Travel guide

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004

The year 2004 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Explorers Club, whose New York City headquarters, like its membership, reflects a wide-ranging fascination for the world's wilder places and how to reach them. The organization is best known for its illustrious membership and its elaborate black-tie dinners with live animal displays and exotic menus of scorpion, sea snakes, and other rarities. However, the club's collections of paintings, sculptures, and artifacts are also worthy of note.

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Since 1965 the club has occupied the former residence of Stephen Carlton Clark (1882-1960), a businessman and Singer Sewing Machine Company heir. The club provides a suitably grand setting for the heroic portraits and memorabilia that its members have assembled over a century of global adventuring. The six-story Tudor revival building at 46 East Seventieth Street was designed to Clark's specifications by Frederick Junius Sterner (see Pl. III). Its cornerstone was laid in 1910, nearly three decades before Clark helped to establish the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. When Clark and his family called the elegant building home, it housed one of the finest private art collections in New York City, which included paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, El Greco, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. Some were given to Yale University, Clark's alma mater, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., but most ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, on whose boards Clark served.

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Today, the building's wood-paneled walls are adorned with paintings, photographs, and memorabilia focused on exploration and discovery. Some of the club's most illustrious members (among them Robert E. Peary, Roald Amundsen, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Theodore Roosevelt, Roy Chapman Andrews, Eric Shipton, Lowell Thomas, Charles A. Lindbergh, Richard Evelyn Byrd, Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, Sylvia Earle, Robert D. Ballard, and Sir Ranulph Fiennes) are represented in a photographic gallery at the top of the open stairwell. The club's art collection and an eclectic assemblage of artifacts, including ships' bells, historical climbing equipment, and elaborate trophies from the golden age of aviation are distributed throughout the building.

One of the most powerful and compelling paintings in the club is Rescue at Camp Clay by the Arctic artist Albert Operti (Pl. IV). A painting that once hung in the United States Capitol, it depicts in exquisite detail the dramatic 1884 rescue at Cape Sabine, Ellesmere Island, Canada, of a scientific expedition led by Adolphus W. Greely (1844-1935), who, in 1905, became the first president of the club. A major general, Greely was a decorated Civil War veteran who also fought in the Indian campaigns of the 1860s and supervised the construction of more than two thousand miles of telegraph lines in Texas, Montana, and the Dakota Territory in the 1870s. He set off for northern Canada in 1881 accompanied by twenty-four colleagues, many from the United States Army, including David L. Brainard, another future club president. As the United States government's representatives to the first International Polar Year (1882-1883), Greely's Lady Franklin Bay Expedition explored the northern part of Ellesmere Island. Its geographical discoveries and scientific observations were made at a latitude higher than anyone had reached up to that time (1) and earned Greely gold medals from both the Royal Geographical Society of London and the Societe de Geographie of Paris. Years later he was awarded the American Geographic Society's Charles P. Daly Medal and a Congressional Medal of Honor. Despite its achievements, the expedition was fraught with difficulties. When heavy ice repeatedly prevented relief vessels from reaching the explorers, they lost contact with the outside world for three years. Starvation, exposure, scurvy, drowning, suicide, and even an execution ultimately led to the deaths of more than two-thirds of the expedition.

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The rescue of the survivors, as depicted by Operti in what can arguably be claimed his greatest Arctic painting, occurred on June 22, 1884, within days--some say hours--of the certain death of Greely and the remaining six members of the expedition. Operti based his painting on life portraits and interviews with the survivors, interviews with the rescuers, and pre-expedition photographs of the dead. The details of the tent and expedition detritus were accurately based on artifacts collected at the scene of the rescue, Camp Clay, by the survivors and members of the rescue party. Some of this material Operti turned into a souvenir collage, which he eventually donated to the club (Pl. VI).