The Fine Art Of Sarah Choate Sears

Erica E. Hirshler

When asked to provide biographical information for an exhibition of her photographs in 1900, Sarah Choate Sears (Pl. 1) of Boston wrote simply, "I am interested in artistic things." [1] Sears was too humble about her talents. She became an award-winning painter in watercolor and pastel, an important pictorialist photographer, a supporter of aspiring artists, and a remarkable collector of contemporary art. She was also part of a significant community of gifted women artists that emerged in Boston at the end of the nineteenth century.

Sarah Choate grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the daughter of a distinguished lawyer, Charles Francis Choate (1828-1911), and his wife Elizabeth Carlile (1834-1898). Like many prominent Bostonians, Charles Choate developed an interest in railroads and served as president of the Old Colony line that linked Boston to its southern suburbs. Sarah Choate was educated at home, and no doubt acquired the usual skills expected of a young lady at the time. These included watercolor painting, which was generally considered an appropriate pastime for a woman of leisure, particularly if she favored floral motifs and refrained from marketing her work. [2] On the occasion of her engagement to Joshua Montgomery Sears (1854-1905), one journal related that the nineteen-year-old Choate was "not a society belle in the strict sense of the term, but is reported to be a lady of fine literary taste, and possessed of no ordinary degree of culture and intelligence." [3]

While praising Sarah Choate's accomplishments, the journal and many others were considerably more effusive about the young lady's engagement gift from Sears-a diamond necklace reported to have cost fifty thousand dollars. Sears was a twenty-three-year-old graduate of Yale College "of medium height with brown eyes, hari, and mustache, rosy cheeks, and geometrical proportions." [4] He had inherited significant assets upon reaching his majority and his wife thus enjoyed a financial freedom unmatched by her Boston peers. It enabled her to pursue many of her artistic interests, but Sarah Sears was rarely mentioned in the press without reference to her fortune, and some critics refused to credit her with genuine creative talent independent of her wealth.

Some years after her marriage in 1877, Sarah Sears began to study watercolor painting with the Boston impressionist Ross Sterling Turner (1847-1915). She first displayed her work to "great admiration" in an 1884 show held in Turner's studio. [5] Sears then studied at the Cowles Art School in Boston with the young French-trained artist Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890), whose paintings she greatly admired. Bunker knew J. Montgomery Sears with whom he shared a love of music and membership in Boston's Tavern Club. Perhaps through Bunker, Sarah Sears met many of the painters who provided her with instruction and inspiration over the next several years, among them Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-192 1), Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862-1938), and John Singer Sargent (see Fig. 3).

By 1890 Sarah Sears had begun to earn serious recognition for her watercolors. She won the William T. Evans Prize at the New York Water Color Club exhibition in 1893 for Romola, a likeness of Bunker's young widow, Eleanor Hardy Bunker (1870-1953). Like most of her early watercolors, its current location is unknown. The portrait was highly praised, especially after Sears donated her prize money to a young teacher. Nevertheless, one critic felt obliged to note that "when a rich woman paints, it ought to be, in 99 cases out of 100, a subject of prayer among her friends," adding only reluctantly that "this favorite of fortune had really earned her success." [6] Sears continued to win significant prizes for her figural work throughout the decade, but she also began to turn her attention toward another mode of artistic expression-photography.

ike pastel and watercolor, photography was considered an appropriate medium for women, and it was actively marketed to them by film and camera manufacturers, whose advertisements often featured women photographers.

The cumbersome technology of earlier years had been eliminated by the 1880s and cameras became much easier to use. George Eastman's (1854-1932) "Kodak Girl" soon became his company's new symbol; her carefree presence implied not only the spirit of the wholesome, optimistic, typically American "girl" that was the emblem of a new age but also the simplicity of the camera itself- everyone could use it. Women's magazines promoted photography, offering articles and helpful hints, and soon the journal American Amateur Photographer prod aimed that "photography is becoming more and more recognized as a field of endeavor particularly suited to women." The author reminded his readers of women's "inborn artistic feeling," and suggested that the feminine traits of "cleanliness and patience" as well as a "delicate touch" made women "peculiarly fitted to succeed in this work." [7]

Sarah Sears created elegant portraits and still lifes with her camera (see Figs. 1-4). which were the same subjects she had explored with a paintbrush. Her photographs are direct and straightforward; she did not embrace mythological subjects or use the atmospheric gum printing techniques favored by many of her contemporaries. Like many women artists who had families, she found aesthetic opportunities in her domestic environment. She photographed her second child and only daughter, Helen, born in 1889, from the time she was a baby. Consciously seeking artistic effects, she depicted Helen both nude, her slim body profiled against the light of an open door, and in elaborate dresses, isolated before a decorative backdrop. Sears's work reflects pictorialist photographs by her American peers, but it is also related to the romantic images of England's best known woman photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), whose work Sears greatly admired. [8]

Sears's depictions of Helen entwined with flowers may have been inspired directly by Cameron's photographs, but others show her devotion to the art of portraiture. Sears particularly admired the work of John Singer Sargent, whom she probably met during his first extended working visit to Boston in 1887 and 1888. She oommissioned a portrait of Helen (P1. III) when Sargent returned to Boston in April 1895 to unveil his first in a series of murals for the Boston Public Library. With his usual dazzling whites, Sargent painted the young girl next to a brass planter full of hydrangeas. She seems quiet and reserved, carefully fingering the showy flowers with a wistful air of abstraction, lost in her own thoughts. Helen was used to modeling by the time Sargent painted her. Three years earlier she had posed for a full-length portrait by Abbott Thayer (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio), and she was a frequent sitter for her mother, who rendered her delicate features in both watercolor and pastel (private collections). Sever al of Sears's photographs of Helen recall Sargent's portrait, and in one she even wears the same white dress and beribboned shoes (Fig.4). But to Sargent, there was no comparison. "Many thanks for sending me the photographs," he wrote to Sears from Biltmore in Ashville, North Carolina, on August 7, 1895. "The new one of Helen has a wonderfully fine expression and makes me feel like returning to Boston and puffing my umbrella through my portrait. But how can an unfortunate painter hope to rival a photograph by a mother? Absolute truth combined with absolute feeling." [9]

Sarah Sears was a firm believer in the artistic potential of the photograph. Along with her friend and fellow photographer Frederick Holland Day (1864-1933), she promoted it as an aesthetic medium. Sears helped to found Boston's Society of Arts and Crafts, and was instrumental in ensuring that photography was included in their inaugural show in 1897. The society's emphasis on craftsmanship and handwork was well-suited to photographers like Sears and Day, who sought to prove that making photographs could involve those very same properties. Like other pictorialist photographers, both felt that the medium had the potential to become fine art; they held that photographic images were not necessarily creations of happenstance and a machine, but could instead be deliberately crafted by an artist.[10] The Society of Arts and Crafts was also a necessary alternative at a time when photography was excluded from museum exhibitions. (The first photography show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was held in 1901.) Early in 1899, Sarah Sears had a solo exhibition at the Boston Camera Club, where her work was praised specifically for its artistic qualities. Photo-Era, the club's journal, described it as "markedly...the work of an artist. The subjects, almost all portraits, were treated from the artist's point of view." The reviewer emphasized the connection between Sears's photographs and "fine" art: "Some of the larger ones... had a peculiar and pleasing effect, as though they had been taken-not from life-but from some fine painting grown dim with age...of the photographs of a young girl holding a lily, it may be said that their delicacy approaches that of a fine drawing" (see Fig. 1)." Sears consciously brought her achievements as a painter and her knowledge of the history of art to her work as a photographer. In 1900, Day included five of Sears's photographs in his exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in London entitled The New school of American Photography. In January 1901 her work was seen in the display of the work of American women photographers that was organized by Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) and held at the Photo-Club in Paris. The ardent embrace of Sears's efforts by the leading photographers of her day was not due simply to her ability to help their cause through her own patronage, but equally to the quality of her work. In her notes pertaining to the exhibition, Johnston remarked that Sears was "an artist of marked ability--[a] strong conscientious amateur."12 The term "amateur" was a compliment in photography circles, where it retained its original connotations. "Amateur" implied that the maker was a lover of photography, an individual artisan, and a connoisseur, while "professional" photographers were often defined as those who produced studio portraits, commercial views of famous m onuments, or trade pictures for merchandising. Sears wrote to Johnston that she took photographs "for an amusement--[I] have never taken any lessons." [13]

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.

During the time Sarah Sears spent in Paris, she maintained her commitment to the arts in a different way, establishing herself as a significant collector Her taste was liberal and her holdings were among the most progressive in Boston. Sears had always been interested in contemporary art, and she had frequently acquired the newest and most experimental canvases by the artists she knew. These included Wild Asters of 1889 by Dennis Bunker (private collection), the most complete articulation of impressionism the young painter ever attempted, and Edmund Tarbell's Three Sisters--A Study in June Sunlight of 1890 (Milwaukee Art Museum), in which Tarbell reconciled the sun-drenched light effects of impressionism with his talent for rendering the human form. When Sargent turned his attention to landscape painting in the first decades of the twentieth century Sears bought one of his most innovative works, a bold and vertiginous slice of the rocky Simplon Pass of about 1911 (Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachuset ts).

Sears also became close to the painter Mary Cassatt, whom she met in Paris in 1892, probably through their mutual friend Louisine Havemeyer (1855-1929). Cassatt was a frequent adviser to American collectors, and it is likely that she led Sears toward several major acquisitions. One of them was Edouard Manet's magnificent Street Singer (Pl. II) that the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) had offered to the Havemeyers in February 1899 and which they refused, remarking that the way the model's face was obscured by her hand was a "great drawback." [17]

Sears continued to favor unconventional art. In addition to works by the impressionists Claude Monet (1841-1926) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Sears owned a number of paintings by Cassatt. Among the finest was Mother and Child (P1. IV), a relatively early example of the maternal images that came to dominate Cassatt's art. Infinitely tender, the image would have resonated with other works in the Sears collection, including Thayer's Virgin Enthroned of about 1891 (National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.) and Mother and Child of 1892 by George de Forest Brush (1855- 1941) (Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts). Cassatt's modern Madonna breathed new life into the old formula with its vigorous, sketchy brushwork and its intimate details of contemporary life.

In 1908, Sears took Cassatt to visit Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), the expatriate American collector of some of the most unconventional art in Paris. Cassatt reportedly announced that she "had never in my life seen so many dreadful paintings in one place...[or] so many dreadful people gathered together," and requested to be taken home "at once." Sears expected her friend's reaction and had asked her driver to remain at the door. [13]

The two women did agree on one artist who provided a link between the old and the new: Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). Cassatt had met Cezanne in Giverny in 1894, and within a few years had purchased one of his tabletop still lifes from the dealer Ambroise Vollard (c. 1867-1939) (Still Life with Rum Bottle of about 1890, private collection, Japan). By 1910, when prices for Cezanne's paintings had risen dramatically Cassatt (always a shrewd investor) sold her still life to Sears, noting to a friend that she had been "one of the first to see merit in his pictures." [19] Sears lent another Cezanne still life in her collection, Flowers in a Vase of 1879 to 1882 (private collection) to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modem Art (Armory Show) in New York City.

Sears demonstrated her belief in the progress of art not only through her own work and with the paintings she acquired, but also by sponsoring aspiring young artists. She established a student prize at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in the late 1890s and early 1900s she supported the efforts of at least two of Boston's most innovative talents, Elizabeth Ethel Copeland (see P1. V) and Maurice Brazil Prendergast (see P1. VI). Copeland received her early training in decoration at the Cowles Art School and then took a course in metalwork from the silversmith and enameler Laurin Hovey Martin (1875-1939). It was in Martin's class that Copeland met Sears, who in addition to watercolors and photography was also experimenting with silver and embroidery. Sears underwrote Copeland's trip to England in 1908. where she studied with the famed London enameler Alexander Fisher (1864-1936). Soon after her return to Boston, Copeland was elected to master status at the Society of Arts and Crafts, and she sh owed her work with Sears's watercolors and pastels in the 1920s. Copeland excelled as a jeweler, working in silver, precious stones, and enamel. Her boxes, richly decorated reinterpretations of medieval covered caskets suffused with dense jewel-like enamels, are particularly admired today (see P1. V). Copeland celebrated the irregularities and asymmetries of her work, qualities that emphasized the individuality and handcraftsmanship of her art.

It may have been through mutual friends and shared interests in the arts and crafts movement that Sears met Maurice Prendergast, who had resettled in Boston in the fall of 1894 after spending several years in Paris. He worked in watercolor, like Sears, and was also active as an illustrator and designer. Sears paid for Prendergast's first trip to Italy in 1898, where the young painter made some of his most adventurous and accomplished watercolors (see P1. VI). Sears and her husband continued to support Prendergast's efforts, realizing that his artistic aspirations might not be best served in Boston. They encouraged him to develop a following in New York, a city that proved much more receptive to modern art. When Prendergast held his first one-man show at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City in 1900, J. Montgomery Sears suggested the prices he should charge. "I will follow your advice," he wrote to him, "and keep strictly within the hundred dollar limit." [20] After the opening, he reported his success: "I hav e been congratulated very heartily by the few men I met. Mr. Macbeth likes them [and] said he never had anything like them on his walls before somebody proposed having chairs in the gallery so they could sit down to recover from their shock of surprise.. ..New York is the place; it has a touch of Paris and I hope they will treat me well." [21]

The realization that New York was the place for adventurous art led Sarah Sears to that city's galleries for examples of the most up-to-date objects for her collection. From the Montross Gallery she bought an exquisite flower painting by Charles Demuth (Pl. VII), one of the modernists championed by her colleague Stieglitz. From the Anderson Galleries, she purchased a still life of squash by Georges Braque (1882-1963). She owned several works by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and a watercolor landscape by John Mann (1870-1953). Her enthusiasm for the beautiful and the new led her far beyond most of her Boston peers.

Cassatt once gave Sears a box of pastels (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and in that medium Sears renewed her own artistic career and underscored her interest in modern art (see Pl. VIII). In these late compositions, she created bold, cropped arrangements of flowers in glowing colors, enhancing the vibrancy of her pictures by juxtaposing complementary shades, often using bright contours in a contrasting hue. Her still lifes frequently have no clear atmospheric setting; her bouquets explode across the sheet like fireworks.

At one of her last solo exhibitions, held at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1925, the student newspaper praised her both as an artist and a role model: "Let Wellesley students take note! A woman may, if she is sufficiently able, take her place in her generation as a professional, a social and civic leader, a patron of the arts, and as a wife and mother." [22] Sarah Sears's ability and spirit were an inspiration to younger generations of talented women, an encouragement for them to seek studios of their own.

An exhibition entitled A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940 will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through December 2. It includes works in a variety of mediums by more than forty women artists, including Sarah Choate Sears and Elizabeth Ethel Copeland. An illustrated book by Erica E. Hirshler accompanies the exhibition. It is available by telephoning 800-225-5592 or through the museum's Web site (www.mfa.org/shop).

ERICA E. IJIRSHLER is the John Moors Cabot Curator of Paintings, Arts of the Americas, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

(1.) Sarah Sears to Frances Johnston, May or June 1900, quoted in Toby Quitslund, "Her Feminine Colleagues: Photographs and Letters Collected by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1900" in Josephine Withers, Women Artists in Washington Collections (University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, 1979), P. 139.

(2.) See Harvey Green, The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America (Pantheon Books, New York, 1983), pp. 147-150, and Annette Stott, "Floral Femininity." American Art, vol. 6 (Spring 1992), pp. 72-76.

(3.) Home Journal, February 21, 1877.

(4.) Unidentified newspaper clipping quoted in Stephanie Mary Buck, "Sarah Choate Sears: Artist, Photographer, and Art Patron" (Master's thesis, Syracuse University Syracuse, New York, 1985), p. 11.

(5.) Boston Traveller, April 26, 1884. Among her fellow exhibitors was Mariquita Gill (1865-1915), who later became an early member of the American colony at Giverny, France.

(6.) "Mrs. Sears, Artist," unidentified clipping [1893], private collection.

(7.) Richard Hines Jr., "Women and Photography," American Amateur Photographer, vol. 11 (March 1899), p. 118.

(8.) Forty-five of Sarah Sears's carbon prints of Cameron's images were given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by her daughter Helen Sears Bradley in 1942. The carbon prints were not made by Cameron, but were produced from her negatives by both her dealer, P. and D. Colnaghi and Company in London, and possibly by her son, Henry Herschal Hay Cameron. I am grateful to Anne Havinga for her assistance with this. Sears's art collection is the subject of an article I am writing.

(9.) letter is in a private collection.

(10.) See Anne E. Havinga, "Pictorialism and Naturalism in New England Photography," in Marilee Boyd Meyer et al., Inspiring Reform: Boston's Arts and Crafts Movement (Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1997), pp. 135-36; Anne E. Havinga, "F. Holland Day and the Boston Arts and Crafts Movement," in New Perspectives on F. Holland Day, ed. Patricia J. Fanning (Stonehill College, North Easton, Massachusetts, 1998), pp. 64-67; and Laura Else Meister, "Missing from the Picture: Boston Women Photographers 1880-1920" (Master's thesis, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, 1998).

(11.) "Among the Clubs: Recent Exhibitions," Photo-Era vol. 2 (March 1899), pp. 260-261.

(12.) uoted in Quitslund, "Her Feminine Colleagues," p. 139.

(13.) Letter of May or June 1900, quoted ibid.

(14.) Joseph T Keiley, "The Salon: Its Purpose, Character, and Lesson," Camera Notes, vol. 3 (January 1900), p. 169. The rivalry between Day and Stieglitz, and Sears's role within it, is studied in wonderful detail in Jane Van Nimmen, "F. Holland Day and the Display of a New Art: 'Behold, It Is I," History of Photography, vol. 18 (Winter 1994), pp. 368-382.

(15.) Pictorial Criticism: Constructive, not Destructive," Photographer, vol. 1 (June 11, 1904), quoted in Buck, "Sarah Choate Sears: Artist, Photographer, and Art Patron," p.58.

(16.) Sears, Southborough, Massachusetts, to Stieglitz, September 19, [1905] (Alfred Stieglitz papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University New Haven, Connecticut).

(17.) Henry O. Havemeyer to Paul Durand-Ruel, February 20, 1899, as quoted in Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1993), p. 225. For Cassatt's activities as an art adviser, see Judith A. Barter et al., Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman (Art Institute of Chicago and Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998).

(18.) Quoted in Frederick A. Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt: Impressionist from Pennsylvania (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1966), p. 196.

(19.) Mary Cassatt to Adolph Borie, July 27, 1910, as quoted in Frances Weitzenhoffer, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1986), p. 192.

(20.) Maurice Prendergast, New York City, to J. Montgomery Sears, March 9,1900 (private collection. For Prendergast, see Nancy Mowll Mathews, Maurice Prendergast (Prestel, Munich, in association with the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1990); and The Prendergasts and the Arts and Crafts Movement (Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1989).

(21.) Prendergast, Winchester, Massachusetts, to J. M. Sears, February 24, 1900 (private collection).

(22.) "Sarah C. Sears Paintings Exhibition at Art Building," Wellesley College News, June 1925, (clipping, private collection). Sears did not attend the college.

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