloved English watercolors. They didn’t like to live without their art. They left Washington on June 18, arriving at Beverly Farms via Albany. Once there, Clover wrote to Anne Palmer about an exploit in a nearby marsh, as she rode Powhatan and Henry rode his horse, Prince:
On Friday—in Harding a marsh—slimy green above—he [Powhatan] balked—got in too deep—became terrified—dashed into a tree—which swept me from my saddle—he leapt over me and the young tree—& dashed away—through bog and bush—I in my brand new habit—that unpleasant—he fled to Henry on the far side of the bog and put his bridle into his hands—then I had to wade to him and we led those two beasts thro’ a mile and more of thick woods—through the “Pole Marsh” on planks—Prince slipping and I slipping and he treading on my toes and I on his—Henry and Powhatan in front—my saddle too muddy to mount—& my safety stirrup going—we got home at dusk . . .
She also described the routine of their midsummer days: “Our days go swiftly riding—Greek o’ evenings—history writing from 9 to 5— breakfast at 12—no dinner—tea at 8.” Perhaps keeping her rival close, she wrote the same story and noted the same routine to Lizzie Cameron, joking that her “husband is working like a belated beaver from 9 to 5 every day in gambling the history of his native land as run by antediluvian bosses—called Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.” She also promised Lizzie she’d send along a photograph of Henry and the dogs, Marquis and Possum, sitting in the window of the children’s playhouse she’d built for the Hooper girls two summers before. After a short time away from her camera due to moving house, she had picked it up again and found herself completely engaged. She wrote to Clara Hay, “I’ve gone in for photography and find it very absorbing.”
Clover’s pictures that summer focused on those closest at hand: Henry, her father, her nieces, her dogs, her new horse, visitors. When Clover photographed Pitch Pine Hill , she did so from the drive at a distance below the house, which emphasized its hilltop location and gave the image an almost gothic quality. The modest house becomes castle-like, in keeping with the medieval medallions in the red-cement floor of its foyer. In picturing the bucolic scene, Clover aspired to the popular French Barbizon style, a genre of early impressionism she had encountered on her visits to Doll and Richards, Boston’s influential art gallery. The leading promoter of the style, the painter Jean-François Millet, invested rural life with a noble, almost sacred, grandeur. Postwar Boston audiences, troubled by an erratic economy and crowded streets, found such scenes hugely appealing. Clover’s photographs of lazy Holstein cows pasturing near ancient stone fences at her neighbor’s farm were infused with nostalgia, recalling the colonial past.
She spent a late afternoon photographing three of her older nieces, dressed in matching summery white frocks and straw hats, as they perched on large rocks at the seashore. Nine-year-old Louisa, called Loulie, stands to the right of the frame, gazing soberly at her aunt’s camera and holding a small bucket in her right hand. The other two girls, Ellen and Mabel (Polly), are seated nearby and carefully posed in profile, looking out to the water. Clover didn’t like their expressions in the first exposure, but concerning the second exposure she wrote in her notebook “very nice.” The image links the sisters through their similar clothing, yet each appears to be a distinct individual; the composition, with its inward focus, calls to mind John Singer Sargent’s Daughters of Edward Boit, painted the previous year and shown in Paris, though Clover would not have had the occasion to see it.
When people stopped for a visit, Clover gave them food and drink and put them in front of her lens. Francis Parkman, the American historian well known for his 1849 book, Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life, and his multivolume France and England in North America, turned up on July 29, and that afternoon he sat for Clover’s camera in a rattan chair against a backdrop evoking his western travels: boulders rising from the ground behind him, sun-dappled branches. The vigorous-looking sixty-year-old sat cross-legged, with his shiny black boots catching the light and a fashionable white-felt derby perched on his head. Clover took two exposures, trying out different compositions and exposure times. She developed the negatives and made prints from both, placing them one after another in her album.
Parkman was an outspoken opponent of woman suffrage, and Clover couldn’t help but comment on his marked prejudice, an attitude she was beginning to find wearisome. To her father she had mentioned that the Confederate general Richard Taylor “disbelieves in democracy and universal suffrage as firmly as Mr. Frank Parkman.” She also joked that the long-widowed Parkman would never find his “ideal woman” in America and that if she had to talk “much with him, I should take the stump for female suffrage in a short time.” At no point, interestingly, did she mention that Henry and Parkman were closely allied in their views on ideal womanhood. In any case, her photographs of Parkman capture his intelligence and élan as well as his Brahmin pose of casual superiority.
When Clover and Henry went to Quincy for a visit at the Adams family’s Old Manse the next day, she took her camera with her. One can only imagine her in-laws’ comments. She photographed Henry’s youngest brother, Brooks Adams, standing next to his horse, Snowden; the horse’s tail is a blur of movement against the stable’s brick wall. But the most compelling image of her Quincy visit is her portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Adams. The two are seated on the porch of the manse, on either side of the front door, which is open. Mr. Adams is on the left and Mrs. Adams on the right. The darkened doorway between them admits neither visual nor emotional access. The viewer stays on the porch. Clover heightened this feeling of exclusion by how the two are posed, each facing three-quarters toward the middle, with Mr. Adams’s leg and Mrs. Adams’s cane angled toward each other, to form a strong V-shape. This gives energy and stability to the image even as it emphasizes what the darkened door already communicates: “no entrance.” She increased this effect by positioning her camera just below eye level so that Mr. and Mrs. Adams are doing in the photograph exactly what she knew they did in life: looking down at her with impassive disdain.
Clover made a factual comment in her notebook: “no—1. Old house in Quincy Mass. / C.F. Adams & Mrs. Adams / on piazza—Monday p.m. / July 30th 1883—longest stop 4 sec.” Most of her early entries in her small leather-bound notebook are spare and concerned with the technicalities of taking pictures. But she was learning and gaining confidence. By the end of the summer, her observations became more fluid and conversational. She frequently made note of her failures: on July 12, “Parlor Bev. Farms—9 minutes—failed”; on July 15, the second exposure of a catboat “spoiled by not putting in a slide”; on July 25, two exposures of Powhatan were “undertimed.” She also mentioned the mechanical and aesthetic aspects of the picture-making process. She wrote in her notebook that her lenses were manufactured by Dollmayer and that she bought her supply of dry-plate glass negatives from Allan & Rowell, a Boston photography studio and supplier on Beacon Hill since 1874. Her photograph of Lucy Frelinghuysen was a “very good photo—expression not good!” Likewise, her portrait of Grace Minot, in a basket chair on the lawn, is a “good photo—not pleasing likeness.” She took note of backgrounds that were “too dim” and commented on how the camera could make flesh look “dead white,” especially if the plate was overexposed.
Clover’s photographs were not like the snapshots Kodak would later popularize. The size of her camera and extended exposure times didn’t allow her to sneak a picture. Most of her images are highly formal and composed. She experimented with tone and style, but nonetheless each photograph required careful forethought and decision making concerning camera placement, the relationship of foreground to background, exposure times, and the processes for developing the prints. Portraits are in a sense collaborations—they record something, always, of the working relationship between subject and photographer. Clover’s portraits reflect what she saw, what she found interesting, compelling, and worthy of a picture, but also something more elusive: her feelings.
This is particularly true of a series of photographs Clover took on August 8 near Beverly Farms. The first two exposures are of Mrs. James Scott at Manchester Beach (which is now called Singing Beach). Mrs. Scott’s identity remains obscure—Clover made no mention of her in letters, nor did she give the woman’s first name in her notebook. Presumably, Mrs. Scott was either a neighbor or a friend of a neighbor who had come along for the day at the beach. In any case, Clover’s photographs of her capture the woman’s direct, candid demeanor. In the first, Mrs. Scott, dressed in cool white vacation clothes, with her dark hair a striking contrast to her white cap, sits low to the ground. She is turned slightly away from the shore, looks directly into Clover’s camera, and clasps her hands easily together, with her parasol to her right and Boojum lying at her feet to her left. A large boulder directly to her right emphasizes the stability of her pose. The next exposure has a subtly different effect. Mrs. Scott is standing this time, with her body turned to the shore and leaning against the large boulder. Boojum is out of the picture, but the parasol leans at a diagonal across her leg. Again, she looks directly at Clover’s camera.
These are somewhat conventional images of the seashore. Clover borrowed the painterly convention of filling one side of her image, the left in this instance, with sand, rock, and plants, with the other side opening up to sea and sky. Mrs. Scott is seated on rocks, with the beach’s most distinctive and identifying feature—Eagle Head, a rocky promontory that juts out to the sea on the eastern end of the beach—directly in the background. This view of the beach, looking east to Eagle Head, had been painted numerous times in the 1860s and 1870s by several American painters, including Winslow Homer, and Clover, of course, would have known this.
The next two exposures, however, have a significant difference. Clover and her friends move from Singing Beach west to a granite headland, Smith’s Point. In the first photograph, Helen Choate Bell, the widow of the Boston lawyer Joshua Bell, sits by herself on a rock surrounded by sea grasses and brush, with Singing Beach barely visible off in the distance. She’s not on the beach but placed above it, overlooking the sea. The scene is as calm as a sleepy summer afternoon, its tranquility complicated only by the way Mrs. Bell’s shoulders seem to slump, as if she’s ill at ease on her rocky perch. Clover positioned Mrs. Bell with her back three-quarters to the camera, a placement that invites the viewer to identify with the figure as she gazes at the sea. Yet the viewer is prevented from seeing what a photograph of a person usually provides: the subject’s face. Mrs. Bell seems to have no visual link to any other person—not to Clover taking the picture nor to viewers of the image. Mrs. Bell becomes, in effect, a woman at sea, or a woman lost at sea.
Clover’s photograph of Mrs. Bell is strikingly similar in composition and mood to Woman on the Beach of Rügen (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, whose work embodies much of what is associated with German Romanticism—a love of nature, an emphasis on individual feeling, and what E.T.A. Hoffman has called an “infinite longing.” In fact, the way Clover positions her figures within the landscape is evocative of Friedrich’s Romantic trope of Rückenfiguren, translated as “turned-away figures.” Though Clover never stated in her letters that she had seen a painting by Friedrich, she was, undoubtedly, familiar with the painter’s work.
If the photograph of Mrs. Bell was a borrowing of Romantic imagery, the next image turns Friedrich’s Romanticism in a new direction. It is an artfully composed photograph of two women and a young girl on the rocks at Smith’s Point, with the seashore in the background. Clover identifies her subjects in her notebook—“Mrs. Ellston Pratt—Mrs. George D. Howe & Alice Pratt—on rock.” Mrs. Ellston Pratt was Miriam Choate Pratt, the younger sister of Helen Bell, the subject of Clover’s previous photograph, and both were daughters of the powerful Boston lawyer and former Massachusetts senator Rufus Choate. Noted for their charm, the Choate sisters were well ensconced in Beacon Hill society. The second woman, Alice Greenwood Howe, was a friend of the sisters, and all three were close friends with the author Sarah Orne Jewett—who would, in fact, dedicate her novel The Country of Pointed Firs to Alice Greenwood Howe. The third name in Clover’s list, Alice Pratt, was Miriam Pratt’s young daughter.
What kind of friendship did Clover have with the women she photographed on that August day? She made mention of Helen Bell and her sister, Miriam Pratt, several times in her letters, always complimentary, on one occasion telling her father that their visit to Washington was socially successful: “It was charming to see Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Pratt . . . It’s well that folks here should see that Bostonians can be decent and well-bred.” Alice Howe, older than Clover by half a generation, was prominent in Boston society—one of the founders of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a member of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Humane Society. She and her husband, George D. Howe, the wealthy owner of a cotton mill, had a summer estate on Lobster Cove, near Smith’s Point. Even so, Clover and Alice Howe were more like neighborly acquaintances than close friends.
Certainly, Clover’s photograph of Mrs. Pratt, Mrs. Howe, and Alice Pratt on Smith’s Point is not a straightforward portrait intended simply to capture the likenesses of three specific women. Instead, Clover carefully stage-managed the composition, creating a mood not of friendship and connection, but of lost possibility. Alice Pratt sits near the bottom right of the frame, her summery white dress suggesting a life of leisure infused with optimism. Her body faces the camera, her hands fold easily on her lap, and her young face—open and faintly smiling—is caught turning a bit to her right. Next to her sits Alice Howe, dressed all in black and turned in the other direction, with her back to the camera, her right earring glimmering above her high collar, her hair just visible through the netting that obscures her face. She is more ghost than living woman. Miriam Pratt stands in the middle of the frame in a three-quarter position, with her elaborate bustle clearly visible. Her strong posture anchors the image, but her head is downcast and her hands are held almost too deliberately in front of her. The figures of the two older women are turned away, yet their stance differs from that of Romantic Rückenfiguren. The women are connected neither to one another nor to the sea, which might otherwise open up their visual world, and their turned-away position shuts out the viewer.
Clover was a month away from her fortieth birthday. While she had seldom shown an inclination in her letters or conversation to critique her social position, there is evidence she had grown into a clearer understanding of the strictures that limited a woman’s horizons. And if, in the process of making photographs, Clover transformed herself from a passive woman to an active one—she was both composer and viewer—this image nonetheless evokes an undeniable feeling of isolation, loss, and constraint. It pictures exactly what the photographer did not have: a mother figure and a daughter, women from the previous generation and the succeeding one, who might have otherwise accompanied Clover.