The Fine Art Of Sarah Choate Sears

While Sears may not have taken classes in photography her study of painting would have lent her credibility among photographers who sought to have their work accepted as fine art. Her friendships with accomplished photographers such as Day and Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934) no doubt led to informal technical and stylistic discussions, but her approach to portraiture was also honed by her association with painters.

Sears's success as a photographer, her energy as an organizer, her potential as a financial supporter, and her friendship with Day eventually brought her into a complicated relationship with America's leading impresario of the medium, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Stieglitz was the vice president of the Camera Club of New York and editor of its journal, Camera Notes, and he sought to make New York City the center of the photographic world. In 1899, Sears challenged Stieglitz by encouraging Day to establish an annual exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She approached Charles G.

Loring, the director of the museum, to make the arrangements, and he agreed to support the exhibition if Sears could recruit the sponsorship of an established photographic organization. That meant enlisting Stieglitz's aid, but he would not help his rival Day or focus on a city outside New York. The effort was costly to Sears. In 1899, when she displayed six portraits in the second Philadelphia Photographic Sal on, Stieglitz's loyal supporter Joseph T. Keiley (1869-1914) denounced her work in Camera Notes, calling it the inferior and unprofessional product of "a $1,000,000 woman," implying that Sears's money eclipsed her art. [14]

Day eventually gave up his ambition to lead a center of photography in Boston, and Sears's relationship with Stieglitz improved. In 1904 Sears was elected a member of both the British pictorialist association, the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, and Stieglitz's new American group, the Photo-Secession. Members of Stieglitz's circle came to praise her portraits, and Stieglitz himself owned her likeness of Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), the American writer and reformer. In 1904, the prominent critic Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944) wrote that, in photographing Howe, Sears knew "precisely what she wanted to do and precisely what to leave undone in order to succeed....In this art of 'omitting' Mrs. Sears is quite accomplished, and this is what gives to her prints their simplicity their harmony, their breadth and unity of effect." [15]

Despite such enthusiasm, Sears found herself unable to keep up her work owing to the prolonged illness of her husband, who died in June 1905. That September she wrote to Stieglitz: "I have not been able to touch photography for many months, but I hope the time is not utterly over for me. I am going abroad for the winter--very soon--and shall be in Paris for some months, so there may be opportunity to learn something even if I do little." [16] Left with two children, Helen and her brother Joshua Montgomery Sears Jr. (1879-1908), and the job of managing the Sears estate, she apparently gave up the serious pursuit of artistic photography, although she continued to take pictures of her family and friends and support the New York group for a number of years.