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

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Sarah Burns

Helena de Kay for her part kept the Homer portrait in Plate I all her life. Over the years the painting lost its sting, at least as far as the Gilder family was concerned. At one point their son Rodman (1877-1953) mounted a photograph of the portrait on a little calendar, a copy of which he sent to Mary Hallock Foote.

Helena de Kay Gilder had a long life as a wife, mother, and artist. She played a key role in forming the Society of American Artists in 1877, organized a lively intellectual salon in the Gilders' house on Union Square in New York City, and later became a social and cultural star in Marion, Massachusetts, an art colony near New Bedford. When her husband died in 1909, a year before Homer, Mary Hallock Foote wrote her a heartrending letter of consolation:

I look up and see you, in the little calendar Rodman gave me--he may have forgotten--your photograph from Winslow Homer's sketch. It is exactly like you--when the 'past' was difficult! I might be looking at you as you are now. Only. Dearest, I hope that you would let me take and hold one of those hands that have closed the book. (23)

Mary Foote correctly understood the meaning of the book, not only with reference to Homer but more generally as an emblem of a sad and irreversible ending.

For Homer in the early 1870s that ending set the course of his life as an inveterately single man. He may have had other flirtations, for several attractive young women appear in his paintings up to about 1880, but he remained solitary. From his fifties into his early seventies Homer traveled widely and turned to increasingly somber, elemental subjects in his art. Whatever scars marked him he had long since covered with the crusty shell that contributed to his undeserved reputation as a belligerent artist-hermit. But the fact that he never let go of Girl in the Orchard suggests that those scars had struck to the bottom of his soul.

SARAH BURNS is the Ruth N. Halls professor of fine arts at the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington.

(1.) See Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995), pp. 122-123; and Helen A. Cooper. Winslow Homer Watercolors (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986). p. 51, n. 44. Joseph Stanton, "Winslow Homer, Helena de Kay, and Richard Watson Gilder: Posing a Rivalry of Forms," Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 51-72, speculates at length about the relationship, using as primary evidence the Homer portrait and Gilder's poetry.

(2.) For their courtship and marriage, see Letters of Richard Watson Gilder, ed. Rosamond Gilder (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1916), pp. 55-61.

(3.) David Tatham, From Paris to the Presidentials: Wins-low Homer's Eddie Path, White Mountains," American Art Journal. vol. 30, nos. 2 and 3 (1999), pp. 43-44.

(4.) Mary Hallock to Helena de Kay, September 1873, letter no. 43, folio 16, box 6 (Mary Hallock Foote papers, department of special collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California). For the friendship of the two women, see A victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, ed. Rodman W. Paul (Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1972).