The Courtship of Winslow Homer - letters reveal relationship with Helena de Kay

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Sarah Burns

Despite past attempts to decode Winslow Homer's Portrait of Helena [partial]e Kay (P1. I), there are puzzles left to solve. Some have speculated that deKay was the woman whose rejection don confirmed Homer's status as an inveterate bachelor. (1) However, there has been little concrete evidence to show that Homer nurtured tender feelings for the woman who ultimately became the wife of the poet Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909). (2) Now, a newly accessible group of letters, most of them written in the early 1870s, offers proof that Homer was powerfully drawn to Helena de Kay. Not only do these letters allow us a rare glimpse into Homer's heart, but they also cast fresh light on his artistic interest in courtship and other romantic themes in the early 1870s. After de Kay was married in 1874, the subject of courtship tapered off and eventually disappeared altogether from Homer's art.

Homer probably met de Kay through her brother Charles (1848-1935), who occupied Homer's studio in the University Building in New York City during 1867, when Homer was living in France. Her acquaintance with Homer must have dated to late 1867 or 1868 after the painter returned to New York City. She was then living in the family house on Staten Island but spent her days in Manhattan studying to become an artist at the Woman's Art School at Cooper Union, often in the company of her close friend Mary Hallock (1847-1938).

It is not certain when Homer's romantic interest in de Kay began to stir. He may already have had her on his mind in the summer of 1868 when he painted The Bridle Path (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williams-town, Massachusetts) set in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. David Tatham has put forward a case for identifying the model as Martha Bennett Phelps (d. 1920) of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. (3) Yet in 1873, Mary Hallock, then living in Milton in Ulster County, New York, wrote to de Kay saying that when her little nephew Gerald "looks at a photograph of The Bridle Path he says 'Helena---ride--horseback.'--this is his own idea." (4)

After her marriage in 1876 to Arthur De Wint Foote (d. 1933), an engineer, Mary Hallock Foote lived largely in the Far West, but she and Helena de Kay continued to exchange letters in which they shared their most intimate feelings until the latter's death in 1916. Whether or not Homer used de Kay as his model for The Bridle Path, the pretty rider looked enough like her to fool a little boy.

In 1871 Homer worked on a set of silhouettes to illustrate a special edition of James Russell Lowell's poem The Courtin'. The silhouette illustrations to various Shakespeare plays and other texts created by the Polish German artist Paul Konewka may have been the inspiration for Homer to choose this type of illustration. (5) Konewka's silhouette of the character of Helena in Shakespeare's Mid-summer-Nights Dream (Fig. 4) would have attracted Homer's attention for the name alone, and certainly the rose vine would have fixed his interest, since Helena de Kay's signature flower was the rose. When Mary Hallock married, for example, she later recalled that de Kay "sent me the red rose we called hers, her type and symbol, to wear inside my wedding dress--I have it still, a few petals empurpled with age, pressed inside an old locket." (6)

Homer's seven silhouettes for The Court-in' illustrate the progress of the Yankee Zekle courting Huldy, a farmer's daughter. In the first (Fig. 1) Zekle peers through a window at Huldy, who is peeling apples. Leafless, thorny vines twine around the window frame like the roses hedging the Sleeping Beauty's castle. Gaining entrance, a tongue-tied Zekle stands abashed while Huldy asks if he has come to see her father. Finally he kisses her, after which Huldy sits "Teary Roun' the Lashes" (Fig. 2), and in the final picture (Fig. 3) they stand together in their wedding finery, roses scattered at their feet. Unaccountably Lowell violently objected to the illustrations, thinking them disgusting and vulgar, particularly the wedding scene. However, it is not difficult to imagine the reticent Homer, Boston-born and bred, imagining himself as Zekle courting Huldy, an Americanized variant of Konewka's Helena.

During the early 1870s Homer sought Helena de Kay's company at every opportunity. The seven surviving letters from the period detail these attempts and betray unfulfilled longing. Although some are not dated, internal and circumstantial evidence allow one to make a good guess at when Homer wrote them. At first be maneuvered to become her instructor of drawing for magazines. In the fall of 1871 or winter of 1872 he wrote:

Miss Helena, If you would like to see a large drawing on wood, and will come to my studio on Monday or Tuesday, I shall have a chance to see you. Why can't you make some designs and let me send them to Harpers for you, they will gladly take anything fresh. And I will see that you draw them on the block all right. (7)

Helena de Kay preferred to receive her instruction elsewhere. Accordingly, in another letter Homer wrote: "Dear Miss Helena, You know you were to let me know when it would be agreeable for me to call at your studio. Having no word from you I suppose you have made other arrangements." Later he attempted to extract a commitment from her: "My work this winter will be good or very bad. The good work will depend on your coming to see me once a month--at least--Is this asking too much? Truly yours, Winslow Homer."