Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer: A Landscape Critic in the Gilded Age 0813933927, 9780813933924

Citation preview

M a r i a n a G r i s w o l d Va n R e n s s e l a e r

M ariana Griswold VaN Renssel aer A Landscape Critic in the Gilded Age

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Judith K. Major

Univ ersit y of V irginia Press Charlottesville and London

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University of  Virginia Press

© 2013 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of  Virginia All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2013

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Major, Judith K.

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer : a landscape critic in the gilded age / Judith K. Major. pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8139-3392-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8139-3455-6 (e-book)

1. Van Rensselaer, Schuyler, Mrs., 1851-1934.  2. Landscape

architecture — United States — Philosophy — History.  I. Title. SB470.53.M35 2013

770.92 — dc23   2012037883 Frontispiece:

M. G. Van Rensselaer in her study, 1887, Marion, Massachusetts. (Sippican Historical Society, Marion, Massachusetts)

For my mother

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Co n te n t s

Acknowledgments ix In troduc t ion Portraits of a Lady 1 one The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer 5 t wo A Career Begins 24 thr ee A New Field of Study: Landscape Gardening 51 f our Historical Sketches on the Art of Gardening 85 five Traces in Garden and Forest 100 si x A Turning Point: 1893 121

sev en While Garden and Forest  Lived 159 eight Changes 180 nine The Aesthetics of Life 201 Appendi x A Garden and Forest  Editorials and Unsigned Articles Written by M. G. Van Rensselaer 207 Appendi x B Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer Chronology 219

Notes 225 Bibliography 259 Index 275

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Ac k n o w l e d gm e n t s

I have been working on this book for so many years that it is difficult to remember everyone to whom I owe thanks. Please forgive any omissions. First, I need to thank the Graham Foundation for its patience; a generous grant funded research that has finally come to fruition. The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia has also waited years since it awarded me a one-month Mellon Resident Research Fellowship, and I had the luxury of reading from its collection of works by Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. I have not forgotten its support. Thanks are due as well to Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and the selection committee of the Foundation for Landscape Studies for a 2009 David R. Coffin Publication Grant. A 2003 sabbatical awarded by the University of Kansas gave me time to do the valuable work of transcribing the handwritten correspondence that forms the core of my book. My transfer in 2011 to Kansas State University’s Landscape Architecture Department provided me with the psychological support to bring the work to closure. A grant from that department and a Kansas State University Small Research Grant paid for the reproduction and permission fees for the illustrations. I owe a debt of gratitude to the libraries, museums, historical societies, and other organizations that supplied the illustrations for my book. In these times of drastically reduced budgets for such institutions, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the staff responded to my requests; all seemed delighted to hear from someone interested in their collections. I spent many hours in the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) manuscript room poring over letters and owe much to Thomas Lannon, the assistant curator in the Manuscripts and Archives Division. The Century Company records and the Richard Watson Gilder papers greatly enrich this book, as do the images from the NYPL. For those, I thank Thomas Lisanti, the manager of rights and permissions at the NYPL. ix

Acknowledgments

I recognize as well the Boston Public Library; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Mann Library at Cornell University; the Western History and Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library; the George Eastman House: International Museum of Photography and Film; the Essex County Historical Society/Adirondack History Center Museum; the Glessner House Museum; the Harvard Art Museum; the Johnstown Area Heritage Association Archives; the Kansas Historical Society, where Nancy Sherbert, the curator of photographs, was of particular help; the Frances Loeb Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of the City of New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; the National Park Service’s Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, and collection of historical photographs; the Newport Art Museum; the Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library in Virginia Beach, Virginia; the Parrish Art Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Cheryl Leibold and Barbara Katus discovered the photo of Van Rensselaer holding a parasol in a Cecilia Beaux album; the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; the University of Delaware Library; and the Westchester County, New York, Archives. A special thanks to Kimberly A. Teves at the Sippican Historical Society, who found the photograph of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer and the donkey. Lisa E. Pearson of the Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library, over a span of at least a decade, has given generously of her time. Paige K. Plant, of the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library, forgave my ignorance of cars and steered me to an image of a Packard that I imagine is Miss Pope’s “yellow peril.” A lucky contact with Simon of www.old-map-blog.com led me to the view of Dresden. I feel grateful to have stumbled upon the “John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History” at Duke University. After so many years, I do not remember what led me to the site. I acknowledge all of the collections that provided the personal correspondence that proved so important in revealing Van Rensselaer’s private self. The Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution is a treasure trove of primary material, including the papers of Cecilia Beaux, August Jaccaci, and Sylvester Rosa Koehler. The Hill-Stead Museum supplied x

Acknowledgments

Van Rensselaer’s correspondence with her good friend the architect Theodate Pope Riddle. Thank you also to the Archives and Special Collections in the Amherst College Library; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; the Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College Library; and the Pelletier Library at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Articles in the historic archives of the New York Times supplied the minutiae of Van Rensselaer’s social life and committee work. I remember with great fondness Philip M. Mello, the estate manager at Rough Point, Newport, Rhode Island, who in 2004 gave me a tour of the grounds and proudly showed me photographs of the camels that roamed the estate during Miss Duke’s time. During that visit to Newport I was also helped by staff at the Redwood Library and the Newport Art Museum (formerly the J. N. A. Griswold house). Chapter 3 began as the paper “The Landscape Gardening Manifesto in Garden and Forest by Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1888),” presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). Dorothée Imbert gave me valuable editorial help on this presentation. In its final form, chapter 3 is a revised and much expanded version of “Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s Landscape Gardening Manifesto in Garden and Forest,” originally published in Landscape Journal 26, no. 2 (2007): 184–200 (© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System; reproduced courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press). I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the article for their constructive comments. Chapter 8 began as “The Landscape Critic and the Motorcar,” presented in 2008 at “Designing the Parks,” a conference cosponsored by the University of Virginia, the National Park Service, and the Cultural Landscape Foundation. I thank the reviewers of that paper for their help. I am grateful to John Dixon Hunt, Don Worster, Charles Eldredge, Joy Stocke, Marlene Heck, and Thaïsa Way for commenting on portions of the manuscript. The anonymous reviewers for the University of Virginia Press gave painful yet ultimately priceless advice on the manuscript. Many friends and colleagues provided support during my Van Rensselaer years: Stephanie Rolley, professor and head of the Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning, Kansas State University; Thaïsa Way and Susan Herrington, who inspire me with their energy and xi

Acknowledgments

leadership in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Landscape History Chapter; Saralyn Reece Hardy, who has consistently believed in me as a scholar; Richard Iverson and Steve Whitesell, my New York friends, who will be thrilled that the book is finally published; Joy Stocke, who talks with me about fine books and fine writing over fine wine; and Marlene Heck, who year after year shares a room with me at SAH and gives of her kind heart (over lots of wine). By this point, I am sure that Boyd Zenner, my acquisitions editor at the University of Virginia Press, is looking for her name — I did not forget what you said. I remember my delight when Boyd approached me after my paper at SAH and asked if I had a publisher — music to a scholar’s ear. She has stayed with me through the long slough. I thank others at the University of Virginia Press, including Angie Hogan and my editor Mark Mones. I appreciate the careful work done by my copy editor, Carol Sickman-Garner, who knows chapter and verse of the Chicago Manual of Style. It is impossible to fully express my love and appreciation for my friend and husband, Jim (he is also my personal chef). Acknowledgments always end with this type of paean to a spouse — he deserves much more. And, once again, Corbin, Sarah, and Adam have put up with my distraction over many summers in Arizona. My mom did not live to see the publication of my second book. When she paged through my first, she commented: “What did you write? It’s all quotations.” I dedicate this book to her.

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Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer (Mariana Griswold), 1888 (this cast, 1890). (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, 1917 [17.104]; Photographed by Jerry L. Thompson)

Introduction Portraits of a Lady

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Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer sits in her study before a cluttered table and gazes directly at the camera. Stacks of paper and a thick reference book lie in front of a typewriter in which a half-finished page is visible. The 1887 photograph, the frontispiece of this volume, was taken in Marion, Massachusetts, then a remote village on Buzzard’s Bay, where Van Rensselaer returned summer after summer to write and to be a part of the congenial and “Bohemian” company that gathered around Century editor Richard Watson Gilder and his artist wife, Helena de Kay.1 The photograph is a softer version of the woman portrayed in the basrelief completed in 1888 by Van Rensselaer’s friend the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The loose bow and ruffled collar have been replaced by a high, tight neckline — a fashionable Princess Alexandra collar — that emphasizes her erect posture. This bronze lady of distinguished bearing fits Van Rensselaer’s public image. At thirty-seven, she was already a redoubtable art and architecture critic who had published three books and was writing for newspapers and for the most highly regarded magazines in America. Not apparent in either image is a sense of the private woman who according to friends and acquaintances was kindhearted and amusing, the center of any social gathering and the brightest of storytellers, and whose personal correspondence was witty, self-deprecating, and often playful. The private woman preferred to publish poetry under the pseudonym Lydia Schuyler, as it was “a much more fitting and artistic name for a verse-maker than my lawful ponderous cognomen”— that is, Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer.2 1

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Studied together, the personal correspondence and published writings of Van Rensselaer bring to life both the private and the public woman, who was a perceptive and articulate critic of art, architecture, and landscape architecture in America’s Gilded Age. Best known for her art criticism and her monograph on H. H. Richardson, Van Rensselaer has been little more than a footnote in the history of landscape architecture. Her writings on landscape gardening (she preferred this nomenclature over “landscape architecture”) in Garden and Forest: A Journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art and Forestry (1888–97) have received scant attention. Most important, she is unacknowledged as the author of over 330 of the journal’s editorials and other unsigned articles. Only a small percentage of these writings, retitled and revised, were included in Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening (1893). This book seeks to establish Van Rensselaer as one of the most significant figures in late-nineteenth-century landscape architecture. In Van Rensselaer’s eyes, the art of landscape gardening could not be separated from painting, sculpture, and architecture because all were intimately connected. Therefore, the present work necessarily addresses her ideas on what she called the sister arts. The natural sciences were important to her as well, for they furnished “a means of complete and precise expression,” and unlike some of her contemporaries, she did not believe that science detracted from aesthetics.3 Biographical details also form part of this narrative because her education and experiences shaped her views and writings. Van Rensselaer held a position in New York’s top social and cultural echelons. She mingled with authors, artists, and affluent patrons of the arts in America and Europe and had access to the homes, art collections, and gardens of the upper class. She frequently traveled abroad and after the winter season in New York could be found at social retreats favored by the rich, including Newport, Block Island, Saratoga, Southampton, Stockbridge, and Lenox. Despite her elite status, Van Rensselaer considered herself a professional author and used her privileged opportunities to review art exhibits and to write in-depth studies of American and European artists. Van Rensselaer was not content to be a mere resident or tourist in the various summer colonies and continental cities to which she traveled; she wrote about their history, art, architecture, and gardens. Rarely idle in the summer, she produced articles, books, and poetry during these months. One year, she complained 2

Introduction

to her editor that her work was suffering because she was “surrounded only by the frivolous multitude,” whose lone interests were lawn tennis and supper parties. She lived quietly in Newport, telling a friend, “Somehow, the invitations I like so well to give and to get in New York do not appeal to me in the summer.”4 The society page of the New York Times chronicled her attendance at private dinners at Sherry’s and Delmonico’s (the most select restaurants in New York), teas, receptions, lectures, auctions, the Metropolitan Opera, and art openings at the National Academy of Design and the American Association of Allied Arts. Fund-raising was often the main purpose for her attendance and patronage of social events — the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement and the New York Infirmary for Women and Children were among the organizations that benefited. She was the president of the Public Education Association and, before America’s involvement in World War I, was a member of the American Branch of the French Wounded Emergency Fund. When Van Rensselaer wrote to Gilder of the lively 1896 New York season, she was not referring to the city’s social life, but rather to those public, civic, and intellectual affairs that had animated the winter. Gilder understood that she was “inclined to like busy rather than pleasure-seeking people.” Van Rensselaer managed to be a lady and a professional critic at the same time, and the chapters that follow seek to explain this seeming contradiction.5

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one The Education of

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer

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The first seventeen years of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s life took place in a city being remade and refined by the great fortunes of the Industrial Revolution. She was born into a family of wealthy New York City merchants on 23 February 1851. Her parents, Lydia Alley and George Griswold Jr., were proud descendents of seventeenth-century New England settlers. The family wealth was generated from the China trade; her grandfather and father sent clipper ships around the world and imported tea, silks, and other items from East Asia. At the age of three, Van Rensselaer moved to a splendid residence at 91 Fifth Avenue. The Griswold children had nurses, tutors, and governesses, and according to her brother Frank Gray Griswold, the house had a nursery, two schoolrooms, a gymnasium, and a theater. The nursery was full of curios with which to play, including Chinese porcelains and bronzes. According to the cultural historian Karin Calvert, “traditionally, the [Victorian] indoor play area for children had always been the garret —  a fairly large storage space that allowed plenty of room for rough-andtumble play during inclement weather, with little danger that the children would damage anything of value.” The Griswold nursery was an unusually luxurious place for the children’s education, exercise, and amusement.1 Joining the Griswolds on Fifth Avenue were the Belmonts, Goulds, Astors, and Vanderbilts, their mansions beginning to edge uptown toward Central Park. By this time, half of the two hundred most affluent individuals in the city had built homes along this stretch of the avenue. The wealthy 5

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James H. Dakin, La Grange Terrace, La Fayette Place, New York City, 1842. (Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

had created a protected and homogeneous environment, separate from the poorer segments of the population. A few blocks east of  Washington Square, some of New York City’s wealthiest families lived on La Grange Terrace, a colonnaded row of town houses in Lafayette Place, between East Fourth Street and Astor Place. John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the country, resided at 37 La Grange Terrace until his death in 1848. Van Rensselaer had a playmate whose grandfather lived on Lafayette Place; she knew the house well, for it was the scene of a calamity — her doll was drowned in one of its big bathtubs.2 Van Rensselaer remembered her childhood as idyllic. The growing class and racial antagonisms and New York’s financial panic of 1857 go unmentioned in her recollections. An early memory was of a very different sort: a huge paulownia tree that bloomed in sight of her bedroom window every spring. Year by year the tree’s large aromatic purple blossoms provided proof that summer was coming: “far away on the Connecticut shore, flowers of a less exotic aspect, of a more companionable charm,” waited for her. Young Mariana often spent her summers with relatives who remained in Connecticut, where she drove to church with her family on hot Sunday mornings redolent with the heavy odor of the ailanthus tree.3 The Civil War rocked Van Rensselaer’s privileged world. She recalled 6

The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer

The John N. A. Griswold house, north entrance, n.d. (Newport Art Museum and Art Association Archives)

both the glory and the gloom of the war: on Fifth Avenue, she saw fresh recruits going to war and returning pathetically worn. “You who are younger,” she wrote, “do not know how a national disaster makes a city look; you did not see the faces one met on [15 April 1865], the morning Lincoln died; you did not watch his funeral-train pass up the avenue.”4 In 1864 Van Rensselaer’s uncle John N. A. Griswold finished building a house at 76 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, designed by the most celebrated architect of the day, Richard Morris Hunt. Bellevue Avenue runs north to south through the city and was a showplace for the “cottages” of the wealthy during the late nineteenth century. That summer the family vacationed at the fashionable resort. While the rich idled in Newport, bathing on Bailey’s Beach and parading on Bellevue Avenue, the Atlantic House housed midshipmen from the U.S. 7

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Naval Academy. The summer of 1864, in Cold Harbor, Virginia, the Union suffered seven thousand casualties in twenty minutes during an offensive against fortified rebels. In Newport, Northerners no longer mingled with wealthy Southern planters such as George Noble Jones. The Jones family, who had lived at Kingscote, their Gothic Revival cottage on Bellevue Avenue, since 1839, left the city at the outbreak of the Civil War and never returned.

On the Continent Van Rensselaer spent only a few summers with her uncle in Newport. In 1868 George Griswold retired from the shipping business and moved his family to Dresden, in what is now Germany. A great-niece of Van Rensselaer claimed that Mrs. Griswold discovered her husband was having an affair, packed up the family, and moved them to Europe. Van Rensselaer was seventeen in May when she sailed to Brest on a new ocean liner; the family stayed in Paris for six weeks and summered in Switzerland.5 In Paris, the Second Empire of Napoleon III was in its closing years, and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann was still at work opening wide new streets. The younger Griswolds were excited by the changing of the guard in front of the Tuileries Palace and by the daily carriage drive of the lovely Empress Eugénie. The Champs Elysées was the great pleasure ground of Paris; the Griswolds could drive their carriage on the avenue in the late afternoon to the Bois de Boulogne to witness the display of high fashion and elegant équipages on a circuit around the lower lake. Slightly larger than New York’s Central Park, the Bois de Boulogne was a grand wooded area with walks, drives, a cascade, and two lakes for pleasure boating. The Griswolds remained for six weeks in Paris — the beginning of Van Rensselaer’s continental education in painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape gardening.6 After summering in Switzerland, the Griswolds settled in Dresden, the beautiful capital city of the Electorate and Kingdom of Saxony. Offering a diversity of advantages including works of art and music, Dresden was one of Europe’s most popular capitals. With its fine bridge across the river Elbe connecting the old and new towns, the city was reputed to be the “Northern Florence.” An American student at the nearby Freiburg Mining Academy 8

The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer

Le Bois de Boulogne, Paris. (From H. Jäger, Gartenkunst und Gärten Sonst und Jetzt, 1888)

Main view of Dresden, Germany, from the Körner House, n.d. (Courtesy of www.old-map-blog.com)

remembered that an entire section of Dresden, called the English quarter, was occupied by American and English expatriates, with a sprinkling of Russians.7 Many prominent individuals and families were among the ranks of the over one thousand Americans residing in and around the city. Descended from one of the oldest colonial families in New England, the expatriate Mr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, his wife, and his son, John Singer Sargent, spent the winter of 1871–72 in Dresden. The artist was only sixteen, and although Van Rensselaer later wrote extensively about Sargent’s work, the social contact 9

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between them was likely minimal, if any. Mariana turned twenty-one that winter and married Schuyler Van Rensselaer (who was descended from the Dutch New York Van Rensselaers) the following year.8 Van Rensselaer received her early cultural education in Dresden’s museums, galleries, and music venues. The Dresden Gallery was full of the best works of the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French masters, including Correggio, Rubens, Poussin, and Claude. The museum also had a collection of over 350,000 engravings and drawings, arranged according to the great epochs in the history of art. Van Rensselaer later wrote about Dresden’s Green Vault of the Royal Palace, with its unequaled collection of precious stones and works of art in amber, ivory, silver, and gold.9 The city was one of Europe’s musical centers in the nineteenth century. With her brother Frank, Van Rensselaer frequently attended Dresden’s celebrated Royal Opera House, where they heard the early works of Richard Wagner. Music was all important to Van Rensselaer and her brother; she believed that music was “the characteristic art of [the] century,” and Frank later became the director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She would travel to Bayreuth in the summer of 1882 to hear Wagner’s Parsifal, writing about the production for Harper’s.10 Van Rensselaer took full advantage not only of Dresden’s but also of other continental cities’ rich cultural offerings, becoming fluent in French and German and fluent in the requisite languages of art, architecture, and landscape criticism. The first twenty-two years of her privileged life figured large in her future profession; her taste in the highest forms of art was fashioned early in the opera houses, museums, and parks of Europe, and she frequently returned to these familiar cities to write about music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape gardening.

A Continental Education Three years before Van Rensselaer left for Europe, education for women in the United States became slightly more promising. In 1865 Matthew Vassar founded the first women’s college, for he was determined to make the education of females equal to that of males. Yet by 1870, only two-fifths of the 582 colleges and universities in the United States admitted women. Opponents of women’s higher education presented arguments ranging 10

The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer

from the physiological (study diverted blood from reproductive organs) to the sociological (women did not belong in the world of men). Over twenty years after the founding of Vassar College, and ten years after Van Rensselaer began her writing career, an article appeared in Century that asked the question “Shall Women Go to College?” The author, E. R. Sill, believed in the advantage of two completely intelligent and rational sexes yet enumerated the reasons to deny women the birthright of a liberal education. Opponents felt that it was not good for a woman to know too much, for it made trouble in the family — a woman needed only sweet sensibilities and the capacity to gaze upon the males of her household with wonder, love, and awe. Van Rensselaer disagreed; she believed that higher education rightly pursued would not make women “pedants, prudes, prigs or blue-stockings, shrews, amazons or hard, cold, semi-masculine monstrosities.” She saw higher education as a foundation for the activities of  life.11 Given these conditions in the United States, Van Rensselaer was fortunate in her upbringing. What is known and what can be inferred about her education during her five years abroad and in subsequent years comes from her personal correspondence and published writings. In “Artist and Amateur,” the first of her essays to appear in the American Art Review, she afforded glimpses into her continental education in the fine arts and told of her experiences in European museums, concert halls, theaters, and churches.12 As a young woman in Europe, Van Rensselaer discovered that intense preparation and study were required to appreciate high art, especially painting. When she first visited galleries, she could give no reasonable explanation for the sense of pleasure she experienced in the presence of the artwork  — the names of the masters carried only a vague impression of renown. She soon learned to organize the genres in a rough order, and after much reading, she gradually built solid, informed opinions. From the German art historian Karl Schnaase, who wrote one of the first historical surveys of the history of art, she absorbed the theoretical foundations of art history.13 One of Van Rensselaer’s first readings was the work of Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson. A professional woman writer, Mrs. Jameson championed expansion of women’s opportunities for work in the mid-nineteenth century and challenged entrenched prejudices against women in the arts. She was one of the first women to attain international recognition as a critic, and her 11

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many books outlined an educational path for women that went beyond the course established by men.14 A look at Mrs. Jameson’s two-volume Sacred and Legendary Art (1848) allows one to understand how Van Rensselaer benefited from her instruction. Mrs. Jameson wrote: “We cannot look round a picture gallery, we cannot turn over a portfolio of prints after the old masters . . . without perceiving how many of the most celebrated productions of Art . . . represent incidents and characters taken from the once popular legends of the Catholic Church.” She regretted that art’s associations had been forgotten or outgrown —  that for many, the arrow-pierced Sebastian spoke of nothing more than line, correct drawing, and color. Without the basis of this knowledge, she argued, works of art offered little pleasure and improvement.15 Armed with these teachings, Van Rensselaer could appreciate the iconography in paintings such as Correggio’s La Notte, which hung in the Dresden Gallery. And when she wrote on church architecture in the 1890s, Van Rensselaer easily recognized and explained iconographic schemes —  for example, how a portal represented the hopes and terrors inspired by the prospect of the Judgment Day.16 From Mrs. Jameson, Van Rensselaer turned to John Ruskin. Because he became associated in her mind with the assertion that the test of truth in landscape art was a literal fidelity to nature, she denounced his art criticism repeatedly throughout her career. Ruskin’s first book, Modern Painters, had been published in England in 1843 after years of controversy over the paintings of  J. M. W. Turner. Because Ruskin established his reputation by vindicating Turner against his critics (he believed that Turner was the only landscape painter to share his scrupulous sense of literal truth), it is no surprise that Turner also came under Van Rensselaer’s fire. She wrote, “Painters who train their wrists often need not train much else, — as witness Turner.”17 The American artist and cofounder of the Crayon, William James Stillman, likewise wrote that Ruskin’s art criticism was “radically and irretrievably wrong.” He observed that Ruskin’s own work, his teaching in his art classes, and the application of his own standards to all works of art showed that he understood “fidelity to nature” to mean an adherence to physical facts and to the scientific aspects of nature. Another critic of the naturalistic school phrased it more bluntly: “I don’t think any landscape right which is merely a reflection of what any Philistine may see.”18 12

The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer

Yet the art historian Roger B. Stein comments that even after the 1860s, when critics and artists began to attack Ruskin’s theories of art, he could not be ignored or forgotten. This was true for Van Rensselaer — she did not discount Ruskin’s intellectual and moral influence. In 1888, she linked Ruskin to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle and praised their stimulating effect upon many of the younger generation in America. A year later, however, she proclaimed, “The first froth of Ruskin’s influence has blown away.”19 Scholars of Victorian literature usually divide into admirers of either Ruskin or the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold. Van Rensselaer sided with Arnold. Shortly after his death in 1888, Van Rensselaer wrote that she owed more to Arnold’s Literature and Dogma (1873) than to any book in the world, save “the great Book with which it so largely deals.” Literature and Dogma concerned the opposition between faith and reason, Arnold quarreling with “the orthodox view that . . . the essence of faith is ‘to take on trust what perplexes the reason.’ ”20 In the late nineteenth century, Arnold was arguably the most significant disseminator of attitudes about culture, which he defined as “the study and pursuit of perfection.” He divided English society into three classes: barbarians, philistines, and populace; he believed the great bulk of Americans were philistines. Supposedly, by dint of repetition in his essays, Arnold imported the word philistine into English — Van Rensselaer often used the word.21 As much as she admired Arnold, Van Rensselaer challenged his views. Responding to an article by Arnold in Nineteenth Century, she faulted him for his pronouncements on American art and the conditions of American civilization that affected art. He found America lacking in beauty: in its landscape, cities, architecture, literature, and art. Van Rensselaer countered with a long list of American accomplishments, including its success in the once preeminently English art of landscape gardening, as well as the existence of the popular journal Garden and Forest, which was largely devoted to the subject.22 Van Rensselaer also read the French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, whom American critics, writers, and educators considered a good counterbalance to Ruskin. In 1870 the naturalist John Burroughs wrote that Taine, as a critic of art, was clearer, more consistent, and more cosmopolitan than Ruskin. A year later, the first director of  Yale’s School of  Fine Arts, John F. 13

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Weir, compared the subjective, moral aspects of Ruskin to Taine’s objective, sensuous idea of art.23 Given the evidence of her writings, Van Rensselaer read Taine’s The Philosophy of Art (1865). John Durand, the son of the landscape painter Asher B. Durand, had translated the course of lectures that Taine offered in 1864 at the École des Beaux Arts. Detailing the merits of Taine’s approach to art theory, Durand wrote that Taine emancipated students of art as well as amateurs from an exclusive adherence to particular schools, masters, or epochs and that this method tended to render criticism less capricious because it dictated no conventional standard of judgment.24 In Philosophy of Art, Taine lay down a rule that “in order to comprehend a work of art, an artist or a group of artists, we must clearly comprehend the general social and intellectual condition (or milieu) of the times to which they belong.” Taine’s name was linked to this formula of race, milieu, and moment; to him, a work of art was never an isolated phenomenon.25 Van Rensselaer brought this formula to bear in her Garden and Forest series of historical essays on the art of gardening. She believed that “facts of race” explained the difference in sensibilities toward nature and that gardening, like its sister arts, illustrated the fundamental characteristics of each nation. She also looked at gardening “as an individual and independent manifestation of the artistic instinct.”26 Another approach that Van Rensselaer adopted from Taine was the socalled modern method of studying works of art, which he understood as a science that neither pardoned nor proscribed but rather verified and explained. Taine thought his duty was to offer facts and to show how these facts were produced. He compared the “moral science” of studying works of art to the natural science of botany; he believed in having sympathy for all forms of art and for all schools just as a botanist studied all trees with equal interest. This method did not judge one art as vulgar and prize another and left students free to follow their own predilections. Yet Taine was partial to the art of ancient Greece, deeming it the ideal model against which to measure the accomplishments of succeeding epochs. This empathy for classical sculpture limited his interest in and admiration for other forms of art.27 Ideas from Philosophy of Art were apparent when Van Rensselaer addressed recent efforts in American architecture in a nine-part series for Century. Taine stated his aim: “Our [aesthetic system] is modern, and dif14

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fers from the ancient, inasmuch as it is historic, and not dogmatic; that is to say, it imposes no precepts, but ascertains and verifies laws.” Van Rensselaer similarly explained: “My aim . . . is chiefly to show what is actually being built in various departments of the art. . . . Whatever considerations of a theoretical or prophetical sort I may have to advance,— they will not be many nor dogmatic.” Like Taine, however, Van Rensselaer had her preferences. In her mind, H. H. Richardson and the firm of McKim, Mead & White produced some of the best architecture in America.28 Writing later about landscape gardening in Art Out-of-Doors (1893), Van Rensselaer pointed out the narrowness and injustice of garden books that could not see any merit in the opposite style, whether naturalistic or formal. Noting that each system of design had its own place, she reiterated that there was no real opposition between the two styles. Her contemporary Charles A. Platt led the American revival of the Italian garden in the 1890s, and however firmly Van Rensselaer sided with Frederick Law Olmsted and the naturalistic, she appreciated both styles. In 1912, after visiting Miss Ellen Mason’s house and garden in Newport, she wrote to a friend that the place was “literally, perfect.” The site included an English park with broad stretches of greensward, groups of trees and masses of shrubbery, a beautiful view of the sea, and formal gardens around the house.29 There is a further overlap between Taine and Van Rensselaer: their interest in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Taine lectured five years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. His reference to Darwin’s law of natural selection was central to his idea that “the work of art is determined by an aggregate which is the general state of the mind and surrounding manners.” Taine urged students to open their eyes to see the change going on in the condition and minds of men. Discoveries in the sciences, including geology, organic chemistry, physics, and zoology, were multiplying daily — a change so profound and rapid that no other century had witnessed the like.30 Studies of nineteenth-century science and American women of letters validate Taine’s observations. Scholars have found that even before the Civil War, the sciences figured more prominently in popular discourse than they do now because they were vital to national progress. Women, as well as men, shared in the enthusiasm: there were scientific articles in general women’s magazines and a proliferation of science books directed specifically 15

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at women. A large number of women (Van Rensselaer included) attended public lectures on science. Many upper-class women organized informal clubs or study groups, and botany was a favorite topic of inquiry. After Van Rensselaer’s death, a friend remembered her special knowledge of botany.31 The evolutionary theories of Darwin influenced Van Rensselaer as they did other nineteenth-century artists, poets, novelists, and historians. “The remarkable thing about Darwinism,” the historian of science Charles E. Rosenberg writes, “is not the conflict it inspired, but — considering its implications — the lack of conflict.” After the scientific community’s comparatively rapid acknowledgment of Darwinism, most educated Americans accepted it within a short time.32 David E. Shi proposes that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “the evolutionary theories of Darwin and [Herbert] Spencer furnished writers of realistic fiction with compelling analogies and a new vocabulary.” Science articles outnumbered works of fiction, travel, and history-biography in the literary monthly Galaxy, and in 1873 a contributor reflected on the coverage of Darwinism in journals: “Not only does all physical research take color from the new theory, but the doctrine sends its pervasive lines through poetry, novels, [and] history. . . . Journalism is dyed so deep with it that the favorite logic of the leading article is ‘survival of the fittest,’ and the favorite jest is ‘sexual selection.’ ”33 Van Rensselaer’s writing career was just beginning in 1877, when the North American Review announced “The Triumph of Darwinism.” A leader in the fight for evolution in America, John Fiske wrote: “It is not often that the propounder of a new and startling scientific theory has lived to see his daring innovations accepted by the scientific world in general.” According to Fiske, in the years since Origin of Species appeared in 1859, the theory of natural selection had won a complete and overwhelming victory. For the great body of naturalists, Darwinism had become “part and parcel” of their daily thought and an element in every investigation.34 Today, Darwin has overshadowed the German natural historian Alexander von Humboldt, who reached the height of his popularity in the 1850s. Yet both men equally influenced Van Rensselaer’s work. From Darwin, Van Rensselaer acquired a new way of seeing and understanding nature and a 16

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new vocabulary. With Humboldt she had a more complex relationship, arguing against his views on art yet greatly respecting his scientific discoveries and insights. Darwin called Humboldt the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived. Before leaving on his historic voyage on the Beagle in 1831, Darwin read Humboldt thoroughly and the following year recorded that “he alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised on first entering the tropics.” He later recalled: “Nothing stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative.” The older man’s work had a profound effect on Darwin’s method of working — Humboldt blended the empirical and the imaginative, as did Darwin’s Origin of Species.35 From 1799 to 1804, Alexander von Humboldt collected an impressive mass of scientific data during an expedition through South America with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. Lavishly illustrated volumes on their travels were published in French; the first, Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes, appeared in Paris in 1805. This monograph is best known for its iconic crosssectional profile of South America that illustrates the zoned occurrence of different plants at different altitudes. Although other naturalists had noted the altitudes for zones of vegetation in the Alps and elsewhere, Humboldt used instruments to measure not only altitude but also temperature and air pressure. He developed a special graphic tool to accurately represent horizontal ranges: to map plant associations, he drew the limits of vegetation on the profiles of the mountain ranges (as shown in his “Tableau physiques des Andes et Pays voisins”). Another instance of his innovative illustrations was the depiction of the distribution of heat across the Northern hemisphere, which he called “isothermal lines.” In several editorials, Van Rensselaer referred to isothermal lines to elaborate on what colors were appropriate for latitudes ranging from Holland to England to Italy.36 Two of Humboldt’s books shaped the way that Van Rensselaer thought about nature and landscape. Published in English in 1849, Aspects of Nature sought “to indicate the unfailing influence of external nature on the feelings, the moral dispositions, and the destinies of man.” The book consisted of a series of descriptions of the magnificent landscapes and natural phenomena Humboldt witnessed on his travels. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (1849) was the culmination of Humboldt’s distinguished 17

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“Tableau physiques des Andes et Pays voisins.” (From Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes, 1799–1803; Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society)

career. This multivolume description of the physical universe surveyed the state of scientific thinking in fields as varied as astronomy, geology, geography, and botany.37 A protégé of Alexander von Humboldt, the Swiss-born paleontologist Louis Agassiz began his career in 1848 as a professor at Harvard’s new Lawrence Scientific School, where he lectured on zoology and geology and directed the labs. Although Van Rensselaer did not refer to Agassiz in her writings, his story is critical to an understanding of American science in the last half of the nineteenth century. He was a pivotal figure in the Darwin controversy and was an associate of the renowned botanist Asa Gray and the geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, both cited by Van Rensselaer.38 Asa Gray was a colleague of Agassiz at the Lawrence Scientific School. He was one of Darwin’s American correspondents and the most prolific and active of the pro-Darwin scientists in the United States. Agassiz and Gray found themselves in opposite camps in the Darwin battle, for Agassiz dismissed Origin of Species as a collection of “marvelous bear, cuckoo, and other 18

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stories.” Species were the products of thoughts in the mind of God, Agassiz argued, and he offered an alternative theory of sequential creation. His view of the biological cosmos remained fixed: God made each species separately out of nothing, put an end to it when he saw fit, and then substituted a new species in its place — the orthodox pre-evolutionist view.39 Van Rensselaer’s husband, Schuyler, had a connection with these scientists, for he attended Harvard from 1863 to 1867, during the years when Agassiz was battling with Gray. His attendance also corresponded to the time when Agassiz hired the young geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler to work with him in his laboratory at the Lawrence Scientific School. Shaler taught paleontology and geology at Harvard for almost forty years, at times teaching extramural courses on practical geology in the School of Mining. Schuyler was studying to be a mining engineer, and after graduation, he attended Columbia College School of Mines in New York for one year before continuing his studies from 1868 to 1871 in Freiberg, Saxony. The Freiberg Mining School interested Shaler, who visited in early 1868 on a tour of the continent. In his autobiography, Shaler recorded a courteous reception by the professors in Freiberg but did not mention meeting an American named Schuyler Van Rensselaer.40 According to Rebecca Bedell, through much of the nineteenth century, geology was the most fashionable science in America. The ranks of geological devotees included artists, art critics, and art patrons, who tended to move in elite social circles. Van Rensselaer shared this general enthusiasm for geology; she wrote that even a little knowledge of geology granted a new sharpness to the eye and broadened one’s sense of the beauty of rock and soil formations. She recommended Shaler’s Aspects of the Earth: A Popular Account of Some Familiar Geological Phenomena (1889) to her readers in 1893. Because both published in the Atlantic throughout the 1880s, Van Rensselaer undoubtedly became familiar with Shaler’s other articles and books at an earlier time. His First Book of Geology (1884) promoted the Darwinian theory and contained a warning that an awareness of nature had to come from the student’s own eyes and mind.41 Aspects of the Earth was a more advanced treatment of the subject. Shaler selected topics that he felt would appeal to “intelligent people”; chapters, for example, were titled “Volcanoes” and “Forests of North America” (addressing the evil effects of deforestation, the effects of fire, and the economic 19

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value of forests). Shaler believed that the taste for nature is slowly acquired: to attain the spirit of a naturalist, a person must proceed gradually from familiar experiences to individual sympathies.42 Despite Van Rensselaer’s experiences and sympathies, she called herself a desultory observer — not a “conscientiously scientific student.” Her pieces in Garden and Forest, however, show a depth of understanding of the natural sciences that went beyond amateurism. She wrote about the flora and geology in many places, including Buzzard’s Bay and Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island. And in her art criticism, she was scathing when a painter did not demonstrate even a proficient level of knowledge about the natural world. When she reviewed an exhibit of flower and fruit paintings at the Academy of Design, she remarked: “As for Mr. John F. Weir’s large picture of Peonies, it quite deserves that an action for libel be brought against it.”43 Ruskin’s criticism of scientific botany was yet another reason for Van Rensselaer to dismiss him. She challenged the belief that scientific knowledge was deadly to artistic or poetic feeling and believed that a close examination of floral structures was well worth many hours of even a busy person’s time, for it revealed the hidden recesses where the great work of reproduction goes on. Ruskin bemoaned the tearing to pieces of the living plant and was saddened by the curiosity that sought to explain “every possible spur, spike . . . filth, or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism.” He wanted nothing to do with the frenzy for the investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants and warned young girls against “all study of floral genesis and digestion.”44 In an 1883 essay for the North American Review entitled “Science and the Imagination,” literary critic Thomas Sergeant Perry observed: “Certain lovers of letters are alarmed at the advance of science and seem to fear that, unless extraordinary precautions are taken, the imagination will expire like the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.” He believed that science encouraged a precision of thought and became a habit that showed itself in even purely literary work. Like Van Rensselaer, Perry thought that science fed rather than blighted the imagination.45 Van Rensselaer revisited the idea of science and the imagination in an article for Garden and Forest. She wrote about Adalbert von Chamisso, 20

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popular as a poet in Germany and known in translation in other countries for the fairy tale Peter Schlemihl. Van Rensselaer informed her readers that Chamisso was also an accomplished man of science and a friend and colleague of Alexander von Humboldt. In 1815 he was appointed as resident naturalist on a voyage of exploration to discover a Northeast Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. The voyage lasted three years, and Chamisso visited lands little known to science, including Tenerife, Brazil, the Sandwich Islands, and California. Van Rensselaer wrote: “Under difficulties even greater than those which, fifteen years later, embarrassed Darwin during his voyage around the world, Chamisso, like Darwin, worked diligently in many branches of science.” Zoology, geology, and anthropology engaged Chamisso’s attention, and Van Rensselaer described the extent of his talents to show that the poet was also a scientific man of much distinction.46 Van Rensselaer also admired Henry David Thoreau, who had interests in common with Chamisso. He was a “poet-naturalist,” according to his friend and biographer Ellery Channing. Nina Baum writes that among the transcendentalists, Thoreau was the most seriously concerned with the question of science because he was the most dedicated to a life in nature. Thoreau constantly elucidated his approach to nature by contrasts and parallels to science. He read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species shortly after their publication.47 Van Rensselaer did not mention specific works by Thoreau, but a piece she wrote for Garden and Forest in October 1897 has ideas in common with an essay prepared for publication by Thoreau immediately before his death in 1862. Both Van Rensselaer’s “Some Questions of Color” and Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints” combine lyrical descriptions of autumnal American forests and scientific questions about seasonal changes. Thoreau noted, “If you undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.” In New York rather than at Walden Pond, Van Rensselaer witnessed an astonishing diversity of tints, including copper, gold, dusky purple, plum, orange-red, scarlet, flaming red, old rose, and crimson.48 Thoreau carefully recorded the date (from August through October) of each shift in color and addressed so-called facts about the change. He cited a physiologist who believed the change was due to an increased absorption 21

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of oxygen. Yet for Thoreau, greater interest lay “in the rosy cheek [of the maiden]”— not in knowing her particular diet. Baum explains this conflict: “[Thoreau’s] late journals are at once more scientific in content and more opposed to science in comment.”49 Van Rensselaer, on the other hand, retained her belief that science enlarged her sphere of observation — she wished to be the sort of scientific observer who could explore the laws of plant growth and work out the riddle of the apparently lawless variations. For instance, when Van Rensselaer picked up an ash leaf, she wanted to know why surfaces exposed to the light were a soft plum color, while the hidden surfaces were a clear yellow. Van Rensselaer, in contrast to Thoreau, did not think it necessary to resolve the dichotomy between subjective interpretation and objective reporting.50 Like Van Rensselaer’s approach, Richard Jefferies’s physical vision combined the subjective with the objective and linked imaginative realism with profound simplicity. And like Thoreau, Jefferies was considered a poetnaturalist. He came into prominence in England in the late 1870s, fifteen years after Thoreau’s death, and over a period of twenty-two years, he produced numerous books and periodical essays. Samuel J. Looker writes that Jefferies seemed to possess a natural delight in the mere naming of things.51 Although Van Rensselaer thought Jefferies a charming painter of the outdoor world, she criticized his refusal to turn to books to learn the names of plants. She found passages in his 1885 essay “Wild Flowers” contradictory. Jefferies wrote that his first conscious thought about wildflowers was to find out their names, but he refused to take a manual of botany out in the field. His lack of elementary scientific knowledge was a loss of an excellent opportunity, Van Rensselaer wrote, and she reminded readers that materials for the study of botany were readily available. She admitted that for her, identifying plants was “quite as amusing and a great deal easier than the reading of verbal puzzles.”52 Van Rensselaer discovered more lessons on botany and geology and references to Darwin in the writings of the American naturalist John Burroughs. Burroughs’s Atlantic essay “A Taste of Maine Birch,” purportedly about camping and fly-fishing for trout, described the geology of Bald Mountain and the botanical specimens along the shores of Maine’s Moxie Lake.53 The most appealing plant of Burroughs’s trip, growing in marshy places near Moxie Lake, bore the common name of horned bladderwort. The most 22

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notable thing about the flower was its rich fragrance, the strongest perfume Burroughs had ever found in a wildflower. Whereas Van Rensselaer found Gray’s Manual of Botany full of information, Burroughs criticized the book for neglecting to mention the fragrance of the Utricularia — “as if one should describe the lark and forget its song.”54 In “Nature and the Poets,” this time for Scribner’s, Burroughs offered his version of the relationship between science and imagination. He greatly admired Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and believed no poet had studied American nature more closely. Burroughs cited Whitman’s description of moonlight, “The vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue,” to illustrate Whitman’s talent for inserting a bit of natural history here and there to help locate and define his position. Although Whitman imbued his seas and woods with passion, Burroughs found his work to be entirely consistent with the sciences of botany, geology, and astronomy. Burroughs emphasized that science had not only laws but also meaning: “What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet’s passion, and comes back to us supplemented by his quality and genius. He gives more than he takes, always.” Like Van Rensselaer, Burroughs found that science does not mar nature: “Study of nature deepens the mystery and the charm because it removes the horizon farther off. We cease to fear, perhaps, but how can one cease to marvel and to love?”55 An unfailingly curious woman emerges in this brief account of  Van Rensselaer’s early life and of the men and women who contributed to her education. She did not cease to marvel and to learn about the arts, and she embraced science for what it added to her understanding of nature. The private and the public woman cannot be separated, just as in Van Rensselaer’s eyes the art of landscape gardening could not be separated from painting, sculpture, and architecture. Her evolution as a landscape critic was a natural outcome of her interests and skill: Van Rensselaer’s professional writing career began early in 1876 and moved effortlessly from art to architecture to landscape gardening.

23

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t

y

The American Art Review was sumptuous in relation to the standard late-nineteenth-century magazine, with original etchings and wood-engraved reproductions of drawings created especially for the magazine. During its brief two-year run (1879 to 1881), it was the most important art publication of its day in the United States, and its editor, Sylvester Rosa Koehler, an internationally known scholar of the graphic arts, commissioned reviews and articles from the best available critics. Among his contributors was Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, who was then, according to one art historian, “perhaps the most perceptive and articulate writer on art in America.” When she wrote to Koehler in the fall of 1881 bemoaning the collapse of his magazine, Van Rensselaer grumbled that she could not imagine “what we poor little scribblers are now to do with our few ideas.” The other “scribblers” included John Durand (the coeditor of the Crayon) and William H. Bishop, a practiced art journalist. She added: “Now my best opportunity for doing good work has been taken away.”1 Van Rensselaer’s concern was unfounded. For the remainder of her long career, she wrote extensively for the most prestigious periodicals of the day: Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century, the Atlantic, and the North American Review. She continued to contribute to the New York World and to the Independent, an influential Protestant weekly in New York, and — most important for this study — began a ten-year affiliation with Garden and Forest. Although not as scholarly as her articles for the American Art Review, this later work benefited a broader public’s understanding of the arts in America. After the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, there was an upsurge of attention paid to the fine arts, and Van Rensselaer was one of the 24

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book

Emil H. Richter, Portrait of Sylvester Rosa Koehler, 1890–1900; graphite pencil, sheet 31.1 × 22.2 cm (12 ¼ × 8 ¾ in.). (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gift of Emil H. Richter, 1979.36; Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

best minds occupied with the subject. According to the art historian Lois Dinnerstein, “the late nineteenth century in America was an era of conscious professionalism in many fields. As artists and critics acquired greater expertise by virtue of travel and study abroad, they undertook the task of educating the public back home.” Van Rensselaer was one of the new breed of American critics thinking about the nature of her profession and bringing a disciplined scholarship to the craft. During this same period, American women writers and editors recognized that newspapers and journals were the most effective media to make themselves and their ideas known.2 Six years after her despairing letter to Koehler, Van Rensselaer received an appreciative note from the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted: “I am in wondering and grateful admiration of all you have written that I have seen upon landscape gardening. I want to see more.” What 25

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had occurred in those intervening years? Olmsted persuaded Van Rensselaer to write about his profession, and she ventured into landscape criticism, moving fluently from art to architecture to landscape gardening.3 Van Rensselaer’s writing career began early in 1876, after she returned from Europe with her new husband to live in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and after their only child was born in February 1875. In the 1870s, only 6 percent of women had professional occupations. Although gainful employment grew more acceptable and commonplace for young white women, the greatest percentage of their work was clerical, secretarial, or sales related: repetitive service positions at low pay, with little or no chance for advancement. Women college graduates were schoolteachers, but not principals or superintendents; men had careers, while women’s jobs were temporary. Work was something to do until marriage came along.4 Writing for Century in 1883, Janet E. Ruutz-Rees defended this notion, remarking that the real disability of most women lay in the absence of a sense of responsibility. The majority of women, she argued, would not sacrifice everything to succeed in a career, and barring this commitment, women could neither compete upon equal terms with men nor command equal wages. These cultural views and social circumstances created situations that gave the advantage to male over female writers. Van Rensselaer, however, managed to create a balance between her literary career and her household and social responsibilities — although unlike most women, she could afford a nursemaid, a personal maid, a “waitress,” and a cook.5 Van Rensselaer thought of writing as a profession and sought out intellectually challenging work. In 1879, in the first of a series of letters to the American Art Review, she explained to the publishers: “The want of such a magazine as I understand you propose to issue has forced me, in company with many others I imagine, to write articles of a more popular nature than I desired.” She was a regular correspondent for the American Architect and Building News, she told them, and a few of her pieces had appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science. These were impressive credentials — women writers on architecture did not generally publish in professional journals such as American Architect, which had an almost exclusively male readership. She told Koehler a number of times that she would much rather work for the Review, and when the magazine failed, she complained, “the driveling little art sheets will have it all their own way & 26

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Illman Brothers, “An Afternoon ‘at home,’ ”— an example of a “plague of formal calls.” (From The Peterson Magazine, 1886; Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

I cannot but think it will do serious injury to the progress of our art. I have been quite blue about the matter.”6

Society Lady and Professional Woman Van Rensselaer was not satisfied with the typical life of the upper class —  what she called the useless drudgery of society. In “The Plague of Formal Calls,” published in Scribner’s in March 1880, she protested against the absurdity of paying calls and alluded to the tedium of life in New Brunswick. It was customary at the time for a woman who moved in society to visit and to receive visits; the calls enabled society women to draw a distinction between those they did and those they did not desire to have as acquaintances. Yet, as Van Rensselaer stated, “a ceremony which is, perhaps, in its simplest form quite indispensable, may at last grow, through senseless iteration, into an intolerable burden.”7 27

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The social life of New Brunswick suffered in comparison to New York and the capitals of Europe. Abroad, women were allowed the same margin as married men: they could leave their cards and fulfill their duty in this pretend visiting. Van Rensselaer resented these social debts because of the hours required — hours that could be spent writing. She had been pursuing a writing career for four years: her objection to these calls is understandable.8 In “The Plague of Formal Calls,” Van Rensselaer summarized her complaints with a reference to Darwin’s theory of natural selection and to another more obscure idea in Origin of Species on the question of how “organs of trifling importance” could be produced by natural selection. She wrote, “Does not the fact that ‘sending cards’ is always hailed as a blessed relief, and often accepted as payment in full of one’s debts, go far to prove that visiting itself will one day be ‘eliminated by natural selection,’ or will pass, at least, from an important organ in our social body to an atrophied survival?” In the chapter “Difficulties on Theory,” Darwin asked, “Can we believe that natural selection could produce, on the one hand, organs of trifling importance, such as the tail of a giraffe, which serves as a fly-flapper, and on the other hand, organs of such wonderful structure, as the eye?” Thus, Van Rensselaer relegated formal calls to a giraffe’s tail, a social organ of trifling importance.9 Mary Warner Blanchard writes that “The Plague of Formal Calls” was a portent of Van Rensselaer’s irritability at American standards in conduct and in art. She maintained that the aim of fine art was “not to make literature or morals or mere records of one sort or another.” Van Rensselaer challenged the relationship between art and the morality of the day six years later when she wrote an appendix to the American edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, which concluded with an apologia for Kenyon Cox’s extensive use of the nude figure in his illustrations for the poem.10 Van Rensselaer was not the typical New York society woman described by the English poet and novelist Charles Hamilton Aidé after a tour of the United States: “so blithe and bird-like, twittering from subject to subject, never dull, never too long poised upon the same twig.” Although she once told Koehler that he ought to know that Americans considered women incapable of starting a business scheme of any kind, her closest female friends were among the best professionals in their chosen fields. Harriet Hubbard Ayer was a Chicago socialite who became a beauty-product entrepreneur and the editor of the women’s pages of the New York World. Dora Wheeler 28

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was one of the best-known commercial artists of the day, and her mother, Mrs. Candace Wheeler, was a textile specialist who formed her own firm, Associated Artists. Cecilia Beaux was acknowledged as one of the leading portraitists of her day. Ida Tarbell was a muckraking journalist who took on such giants as the Standard Oil Company, and Theodate Pope was an architect — almost unheard of among her female contemporaries.11 Harriet Hubbard Ayer was one of the few women of the time who managed to have a business career; she pioneered the technique of getting celebrity endorsements for her beauty products. Van Rensselaer escaped with Mrs. Ayer to Block Island in the summer of 1880. Block Island is at the eastern entrance to Long Island Sound, and summer guests were typically women and children fleeing the heat and dirt of the city. They stayed at the Ocean View Hotel, and Van Rensselaer probably brought her five-year-old son, Gris, and Mrs. Ayer her two daughters, a baby and an eleven-yearold. Both would have been accompanied by a nursemaid. The summer was meant to be a working vacation for Van Rensselaer, but Mrs. Ayer became ill, and Van Rensselaer wrote to Koehler that she had spent so much time attending her that she had not moved forward as expected with her work for the Review on William Merritt Chase.12 In August of the following year, her husband, Schuyler, an iron expert for the railway, moved the family temporarily to Cresson Springs, Pennsylvania, near the Johnstown Cambria Iron Works. (Eight years later, the iron works would be destroyed in the catastrophic Johnstown flood.) Despite the disruptions of the relocation and a lack of reference books, Van Rensselaer struggled to make progress on a Washington Allston paper for the Review. She was disappointed that Dora Wheeler could not visit, for she felt it would have been easier to work with a sympathetic friend at hand. That summer, Miss Wheeler was working on entries for two competitions, both of which won awards.13 Van Rensselaer could not have asked for a more understanding companion in these trying years of professionalization for women. Dora Wheeler was the first private pupil of William Merritt Chase after he returned to New York from Munich and Venice in 1878. Miss Wheeler eventually became the chief designer of figural compositions for Associated Artists, a wholly female enterprise led by her mother, the textile and interior designer Mrs. Candace Wheeler. 29

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William Merritt Chase, Portrait of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, 1879; oil on canvas, 48 ⅛ × 32 ¼ in. (Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, Museum Purchase, 1981.1)

Dora Wheeler overcame the nineteenth-century image of the lady painter, what Linda Nochlin describes as “the insistence upon a modest, proficient, self-demeaning level of amateurism — the looking upon art, like needlework or crocheting, as a suitable ‘accomplishment for the well-brought-up young women.’ ” A change had begun in the status of women artists: from crafts practitioners and enlightened amateurs, to fully professional, well-trained figural artists who were recognized and paid on an equal basis with men.14 Van Rensselaer first referred to Miss Wheeler in a letter to Koehler in August 1880 after visiting her at the studio of William Merritt Chase. The Tenth Street Studio Building in New York where Chase had a commodious studio was a short, comfortable excursion by train from her home in New 30

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William Merritt Chase, Portrait of Dora Wheeler, 1882–83; oil on canvas, 159 × 165.5 cm. (The Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of Mrs. Boudinot Keith in memory of  Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade, 1921.1239)

Brunswick. Van Rensselaer and Miss Wheeler met periodically throughout the autumn and became such good friends that Van Rensselaer was invited the next summer to spend a week at Nestledown, Miss Wheeler’s family home in Jamaica, Long Island.15 Two months after her visit to Nestledown, Van Rensselaer tried to settle in at Cresson Springs. Owned by the railroad, Cresson Springs was made up mainly of the Mountain House, with a cluster of dependent cottages built in a natural grove of maple trees. The Van Rensselaers lived in one of the pretty cottages with a shady porch. The little community was hospitable and had a custom of midday tea and “all-day cordiality,” but Van Rensselaer found the social life problematic. She had resolved to spend mornings writing and was not able to complete the Washington Allston paper promised to the Review.16 31

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Van Rensselaer, however, took advantage of her experiences in the heart of the Allegheny mining country to produce a two-part article for Lippincott’s. She invited lovers of the picturesque to explore the Allegheny Mountains by train from Harrisburg to Altoona, Pennsylvania, home of the iron industry. She described “vistas of the most seductive loveliness” made by narrow gaps and gorges.17 Van Rensselaer’s most animated accounts concerned the iron industry itself. Lovely mountain vistas paled in comparison to “the infernal beauty” of the Bessemer process at the Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown. Johns­ town had abundant deposits of iron ore, coal, and wood, and a water supply, and with the arrival of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1854, it became an ideal location for the Cambria Iron Works, the most extensive works in the United States at the time of Thomas Dunlap’s American Iron Trade Manual (1874), including blast furnaces, iron and steel rail rolling mills, and Bessemer works. It became one of the nation’s largest producers of rails, and as the mill grew, thousands of immigrants settled in the area to work in its steel mills and coal mines.18 When Van Rensselaer visited the mill, she was fascinated by “the noise and glare and rush of places where metal in any shape is treated hot.” She spent nights watching “the gigantic conflict between man and the brute material which he conquers and moulds to his will at last by the well-directed power of his fearful allies, flame and steam.” The topic of steam gave Van Rensselaer one more reason to disagree with John Ruskin, who did what he could to promote an aversion to steam, its processes, and its results. Van Rensselaer believed the Bessemer steel works the very apotheosis of the century, and she wished for a critic more daring than Ruskin to point out the superb picturesque qualities of steam and its imaginative and artistic side.19 Van Rensselaer divorced herself from the reality of the brutal, dangerous work below her on the floor of the steel works — she took a distant stance, observing only the scientific and aesthetic aspect of the process. She explained how a “blower” superintended the blast of air forced through the converter to bear away the carbon. The color and intensity of the immense flame enthralled her: “The colors of the liquid, almost etherealized metal in the different stages of the process are as various as they are beautiful.”20 Just as she would later be fascinated by the “murderous arrangements” of the insectivorous sundew plant, she could not tear herself away from what 32

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Men and boy wire drawers, ca. 1890 — the “exciting spectacle” of workers at the “rolls.” (Courtesy of  Johnstown Flood Museum Archives, Johnstown Area Heritage Association)

she labeled the “exciting spectacle” of a row of young boys standing ready with their tongs in front of the line of “rolls.” As the boys repeatedly passed the metal through rollers, it became longer and more treacherous to the operator. During one record night the Cambria Iron Works made 210,800 pounds of steel. The dangerous pace that Van Rensselaer observed on the floor was the result of the effort to keep up maximum production in a work week of six days and five nights. Van Rensselaer stayed far into the night to watch the activity, admitting that a sense of personal danger added spice to her enjoyment: “Accidents to the rollers seem always imminent. . . . An end of wire missed by the tongs means, very likely, a hole through arm or body.”21 Van Rensselaer’s description of the scene is a far cry from “Life in the Iron Mills,” a story published in the Atlantic twenty years earlier by Rebecca Harding Davis. One of the characters who toils in the rolling mill of Davis’s story is a young furnace tender already grown consumptive. Davis invited her readers: “take no heed of your clean clothes, and come right down with me — here into the thickest fog and mud and effluvia.”22 33

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John Mitchell, who began work in an Illinois coal mine at the age of twelve, one year earlier than allowed by state law, wrote about his experience under conditions similar to those in the Pennsylvania camps. Low pay and long work days were exacerbated by squalid conditions where workers ate and slept. Life in the mining camp was dangerous as well as dreary, and death underground was a daily occurrence. The boys whom Van Rensselaer observed led equally grim lives, and many were as young as John Mitchell.23 Van Rensselaer was not entirely immune to the plight of the miners; in the second part of her article for Lippincott’s, she wrote about their monotonous existence with its bad food, hard labor, and insufficient shelter. She could not know then that the disease that would kill her husband three years after their stay in Cresson Springs had its origin in the conditions of the Cambrian mines. At thirty-eight, Schuyler would die of capillary bronchitis, a lung disease caused by coal dust.24 In an account of her husband’s life and work, Van Rensselaer recalled the intense sympathy Schuyler had felt with individuals of the working class —  those of “humbler birth” with whom he came in contact. Van Rensselaer’s social position and deep affection for her husband are apparent in her naive recounting. She reminisced that although he was a strict and exacting inspector for the railroad company, he was always looked upon as a friend. She alluded to the industrial unrest that pervaded the country: “if men of his station more commonly shared his brotherly attitude towards those of lower station, the greater problem of our day would be much more hopefully near solution.” In the following years, alarm and anger grew on both sides of the capital-labor issue.25

Family Duties The account of Schuyler’s life also told of the long and frequent journeys his job necessitated. Such separation between home and business became more frequent and typical during the country’s industrialization, resulting in a shift in the control of economic resources away from the home. Males worked in the marketplace, and women and children remained at home in a more subordinate and dependent position. This division of labor held true for the Van Rensselaers. From New Jersey, Schuyler commuted to his office in New York and often traveled to the company headquarters in Chicago 34

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and even farther afield to California and Canada. At home, Van Rensselaer cared for her son and wrote intermittently — or so she claimed.26 In reality, Van Rensselaer seems to have had a high degree of independence. She took frequent trips to New York, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia to interview artists and to see exhibitions, and she spent a summer in Europe with her son while Schuyler was traveling in the western United States. Her productivity during her marriage also belies the assertion that she relied on time taken at odd hours; she was the art critic for the New York World and published in Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, Harper’s, and Century; she wrote more than fifty articles for the American Architect and Building News in addition to scholarly pieces for the American Art Review. Yet when financial exigencies threatened the American Art Review in 1881, Van Rensselaer turned down Koehler’s proposal to establish a successor to the Review in New York. Although she had always been interested in editorial management and was confident that she could be a valuable staff member, she demurred: “Even if a periodical were established in New York it would be impossible for me to take even a subordinate place in its office. You imply that I have much time at my command. So I have, but it is time that cannot be regularly given to any work at fixed hours or in a fixed place. As is the case with almost all of my sex I have family duties which must take precedence of all others.”27 Van Rensselaer told Koehler that, as a married woman, she was necessarily limited in her activities. She understood that the case was different for a woman who was the primary breadwinner — but Van Rensselaer had a husband to work for her, although she admitted that any money she made was a welcome addition to the household funds. Another reason Van Rensselaer refused to consider Koehler’s offer was the nature of her husband’s job: not only did he travel frequently, but it was possible the family could move to Chicago or farther west. Another excuse was her variable health: Van Rensselaer was laid up with severe asthma every spring, and she could not pledge herself to a full-time job.28 In spite of her many justifications for not accepting the offer, Van Rensselaer admitted to Koehler in a postscript that his proposition had fired her imagination: “but I fear that will be all the good it will do me.” To add weight to her rationalization, it is likely that she embroidered the tales of her husband’s extreme displeasure. Schuyler may well have discouraged her 35

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from working too hard, but it is doubtful that he threatened in all seriousness to “smash the type-writer.”29 Van Rensselaer and Koehler kept up a steady correspondence after the demise of the American Art Review. “Your approbation has done more than anything else to encourage me to persevere,” she wrote in 1881, and her gratitude turned into a warm friendship. They shared an interest in American etching, and on her frequent visits to Boston to see exhibitions, Van Rensselaer became better acquainted with Koehler, who had become the curator of prints at the Museum of Fine Arts.30 Before she left with her son for a summer abroad in 1882, Koehler made a list of recommended artworks to view in Dresden. In July, Van Rensselaer wrote to him that physically she had not been so well in years and that she was enjoying the lovely cool weather and the company of her two sisters. She had visited Paris and was on her way to Bayreuth to gather material for an article for Harper’s. She closed with the news that Gris was well and enjoying himself except when he thought of his father and the dog. Three weeks after she returned, she wrote to Koehler, saying how much she had enjoyed her holiday, “especially the Wagner music which is better than all the pictures in the world.” She confessed to him that as much as she loved Germany, she no longer wished to go back there to live: “One has on this side of the water an idea that everything is ahead of one instead of behind & that is more inspiring — enough so to almost make up for all one certainly misses.”31 During the remaining years of her marriage, Van Rensselaer wrote regularly for newspapers and magazines. Her long relationship with Century and its editor, Richard Watson Gilder, began in 1882; she was one of a number of women authors and poets, including Mary Hallock Foote and Emma Lazarus, who contributed articles to Gilder’s magazine. Paul A. Kramer labels Century a genteel Anglo-American literary-political magazine that brought together literate, English-speaking Americans with common affiliations and reference points.32 Like Van Rensselaer, Frederick Law Olmsted had a connection with Century’s editor and was part of the genteel set that wrote for the magazine. Although she and Olmsted had friends and interests in common, they did not meet until the fall of 1883. In September of that year, Van Rensselaer returned home from a stay with Mrs. Candace Wheeler, whom Olmsted 36

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William M. Van der Weyde, Richard Watson Gilder, ca. 1905 negative, gelatin on glass, 8.5 × 6.5 in. (Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)

had known since 1858. Van Rensselaer was among the “delightful friends” Wheeler entertained the first summer at Pennyroyal, her newly christened rustic cabin located in Tannersville in the Catskills. The previous spring, Mrs. Wheeler and her brother had taken a train from New York to roam in the Catskills, finding a site that offered distant, misty views of the Hudson Valley and the Berkshire Mountains. They had built two houses side by side at the top of the lower slope of the mountain, where they could “live the wild life” away from the strains of the city.33 Several weeks after her stay in the Catskills, Van Rensselaer wrote to Olmsted for the first time. She referred to Henry Adams, another shared acquaintance, who had spoken to Olmsted earlier in the summer about an article for Century assigned to Van Rensselaer. She wanted to talk with Olmsted about 37

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Henry Hobson Richardson in monk’s robes, n.d. (Glessner House Museum, Chicago, IL)

his collaborative projects with Henry Hobson Richardson for an upcoming series entitled “Recent Architecture in America.” She was planning a trip to Brookline, Massachusetts, to interview Richardson, and she requested a meeting with Olmsted, who lived near the architect’s home office.34 In the first of her nine-part series on architecture for Century, Van Rensselaer reviewed a number of Richardson’s works, including the Ames Memorial Library and the Town Hall in North Easton, Massachusetts. Olm­sted had assisted in the design of the connecting grounds and terraces of these two buildings. Van Rensselaer recognized the importance of the relationship between architecture and landscape gardening, and she commended the skillful results of the project, calling it one of the most delight38

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Ames Memorial Library, North Easton, Massachusetts. (From Century Magazine 28, May 1884)

ful groups of harmonious yet contrasting works in America. She believed that in regard to structure, architecture could take a lesson from nature: to be expressive or delightful, a structure must be a whole, with such unity and harmony among parts that a single coherent impression is the result.35 The architectural historian Margaret Henderson Floyd writes that the mature, organic qualities of Richardson’s buildings began to appear in the 1880s as the vision and influence of Olmsted began to coincide with his own. Olmsted undoubtedly noted with approval Van Rensselaer’s call to architects to build appropriately with regard to the nature of the site; he generally found architects unsympathetic to the natural environment of their buildings.36 39

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“A Million Miles Away” A break in Van Rensselaer’s correspondence with Olmsted occurred after her husband’s death on 7 March 1884. At the end of the month, she went to stay with Mrs. Wheeler at Nestledown and wrote to her former editor and now friend Koehler, “I am not very strong yet but find that it is better to exert myself than to do nothing.” But soon, another tragedy struck when her father died unexpectedly in Dresden, and she prepared to leave on an extended stay abroad. Van Rensselaer bid goodbye to Koehler: “I have my good days & my bad days. . . . At times I am brave & do try to find something worth looking for in the future and I suppose as the months pass it will not seem quite so hard.”37 Later in the summer, she wrote to Koehler from a villa on the Elbe about ten miles from Dresden, where she had settled with her son, mother, and sisters. She had been ill for two months and in total seclusion and admitted that she had done no work in spite of her urgent obligations: “I feel a million miles away from my old life sometimes and as though everything were lost to me.” Despite her grief and long illness, Van Rensselaer worked on the architecture series for Century. She evidently had completed the first three articles before her husband’s death, but it was August before she was able to send the fourth one, entitled “Churches,” to Gilder.38 As if the family had not gone through their share of sorrow, in 1885 her younger sister Louisa’s (called Lily by the family) husband of two years died suddenly in Dresden, leaving her with a one-year-old son. Koehler learned the news in a letter, which also informed him that Van Rensselaer and her family would be sailing for home in October. She wrote to Koehler: “Looking back it seems as though I had been unpardonably idle & yet as the days passed I felt that I was doing in each of them all that I had the strength & the spirits for.” She visited Berlin and Prague and did some sightseeing in the immediate neighborhood of Dresden but never got to Paris as planned. Before leaving for New York, Van Rensselaer and her sister Edith traveled to England, where Gris was enrolled in a country school while they went off to visit English cathedrals to do research for yet another Century series.39 The American engraver Joseph Pennell was illustrating the cathedral series, and Van Rensselaer contacted him from Dresden to set up a meeting in England. The letter had an accommodating tone; she enclosed a few 40

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notes suggesting suitable illustrations for her commentary, while assuring Pennell, “I do not wish of course to fetter you in any way.” Pennell’s wife recorded that a meeting took place in Salisbury, saying with some delicacy, “Pennell . . . wrote me what happened to him, also his frank impressions of Mrs. Van Rensselaer who had ideas for the [Salisbury] Cathedral which were not his.”40 At thirty-four, Van Rensselaer was only six years older than Pennell when they first met, but he claimed that he was “deadly afraid of her.” She became increasingly irritated with Pennell; he was supposed to be in York about August 5, but he not only failed to appear but also failed to contact her during the four days she waited. Hurried for time before leaving England, she wrote, “I need hardly say I am very much disappointed.” Van Rensselaer knew Pennell was a cycling enthusiast and remarked that they had been out of contact so long that she had begun “to fear the tricycle & its freight had gone to smash somewhere.” When his wife wrote to assure Van Rensselaer that her husband would meet her before she left for home, Van Rensselaer pointedly requested: “If you will let me know the exact day when you will want to see me as long in advance as possible I shall be much obliged, so that I shall not have to upset any of the many schemes I still have to carry out before leaving.” Thus began their long and stormy relationship.41 Van Rensselaer sailed for home with her family on 7 October 1885. Despite the fact that the lowest part of Fifth Avenue had become unfashionable, she took a house at 9 West Ninth Street, less than a mile from her childhood home. She told Koehler that for busy people like themselves, the location was more convenient than a place far uptown. (After twenty-three years at this residence, she would move only one block away, to 9 West Tenth Street.) Van Rensselaer maintained that it was still a good residential neighborhood. “Sometimes down here,” she wrote, “we even call upon a newly established neighbor whom we know only by name. Perhaps, up near [Central] Park, you do not do this, because people with such nice names are not so apt to settle near you.”42

Home Again On her return to New York in October 1885, two articles of interest to Van Rensselaer were published in Century. Given that she knew Olmsted and 41

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“Central Park Entrance at Fifth Avenue & 59th Street.” (From 150 Views of New York and Environs [Charles Magnus, 1886]; Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

would soon turn her interest to landscape architecture, the topic of the expansion of public parks in New York and in other major American cities would have drawn her attention. The New York journalist and Van Rensselaer’s future managing editor of Garden and Forest, William A. Stiles, had written the first piece, entitled “Riverside Park.” Stiles insisted that a park’s influence must reach the nobler part of man’s nature — it must directly appeal to the imagination through the senses. Central Park, then in its twenty-seventh year, was an example of such a design: the park suggested to the imagination the simplicity, dignity, innocence, and contemplative leisure of the ideal pastoral life. Nevertheless, Stiles believed that a time would come when Central Park would be as unfashionable as the Battery, a park at the southern tip of Manhattan: with the mass European emigration of the mid-nineteenth century, the city’s elite had moved north, away from the park.43 42

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Although his prediction proved wrong, Stiles was trying to make a case for a much-needed expansion of Manhattan’s recreational grounds. Stiles looked to Riverside Drive and Park to offer much more than simple relief from the busy roads of Central Park: at the time, Riverside Drive extended from Seventy-Second Street to 127th Street. Overlooking the Hudson, it had ample room for riding, driving, and walking and, with the river below the drive and park, had a unique interest. When one looked up the river, Claremont (the former residence of Joseph Bonaparte) crowned the view.44 In the same issue of Century was an unsigned editorial by the magazine’s associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson. In “Civic Rivers,” Johnson tried to convince New Yorkers to bring the beauties of water scenery nearer to the city’s population. To the shame of New York, he wrote, little or no attempt had been made to use its two great rivers to enhance the city. Only Riverside Drive and Park (then in their infancy) took advantage of the Hudson River. He cited the opinion of the two most valued landscape architects in the country, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who believed that a park should be located at Niblo’s Point (Hell Gate), because it was beautifully adapted to that purpose. The site was along the turbulent stretch of the East River where the Harlem River meets the waters of Long Island Sound; the wooded slopes of Astoria were to the east, and on the New York side was a partly wooded bluff a half-mile long. Johnson urged officials to preserve the spot, warning that in the future, New York would be tearing down buildings to provide public parks. Carl Schurz Park now overlooks this section of the East River.45 Two months before Van Rensselaer’s return to New York, Johnson asked Olmsted to write an “Open Letter” for the magazine to call attention to what American cities were doing to incorporate rivers into their landscape plans. Century published Olmsted’s brief piece on waterfronts in October 1886. The title incorporated words from John Ruskin, “A Healthy Change in the Tone of the Human Heart,” with the parenthetical subtitle “Suggestions to Cities.” Olmsted thought Ruskin’s phrase an apt description of the difference between taste in the fifteenth century and that in the late nineteenth century. In past times, according to Ruskin, cultivated men found delight in water flowing in a channel that was paved at the bottom and walled at the sides, and “they fairly hated the sight of the disorderly, unconfinable sea, 43

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with its fluctuating lights and shadows, and fugitive hues.” On the other hand, Ruskin and Olmsted believed that in their own day, civilized society found greater pleasure in rivers than in canals and that men now enjoyed the sea blended into natural scenery. Olmsted wondered what these same men thought of the failure of many cities to preserve, develop, and make available their natural woodlands and urban waterfronts.46 As he related to Van Rensselaer after “Suggestions to Cities” appeared in Century, prominent Bostonians recognized their city as the one Olmsted had criticized for ignoring its harbor and the various islands and headlands that used to form its most scenic feature. The citizens of Boston sent a memorandum to the Park Commission asking it to look into the issue, and the commissioners contacted Olmsted with a request for a scheme to carry out his idea, outlined in the article, of restoring the harbor’s lost beauty. Olm­sted prepared a report that recommended the reforestation of the islands in Boston Harbor, but the project was never realized.47 Before Olmsted’s “Suggestions to Cities” appeared in Century, his friend and colleague Henry Hobson Richardson died in late April 1886. Van Rensselaer’s correspondence with Olmsted had stopped while she was in Europe, but it resumed soon after Richardson’s death. He described to her his last meeting with Richardson in Washington and his funeral in Boston’s Trinity Church; in his next letter, he remarked that it was hard to become accustomed to Richardson’s absence. He then suddenly switched the topic away from his friend to praise Van Rensselaer: “You will let me say how highly I esteem the value of the work that you are doing. I don’t think that you can begin to realize its educational influence — of course you cannot. It is so widely scattered and ‘upon the waters.’ ”48 Although Olmsted certainly valued Van Rensselaer’s writing skills and critical acuity, his praise for her work had another agenda — he wanted her to undertake an account of Richardson’s life and works. He had talked about Richardson with Charles Sprague Sargent, a Harvard professor of horticulture and the director of the Arnold Arboretum, and they agreed that an illustrated memorial book needed to be started at once while memories of Richardson were fresh and before his office was dismantled. Both men thought Van Rensselaer the best person for the job.49 Van Rensselaer, however, was uncertain of her command of the subject, and in June Olmsted renewed his attempt to convince her. He and Sargent 44

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agreed the book should not be particularly technical, but aimed at instructing the public. Olmsted pointed out that this type of book suited Van Rensselaer’s accustomed and natural way of writing and told her that the project could be accomplished with the greatest ease. He played to her strengths and her sense of duty as a critic: “The public is so far behind good architects and finds it so hard to understand what they are driving at. . . . And this — the interpretation of artists to the public — is your public mission.”50 Van Rensselaer’s Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works was published two years later in a limited luxury edition of five hundred copies and remained the only comprehensive study of Richardson for nearly fifty years. In the meantime, Van Rensselaer completed her series on American architecture for Century with a series of three essays entitled “American Country Dwellings.” The successful collaboration between Richardson and Olmsted remained an exemplar for Van Rensselaer, and she encouraged architects to build appropriately with regard to the nature of a given site. In her selection of contemporary country homes to include in the series, the precept that architecture was dependent upon the character of different sites was a critical factor. A country home admirable in Newport, Rhode Island, she wrote, could not be repeated at Mount Desert, Maine, or in the Catskills.51 Van Rensselaer (then one of the Griswold sisters) had first visited the fashionable colony at Newport in 1865, and by the time she returned as a newlywed from Europe, Newport was the undisputed social capital of the nation. Thus, Van Rensselaer had a twenty-year history with Newport when she wrote about the town’s domestic architecture for the Century series. Van Rensselaer explored Bellevue Avenue and the adjacent roads that led toward the Atlantic Ocean and found a succession of summer homes with many kinds of architectural types — some well screened by trees and isolated in extensive grounds, others on treeless sites and close together. She observed that no place revealed as clearly as Newport the extreme directions that American architecture had taken.52 Van Rensselaer asked what sort of structure would be both appropriate and beautiful for the cramped and treeless sites far out on Bellevue Avenue and along the border of Newport’s cliffs, where nature supplied a line of broken cliffs with such an agreeable form and color. She cautioned that this sort of beauty was quiet and subtle and could be easily marred by the touch 45

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Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, ca. 1900–1906. (Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

of man. On the cliffs, any structure that was not entirely harmonious was strikingly discordant: not one house lived up to Van Rensselaer’s standard of architecture coexisting in harmony with the natural beauty of  Newport’s cliffs. (Two years later, she would offer a site design by Olmsted as an appropriate exemplar.)53 The best among the recent Newport houses, in Van Rensselaer’s opinion, did not have exacting sites. McKim, Mead & White’s house designed for the landscape painter and etcher Samuel Colman was singled out for being “happy in expression — dignified yet rural, simple yet refined.” Van Rensselaer took minor exception to the detailing of the piazza (the term she preferred over “porch”), but she felt the rather commonplace situation of the house was given individuality by a terrace that united the house with the lawn. At the time, the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White was the largest architectural office in the United States; later it would join the team of artists, including Olmsted, who gathered in Chicago to design the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.54 46

A Career Begins

Cliff Walk, Newport, Rhode Island, ca. 1880–99. (Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

A year after Van Rensselaer’s architecture series ended, she joined Olm­ sted’s struggle to establish a Niagara reservation in New York. Olmsted became officially involved in the campaign when he outlined a scheme to restore and preserve the natural character of the region’s scenery. In 1880, with James T. Gardiner, the director of the New York State Survey, Olmsted published a special report that proposed a state purchase of critical land parcels. Widespread public interest in the idea was sparked by pamphlets and journal and newspaper articles, and the resulting pressure on the legislature from an intense letter-writing campaign finally achieved its purpose: the New York State Reservation at Niagara opened on 15 July 1885.55 Olmsted wrote Van Rensselaer that two Century articles had been of great value in stirring up popular agitation in support of his Niagara plan. In 1885 Century had published “The Attempt to Save Niagara” and “The Blindness of Legislators.” These pieces were much quoted in newspapers, and men who otherwise would have paid no attention to the project were moved to action.56 47

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House of Samuel Coleman [sic], Newport, Rhode Island. (From Century Magazine 32, June 1886)

In May 1887 Olmsted told Van Rensselaer that he was delighted that she had been inspired by the “General Plan for the Improvement of the Niagara Reservation” that he had jointly authored with Vaux. He wrote, “The subject . . . interests me more than any other living man, but I can no more write what is in my mind about it than a crow can sing.” He was grateful to Van Rensselaer for her willingness to translate the substance of the Niagara report and boil it down to “a palatable popular plateful.” She had completed the manuscript of her Century piece on Niagara before receiving two relevant letters from Olmsted, but she assured him: “Your main idea [described in the letters] with regard to the difference between landscapes and gardens I think I had grasped before, from certain things of yours and others I had read and from many conversations with Mr. Sargent.”57 “The Niagara Reservation,” published in the August issue of Century, praised the plan as complete and lucid. Van Rensselaer explained Olmsted and Vaux’s primary idea: to retain the natural scenery of Niagara in as pure and unadulterated condition as was possible given the fact that great throngs of visitors had to be accommodated safely and comfortably. The designers believed that people came to Niagara to look at Niagara — not to picnic and 48

A Career Begins

George E. Curtis, “American Fall from below, Moonlight.” (Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

not to gaze at peep shows, galleries of art, or collections of natural curiosities. Visitors would be shown Niagara as near as nature made it, “under the beams of the sun and moon, but never again of colored calcium-lights.”58 Olmsted told Van Rensselaer that there was little probability the legislature would make an appropriation for the purpose of carrying out the plan for improving the Niagara Reservation. He thought that improvements would only occur through stirring up general popular agitation by personal preaching and extensive newspaper coverage. In the Century piece, Van Rensselaer gave voice to this sentiment, pleading with the next legislature to vote sufficient funds to execute the scheme. She assured legislators that everything the plan suggested did not have to be done at once; some things, however, did require immediate action. As the months passed, for example, stretches of ground were becoming more seriously injured by trampling feet. She warned that none of the work could begin too soon, for even after it was completed, much additional time must elapse before its full results would be 49

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apparent: “a landscape-artist must wait years for his labors to finish themselves after he has finished upon the soil the plan he had sketched on paper.” Years later, while attending the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, Van Rensselaer visited Niagara Falls and wrote that the surroundings of the falls “have been redeemed from disgraceful ugliness into a high degree of beauty.”59 In a final appeal for Niagara, Van Rensselaer alluded to a complaint Olm­ sted had made to her in the first of his May letters: “I have been engaged in hardly any work of public interest upon which an entirely different class of art motives has not been engrafted or sought to be engrafted — overlaid would be the better term.” She told the Board of Commissioners that the main thing to remember through the coming years was that the property must be kept as a piece of nature and defended against all artificial intrusions. Olm­sted had cautioned her: “The danger of a drift to another Prospect Park, to a Jones’s Wood, Coney Island Big Elephant affair will be very great.” Arguing on behalf of Olmsted and Vaux, she wrote that trying to prettify the reservation with fountains, statues, exotic shrubs, and brilliant flower beds would be inartistic and vulgar, almost as damaging as adding merry-go-rounds and menageries to Niagara’s attractions.60 Thankfully, they would never know that 130 years later, global hospitality and food-service vendors run the park concessions, a second bridge has been added for cars, a flower garden greets tourists at the main visitor center, and large parking lots occupy both ends of Goat Island. The park still has no entrance fee, but the Niagara Reservation depends on revenue from parking lots and trolley fares.61 Van Rensselaer’s Niagara article began what would be ten years of concentrated writing on a new field of interest for Van Rensselaer. In the remaining months of 1887 and into the new year, she published an article for Century and a series for American Architect and Building News and helped to prepare articles and editorials for a new journal called Garden and Forest —  all of them on the topic of landscape gardening.

50

three A New Field of Study

L andscape Gar dening

t

y

Anticipating the opportunity to explore a fresh topic, Van Rensselaer wrote to Olmsted in May 1887: “I am getting so interested in this new field of study that I am most impatient to begin writing about it, especially as I feel that the only way to learn anything one’s self is to try and teach others!” She began her role as a landscape critic while carrying on a prodigious output as the art critic for the Independent: articles ranging from Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Lincoln Monument to the painters of the Society of American Artists were published that spring and summer. Her English cathedral series also continued in Century; for the American Architect and Building News she wrote on ecclesiastical decorative art, and she published a poem on horse chestnuts in Harper’s.1 Van Rensselaer’s attraction to this new field was a natural extension of her interest in sculpture, painting, architecture, decorative art, and nature. From “Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America,” published in Century a few weeks after her letter to Olmsted, to the second edition of Art Out-ofDoors thirty-eight years later, she maintained that the landscape gardener should be considered an artist. To become such an artist required studying the principles of painting, carefully observing works of sculpture, acquiring architectural training, and being able to recognize bad taste in decorative details. The landscape gardener must also have “the widest possible knowledge of the resources which Nature’s infinite fertility supplies.”2 In all of the arts, expressive feeling was the most important element for Van Rensselaer. She applied the same criteria to landscape gardening as she 51

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did to painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative art, and even to acting: “No true art of any kind ever copies, ever aims at literal transcription. It selects, modifies, interprets, translates, and so reproduces and intensifies.” As a true art, landscape gardening was held to the same standard.3 Van Rensselaer had just written “Architecture as a Profession” for the Chatauquan, and in a subsequent piece for Century, she spelled out the training required of architecture’s sister profession, which she preferred to call by “the older, equally dignified, and exacter term” landscape gardening. The landscape gardener, she believed, needed to train as long and as seriously as the architect and then go further to cultivate his powers of observation and his feeling for natural beauty. He must learn botany and know as much as the practical agriculturist, and he must study architecture and travel widely at home and abroad. The landscape gardener must go through a period of apprenticeship in an office (she suggested Olmsted’s) and, most of all, must cultivate patience and imagination, because “his works . . . grow very slowly to completeness.” Van Rensselaer encouraged Americans to enter into the profession, declaring: “How vast is our need . . . how immense is the number and how various the nature of the tasks which should no more be intrusted to the gardener-artisan than should the construction of public buildings and beautiful homes to the carpenter or mason.”4 Van Rensselaer’s next foray into the topic came in the fall, when American Architect published the first of a three-part series sandwiched between articles on nails and screws and on how to lay out arches. Due to the intended audience, the content and style were much more practical than in her series on landscape gardening that began just four months later in Garden and Forest. These essays were written for architects, perhaps to lure students still uncertain of their chosen field but certainly to educate architects about the general artistic principles of their sister field and to convince them to call in a landscape gardener to help site the house, lay out the approach drive, and orchestrate views. “Landscape Gardening I” expanded on the ideas in the much briefer Century piece: only a well-trained artist could be considered a professional landscape gardener, and the essential things to study were art and nature —  everything, in fact, that could possibly cultivate the eye and taste. Van Rensselaer told of visiting the home of a man who had devoted a great part of his life to the study of “landscape arrangements.” Despite her exacting standards 52

A New Field of Study

for professional training, Van Rensselaer was impressed that without any study of painters or their theories, he had achieved the artistic principles of composition on his grounds in terms of perspective, color, lights and darks, and light and shadow. The man possessed the type of imagination most needed by the landscape gardener: he had not simply imitated nature —  the grounds expressed his own ideas on how to make his place more beautiful than nature left on its own.5 Van Rensselaer began the article by favorably citing Frank J. Scott’s The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds (1870) and praised Frederick Law Olmsted and the late A. J. Downing as the two most successful American landscape gardeners. Yet she felt that Japan had the greatest landscape gardeners the world had ever seen. She recalled a conversation with a Japanese friend, who told her that for large gardens or for anything like the American public parks, the general scheme was always supplied by a painter.6 “Landscape Gardening II” turned to what Van Rensselaer labeled the more “prosaic” tasks that the landscape gardener had to pursue. Knowledge of plants and engineering was required, including the scientific study of plants, soils, exposures, drainage, and road building. She carefully outlined the similarities to architectural practice, emphasizing the necessity of preparing “paper plans” for even small garden projects: a scheme “cannot be tested and developed in imagination any more than an architect’s first idea of a building.” Architects also learned that the landscape gardener’s challenge in planning large grounds such as Central Park was even more difficult than designing the most complex structure.7 Van Rensselaer thought it unfortunate that although training in engineering, architecture, agriculture, and botany could be had in well-known schools, there was nowhere that an aspiring landscape gardener could go except to the offices of a few American practitioners. Even in Paris, where schools for everything else existed, there was no place to teach the complex art of landscape gardening. She had been told that professors of the art existed in Japan, but no actual school had been established, and she feared that Japan was too far away to attract students of landscape gardening as Paris did students of architecture.8 European travel could profit the American student who wanted to enlarge his knowledge of materials and to learn historic precedents; however, Van Rensselaer cautioned that the experience would not be as beneficial as 53

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readers might think. The great days of the art were over, she wrote, but one could still find fine old parks and places that were fairly well preserved. The best skill to be learned in Europe and England was “how to design scenes which must be semi-formal in order to harmonize with beautiful works of architecture,” but she believed that most modern work abroad was marred by bad taste in matters of detail: tropical plants intruding into places that should have a native, natural air, or coleus beds and red and pink geranium borders lending a “chromo vulgarity” to parks.9 Van Rensselaer referred here to chromolithography, a popular art form. She shared the upper-class distain for “chromos” that was prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century. A common decoration in homes throughout post–Civil War America, these colored prints allowed middle-class families to own inexpensive artwork that had the appearance of original paintings. Lawrence W. Levine uses chromos as one example of the “sacralization of culture.” He writes: “Once again, as with theater, opera, and symphonic music, a medium that had the effect of widely disseminating a form of artistic expression was perceived as a force of cultural dilution.” Van Rensselaer consistently criticized brightly colored flower beds over the next ten years.10 As Downing had forty years earlier, Van Rensselaer considered travel in America more indispensable than travel abroad; both believed that the American landscape gardener needed to visit places where native materials were used in the climate and soil of their own country. American country houses were located and built differently from those abroad; cities were planned differently; parks were often laid out on virgin soil; and villages were, in general idea and arrangement, like none in the Old World.11 Nevertheless, Van Rensselaer recommended a French treatise as the best preparation for this home tour: Edouard André’s L’art des jardins (1879) supplied clear ideas about what a landscape gardener must do, offered an outline and history of the art, and analyzed modern work in various countries. She was among those late-nineteenth-century critics who changed America’s longstanding hostile opinion toward things French.12 Van Rensselaer thought American students should hear from a foreign critic how well their countrymen were doing in the profession: there was no living European landscape gardener whom André praised as much as Olmsted. Van Rensselaer cautioned that no amount of looking at finished landscapes would help as much as actually working on the design of similar 54

A New Field of Study

schemes, and she encouraged serious students to look for any opportunity to work in an office like Olmsted’s.13 “Landscape Gardening III” opened with two useful lists of works on landscape gardening — especially for those who could not find teachers. The first contained French, German, and British books from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More recent treatises were listed next, including four American authors. Van Rensselaer again cited Frank J. Scott but commented that his books seemed “to reveal a man with more intelligence than taste.” She had not read Jacob Weidenmann’s Beautifying Country Homes or G. M. Kern’s Practical Landscape Gardening, but she trusted André’s opinion of them. She particularly praised the landscape gardener A. J. Downing as “a pioneer in what, if not an actual wilderness, was a wilderness of ignorance, bad taste and indifference, [who] showed, alike in his writings and his practical results, the true spirit of an artist and the true instincts of a man of intelligence, education and taste.” As she would later criticize Downing’s selection of house colors as “dismal,” Van Rensselaer remarked that “in architecture his taste was about on a level with that of his time — which is to say, [it] was pretty bad.”14 Van Rensselaer turned from books to the living world to recommend that the student of landscape gardening sketch from nature to record site characteristics and to train the eye to value the relations of outlines, colors, and masses. Another study technique was the “quite modern helper” of photography. Perhaps she was referring to her own experience when she remarked that not everyone could learn to sketch, but everyone could learn to photograph (the New York Public Library holds a collection of her photographs of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo). She assured readers that photography was neither costly nor laborious because a small portable camera served well enough.15 This is a remarkable inconsistency for Van Rensselaer. Typically, the genteel group who disdained chromos also disdained photography because it mimicked rather than created art. Photography was another process that was accessible to large numbers of untrained amateurs and thus a radical departure from the highbrow philosophy of art and culture.16 Van Rensselaer expanded on her discussion of the parallels between architecture and landscape gardening — appropriateness was the prime virtue in both professions. She cautioned, however, that there existed an even 55

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greater danger for the landscape gardener to sin against appropriateness, for it took sensitive taste to decide which style should be employed: “a landscape is not a park, nor a park a garden, nor a garden a lawn, nor a lawn a shrubbery, nor a shrubbery a front-yard.” She ended the three-part series with a reminder that the architect could influence the progress of this sister art. The American Architect had extensively covered the work of the late H. H. Richardson, and Van Rensselaer now made much of this architect’s close professional relationship with Olmsted, with whom he had worked as an artist of equal rank and equal rights.17

All These Wants Met In the last of the series for American Architect, published in early January 1888, Van Rensselaer wrote: “It may seem strange and it certainly is an unfortunate fact that there is to-day no periodical which either gives the landscape-gardener theoretic counsels or enables him to follow what is being done in the world in his profession.” She was well aware, however, that such an enterprise was in the works. Van Rensselaer had been asked to be a regular correspondent for a new weekly journal to be called Garden and Forest: A Journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art and Forestry and was already preparing articles for the opening numbers.18 Financial difficulties and the grave illness of the journal’s founding editor, Charles Sprague Sargent, delayed the publication, set for the first week of February. In January Van Rensselaer could not know that Sargent would recover earlier than expected (the doctor had feared typhoid) and that checks from Olmsted and another stockholder would cover immediate debts and allow Garden and Forest to appear only slightly behind schedule, on 29 February 1888. In March, Van Rensselaer was able to assure Century readers who had expressed a desire for more information concerning landscape gardening, horticulture, and forestry: “All these wants ‘Garden and Forest’ gives good promise of meeting.”19 As the prospectus stated in the first number of Garden and Forest, Professor Charles Sprague Sargent of Harvard College had general editorial control of the new illustrated weekly, and William Augustus Stiles was its managing editor. Frederick Law Olmsted of Brookline, Massachusetts, was listed among other correspondents, including Charles Eliot of Boston; 56

A New Field of Study

Charles Sprague Sargent, 1898. (Archives of the Arnold Arboretum, Cambridge, MA; Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

Frank J. Scott of Toledo, Ohio; Samuel Parsons Jr., the superintendent of Central Park; and Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer of New York.20 Unlike the other correspondents, Olmsted was deeply involved in the early planning of Garden and Forest. In April 1886 Olmsted and Sargent had jointly tried to persuade Stiles, a writer for the New York Tribune and the Philadelphia Press, to edit the prospective journal. Stiles was reluctant, concerned that too much of his time would be spent on railroads and in Boston. He changed his mind sometime within the next year, perhaps because Sargent contracted with David A. Munro, previously with the literary department at Harper and Brothers, to be the periodical’s business manager.21 Olmsted was an eager mentor to two of the contributors to Garden and 57

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William Augustus Stiles. (From Garden and Forest 10, October 13, 1897)

Forest whom he recommended to Stiles: Van Rensselaer and the young landscape architect and Olmsted apprentice Charles Eliot. In them, he hoped to find voices that could speak fluently and eloquently to the public about the profession. Olmsted consistently complained of his own literary skills and sought “the comfort of finding what I would like to say written by someone else.”22 Charles Eliot wrote to Olmsted from England and Europe, describing the scenery, gardens, and parks that he saw on his travels in 1885 and 1886. Olmsted found the letters refreshing and told Eliot that it was part of his professional duty to write for the public: “I have seen no such justly critical notes as yours in Landscape Architectural matters from any traveler for a generation past.” Eliot published twenty articles for Garden and Forest 58

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and went on to become a partner in Olmsted’s firm, where he worked on the Boston metropolitan park system until his death in 1897, at the age of thirty-seven.23 If Olmsted thought Eliot “better than any living English writing man,” then Van Rensselaer impressed him as the best person writing critically about the fine arts. As a result of her architecture series for Century and pieces she published in American Architect, both he and Sargent were confident that she should undertake the proposed book on Richardson. Olmsted followed the progress of the book and encouraged her increasing interest in landscape architecture; by the end of 1887, he wrote approvingly: “I am in wondering and grateful admiration of all you have written that I have seen upon landscape gardening. I want to see more.” He and Sargent were exultant when the Richardson volume appeared to accolades in 1888.24 Stiles mentions the two contributors’ involvement in the new journal in a progress report to Olmsted: “Eliot has sent me some valuable material  — quotations from early landscape writers — German & English — with a catalogue of references. There’s stuff in the young man. Mrs. Van Rensselaer is also very helpful. We are going to be able, I begin to feel, to make a paper distinctly different & better than any yet seen.”25 Stiles was grateful for the input from these writers, but he needed more assistance. In the midst of the drudgery of organizing the whole journal without support from the ill Sargent, he had no contemplative time for original thinking, and he turned to Olmsted: “As days pass & an idea comes to you put it down — as a hint. You need not elaborate it. . . . I can pull myself together long enough to connect words if some one will suggest ideas.” In this way, as well, Olmsted made a mark on Garden and Forest: offering ideas for editorials and making a suggestion that was adopted as the feature “Public Works,” a means by which Stiles connected the journal with news of current practice in landscape architecture. In the first number, “Public Works” commented on parklands acquired in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Wilmington, Delaware.26 Stiles’s greatest concern was the content of the earliest numbers. Sargent was supposed to set the tone in the opening editorials, but no one knew what he planned to say. Stiles asked Olmsted to arrange several brief talks with Sargent in late January “to make just such a number as he would approve.” One interview took place in Boston, and Stiles and Sargent exchanged 59

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letters; emerging from these discussions were the lead editorials in the second and third numbers of Garden and Forest: “The Future of American Gardening” and “The Future of Our Forests.”27 The circumstances before and into the early months of publication —  Sargent critically ill, Olmsted busy with his landscape architecture practice, and Stiles fully engaged in the business concerns of the magazine — make it incumbent to reconsider the full extent of Van Rensselaer’s editorial involvement in Garden and Forest. “Editorials,” in this case, refer to the three to four unsigned pieces in the opening pages of each issue. A number of these editorials were revised and included in Art Out-of-Doors (1893), and evidence in the Olmsted correspondence establishes Van Rensselaer’s authorship of others. Careful study shows that over 330 editorials and other unsigned articles in the journal can be attributed to Van Rensselaer because of their subject matter and stylistic similarity to her other writings.28 Thus, Van Rensselaer’s contribution to the journal was more extensive than has been credited by scholars. Although there were close to thirty other women correspondents, Van Rensselaer was one of the (if not the only) female editorial voices of Garden and Forest. Evidence to this effect is found in an 1890 letter from Olmsted to his son Rick; he wrote of his modest pride in having elevated the art and profession of landscape architecture. Yet Olmsted felt that he was only “holding the fort” until reinforcements could arrive. When he mentioned the good that Garden and Forest had accomplished, Olmsted mentioned three persons: Sargent, Stiles, and Van Rensselaer.29 Why would Van Rensselaer take on these editorial responsibilities in 1888? Seven years earlier she had refused to consider Koehler’s suggestion that she accept the managing editorship of a New York successor to the American Art Review. Circumstances had changed: Van Rensselaer was now a widow permanently living in New York with her mother and thirteenyear-old son, and she was the breadwinner of the family. Stiles ran Garden and Forest out of an office in the Tribune Building, a mere two miles from her home, and her health was stable enough to allow her to travel extensively and to write steadily. In 1881 the idea of working with and under Koehler at “editorial management” of a new journal had fired her imagination, but she believed that in America a woman could not successfully lead such an enterprise. At this later date, with Sargent and Stiles at the helm, Van Rensselaer 60

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Masthead of Garden and Forest, vol. 5, no. 238, September 14, 1892.

accepted the opportunity. With her reputation as an art and architecture critic established, she was eager for the new challenge of teaching others about landscape gardening. Writing about gender and late-nineteenth-century periodicals, Sarah Robbins categorizes Garden and Forest as “an urban, ‘high culture,’ masculine model.” Robbins opposes it to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Hearth and Home, a magazine for women “grounded in the values and practices of a more rural or domestic, middlebrow — and feminized — space.” Van Rensselaer’s editorials and articles addressed topics that went beyond the self-help content centered on American home life found in Hearth and Home. The same professional and scholarly standards apparent in her critical writings on art and architecture were evident in Garden and Forest, where she addressed not only the subject of landscape gardening but also topics ranging from municipal art to architectural fitness.30 Although Garden and Forest had only small circulation numbers, its readers included foresters, nurserymen, botanists, landscape designers, and others who were important in scientific, political, and design spheres. In its fifth year of publication, the journal printed comments from advertisers and the press and opinions from representative readers. Advertiser letters were generally from nurserymen and horticulturists; press comments came from New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Boston, and Chicago. The Chicago Evening Journal wrote of the magazine, “Its character is at once dignified 61

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and pleasing, and its contents are scholarly and scientific in the exact sense.” A U.S. senator from Vermont and the author of the Sherman Act, George F. Edmunds, wrote, “[Garden and Forest] is taken in my family and read with much interest by us all. I consider it one of the very best publications of the kind I have ever seen.” Given the content and importance of this magazine, Van Rensselaer must be recognized as one of the most important latenineteenth-century figures in landscape architectural history.31

Another Fine Art Van Rensselaer’s best-known contribution to Garden and Forest was a sevenpart series on landscape gardening that began with the first number of the journal on 29 February 1888. Entitled “Landscape Gardening,” like the earlier series in American Architect, the essays were directed not at architects, but at aspiring landscape gardeners, gardeners, clients, and public and private users of designed landscapes. At least five young men, inspired by these articles, visited Olmsted’s office for advice.32 Van Rensselaer was an established art and architecture critic, and she brought her reputation, keen eye, and knowledge to bear on the subject of landscape gardening — which she considered another fine art. Van Rensselaer built upon her expertise in these other arts to inform her new interest. The first essay concerns Van Rensselaer’s insistence on retaining the nomenclature of “landscape gardening” for the profession; the second notes landscape gardening’s points of agreement and its contrasts with the other fine arts. The third explains that self-expression is essential for the landscape gardener’s art; the fourth addresses what Van Rensselaer labeled “appropriateness” and demonstrates most clearly that Van Rensselaer held similar views about the artistic creations of the landscape gardener and those of the idealist painter. For the idealist painter, nature was a material rather than a model, as opposed to those painters who sought simply to imitate nature. The fifth essay reveals Van Rensselaer’s idea of nature. The sixth is on the topic of organized beauty — an essay particularly admired by Olmsted. The seventh reviews the essentials of landscape gardening as a fine art. The essays may be analyzed by attempting to answer a series of questions. How did Van Rensselaer’s ideas on landscape gardening diverge from those of the previous generation, and what remained the same? What influence 62

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did the teachings of Frederick Law Olmsted have on her work, and how did she differ from Olmsted’s and his contemporaries’ views of the practice of landscape architecture? How did her cosmopolitan education and her views on painting and architecture shape her ideas on landscape gardening? Editorials, letters to the editor, and other articles written by Van Rensselaer in later issues of Garden and Forest may be linked to the topics of each early essay to demonstrate how key ideas were reiterated throughout the remaining years of the journal. Landscape Gardener versus Landscape Architect

Van Rensselaer conveyed her opinion that the designation of the practice should remain “landscape gardening” through the title she gave the first of these essays: “Landscape Gardening — A Definition.” The opposing view of the premier practitioner in the field, Frederick Law Olmsted, was apparent in a letter he wrote to Charles Eliot: “I prefer that we should call ourselves L[andscape] Architects, following the French & Italian custom, rather than l[andscape] gardeners following the English . . . because the former title better carries the professional idea. It makes more important also the idea of design. ‘Gardener’ includes service corresponding to that of carpenter and mason. Architect does not. Hence it is more discriminating, and prepares the minds of clients for dealing with on professional principles.” Evidence suggests that Olmsted employed similar arguments with Van Rensselaer.33 Other practitioners also struggled with nomenclature. For want of a better term, the Chicago-based H. W. S. Cleveland wrote in 1873 that the profession was called “more properly Landscape Architecture.” In trying to establish himself in the Midwest, Cleveland found that most of his clients believed that landscape gardening was solely a decorative art, and he resolved to adopt the higher-sounding “landscape architecture” until the art could achieve for itself “a name worthy of its position.” As late as 1897, however, the Chicago practitioner O. C. Simonds preferred “landscape gardener” to “landscape architect,” which in his mind could mean “a man who designed summer-houses, pavilions, balustrades, fences, hedges and things with stiff formal lines.”34 Van Rensselaer used her first essay in this series to address the “lack of clearly understood terms by which to speak of [the art] of those who practice it.” She reviewed the history of the title “landscape gardener,” explaining 63

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that it was once used by artists of the eighteenth century to mark their search for natural as opposed to formal beauty. The title suffered as taste declined in England and as men who, she felt, did not have the slightest right to be considered artists adopted the designation “landscape gardener.” In the late 1880s, when Van Rensselaer wrote this series, the title had fallen into such disregard that “landscape architect” often replaced it. She admitted that “landscape architect” had French usage to support it and was in many respects a good title, but she found its correlative — landscape architecture  — unsatisfactory. “Landscape artist” was unacceptable as well.35 Van Rensselaer stated in this first essay that like the arts of design —  —  landscape gardening demanded painting, sculpture, and architecture  much of its professors in creative power and skill. She defined landscape gardening as “the art whose purpose it is to create beautiful compositions upon the surface of the ground.” Olmsted too spoke of his profession as an art, but he and others, including Cleveland and Eliot, believed the field to have a broader scope and depth. To Van Rensselaer’s description, Cleveland added the factors of convenience and economics. For Olmsted, his work included “exposing great ledges, damming streams, making lakes, tunnels, bridges, terraces and canals.” In a letter to Van Rensselaer, Eliot wrote that the most important part of his profession was “the devising of general schemes which shall combine convenience with preserved, increased, or created beauty.” None of these men would have argued with her stipulation that to be an artist who could rank among the best, a landscape gardener must “compose a beautiful whole with a number of related parts.”36 Less than a year later, when Van Rensselaer wrote “When to Employ the Landscape-Gardener,” she wanted to make sure clients understood that the time to secure the services of a landscape professional was at the very outset of a project. She expanded the landscape gardener’s responsibilities to include consulting with the architect to select the best building site and to decide what sort of architectural design would best suit the locality. She added that, whenever possible, all architectural features that come in close contact with natural features, including piazzas, terraces, summer houses, bridges, and boundary walls, should be built with the assistance of the landscape gardener.37 Like J. C. Loudon in Britain and A. J. Downing in America, who both tried to establish landscape gardening as a fine art, Van Rensselaer explained 64

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the radical difference among the sister arts: unlike painting and sculpture, landscape gardening uses the same materials as nature herself. She used the traditional terms natural and formal to distinguish between the two types of gardening. Van Rensselaer also noted the unstable character of the landscape gardener’s productions: “it is easy to see how often neglect or interference must work havoc with the best intentions, how often the passage of years must travesty or destroy the best results, how rare must be the cases in which a work of landscape art really does justice to its creator.” Van Rensselaer was trying to counter the general lack of understanding about the art of landscape gardening that had become evident to Olmsted and other practitioners in their dealings with clients and the users of their designed landscapes.38 It is clear from this series of essays on landscape gardening that Van Rensselaer had read Olmsted’s pamphlet The Spoils of the Park (1882), in which he bemoaned the ruinous course of development in New York’s Central Park. After Olmsted and Vaux won the 1857 competition to design Central Park, they encountered enormous difficulties in its construction and maintenance. As did the rest of New York, Olmsted and Vaux lived with the thievery of Boss Tweed’s organization. In the case of Central Park, a Tweed-controlled Board of Commissioners of the Department of Public Parks had carried out an intrusive building program, and in his pamphlet, Olmsted described their so-called landscape improvements: “Rocky passages of the Park, which had been furnished under my direction with a natural growth of characteristic rocky hillside perennials, have been more than once ‘cleaned up,’ and so thoroughly that the leaf-mould, with which the crevices of the ledge had been carefully filled for the sustenance of the plants, was swept out with house-brooms.”39 These and other depredations had fundamentally altered the Central Park of Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan, and Olmsted had tired of trying to convince the Board of Commissioners that landscape gardening was an art “having due place side by side with [its] fair sisters.” His experience with a “friend” of the board was particularly discouraging; this politically connected gentleman was the spokesman for a delegation of citizens advocating the introduction of a race course in the park. The board asked Olmsted to clarify his objections to the project without provoking the man, but he explained that it was impossible for him not to refer to landscape 65

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considerations in the presentation. Olmsted described the meeting in Spoils of the Park. The friend of the board interrupted at the first mention of the word landscape: “ ‘Oh, damn the landscape!’ then, rising, he addressed the president to this effect: ‘We came here, sir, as practical men, to discuss with your Board a simple, practical, common-sense question. We don’t know any thing about your landscape, and we don’t know what landscape has to do with the matter before us.’ ”40 Writing to Olmsted in September 1887, Jacob Weidenmann had similar complaints: “too well known and yet too little understood [the profession] is tossed like a foot-ball by florists, gardeners and nurserymen[,] by engineers, architects and surveyors, whosoever gets a chance to practice, criticize[,] slur or slander, publicly or secretly.” A year later, another colleague related his frustration. Cleveland grumbled about the lack of park work in Minneapolis and St. Paul: “At times I get heartsick at the supineness & indifference which suffers the waste of such opportunities as are offered us. I preach whenever an opportunity offers — but it’s like whistling to the wind.”41 “What landscape has to do with the matter” was one of the major questions that Van Rensselaer addressed in her seven-part series. Her 1888 Garden and Forest essays offered an essential education for readers wanting to see, know, and judge the art of landscape gardening for their own delight and appreciation. What she classified as “capable amateurs” in an earlier work published in the American Art Review has relevance in the interpretation of these essays. Van Rensselaer thought it worthwhile to train a nation of capable amateurs to the possibilities of the fine arts. She believed that in great art epochs, creative power and appreciative power nurture one another and that Americans should be preparing “the only soil from which creative genius might spring.” At the conclusion of the first essay in the series, she prompted: “try to remember that [‘landscape gardener’] ought always to mean an artist and an artist only.” The essays attempted to elucidate the creative principles of these artists.42 Respect Nature’s Frame

The following week, in “Landscape Gardening II,” Van Rensselaer further explored her dissatisfaction with the correlative “landscape architecture,” writing that the landscape gardener stood with the sculptor and painter, not the architect and musician, because he draws his inspiration directly from 66

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nature. Like Downing holding to eighteenth-century British aesthetic theory, Van Rensselaer supported the idealist school of thought: the landscape gardener reunites nature’s “scattered excellences” and obliterates nature’s defects. Speaking from her experience of the difficulty with which painters simulate light and atmosphere, she noted that “to the landscape gardener’s pictures nature freely supplies them, everywhere and always, and not merely in the one phase for which the painter strives, but in a thousand — changing them with each day of the year and with each hour of the day.” Thus she concluded that the best results of the landscape gardener greatly surpass the best painted landscapes.43 Van Rensselaer cautioned, however, that the landscape gardener must respect the frame or the general scheme furnished by nature. One American country seat that exemplified her charge was located in Marion, Massachusetts. By the time Van Rensselaer wrote of Great Hill, in 1891, she had spent four summers there and had become thoroughly familiar with the local character of this region on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay. Great Hill’s owner, Albert W. Nickerson, proved the exception to the rule that one should employ a landscape gardener to give an artistic aspect to a piece of wild nature when adapting it for a residence. Nickerson had dispensed with professional assistance to improve his 1,500 acres, yet the result was a domain of uncommon and striking beauty, one as natural as it was artistic.44 Except for a few vines on the piazza of the house and narrow flower beds close to its foundation, not a tree or shrub or flower had been planted. Much labor had been put into clearing space in front of the house for a large lawn (not as smooth and velvety as those in Newport or Lenox), and irregular groups of native oaks, pines, and tupelos had been left along a walk near the water. Van Rensselaer observed that “no details attract the eye to the disturbance of the general effect of breadth, dignity and repose, and nothing has been done to alter the essential character of the spot as Nature designed it.” Great Hill’s clear local character and its unity were the place’s chief beauties. Van Rensselaer could think of no worse fate for this country seat than to fall into the hands of an owner with a taste for horticulture. Great Hill was simply a piece of the Marion countryside beautified, but not essentially altered. Mr. Nickerson had lived on the place, loved and studied it, and very gradually decided what the next step should be. Van Rensselaer believed that using materials supplied by nature produced good works of art.45 67

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Self-Expression in Landscape Gardening

Van Rensselaer asked in “Landscape Gardening III” whether this close partnership with nature deprives the landscape gardener of the opportunity of artistic self-expression. She ultimately concluded that the artist is not deprived of self-expression or what she also called individuality. She viewed painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and landscape gardening not as arts of imitation, but as arts of creation. Artists must always interpret, Van Rensselaer stated: “the more personal is the quality of expression [in the work of art] — the more unlike it is to the expression which other men have put into their works — the higher is his rank as an artist.”46 Art for art’s sake, or aestheticism, was a late-nineteenth-century movement in which style and the individuality and originality of that style came to be seen as more important than subject matter in evaluating the meaning, content, and quality of a painting. It was for this quality of individuality that Van Rensselaer wrote admiringly of Rembrandt, Corot, Millet, the French Barbizon painters, and the favored American and European painters of her generation such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who argued that a painting is first and foremost an arrangement of lines and shapes and colors, with no need to teach a lesson or tell a story.47 Van Rensselaer believed that it was no truer to say of the landscape gardener than of the painter or the sculptor that he copies nature. A landscape gardener’s compositions are and must be his own. She reiterated this notion in a later editorial, “Natural Beauty and the Landscape Gardener,” observing that there were many beautiful natural spots on earth, but that very few of them were beautiful in a way that made them appropriate for a dwelling. The landscape gardener could not escape from self-expression; in places where nature was not beautiful, Van Rensselaer wrote, “then the artist may well interfere with her intentions and create a loveliness of his own.”48 Appropriateness in Landscape Gardening

Appropriateness, the main subject of “Landscape Gardening IV,” was a prime consideration of artistic self-expression for Van Rensselaer. One gets a clear understanding of her full use of the term “appropriateness”— or suitability — in her revisiting of the subject in 1919, barely five months after the cease-fire that ended World War I. The American Magazine of Art asked her to comment on the best war memorials for commemorative purposes, 68

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and she stated that appropriateness to site and surroundings had to be the first consideration, but that an artist must also take into account appropriateness in meaning or feeling. Van Rensselaer remarked that appropriateness and practical difficulties were the two insurmountable obstacles that the landscape gardener faced when he wished to reproduce a large natural composition.49 In an article entitled “On Gardening,” published in 1887, Olmsted raised the subject of appropriateness and practicality concerning plants. Design in gardening, he wrote, begins when one questions whether certain plants are “right in their places” and whether they help to achieve the desired expression. Then the question remains: are they practical enough to survive in that particular place?50 In contrast, Van Rensselaer developed the idea of appropriateness to link landscape gardeners to idealist painters. Her fellow art critic William C. Brownell distinguished the idealist painter from those American painters who leaned toward literalness and whose main effort was to imitate nature. Brownell singled out the art of Frederic Edwin Church as an example of mechanical cleverness and perfect illusion. In Brownell’s opinion, Church’s art differed little from the art of the scene painter. Likewise, in her fourth essay, Van Rensselaer implicitly challenged the work of Church and his intellectual mentor, the German natural historian Alexander von Humboldt.51 In Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (1845), Humboldt had praised landscape painting as a powerful means to encourage the study of nature and the taste for distant travels. Humboldt was interested in how landscape painters over the centuries represented “the character and aspect of vegetation in different zones.” He noted that it was not until discoveries in Central America and Southern Asia extended the geographical field of view, and botanical gardens were established in the sixteenth century, that artists began to delineate exotic vegetation with “natural truth and grace.” Passages from Cosmos moved Church to trace Humboldt’s 1799 to 1804 journey through South America, and in 1859, he sent The Heart of the Andes to Europe, hoping to show it to Humboldt as “a transcript of the scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago.”52 Readers of Van Rensselaer’s fourth essay on landscape gardening would have recognized Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness (1860), The Icebergs (1861), and The Heart of the Andes (1859) in her comment: “If Nature will 69

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Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909 [09.95])

not help, she will not hinder [the painter], nor will appropriateness forbid his savage, or his arctic, or his tropical landscape to hang upon a wall in Paris or New York.” Church showed The Heart of the Andes as a one-picture, paid-admission special exhibition for three weeks in New York in 1859: it was the most notable success of a single picture by a native artist. She used this example of a painter, who could find a natural scene that pleased him, paint it without alteration, and then take his picture where he wished, to demonstrate her contention that the landscape gardener’s efforts are controlled even more strenuously by appropriateness than are those of most other artists.53 Because Van Rensselaer considered the aim of the idealist landscape painter to be much the same as that of the landscape gardener, her writings on art need to be examined. Van Rensselaer was preparing an article on the French painter Jean Baptiste Camille Corot for Century while writing her series on landscape gardening for Garden and Forest, and the similarities in language are remarkable. In the Corot essay, she sought to clarify the difference between painting analytically and painting synthetically. In doing so, she constructed an implicit counterargument to Humboldt’s ideas on painting in Cosmos — those same ideas that inspired Church. Humboldt coun70

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seled: “Colored sketches, taken directly from nature, are the only means by which the artist, on his return, may reproduce the character of distant regions in more elaborately finished pictures. . . . Landscape painting, though not simply an imitative art, has a more material origin and a more earthly limitation.”54 The environmental historian Donald Worster suggests that Humboldt taught Darwin’s generation “to look at nature comparatively: to see each region as a unique ecological assemblage dependent on local or regional conditions.” In Cosmos, Humboldt extolled the characteristic beauty of each portion of the earth. This distinct “physiognomy” of nature, Humboldt proposed, was like the analytic classifications of animal and vegetable forms in descriptive zoology and botany. For Van Rensselaer, the problem lay in the methodology.55 Humboldt explained what an artist can do if he has only a vague sense of what “Swiss nature” or “Italian skies” means in terms of local characteristics. According to Humboldt, the elements that determine the total impression of any particular region, be it Switzerland or Italy, include “the azure of the sky, the form of the clouds, the vapory mist resting in the distance, the luxuriant development of plants, the beauty of the foliage, and the outline of the mountains.” He believed it was the province of landscape painting to understand these characteristics and to reproduce them and that the artist could understand nature by analyzing the various groups of elements. Ruskin, as well, wrote in Modern Painters that “every class of rock, earth, and cloud, must be known by the [landscape] painter, with geologic and meteorological accuracy.”56 Van Rensselaer thought otherwise: artists (both painters and landscape gardeners) must see imaginatively, must see things or complete them in a personal way. She stressed that the whole import of idealism in art was crystallized in the word complete: “Not to depart from Nature, but to complete her is the true idealization.” She explained that the idealist painter needed to transmute the facts of nature to give them new beauties and a new meaning drawn from the essence of his own soul. In her opinion, this was also the charge of the landscape gardener. Because appropriateness of meaning was of prime importance to artistic self-expression, her essay on Corot is essential reading to understand the parallels between her ideas on the two sister arts.57 71

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Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Beach near Etretat, ca. 1872. (Alisa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.117; Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

In “Corot,” Van Rensselaer criticized contemporary painters as well as the previous generation of painters, who painted from analysis, not from sight. She praised Corot for prizing effects rather than what the nonartistic world called solid facts. There was a new vogue in painting labeled realism that was opposed to the idealism of Van Rensselaer. Referring to these “realist” painters, she wrote: “It is their fashion to rave about ‘realism,’ to despise idealism — to exalt the mere facts they chance to see above the greater fact which Corot divined and gave.” She argued that in the presence of nature, effects are seen first and leave the longest-lasting impression. Van Rensselaer pointed out that outlines, modeling, local colors, and minor details shift with changes in light and shadow and urged readers to look at the same scene on a sunny morning or by cloudy sunset light. Although the features are the same, their effect has changed. Van Rensselaer stated that Corot, unlike Church and the modern painters, never painted analytically; he studied analytically and then painted synthetically. He omitted many things he knew and even many things he saw in order “to portray more clearly the general result” of the scene before him.58 As she explained how Corot interpreted the life, mood, and meaning of the landscape, Van Rensselaer addressed all the elements listed by Humboldt in Cosmos for characterizing a region’s distinct physiognomy. Corot 72

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found the general result in “the main lines of the scene before him; in its dominant tone; in the broad relationships of one mass of color to all others; in the aspect of the sky, the character of the atmosphere, and the play of light; and in the palpitating incessant movement of sky and air and leaf.” Van Rensselaer thus not only constructed a counterargument to Humboldt’s ideas on landscape painting but in doing so provided guidelines for landscape gardeners.59 In “Landscape Gardening IV,” Van Rensselaer noted that on a given site, nature has already drawn a rough outline that the landscape gardener has to make into a picture by fusing together scattered beauties from many other sites. It is up to the landscape gardener to decide which of the beauties to select, and he must use appropriateness as the touchstone for both general effects and particular features. There are numerous questions that the landscape gardener must ask, she wrote, before he can use even one of the countless beauties stored in his memory: “Will it, theoretically, be appropriate in this part of the world? Can I, theoretically, introduce it into a creation of this special sort? And will practical, local considerations permit me to introduce it, if I find it theoretically appropriate?” In other words, after judging whether the chosen effect is suitable in theory, the landscape gardener needs to address practical considerations.60 Just as Van Rensselaer observed that Corot painted synthetically to portray more clearly the general result in the scene before him, she believed that if a landscape gardener is an artist, “the true process of landscape creation is more synthetical, more imaginative,” and that he must venture beyond these questions of appropriateness. For an example, she advised the landscape gardener to try to understand how nature’s composition produces beautiful results. She defined composition as “variety in unity, harmonious contrasts, appropriateness of feature and detail, beauty of line and color, and distinctness of expression.” From Joseph Addison to A. J. Downing, these were the typical elements of composition — but color was a particular concern of Van Rensselaer.61 In concluding the fourth essay, she challenged the landscape gardener to see his work as preeminently artistic: he must express himself and exercise his imagination and take from his memory only general, not special, truths. Again, Van Rensselaer’s opinion went counter to Ruskin’s, who had declared: “Generalized! As if it were possible to generalize things generically 73

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different. . . . It is just as impossible to generalize granite and slate, as it is to generalize a man and a cow.”62 “Nature in Her Bondage”

The principle question posed by Van Rensselaer in the fifth essay was how much the landscape gardener owes to nature, how much to himself, and how much to others who have altered nature. Van Rensselaer distinguished among three categories of landscape: nature; cultivated land, or so-called second nature; and landscapes modified by the “conscious action of art.”63 She could look to Olmsted and Vaux for examples of the third category. By 1888 they had designed most of the public parks of their long partnership that had begun thirty years earlier with the successful competition entry of the “Greensward Plan” for New York’s Central Park. Olmsted described the inspiration for the type of spaces he created for these parks: “the beauty of the fields, the meadow, the prairie, of the green pastures, and the still waters.”64 Van Rensselaer trusted that park users recognized these landscapes as nonnatural, but she wanted to remind readers that the rural landscapes in cultivated countries from which the park designer got his best inspiration were also nonnatural. Indeed, almost a thousand years before Olmsted began a walking tour of Britain in the summer of 1850, the bulk of forest clearance on the island had been accomplished; most of the human settlements he saw, with their winding lanes and irregularly shaped fields, had been established by the late thirteenth century. Therefore, the unnamed English writer cited by Van Rensselaer was correct, with one exception: “No spot in this island can be said to be in a state of nature. . . . Wherever cultivation has set its foot — wherever the plow and spade have laid fallow the soil — nature is become extinct.”65 Van Rensselaer responded to the unnamed Englishman’s last comment: “Extinct, of course, is too strong a word if we take it in its full significance.” She was familiar with Darwin’s discussion of extinction in the chapters on natural selection and geological succession in Origin of Species; extinction in its fullest sense meant disappearance or complete eradication. Nature was not extinct, stated Van Rensselaer; in all thickly settled countries, cultivation had driven to extinction the compositions and the broad general pictures of nature.66 74

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Van Rensselaer criticized the eighteenth-century English landscape gardeners who thought to transform the formal architectural gardening of the last century by learning from nature when “in reality, they were learning from the face of a country which for centuries had been carefully moulded, tended and put to use by man.” She believed it was these tended parts of nature and not the wilder ones that had given the most assistance to these landscape gardeners. Van Rensselaer’s references to “nature” and to “wild” or “free” nature in her fifth essay need to be understood as Darwinian nature. In her interpretation, this nature was anything but peaceful. Van Rensselaer remarked that, fortunately for these eighteenth-century artists, “nature herself is so good an artist that even in her bondage she had worked admirably and with more suavity and gentleness than in her free estate.” Like others of her generation who had read Darwin, Van Rensselaer viewed the face of nature and did not see it “bright with gladness,” as did the author of Origin of Species.67 As Van Rensselaer described how eighteenth-century landscape gardeners sought to create scenes appropriate for the habitations of men, she reiterated a lesson from the previous week’s article: all this semi-artificial beauty of England could not have taught them how to make beautiful parks and gardens without the exercise of their own imaginations. And she once again pointed out the similarities between landscape gardening and painting: “Such landscapes [that fitly surround human habitations] we can no more expect to find in nature — even in cultivated, semi-artificial nature — than landscapes painted upon canvas. . . . Every step in civilization is a step away from that wild estate which alone is really nature.”68 Just as Corot did not depart from but complete nature in his paintings, the landscape gardener was expected to achieve similar imaginative results in the landscape. Van Rensselaer explained the difficulty of the landscape gardener’s task: the stronger the artist’s desire to make an artificial aggregate of features read as nature’s design, the more he must develop his imaginative power. “Organized Beauty”

In an April 1888 letter, Olmsted praised Van Rensselaer’s concise handling of the subject of “organized beauty” in “Landscape Gardening VI” and remarked on the impact of her Garden and Forest articles: “We have had five 75

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young men coming to us for ‘advice’ about entering our profession, all referring to your articles.”69 Van Rensselaer’s call for organized beauty was an appeal for designs in which details are subordinated to a coherent general effect. Organized beauty is required, she stated, “whenever and wherever we touch the surface of the ground and the plants it bears.” She advised that from large park to small city square, from great estate to modest dooryard, the landscape gardener must pursue his work in this artistic spirit. As was typical, Van Rensselaer asked readers to look at a scene from the points of view of both the painter and the landscape gardener: take two trees, six shrubs, a scrap of lawn, and a dozen flowering plants — they may form either a beautiful little picture or a huddled mass of greenery and colors. If the former, the scene offers the true aesthetic satisfaction one gets from a good landscape painting, even more because it is alive and will reveal new beauties day by day, hour by hour. If the latter, the scene will please only by the beauty of certain scattered details.70 Van Rensselaer believed details less intrinsically delightful than an agreeable general effect. She linked Ruskin’s definition of a good composition  — that is, “one in which every detail helps the general beauty of effect”—  to the latter scene. Van Rensselaer suggested that a good composition may also be defined conversely — “as one in which the general arrangement brings out the highest beauty of each detail”—  and thus would offer true aesthetic satisfaction. It was in this regard that Van Rensselaer believed Americans deficient in artistic feeling for natural objects. Alluding to Francis Bacon’s often quoted observation, she observed that the surroundings of homes had not improved as rapidly as the homes themselves.71 She was adept at incorporating references to architecture in her essays for Garden and Forest. By 1888 Van Rensselaer was a respected architecture critic; her nine-part illustrated series “Recent Architecture in America” had run in Century from 1884 to 1886, and her book on Richardson had just appeared. She thought Americans had come to understand certain architectural truths, and she used the profession of architecture to make the point that both landscape gardening and architecture were artistic pursuits requiring professional skill. One could not expect to build a good house without an architect’s help, she wrote: clients would think poorly of a de76

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signer who began without having a clear idea of the special site and needs the house must occupy and fulfill. The artist does not design a house by throwing together a number of pretty features with no regard to harmony of effect.72 Why should expectations be different outside the home? Van Rensselaer asked. Why put your grounds into the hands of a gardener with no qualifications beyond knowledge of how to make plants flourish? She cautioned that a true taste for art — an appreciation of organized beauty — went beyond “a taste for nature’s individual productions — a love for trees, an interest in shrubs, a passion for flowers.” Several days after Van Rensselaer’s article appeared, Olmsted wrote to express his gratitude to her: “I suppose that I have spoiled quires of paper, laboring vainly to say what you say fully in half a page and as if it was as easy as falling off a log. And it seems to me that one has only to read it and accept it.”73 Olmsted also insisted that in the creation of a composition all parts should be subordinated to a single, coherent effect. Charles Beveridge cites an undated manuscript fragment in which Olmsted sketched out his design principles: visitors to his landscapes, Olmsted noted, should not think “of trees as trees, of turf, water, rocks, bridges, as things of beauty in themselves.”74 Harmonious Arrangements

In the seventh and final essay in the series on landscape gardening, published on 11 April 1888, Van Rensselaer continued to discuss composition, with an emphasis on the harmonious arrangement of contrasting forms and contrasting colors. Van Rensselaer often addressed form in her writings and had a passion for making fine color distinctions not only in her art and architecture criticism but also in her pieces for Garden and Forest. In “The Artistic Aspect of Trees I: Form,” an editorial for Garden and Forest, Van Rensselaer specified that it is only by studying trees from the artistic point of view, and by contrasting the character and beauty of the form of one species with another, that one can really learn to appreciate trees. She listed the elements of a tree’s form: its general outline, its contour, and its silhouette against the sky or against masses of trees of other kinds. Two weeks later, in “The Artistic Aspect of Trees III: Color,” Van Rensselaer observed that among the innate artistic powers is a feeling for color. She admitted that 77

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this gift might also be cultivated by a process of practical self-culture: “The trouble with most of us is not that we could not see the difference between harmony and disharmony in colors if we tried, but that we do not try.”75 Van Rensselaer’s major complaint in the seventh essay was that little regard was paid to the forms and colors of the popular kind of gardening known as “bedding out,” “ribbon,” or “pattern gardening.” She claimed to find nothing intrinsically wrong with the fashion but observed that a passion for flowers usually outstripped a true taste for art. Van Rensselaer found that most often the resulting flower beds were ugly in shape, garish in their contrasts of tints, and set out with no regard to anything around the beds — which meant no appreciation for organized beauty. To make her point about the tasteless colors of such beds, Van Rensselaer again referred to chromolithography: “A man who would not for worlds hang a chromo on his carefully tinted parlor wall, contentedly puts chromos in Coleus and Geranium in the middle of a lawn the strong green tone of which throws their gaudiness into high relief.”76 Olmsted also condemned this type of specimen planting in Spoils of the Park, remarking that during the last twenty years Europe had been swept by a mania for sacrificing natural scenery to brilliant and gaudy decoration. And Cleveland, in an 1888 letter to Olmsted, related his experience with pattern gardening. He had been introduced to an old gentleman who was a graduate of Yale, and he complimented Cleveland on his work in Chicago, especially the “fancy work in flowers.” The man was one of a multitude, Cleveland observed, “to whom any work is artistic in proportion as it is artificial.”77 Throughout the remainder of the year, Van Rensselaer repeatedly denounced ugly formal pattern beds placed without regard to organized beauty. Just two months after the landscape series ended, she wrote that the most frequently discussed question affecting the art of gardening was whether the formal flower bed was a thing to praise or to condemn. She rephrased the question to make the answer apparent: was the formal flower bed “a thing which gratifies a cultivated taste or one which merely panders to the taste that delights in vivid chromos and in pinchbeck personal adornments?”78 In an 1888 letter to the editor of Garden and Forest written from Marion, Massachusetts, where she rented a summer home, Van Rensselaer singled out the flower beds in the Boston Public Garden for harsh criticism. The 78

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Boston Public Garden, 1892. (Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department)

controversy that followed was a classic example of the late-nineteenthcentury conflict between highbrow and lowbrow, between the standard bearers of cultivated taste and the purveyors and defenders of popular taste. In the Boston Public Garden, Van Rensselaer observed, color was used not only too profusely but also poorly. She detailed the scores of formal flower beds that had been planted with “the crudest hues that the ingenuity of the gardener’s craft has been able to produce.” She was particularly offended by the color combination of the “Crystal Palace Gem” geranium; with its cherry-colored blossoms in contrast with yellow-green leaves, it was the most hideous product of recent horticulture.79 As the superintendent of Boston’s common and public grounds, the Irishborn horticulturist William Doogue could count himself doubly insulted —  he also cultivated the flowering plants that decorated the city’s gardens, parks, and squares. Van Rensselaer’s letter was republished in the Boston Evening Transcript, and Doogue included it in his annual report for 1889. He defended his designs, stating that he catered to “the general taste of the public for whom I am employed” and that the Public Garden was meant for “the mass of God’s people, without any distinction as to race, color, or 79

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condition.” Doogue believed that the attack “had its source in the brain of her [Van Rensselaer’s] employer, the ‘professor,’ ” as C. S. Sargent was known to family, colleagues, friends, and the not-so-friendly. Doogue disparaged as aristocratic swells those who disapproved of tropical plants in gardens and squares.80 In his report, Doogue also recorded the trip he had made to Marion to visit Van Rensselaer. He had been struck by the appearance and surroundings of her summer rental: the narrow path to the front door was “fringed with the commonest and ugliest weeds that grow. . . . A few bilious-looking geraniums flung their branches despairingly aloft from their crowded positions among the triumphant weeds.” To spare embarrassment to the lady, Doogue stated, he did not make the call, and on his trip back to Boston, he reflected, “how wonderful is the ‘art’ of some ‘artists’ and what a vast difference there is between the theories of one and the practices of the other.”81 There was not such a vast difference between Van Rensselaer’s theories and her practices. When she commented on the landscape features of Marion in “July on the Shores of Buzzard’s Bay,” she particularly noted the quiet charm of the moist meadows and the sandy heathlike tracts bordering the salt-water bay. She detailed the richness of the native vegetation, mainly shrubs and herbaceous plants. Were these plants the common and ugly weeds noted by Doogue? The horticulturist missed July’s pretty white blossoms on four species of ilex, and the many other plants cataloged by Van Rensselaer were well past their season of flowering by the time of his fall visit.82 In October Van Rensselaer wrote a letter to the editor entitled “The Responsibilities of Florists” that was another affront to Doogue, who owned a floral business in Boston’s South End. She began on a conciliatory note, conceding that florists had done much to improve the taste of the public, but then added that there was still much for them to do. Reading like Alexander Pope’s 1713 satirical list of verdant sculptures, her examples of recently produced floral designs in Boston were “too bad to be true in a community which calls itself civilized.” One of the least offensive was a piece at the funeral of an expressman (a man who took care of cargo on board a train): a large trunk of white flowers bearing in red the legend “C.O.D.” As one of the public, Van Rensselaer begged florists to give better advice to their clients: “The taste of our people is not naturally bad; it may be uncultivated. 80

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Plan of Rough Point, Rhode Island, June 1887. (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Olmsted Plans and Drawings Collection, Olmsted Plan #1036‑9)

Show them excellence, and they will admire, and when they next see ugliness they will recognize it for what it is.”83 During this same time, Olmsted was urging his clients Mr. and Mrs. Frederick W. Vanderbilt to follow his advice, trying to prevent the installation of “a piece of decorated smooth blue turf between their sea-facing meadows and the quiet rocks” on their Newport estate of Rough Point. The Vanderbilts were being swayed, Olmsted told Van Rensselaer in a June 1888 letter, by “the Voxpopuli,” which was convincing them that what he wanted to do was shocking. He envisioned “a rugged moorland character” for the seaward side of the house, with the grass kept down with sheep and the ground between and above the rocks left half arid, planted with low wild bushes. Could he possibly be wrong? Olmsted speculated: “it really seems as if [the blue turf] would be an abuse upon public taste.” An early site plan of Rough Point, from June 1887, shows the character of its rugged topography and irregular shoreline.84 In December, Van Rensselaer wrote about Olmsted’s design for the Vanderbilt place, describing it as “the most interesting work now in progress at Newport.” Was the piece meant to convince the recalcitrant Vanderbilts 81

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with a clever psychological ploy? “I am told,” Van Rensselaer commented, “that the owners are considering whether it will not be well to adopt a scheme for treating their grounds which will be an entire novelty in Newport.” The proposed design was as Olmsted described in his letter: the lawn and garden shrubberies confined to the entrance side of the house, with the most natural treatment possible on the seaward slope. This respected critic depicted the rocky portion nearest the Cliff Walk as “interesting and picturesque” and gave her considered opinion that the best device would be plantings of low native shrubs, creepers, and wildflowers that would simulate, as far as possible, “a spot which has not been planted at all.” Van Rensselaer challenged the Vanderbilts: “if one loves either the best kind of beauty or the truest kind of appropriateness,” then Olmsted’s new idea should be carried out. She observed that it would be “a thousand pities” if the most beautiful spot on the Cliff Walk were mutilated in the same way as a certain unnamed estate on Ochre Point.85 “The Scheme Is the Main Point”

Notwithstanding the Vanderbilt estate, Van Rensselaer generally found more evidence of good taste in America’s larger country seats and parks. In the seventh essay in her series on landscape gardening, she suggested that this improvement in the more sizeable estates was due to the admirable landscape gardeners of America. Proprietors most often hired these artists to manage large problems and rarely asked them to deal with small ones. Yet even when the landscape gardener is asked to give his counsel, Van Rensselaer wrote, it is not always respected. She reiterated a criticism from the first essay: the landscape gardener is allowed to lay out the grounds as he wishes, but as soon as his back is turned, how quickly the owner retouches, even spoils, his work.86 This type of problem constantly bedeviled Olmsted. Eight months earlier Olmsted had complained to Van Rensselaer: “I have a good many strokes of inspiration in my art . . . and if all the world did not seem to be conspired to spoil whatever good thing I set a going, I think I should have been fairly successful in it.” He related instances of private work whose use and purpose were ruined because a different class of artistic intent was overlaid on the design: “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get 82

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Postcard of Rough Point, Rhode Island, n.d. F. W. Vanderbilt sold Rough Point to William B. Leeds in 1906. (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Olmsted Photograph Album Collection, Olmsted Photo #1036)

suitable vegetation growing — come back in a year and find — destruction: why? ‘My wife is so fond of roses;’ ‘I had a present of some large Norway spruces.’ ” In Olmsted’s opinion, the beauty of individual plants such as roses and Norway spruces confused the artist’s scheme. “The scheme is the main point,” Van Rensselaer emphasized; “[do] not be tempted by the beauty of individual things into frittering away or confusing its effect.”87 In this final essay of her landscape series, Van Rensselaer concentrated on offering advice to the proprietor and the gardener because either of these individuals might take over the finished work of the landscape gardener or, in her words, might try “on a modest scale to emulate the artist.” The proprietors (they could also be considered clients/users) and gardeners were the most important of the “capable amateurs” who needed to be educated to appreciate the art of landscape gardening and to respect the new profession. Van Rensselaer subtly assigned them their due rank: they were cultivators who could add to their scientific satisfaction a purer delight — “the consciousness of being a creator in the field of art”— although they should not think to rival the artist’s skill in execution.88 83

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Van Rensselaer’s final words for the Century series on American architecture also supply an appropriate summary of her message in the Garden and Forest series on landscape gardening: “Let us remember how difficult are many of [the artists’] tasks, and how often we make their difficulty greater. Let us remember how ignorant we are ourselves, and how our ignorance reacts on them.” In the late 1880s the artists referred to by Van Rensselaer consisted of a small body of professional landscape architects, including Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Charles Eliot, Henry Sargent Codman, Jacob Weidenmann, Horace Cleveland, Samuel Parsons Jr., and Warren H. Manning. In her seven-part series for Garden and Forest and in subsequent editorials, letters to the editor, and other articles, she interpreted the aesthetic principles of these practitioners for a public that included aspiring landscape architects, clients, gardeners, and public and private users of designed landscapes.89 Van Rensselaer was a professional critic, not an artist; she believed it was possible for a person not completely deficient in brain or eye to be cultivated into a critic and to appreciate what she could not produce. As the English art critic Sir Sidney Colvin wrote at the time: “It is the business of criticism to teach people how to look. . . . The mission of criticism, as applied to the works of art, is fulfilled when it has defined and analyzed the qualities of the object before it in the way best calculated to help a reader see them for himself.” Olmsted recognized Van Rensselaer’s particular gift and her public mission. Her astute understanding of European and American art and architecture, her grasp of nineteenth-century science, and her vivid prose contributed to her standing as the most respected late-nineteenth-century critic of landscape gardening.90

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In the late 1880s, Van Rensselaer focused her energy on a series of “historical sketches” on “the art of gardening” for Garden and Forest. Her art and architecture criticism was always remarkable for the scholarly and historical perspective that was part of her treatment of even the most contemporary subjects. The Century article “American Etchers” started with a thorough examination of the term etching, beginning with its etymological root in the Greek “to eat.” Emphasizing that “etching” denotes not an effect but a process, Van Rensselaer outlined the various methods of production that she described step by step. In another instance, stating that she was not trying to write a history of American architecture, Van Rensselaer nevertheless began the “Recent Architecture in America” series for Century with several pages of information on the “varied and perplexing architectural experience” in nineteenthcentury England and the imitation of these successive phases in America. When she introduced her garden-history series, Van Rensselaer wrote that the surest way to foster a higher development of the art of gardening in America was to acquaint artists and the public with the creations of the past.1 Van Rensselaer was recognized as a historian in 1910 when Columbia University awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters for The History of the City of New York (1909), a twelve-year effort in research and writing. The New York Times covered the event and quoted the admiring though, to the modern ear, provocative remarks of the university president: “In conferring this degree President Butler addressed [Van Rensselaer] as one ‘to whom it 85

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has been given to trace with a woman’s skill and a man’s strength the story of the early history of our city, and to interpret with charm, and in many ways the great monuments of architecture and art.’ ” Van Rensselaer’s skills and strengths had little to do with gender and much to do with an astute sensibility and a disciplined scholarship that she brought to her entire body of work.2

Written and Pictured Testimony Beginning in Egypt, Van Rensselaer’s twenty-one-part garden-history series moved on to Mesopotamia and Judea and ended with the Mahometans in India. The articles were meant to redress the lack of a general history of landscape gardening in English. More than sixty years had passed since John Claudius Loudon published The Encyclopedia of Gardening (1822), in which he considered gardening chronologically as well as politically and geographically. Van Rensselaer made no mention of the various editions of Loudon’s book, which had continued to appear throughout the century. Instead, she gathered together a variety of other source material in English, German, and French. Van Rensselaer reminded readers that because a garden carried within itself “the seeds of decay,” historians had to rely on written and pictured testimony. She turned to what she knew best: illustrated art and architecture history books, including A History of Art in Ancient Egypt (1883) by Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, A History of Ancient Sculpture (1883) by Lucy M. Mitchell, and History of Architecture (1865) by James Fergusson. Gartenkunst und Gärten Sonst und Jetzt (1888) by H. Jäger was her main garden-history source. For her articles on Rome and Roman suburban villas, she quoted extensively from Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries (1888) by Rodolfo Lanciani, the archaeologist in charge of all excavations in Rome. She sought out not only classical sources such as Plutarch, Xenophon, and the elder and younger Pliny but also recently published papers from 1889 in the Edinburgh Review and the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. She cited popular travel literature like Voyage en Espagne (1843) by Théophile Gautier and romances written by an unnamed “learned German student of antiquity.”3 Van Rensselaer introduced her historical sketches with a promise that 86

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the brief articles would look at gardening from the most instructive point of view: “as an individual and independent manifestation of the artistic instinct, yet one which has a vital kinship with all the [arts], and a vital relation to the general course of human development.” When she addressed Judea and Phoenicia (modern-day Israel, Lebanon, and Syria), Van Rensselaer concluded that because Jews were not artists by nature, their gardens were less numerous and important than could be found elsewhere. Likewise, in Carthage, the greatest of the Phoenician colonies, she figured that the gardens may have been extensive, but that “a people so inartistic as to have produced neither great architects, great sculptors nor great writers has naturally left few traces of itself on history’s page.” On the other hand, she believed that Hindu gardening in ancient India featured remarkable formal flower beds that demonstrated a “keen sense for harmony as well as brilliancy in tint which distinguishes the race in all its artistic endeavors.”4 Van Rensselaer also undertook to explain the close tie binding gardening to architecture. Writing about suburban villas outside of Rome, she observed, “[Roman] gardens were naturally those which an architect, rather than a poet or landscape-painter, would admire,” reasoning that Romans loved system, regularity, and usefulness. In another essay on ancient India, she noted the Persian influence on Hindu architecture but wrote that on the whole a distinctly national taste could be seen in Hindu architecture and gardens, which revealed a “strong feeling for the picturesque and fantastic.” In her final historical sketch, on the Mahometans in India, she stated that “architecture and gardening went hand in hand under the Moguls as they had under the old Hindu rulers.” She particularly cited the Taj Mahal for its charming grouping of many different parts and “the union of them all with the gardens.”5 In Van Rensselaer’s eyes, landscape gardening reflected the spirit and tendencies of the age, differing in various countries according to the character of the national civilization. Like Humboldt, whom she cited, she grouped European gardening and the other arts under two main types: the first illustrated the temperament and expressed the aesthetic ideals of the south, while the other type stood in the same relation to the north. Racialist thinking and stereotypes blinkered the vision of many nineteenth-century Americans, and Van Rensselaer was no exception. She explained the differences in sensibilities toward nature by “facts of race” and also adopted the now 87

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questionable mode of thinking that opposed the Orient and the Occident, known as “Orientalism.”6

The Oriental Imagination It may have been an earlier pair of articles written by Van Rensselaer on Japanese gardening that gave the Garden and Forest editors the idea for a series devoted to the art of gardening. In “Japanese Gardening I” and “Japanese Gardening II,” Van Rensselaer cited a lengthy article, “The Art of Landscape Gardening in Japan,” by Josiah Conder, published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1886. Conder was a British architect who at the age of twenty-four moved to Japan to serve as a professor of architecture at the forerunner of Tokyo University and to advise the Japanese government on Western architecture. He published Landscape Gardening in Japan in 1893 and wrote in the preface that the work was the result of a combination of personal observation of the best remaining examples of Japanese gardens and a thorough study of the most reliable Japanese sources.7 Van Rensselaer extensively quoted Conder’s article with only brief commentary, but her remarks displayed the era’s Orientalist manner of thought. Van Rensselaer noted that it was often said that the Japanese have less imagination than Occidentals. She believed, however, that the Oriental “material imagination” was much stronger than the Occidental, which explained the Japanese “picture-making power of the eye, the ability to recognize, appreciate and enjoy the beauty and sentiment of a thing which is not actually imitated or even portrayed in art, but merely suggested.” After much reading upon the subject, she concluded that the Japanese always desired a strictly natural effect but demanded that a natural garden should suggest a beautiful passage of scenery. For example, the Japanese did not see anything unnatural about a small garden composed of piles of earth, rocks, and shrubs that represented mountains, trees, and lakes. In contrast, the Occidental demanded that a natural garden should be a beautiful passage of scenery.8 Van Rensselaer only partially adopted the type of Orientalist thinking criticized by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) that distinguished between “European” (in her case labeled “Occidental”) and “Oriental”: that is, the former was familiar and comfortable, the latter its reverse. Given the fact that she had previously stated that Japan had the greatest landscape garden88

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Cover of  Josiah Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan, 1893.

ers in the world, it is difficult to argue that she also adopted the accompanying Orientalist value judgments: that the “Occidental” was rational, normal, and superior and the “Oriental” irrational, depraved, and inferior. Nevertheless, one needs to ask, as did Edward Said, “Is [there] any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say of men into ‘us’ (Westerners) and ‘they’ (Orientals)?”9

“Scholarly in Point of View” A month after the articles on Japanese gardening, Van Rensselaer wrote a review of the German work that she would use in her upcoming historical sketches. Herr Jäger, the royal garden inspector at Eisenach, was the author of the illustrated Gartenkunst und Gärten Sonst und Jetzt, translated as Garden Art and Gardens in Former and in Present Time. It was in Van Rensselaer’s 89

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opinion “at once scholarly in point of view and popular in tone,” and readers were instructed in how the efforts of gardeners in every era resulted from abstract beauty and in how those efforts could be used as precedents for modern practice. She especially praised Jäger for treating architecture and landscape gardening not as separate rival arts, but as sister arts, each dependent on the other.10 Like Van Rensselaer, Jäger believed that modern theorists and practition­ ers should not feel obliged to declare distinctly in favor of the formal or the natural style of gardening; he stated that a building could be properly supported by symmetrical features while the remote parts of the estate had a more natural landscape beauty. For the American reader, Van Rensselaer believed, the main value of Jäger’s book was that it supplied basic knowledge about the general course of the art of landscape gardening and the differences among its typical manifestations in various countries. She offered few direct quotations from the 550-page volume; the one paragraph selected would not have surprised those familiar with her opinions: “As brightfoliaged plants, he says, ‘form a contrast with the green of the main plantations, they ought to be very sparingly employed in their neighborhood.’ ” She undoubtedly agreed with Jäger that many gardeners and proprietors confused rarity with beauty.11 Jäger covered the gardens of Egypt, Asia Minor, Persia, Greece and its colonies, Rome, China, and Japan, as well as medieval developments in the art, and then continued through the Italian Renaissance to modern developments in Europe and North and South America. It was his treatment of landscape gardening in the United States that Van Rensselaer addressed in a follow-up article. She believed the information generally accurate and was pleased that American artists and their work received a substantial share of attention and praise. The artists mentioned by Jäger included Downing, Olmsted, and Adolf Strauch, the designer of Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. She commended Jäger, “unlike many native Americans,” for recognizing the importance of the piazza in American rural architecture and for seeing its distinctly local significance.12 In the review, Van Rensselaer slipped in yet another insult to William Doogue, the superintendent of Boston’s common and public grounds, noting that “all does not look fair and laudable in American gardening to intelligent foreign eyes.” She quoted Jäger with evident satisfaction: “in spite of 90

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Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnatti, Ohio. (From H. Jäger, Gartenkunst und Gärten Sonst und Jetzt, 1888)

its size, [the Boston Common and the Public Garden] must be called petty in arrangement, presenting a monstrous mixture of Franco-Italian and English gardening styles, and being tastelessly encumbered with flowers.”13

The Charms of the Outer World On 20 March 1889, Van Rensselaer began her series “The Art of Gardening” by reiterating ideas from her “Landscape Gardening” essays. Whether formal or naturalistic, whether large or small, all works must be distinguished by organized beauty and a beautiful general effect. Landscape art in its complexity combined beauty and utility and was “always expressive . . .  of the spiritual temper and the intellectual development of the peoples who have practiced it.” Van Rensselaer believed that unlike the origin of other arts, the origin of the art of gardening could not be traced back to savage times; gardens must have followed and at first strictly depended upon architecture. Disagreeing with the romantic view of Rousseau, she could not envision the “first man” living in a garden: only after man viewed nature as a source of comfort and restoration rather than as an enemy could he have come to appreciate the charms of the outer world.14 91

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Although differing with Humboldt’s ideas on landscape painting, Van Rensselaer adopted his concept of physiographic regions. Humboldt observed: “There are reserved to each zone its own peculiar beauties; . . . each region of the earth has a natural physiognomy peculiar to itself.” Similarly, Van Rensselaer connected the art of the garden with local physical aspects of the land. In her sketch of Egypt, she emphasized “the physical character of the land, with its burning sun and level plains, devoid of all that picturesqueness of surface and that richness in large vegetable forms which other countries exhibit.” Local taste in all forms of Egyptian art favored symmetry, and Van Rensselaer wrote that this was understandable, given the physical aspect of the land. According to a letter that she wrote to Gilder in 1896, Van Rensselaer had seen the Egyptian landscape firsthand: “I am told you are puffed up with pride at having discovered Egypt. I did that twenty years ago.” She knew that few varieties of trees grew there and that Egypt itself was symmetrical: it had a single wide river and vast level plains, and the bordering mountains had perpendicular walls. All of these aspects contributed to what Van Rensselaer described as Egypt’s “persistent, if splendid, monotony of outline.”15 Thus, nature itself dictated formality in the Egyptian garden. The walled garden permitted the imagination to believe that variety lay outside and also provided essential coolness and shade. Explicitly linking architecture and gardens, as she did in other essays, Van Rensselaer observed: “As [the Egyptian] naturally evolved the most solid and symmetrical kind of architecture that the world has seen, so, too, he naturally created only formal, architectural gardens.”16 For her sketch on Egypt, Van Rensselaer borrowed extensively from Jäger’s Gartenkunst. Her description of a villa garden matched an illustration in Jäger and his account of its features: the enclosing wall, water basins, vineyard, and location and type of vegetation, including date and doum palms, acacias, papyrus, and sycamores. She explained that the sycamore grown in Egypt was not the typical one familiar to Americans, but Ficus sycamores, a large evergreen tree. Both Jäger and Van Rensselaer wrote of the bas-reliefs that showed potted trees being loaded onto ships; exotic plants were transported by water from conquered lands and placed as trophies in front of palaces and temples.17 When Van Rensselaer remarked on the familiar form of the Egyptian 92

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Plan of an Egyptian garden. (From H. Jäger, Gartenkunst und Gärten Sonst und Jetzt, 1888)

column, with its capital and shaft simulating the lotus flower and bundles of papyrus stems, she cited A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Georges Perrot, a classical scholar and archeologist, and Charles Chipiez, an architecture critic, suggested that the form arose from the use of the lotus and papyrus in earlier times to decorate plain columns for festivals.18 A few months later, Van Rensselaer published more information on Egypt in a piece entitled “Horticulture in Ancient Egypt,” translated from the French journal Revue Horticole, including an itemization of the recognizable types of fruit found in mummy cases — dates, figs, bananas, lemons, grapes, pomegranates, lotus beans, and flowering shoots of lawsonia. One of the most interesting facts was that a species of lawsonia (Lawsonia inermis) native to Egypt provided the henna used to dye the fingernails of Egyptian women.19

Race and Blood Before moving on to Greece and Rome, Van Rensselaer dedicated “Historical Sketch VIII” to “The Love of Nature,” citing Humboldt’s Cosmos for its approach to understanding the distinct difference between the classic and the modern world’s love of nature. 93

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Bird’s-eye view of an Egyptian villa, restored by Charles Chipiez. (From Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. 2, 1883)

In discussing this idea, she revisited a subject that A. J. Downing had addressed forty years earlier in the Horticulturist, when he used Humboldt to validate his ideas on national tastes in gardening. Referring to the section of Cosmos entitled “Incitements to the Study of Nature,” Downing wrote that Humboldt had demonstrated, “very conclusively, that certain races of mankind, however great in other gifts, are deficient in their perceptions of natural beauty; that northern nations possess the love of nature much more strongly than those of the south.” Downing’s selective rendering of Humboldt’s discussion of the classical world and its literature diminished Greek and Roman — that is, “southern”— accomplishments and aesthetic sensibilities, thus inflating those of the “north”— that is, England and the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of  North America. He drew a false corollary from 94

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Humboldt’s work that supported his prejudice against the formality of the French and Italian garden: “As success, in ‘the art of composing a landscape’  . . . depends on appreciation of nature, the taste of an individual as well as that of a nation, will be in direct proportion to the profound sensibility with which he perceives the Beautiful in natural scenery.”20 Van Rensselaer reviewed the same passages in Cosmos and tried to correct Downing’s misconceptions about the classical world’s love of nature. She reminded readers that Humboldt admitted that the evidence was not positive, only negative, in proving that Greek literature lacked poetic sentiment in the presence of Nature. The so-called proof consisted of the almost total absence of descriptive verse and prose passages common to her time. This negative evidence did not prove a deficiency in sensibility so much as a lack of strong desire to express a love of nature in words. Van Rensselaer made an important distinction that Downing failed to make: the Greeks simply had a different idea of the beautiful in nature. The term beautiful was not so widely used by the Greeks. She looked at Greek works of art and saw that “beauty to a Greek meant simplicity, sobriety, clarity, grace, balance, and repose.” She also suggested that in Greek and Roman thought, a greater place was given to the claims of the physical as distinguished from the spiritual, and this limited their appreciation of wild nature as clearly unfit for comfortable habitation. Van Rensselaer alluded to Downing’s conclusions when she cautioned that the modern love for nature — the awful, the terrible, the savage and grandiose — was not shared by men of classic times: “But this truth . . . has too often been misread to prove that they did not really care for Nature in any shape.”21 Van Rensselaer believed that the difference in sensibilities toward nature was explained by facts of race. Greeks differed from the modern Germans in love for nature because their blood and therefore their whole mental and spiritual attitude were different. She recognized that the “Teutonic influence” had permeated the South and conversely that the “classic influence” had spread everywhere in the North, but nonetheless, the fundamental racial characteristics had not been eradicated. These racial characteristics were voiced whenever “a genuine, spontaneous impulse speaks through art.”22 Van Rensselaer explained that she was devoting an article to this subject in order to show why the art of gardening had developed as it did in different countries. Although the attitude of a community toward the beauty of 95

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natural scenes was not the only cause that affected the development of the art of gardening, she believed it was one of the causes. She thought it critical to understand how gardening, like its sister arts, illustrated the fundamental characteristics of each nation. As highly educated and sophisticated as she was, Van Rensselaer did not escape her era’s ideas about race and its enthusiasm for the Teutonic, of which Anglo-Saxonism was a substantial part. Along with her knowledge of art, botany, and geography came the prejudices of her upper-class education.23 Extensive scholarship exists on nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and its link to the archetype of Teutonic racial excellence. Paul A. Kramer argues that “Anglo-Saxon” racialism developed as a bond connecting upperclass Britons and Americans. Anglo-Saxons were frequently depicted as having split off from older racial groups, usually “Teutons,” and there was a division on whether Anglo-Saxonism was a matter of blood or culture. This impulse intensified in an Anglo-American world being transformed by immigration.24 Race became a topic of general intellectual and popular interest in the second half of the nineteenth century; one of the manifestations of this concern was ethnology, or the “scientific” study of humanity. Ethnology was understood by nineteenth-century anthropologists to be limited to the rudimentary beginnings of human society, and there was a widespread fascination with the question of whether humans could be divided into superior and inferior races. The mass immigration by non-Teutonic people begot the fear that the established basis of the American society was being transformed. The response of the Anglo-Saxons was to force immigrants to conform to prevailing standards in language and culture, to be absorbed as quickly as possible into the main Anglo-Saxon tradition. A speech given by Van Rensselaer in 1896, after she was elected the president of the Public Education Association (PEA) in New York, indicates that she supported this trend: “The one great objection we have to bring forward is that [children in parochial or national schools] are taught Latin or the German language . . . and that retards their growth as Americans. We want to Americanize the children of foreigners to make good citizens.”25 In Western Europe and the United States the Caucasian race was generally recognized as clearly superior to all others and the Germanic as the most talented branch of the Caucasians. In England and in the United 96

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States, Anglo-Saxons were acknowledged as the most gifted descendants of the Germans. Works on race ranged from impressionistic studies based on cultural differences to those of supposedly exact scientific measurement. The importance of race or of blood was taken for granted in a manner unlike in the previous century. The Edinburgh Review noted in 1844: “of the great influence of Race in the production of National Character, no reasonable inquirer can now doubt.” For example, the similarity in national character between the French and the Irish was ascribed to their Gaelic blood. Historians point out that such attitudes permeated all aspects of scholarly, creative, and even scientific endeavors.26 Although she did not mention race or blood, Van Rensselaer was in no doubt of the national character of Persia. She began her essay on the art of gardening in Persia with what she considered a fact: the Persians were “the most luxurious and pleasure-loving of ancient peoples,” with “effeminate [and] self-indulgent habits.” Even American schoolboys during this time learned the significance of the wars that had left the Greeks instead of “the sensuous Persian” as guides and leaders of the world’s intellectual development. This Persian national character was strongly expressed in their gardens. Paradise, the Persian word for garden, came to symbolize “the highest delights which the body or soul of man can enjoy.”27 Van Rensselaer used the argument of race and blood to account for the difference between Arab (or Moorish) gardens in Spain and Mohameton gardens in India, while also recognizing the difference in climate and landscape. In the accounts she was able to find of Mogul gardens in India, there was no sign of the love for the picturesque and for the variety that marked the pleasure grounds of Granada. She hesitated to conclude from this negative evidence that the Moguls of India designed only strictly formal gardens, but it seemed probable to her that a love for symmetry and regularity was stronger, or at least more universal, in India than in Spain.28 Van Rensselaer’s twenty-one-part garden-history series in Garden and Forest ended with the Mahometans in India. These essays offered Americans a detailed, scholarly study that combined firsthand experience; primary sources; and secondary sources on art, architecture, and landscape history. Borrowings from Humboldt and Van Rensselaer’s expertise in art and architecture and knowledge of geography and botany enriched these writings; however, it is important to understand that the time’s racialism shaped them 97

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Moorish garden in Spain’s Alhambra. (From H. Jäger, Gartenkunst und Gärten Sonst und Jetzt, 1888)

as well. Her views were tempered by the belief that a region’s gardens and architecture were related to the character of the national civilization. At least half if not all of the historical sketches were completed before Van Rensselaer left for France on 19 June 1889. She returned from Europe in mid-October, and during this time abroad, an astounding number of articles were published in the Century, the Studio, the Magazine of Art, and the Independent, in addition to the twenty-five in Garden and Forest. Her months in France were busy with research for her next Century series on French churches; among other cities, she traveled to Limoges, Bourges, and Chartres. She spent five weeks in Paris, in “a jolly little apartment,” where she visited the 1889 Exposition Universelle, and complained to Gilder about having to write about “that bewildering colossal exhibition.” That summer was also the beginning of years of battling with Joseph Pennell, who was illustrating 98

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Van Rensselaer’s articles on French churches. The argument came to a head in July 1890, when she asked Gilder: “In short, the whole question resolves itself into this: Am I to write articles on French architecture which Mr. Pennell will illustrate? Or is he to make pictures of such motives as strike a draughtsman’s fancy in the expectation that I will fit my text to them?” With these professional commitments and complications in her life, it may be that when the last of her historical sketches was published on 11 June 1890, Van Rensselaer decided not to pursue the topic further and left New York to summer in Marion, Massachusetts.29

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Summers in Marion and Southampton, a trip to see the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, and a cruise down the Rhone River — over a five-year span of Garden and Forest, from 1888 through 1892, Van Rensselaer contributed essays about these and more experiences and her impressions of a wide diversity of  landscapes. Shifting easily from a broad overview of regional setting to details such as the color of a wildflower, she remained a tirelessly curious observer of natural and urban settings. Her editorials, articles, and letters to the editor reveal her knowledge of botany and geology, the manner in which she familiarized herself with a place, and how she sought to educate public awareness of landscape and architecture. These writings, combined with her personal correspondence, disclose traces of her life, as Van Rensselaer traveled for professional assignments and to see friends and family. At the age of sixty-nine, Van Rensselaer looked back on the twenty-two summer houses that she had occupied in fourteen different places in the United States — most of them agreeable. She found this way of visiting different localities advantageous: like the slowly moving snail, she was always at home. Van Rensselaer recognized that any person with a motorcar could easily see more, yet she preferred to see the details of a place and the variations worked by changing days and passing months. She chose to weigh and appraise the thousand minor charms and peculiarities of a place and its architecture and inhabitants.1

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The Thousand Minor Charms An unsigned editorial, “Balcony Flower Boxes,” was published in Garden and Forest in May 1888. Van Rensselaer had waited two years to describe her summer rental in Southampton, Long Island. The summer of 1886, she had lived in the central house of a row of small, ugly wooden houses —  undoubtedly one of her more disagreeable rental experiences. But it was here that she began her book on H. H. Richardson, wrote art criticism for the Independent, and continued her Century series on American architecture. The house had a small balcony off the parlor windows, and its front stoop descended to the sidewalk with only a narrow strip of grass. As the title suggests, the editorial’s lesson was that a naked, unattractive house front could be transformed by “wide boxes filled with veritable little thickets of foliage and flowers.” With little labor and almost no cost, the results were charming; neighbors and people throughout the town subsequently followed the example set by the “lady who had long lived in Germany.”2 Van Rensselaer spent the next summer on the western shore of  Buzzard’s Bay in Marion, Massachusetts, in a little house that she allowed a friend to engage for her. She had finished the Niagara article for Century and sent off the manuscript of the Richardson book. She returned to Marion the following summer; the intervening year had been intense, for Garden and Forest began publication in February 1888, and Van Rensselaer was busy writing for the new journal.3 “July on the Shores of Buzzard’s Bay” was the first article to specifically describe the spot in southeastern Massachusetts where she summered. By that time, she was familiar with the details of the place and the variations that came with the changing days and months. As would be her pattern, she began with a broad description of the landscape, explaining that one had to be not only a true lover of landscape beauty but also a “lover of nature’s minor productions” to appreciate the aspect of the shore; the charm of the moist meadows and sandy heathlike areas; the thick, low-growing forests; and the ubiquitous stone walls. The small, unpainted gray cottages were a particular delight because they harmonized well with the character of the landscape. Buzzard’s Bay was not a striking landscape — it had no “beautiful” views in the common understanding of the term, and the few species of 101

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M. G. Van Rensselaer, the Gilder family, and a donkey in Marion, Massachusetts, ca. 1890. (Sippican Historical Society, Marion, Massachusetts)

native trees were almost all second growth, except for a few groves of grand white pines.4 The real richness of the district lay in its shrubs and herbaceous plants, and Van Rensselaer took advantage of her botanical knowledge to detail what could be found in and around Marion in the month of July. The heath family ruled in the landscape, and the mountain laurel bloomed in great abundance. Her catalog of plants, which she admitted was incomplete, included ilex, viburnums, wild roses, spireas, and potentillas. She meant to show that however unassuming the area, there was good reason for liking it. Of course, there were other delights to be had in Marion, including the artistic and intellectual company that gathered around Richard Watson Gilder and his wife, Helena de Kay. As she wrote the article on Buzzard’s Bay in July 1888, Van Rensselaer was also looking forward to a visit from the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; he had just sent his portrait of her (shown in the introduction) to the bronze foundry. They were close friends and carried on a warm correspondence until his death in 1907.5 Two weeks later, again writing from Marion, Van Rensselaer abandoned 102

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Gilder House, Marion, Massachusetts, n.d. (Sippican Historical Society, Marion, Massachusetts)

the heaths in favor of the sundew. After exploring a swampy area away from the main roads, she wrote “A Woodland Tragedy,” describing her experiences with the insect-eating plant called the sundew. She was a bit late in her discovery, for a cultural fascination with the sundew had begun in the 1860s, when the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne addressed an ode to the plant. The first two lines of “The Sundew” describe its physical appearance: “A little marsh plant, yellow green, / And pricked at lip with tender red.” When the poem was published, the sundew was not a focus of scientific attention, but Darwin’s interest in the plant drew others to consider it, and by the end of the 1870s, the plant was part of discussions on the ethical, philosophical, and cultural implication of Darwin’s work.6 A chance encounter with the sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) had inspired Darwin to embark on a detailed inquiry into its characteristics. He described his surprise at discovering how many insects were caught by the leaves of the sundew. Considering that the plant was extremely common in some districts, he realized that the number of insects annually slaughtered (his word) was enormous. He decided that the sundew was worthy of investigation because “Drosera was excellently adapted for the special purpose 103

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Drosera rotundifolia. (From vol. 3 of W. Baxter, British phaenogamous botany, or, Figures and descriptions of the genera of British flowering plants [Oxford, 1837]; Archives of the Arnold Arboretum, Cambridge, MA; Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

of catching insects.” Insectivorous Plants was published in 1875, its second edition in 1888 — the same year that Van Rensselaer discovered the sundew.7 John Lindley also wrote about the sundew, and his Ladies’ Botany illustrated what could be seen under a lady’s magnifying glass: what seemed a little hair with a drop of water at the point of the tentacles on the sundew’s leaf was really a long curved horn. Lindley warned that in order to become acquainted with the Drosera, ladies had to face the realities of the wilderness, because the plant’s home was the fen and marsh.8 Undaunted by the difficulties, Van Rensselaer was resolute in finding a 104

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Drosera rotundifolia. Her journey led her far away from main roads, through a growth of young trees and thick shrubs to a swampy place. She followed Swinburne’s counsel to “stoop with drawn brows against the sun” and lifted a curtain of shrubs and creepers to discover “the round, red, bristly little leaves, each tiny hair bearing its drop of glue, like a diamond awaiting some Titania’s ear.” With this reference to Titania, queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Van Rensselaer alluded to the oftenquoted line from Erasmus Darwin’s “The Botanic Garden” — “a zone of diamonds trembles round [Titania’s] brows.”9 More than its extraordinary shape or lustrous shine, the sundew’s habit of trapping insects fascinated Van Rensselaer. She reported: “Of course the fact that these miniature, jewel-like arrangements are murderous arrangements is what makes them so attractive.” She relished the bloodier interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution: “This tiny plant gives us a chance to see a bit of the great world-drama called the struggle for life in vivid action. Though we know that one plant always lives by the death of another, we do not often see this truth in clearly visible shape.” She recounted sitting patiently for almost thirty minutes to watch a tiny fly disappear “in a tight, little, red, clammy fist,” and she encouraged her readers to do the same: “watch a little, lovely Sundew leaf . . . and the whole panorama of the world’s history seems to unroll before the imagination.” She seemingly ignored Darwin’s call in Origin of Species to “behold the face of nature bright with gladness.” Only a dull mind, she thought, would not be thrilled with a sense of  “the awfulness of Nature’s methods, . . . the iron rule of the law that nothing can live but by the death of something else, when he sees a Sundew clasp its victim.”10 The Darwin scholar Ernst Mayr writes that Darwin’s adoption of such misleading terms as “struggle for existence” and “struggle for life” gave currency to the idea that he shared Tennyson’s concept of “nature red in tooth and claw.” Darwin in fact meant something much broader: he used “struggle for existence” in a metaphorical sense, including the dependence of one being on another and, more important, including not only the life of the individual but success in leaving progeny. Darwin explained that a plant on the edge of a desert does not struggle for life against another plant or against the drought — it is dependent on moisture.11 The sharpness of attention instilled by Van Rensselaer’s botany and geology lessons is also evident in “A Glimpse of Nantucket,” which was 105

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published in Garden and Forest in 1888. Her treatment of the subject owed a debt to Darwin’s Origin of Species and to Shaler’s writings on geology. In Darwin’s chapter “Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest,” he explained the probable course of natural selection through the example of a country undergoing some physical change (e.g., in climate): “The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct.” If the country had open borders, new forms would immigrate, seriously disturbing the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Darwin wrote that the introduction of even a single tree or one mammal had a powerful influence.12 Van Rensselaer opened her essay with a statement about the steadily declining population of Nantucket, an island south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She commented that the people who remained in 1888 represented “a selection of the unfittest”— the community’s more energetic and intelligent youths had left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Van Rensselaer wrote that before the 1870s, the condition of life on Nantucket was generally described as “a featureless expanse, interesting simply as a bit of sandy wilderness isolated in a wilderness of waves.” Change arrived in the new form of offislanders in the late 1870s, after they discovered the cool, bracing Nantucket climate; the picturesque, quiet town; and its rich facilities for bathing, boating, and fishing. Summer after summer, thousands of immigrants swelled the population of the island.13 Before her visit, Van Rensselaer studied local records, the geology of Nantucket, and Maria Owen’s native plant guidebook. She spent only two days on Nantucket, with no time to explore the lower western portion of the island, but diligent driving took her through the higher eastern half. Van Rensselaer came prepared with the knowledge that the island had been formed during and after the glacial epoch, and she expected to discover boulders strewn all over New England and along the coasts nearest to Nantucket. As a mass of drift, however, Nantucket did not have the bedrock of the mainland. Van Rensselaer found none of the picturesque stone walls that she enjoyed on Block Island, where she had summered in 1880. Van Rensselaer also compared the general landforms of the two islands: Block Island had a perpetually undulating surface covered with boulders, with scarcely any vegetation except a close, yellowish grass. On Nantucket, the grass was thick with flowering plants, and the surface was flat or gently 106

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rolling in long swells; a border of sedges and tall grass encircled the island’s ponds.14 Van Rensselaer grasped the interest of both the large and the small features of a place — from landforms to trees to flowers — “so impressive in a general view, so interesting to the eye of minute examination.” She wrote in depth about Nantucket’s vegetation, again alluding to Darwin. Van Rensselaer knew that white oaks had once grown on Nantucket, but when she visited in the late 1880s, no trees existed except scattered plantations of fortyyear-old pitch pine and trees planted along the streets of the town. She observed, “[The pitch pine] can seldom have struggled with greater difficulties than on Nantucket. No individual rises more than ten or twelve feet above the soil; all are grotesquely distorted by the fierce sea winds.” In his chapter “Struggle for Existence,” Darwin described the stunted forms of species that move northward or ascend a mountain because of the direct, injurious action of climate.15 Darwin wrote that a web of complex relationships binds plants and animals; he cited an example of how cattle determined the existence of Scotch fir on a once-barren heath in Staffordshire. Looking closely between the stems of the heath, Darwin found a multitude of seedlings and little trees perpetually browsed down by cattle. As soon as the land was enclosed, it became thickly clothed with young firs. Van Rensselaer similarly observed a positive aspect to the abandonment of raising sheep on the island —  Nantucket had become a garden of flowers. As soon as the sheep were gone, flowers and blooming shrubs sprang up.16 Van Rensselaer detailed the rich flora, including golden asters, goldenrods, and everlastings, all stunted by the wind to a few inches yet blooming vigorously. She found the most characteristic and charming tracts to be those covered by a close growth of bearberry and broom crowberry. Maria L. Owen’s Catalogue of Plants Growing Without Cultivation in the County of Nantucket, Mass. (1888) listed the abundant bearberry or meal-plum (Arctostaphylos Uva-ursi) and the broom crowberry (Corema conradii). The bearberry, with its thick mat of glossy leaves and dark red fruit, was an attractive contrast to the heathlike crowberry, which rose in dense miniature evergreen thickets. Van Rensselaer recommended this combination to owners of sandy seashore places as a substitute for a grass lawn. Owing to the springy quality of the stems, it was delightful to look at and to walk on.17 107

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“A Glimpse of the Sea,” Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, Detroit Publishing Company postcard, n.d. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

She encouraged readers to see Nantucket before the tourist throngs critically altered what she described as the “savage simplicity of the interior”—  before Nantucket looked like the rest of the world. Van Rensselaer admitted that almost all the conventional attributes of natural beauty were wanting and hesitated to call the island “attractive.” She thought a better word was “impressive” and sought to explain the pull of this unique landscape.18 The sea played a huge part in the island’s appeal for Van Rensselaer, who loved the sea. She enjoyed her summers in Lenox, Stockbridge, and Saratoga, yet she wrote of her longing for sea air and pined for the sight of the sea, even if it was not continually in view. “It suffices,” she declared, “to know that one may go out & look at it & at night, perhaps, hear its voice in the distance. I love even the harbor whistles when I am at home.” Visiting Jekyll Island in Georgia, she wrote that it was pure heaven — “such a beach and ocean.” She found this aspect of Nantucket irresistible: “A splendid sky and the breath of a tearing wind tell us of the splendid sea, even when it lies out of sight. Seldom in civilized regions are we swayed by such a sense of breadth, vastness, freedom and the spontaneous action of elemental forces.”19 108

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An Exposition and a Steamer Van Rensselaer “travelled far & fast” through France in the summer of 1889 to research French churches for Century. She was with her fourteen-yearold son and her late husband’s niece Anna Murray Vail and later recalled a “frightfully dirty [hotel in Le Puy], spiders as big as chickens being the least of its evils.” They were relieved near the end of the trip to be able to rent an apartment in Paris for five weeks. She came down with a miserable cold while visiting Notre Dame and was late sending the article requested by Gilder on the Exposition Universelle. Her article on the exposition in Century was published about the same time as her unsigned editorial on the same topic in Garden and Forest.20 In “The Exhibition Grounds, Paris,” for Garden and Forest, Van Rensselaer dutifully explained what could be seen in the illustration of the grounds as viewed from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower. Her usual flair for description was not apparent until the piece’s end, when she described the enchanting effect produced by the electric lights that encircled the grassy areas. Viewed at night from the tower, these “starry bands” contrasted with “the flashing splendor of the illuminated fountains.” The gardens became a fairyland after dark, and Van Rensselaer was filled with admiration for the good taste that had produced such a dazzling effect. With her art critic’s eye, she painted the scene of Sunday afternoons on the exhibition grounds, when visitors were allowed to walk, sit, and eat on the grass: “myriad white napkins and bright spots of color enlivening every green expanse”— a veritable Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, completed by Georges Seurat three years earlier.21 In the summer of 1888, before Van Rensselaer started out for France, she “fell in with certain artists” who spoke of their delightful voyage by boat down the Rhone River — and they persuaded her to do the same. These artists were likely Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his architect friends Stanford White and Charles McKim, who had traveled the route ten years earlier. She wrote about the trip in a two-part series entitled “Down the Rhone,” which began in Garden and Forest in January 1890. The Rhone, known for its fierce currents, is located in eastern France and runs almost due south into the Mediterranean.22 It was early morning in mid-July when Van Rensselaer and her companions 109

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Grounds of the Paris Exhibition from the platform of the Eiffel Tower. (From Garden and Forest 2, November 27, 1889)

boarded a long, narrow steamer in Vienne, a little way below Lyons. They were alone in the space reserved for first-class passengers, except for a Frenchman and his daughter; the remainder of the boat was piled high with freight and filled with “peasants” going short distances. Passing through the valley of the lower Rhone, Van Rensselaer saw a succession of landscape types and picturesque ruins, churches, and villages. Fertile plains encircled by rocky yellow hills turned into superb rock forms touched with spots of dusky foliage. The river itself was exciting, so swift and full that the boat sped along and passed beneath bridges with a roar like a cataract. As usual, Van Rensselaer took great care in the description of colors: the river was “a sort of pale greenish gray that turns all sorts of tints with the varying light.”23 Lois Dinnerstein writes that because Van Rensselaer’s articles were rarely illustrated, her style of art criticism was very explicit — she felt “the need to convey the artist’s image through words.” The same is true of her descriptions of landscapes. In the village of Lavoulte, looking southward in the early afternoon, she described the scene: “On all sides were distant mountains of the most genuine blue. To the east was a nearer amphitheatre of hills, some vivid green, some pied green and yellow. The sky was blue and 110

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the clouds white, but whiter still was the sun-struck river flowing between pure white beaches fringed with low pale green Willows and filmy little Poplars.”24 The picturesque qualities of a scene drew Van Rensselaer’s attention. Just as she wrote much of “the infernal beauty” and little of the danger of the Bessemer process at the Cambria Iron Works, she noted the beauty of the “naked, glowing yellow” of the vineyards above green lowland fields in the village of Tain. The vines had produced the famous Hermitage wine before being ravaged by the phylloxera pest; yet, she commented, “their beauty . . . has not been hurt so much as their usefulness.”25 In Van Rensselaer’s eyes, the very best aspect of the journey down the Rhone was the clear progress from north to south: the change in the character of the land, vegetation, and architectural features. The light grew clearer and stronger and the color ever more intense as they moved south. Because she had just completed an essay about the French painter Corot for Century, it is no surprise that she saw a “succession of  ‘Corots’ as complete and exquisite as ever came from the master’s brush.” Pollarded mulberries ran in long lines between fields, and nearby hills lay in “low, gentle waves like sea water charmed to rest”— one of many poetic similes that graced the essays.26 How was Van Rensselaer able to recall the forms and colors of landscapes and architectural details so vividly? She once wrote Gilder about his assumption that he had asked her to write about the German realist painter Adolf von Menzel: “I am not mistaken for I have an infallible memory in such matters.” Did she have an infallible memory in all matters?27

“Nature’s Nurseries” In June 1891 Van Rensselaer wrote to the Century editor R. U. Johnson from Marion, where she was again spending the summer: “I hope you are as cool in New York as we are here. Indeed, it has been too cold for comfort of  late. That you are as peaceful and quiet and as devoid of professional responsibilities, I can hardly fancy.” She was working on the English cathedral series for Century, and that summer she published ten editorials and a few other articles in Garden and Forest. Her sister Lily was visiting from Europe, and as Van Rensselaer remarked to Gilder, “I grudge every one of the very few days I can have with her.”28 111

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While in Marion, Van Rensselaer returned to a spot in the forest to observe a change in the landscape. She was used to walking or driving through the miles of forest in Plymouth County, and she remembered one pitch pine that stood in the center of a meadow surrounded by white pines. Three years previously, nothing was growing beneath the pitch pine, but since that time the encircling trees had sent out “their flights of seeds,” and a thick expanse of tiny white pines was now sheltered by its branches. Van Rensselaer directed anyone wishing to know the processes that built up the primeval forest to visit this place — thus the title of the piece for Garden and Forest: “Nature’s Nurseries.”29 Over the years in Marion, Van Rensselaer came to know one of the local inhabitants named Aunt Keziah, who claimed to be 107 years old. To visit “the ancient dame,” she had to follow a rough farm track through fields and more than half a mile of dense wood; the old woman’s cottage stood in a clearing surrounded on all sides by the forest. On one visit, Van Rensselaer remarked on the quiet charm of the spot. Aunt Keziah protested that it had been much prettier years ago, recalling: “My! It looked lovely; no woods just as far as you could see!” She was a survivor of the day when trees were regarded as a nuisance, and Van Rensselaer thought it fortunate that public sentiment had changed in this regard and that the need for preservation of forests was accepted.30

“Accents as Well as Broad Effects” In 1892 Van Rensselaer was busy attending to art criticism — writing for the New York World and dispatching articles to the Boston Evening Transcript as its special New York art correspondent. The Century Company also published her book English Cathedrals. In summer and early autumn, Van Rensselaer was again living in Marion. She slyly titled her letter to the editor of Garden and Forest “Early Autumn Near Cape Cod,” for she realized the draw of “the Cape.” There was a distinction in the name for readers of the journal — Cape Cod was known; Buzzard’s Bay was not. Although Marion was only three miles to the west across the Wareham River, the river marked a clear geographical and botanical demarcation between the two regions. Just as she preferred the Rhone to the Rhine, Van Rensselaer preferred the area around Buzzard’s Bay to the 112

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Cape, and she argued that “the eye which can appreciate accents as well as broad effects” would find infinite satisfaction in her summer place.31 Van Rensselaer was intent upon depicting her country as richer than the Cape in botanical and geographical features. She detailed the many plants flourishing around Buzzard’s Bay that barely clung to existence in “the sandy, heathy, boggy, rough-and-tumble stretch of the Cape country.” Her country had verdant rolling meadows; sturdy oaks, maples, and white pines in the woodlands; and poplars and locusts by the cottage doors. She bragged about the variety that her daily excursions could encompass that was not available to residents of the Cape: “We can go to the Cape after dinner and be back to tea, and the next day can go to our pastoral inland country in an equally brief space of time.” The topography west of the river had more variety as well. The road nearest to where Van Rensselaer lived brought her to a modest elevation that the natives called “cliffs,” where the wide azure expanse of Buzzard’s Bay opened up. The road continued between hay fields and small fruit farms and led through miles of narrow roads, where woods came close to the carriage wheels, and boughs met overhead.32 The remainder of the piece vividly describes the colors of the American autumn. Van Rensselaer’s son, Gris, was beginning at Harvard that year, and she could not stay in Marion until October, when the trees would be at their most brilliant. But she found beauty in the beginning of the season: “Autumn is setting her palette, trying her effects with little streaks and spots and splashes, indicating what she means to do, sketching in her colorscheme; and everyone knows that a great artist’s sketches have a peculiar value to the understanding eye.” Hers was certainly a discerning critical eye, and she delighted in recording when each different tree began to turn. Some trees were particularly willful: the maples that year enlivened themselves in a fragmentary and fantastic fashion. On a drive one September day, she came upon a good-sized specimen, still perfectly fresh and green, with one single scarlet leaf hanging over the roadway. Van Rensselaer ended the letter with an invitation: “You must come to our individual little corner of the world, just under the heel of Cape Cod, to know exactly what you miss.”33 No letters have been found that trace Van Rensselaer’s movements during the summer of 1892, but it is certain that she took a trip west to Chicago, likely in July, to see her sister Edith Higginson and her husband, 113

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George — and to see for herself the city (not yet white) being constructed on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Impressive, Noble, and Beautiful Several articles that Van Rensselaer wrote in 1892 look forward to a subject that would dominate the next year: the World’s Columbian Exposition. She first published her views on the fair in Garden and Forest, carrying forward her message on the value of landscape gardening. She particularly praised the Chicago Commission for realizing that the true function to be performed by Olmsted and his colleagues was to set the “general scheme,” which the architects, to their credit, were following. She believed that the example of eminent architects working in perfect sympathy with Olmsted would exert a wholesome influence in helping to establish landscape gardening among the arts of design.34 In August Van Rensselaer wrote about her impressions for a more general audience in an article for the New York World, reprinted the same day in the Chicago Tribune. As a native New Yorker, she had been apprehensive when Chicago was selected as the site of the fair: “We at the East felt that the West would not enter into the scheme in an artistic spirit.” Van Rensselaer castigated herself that even when the design scheme for the fair was made public, she did not recognize its remarkable mechanical daring and ingenuity and its aesthetic wisdom and originality.35 Van Rensselaer was perfectly situated to appreciate and to promote the genius of the fair. The design encompassed all the arts she knew so well: painting, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture — and her latest interest, landscape gardening. “What pleases me most,” she wrote, “is that one great art, hitherto ignored or half despised by the public and even by most artists in other branches, will now surely establish itself.” Readers of the World were familiar with her opinion on Olmsted; she believed him “the most remarkable of American artists — living or dead.” Van Rensselaer failed to mention that Olmsted’s partner, Henry Sargent Codman, was responsible for the arrangement of the fair’s terraces, bridges, and landings.36 Van Rensselaer used her firsthand knowledge of both the Paris and the Chicago expositions to point out the boldness of Olmsted’s concept. Unlike Paris, the site in Chicago offered no naturally fine situation. In Paris, 114

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Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1893. (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Olmsted Lithograph Collection, Olmsted Job #274)

according to Van Rensselaer, the landscape architects created nothing; the land on one side of the River Seine easily accommodated buildings and plantings, and on the other, fountains, cascades, and gardens fit effortlessly into the slope. In contrast, the lake site in Chicago was an expanse of barren sand dunes divided by swampy hollows, where water often overflowed from the lake to a considerable depth.37 The selection of F. L. Olmsted and Company (the next year, the firm’s name changed to Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot) as consulting landscape architects was one of the first decisions made by the Board of Directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Olmsted’s unifying ground plan coordinated spaces and structures: about four hundred buildings covered 630 acres of once swampy land that had to be dredged and filled. Canals and lagoons were cut and provided water and a means of transportation within 115

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Island and lagoon with gondola at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, n.d. (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Olmsted Photograph Album Collection, Olmsted Photo #274‑05–ph00a)

the grounds. The landscaping of the exposition also proved to be a superhuman effort. Olmsted reported that on the shores of the lagoons, a little over a million plants were transplanted, including seventy-five large railway carloads of herbaceous aquatic plants collected from the wild and 285,000 ferns and other perennial herbaceous plants.38 Two months before the opening ceremony, Van Rensselaer was able to envision the plaza that would act as a frontispiece to the exposition for those approaching by water. She gave the dimensions of the huge statue the Republic, by the American sculptor Daniel Chester French, to be placed at the end of the great basin and asserted that it would look better than her readers could imagine: “Size is a factor of immense importance in architectural creations. It is easy to give facts of size in feet and inches, but such facts convey no real idea of effects except, perhaps, to minds thoroughly trained in architectural matters.” She commented that French’s sculpture exceeded her expectations — his previous work, “charming and skillful” though it was, 116

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Jean André Castaigne, “Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic,” World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. (From Century Magazine 46, May 1893)

lacked monumentality. In her opinion, French had stood the test. The size of this statue and other features of the fair were going to support what she called the “scholarly dignity” of the exposition as a whole. She set the Paris exposition against the upcoming American one: Paris had been merely brilliant, amusing, and gaily delightful. Chicago would be impressive, noble, and beautiful.39 A week later, the World published the second portion of Van Rensselaer’s preview of the World’s Columbian Exposition. She entered the fair from the railroad side this time and envisioned what the visitor would see from this approach — an even more astonishing impression than from the lake —  passing through courtyards and archways, walking by the long expanse of 117

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the basin, and glimpsing “the further vista of pier and pavilion and limitless lake . . . the lake pale green under a morning sun, dark blue if the sunset is approaching.”40 The color scheme of the fair had not been thoroughly worked out when Van Rensselaer wrote her article. She believed that white or pale yellow would be better suited to the classical architecture and provide an essential uniformity of effect. One historian of the fair, David F. Burg, writes about the circumstances that led to the “White City.” The fair’s first director of color, William Pretyman, resigned in the spring of 1892 because of a dispute over decoration. Pretyman’s departure was significant, for had he remained the exposition might have been more colorful. He wanted to use variegated colors for the buildings, but the architect and chief of construction, Daniel H. Burnham, insisted upon a uniform white or off-white.41 Van Rensselaer’s own reasons for preferring white went beyond uniformity of effect; she argued that white was better suited to the clear American air and luminous blue sky. She repeated an argument she had used six months earlier in Garden and Forest. In “Color of Rural Buildings,” Van Rensselaer elaborated on what colors were appropriate for latitudes ranging from Holland to England to Italy. New Yorkers could expect summers as warm as in Madrid and Rome, for the city lay in the same latitude, although its winters were much colder. She cited a bit of scientific information learned from Humboldt: “Atmospheric conditions do not change to correspond with isothermic lines; and all year round . . . we have vivid skies, a pellucid thin atmosphere and a clear bright scheme of natural color.” Architects had learned to follow the teachings of the south in the external coloring of  buildings in New York. She recommended white or pale yellow for houses situated among trees, but she also specified a situation in which a house could stand apart from trees and still look well if painted white — on the edge of the sea, with strong blue color below it — or at the edge of  Lake Michigan?42 Van Rensselaer was proud of the World articles; she wrote to Olmsted in October and asked him to read them: “This time I really think I caught the public ear & have done some good in ‘popularizing’ a really fine thing. . . . I feel very egotistical in making the suggestion, but you have always shown so kindly an interest in things I have tried to say that, if I bore you now, you have only yourself to blame.” Olmsted was in Chicago when his office 118

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received the letter, and he did not reply until 7 November. Much remained to be done with the planting, he reported, but he was “pretty well satisfied” with the overall effects, and the general comradeship and fervor of the artists delighted him. He had not seen the World articles but nevertheless coached Van Rensselaer on how to represent the landscape work to the public: “If people generally got to understand that our contribution to the undertaking is that of the framing of the scheme, rather than the disposition of flowerbeds and other matters of gardening decoration — as to which those familiar with European exhibitions will be disappointed, it will be a great lift to the profession — will really give it a better standing than it has in Europe. I was exceedingly pleased to find how fully the architects recognized our service in this respect.”43 Olmsted disagreed with Van Rensselaer’s preference for white paint. He wrote to his colleagues from Paris in April 1892 after visiting the site of the former Exposition Universelle. He thought about the exposition’s design in relation to the Chicago fair: “The buildings (as they now appear) have much more color and much ornament in color but much less in moulding & sculpture than I had supposed. They show, I think, more fitness for their purposes — seem more designed for the occasion and to be less like grand, permanent, architectural monuments than ours are to be.”44

The Importance of Art Van Rensselaer visited Chicago again in October and wrote “The Artistic Triumph of the Fair-Builders,” published in the Forum in December. The writing is awkward and full of hyperbole and exhibits little of her usual flair and originality. Rather than luring readers by describing the vista of Lake Michigan, pale green under a morning sun, she offered reasons “why no intelligent American, and none who wishes to become intelligent, should fail to visit [the fairgrounds] next summer.” She claimed that the sight of the exposition had not been paralleled since “the Rome of the Emperors stood intact with marble palace, statue, terrace, bridge, and temple, under an Italian sky no bluer than our own.” This was not Van Rensselaer’s most original effort — David F. Burg notes that using Rome in an analogy easily came to mind for many people.45 The article clumsily expressed what Van Rensselaer had written earlier: 119

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that she hoped the fair would impress upon the public mind the importance of art as a factor in national life. This long, graceless sentence is unlike Van Rensselaer’s usual output: “It will be worth your while to take a great deal of trouble and make many sacrifices to visit the Fair if you care to learn, in a very short time, more about certain very important matters than months of home study or foreign travel could teach you — to gain much valuable knowledge and many fruitful impressions which there has never before been such an opportunity of gaining, and probably never will be in the future while you live.”46 The sentence in no way compares to the vivid description she provided in “The Triumph of Beauty” of the Daniel Chester French statue that crowned the archway of the fair’s entry colonnade. Anyone reading it would have learned something about art and would long to see the real thing: “The four horses do not simply stand abreast and by themselves, guided only by the Victory in her chariot. Between each pair advances a female figure, holding them to right and left by their bits. . . . If on a large scale he can preserve the graceful force of the figure I saw [in a sketch], with its hands upraised at equal heights to hold the champing heads of the horses, we shall see one of the most delightful sculptured conceptions of modern times.”47 Van Rensselaer ended her Forum article by castigating those “self-styled Christians” who called for the fair to be closed on Sunday. The issue of Sunday closing was one of the most controversial of the exposition’s publicrelations problems. Clergymen argued that if the fair was open on Sunday, it would detract people from church, yet others argued that Sunday was the only day the poorer people of Chicago could visit. Van Rensselaer took the argument further, writing that it was the one day “when our mind-hungry, beauty-starved, ignorant but eagerly ambitious masses could best make use of its civilizing and uplifting ministrations.” The issue was finally resolved by the Superior Court of Cook County, which determined that the fair would remain open on Sunday — for Van Rensselaer’s so-called ignorant masses.48 Alan Trachtenberg suggests that the World’s Columbian Exposition closed out an era — “ like the Gilded Age, White City straddles a divide.” The year 1893 straddled a divide for Van Rensselaer as well; the death of her son in April 1894 from tuberculosis led to an interest in public service and a gradual retreat from the topics she had pursued for almost twenty years.49 120

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Like Trachtenberg, Lewis Mumford looked to the World’s Columbian Exposition as a turning point for America: “The Brown Decades mark a period. . . . If it began with the mourning note of Lincoln’s funeral, it ended, like a sun thrusting through the clouds, in the golden portal of Sullivan’s Transportation Building at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.” 1 The year 1893 was also an important milestone in Van Rensselaer’s career and a turning point in her life. The World’s Columbian Exposition opened on 1 May, and every periodical in the country covered the fair. Century chose Van Rensselaer to write “At the Fair” for its May issue. Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handbook of the World’s Columbian Exposition, distributed on 2 May, featured “What Mrs. Van Rensselaer Says.” The next day, Garden and Forest published “The Work of Frederick Law Olmsted at the Columbian Exposition,” an editorial written by Van Rensselaer; she would write five more pieces about the fair before the end of the year. In mid-May Charles Scribner’s Sons brought out Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening. The book was a recasting and elaboration of six years of articles and editorials from American Architect and Building News, Century, and Garden and Forest. Moreover, in the October Century, Van Rensselaer published “Frederick Law Olmsted,” which Laura Wood Roper calls the most comprehensive biography on Frederick Law Olmsted to appear up to that time. Van Rensselaer managed to produce all this and much more while traveling in search of a healthy climate for her tubercular son.2 121

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Cover of Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handbook of the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. The cover shows the Golden Doorway of Adler and Sullivan’s eastern facade of the Transportation Building. (Author’s collection)

“A Friendly Word to the Public” It appears that the first task that Van Rensselaer took on in the new year was Art Out-of-Doors. She cautioned readers that the book was not a doit-yourself manual; with her high regard for the profession of landscape gardening as an art, she could not conceive of writing such a book. It was also not a practical treatise for artists and students. Reminiscent of A. J. Downing’s voice adopted for the Horticulturist, Van Rensselaer’s was light: she simply wished “to say a friendly word to the public on behalf of gardening as an art.” As she had attempted to do during the previous six years, Van Rensselaer wanted “to plead the cause of good taste by showing why this 122

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Cover of  Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer’s Art Out-of-Doors, 1893. (Author’s collection)

art should be practiced and judged as are arts of other kinds.” She went further: “the most remarkable artist yet born in America” was Frederick Law Olmsted — a notable statement given her knowledge of American sculptors, painters, and architects. Olmsted’s discomfort with his new prominence came out in their subsequent correspondence.3 Tracing the origins of the seventeen chapters of Art Out-of-Doors to their previous incarnations is critical for recognizing Van Rensselaer’s importance as one of the editorial voices for Garden and Forest. Because many of the book’s chapters were renamed, an easy correspondence to editorials and unsigned articles in that periodical has eluded historians. And all of the material in the book did not originate in Garden and Forest — in several instances Van Rensselaer reached back to the first articles that she wrote on landscape gardening in 1887 for American Architect and Century. 123

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The opening chapter in Art Out-of-Doors, “The Art of Gardening,” is a version of Van Rensselaer’s first five articles in the Garden and Forest series “Landscape Gardening.” Newly added to her discussion of the naturalistic style of gardening was a passage praising the creation of Central Park by Olmsted and his associates; she reminded readers that as late as the 1860s, a “dismal, barren, treeless, half-rocky, and half-swampy waste” occupied the tracts below the reservoir. Ironically, Central Park’s landscape was devastated on 23 August 1893, when a category-two hurricane hit New York City almost three months to the day after the book’s publication.4 The second chapter, “Aims and Methods,” combined ideas from the last articles in the series “Landscape Gardening” and the two-part series “Great Hill: A New American Country-seat,” published in October 1891. Other material was initially written for American Architect.5 Whereas before, in her Garden and Forest articles, Van Rensselaer had made only general statements about America’s landscape gardeners, in the book she specifically named Olmsted as “the greatest living master of his craft, if not the very greatest who has lived since gardening art has dealt with landscape-effects at all.” When Olmsted received a copy of Art Outof-Doors, he was proud to see how highly he stood in Van Rensselaer’s judgment, but it made him feel a bit “giddy and unsafe to stand in such a position.” He did not like to be given credit for works to which his partners Calvert Vaux, Harry Codman, Charles Eliot, and his son John Charles Olmsted had contributed: he explained that it was impossible to even apportion credit because a design typically grew from “two or more minds in prolonged, practical discussions.” Codman was no longer contributing to the discussions; he had died on 13 January 1893, while recuperating from an appendectomy.6 Olmsted had not managed to convince Van Rensselaer to use the designation “landscape architecture” in Garden and Forest, and when he read her book, he renewed his protest about “this confusion of terms.” In his opinion nothing could be written on the subject without extreme care “to discriminate between what is meant in common use of the words garden, gardening, gardener, and the art which I try to pursue.” He was tired of the struggle and did not live to see Van Rensselaer finally adopt the term he preferred in the second edition of Art Out-of-Doors (1925).7 Because the majority of Art Out-of-Doors originated from editorials and 124

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unsigned articles in Garden and Forest, it is not surprising that scholars do not credit Van Rensselaer for these pieces. In a few instances even Olmsted did not identify her as the author. In one case, the anonymity caused acute embarrassment for Olmsted when he wrote to Van Rensselaer and criticized one of her editorials. Belatedly aware of his blunder, he composed a particularly muddled letter to her: “It would seem as if there must have been some two lobe operation otherwise how was I prompted to write to you about the article on lawns & terraces? To the best of my knowledge I had not the least idea that you had had anything to do with it. . . . I supposed (or thought with one lobe), that Mr. Sargent had written the article and while writing you the thought of his terrace which I had just come from came to me & the idea overflowed to you.”8 The third chapter, “The Home-Grounds,” was based on the 1891 editorial “The Planting of Home Grounds,” and both begin with a quotation from the English gardening author William Robinson: “The union — a happy marriage it should be — between the house beautiful and the ground near it is worthy of more thought than it has had in the past.” The essay addressed local plants as an essential foundation for local character. Van Rensselaer argued that to be harmonious and beautiful, home grounds with distant views to the Berkshire Hills or to the Hudson Valley, for example, must be clearly American, just as those in the Thames Valley or on the southern shore of France must have their own particular local character. Exotics were to be used only for variety and interest and definitely not for mere conspicuousness, as was too commonly the case, she added. As always, Van Rensselaer sought tasteful combinations, no matter the collection of plants. She urged that “the main picture formed by the general environment of the house and the encircling landscape” must always be the essential objective.9 Suitably for the year 1893, when all eyes were on the World’s Columbian Exposition, Van Rensselaer added a patriotic finish to the original editorial. “When the first explorers landed,” she wrote, “when no seeds had been sown here but those of Nature’s sowing, these Atlantic and Middle States would have seemed very rich if matched against all of Europe.” She believed that America did not actually need foreign plants but conceded that foreign plants could be added without “selling our birthright of individuality.”10 The book’s next chapter, “Close to the House,” combined the contents of the four-part series “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House.” 125

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Olmsted had again failed to connect her with the Garden and Forest editorials and asked Stiles for their author’s name. Stiles responded: “The articles in question were written by Mrs. Van Rensselaer. . . . They have been changed but very little. I supposed that they were inspired in the office of F. L. & J. C. Olmsted with some additional afflatus from CSS[argent]. Although they have a good deal of the native and acquired taste of the distinguished authoress herself.”11 The opening of the editorial surely offered Olmsted some inkling of the identity of the author. Van Rensselaer wrote that American architects had begun to reconsider the desirability of an irregular site; rather than level and smooth the ground, designers sought to integrate architectural and natural features. She praised Richardson’s Town Hall in North Easton, Massachusetts, where rough-faced local stone was used on the foundation to blend with the rocky site. Her 1886 Century article “Recent Architecture in America: Public Buildings I” and Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (1888) had carried the same message.12 The chapter “Close to the House” describes the type of plantings that could link the walls of a house to “Mother Earth,” ranging from different kinds of vines and creepers to shrubs. Van Rensselaer never varied in her concern for appropriateness. Each vine and creeper has a special character of its own, she wrote, and each is more or less appropriate for different sites, exposures, climates, and the colors and materials of the house walls. She also never varied in her concern for fitting color combinations: “The splendid foliage-masses of the trumpet-creeper and its brilliant clusters of orange-flowers look better against gray wood than against red brick.”13 The selection of shrubs was another exercise in appropriateness — of size, spacing, and especially color. “Green is Nature’s color,” she stated, and “far too many places are disfigured by an accumulation of abnormally colored plants, with striped or blotched or speckled foliage.” She allowed that a single plant of this sort could produce a pretty effect, but too much reckless mingling of reds and yellows, streaks and spots, destroyed all peacefulness, unity, and naturalness of effect. If readers still had not taken in the message of simplicity and unity, Van Rensselaer repeated her opinion of pattern bedding. The “sternest self-restraint” was called for in regard to brightly colored borders, for nothing was uglier or more inharmonious.14 Chapter 5, “Roads and Paths,” combines five editorials in Garden and 126

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Lantern slide of C. S. Sargent estate, garden beside house, Brookline, Massachusetts, n.d. (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design)

Forest. The general subject was one that had been addressed by Humphry Repton in 1806 when he offered eight rules for approach roads; subsequently A. J. Downing had quoted Repton’s rules in his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841). Van Rensselaer was particularly keen about the need to preserve a broad expanse of lawn in front of a house with no interruption by the gray gravel of a road or path. With an art critic’s eye, she shaped her argument: “No one would ruin a fine painted landscape by pasting a strip or great circle of gray paper over the lower part of the foreground.”15 More important than the details of road and path layout are the letters exchanged between Olmsted and Van Rensselaer after the editorial “Walks and Drives” was published. She did her best to be conciliatory to the professional who was thirty years her senior. Olmsted was concerned about her statement that “nothing is more pleasing to the eye than the foundations of a house springing from the green turf.” He wrote: “I think I would have put in a qualifying word or two [about invariably bringing greensward to the walls of the house].” He offered the example of Sargent’s terrace at Holm Lea 127

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that separated the lawn from the walls of the house, as seen in an undated lantern slide.16 Van Rensselaer quickly responded: “I am perhaps the greatest admirer of terraces who lives, but in writing such short things as editorials for G. & F. one has to stick to a single point at a time, often to the injury of general righteousness.” She offered to write another article on terraces to qualify what she had said. Adopting a surprisingly obsequious tone, she concluded: “Many thanks for the kind and indulgent way in which you meet my callow efforts in your domain. Perhaps after a while I shall succeed in clearing my own thoughts — a thing which can only be done, I find, by a process of purporting to instruct others!”17 Chapter 6, “Piazzas,” is a slightly edited version of two editorials of the same name that were published in Garden and Forest in November 1888. Van Rensselaer championed the piazza, refusing to call it by any other name  — not verandah, not porch. She believed that the large covered piazza, as an architectural feature, had been developed in answer to a distinct and imperative American need. An American country house without a piazza, she vigorously proclaimed, is in every sense a mistake and a failure. She conceded that there were other external features that could add comfort and beauty to a home — for example, the Italian loggia and the terrace protected by a vine-covered trellis — but neither of these could really fill the place of a true piazza.18 The next chapter, “Formal Flower-Beds,” combined the editorial of the same name from June 1888; a letter to the editor about the Boston Public Garden published three months later; and a number of editorials from late 1889 and 1890 on French ornamental grounds, parterres, and gardens. By the time she published Art Out-of-Doors, Van Rensselaer’s opinion of garishly colored pattern beds was well known.19 Examples of especially artistic formal flower beds were confined to England and Paris: an Elizabethan garden at Charlecote Hall, near Stratford-onAvon, that she may have seen during her 1885 tour of  England; and Parisian pleasure grounds visited during her 1889 summer trip to France. According to Van Rensselaer, the rectangular, walled-in space at Charlecote Hall  — had it been disposed in a naturalistic way — would have been ineffective and would have injured the unity of its architectural environment. The hall’s formal flower garden with its gracefully shaped small pattern beds divided 128

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Courtyard at Charlecote Hall, England. (From Garden and Forest 1, June 6, 1888)

by narrow threads of gravel seemed perfectly appropriate. The brightly colored beds did not seem crude or gaudy because they were not set as spots on a carpet of vivid green and were subdued by the neutral tones of the gravel and the encircling walls.20 Also appropriate were the flower beds in the smaller pleasure grounds in Paris: they were formal in outline but not true pattern beds — merely long simple strips. Van Rensselaer saw the beds in August and September, when they were filled to the edges with such plants as dahlias, asters, geraniums, tuberous begonias, and lantanas. The flowers had been carefully placed with due regard to the habit and color of their neighbors, and the whole bed had been allowed to grow luxuriantly. No inharmonious hues offended the eye.21 One of the longest chapters in Art Out-of-Doors is “Formal Gardening”—  surprising given Van Rensselaer’s admiration of Olmsted and his signature naturalistic style. But the titles of two editorials on which the chapter was partly based reveal the subject more fully. “Formal Gardening: Does It Conflict with the Natural Style?” was published in March 1893, followed a week later by “Formal Gardening: Where It Can Be Used to Advantage.”22 Just as Taine believed in having sympathy for all forms of art and for all 129

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schools, Van Rensselaer professed that both the formal and the naturalistic systems of design are correct in their own place. She tried to avoid using the term natural gardening because no gardening result was natural. She disparaged several English books that would have been useful to the public if not for the bitter way in which they attacked the ideals and processes of the opposite camp.23 Undoubtedly she was referring to the dispute between the English landscape gardener William Robinson, a supporter of the natural garden, and the architect Reginald Blomfield, who wrote The Formal Garden in England (1892), a work that argued that the garden should be a logical extension of the house. The exchange between Robinson and Blomfield had turned vitriolic. At one point, in The Garden, Robinson asserted, “Mr. Blomfield writes nonsense and then attributes it to me.” Blomfield, on the other hand, wrote: “[The landscapist] ‘copies nature’s graceful touch,’ but under totally different conditions to the original; so far, therefore, from being loyal to nature, he is engaged in a perpetual struggle to prove her an ass.” Olmsted was of the same opinion as Van Rensselaer, asserting: “Neither writer takes quite the right ground, Robinson being almost as heretical as Blomfield.”24 Van Rensselaer believed that a true appreciation of the charms of formality would, in general, help landscape gardening: formal elements could be used when needed in naturalistic work and dispensed with altogether when they were unnecessary. She wrote that the line between one great gardening style and the other is not rigid. Nature must be allowed freedom to some extent, even in a formal garden: “within the prescribed shapes and lines [nature] must grow her flowers and foliage as she will; and she must supply light and shadow and the atmospheric envelope.” Van Rensselaer compared a beautiful park near Dresden to Central Park. The former was fundamentally formal, with scenes of parklike charm; the latter was distinctly naturalistic but featured the Mall as a major element; both harmoniously contrasted the formal with the naturalistic. Useful and therefore artificial features, she concluded, were required in all pleasure grounds.25 Even Downing, the promoter of the natural style as the national style, realized that some circumstances called for the formal style. Van Rensselaer wished that more Americans recognized that in places from Newport to Mount Vernon Place in Baltimore, there were situations that benefited from an architectonic simplicity. No theory was always right, she cautioned: 130

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“good sense and good taste must dictate the specially appropriate solution.” She offered the Capitol grounds in Washington as an example of a design created by a landscape architect (not surprisingly Olmsted) who realized that the side of the Capitol building facing the city might be improved with the addition of a wide and high architectural terrace that was united to sloping, more naturalistic gardens.26 “Formal Gardening” was followed by “A Word for Architecture,” a version of the editorial “Architectural Fitness,” from August 1891. For the most part the chapter addresses the exaggerated effort to adapt architectural work, such as drinking fountains, gateways, and bridges, to rural surroundings in urban parks. Van Rensselaer believed in a fundamental rule of art that broadly applied to all kinds of work: “the art which tries to conceal what cannot be concealed is always mistaken.” In other words, architectural features should not be concealed or made to look naturalistic. She compared the gateway at the principal entrance to Franklin Park in Boston to the gateway set at one entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The former, built wholly of small boulders and draped with thick foliage, sacrificed art and appropriateness to the unattainable end of trying to make the gateway inconspicuous. The example of Richardson’s architecture, Van Rensselaer wrote, had undoubtedly inspired this practice, yet she was sure that he would be distressed “by a sight of the progeny it has engendered.” The Prospect Park effect was better because the gateway was confessedly artistic.27 Later that year, Olmsted reproached Van Rensselaer for her Franklin Park remarks: “May I say that the comments in your book on boulder work on the Boston Parks is [sic] wholly wrong as to its facts and also wrong as to its theory of motives. I think Prof. Sargent much to blame for having misled you at first and still more wrong if he knew that you were to reprint the article. . . . But he is the most obstinate and implacably ‘set’ old man I have ever known.”28 Chapter 10, “Out-Door Monuments,” was based on a series of three editorials from 1891 entitled “Monuments in Public Places,” in which Van Rensselaer was able to expound on all her interests: art, architecture, and landscape gardening. She began with three questions: Was the person or event commemorated deserving of conspicuous and lasting honor? Was the monument an excellent work of art? Was the monument placed to appear at its best advantage, and did it increase the beauty of its surroundings? 131

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Lantern slide of Franklin Park, Ellicott Dale, looking north, Boston, Massachusetts, 1894. (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design)

The first question did not overly concern Van Rensselaer: if a work of art was good, it was worth having even if it commemorated “a well-meaning nobody.”29 Van Rensselaer was biting in her critique of the artistic merits of several statues in New York. The Robert Burns statue on the mall in Central Park provoked this question: “Who can be won to admiration of the poet by the contorted, ridiculous figure?” On the other hand, she described her friend Saint-Gaudens’s statue of Abraham Lincoln in Chicago as an adornment to the city. All told, she figured that the proportion of bad monuments to good ones in American cities was at least ten to one.30 Van Rensselaer wrote that the best place for a monument is with other artificial objects. In a park, appropriate locations would include the intersection of roads or paths, a terrace, or near a building. Commonwealth Avenue in Boston appeared to be specially designed for monuments. On the other hand, the entrance avenue of Druid Park in Baltimore drew her wrath: “its rows of monotonous, ugly urns [are] suggestive only of the Forty Thieves.” She ended the chapter on a dismal note: “most of the work already done seems very monotonous and unimaginative.” The question of site was 132

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The statue of Robert Burns, Central Park, New York City. (From The Art Journal, March 1881, p. 71; Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

the chief problem. She encouraged the public to consider monuments in a broader way, “as opportunities for the architect as well as for the sculptor, and as features in general views.”31 Chapter 11, “Cemeteries,” combined four editorials and carried Van Rensselaer’s plea for good public monuments from the city into “God’s Acre.” She did not react with scorn or anger, as she had with the Burns statue in Central Park, to “the clumsy, meaningless, [and] hideous figures” that filled American cemeteries. In their distressing failure to be either beautiful or expressive, these costly tributes of affection merely brought her to tears.32 133

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A half-century earlier, John Claudius Loudon, Downing, and his friend John Jay Smith had all written about the design of cemeteries, and America was known for the beauty of its rural cemeteries in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. But that was no longer the case with the late-nineteenthcentury cemetery, according to Van Rensselaer: “Nature is asked to take our dead in charge, and then we do a thousand things to ruin the repose, the sanctity and beauty which she is ready to provide.” With a vast waste of time and money, beds of gaudy flowers were done up in ribbon patterns, and hideous monuments that owed more to stonecutters than to artists ruined cemetery grounds.33 She wrote of the rural cemetery in Brookline where H. H. Richardson was buried. Trustees had taken the matter of monuments and planting into their own hands, and Van Rensselaer offered this strategy as an exemplar. A skillful architect had drawn up a number of tombstone designs, and lot owners had chosen among them or submitted their own for the trustees’ sanction. Planting was controlled, no enclosures were permitted around the lots, and there was no excessive tidiness — because Van Rensselaer believed that a cemetery is a home for the dead, not a place for residences or for pleasure seekers. She wished other artists to see this quiet and beautiful cemetery in Brookline and how satisfying it was to both mind and eye. If they could experience it, “all the artists in America might ask to lie near Richardson.” Van Rensselaer herself is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, one of the most beautiful of the early-nineteenth-century rural cemeteries.34 Chapter 12, “The Beauty of Trees,” looks at the form, texture, and color of trees from an artistic point of view. Culled from the five-part series “The Artistic Aspect of Trees,” the chapter demonstrates the extent of  Van Rensselaer’s botanical knowledge and the intensity with which she looked at trees. Her study of trees had a particular bias — after years as an art critic assessing trees reproduced on canvas, she had begun to look at different species under different conditions in nature. She emphasized that a knowledgeable landscape gardener could be relied on to understand the subtleties of three key characteristics: form, texture, and color.35 Like Downing, who used the term type form, Van Rensselaer explained that “the outline peculiar to a given species [of tree] varies a good deal,” that each species has a “typical shape.” Expressed as a simple diagram, a spruce 134

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“Selections from Twenty-five Designs made for the Trustees of Walnut Hills Cemetery,” Brookline, Massachusetts. (From Garden and Forest 2, April 24, 1889)

is an isosceles triangle with a broad base; a white elm fills a vaselike figure supported by a straight line. Also determining a tree’s form are its structure (e.g., sharply ascending or stiffly drooping branches) and its average size. She pointed out that few persons other than an intelligent landscape gardener take these intrinsic characteristics into account when selecting a tree and deciding whether to use it as a single specimen or to plant it in masses.36 By the texture of a tree, Van Rensselaer meant “the character of its masses of foliage,” determined by the manner of growth and the number, shape, and arrangement of its leaves. She was undoubtedly thinking of her friend Candace Wheeler, an expert in textiles, when she offered this analogy: “We know what great differences in texture . . . may be produced . . . by different methods of weaving silken threads, resulting now in silk, now in gauze, now in satin, and again in velvet.” Likewise, nature weaves different leafy 135

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coverings for her trees, from feathery sprays to rigid needles, from large or small to clustered or scattered leaves. This general aspect of foliage, she wrote, largely determines the expression of a tree, ranging from dignified to restful.37 Van Rensselaer believed that anyone who aspired to be called a lover of trees needed to note these facts. The landscape gardener would know how to combine different textures for the best effect, but few amateur planters paid attention. A cultivated eye was distressed to see a rigid-looking spruce or a solid sugar maple where a feathery hemlock or a delicate honey locust was most appropriate.38 While others saw only green trees, Van Rensselaer knew that a painter could distinguish varieties of tint and tone: seeing blue, yellow, or gray tints in green foliage and tones ranging from very pale to very dark. The artist understood that the surface of the leaves, whether smooth and shiny or dull and woolly, affected the tone. Although she recognized that it was difficult to cultivate a good eye for color, Van Rensselaer also believed that few people really looked and tried to appreciate the differences.39 To explain how a purple, red, or blue tree must be used with particular care, Van Rensselaer naturally turned to landscape painting: “It is like the red cloak which landscape-painters are so fond of employing — invaluable, sometimes, if set in exactly the right place . . . and always ruinous if wrongly placed or over-emphasized.” She left it to the landscape gardener to manage the great confusion of forms, textures, and colors that were newly available. The amateur, she feared, was too apt to be seduced by novelty.40 Van Rensselaer admitted that it might seem like a reversal of the right order of things to study art as a preparation for the study and appreciation of nature, yet she argued that to appreciate nature in full, one needed to know what the great painters of the world see in nature’s forms, textures, and colors. A great painter has eyes, tastes, and feelings that are clearer than those of the average man.41 Following on her advice that knowledge and good taste must go into the grouping of trees, Van Rensselaer offered a chapter entitled “Four Trees,” based on the last two editorials in her series “The Artistic Aspect of Trees.” The Lombardy poplar, the weeping willow, the purple or copper beech, and the white birch were familiar yet “conspicuously peculiar.” She felt that 136

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special care had to be taken to artistically integrate each one of these trees into a landscape.42 The Lombardy poplar was particularly architectonic, and Van Rensselaer saw its main value as a pronounced accent — not to be repeated too often. She confessed that she did not care at all for the weeping willow, for it is even more difficult than the Lombardy poplar to use well. “Our gardens owe much to the Chinese,” she wrote, “but they have done a good deal to offset their claims upon our gratitude by sending us the weeping willow.” The abnormal color of the purple beech, not its shape or texture, gave it a place on Van Rensselaer’s list of “eccentric, and therefore dangerous trees.” She claimed that everyone knew the purple beech was a chance variety and was artificially propagated; therefore its place was in ornamental and welltended grounds — to be used very sparingly. Rensselaer thought the little white birch, so well loved in its native woods, was too “nerveless in build and too undecided in outline to look well standing alone.” She recommended that the white birch be planted as nearly as possible in the way that nature plants it.43 Chapter 14, “A Word for the Axe,” combines three editorials from 1888. In the late 1840s, the English botanist John Lindley had observed that in contrast to his own country, where a landscape gardener had to create an almost entirely new scene, the first skill to be shown by New World designers was in removal — clearing away superfluous plants to make the view one of unity, harmony, and variety. Forty years later, Van Rensselaer made a plea to sentimental owners of trees to consider removing trees in the interest of beauty, to be courageous enough to sharpen and swing an axe.44 Van Rensselaer sketched out the circumstances that called for removing a tree, whether it be “worthless, or worse than worthless,” or a fine specimen. The decision seemed straightforward: if a tree hurts the general effect of the grounds or if it detracts from the beauty of neighboring things — use the axe. If two or three trees are growing so close together that the growth of each one is being checked — use the axe. If a tree is overshadowing a house and making it damp and dark — use the axe. But she knew how difficult it was to persuade an owner to fell even one tree on his property. In public grounds, it was even more problematic. In Central Park and Prospect Park, trees needed to be thinned, but “lovers of Nature” cried out in outrage when 137

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they saw the superintendent’s axe and protested to the park commissioners or to the public through the newspapers. She advised “the chopper” of a condemned tree in a public park to get up very early in the morning to do the deed.45 The next chapter, “Love of Nature,” was taken from a series of three Garden and Forest editorials of the same name, although a fourth editorial on the same subject published two months later was not incorporated. The most reasonable explanation for the omitted editorial is that Van Rensselaer, anticipating her son’s departure for Harvard that fall of 1892, had written an uncommonly sentimental look at the attempt to preserve a child’s love for nature. Perhaps her son read and commented on the editorial, as Van Rensselaer told Gilder he was prone to do. Gris approved of the more scholarly passages in his mother’s work but called the sentimental passages “gabble”— he had “no soul,” she remarked. Gris may have convinced his mother not to reprint the editorial.46 The substance of the chapter “Love of Nature” recalls aspects of Van Rensselaer’s earlier account of Schuyler’s life, in which she compared those of humbler birth to men of her husband’s station. In “Love of Nature,” she observed that all human beings, even the uncultivated classes, draw pleasure from nature in an instinctive way — this pleasure is purely physical, like that of an animal basking in the sun. Just as she remembered her husband having an intense sympathy for the working class, Van Rensselaer wrote about the very poor people who crowd parks on Sunday: “anyone who has sympathetically mingled with them knows that part of [their pleasure] is of finer quality [than simply physical].”47 She explained that this instinctive admiration for the charms of the natural world is not, in any true sense, the love of nature, because once these striking natural things become familiar, they grow dull. This occurred, Van Rensselaer believed, whether a person lives in a tenement house or is much more widely cultivated. “The true lover of nature,” she insisted, “is he who gives interested attention to all natural effects and forms, and finds much beauty where the average eye finds none.”48 The chapter takes a distinct turn toward the ideas of John Burroughs and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom discovered the whole world in their own home fields, woods, lakes, and streams. According to Van Rensselaer, 138

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the lover of nature appreciates scenic grandeur, but he “gladly comes back to his quiet plains, his placid pools, his little forest-glades.”49 In the final section of the chapter, Van Rensselaer returned to what was for her a customary analogy: “Everyone realizes that more kinds of art appeal to the connoisseur than to the ordinary observer, and that he does not exalt showy, spectacular kinds above all others.” The true lover of nature is like the connoisseur: he is impressed by great things but contented with small ones — the giant oak and roadside grass, the beauty of the mountain and the beauty of a plain.50 For those people not born with a deep and true love for nature, Van Rensselaer suggested that one way to acquire such knowledge was to study fine landscape paintings. Another was to paint. She encouraged intelligent young girls (she rarely addressed girls) to spend an hour a day during a single summer, “faithfully trying to set down in paint what she sees in Nature.” No matter whether all the studies are amateurish failures, she will have trained her eye to see a thousand things she had never seen before. One wonders if Van Rensselaer was made to do this as a girl and thereby “enlarged her own powers of enjoyment to the sweetening and dignifying of all the rest of her life.”51 Another way to develop a love for nature, Van Rensselaer wrote in the book’s next chapter, “A Word for Books,” was with the aid of a botanical hand­book. This chapter combined two editorials written in response to a letter to the editor of Garden and Forest.52 In the late nineteenth century, there were many publications on botany with simple language directed to women and children, and Van Rensselaer was dismayed with the type of articles on botany that appeared in children’s magazines such as Saint Nicholas. She criticized a “lady” author who offered misleading advice to young folk interested in studying nature; the author implied that as a class, the scientific names of plants are less agreeable to the ear than the common names. Van Rensselaer countered: “But is milkwort prettier than polygala . . . or false-mitrewort than tiarella?”53 The “lady” author encouraged children to take pains to learn the common names of the flowers and wished someone would make a dictionary of common plant names. Van Rensselaer responded, “How often when we discover a strange wild flower, or even a new garden-flower, do we find anyone to tell 139

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Tiarella cordifolia (false-mitrewort). (From John Sims, Curtis’s botanical magazine, or, flower-garden displayed [London: Printed by Stephen Couchman for T. Curtis, 1801–44]; Archives of the Arnold Arboretum, Cambridge, MA; Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

us its English name? But any book on botany will tell it, if we know how to determine its scientific name.” She believed that botanists employed precise descriptive terms because the plant’s right to a name was apparent. Van Rensselaer regretted that it was not only the occasional writer for children who thought systematic knowledge diminished love for natural beauty. She knew otherwise intelligent people who discouraged the pursuit of botany even in its simplest forms. These same people believed a scientific attitude to be the reverse of an attitude of enjoyment.54 140

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Van Rensselaer used a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson for the chapter’s epigraph: “When science is learned in love and its powers are wielded by love they will appear the supplements and continuance of the material creation.” She argued that books provide a fine way to develop a love for Nature and recommended the writings of Henry David Thoreau, the English poet-naturalist Richard Jefferies, and John Burroughs, all of whom stimulated powers of observation and painted beautiful pictures for the mental eye.55 She emphasized that there is no helper like a botanical handbook to enlarge the study of nature as widely and as quickly as possible. Significantly, the book she turned to was Asa Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, designed for “the use of students and of practical botanists”— not John Lindley’s Ladies’ Botany, which “attempted to render the unscientific reader familiar with what is called the natural system.”56 Ann B. Shteir notes that Lindley’s book “belongs to the polite literature of botany, and that is precisely where Lindley would have his ladies remain.” In his 1829 inaugural lecture as a professor of botany at the University of London, Lindley had declared his intention to redeem botany from its humiliating connection to the polite accomplishments of women. He believed that botany was undervalued because it was considered an amusement for ladies rather than an occupation for enlightened men of science. Shteir writes that “his bifurcated identification of polite botany with women and botanical science with men signals the direction botanical culture took during the succeeding decades.” She interprets nineteenth-century professionalization of the sciences as removing the authority invested in women’s feelings and experiences. It is no surprise that Van Rensselaer hesitated to call herself a conscientious student of science.57 Van Rensselaer wrote that Gray’s Manual of Botany, paired with his “Handbook,” supplied her with the necessary introductory knowledge, a glossary of terms to assist her memory, and full descriptions of all the plants within the wide area where she lived and traveled. Van Rensselaer related the story of her initiation one busy summer when a friend compelled her to open her botany books. The whole aspect of the summer changed: “It was as though all my life I had gone with veiled eyes among people whose language I could not speak, and now the veil had been lifted and the language explained.”58 Those familiar with Darwin’s closing metaphor of an entangled bank in 141

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Origin of Species would have recognized Van Rensselaer’s allusion to it in the chapter’s concluding remarks. Darwin’s metaphor reads: “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth . . . these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.” Van Rensselaer similarly wrote: “The green tangle by the roadside which, before, I had seen as a pretty tangle merely, now became a lovely intertwining of a dozen different shrubs and vines; and it was only when each thus began to speak for itself to the eye that the composite beauty of the group was manifest. . . . Once a little science has been ‘learned in love,’ once . . . the feeders of the imagination have been opened to Nature’s voice, we surely go on . . . thinking of the laws which govern it.”59 The last chapter of Art Out-of-Doors reached back to several of the first articles that Van Rensselaer had written on landscape gardening for Century and American Architect and incorporated those she had just completed on the World’s Columbian Exposition. The title “The Artist” was a reminder to the public that landscape gardening is an art and that an intelligent love for nature is indispensable to appreciate the aims and results of those who practice this art.60 Van Rensselaer here gave voice to Olmsted’s concerns from his November 1892 letter. She primed Americans for the “great enterprise” of the Chicago fair that had just opened, making sure that the public realized that he and his associates had “done it all” and that the ground plan was of primary importance. Olmsted had told her how fully the architects had recognized the work done by him and his colleagues, and Van Rensselaer conveyed this message: “the enthusiastic recognition of his help expressed by all the artists of other kinds who have worked at the Fair, ought to bear immediate fruit all over the country.”61 Six years after she argued in Century that landscape gardeners were needed for America, Van Rensselaer again outlined the benefits that came with the practice: “surely there is no profession whatsoever . . . which suggests to the imagination so delightful an existence.” She did not ignore the more prosaic things that the artist must study and master or the need for the cultivation of taste by studying painting and by traveling.62 142

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Van Rensselaer was specific when it came to outlining the skills and responsibilities of the landscape gardener, but she also addressed the responsibilities of the client. As she had in “Client and Architect,” published in an 1890 issue of the North American Review, she wrote that the task of a designer is very complicated, involving outlays not only for construction but for preparatory studies, superintendence, and the office work of subordinates. She wanted the client to understand this and also to be aware that every change from the original plan is costly.63 Van Rensselaer’s “friendly word to the public on behalf of gardening as an art” concluded with quotations by Goethe and André about professional versus amateur productions: the qualities that distinguish the two are simplicity and breadth of treatment. Remember this, she wrote, and you will have a steady guidepost — “ if your garden has not simplicity and breadth of effect, it is certain to be bad as a work of art.”64 The New York Times reviewed Art Out-of-Doors soon after its publication, noting that Van Rensselaer was “cheerfully aggressive in her pursuit of proselytes.” The author praised Van Rensselaer for saying extremely well a great deal about gardens and grounds and their component parts, but the tone of the review has an underlying acerbic quality. With a few qualifiers, the author called into question his tribute: “[Her] exuberance of enthusiasm and confidence . . . is almost justified by her point of view and her familiarity with the details as well as the broader aspects of the various arts.” Although praising her wide reading and observation skills, the author added: “if she insists somewhat crudely of the supremacy of man over nature, her idea is a perfectly just one considering the nature of her subject.” “Cheerfully aggressive” and “crude” are not terms one would choose to describe Van Rensselaer and her writing style.65 The reviewer responded to one passage in the book about the selection of shrubs close to the house. Van Rensselaer had written: “The question should not be whether one likes lilacs especially, but whether lilac-bushes can be well used in the general scheme.” The reviewer confessed “to an illogical, inartistic, reminiscent affection for certain ugly farmhouse grounds along a familiar road, in which the trees were huddled and lilac bushes were planted quite for love of them, and not because they added to the general scheme.”66 Van Rensselaer’s many passages condemning bright flowers planted in the midst of a lawn provoked another admission: “geraniums were there 143

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also, flaunting their ill taste in full force against the bright green of the grass plot.” The reviewer had become fond of these landscape elements by long association. A bit of mockery can be detected in the closing remarks: “We freely own that a gradual working toward the excellent and artistic principles that Mrs. Van Rensselaer has so ably set forth would present to us many a fair picture in place of what is now an offense to the critical and instructed eye, and time may be trusted to imbue the new order with old and common associations such as now belong to the order passing away.”67 Even a Frenchman, the landscape architect Edouard André, remarked on the highbrow tone of the articles in Garden and Forest and thus in Art Outof-Doors, for Van Rensselaer’s many contributions were of that sort. Five months into the journal’s publication, André wrote to his friend Sargent: “Your journal becomes better with each day . . . but it is too ‘high class.’ ” He believed that more information should be included on ordinary efforts in horticulture and ordinary plants.68 All things ordinary and popular were increasingly pitted against high culture in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and Van Rensselaer was definitely on the side of the refined arts. While she attended a performance of the Engelbert Humperdinck opera Königskinder at the Metropolitan, the less genteel watched Will Rogers at the George M. Cohan Theater “doing things with ropes.” Van Rensselaer’s writings up to this point gave no indication of the cultural revolution occurring around her — culture for her represented a sense of refinement and a trained aesthetic sensibility.69

“If I Can Get Him Well Again” Van Rensselaer’s son, Gris, fared poorly in the Cambridge winter of 1892–93. In the spring, after completing Art Out-of-Doors, Van Rensselaer took her son south to Virginia Beach, Virginia, the newly fashionable resort town located on the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay; they stayed at the Princess Anne Hotel. She told readers of Garden and Forest that she was not impressed with the flat shore country; its lack of green fields was the main reason that she did not consider it beautiful. The meadows were still dry and yellow in the spring, and she was unaccustomed to the “doleful grayish white clay-color” 144

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Princess Anne Hotel, Virginia Beach, Virginia, ca. 1890s. (Virginia Beach Public Library, Archives, Edgar T. Brown Collection)

of the roadways. Nevertheless, she wrote Johnson, “Griswold and I are both improving in this delightful climate and hope to be back in New York by the first of the month.”70 A little farther inland Van Rensselaer discovered rich woodlands with contrasting colors of spring foliage. The most common tree was the loblolly pine; its deep dull green made an excellent foil to the region’s deciduous trees. She found the native flowering plants especially beautiful: “the Dogwoods with their layers of snowy white, clouding wide stretches in the open woods as though a little snow-storm had been arrested in its descent,” mixed with redbuds that “spread clouds of deep pink against the clouds of white.” She noted the great variety of colors in the spring vegetation: the bright green of the swamp maples; the grayish pinkish leaves of the white oak; the bronzy hue of the willow oaks; and the bright yellow catkins of the willow. The emerging cat-brier leaves were like emeralds. When driving west late in the afternoon with sunlight filtering through the leaves, Van Rensselaer observed, “it seems as though the woods had been sprinkled with gems, blazing and scintillating with a gold-green radiance of their own.”71 From late June through early September, Van Rensselaer took her son to the recently opened Hotel Ruisseaumont in Lake Placid, located in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. She wrote to Gilder: “It has rained here since I can’t remember but we manage, as Gris says, to get out between drinks.” From Lake Placid, she composed a brief letter to the editor of Garden and Forest in response to an article that had appealed for a more general cultivation of Acer spicatum, a beautiful small native maple. 145

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Hotel Ruisseaumont, Lake Placid, New York. (Image courtesy of the Adirondack History Center Museum, Essex County Historical Society)

Van Rensselaer was able to track the changes in this admirably compact and symmetrical shrub over two months’ time, for it grew wild along the edges of the woodland roads in the region around Lake Placid. At the end of June, delicate pinkish brown flowers rose above its drooping leaves, and in July clusters of brighter-colored fruit replaced the flowers. When she recommended the native shrub for planting, she remained true to her often stated dislike of garish colors: “The very fact that its profusely produced flowers are not brightly colored would assist its usefulness to the gardener, who often wants, or should want, some delicate, rather dullish notes to mingle with the greens and the brighter floral notes of his shrubberies.”72 During her stay in the Adirondacks, Van Rensselaer was corresponding with the Century editors, and her true feelings about the place came out: “It is beautiful here but lonely, & the kind of beauty I don’t especially like —  as though one were sitting in one of nature’s pockets & might never get out. I am a trifle homesick for the farther perspectives of New York streets.”73 She elaborated on their situation in a letter to Olmsted: “We have a rather restricted yet magnificent view across the lake with its islands & hills beyond, & the sunsets & we see no house, nor any foot of land which is not thickly forest clad. . . . I don’t like the mountains, though, however much I may ad146

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mire them. I would rather see a horizon line somewhere than this cup-like enclosure which seems to take me by the throat after a while.” She again wrote to Olmsted as she made plans to take her son to Colorado Springs in October: “It is great wrench to leave New York, and so early in the year; but nothing matters if I can get him well again, not even being so far ‘out of the swim’ that I shall have to stop the better part of my work.” Despite her eloquent and knowledgeable descriptions of nature, she always remained a New York–bred “cockney.”74

The Thread of a Life During her stay in Lake Placid, Van Rensselaer worked on her biographical Olmsted piece for Century. It would be published in October — after much anxiety on Olmsted’s part and much appeasing on Van Rensselaer’s. Olmsted had confidence in Van Rensselaer’s judgment, yet he hesitated for a particular reason. Writing that he would have been a farmer if not for Vaux, he added: “I do not like to be given credit for the design of [Central and Prospect Parks] when he is not given quite equal credit.” He agreed to help her as much as possible, suggesting that she read over two of his encyclopedia articles, one on landscape architecture, the other on parks. As always, he was extremely concerned about proper terminology and again tried to convince Van Rensselaer to share his views: “Architecture is not rightly to be limited to works of buildings. Gardening is rightly to be limited to garden work, which work does not conveniently include that, for instance, of exposing great ledges, damming streams, making lakes, tunnels, bridges, terraces, and canals.”75 She received lengthy letters from Olmsted (one was ten pages long) that described his personal background in great detail and the factors that had led him to take up the profession of landscape architecture, much of which he asked not to be made public. She made a point of assuring him that she found his letters “delightful for private perusal and likely to be useful in my little assault upon the public.”76 Van Rensselaer sent the article to Century in July, and although it was longer than expected, she made the case that it should be a good deal longer to include all the interesting facts about Olmsted’s early life. Sargent reviewed the manuscript, and he did not want her to dwell upon the fact that 147

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Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., photograph by Bartlett F. Henney, ca. 1895. (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Olmsted Family Photographs, Olmsted Job #1)

Olmsted had never received a proper art and science education, for as a rule a landscape architect ought to have such an education. It is interesting to speculate exactly what this insightful critic would have said differently if she had not been hampered by the Century editors and by Sargent. She was not comfortable writing a biographical piece on a living person, and she wrote to Johnson: “If the dear gentleman would never see the chapter I could have been more explicit in the way of pointing out the defects in his work.” She did not like the way the article read and hoped others would not realize how much she had left out.77 Van Rensselaer sent a series of placating letters to Olmsted in August and September, offering several excuses as to why she had not sent him the manuscript to review. She transferred the blame to Century and to Sargent; Century was in a desperate hurry to get it into type, and Sargent had not 148

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wanted to show it to Olmsted: “So you must settle the matter with him if you are vexed.”78 After reading the completed manuscript, Olmsted admitted that the article was “a feat in that kind of work.” He also revealed to her why he and his wife had been so apprehensive. After a casual conversation on a streetcar with an acquaintance who turned out to be an occasional journalist, he had found an article in the next day’s morning paper “that . . . made me so ill that my wife, seeing my paleness, thought I was fainting away and ran to get remedies.” There had been other instances of so-called interviews finding their way into print.79 To anyone familiar with the many articles and books published about Olmsted since 1893, the information in Van Rensselaer’s biographical essay is common knowledge. She edited a passage from one of Olmsted’s letters to use as the opening of the article, simply titled “Frederick Law Olmsted.” He had told her that it was not as a gardener, as a florist, or as a botanist that he had been drawn to his work as a landscape gardener: “The root of all my work has been an early respect for and enjoyment of scenery, and extraordinary opportunities for cultivating susceptibility to it power.” Van Rensselaer advised her readers to keep these words in mind to follow the thread of Olmsted’s life.80 The first three pages of the seven-page article were devoted to Olmsted’s early life: his birth in Hartford, Connecticut, and his summer journeys with his family, who did not speak of a love for natural beauty but “indulged it as simply and constantly as their desire to breathe.” She guided readers through Olmsted’s various careers as engineer, farmer, author, publisher, and superintendent of Central Park, and finally his collaboration with Calvert Vaux in the Central Park competition. She gave Olmsted credit for the idea of conducting traffic across the park by means of sunken transverse roads. The statement was hardly just to Vaux, Olmsted wrote to her: “He seized . . . upon my tentative suggestion with the greater eagerness because of his familiarity with some construction partially serving a similar purpose in the zoological garden in Regent’s Park.”81 Olmsted had been anxious that something be said about the difficulties that attended the design and construction of Central Park — without specifically mentioning his battles with Egbert Vielé, Andrew Green, and the park commissioners. Van Rensselaer was discreet and referred in general 149

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terms to fights with politicians, “unrighteous obstacles perpetually piled in Mr. Olmsted’s path,” and men in search of employment who were wholly unfit but armed with insistent letters from one “boss” or another.82 America was far behind Britain and Europe in social amenities when Olm­sted and Vaux created Central Park in the late 1850s, and Van Rensselaer reminded her readers that there were no large public parks at the time. Olmsted had asked his son John to send Van Rensselaer a list of projects, along with copies of plans and reports, and she dutifully wrote that according to office records, Olmsted and other artists trained in his office had created, among numerous other works, thirty-seven public pleasure grounds. She was careful to acknowledge his partners Calvert Vaux, John C. Olmsted, Charles Eliot, and Henry Sargent Codman, who until his death in January 1893 (she mistakenly wrote 1892) had been Olmsted’s partner.83 Van Rensselaer conscientiously addressed Sargent’s concern about Olm­ sted’s lack of training: “It may seem almost as though mere chance had determined that Mr. Olmsted should be an artist.” But, she added, he was well prepared to turn chance into opportunity, and readers should not assume that a landscape gardener’s education could always be accidental. This course may have sufficed for him — but what worked for Olmsted would probably not be adequate for another. She cautioned that as a rule, a landscape gardener’s creative power must be nourished by long contemplation of nature, as well as by a systematic study of art.84 Van Rensselaer called Olmsted a genius — the premier artist of landscape gardening. His parks for the poor of American cities were marked by simplicity and a lack of self-consciousness, and she believed that these characteristics were indicative of a true artist. She offered an example of  his genius that people could still visit: the World’s Columbian Exposition was “singularly novel . . . boldly imaginative, as well as practical and skilful.” The fair was carrying on the great educational work begun thirty-five years previously in Central Park.85

“They, Too, Will Have Their Reward” Published as the lead in the May Century, Van Rensselaer’s “At the Fair” was a lightweight piece on the World’s Columbian Exposition, which opened on 1 May. “Frivolity pays,” Van Rensselaer acerbically observed to Gilder about 150

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The World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, n.d. (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Olmsted Photograph Album Collection, Olmsted Photo #274‑03–ph00a)

her “products”; she was often asked by the Century editors to popularize her pieces. Beautifully illustrated with drawings by the French artist Jean André Castaigne, the article outlined a campaign plan to get the most out of the enormous fair. Day 1: satisfy your curiosity; “get your bearings and discover how much exertion you can support.” Day 2: stay in bed. Day 3: “spread the wings and stiffen the spine of your conscience, and go in search of the things you have come to study”— no matter whether the statistics of idiot asylums or stuffed birds. Then relax and go see something else — for example, pictures if you have been studying plows. You will be refreshed and ready to come back to your work after “what your rustic fellow-countrymen would call a ‘good spell’ of idling.”86 Van Rensselaer offered a critical piece of advice: “be by yourself, or be sure that your comrade is exactly of the same mind as yourself.” Visitors were surely aware that outside the grounds, violence was rampant in Chicago; a record number of violent deaths occurred during the six months ending 30 June 1892. Van Rensselaer assured the husband that his wife would be safe and assured the lady that with so many people at the fair “no one individual will be annoyingly observed.”87 151

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Van Rensselaer recognized that not all Americans were eager for new knowledge, that many would go simply to be amused. Century readers were assured that “they, too, will have their reward.” They would be able to spend time in the Midway Plaisance, outside the true boundaries of the fair. “Here,” Van Rensselaer wrote, “the most frivolous may disport themselves well.” The distinction between these sorts of visitors and the readers of Century was apparent.88 Levine calls the Midway Plaisance “the second and contrasting universe” because it was so distinct from the high culture of the fair’s magnificent classical buildings and monuments. The Midway Plaisance was a six-hundredfoot-wide, mile-long avenue with the spirit of a sideshow, featuring popular entertainments from around the world. For example, a guidebook promised that visitors would be transported as if by magic to a Cairo street, “to the shores of the mystic River Nile.” Turks, Arabs, Nubians, donkeys, donkey boys, and camels wandered the plaza, and mocha coffee was sold in the cafés. In the Lapland Village, fairgoers could see thirty-seven native Laplanders and twenty-five reindeer.89 Van Rensselaer distinguished between two classes of visitors: one with a serious purpose of learning from the fair, the other wishing merely to be entertained. She encouraged both classes to visit Chicago. Yet there was another type of person she also tried to reach, “chiefly born at the East,” whom she labeled a flâneur, a word difficult to translate from the French but instantly recognized by those in the know. Such an idler in the city took great pride in his apathy, thinking it banal to want to do what everyone else was doing. She encouraged such men to leave such concerns behind and go to the fair, to go in perfect freedom to find “an idler’s paradise as was never dreamed of in America.”90 A more serious essay by Van Rensselaer was published in the Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handbook of the World’s Columbian Exposition. After seventeen years, she was now a renowned critic, and the publisher counted on name recognition in the chapter title “What Mrs. Van Rensselaer Says”; the introduction to the essay remarked that praise from her pen was praise indeed. “The Fair Grounds” was supposedly written especially for the handbook, but much of the material was repeated from earlier articles. The Paris Exposition of 1889 was again used as a foil to the greater accomplishments of the “White City.” The Eiffel Tower was “a mere scientific marvel” com152

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pared to the beautiful dome of the Administration Building, symbolic of the fair’s glorification of art.91 To emphasize the transformation wrought by Olmsted, Van Rensselaer might have exaggerated the unsightliness of the unimproved site. In an earlier work, she was “a lover of nature’s minor productions” on the shore of Buzzard’s Bay, admiring its moist meadows and sandy heathlike areas. In her chapter “The Love of Nature,” in Art Out-of-Doors, she proclaimed that the true lover of nature is interested in all natural effects and forms. In Chicago, however, the shoreline had been “an ugly, treacherous marsh” and “a dreary expanse of ridgy sand-dunes” before the great artist Olmsted created the fair’s wide canals, architectural terraces, lagoons, and islands.92 The Woman’s Building, designed by the architect Sophia G. Hayden, received surprisingly little attention from Van Rensselaer. She called it “refined and pleasing,” although most critics thought it undistinguished. The critic for American Architect (no longer Van Rensselaer) commented, “The Woman’s Building is neither worse nor better than might have been expected. It is just the sort of result that would have been achieved by either boy or girl who had had two or three years’ training in an architectural school.”93 Her friend Candace Wheeler had directed the interior design of the building and was involved in the discussion of whether to have the work of women artists exhibited separately or in conjunction with the work of men under the general classifications. Wheeler was a strong supporter of the former view, and her position won out, although many of the most accomplished woman painters chose to display their works in the Fine Arts Building. Another Wheeler project for the fair was the preparation of the manuscript for Household Art, a small book that compiled earlier articles by authors on the subject of interior decoration. Van Rensselaer contributed “The Development of American Homes,” previously written for the Forum.94 In “The Fair Grounds,” Van Rensselaer wrote that the fair demonstrated that the search for intellectual and spiritual benefit rather than for material profit mattered to Americans. At the time, the socialist Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward (1888), seemed to be alone in his critique of the fair: “The underlying motive of the whole exhibition, under a sham pretence of patriotism is business, advertising with a view to individual moneymaking.” Trachtenberg quotes Bellamy in The Incorporation of America in 153

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Cover of Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1893. (Special Collections, University of  Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware)

support of his own argument: “In sum, White City seemed to have settled the question of the true and real meaning of America. It seemed the victory of elites in business, politics, and culture over dissident but divided voices of labor, farmers, immigrants, blacks and women.” Another historian of the fair writes that it was apt that one of the members of the exposition’s board of directors was a “rapacious businessman.”95 The six editorials in Garden and Forest written by Van Rensselaer over a seven-month period offered a balanced view of the fair’s problems and outright disappointments. She realized three months after the fair’s opening, for example, that a photography monopoly held by the son of one of the 154

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high officials in the fair administration was damaging the educational intent of the exposition. Visitors who brought a camera (only hand cameras not larger than five inches were allowed) were taxed two dollars per day, or they could hire the fair’s official photographer. She complained: “If the authorities had desired to obliterate many of the best lessons of the Fair they could have hardly selected a better method of doing this than by establishing this photography embargo.”96 Mid-August was an opportune time to evaluate “Horticulture at the World’s Fair” because the previous year’s crop was exhausted, and the current season’s plants were taking their place. Any criticism, she noted, had to be made in a spirit of sympathy because the managers of the horticultural department had had insufficient time to accomplish the enormous task and were beset with an endless series of difficulties. One of the most discouraging features of the fair, she thought, was the fact that the displays were not representative of the country as a whole. State budgets were blamed. The collection of ornamental plants was generally good; New York and Pennsylvania, however, contended for “the questionable honor of having filled the great dome space [of the Horticultural Building] with an unfortunate jumble of plants.” She did not mean to actively discourage people from going to the Horticulture Department, but Van Rensselaer frankly wrote that visitors would ultimately “come away unsatisfied, if not humiliated,” that a country of such great resources could present such a bewildering variety of exhibits so poorly arranged.97 Another editorial summarized Olmsted’s detailed “Report upon the Landscape Architecture of the Columbian Exposition,” which had been written at the request of the American Institute of Architects. The fair had received such overwhelming praise that it is surprising to read an account of Olmsted’s regrets concerning its design. In Olmsted’s opinion, a failure to carry out part of the planned transportation system had harmed the exposition: an intramural railway was supposed to feed into a station that connected to the entry court, but lack of cooperation from the Illinois Central Railway kept this part of the scheme from being carried out. Olmsted had also planned to keep the wooded island free from all objects that would detract from its calm and natural character because he intended the island to act as a foil to the artificial grandeur of the rest of the fair. Despite his objections, a Japanese temple and garden and horticultural exhibits had been 155

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Plan of lagoon, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, by Percy R. Jones, March 20, 1891. (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Olmsted Plans and Drawings Collection, Olmsted Plan #274‑13)

placed on the island. Van Rensselaer commented that the country should be gratified that artists of such rank as Olmsted and Codman had been selected to design the fair and that they had permitted so few departures from the plan.98 Van Rensselaer and her son were already in Colorado when her final editorial on the fair was published. She was replying to disparaging comments on the exposition site design and on landscape gardening in general contained in an article from the Engineering Magazine. The editor of the journal’s architecture department had commented that the fair’s landscape was beautiful but totally unsuited for practical purposes: “everywhere there was walking, walking, walking; short cuts were impossible, because you were invariably shut off by a lagoon or a lake.” The author claimed that an architect never designed without thinking of the ultimate use of his building; by neglecting this basic principle of utility, landscape gardening had been degraded in the estimation of the public. The details of Van Rensselaer’s response do not have to be spelled out, beyond noting that she used phrases like “intelligent men” and the “practically unanimous verdict of the cultivated public” to counterattack. Her closing remarks left the critic and 156

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the public in no doubt about her opinion: “all men, are prone to suspicion and jealousy, especially when they divide off into classes and professions.”99

“One Positively Must Go West” Van Rensselaer wanted to show Gris the fair before it closed on 31 October, and they stopped in Chicago on the way to Colorado. They also saw her pregnant sister Edith and her husband, George Higginson. Before leaving on the journey, she wrote to Olmsted that Colorado would be good for both her and her son: “it is rather more of a strain on me to have him not well than it is on him, for he is young and cheerful and makes no complaint even at having to give up his beloved Cambridge for a while. . . . One positively must go west, I fancy, to find a really dry climate.100 With the Olmsted article and all its attendant worries behind her, and what she labeled her “frivolous” piece “Fifth Avenue” completed for Century, she and Gris settled in Colorado Springs for the winter. Clara Davidge and her husband invited them to share their house. Clara Davidge was a patron of the arts and Van Rensselaer would see her in future years at Onteora, New York, and at Cecilia Beaux’s place in Gloucester, Massachusetts.101 During her time in Colorado, Van Rensselaer wrote eight editorials for Garden and Forest, although none addressed the landscape around Colorado Springs. This might be explained by an article in the journal that was published earlier the same year: “The Botanical Aspect of Pike’s Peak,” by V. Havard. Van Rensselaer likely read this piece with interest before she moved with her son to this unfamiliar arid climate. She learned that Colorado Springs was “a well laid out town on the plains, near the foot of [Pike’s Peak], offering to invalids many attractions of climate and mountain scenery.” (If the Adirondacks made her uncomfortable, how was she able to stand the 14,000-foot mountains that towered over Colorado Springs?) The streets of the town were lined with closely planted cottonwoods, and Havard noted that the absence of other more ornamental and useful shade trees evinced “a sad want of public taste and judgment.” From the town she could see at a distance the silvery blue foliage of the blue spruce, common on the lower slopes of Pike’s Peak. She could leave behind her Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States and buy the Flora of Colorado to learn the indigenous plants. From Humboldt, she understood the zoned 157

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occurrence of the different plants that Havard found at different altitudes. Van Rensselaer would not have approved of the boys described by Havard who gathered bouquets of mountain wildflowers to sell along the track of the railway running up to the summit. She wrote several editorials condemning the thoughtless collection of wildflowers.102 During the winter in Colorado, her letters to Gilder (one was addressed to “Dear Great Chief ”) were determinedly cheerful and filled with her adventures with Gris: “If you have never had the sensation of taking a fence in a buckboard I can assure you that it is exciting.” She asked him not to tell her mother about the incident. She was feeling very far from her friends in New York and begged “R. W.” to let Helena visit: “Of course it will be horrid for you, but you won’t really mind that if it does her good and makes me happy!” Gris had no one to drive with in the morning, and because the exercise was part of his cure, he never missed it; perhaps after the accident with the buckboard, no one dared accompany him. She promised Gilder that “we shall jump for delight, hand in hand in a ring,” if only he and his wife would hold out a hope of a visit.103 The Colorado weather was a regular topic in her letters. She reported that the changes in temperature were remarkable: within two days it went from eight degrees below zero to fifty-eight degrees above. Understandably, the vicissitudes of the climate were always on Van Rensselaer’s mind; when she extended her invitation to Helena, she wrote, “even what seems bad weather here is good for throat and lung people. I mean it is always dry, and they say the cold and the wind are what brace people up best.” If Gris remained well, she meant to leave him in Colorado in March and, on her way home to New York, visit her sister Edith after her baby was born. These plans changed.104

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In 1894, buoyed up by a doctor’s report that Gris would be able to return to New York with her in May, Van Rensselaer began writing again for Garden and Forest and completed “People in New York” for Century. In a letter of transmittal to Gilder on 15 January, she was relaxed after a long afternoon drive up into “the red and purple mountains, with the thermometer at 60, the sun like May and the breeze a delicious zephyr.” The description was the most appreciative yet of the Colorado landscape, but the next line revealed her true feelings: “I would change places gladly with you and your mud and your horrid smells. Such is the mixture of cockneyism and love for my friends which composes what I am obliged to call my soul.”1 Throughout the winter, Van Rensselaer continued to complain to Gilder about Colorado Springs; in one letter she described the town as a “barbaric place where there is nothing to balance one’s mind or keep one’s pen in serious paths.” In late February, she sent the introductory chapter of the French church series and told Gilder she was leaving the next day for Denver. She was excited at the prospect of the trip, for she had not stirred from Colorado Springs since October. She wrote to Gilder on her return that Denver had been a surprise, especially her hotel: “It is the finest I have ever seen in any part of the world, and the internal architecture and decorations in much better taste than any hotel in N.Y. And think of coming to the Rockies to have all clean linen on your bed every night! Only crowned heads have that in Europe.” She would have much preferred to be in Denver than in Colorado Springs, because, as she repeated to Gilder, she was a cockney and inclined to like busy rather than pleasure-seeking people.2 159

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Downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1890s, photograph by W. E. Hook. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, 1X–14839)

In March the doctor told Van Rensselaer that she could return home with Gris in the middle of May and stay all summer. It was not wise advice, she thought, and decided that they would avoid the New York City summer and return to Colorado before the heat set in. In April they made plans to go to Glenwood Springs on the other side of the Rockies to have several quiet weeks before starting eastward. She hoped to be home by the third week of May, she told Gilder, and wrote on 19 April: “My kid is well and so am I.” Three days later, Gris was dead.3

“It Is No Time for Amazons” Within a month of Gris’s death, Van Rensselaer was back in New York City, where the suffrage revival was under way as part of a general politicalreform movement. Much has been made of Van Rensselaer’s opposition to woman suffrage. How to explain what certainly seems like a contradiction? William Morgan, in the introduction to the Dover edition of Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, uses Van Rensselaer’s position on suffrage to reduce her to a “gentlewoman,” when in fact Ellen Carol DuBois has found that elite New York women were about equally divided between the 160

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pro- and anti-suffrage camps. Does her stance inevitably mean that she was an “amateur,” as Morgan claims, and “neither an outstanding scholar nor a brilliant researcher”?4 Cynthia Kinnard writes that Van Rensselaer was “decidedly not a feminist” and asks, “How can one be a lady and an art critic at the same time?” She suggests that this contradiction remains “to confound appreciation of her to this day.” Kinnard takes Van Rensselaer to account for having definite ideas about the role of women that colored her writing as an art critic. Van Rensselaer believed that it was a woman’s role to influence and to educate, but these aims also define the role of a critic, as was spelled out by the latenineteenth-century English art critic Sir Sidney Colvin: “it is the business of criticism to teach people how to look.” Thus, the mission of the critic cannot be differentiated by gender. Her opinion on suffrage had nothing to do with her professionalism or her scholarship.5 In 1893 Colorado became the first state in the nation to allow women to vote, and Van Rensselaer arrived just in time to participate in the first general election. She wrote to Gilder that she was going to register to vote in the spring: “This is not because I approve of  W.S. but because it is the law, and also so that Gris shall not be a man before his mother as all boys expect to be.” Gris had much to do with convincing his mother to vote; in another letter, Van Rensselaer admitted that her son had threatened to carry her to the polls if she did not go “as a revenge for the way I have talked good citizenship to him ever since he was born!”6 In the brief time she lived there, Van Rensselaer learned enough of the political situation in Colorado to decide that she would vote a straight Republican ticket, although she was a Democrat who supported and was friends with President and Mrs. Cleveland. She disliked Davis H. Waite, the governor of Colorado. He was a Populist who served from 1892 to 1894 —  the first and only governor in Colorado history to be elected from a third party. Established in 1887, the Populist Party was a short-lived political party that represented a radical crusading form of agrarianism and hostility to banks, railroads, and elites in general. Van Rensselaer opposed the party, and that year in Colorado the election was a battle between Republicans and Populists.7 The more she observed how woman suffrage was being handled in Colorado, the more Van Rensselaer was convinced it was “being put through in 161

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a very silly way.” She was able to register without being asked how long she had been in the state; neither was she asked for any witnesses to her identity. Nevertheless, she voted, and the Republican ticket came out on top.8 All her letters from home were filled with woman suffrage business, and she observed to Gilder that New York seemed to be getting as “daft” as Colorado had been in 1893: “I fancy it will go through in spite of you & me if it has become so fashionable.” She was amused to hear that there was a suffrage petition at Sherry’s — one of the most exclusive restaurants in New York City.9 A New York Times article made the woman suffrage business going on “in the dainty white-and-gold atmosphere” at Sherry’s seem daft indeed. In April a reporter interviewed the society women who had organized the petition, although the names of the ladies who signed were kept away from the press. One of “the fair advocates of equal rights” said the women did not want their names made public: “We want enfranchisement, not notoriety.” The ladies made known that they had no official connection with professional women’s rights agitators — they were not like the members of the Woman Suffrage League.10 These elite women were interested in woman suffrage, but they had their own ideas about how to work for it. They formed their own organization; at Sherry’s and at parlor meetings in the homes of wealthy women, they tried to strike a genteel note, emphasizing that enfranchisement would not take women out of their “proper sphere.” Like Van Rensselaer, these prosuffrage women believed in separate sexual spheres — that each sex had its own proper and natural place in society and that men and women should perform different and contrasting roles, functions, and tasks. Almost all the suffragists and other members of the early feminist movement believed in separate spheres, and most saw their demands as a means to enhance and protect and not to undermine women’s special sphere of domestic life.11 In May 1894 Van Rensselaer began writing a series entitled “Thoughts on Woman Suffrage” for the World, which was published several months later in pamphlet form as Should We Ask for the Suffrage? She began by establishing her credentials, stating that she was speaking out as a New York woman who had lived in other countries and other parts of the United States and who had compared the condition of women in those places to that of women in New York. She wanted it known that she was a working woman, 162

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“who for many years has been thrown much with other working-women and with men of various classes and kinds.” Van Rensselaer reasoned that the natural and admirable tendency of women was to shun an active public life, but that she had accepted personal publicity to earn a living and was willing to make the sacrifice for a good cause. Yet she feared that woman suffrage would encourage women who lack “certain elements of character and feeling . . . essential to a finely feminine character” to seek out the life of an active politician and to devote their lives and energies to public affairs.12 Van Rensselaer believed that the establishment of woman suffrage in New York would be a risk during a time of social, political, and economic uncertainty. The experience of Wyoming and Colorado could not be taken as examples, she noted, for these states did not approach the population of New York State or the city of Manhattan. She responded one by one to the grounds on which advocates based their demand: personal rights, taxation without representation, and claims that women had no voice in framing laws.13 The average woman, Van Rensselaer argued, was physically much weaker than the average man, but rather than being a misfortune, this difference was a necessary part of nature’s economy. Historians of woman suffrage write that the physical weakness and physiological and sexual characteristics of women were at the heart of the matter for the antis. The antis also argued that females were unable to bear arms and would be unwilling to use force.14 Like her friend Van Rensselaer, Ida Tarbell made her living as a journalist and editor at a time when such a career was unusual for a woman — she is best known for her muckraking History of Standard Oil Company (1904). And like Van Rensselaer, Tarbell opposed giving women the vote and did not believe that women with the franchise could cure all ills. Although she never married or had children, Tarbell nevertheless upheld the value and power of the homemaker. Her biographer Kathleen Brady devotes a chapter to Tarbell and the “woman question,” proposing that “it was probably Mrs. Van Rensselaer who convinced Tarbell to become a member, although inactive, of the New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.”15 Even after Van Rensselaer stopped writing about the subject and was no longer actively participating in associations opposed to woman suffrage, she kept up an ongoing debate with Theodate Pope about the issue. When 163

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Ida M. Tarbell seated at her desk in the McClure’s magazine office, 1894, photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals. (The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)

Pope adopted a young boy, Van Rensselaer teasingly wrote: “I still do not understand why, with all your ‘feminist’ sympathies and ideas, you did not choose a little girl and show what could be made out of her!”16 A month after Great Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Van Rensselaer responded to Pope’s contention that if women could vote there would be no wars. She thought it “a perfectly unsupported opinion!” Her father used to say that during the Civil War, “the most pugnacious people were the women and the parsons.” She believed that now that women knew what modern fighting was like, they might realize that they could not fight as well as they imagined: “It is no time for Amazons nowadays, now that bows and arrows have gone out of fashion.” Although their correspondence continued 164

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Theodate Pope (later Riddle), 1915. (Archives, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT)

into the 1920s, there are no letters that describe how Van Rensselaer felt about New York’s passage of woman suffrage in 1917 or the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that enfranchised twenty-six million women.17 In the end, one might ask how Van Rensselaer’s writings would be different if she had supported woman suffrage. The question, however, cannot be answered. Her stance is an interesting biographical fact — and that is all.

The Intersection of the Arts In mourning but relieved to be back with friends in New York City, Van Rensselaer kept busy by doing what she knew best — writing. Some insight into the way she handled her grief can be found in a letter written years later as she tried to console Theodate Pope after the sudden death of her father. 165

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She reminded Pope that twice she had lost her “very dearest, twice seen no hope or light ahead. . . . We love our dead best when we do our utmost to make the memory of them a joy & blessing to us rather than a grief — not to forget them but to share with them . . . all the good & pleasure that we can get from life & that they would wish us to have.”18 In addition to the articles on woman suffrage, she contributed to Century and to the World, and most important for this study, in late May she began to write again for Garden and Forest. From this time until the journal’s demise in December 1897, she wrote ninety-two editorials and unsigned articles. Scholars have presumed that she published only intermittently in the final years of the journal; these unattributed pieces prove that assumption wrong. Van Rensselaer’s subject matter in the 1894 Garden and Forest was typical of her interest in the intersection of art, architecture, and landscape gardening; some expanded on topics addressed in Art Out-of-Doors, but some covered new ground. One in particular stands out. Who better to tackle “Nature and the Rich” than Van Rensselaer? It was an issue that she had never explicitly addressed. She borrowed the title and subject from a recent “Contributors’ Club” piece in the Atlantic and felt secure in taking up the author’s criticism of the “stupid rich” and their taste in landscape gardening. “It is ‘the thing,’ ” she wrote, “to have handsome grounds as large as one’s means permit.” One reason for the “vulgarity” that she noted in the nation’s country places was the rapid growth of American fortunes and the excessive value placed on results that clearly demonstrated the expenditure of a great deal of money. Van Rensselaer defined vulgar as “ostentatious, inappropriate, inartistic and ugly.” She thought this trend toward vulgarity held true in every branch of art.19 Lawrence W. Levine and Robert H. Wiebe write about the obsessive interest in culture and class during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the old families and the nouveaux riches battled for social position. Yet in the 1840s Downing had made the same observations as did Van Rensselaer later; he scolded wealthy men, “ambitious of taste,” who believed that one could solve the problem of rural beauty only by spending a great deal of money. Downing, however, could not have imagined the vast wealth that would be accumulated during the Gilded Age or the enormous and enormously vulgar country places that would be built as a result.20 166

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Van Rensselaer’s attitude toward New York society during the Gilded Age is spelled out in a letter to the Century editor R. U. Johnson after he asked her to write an article on the subject. The two words “stupid rich” sum up what she went to great lengths to describe: I do not think that there is anything permanent, organized, and important enough to be seriously written about as New York society. . . .  I think there is a vast difference between the group of temporarily fashionable people in New York commonly called society and the organized, permanent stratum which, because of an aristocracy, does exist in European countries. And it seems to me that a great deal of harm is done to foolish people throughout the country by over-estimating the importance of our “fashionable set” or sets. The worship of wealth that we all deplore is, I think, largely stimulated by such writings. . . . Some day there may be in New York bodies of people socially prominent who include the brains as well as the wealth and social aptitudes of our population, as European society largely does. But today there are none such, so far as I know, and what there is it seems to me best to discuss as little as possible.21 Four of the twenty-seven editorials that Van Rensselaer contributed to Garden and Forest in 1895 addressed topics new to her. The first, “The Defacement of Scenery,” concerned an issue that would become increasingly troublesome as automobile ownership became more common. She wrote about the need to protect natural objects such as country rocks and cliffs against the vandalism of advertisements — “ highly colored importunities to use one man’s ready-made soup or to try another man’s remedy for indigestion.” According to Van Rensselaer, these obtrusive vulgarities were wounds on the face of nature and violated the rights of the public as much as air and water pollution. She called for stronger statutes to be leveled against the wanton defacement of natural beauty.22 Another editorial concerned a type of park that was new not only to Van Rensselaer but also to the country. The Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park had been created in 1890 and was the first of the nation’s National Military Parks. The battlefield was the scene of the last major Confederate victory of the Civil War. A week before the dedication ceremonies, Van Rensselaer asked how art could contribute to the celebration 167

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A.1. Sauce signs, 1916–17 — an example of “highly colored importunities.” (Emergence of Advertising On-Line Project  –M0004, R. C. Maxwell Company Records, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)

of the heroes of the Civil War battle of Chickamauga — this was a question that applied to all the Civil War sites that were coming under government control.23 For the basis of her discussion, she looked to guidelines proposed by General Henry Van Ness Boynton in a Century article; Boynton had been a Union Army officer in the Civil War. The first guideline called for the advice of the best landscape architects. These professionals would assure that parklike effects were attained in harmony with the more practical objectives of the reservation, which covered more than fifteen square miles and included the roads to and from the battlefield. The commission was attempting to restore the countryside to its condition at the time the battles were fought. Van Rensselaer, however, believed that more than historical accuracy was needed — that an appeal to the imagination should be made as distinct and powerful as possible.24 Another guideline laid down by the general was for a competent board 168

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of sculptors to oversee the hundreds of monuments and granite markers. Van Rensselaer concurred: she used the example of Gettysburg to make the point that through a lack of coordination, a battlefield could become an unsightly collection of tombstones. She believed that the type of strict artistic supervision that made the Columbian Exposition the admiration of the world needed to be brought to bear on these historic landscapes.25 The following week, Van Rensselaer responded to a disgruntled reader who was appalled by the idea “of decorating a battlefield with garden finery.” The work of the gardener was too petty, he wrote, to be tolerated in a military park. More of nature was needed — nature without any artificial adornment. The feeling that inspired the objection was a worthy one, Van Rensselaer wrote, but she criticized the protestor: he had no adequate appreciation of the true functions of the landscape artist. The problem faced by the landscape gardener, as she described it, was “how to control and direct the unsleeping forces of nature and the persistent influence of man so that they will work together to preserve and develop the scenery of the great park in accordance with its real spirit and original meaning.” Thousands of people had to be accommodated and given access to fifteen square miles of the battleground, and it was absurd to think that the face of the country would not be changed by the needed constructions. An intelligent designer would develop a plan to guide all the forces of transformation and preserve the poetry of the scene.26 Van Rensselaer wrote that the correspondent evidently believed that the field of landscape gardening was confined to “making smooth lawns and bordering them with Golden Elders, Kilmarnock Willows and Purpleleaved Plums, with, perhaps, a beautiful pattern bed of Coleus and Alter­ nanthera in the middle”— all the unnaturally colored plants that she so despised. No man of taste, she added, would ask to have anything foreign or fanciful imported into such a park.27 Van Rensselaer also found new things to say to improvement associations as she injected comments on woman suffrage into “The Work of Women in Village Improvement.” She wrote that if the women of America would generally devote themselves to useful and fruitful public work, they would find that “they are not without influence, even though they cannot vote.” The members of the Honesdale Improvement Association in Pennsylvania (a small community in the northeast corner of the state) were all women, and 169

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Early visitor to the Chickamauga Battlefield, n.d. (National Park Service, Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park)

the first issues they advocated were improved sewage management and sanitation. She praised the fact that the association also enlisted school­children to protect flower beds and shrubbery and to gather waste paper.28 Like Downing in the 1840s, Van Rensselaer wrote about the benefit to children of tastefully planted and carefully maintained school grounds. This topic took on more importance as she became involved with public-school reform in the late 1890s. A correspondent wrote to Garden and Forest asking the journal to publish plans for laying out school grounds, and Van Rensselaer took the opportunity to state once again her opinion on readymade site plans. She reminded readers that each place has individual characteristics of size, topography, and views and that each unique site must be studied. What was possible in a country setting was not feasible in a crowded city, where school grounds were not sufficiently spacious to have both an outdoor play area and a garden. She recommended planting along the walls, where vines and flowering herbs could flourish. Window plants could cheer bare rooms and provide the opportunity for elementary lessons in horticulture and botany.29 170

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Van Rensselaer, however, was proven wrong about urban school gardens. Laura J. Lawson writes that a grammar school in Boston established a garden in 1891, and other gardens quickly began to appear throughout Boston. In New York City, a site at Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street was transformed from a dumping ground and truck storage facility into a children’s garden in 1902. Within a decade two national voluntary organizations were founded to promote school gardens as an integral part of the educational system.30 Van Rensselaer’s interest in schools went beyond aesthetics; on her return to New York City, she became engaged with the Public Education Association, serving as its president from 1898 to 1906. She may not have believed in woman suffrage, but she was willing to submit to public display for what she considered a good cause. Two days after her forty-fifth birthday, she conquered her fear of public speaking to appear before the Cities Committee of the New York State Senate in Albany on 25 February 1896. (Seven years earlier, in a letter to Pennell, she had written, “No millions would induce me to speak or read in public.”) The New York Times reported that, “dressed in black with a bunch of violets at her corsage,” she made a very convincing argument in favor of the Pavey Bill. The reformation of New York City public schools was complicated by class and political issues, but in short the Pavey Bill proposed to do away with school trustees and replace the current system with a centralized one. Diane Ravitch, a historian of public school reform in New York, observes that the teachers in the city not only failed to see the value of adding another level of superintendence but also resented the patronizing role of the society ladies “who wanted to educate them as to their best interests.”31 The day after her Albany speech, Van Rensselaer wrote about her experience to Johnson: “Thank you for your kind words about my ‘public service.’ I thought it was horrible before I began to speak, enjoyed it as soon as I began, was complacent afterwards, and now think it was horrible again — now that I have seen how the newspapers garbled what I said and drew false inductions and printed a portrait of a fat lady with a snub nose as me.”32 A letter to Gilder, who was still in Europe the spring of 1896, describes from another angle the political and social news from New York. The wry and witty aspect of Van Rensselaer’s personality is fully revealed in the letter, and it is worth quoting extensively: 171

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I want to make you feel that you have missed something, not being in N.Y. this winter. . . . I was frightened within an inch of my life [in Albany]. . . . But I am told that I got through all right, and one man told me afterwards I was the only person on record who ever “made [New York state senator] Johnny Ahearn shut his mouth” and that seemed a nice ladylike compliment. . . . Twice after that I went to Albany but only once to speak. . . . We went up in a gang in a car together and had great fun. . . . It has been a great education for me, and being in a thing like this seems to have widened out the horizon of my life so that I expect soon to be meddling in the school affairs of Mars. . . .  I have always said that I was born for a school marm and now I know it. I love to go to the school rooms and my fingers always itch to take the pointer and the book and do the teaching myself. . . . And now I am tired to death and must go to bed. . . . I don’t get time to have my teeth filled . . . so you may imagine whether I am a hard worker this year or not. When the warm weather begins and it takes time to keep my hair in crimp, I really don’t know what I shall do.”33 Given the teasing tone of the entire letter, it is doubtful whether Van Rensselaer was serious when she told Gilder in closing, “I am a good worker when some man tells me what to do, and I find I sometimes have good ideas of my own for the men to work out; but I can’t get along all by myself in anything.” She had been getting along for twelve years on her own and would continue to do so until her death almost thirty-eight years later.34 Van Rensselaer was busy in 1896; in addition to her work on school reform (attending meetings, writing a brief account on the subject for Harper’s, and traveling to Albany two more times), she helped to organize lectures on literature and on the origin of French songs and attended a garden party to raise funds for Barnard College. For Century, she continued work on the French churches series while writing a short story and an article about Sargent’s estate, Holm Lea. That year, she also wrote twenty-five editorials and articles for Garden and Forest. A few of the titles seem an odd match, but the approach to every subject is all Van Rensselaer. Whether she took on engineering or street cleaning, she tried to educate the public about civic responsibility and to elevate expectations for good design. 172

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She admitted in the introduction to “The Artistic Element in Engineering” that it might be considered impertinent for one who did not belong to the engineering profession to state that American engineers paid little or no attention to considerations of beauty. Yet she was merely reporting on a paper given by Professor Frank O. Marvin from the University of Kansas at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Although Professor Marvin considered American engineers courageous and original designers, he argued that they paid scant attention to the artistic possibilities in their practice. He regretted that the profession persistently devoted itself to quick profits and had forgotten that “there may be as much fine art in a well-planned machine for making some article of daily use as there is in a good picture or statue.”35 Professor Marvin’s paper had caught her eye because she was concerned with an almost completed structure that would act as a vestibule to the New York terminus of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was located at one of the most conspicuous points of the city, and thousands of “civilized men and women” would be passing through it every day. The structure had neither dignity nor a harmonious relation with the bridge and showed contempt for the sensibilities of the people of New York.36 This structure was only a small-scale example of what she observed happening in the city at large: piers and wharves built without any consideration of the artistic possibilities of the waterfront, and railroads gashing their way through beautiful scenery. Van Rensselaer encouraged the public to demand construction that paid attention to principles of aesthetic design, but she also asked engineers to take the lead, for the engineer “comes close to our lives in a hundred ways at home, in our business, in our pleasure.”37 A quotation from Emerson, one of Van Rensselaer’s favorite authors, was taken for the title of an editorial about New York City street cleaners. “Hitch your Wagon to a Star” applauded Colonel George E. Waring Jr. and his well-disciplined force of men and horses who marched down Fifth Avenue in June 1896 under the banner “Four Hundred and Twenty Miles of Streets Cleaned Every Day.” She believed that the spectacle of these “manlylooking men” in white uniforms with their neat, brightly painted carts and well-groomed horses would win the respect of people for municipal work of every kind.38 Waring was a sanitary engineer who had designed and supervised the 173

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“New York Street Cleaning under the Old and the New Regime,” 1885. (Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

construction of the drainage for Central Park; in 1894 he was appointed street commissioner of New York City and began a series of reforms of the department by, in his words, “putting a man instead of a voter behind every broom.” Danish newspaper man and reformer Jacob Riis wrote in 1902 that “it was Colonel Waring’s broom that first let light into the slum.”39 Van Rensselaer noted that blame did not entirely rest with the city government: “most people toss rubbish of all sorts into the highways as if they were built as a receptacle for refuse.” She hoped that the newly clean streets would act as a lesson that would mark an era in municipal history. Indeed, this would prove to be the case. Three years later, in an article for the Atlantic, Charles Mulford Robinson, a journalist who wrote about urban problems and their solutions, observed that Waring’s efforts at street cleaning had proved to be the most popular direction for municipal aesthetic efforts. Clean pavements involved good pavement, and together these were the es174

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sentials of municipal dignity: “As a man is judged by his linen, a city is judged by its streets.” Like Van Rensselaer, Robinson praised women in improvement associations and civic clubs who cooperated with municipal boards to advocate for clean cities. These drives against filth became campaigns for public health, and progressive reformers broadened their movements into attacks on particular diseases and housing and factory conditions. Two years after the death of her son from tuberculosis, Van Rensselaer wrote in the conclusion to this editorial: “One who is willfully guilty of the unspeakable nuisance which may fill the air with microbes of consumption and other diseases” should be looked upon as a public enemy.40

“This Experiment” The publication of Garden and Forest ended with an abrupt notice on 29 December 1897. The announcement was likely written by C. S. Sargent. The “Professor” was at his irascible best: “This experiment, which has cost a large amount of time and money, has shown conclusively that there are not persons enough in the United States interested in the subjects which have been presented in the columns of Garden and Forest to make a journal of its class and character self-supporting.”41 What were the subjects of the thirty-two editorials that Van Rensselaer wrote for Garden and Forest in its last year? In 1897 Van Rensselaer had been elected president of the Women’s Auxiliary at the annual meeting of the University Settlement Society, and many of her pieces were tangentially concerned with the issue of tenement-house reform and the improvement of public schools and were explicitly related to her long-term interest in teaching children the basic principles of science — especially botany. From “A Garden for Children” to “Vacant-lot Farming” to “City Playgrounds,” she addressed issues that were closely tied to her reform work. The first editorial called attention to a series of illustrated leaflets prepared by a professor in Ithaca, New York, one of which asked every school child in the state to grow a few plants during the summer. Van Rensselaer believed that this type of personal investigation was the only intelligent way in which children could become interested in anything that lives and grows.42 Ithaca’s Cornell University had received state funds to teach nature study in New York’s rural schools after the Association for Improving the 175

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Conditions of the Poor in New York organized a Committee for the Promotion of Agriculture. The botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey, who, like Van Rensselaer, believed that children should grow up appreciating nature, was responsible for the new program. Bailey and the committee member Anna Botsford Comstock began publishing the Home Nature Study Course, and in 1897 Cornell began offering a summer Nature Study School.43 The second editorial was a direct result of her work in the tenements of New York City. After one year of a program carried out under the direction of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, she was convinced that there were many destitute people in crowded districts of the city who were willing to support themselves and could earn a living if they were allowed to use vacant land that lay idle and unproductive. They would learn an honorable trade working under expert instruction, and she believed that it would be a great advantage to people who were unskilled and unemployed “to be lifted up to a place where they can think for themselves and have their dull mental processes stirred up and made helpful.”44 It is probable that these tenement dwellers, like the public school teachers, resented the arrogance of these high-born women and their reform work. Yet her friend Helen Moore recalled that Van Rensselaer did not view her settlement work as simply the fashionable thing to do. Moore wrote that Van Rensselaer showed “illuminating common sense and good judgment” when she was asked by an aimless society girl if she should “go down and do settlement work.” She replied, “In heaven’s name, don’t. People who live in the tenements have enough to bear without your condescension.”45 “City Playgrounds” addressed the importance of fresh air to the inhabi­ tants of crowded city tenement districts. Van Rensselaer knew from experience that small children and girls usually played in the streets and that large boys, if they played games at all, were forced to make excursions to distant parts of the city — the lower East Side was over four miles from Central Park. She praised the small park at Mulberry Bend, in the very heart of the old Five Points neighborhood, that Riis had attacked as the foul core of New York. Against resistant politicians and private owners, the city government had demolished the tenements on “The Bend” and in 1897 opened Mulberry Park (renamed Columbus Park in 1911). But even the parks on the Lower East Side (another was planned for Corlears Hook) were not the playgrounds that children needed. Van Rensselaer was before J. B. Jackson 176

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Newsboys and boot blacks on Mulberry Bend, New York City, Bryon Co., 1898. (Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.3169)

in calling for the type of open space where “boys can play rough games in freedom.”46 Van Rensselaer continued to write for Garden and Forest through a period of mourning for her sister Edith, who died in childbirth in April 1897 — she seemed to find comfort from sitting in front of her typewriter. While in Winnetka, Illinois, where she was secluded with her brother-in-law and the newborn baby, she wrote to Gilder: “I wish you could see the colors [the sun] makes on Lake Michigan as my typewriter beholds it through a big window at this moment. It is a beautiful place & a beautiful house & a dear & beautiful child. It makes my heart ache for my dear sister.” Five days later, she wrote: “I like the restfulness here especially because it gives me a chance to work hard.”47 There was only a two-week break before her editorials began appearing again; Van Rensselaer returned to familiar subjects in late April. She wrote “The Care of Park Trees” in support of the new superintendent of the Boston park system, who was raising storms of complaints from persons who objected to the judicious thinning of park trees. These protestors were “forgetting that parks are not primeval forest.” In “The Field of  Landscape-art,” 177

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she lost patience with those who still did not understand the true function of landscape gardeners or that these artists were much more than mere plantsmen who decorated the landscape. After ten years of writing about the profession, Van Rensselaer noted: “We ought to have reached a stage of civilization when it is no longer believed that any unskilled journeyman is competent to lay out a park or garden, or pass judgment on the plans of a park or garden.”48 The managing editor of Garden and Forest, William A. Stiles, died on 6 October 1897, after an illness of several months. His death was a critical loss to the journal and its readers and foretold its demise two months later. Van Rensselaer wrote the last editorial for Garden and Forest on 29 December 1897. Forty-five years after Downing wrote what would be his last editorial for the Horticulturist, “American Trees for America” struck the same nativist tone as Downing’s “Shade Trees in Cities.” Both editorials reminded Americans of the true beauty and value of native trees, insisting that “the best trees to plant in any particular region are those that grow and thrive naturally in that region.” Van Rensselaer believed the lessons learned from experimenting with exotic trees had been costly but worthwhile if planters, horticulturists, and landscape gardeners had finally learned that “American trees are the best for America.”49

Above the Hoi Polloi Looking back in 1925, Van Rensselaer wrote, “there is no periodical now which fills the place held for ten years by . . . Garden and Forest. It died, I may explain, partly because it was born too soon — too soon to find the popular support which it certainly would find could it be reborn to-day.  . . . While it lived it was prized by many persons in a position to pass its influence on to others, and was constantly quoted as an authority even in the daily papers.” Garden and Forest, in fact, may have been born too late, for the highbrow tone of the journal was not a good fit for the time. If a Frenchman could agree with a critic from the New York Times that the periodical was too high class, it was probably true that it belonged to an order that was passing away.50 Frank Luther Mott suggests another reason that a journal such as Garden and Forest passed away: the sudden and overwhelming popularity of 178

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such ten-cent magazines as McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Munsey’s upset the established order in the 1890s. “The noble old thirty-five cent magazine,” Mott writes, “had always to aim at the educated and moneyed audience, and naturally it was inclined to be aristocratic in tastes and in political and social attitudes.” He refers specifically to monthly magazines such as the Atlantic, Century, and Scribner’s, but Garden and Forest was comparable. Van Rensselaer’s writings certainly apply to the pieces Mott describes as maintaining “a certain degree of aloofness as an observer of the passing scene, as well as an esthetic level above that of hoi polloi.”51 Dinnerstein writes that in her art and architecture criticism, as well, Van Rensselaer had “a lingering commitment to the ‘heroic’ in an age increasingly plebeian.” She addressed the multitudes in the same exalted language she deemed appropriate for an elite. Another story told by Helen Moore about her friend illustrates this propensity. Moore wrote that when Van Rensselaer began to visit the settlements on the Lower East Side after her son’s death, she found solace in trying to share the cultural richness of her own life with girls at the tenement grammar school. Van Rensselaer chose Egyptian archaeology for her lectures and arrived on club afternoons in a hansom cab filled with beautifully illustrated volumes from her own library. To the girls, she was “a creature from another world, fairer and nobler than theirs, an exemplar of taste, sensibility and distinction.” Garden and Forest, as an exemplar of taste, sensibility, and distinction, could not make it into the new century.52

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Van Rensselaer devoted the remainder of her life to public service and to writing poetry, short stories, and a history of New York. But sporadically, she returned to topics that picked up earlier refrains from her Garden and Forest editorials. In 1901 she rented a house in Buffalo, New York, during the Pan-American Exposition and visited Niagara Falls. Fourteen years after her Century article on the reservation plan by Olmsted and Vaux, she published Niagara: A Description. Familiar themes reemerged as she wrote that Niagara “must be studied in detail — in minutest detail — as well as in broad pictures.” She wove into the text the first historical account of Niagara, penned in 1697 by the Jesuit Father Hennepin; the larger aspects of the river bed, the gorge, the rapids, and the various channels; and the geological phases of Niagara’s life. She wrote about Niagara as seen by different lights and atmospheres: the fall’s “exhilarating sound, like freshness, coolness, vitality itself made audible”; the trilliums, dicentras, and uvularias (May wildflowers that spread beneath the forest canopy); the fragrance of the grape vines that permeated the air in June; and the tints and tones of the water, from dark green to pale gray to clear amber — all of these details seen through her finely tuned eye.1 She did not again write specifically about landscape architecture (she ultimately abandoned her preferred terminology “landscape gardening”) until she was asked in 1925 to bring out a second edition of Art Out-of-Doors. Rather than alter the original text, Van Rensselaer added a supplementary chapter entitled “Changes.” The epigraph for the chapter came from one of her poems, signed with her pseudonym “Lydia Schuyler”: “Time reaps the harvests, good and bad. If so / Our share grows better, thank the Gardener who / Offers the acres and the seed, and gives / The wit to choose them well 180

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to me and you.” Addressing a generation of changes in the profession, the section also reflected Van Rensselaer’s and the nation’s shifting ideas on education, social reform, recreation, and health. The advent of the motorcar had also been a significant factor during these transformative years in America.

“A Healthful, Beautiful and Useful Pursuit” In “Changes,” Van Rensselaer charted the good and bad harvests in landscape architecture over the preceding thirty-two years. The good included the organization in 1899 of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) — by 1925, its 160 members included 14 women. Also to the good: the development of specialized university degrees in landscape architecture, with two schools for women. Beginning in 1892, Van Rensselaer had written a series of editorials about women as landscape gardeners. She saw no reason why “a woman of taste should not master the science of outdoor beauty”— if women would simply conform their arrangements to landscape gardening’s rules rather than their own caprice. She compared the principles of landscape gardening to those of household arrangement, and according to Van Rensselaer, cultivated American women had a natural sense of fitness in dress and household adornment. Van Rensselaer encouraged women to acquire a solid foundation for taste in the arrangement of their grounds: “It is a healthful, beautiful and useful pursuit, far more valuable than the decoration of bits of china.” She stated that landscape gardening on a large scale is a masculine art, requiring “a certain manly vigor of treatment [and] an unhesitating despotism.”2 Four weeks later, in an editorial again titled “Taste Indoors and Out,” Van Rensselaer summarized her argument in clearer terms: “Since American men are usually too much occupied to give attention to the planning and planting of their places, it might be well for women to give some serious study to landscape-gardening as an art.” The editors had received a complaint from Mrs. Robbins, a contributor to the journal, who did not believe that women should be confined to the petty and pretty forever; she asked Van Rensselaer to lay down the fundamental principles of the art so that women might master them thoroughly. Van Rensselaer offered several pieces of advice but concluded that eventually the puzzled planner 181

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would long for the counsel of a professional landscape gardener. She did not mean to discourage anyone from studying the art; rather, she felt that only a knowledgeable amateur could truly appreciate the skill of the true artist.3 Van Rensselaer’s final comment on women in the profession came in a brief editorial later in the fall, when she stated that if women developed a capacity for the proper planning and embellishment of grounds, they should have the opportunity for professional employment. She recognized that certain prejudices about what constitutes proper occupation for women would first have to be removed. She knew that architecture was becoming a pursuit for women (her friend Theodate Pope was an architect and Sophia G. Hayden was designing the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition), and she could think of no reason why women should not be entering a calling that brought them into a healthy life in the open air —  adding, “if no hard manual labor is demanded.” Her opinion about the strength of women had been spelled out in her writings on woman suffrage. Overall, however, Van Rensselaer believed that landscape gardening was suitable employment for women. Thaïsa Way describes the routes generally taken by those women who wanted to pursue such a career: because a professional education was not a real option at the time, mentorship and travel often allowed them to launch a practice.4 In addition to noting the progress that had occurred during the previous generation, Van Rensselaer wrote about regrettable developments (admittedly minor): a popular hydrangea with huge floral heads and the new lion statues in front of the New York Public Library were singled out as particularly unattractive additions to outdoor art. Of much more import were the unfortunate demise of Garden and Forest in 1897 and the death six years later of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.

The Critic and the Motorcar When Van Rensselaer began writing about landscape architecture in 1887, she remarked: “How vast is our need, how immense is the number and how various the nature of the tasks” entrusted to landscape architects. At the time, little did Van Rensselaer or these practitioners realize that they would be called upon to address the automobile’s impact on recreation and on city 182

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and rural planning. She and the profession adjusted to the more diversified field that was evolving from an earlier art out of doors.5 As early as 1896, references to automobiles began to appear in Van Rensselaer’s correspondence; by 1910 she was starting to realize the negative effect of the new machine. That summer she was staying in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and in a letter to a friend remarked: “those who, like myself, have no automobile, are really better off, being to my mind, more ‘in harmony with their environment,’ which the gospels of both science & art tell us should be our aim.”6 Van Rensselaer was nearing sixty and no longer traveled abroad. Columbia University had recently awarded her an honorary degree of doctor of letters for her History of the City of New York (1909) and for her career achievements as an art, architecture, and landscape gardening critic. She lived at 9 West Tenth Street in New York and spent holidays with family in Tuxedo Park, New York, a community formed by a group of wealthy and well-established American families. Her brother George Griswold was a founding member of Tuxedo Park and lived there with his wife, Emily, and their son George.7 One year Van Rensselaer visited her friend Cecilia Beaux at Green Alley, the artist’s home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Beaux was the most celebrated woman painter of the day (she disliked the artificial category of “women’s art”). A photograph from Cecilia’s photo album shows Van Rensselaer sitting in Beaux’s garden wearing a surprisingly modish dress — belying the known images of a stiff Victorian lady in black. Beaux had known Van Rensselaer since 1899, when she met her at the Gilders’ home in Tyringham, Massachusetts. Beaux wrote in her autobiography that “[Van Rensselaer’s] friendship has been one of the ties that since then have bound me to New York.” These two women had much in common, for as Richard J. Boyle writes, “[Beaux] understood that true beauty is not a mere matter of surface, but resides instead in the artist’s power of expression.”8 Van Rensselaer also summered at Newport and Saratoga Springs, both favored choices of the American elite during the Gilded Age. She thus mingled with those who could afford the early motorcar — the expense of buying and operating a car initially restricted ownership to persons with much higher than average incomes. At the turn of the century there were only 183

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John Lambert, Portrait of Cecilia Beaux, ca. 1905. (Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Gift of Henry Sandwith Drinker)

about thirteen thousand motor vehicles in the United States; ten years later, however, registrations had grown to nearly half a million. James J. Flink refers to the period from the introduction of the motorcar to the opening in 1910 of the Ford Highland Park plant, which began mass production of the Model T, as the first stage of American “automobile consciousness.” As America was moving into the second stage of its relationship with the automobile, described by Flink as a “mass idolization of the motorcar,” both Van Rensselaer and the emerging profession of landscape architecture began to accept and adjust to the automobile’s increasingly integral place in American society.9 By the summer of 1911, Van Rensselaer was enjoying motoring in and around Saratoga Springs, New York, with her now-widowed brother George. The roads were good and the countryside charming, especially the route to the foot of Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains, and she encouraged 184

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Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer in Cecilia Beaux’s garden at Green Alley, Gloucester, Massachusetts. (From the Cecilia Beaux photo album, 1917, vol. 2; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Archives)

her friend August Jacacci, an art critic and editor working in New York City, to join them for the cool weather and “some automobile rides.” Van Rensselaer still took pleasure in exploring the wood paths at her back door but acknowledged there was more to see “a little farther off” by hired automobile. She told Jacacci that they could reach Adirondack State Park on a day trip north; over three million acres had been designated in 1892 as “ground open for the free use of all the people for their health and pleasure.”10 The following spring, Van Rensselaer planned to motor to Farmington, Connecticut, 120 miles northeast of New York City, to visit her friend 185

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Lexington Motor Company advertising booklet, “The Motor Car is the Magic Carpet of Modern Times,” ca. 1920s. (Emergence of Advertising On-Line Project–A0012, Advertising Ephemera Collection, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)

Theodate Pope, but a debilitating attack of asthma kept her at home. She was well enough a few months later to take three-hour motor rides with her brother George in Newport, where she rented a summer cottage. When she visited Newport in 1913, Pope parked her new Packard (dubbed “the yellow peril”) in George’s garage. Van Rensselaer began to look forward to the adventurous summer outings with Pope in the Packard; she appreciated that the automobile allowed her to visit places near Newport not easily reached on foot or by horse-drawn carriage.11 The arrival of the motorcar brought the good, the bad, and the ugly to the American people and to the nation’s urban and rural landscapes, and 186

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Packard, 1913 — the model of Theodate Pope’s “yellow peril.” (Courtesy of the National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library)

Fred Major and family in their automobile, Russell County, Kansas — “everybody and his wife and child . . . go a-wheel.” (Halbe Collection, Kansas State Historical Society)

Van Rensselaer experienced all three aspects of this new technology. She recognized that the automobile permitted “everybody and his wife and child to go a-wheel,” to leave the city on extended tours or at least on Sunday excursions. She heard that in some parts of California, half the population seemed to live for months in motorcars and tourist camps. In The Book of National Parks (1928), Robert Sterling Yard of the National Park Service wrote: “Under the gigantic pines, firs, and ancient sequoias of [General Grant and Sequoia National Parks], increasing thousands spend summer weeks and months.”12 187

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“Hello, killed anything?” satirical postcard, 1908. (Warshaw Collection of Business Americana–Automobile Industry, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)

Allowing Americans independence of movement was only one of the attractions of the automobile; it was also supposed to be cleaner, safer, more reliable, and more economical than other forms of transportation. Quickly proven false was the expectation that the automobile would be safer: in 1913 more than four thousand people died in car accidents, and by the 1930s, more than thirty thousand people died every year. Beyond what Van Rensselaer called “its homicidal appetite and its noisy manners,” she leveled many other charges against the automobile. She found the roads constructed for this new machine too black and shiny, and she cautioned the landscape architect to be careful about their number and placement. Not only did she think that the fumes from the motorcar obliterated all sweet natural odors, but its multiplication induced advertisers to 188

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set big, gaudy signs and billboards along rural roads and at the entrance to towns and villages.13 Writing about American parkways, Timothy Davis notes that in the 1920s and 1930s, the new automobile-related roadside brought forth widespread condemnation: unregulated entrances to gas stations, cabin courts, and quick-lunch stands disrupted traffic, and attention-grabbing, garish signs offended motorists. As early as 1913, Van Rensselaer complained to a friend about “the monstrous sign of a cigarette company that so terribly disfigures the viaduct at the end of Riverside Drive.” The thirty-two-yearold Municipal Art Society (MAS) of New York joined the battle against big advertising signs; in 1925 Van Rensselaer reported to her readers that the society encouraged any person who was aggravated by a “disfiguring” billboard to write directly to the advertiser. Today, MAS is still working with the New York City Buildings Department to help control the proliferation of advertising signs throughout the city.14 Nevertheless, there were many advantages to what Flink labels “automobility.” For the urban population, automobility promised escape from the city while allowing them to hold on to the advantages that the city offered; for farmers, automobility promised relief from the isolation of rural life and a reduction in the cost of transporting farm products to market. With Henry Ford instituting mass production techniques with his movingbelt assembly line, the cost of automobiles decreased dramatically. In 1926 a new Model T (nicknamed the flivver) cost $520, in comparison to a $1,000 price tag in 1910. When manufacturers adopted Ford’s innovative policy of the five-dollar, eight-hour day, the entire American labor force benefited. A significantly higher standard of living and much more leisure time changed the way Americans played.15 Given these circumstances, it is no surprise that in 1925, Van Rensselaer remarked on the need for landscape architects to deal with the automobile’s impact on recreation and on city and rural planning. With a higher standard of living and more leisure time conjoined with changing demographics, Americans increasingly turned to outdoor activities. Galen Cranz writes that the phrase “leisure time” first appeared in Recreation Magazine in the spring of 1907, and reformers sought to fill this gap of free time by demanding an increase in recreational services, including municipal facilities, beaches, golf courses, stadiums, tennis courts, and picnic areas. Van Rensselaer noted the 189

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tourist camps permitted in public reservations and the attention being paid to garden cities and suburbs. She had personal experience of winter migrations from Northern cities to Southern health and pleasure resorts, for she traveled to resorts in Georgia and South Carolina, and she also knew about the great vogue of summer camps for boys and girls — her young nephew attended one.16 Hans Huth addresses the automobile’s effect on the behavior of the American public toward nature in the opening years of the twentieth century. Years passed before roads became adequate or inns and hotels were able to offer sufficient facilities to house the steadily enlarging crowds going to the country for pleasure. Summer guests and campers not only left behind piles of trash but also created fire hazards, damaged vegetation, and polluted streams and lakes. As city dwellers became more mobile, they had greater opportunities to destroy the very beauty that drew them to the countryside. Van Rensselaer recognized this problem of easier access to the countryside: “hordes of devastators of woodland and meadow” became such a problem that landowners who had graciously opened their property to the public were being forced to protect their places by tall wire fences. She wrote that if the onslaught was not controlled, America would have only remote and secluded spots left with their wildflowers and blossoming trees and shrubs intact.17

America’s Love of the Outdoors Van Rensselaer praised the activities of the national and state governments that were responding to America’s love of the outdoors by reserving tracts of land in especially beautiful and remarkable wild regions. Since 1916, she noted, the number of national parks had risen to nineteen, and the states were growing more ambitious and generous with the money needed to preserve choice bits of nature with scenic, historical, and recreational value. A national policy of conservation was taking shape: in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt convened the Conference of Governors at the White House to discuss actions to protect and renew the country’s natural resources. J. Horace McFarland, the president of the American Civic Association, gave an impassioned speech, urging the assembly “to consider the essential value of one of America’s greatest resources — her unmatched natural scenery.” McFarland believed that the new outdoor movement needed to be chan190

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Camp, Wakefield, Virginia, 1924 — city dwellers venturing into the countryside. (NPS Historic Photograph Collection, National Park Service)

neled, that certain areas must be designated for the public, rules made for their use, and appropriate facilities provided. He envisioned a great system of city and county parks for the refreshment of city dwellers and, beyond those, state and national parks to offer spiritual values. In 1910 McFarland was asked to help prepare a bill to establish a special bureau to administer the national parks, and he conferred with Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., who suggested the insertion of a passage to ensure that firm principles of conservation would define the purpose of the parks, monuments, and reservations. Years of controversy followed, until a restructured bill establishing the National Park Service passed under Woodrow Wilson in 1916.18 Reflected in Van Rensselaer’s expanded bibliography for the revised edition of Art Out-of-Doors was the profession’s new concern with state and national parks and parkways. She gathered information on these latest developments from two recently published books. In State Parks (1921), landscape architect Harold A. Caparn described how New York had taken over the Bronx River channel and enough adjacent area to provide a parkway for 191

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Bronx River Parkway reservation near Woodlawn Station, New York, 1922. (Historic American Engineering Record, Bronx River Parkway Reservation–HAER No. NY–327; Courtesy of the Westchester County Archives)

public use. Caparn pointed out that proximity to a great city could sometimes be the most important reason for a state park to exist — even though the scenery was not especially remarkable. When the Bronx River Parkway opened to automobile traffic in 1923, it soon attracted motoring day trippers who took advantage of the fast and scenic route north out of the city.19 Caparn did not believe that the growth of state parks was altogether due to the growth of the automobile, but he recognized that the expansion closely followed the increasing American fascination with this technology. He described park efforts in other states, citing a resolution of the Friends of Our Native Landscape: “As far as is practicable state parks ought to be connected by state highways.” Jens Jensen, a landscape architect who immigrated to Chicago from Denmark in the 1880s, was the founder of this conservation club based in Illinois. Members enjoyed weekend outings to nearby scenic areas such as the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan — the type of Midwestern landscape that inspired Jensen to use native prairie plants in his Chicago parks. With reference to her own much appreciated New York Adirondack preserves, Van Rensselaer wrote of this club, which hoped to 192

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Tourists, Old Faithful Inn, 1922. (National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park, Museum Collections and Photo Archives)

preserve tracts in many parts of the state and connect them by roads, with the hope of making Illinois one great park.20 The more spectacular American landscapes were administered by the National Park Service. In a 1922 publication cited by Van Rensselaer, Jenks Cameron wrote that the public would be afforded every opportunity to enjoy the national parks in a way that best satisfied individual tastes; automobiles and motorcycles were permitted, and low-priced camps and comfortable, even luxurious hotels were planned. In the national parks, particular attention was paid to the construction of roads, trails, and buildings in order to harmonize these improvements with the landscape. Cameron stipulated that designers needed to possess knowledge of landscape architecture or have a proper appreciation of the aesthetic value of parklands. As Van Rensselaer pointed out, over the span of a generation, landscape architects had become more ambitious and much more versatile, and these professionals quickly took on design work for the National Park Service. Ethan Carr writes that the profession matured with the American park movement and describes the many contributions that landscape architects made to the 193

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National Park Service, including the construction of scenic roads, trails, and planned villages.21 Van Rensselaer was hearing of the formation of more and more walking clubs, trail clubs, and hiking clubs and recognized that “in truth, it is only on foot now that one can make real acquaintance with Nature.” In an automobile, she wrote, the driver saw nothing but the road ahead, and passengers had no time to observe or enjoy the roadside vegetation or to appreciate the skill of nature or the art of landscape composition. Moreover, the view out of a covered car blotted out most of the sky and cut all near and large objects in two; the motorist only saw the lower half of passing trees and structures. As a lover of beauty, Van Rensselaer considered a world without tree tops and sky a poor mutilated one.22

From Cities to Rural Villages The new state and national reservations were too numerous to list, and Van Rensselaer moved on to outline thirty years of progress in city and rural planning. She referred to the Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs (1922), a scheme embracing 5,500 square miles that sought to improve housing, transit, and industrial and commercial development. “What dreamer,” she asked, “could have thought of enterprises like these as possible?” The dreamer was the New York lawyer and philanthropist Robert Weeks de Forest, the man most responsible for the realization of the plan. After the city of New York refused to finance a regional plan in 1923, de Forest obtained a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. De Forest championed conservation, and his interest in a regional plan stemmed from his concern for the environment. He worked with Olmsted Sr. to establish the state park at Niagara and also led organizations that tried to protect the Adirondack wilderness. These proposals were of great interest to Van Rensselaer, for she had worked with Olmsted to promote the “General Plan for the Improvement of the Niagara Reservation” and had personal interest in the preservation of the quiet beauty of the Adirondack State Park.23 Regional planning as a response to metropolitan growth was the theme of the 1923 congress of the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Federation. Van Rensselaer wrote about the third congress, held in New York in 1925; the organization’s name by that time had been changed to the 194

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International Federation of Town and Country Planning and Garden Cities. She called for men of intelligence trained in different yet allied branches of science and art to open the eyes of Americans to critical planning issues. Although recognizing that women had begun to enter the profession of landscape architecture, Van Rensselaer typically used the masculine pronoun when she was writing about the arts. Perhaps she did not know that Marjorie S. Cautley was the landscape architect for the 1923 Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, a model of urban planning. Cautley worked beside the architects Clarence S. Stein and Henry Wright to design this twentieth-century American garden city.24 Just as important to Van Rensselaer as the condition and prospects of American cities were those of the nation’s rural villages. She had a hopeful tale to tell. Journeying by automobile, she could see that especially in New England, the average village was looking neater and more charming. And she discovered more villages to admire in the reports on rural planning in a publication called the Farmers’ Bulletin. Van Rensselaer’s usual sources for her scholarly work included books and journal articles on the fine arts, horticulture, botany, geology, and natural history published in France, Germany, England, and America. Yet in 1925 this cosmopolitan New Yorker cited the Farmers’ Bulletin, a ten-cent pamphlet published monthly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to argue for changes in the landscape profession and to urge landscape architects to take up the concerns of the twentieth century. Van Rensselaer likely discovered the Farmers’ Bulletin through her work with the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural Association and her contact with gardening author Louisa Yeomans King. Mrs. Francis King was the association’s first president, and Van Rensselaer was elected to serve as one of its first vice-presidents, when it was formed in 1914 “to help women help themselves earn their living in the beautiful ever-changing out-ofdoors.” There were speakers and exhibits of agricultural bulletins at the first annual conference, hosted by the School of Horticulture for Women in Ambler, Pennsylvania.25 The Farmers’ Bulletin, which Van Rensselaer found to be “interesting and sensible,” sought to stimulate local enterprise by illustrating accomplishments in places throughout the United States. The impetus for these community movements came from local initiative and in part was due to the 195

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Cover of  U.S. Department of Agriculture Farmers’ Bulletin No. 1388, “Rural Planning: The Social Aspects of  Recreation Places,” March 1924.

automobile, which made it worthwhile to please passing tourists and to attract their business. Communities were also addressing the need for special recreation grounds to accommodate the thousands of motorists. The recent report cited by Van Rensselaer was the March 1924 Farmers’ Bulletin entitled “Rural Planning: The Social Aspects of Recreation Places,” by Wayne C. Nason, a junior economist for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics.26 Nason believed that the economy of rural communities (including both agriculture and tourism) should be coupled with a program of rural recreational and social life. Why should farmers, he asked, have to rely on the city for their educational, religious, health, and recreational needs? He wrote that recreation and outing places, spots of natural beauty, and places 196

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Wamego City Park, Wamego, Kansas, 1930s. (Kansas State Historical Society)

of historic interest should be part of a rural plan that protects rural beauty and civic art and noted that national, state, and city parks scarcely affected rural people, who made up half of the American population.27 The unnamed village in Kansas that is mentioned by Van Rensselaer in “Changes” is Wamego — one of the agricultural towns featured in the 1924 Bulletin on rural planning. The pride of Wamego was (and still is) its twelve-acre city park. The land was acquired in 1901, and over a span of thirteen years, town citizens and residents of the farming community donated money and volunteered labor to build amenities including a bandstand and an artificial lake. Most telling was the improvement made in the early 1920s: a three-acre free tourist camping ground that propelled the Wamego park to become one of the advertised attractions along US Route 40. Van Rensselaer used the new park in Wamego as an exemplar of the effect such rural parks could have in helping stem the cityward tide that she considered one of the great dangers in contemporary America. She felt that if young people could find activities, interests, and pleasures in their native villages and farms, they would not be so easily lured by the city. She agreed with the Bulletin that setting aside rural parks, playgrounds, and places of historic interest or special beauty should be part of planning’s social program just as much as laying the foundation of an economic superstructure. 197

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The landscape architect, Van Rensselaer declared, should play a part in all phases of the diverse activities involved in these new planning and design opportunities for national, state, and local parks. The changes in the field of landscape architecture that she had observed over a generation thus went far beyond the number of practitioners and educational opportunities, and she encouraged engineers involved in city planning to ask for help from the professionals who had been trained in designing, planting, and maintenance of pleasure grounds.28 All types of recreational facilities were needed. Since the early 1900s, larger incomes, earlier retirement, and shorter work weeks had left Americans with more time on their hands. In 1914, a California Recreational Inquiry Committee issued a report stating that increased leisure time was “the greatest problem with which the coming century must cope.” The committee regretted that amusements at home in the evening had become unfashionable. People lived in apartment houses and hotels and spent their leisure hours in the streets or in the dance hall, the theater or motion picture house, or the pool room. According to the report, these privately owned and operated places largely could be blamed for the civic problems of crime, poverty, and white slavery. Testimony from an authority in charity work was cited: perhaps 90 percent of illegitimate children brought to their attention were the result of “misguided recreation instincts.” The city thus needed to provide recreation centers, public parks and playgrounds, social centers, athletic fields, and bathing beaches. “Public recreation is a public utility,” the report concluded, “as much as the other necessities of life, such as light, air and water.” Similar sentiments were repeated throughout the United States in surveys and reports published by national organizations that addressed issues ranging from recreation to education and from health to social reform.29

“Manifold Tasks” Van Rensselaer closed “Changes” with a reference to an essay entitled “America after Fifteen Years,” published in Scribner’s Magazine in April 1925. Written by H. A. L. Fisher, a former minister of education in England, the article addressed three new inventions of great vogue in America — the automobile, the moving picture, and the radio. Fisher felt that these inven198

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tions were helping Americans to solve “one of the gravest problems” that confronted an industrial democracy once it reached a high level of prosperity, which was how to dispose of its leisure time. His solution: “Drive cars, enjoy the movies, listen in.” Fisher observed American civilization on wheels: in winter the roads of Florida were crowded not only with the auto­ mobiles of the wealthy but also with the Ford cars of the workingman in search of change and sunshine. He saw motion pictures as an inexpensive means of providing amusement, and even a bit of instruction, to a vast population. The radio could also fill leisure time in productive ways. Found in every tenement house in New York City, the wireless, in Fisher’s mind, had the power “to strengthen the reflective elements in the public opinion of the nation” by encouraging a listening-in habit.30 Van Rensselaer’s own leisure habits tended toward reading, walking, watching polo and tennis matches, and attending live performances of plays and operas, but by 1914, she had come to enjoy motoring, as well. She wrote to Pope in anticipation of her visit to Newport: “you are not going to bar me out of the car quite as entirely as you seem to anticipate. It is not that I do not like motoring — only, that I do not like to motor too long, as it tires my head.” She agreed with American observers that one of the chief defects of the system of education was that it took no account of leisure as a permanent factor in a person’s life and saw a probable relationship between increased leisure and the growing lawlessness of American communities.31 Looking back on thirty years of progress in landscape architecture, Van Rensselaer saw that the profession was becoming more ambitious and more versatile, and she urged practitioners to take up the “manifold tasks of enlightenment and betterment” that had arisen along with America’s prosperity. “Here and now,” she wrote, “there can be no more useful work than increasing contentment by improving the conditions of daily life and supplying for leisure hours occupations and amusements that . . . will refresh and cultivate body and mind, the senses and the spirit.” What that work would be is revealed by the subject trends between 1930 and 1980 in the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) magazine. After parks and park systems, the most citations pertained to highways, roadsides, city planning, conservation, and housing — among the more traditional concerns such as planting design. Other subjects included national parks, parkways, playgrounds, and residential communities.32 199

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Yet in 1925 the new generation of university-trained landscape architects likely viewed Art Out-of-Doors as did Van Rensselaer, who wrote in the preface to the second edition that its worth rested in its value “as a witness to a certain period in our artistic development.” Although the ASLA awarded her honorary membership, few remembered her as the particularly gifted critic who helped the American public understand the genius of the small body of professional landscape architects who practiced in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Van Rensselaer was in a unique position to evaluate advancements in the field and to point to future directions after forty years of intimate contact both at home and abroad with the major figures who had contributed artistically, politically, and socially to the emerging discipline of landscape architecture.33 Van Rensselaer died at home on 20 January 1934, not far from where she was born. She had been bedridden by a fall but still delighted in receiving visitors. It was “a privilege to be admitted to her bedside,” Gilder’s brother Joseph wrote, “for she preserved her keen interest in life almost to the day of her death.”34

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Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer was alone in combining an expertise in American and European art and architecture with the ability to use the language of science to enhance latenineteenth-century public awareness and appreciation of the emerging profession of landscape architecture. The more than 330 editorials and unsigned articles in Garden and Forest added to Van Rensselaer’s known body of work reinforce the contention that the natural sciences figured prominently in her thinking. In particular, Humboldt and Darwin furnished compelling analogies and a new vocabulary for her studies of landscape architecture. Her writings demonstrate an easy familiarity with and love for nature and botany, despite the fact that she was a cosmopolitan New Yorker and a self-proclaimed “cockney.” One editorial, “The Language of Science,” addresses a reader complaint about the necessity of learning “hard Latin and Greek names” to study botany. Underlying Van Rensselaer’s response are much broader implications about her beliefs: “This [scientific] language is not constructed primarily to make science attractive to the young, but to furnish a means of complete and precise expression for those who are prosecuting particular studies.” She likewise strived for “complete and precise expression” in the languages of art, architecture, and landscape architecture. What she took from science added immeasurably to her critical writings, and this blend is her most valuable legacy to landscape history.1 Van Rensselaer attempted to raise the standard of public expectations for the design of villas, railroad stations, school grounds, parks, cemeteries, roads, walks, public monuments, military parks, playgrounds, piazzas, terraces, fences, flower beds, and window boxes. From her earliest writings, she 201

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Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer with her Jack Russell terrier, 1920. (Archives of the Arnold Arboretum, Cambridge, MA; Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

stated that it was essential to train a nation of capable amateurs to recognize the higher possibilities of the fine arts, for she believed that creative power and appreciative power nurture each another. She quoted Emerson in her early essay “Artist and Amateur”: “It is always hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it.” Van Rensselaer thought that Americans had a desire for beauty and simply needed guidance to appreciate the best.2 Van Rensselaer considered herself a competent professional and a successful critic of landscape gardening. Her belief is apparent in an 1897 letter to Gilder, when she asked him to pay the going rate for an essay: “I really don’t think it is too much for me at the end of all these long years of labor & some 202

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success in certain special paths, like landscape gardening criticism.” None of the small number of professional landscape architects who produced reports, journal articles, or books during this time rivaled Van Rensselaer’s writing skills, or her ability to interweave aesthetics and science, or her influence on the public perception of the discipline. Olmsted never produced the book that André envisioned for him: “a great work, well illustrated, in which he expounds on his theories of the art of the garden, bolstered by examples of his personal creations.” Olmsted’s former office apprentice Charles Eliot showed the greatest potential with his attempt “to explain and illustrate the objects of his profession,” but his death at the age of thirty-seven cut short his promising career. Other professionals’ works that contributed to the field included H. W. S. Cleveland’s Landscape Architecture: As Applied to the Wants of the West (1873); Jacob Weidenmann’s Beautifying Country Homes (1870) and Modern Cemeteries (1888); and Samuel Parsons Jr.’s four books, including Landscape Gardening (1891) and How to Plan the Home Grounds (1899), and his articles for Scribner’s.3 One historian writes that Van Rensselaer “exemplified the feminine version of her group’s ideal of the ‘gentleman-artist-scholar-statesman.’ ” Labeling her a “feminine version” of accomplished males belittles her achievements. The significance of her articles and editorials on landscape architecture does not rest merely in the fact that they were written by a woman at a time when the profession was exclusively male. She was a complex and contradictory mixture of a high-born lady and a professional critic. Never more so than in a letter written to Koehler did she reveal these two aspects of her character. She had visited the studio of Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia and found that the real Eakins and the man she had pictured were worlds apart. In her eyes, he was not even of tolerably good breeding. Although she respected his work, she would not think to ask him to dinner, observing: “His home & surroundings & family were decidedly of the lower middle class.” His paintings seemed more remarkable to Van Rensselaer after she considered the source and place of their production, and she believed Eakins needed someone to give him “a little insight into the aesthetics of life.”4 The aesthetics of life were all important to Van Rensselaer. For her, taste in painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape architecture required cultivation and intelligent direction. She believed that “what men like is a sure test of their aesthetic development and refinement,” and she spent her 203

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Durr Freedley, Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, 1927. (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund, 1938.111; Photo: Katya Kallsen © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

career trying to improve the public’s artistic sense through constantly reiterated precepts and by offering examples of what she considered good taste. In a paper given before the American Association of Museums in 1917, she spoke about the importance of art education for children in order to train their taste for beautiful things.5 Van Rensselaer’s place in the history and theory of landscape architecture must be reconsidered. Van Rensselaer’s Art Out-of-Doors was required reading for James Sturgis Pray’s introductory course in landscape design at Harvard, and Cornell and the University of Illinois listed the book as a course requirement. Taking its place among works by Edouard André and Humphry Repton, Art Out-of-Doors was one of eleven general reference works that Hubbard and Kimball recommended in their textbook  An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design (1917). In Variety in the Little Garden (1923), Mrs. Francis King cited Art Out-of-Doors and wrote that Van Rens204

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selaer clearly set forth in this notable book that “the history of civilization is partly written in gardens.” After establishing a program of landscape design for its members, the National Council of State Garden Clubs republished the 1893 edition of Art Out-of-Doors in 1959, and Hubert B. Owens, who became the first dean of the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia, remarked in the foreword that “the fundamental points dealt with . . . are considered to be of sufficiently outstanding merit to meet an important need as a required reading reference.”6 Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer brought a distinct sensibility to American landscape criticism that evolved from her knowledge of art and architecture and from her belief in the value of science. Because of the anonymity typical of editorials in nineteenth-century magazines and the scant attention paid to her writings on landscape architecture, scholars have failed to celebrate her as one of the major figures in American landscape history. From her first article in Garden and Forest, when she defined landscape gardening, to her last editorial ten years later, when she argued for the true value and beauty of America’s native trees, she wove together the worlds of art, architecture, and landscape architecture to mark out an enlarged vision for the profession.

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Appendix A Garden and Forest Editorials and Unsigned Articles Written by M. G. Van Rensselaer

I have been studying the writings of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer for more than fifteen years. I know the words she used and how she consistently linked art to architecture to landscape gardening. In my reading, I began to find references to Garden and Forest editorials in the Olmsted, Stiles, and Sargent letters and subsequently discovered the connection of the chapters in Art Out-of-Doors not only to signed pieces but also to editorials and unsigned articles. I looked more closely. Like other scholars before me, I had not realized the extent of Van Rensselaer’s contribution to the journal. Some of her editorials and unsigned articles are recognizable simply by title, because there are subjects she tended to address (at times to tedious repetition). I know what writers she admired and what journals she read. She tended to begin a piece with a historical treatment of the subject. She was a competent botanist and believed that scientific study enhanced the knowledge of nature. She spoke French and German and traveled extensively through England and the Continent. She was fascinated with various shades and tones of color, and I often recognize her writing simply by the painterly color descriptions. A detailed chronology of her life that I developed also helped to establish her authorship. The following list of 333 editorials and unsigned articles is likely incomplete, but it nonetheless offers a comprehensive view of her contributions to Garden and Forest.

Garden and Forest 1 (1888)

42 editorials and unsigned articles

“The Future of American Gardening,” 7 March 1888, 13–14 “Arbor Day,” 11 April 1888, 73 “Easter Flowers in New York,” 18 April 1888, 86–87 “A Temple in Japan,” 18 April 1888, 88 “Flowers in Winter,” 25 April 1888, 98 207

Appendix A “A Plantation for Winter,” 25 April 1888, 98–99 “American Cemeteries,” 2 May 1888, 109 “Plans for Small Places,” 2 May 1888, 110 “Cut Flowers and Growing Plants,” 2 May 1888, 110 “Why We Do Not Buy Growing Plants,” 9 May 1888, 121–22 “The Improvement of School Grounds,” 16 May 1888, 133 “Villas and Their Doorways,” 16 May 1888, 133–34 “Rural Improvement Societies,” 23 May 1888, 145 “Balcony Flower Boxes,” 30 May 1888, 158 “Formal Flower Beds,” 6 June 1888, 169–70 “The Court-yard of Charlecote Hall,” 6 June 1888, 171–72 “Walks and Drives,” 20 June 1888, 193–94 “The Sermon of the Flowers,” 27 June 1888, 205–6 “The Artistic Aspects of Trees I: Form,” 4 July 1888, 218–19 “The Artistic Aspects of Trees II: Texture,” 11 July 1888, 230 “The Artistic Aspects of Trees III: Color,” 18 July 1888, 242–43 “The Onteora Club and Its Chance for Usefulness,” 1 August 1888, 266 “Note,” 1 August 1888, 266 “Wild Flowers in City Markets,” 8 August 1888, 278 “House at Honmoku in Japan,” 29 August 1888, 314–15 “Sentimental Objections to Felling Trees,” 5 September 1888, 325 “The Responsibilities of Florists and Nurserymen,” 12 September 1888, 337 “The Proper Use of Herbaceous Plants,” 26 September 1888, 361–62 “The Artistic Aspects of Trees IV,” 3 October 1888, 373–74 “The Ailanthus,” 10 October 1888, 385–86 “Sentimental Objections to Felling Trees II,” 17 October 1888, 397–98 “Taste in Florists’ Arrangements,” 24 October 1888, 409 “Planting for Autumn Effect,” 24 October 1888, 410 “Window Gardens,” 24 October 1888, 410–11 “Do Not Spare the Axe,” 7 November 1888, 433 “Piazzas,” 7 November 1888, 433–34 “Entrance to the Temples at Nikko, Japan,” 7 November 1888, 434 “Chrysanthemums,” 14 November 1888, 445–46 “Piazzas II,” 14 November 1888, 446–47 “Natural Beauty and the Landscape Gardener,” 5 December 1888, 481 “The Artistic Aspects of Trees V,” 12 December 1888, 493 “Christmas Green,” 19 December 1888, 505–6

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Garden and Forest Editorials and Articles

Garden and Forest 2 (1889)

45 editorials and unsigned articles

“When to Employ the Landscape-Gardener,” 9 January 1889, 13–14 “The Trees of Central Park,” 16 January 1889, 25–26 “A Japanese Stable,” 16 January 1889, 26 “Concerning Elizabethan Architecture,” 30 January 1889, 49–50 “The Terrace Garden at Wellesley,” 27 February 1889, 98–99 “A German Sketch of American Gardening,” 6 March 1889, 110–11 “The Railroad in Horticulture,” 13 March 1889, 121–22 “History of Gardening,” 20 March 1889, 133–34 “Longleat,” 20 March 1889, 134 “The Improvement of Villages,” 27 March 1889, 145–46 “The Practice of Landscape Gardening,” 27 March 1889, 146 “Thinning the Plantations in Central Park,” 3 April 1889, 158 “The Railroad-station at Chestnut Hill,” 3 April 1889, 159–60 “Easter Flowers,” 17 April 1889, 182 “Improvement in Rural Cemeteries,” 24 April 1889, 194 “School Grounds,” 1 May 1889, 205 “The Garden of Levens Hall,” 1 May 1889, 206 “The Artistic Aspects of Trees VII,” 8 May 1889, 217–18 “The Judicious and Systematic Thinning of Trees,” 22 May 1889, 241–42 “Horticulture in Ancient Egypt,” 12 June 1889, 278–79 “Thinning Plantations,” 26 June 1889, 301 “Topiary Gardening in Japan,” 26 June 1889, 302 “The Treatment of Road-sides,” 17 July 1889, 337 “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House I,” 24 July 1889, 350 “Country Foot-Paths,” 31 July 1889, 361–62 “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House II,” 31 July 1889, 362 “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House III,” 14 August 1889, 386 “Florence Nightingale’s Home,” 14 August 1889, 387 “Design in the Surroundings of Houses,” 21 August 1889, 397–98 “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House IV,” 28 August 1889, 409–10 “Drives and Walks I,” 11 September 1889, 434 “The Landscape-Gardener and the Architect,” 18 September 1889, 445–46 “Drives and Walks II,” 18 September 1889, 446–47 “Drives and Walks III,” 25 September 1889, 458

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Appendix A “Drives and Walks IV,” 2 October 1889, 470 “Spare the Wild Flowers,” 9 October 1889, 481 “Sea-side Parks,” 9 October 1889, 481–82 “Color in Flowers,” 16 October 1889, 494 “Chatsworth,” 23 October 1889, 506–7 “The Chrysanthemum,” 20 November 1889, 553–54 “The Exhibition Grounds, Paris,” 27 November 1889, 566–67 “Trees in Winter,” 11 December 1889, 589 “The Training of Gardeners,” 18 December 1889, 601–2 “Christmas,” 25 December 1889, 613–14 “The Petit Trianon at Versailles,” 25 December 1889, 614

Garden and Forest 3 (1890)

30 editorials and unsigned articles

“The Forest Pavilion at the French Exhibition,” 15 January 1890, 26–27 “French Parterres,” 29 January 1890, 50–51 “Gardening Art in Public Parks,” 5 February 1890, 61–62 “Entrance to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris,” 12 February 1890, 74 “Botany for Young People,” 26 February 1890, 97–98 “The Parterre, Fontainebleau,” 9 April 1890, 174 “Planting New Places,” 16 April 1890, 185 “Flower Painting,” 30 April 1890, 210–11 “An Old New England Bridge,” 30 April 1890, 211 “The Spring Garden,” 7 May 1890, 221 “The Greendale Oak and Welbeck Abbey,” 14 May 1890, 233–34 “A Stone Bridge in Wales,” 4 June 1890, 270 “Formal Gardening in America,” 11 June 1890, 282 “Parterres in the Park of St. Germain,” 18 June 1890, 294–95 “The Locust Trees,” 25 June 1890, 305–6 “The Kecskemet Heath,” 25 June 1890, 306–7 “Who Is the Vandal?” 25 June 1890, 307 “The Gardens of the Fountain at Nimes,” 30 July 1890, 366–67 “Country Roads,” 13 August 1890, 389–90 “Two Kinds of Gardening Art,” 27 August 1890, 413–14 “The Sacred Olive-Tree of Blidah,” 27 August 1890, 414 “Plan for a Small Town Place,” 17 September 1890, 450 “The Language of Science,” 24 September 1890, 461 “Save the Wild Flowers,” 1 October 1890, 473–74 210

Garden and Forest Editorials and Articles “A Stone Bridge in Wales,” 1 October 1890, 474 “Landscape Art and Decorative Gardening,” 8 October 1890, 486 “Form in Flowers,” 26 November 1890, 569–70 “The Jesup Collection of the Woods of the United States,” 26 November 1890, 570 “Elementary Botany for Young People,” 31 December 1890, 629 “The Beginnings of Fruit-culture in Germany,” 31 December 1890, 630

Garden and Forest 4 (1891)

38 editorials and unsigned articles

“The ‘Sauce’ of Architecture,” 28 January 1891, 37–38 “A Vase of Chrysanthemums,” 28 January 1891, 38 “The Forsythia as a Pillar Plant,” 18 February 1891, 74 “The ‘Tree of the Janissaries,’ ” 25 February 1891, 85 “The Rose-bush of Hildesheim,” 18 March 1891, 122 “The Movement for Better Roads,” 1 April 1891, 145 “Every Man His Own Gardener,” 1 April 1891, 145–46 “The Colonnade in the Parc Monceau, Paris,” 8 April 1891, 159 “A Flower-Garden for New York,” 15 April 1891, 169–70 “Class Vines and Class Trees,” 22 April 1891, 181–82 “Tree-planting in Cities,” 29 April 1891, 193–94 “The Gardens at Monte Carlo,” 29 April 1891, 194 “Early Spring in Central Park,” 13 May 1891, 218 “Do Americans Love Flowers?” 20 May 1891, 230 “Matters of Taste,” 3 June 1891, 253 “Gardens of Bermuda,” 3 June 1891, 254 “A Fountain at Potsdam,” 10 June 1891, 266 “ ‘Our Trees,’ ” 17 June 1891, 278 “Do New Englanders Love Flowers?” 1 July 1891, 301–2 “The Planting of Home Grounds,” 15 July 1891, 325–26 “Four Pictures of Gardens,” 29 July 1891, 350–51 “The Summer Vacation,” 12 August 1891, 373–74 “Architectural Fitness,” 19 August 1891, 385–86 “Monuments in Public Places I,” 26 August 1891, 397–98 “The Responsibilities of Florists,” 2 September 1891, 409–10 “Monuments in Public Places II,” 2 September 1891, 410 “Monuments in Public Places III,” 9 September 1891, 421–22 “Artist and Client,” 16 September 1891, 433–34 211

Appendix A “A Garden Pool,” 16 September 1891, 434–35 “A Fine Road,” 16 September 1891, 435 “Monuments in Public Places IV,” 23 September 1891, 446–47 “Botany at Barnard,” 21 October 1891, 494 “The Effect of Gardening upon the Mind,” 28 October 1891, 505–6 “The Delayed Frost,” 4 November 1891, 518–19 “Public Gardens,” 11 November 1891, 529–30 “Statues in Central Park,” 18 November 1891, 542 “The New Grant Monument in Lincoln Park, Chicago,” 25 November 1891, 554 “Books about Nature Published in America,” 16 December 1891, 590

Garden and Forest 5 (1892)

43 editorials and unsigned articles

“Ready-made Plans for Planting,” 13 January 1892, 13 “An Appropriate Decoration,” 20 January 1892, 26 “The Aspect of Trees in Winter,” 3 February 1892, 50 “Some Uses of Flowers,” 23 March 1892, 133 “Poe’s Cottage at Fordham,” 23 March 1892, 134 “A Japanese Garden,” 13 April 1892, 170 “The Love of Nature I,” 27 April 1892, 193–94 “Formal Gardening,” 4 May 1892, 205 “The Love of Nature II,” 4 May 1892, 205–6 “The Love of Nature III,” 11 May 1892, 218–19 “The Love of Trees,” 18 May 1892, 230 “The Management of Cemeteries,” 25 May 1892, 241–42 “Good Taste in Our Cemeteries,” 1 June 1892, 253–54 “The Florists’ Shops in Berlin,” 1 June 1892, 254 “The Beauty of Our Trees in Spring,” 8 June 1892, 265–66 “The General Design of the Columbian Fair Grounds,” 15 June 1892, 278 “The Flower-trade of Paris,” 15 June 1892, 279 “The Plan of the Columbian Fair Grounds,” 22 June 1892, 289–90 “Restful Burial Grounds,” 29 June 1892, 301–2 “Pretenders in Landscape-art,” 29 June 1892, 302 “Simplicity in Landscape-art,” 6 July 1892, 313–14 “The Terrace at Haddon Hall,” 13 July 1892, 326 “The Love of Nature,” 20 July 1892, 337–38 “The New Jersey Building at the Columbian Fair,” 3 August 1892, 362–63 “Taste Indoors and Out,” 10 August 1892, 373–74 212

Garden and Forest Editorials and Articles “The Wellesley Plantations,” 17 August 1892, 385–86 “An Old House in New Jersey,” 17 August 1892, 386 “Water-towers in Massachusetts,” 31 August 1892, 410 “Taste Indoors and Out,” 14 September 1892, 433–34 “Statues in Parks,” 14 September 1892, 470 “Elbow-room in the Country,” 21 September 1892, 445 “Gaudy Floral Devices,” 21 September 1892, 445–46 “Gardening as a Human Bond,” 12 October 1892, 481–82 “Women as Landscape Architects,” 12 October 1892, 482 “Trees in October,” 26 October 1892, 505 “Jericho Roses,” 26 October 1892, 506 “Grottoes in France,” 2 November 1892, 518 “The Beautiful in the Surroundings of Life,” 9 November 1892, 529–30 “Encouraging Children in the Intelligent Planting and Care of Trees,” 9 November 1892, 530 “Landscape-art as a Profession,” 16 November 1892, 541 “A German Pleasure-ground,” 23 November 1892, 554 “Llewellyn Park,” 7 December 1892, 578 “The Cedar of Lebanon,” 21 December 1892, 602

Garden and Forest 6 (1893)

36 editorials and unsigned articles

“The Effect of Country Life upon Women,” 4 January 1893, 1–2 “The Names of Garden Flowers,” 18 January 1893, 25–26 “Agriculture in Public Schools,” 25 January 1893, 37–38 “A Seventeenth Century Garden,” 1 February 1893, 49–50 “Garden-art and Architecture,” 15 February 1893, 73–74 “A Statue of President Arthur,” 22 February 1893, 86 “Formal Gardening: Does It Conflict with the Natural Style?” 15 March 1893, 119–20 “Formal Gardening: Where It Can Be Used to Advantage,” 22 March 1893, 129–30 “Flower Shows and Their Uses,” 29 March 1893, 139 “Arbor Day,” 5 April 1893, 151 “A Too Realistic Statue,” 5 April 1893, 152 “Some Uses of Formal Gardening,” 12 April 1893, 161–62 “The Gardens Surrounding the Taj,” 19 April 1893, 171–72 “Landscape-art in Public Parks,” 3 May 1893, 191–92 213

Appendix A “The Work of Frederick Law Olmsted at the Columbian Exposition,” 3 May 1893, 192 “The Flower Garden in Spring,” 31 May 1893, 231 “Bestowal of Degrees by Harvard and Yale,” 5 July 1893, 281–82 “Art Societies and City Parks,” 12 July 1893, 291–92 “The Photograph Monopoly at the Columbian Exposition,” 12 July 1893, 292 “Sentimentalism and Tree-felling,” 26 July 1893, 311–12 “Selecting Shrubs for Planting,” 2 August 1893, 321–22 “Notes on Italian Gardens,” 2 August 1893, 322 “The Height of Ignominy,” 9 August 1893, 332 “Horticulture at the World’s Fair,” 16 August 1893, 341–42 “Economy in Decoration,” 23 August 1893, 352–53 “The General Design of the Columbian Exposition,” 30 August 1893, 361–63 “Tender Plants in Public Parks,” 6 September 1893, 371–72 “Extracts from Letter,” 13 September 1893, 382 “Photography at the Fair,” 8 November 1893, 462 “What Shall We Plant?” 15 November 1893, 471–72 “Fences I,” 22 November 1893, 482–83 “The Popularity of the Chrysanthemum,” 29 November 1893, 491–92 “Landscape-gardening at the Columbian Fair,” 6 December 1893, 501–2 “Fences II,” 6 December 1893, 502 “Fences III,” 13 December 1893, 512–13 “The Key-note in Landscape-gardening,” 27 December 1893, 531–32

Garden and Forest 7 (1894)

15 editorials and unsigned articles

“Street Trees,” 17 January 1894, 21 “A German View of Landscape-art in America,” 31 January 1894, 41 “Floriculture for the Farmer,” 14 March 1894, 101 “Easter Flowers,” 28 March 1894, 121 “The Spring Garden,” 11 April 1894, 141–42 “A City Garden,” 25 April 1894, 161–62 “Flower-thieves,” 30 May 1894, 212 “Architecture and Vines,” 20 June 1894, 241–42 “ ‘Nature and the Rich,’ ” 27 June 1894, 251–52 “Art and Nature,” 4 July 1894, 261–62 “The Use of Color in Our Parks,” 18 July 1894, 281–82 “New Statues in New York,” 15 August 1894, 321–22 214

Garden and Forest Editorials and Articles “Nature and Art,” 29 August 1894, 341–42 “Gardening at Newport,” 14 November 1894, 452–53 “Deciduous Trees in Winter,” 29 December 1894, 501

Garden and Forest 8 (1895)

27 editorials and unsigned articles

“Parks and Park-planting,” 9 January 1895, 11–12 “The Defacement of Scenery,” 27 February 1895, 81–82 “Sculpture in Garden Art,” 20 March 1895, 111–12 “The Winter Aspects of Trees,” 27 March 1895, 121 “The Work of Women in Village Improvement,” 27 March 1895, 121–22 “A Memorial for Francis Parkman,” 17 April 1895, 151–52 “Nature and American Literature,” 8 May 1895, 181–82 “American Forest-trees in Spring,” 15 May 1895, 191–92 “Popular Books about Flowers,” 22 May 1895, 201–2 “The Debt of America to A. J. Downing,” 29 May 1895, 211–12 “Street-trees,” 5 June 1895, 221–22 “Plans for Home Grounds,” 19 June 1895, 241–42 “The Proposed Statue in Bowling Green,” 26 June 1895, 251–52 “Country Roads and Roadsides,” 10 July 1895, 271–72 “Old-fashioned Gardens,” 17 July 1895, 281–82 “Doing Too Much I,” 24 July 1895, 291–92 “Doing Too Much II,” 7 August 1895, 311–12 “Color in the Garden,” 14 August 1895, 321–22 “The Treatment of Small Seashore Places,” 28 August 1895, 341–42 “The Architectural Attack on Rural Parks,” 4 September 1895, 351–52 “A Great Battle Park,” 18 September 1895, 371 “Landscape Art in Military Parks,” 25 September 1895, 381–82 “Seasonable Work among the Trees,” 20 November 1895, 461–62 “Autumn Colors of Leaves,” 20 November 1895, 462 “School-grounds,” 11 December 1895, 491–92 “The Shrubbery in December,” 11 December 1895, 492 “Municipal Art,” 18 December 1895, 501–2

Garden and Forest 9 (1896)

25 editorials and unsigned articles

“White’s Selborne,” 1 January 1896, 1–2 “Municipal Art Again,” 15 January 1896, 21–22 215

Appendix A “Horticultural Education,” 22 January 1896, 31 “The Shrubbery in Winter,” 29 January 1896, 41 “The Surroundings of Statues and Monuments,” 19 February 1896, 71 “John Bartram,” 25 March 1896, 121 “Dangerous Enemies of Street Trees,” 8 April 1896, 141–42 “Park Work Near Boston,” 29 April 1896, 171–72 “The Revised Plan for Jackson Park, Chicago,” 20 May 1896, 201–2 “County Parks,” 3 June 1896, 221–22 “Where Competitive Examination May Fail,” 10 June 1896, 231 “Hitch Your Wagon to a Star,” 24 June 1896, 251–52 “Privacy in Suburban Life,” 8 July 1896, 271–72 “English Gardens Unsuitable for America,” 15 July 1896, 281–82 “A Wild Garden,” 5 August 1896, 312 “Various Motives for Gardening,” 26 August 1896, 341 “Newport through English Eyes,” 9 September 1896, 362 “The Garden in Autumn,” 16 September 1896, 371–72 “The Artistic Element in Engineering,” 14 October 1896, 411–12 “Horticulture and Health,” 28 October 1896, 431–32 “The Defacement of Niagara,” 11 November 1896, 451–52 “Artistic Supervision for Public Works,” 18 November 1896, 461–62 “Unnatural Colors in Foliage,” 25 November 1896, 471–72 “Municipal Playgrounds,” 16 December 1896, 501–2 “Trees in Public Parks,” 16 December 1896, 511

Garden and Forest 10 (1897)

32 editorials and unsigned articles

“The Planting of Shrubberies,” 6 January 1897, 1–2 “Park-making as a National Art,” 13 January 1897, 11–12 “The Need of More Public Pleasure-grounds,” 27 January 1897, 31–32 “Sculpture in Gardens,” 24 March 1897, 112 “Garden Design,” 31 March 1897, 121–22 “Early Flowers,” 7 April 1897, 131–32 “The Care of Park Trees,” 21 April 1897, 151 “A Garden for Children,” 21 April 1897, 151–52 “The Field of Landscape-art,” 28 April 1897, 161 “School Gardens and School Grounds,” 5 May 1897, 171–72 “Art and Nature in Landscape-gardening,” 19 May 1897, 191–92 “Vacant-lot Farming,” 19 May 1897, 192 216

Garden and Forest Editorials and Articles “One Way to Make Parks Attractive,” 26 May 1897, 201–2 “Common Plants,” 2 June 1897, 211–12 “Doing Too Much,” 16 June 1897, 231–32 “Natural Beauty in Parks,” 30 June 1897, 251–52 “One Way to Reduce the Cost of Park Maintenance,” 14 July 1897, 271–72 “The Use of Trees and Shrubs with Leaves of Abnormal Colors,” 4 August 1897, 301 “The Wild Flowers of Early August,” 18 August 1897, 319–20 “The Planting of Private Grounds,” 25 August 1897, 329–30 “Harmony in Small Country Places,” 1 September 1897, 339–40 “Native Plants for Ornamental Planting,” 8 September 1897, 349–50 “Penshurst Place,” 6 October 1897, 389–90 “The Advertising Nuisance,” 20 October 1897, 409–10 “Autumn Work among the Trees,” 3 November 1897, 429 “New Dangers to Public Parks,” 24 November 1897, 439–40 “The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument,” 24 November 1897, 459 “City Playgrounds,” 8 December 1897, 479–80 “Mistakes in the Maintenance of Philadelphia Parks,” 8 December 1897, 480 “Park-making,” 15 December 1897, 489–90 “Landscape-gardening,” 22 December 1897, 499–500 “American Trees for America,” 29 December 1897, 509

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Appendix B Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer Chronology 23 February 1851 1854 1863–67 1864 May 1868 1868–71 April 1873 May 1873 February 1875 1876–77 June 1879 1880–84 June 1880 August 1880 May–June 1881 June 1881 July 1881 August–September 1881 Summer 1882 December 1882

Birth of Mariana Griswold Family moves to new house on Fifth Avenue, New York City Schuyler Van Rensselaer at Harvard Griswolds summer in Newport, R.I., at uncle J. N. A. Griswold’s new house Griswold family moves to Dresden Schuyler Van Rensselaer in Freiburg Mariana Griswold marries Schuyler Van Rensselaer in Dresden Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer return from Europe to live in New Brunswick, N.J. Son George Griswold (Gris or GG) is born Van Rensselaers in Dresden, during which time they visit Egypt First letter to publishers of Art Review; begins relationship with editor Sylvester Rosa Koehler Van Rensselaers live in New Brunswick MGVR visits Boston, Hotel Brunswick MGVR visits Block Island, R.I., Ocean View Hotel with Mrs. Harriet H. Ayer MGVR visits Nestledown (Jamaica, Long Island, home of Dora and Mrs. Candace Wheeler) MGVR in Philadelphia to visit Thomas Eakins and in Boston MGVR in Narragansett Pier, R.I. Van Rensselaers in Cresson Springs, Pa. MGVR and Gris in Europe (Schuyler out west) MGVR visits Mrs. Henry Adams in Washington, DC 219

Appendix B May 1883 MGVR visits Newport June 1883 MGVR visits Boston Summer 1883 MGVR visits Mrs. Candace Wheeler in Onteora, N.Y. September 1883 MGVR in Boston November 1883 MGVR in Washington, DC 7 March 1884 Death of husband, Schuyler 26 April 1884 Death of father June 1884–85 MGVR in Hosterwitz, near Dresden July 1885 MGVR in London August 1885 MGVR in Lichfield, Oxford, and Bournemouth, England MGVR in Paris September 1885 MGVR sails for New York City with her son, October 1885 mother, and sister Louisa (Lily) MGVR living at 9 West Ninth Street, New York City 1886–1908 27 April 1886 Henry Hudson Richardson dies May 1886 Brother George Griswold III marries Emily Oliver Post June 1886 MGVR in Brookline, Mass. Summer 1886 MGVR in Southampton, Long Island January 1887 MGVR in Brookline June 1887 MGVR in Brookline Summer 1887 MGVR in Marion, Mass. 29 February 1888 First issue of Garden and Forest June 1888 MGVR publishes Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works Summer 1888 MGVR in Marion January 1889 MGVR visits Boston May 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris opens June 1889 MGVR sails for France Summer 1889 MGVR in Europe; begins thorny relationship with Joseph Pennell July 1889 Boat trip on the Rhone River August 1889 MGVR in Limoges, Clermont-Ferrand, and Bourges, France September 1889 MGVR in Paris and Tours, France MGVR in Antwerp, returns to New York City October 1889 MGVR in Marion Summer 1890 Summer 1891 MGVR in Marion with sister Lily 220

Chronology October 1891 Summer 1892 October 1892 January 1893 Spring 1893 1 May 1893 May 1893 Summer 1893 September 1893 October 1893–April 1894 February 1894 22 April 1894 May 1894 February 1896 7 October 1896 November 1896 1897 January 1897 April 1897 6 October 1897 29 December 1897 May 1898 Summer 1898 Summer 1899 Summer 1900 May 1901 Summer 1901 May 1902

MGVR returns to New York City, and Lily sails for Europe MGVR in Marion Gris enters Harvard Death of Harry Codman MGVR takes Gris to Virginia Beach, Va. World’s Columbian Exposition opens Art Out-of-Doors published MGVR and Gris at Hotel Ruisseaumont, Lake Placid, N.Y.; trip to Chicago MGVR visits Montreal; visits World’s Columbian Exposition with Gris; visits sister Edith Higginson and her husband, George MGVR lives in Colorado Springs with Gris Sister Edith has a child; MGVR visits Denver Death of Gris MGVR returns to 9 West Ninth Street, New York City MGVR in Albany, N.Y., appearing before the City Committee in the Senate Chamber George Griswold IV born to brother George MGVR chairs meeting of Public Education Association (PEA) Sister Louisa (Lily) remarries de Raasloff (Danish ambassador to the United States) MGVR elected president of Women’s Auxiliary of the University Settlement Society Death of sister Edith in childbirth; MGVR in Winnetka, Ill., with her brother-in-law William A. Stiles dies Last issue of Garden and Forest MGVR addresses PEA conference as its president MGVR in Newport MGVR in Newport MGVR in Newport, at Red Cross Avenue Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo opens MGVR in Buffalo; visits Niagara Falls MGVR attends PEA conference in Baltimore, Md. 221

Appendix B Summer 1902 MGVR in Newport; brother Frank Gray Griswold and Mrs. George Griswold visit December 1902 MGVR presides at PEA meeting in New York City; son of uncle J. N. A. Griswold, George Griswold II, commits suicide 28 August 1903 Death of Frederick Law Olmsted 10 May 1905 Death of brother George’s wife, Emily Summer 1905 MGVR in Lenox, Mass. Christmas 1905 MGVR in Tuxedo, N.Y. March–April 1906 MGVR visits Jekyll Island, Savannah, and Augusta, Ga. April 1906 MGVR visits Charleston and Summerville, S.C. Death of Augustus Saint-Gaudens 3 August 1907 Death of MGVR’s mother 22 May 1908 Summer 1908 MGVR in Southhampton, N.Y. MGVR moves to 9 West Tenth Street, New York City Fall 1908 Summer 1909 MGVR at Eastern Point, Gloucester, Mass.; MGVR visits Cecilia Beaux at her home, Green Alley, in Gloucester 18 November 1909 Death of Richard Watson Gilder at MGVR’s home March 1910 MGVR visits Tuxedo Park, N.Y. June 1910 MGVR receives honorary degree of doctor of letters from Columbia University Summer 1910 MGVR at Fair Acres, Stockbridge, Mass.; visitors include Augustus Jaccaci and perhaps Ida Tarbell (she was invited) Summer 1911 MGVR at Inwood, North Broadway, Saratoga, N.Y., with sister Lily; brother George, his son George IV, brother Frank, Sargent, and Jaccaci visit Christmas 1911 MGVR in Tuxedo, N.Y. April 1912 MGVR acts as patroness for a benefit for the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement Summer 1912 MGVR at Hone Cottage, Newport; brother George, his son George IV, and Jaccaci visit Fall 1912 George IV (sixteen years old) living with MGVR in N.Y. MGVR acts as patroness of a benefit for the Girls’ February 1913 Branch of the Public Schools Athletic League 222

Chronology March 1913 Summer 1913 October 1913 Christmas 1913 February 1914 April 1914 May 1914 Summer 1914 April 1915 1 May 1915 7 May 1915 May 1915 August 1915 December 1915 February 1916 March 1916 6 May 1916 21 December 1916 18 March 1917 Summer 1918 26 August 1920 February 1923

MGVR joins the Committee on Park Preservation of the Parks and Playgrounds Association, New York City MGVR at Hone Cottage, Newport; sister Lily, brother George, his son George IV, and Jaccaci visit Theodate Pope opens architectural office in New York City MGVR in Tuxedo, N.Y. MGVR acts as patroness of fundraiser for the Gramercy Neighborhood Association with Mrs. Richard W. Gilder and Miss Cecilia Beaux; MGVR acts as patroness of fundraiser for the City History Club, New York City Theodate Pope adopts a two-year-old boy First annual conference of the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural Association at the School of Horticulture for Women, Ambler, Pa., with MGVR as a vice-president MGVR at Hone Cottage, Newport; Theodate Pope and brother George and his son George IV visit MGVR acts as patroness of a fundraiser for the Cripples’ Welfare Society, New York City Theodate Pope departs on the Lusitania Sinking of the Lusitania MGVR works for the American Branch of the French Wounded Emergency Fund Theodate Pope returns to New York City Theodate Pope closes New York City office MGVR acts as patroness of fundraiser to benefit the City History Club MGVR receives guests at fundraising reception for Vacation War Relief Association Theodate Pope marries John Wallace Riddle Death of Theodate Pope Riddle’s adopted son, Gordon, from polio Death of brother George Griswold MGVR at Hone Cottage, Newport Nineteenth Amendment ratified — woman’s suffrage MGVR awarded American Academy of Arts’ Gold Medal for Distinction in Literature 223

Appendix B June 1923 28 May 1924 March 1927 20 January 1934

MGVR on list of incorporators for the new Museum of the City of New York Death of sister Louise Griswold de Raasloff Death of C. S. Sargent Death of MGVR at home

224

N ot e s

A note on sources: Books and journal articles by Van Rensselaer are cited fully on first occurrence by chapter in the notes and are not listed in the bibliography.

Abbreviations AABN American Architect and Building News AJ August Jaccaci CE Charles Eliot FLO Frederick Law Olmsted G&F Garden and Forest JP Joseph Pennell MGVR Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer MSVR Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer RUJ Richard Underwood Johnson RWG Richard Watson Gilder SRK Sylvester Rosa Koehler TPR Theodate Pope Riddle WAS William A. Stiles

Introduction 1. According to the Gilders’ daughter, Miss Rosamund Gilder, the “Bohemian” circle around her parents was “a release from the more stringent social world of her family.” See Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 83n; Van Rensselaer is in profile in a similar photograph in the collection of the Arnold Arboretum; “circa 1888” is given as the date and “Marion, Massachusetts,” is penciled in. 2. MGVR to RWG, 23 June [1909], Richard Watson Gilder papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 3. See [MGVR], “The Language of Science,” G&F 3 (24 Sept. 1890): 461. 4. For “frivolous multitude,” see MGVR to SRK, 5 Aug. 1881, Sylvester Rosa 225

Notes to Pages 3 – 11 Koehler Collection, Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu. For “invitations,” see MGVR to TPR, 28 July [1913], Theodate Pope Riddle Papers, Archives, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT. 5. MGVR to RWG, 1 Apr. [1896], Gilder papers. For “pleasure-seeking,” see MGVR to RWG, 28 Feb. [1894], Century Company records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

1. The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer 1. MGVR, “Fifth Avenue,” Century 25 (Nov. 1893): 8; Griswold, After Thoughts, 3, 11; Calvert, “Children in the House,” 81. 2. Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York, 108. On the drowning, see MGVR, “Places in New York,” Century 31 (Feb. 1897): 501–16 (quotation at 506). 3. Van Rensselaer’s people were of English and Scotch origin and, until her four grandparents became citizens of New York, lived in Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, and on Long Island. See MSVR, History of New York in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1, New Amsterdam (New York: MacMillan Company, 1909), xx. For the paulownia tree, see MGVR, “Fifth Avenue,” 12. For the ailanthus tree, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening, new and enlarged edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 451. 4. MGVR, “Fifth Avenue,” 17. 5. For the recollection of the grand-niece, see Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 41 fn. 6. Griswold, After Thoughts, 16. For Paris in the 1860s, see Morford, Appletons’ Short-Trip Guide, 177–78. For a discussion of Paris parks during the Second Empire, see Schenker, “Parks and Politics,” 201–19. 7. For the Griswolds in Dresden, see Griswold, After Thoughts, 17–21. On expatriates in Dresden, see Corning, Student Reverie, 72. 8. On prominent individuals in Dresden, see Corning, Student Reverie, 77. 9. See “Dresden,” 469. 10. Griswold, After Thoughts, 22. For music as “the characteristic art,” see MGVR, “Artist and Amateur,” American Art Review 1 (1880): 384; MGVR, “Parsifal at Baireuth,” Harper’s 66 (Mar. 1883): 540–57. 11. Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place, 26–27; Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 156–57; Sill, “Shall Women Go,” 323–26; MGVR, “The Waste of Women’s Intellectual Force,” Forum 13 (July 1892): 620. 12. See letters such as MGVR to SRK, 7 July 1880, Koehler Collection; 226

Notes to Pages 11 – 14 MGVR, “Artist and Amateur,” 382. In a 1917 speech before the American Association of Museums, MGVR said: “my sister and I were taken to Europe and there we haunted the picture galleries. We had never had any instruction in what we should like and had never read anything but Ruskin, who contradicted everything the catalogs told us. So we just looked at pictures and that was the way we learned.” See American Association of Museums, Proceedings, 67. 13. For travel in the Gilded Age, see Rugoff, America’s Gilded Age, 73; Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 227. For a description of Van Rensselaer’s European experiences, see MGVR, “Artist and Amateur,” 382–83. For Karl Schnaase (1798– 1875), see Dictionary of Art Historians, http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/ schnaase.htm. 14. See Holcomb, “Anna Jameson on Women Artists,” 16. Also see Booth, How to Make It, 176, 178. 15. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, 1, 11–12. 16. See, e.g., MSVR, “Churches of Provence,” Century 49 (Nov. 1894): 128–29. 17. Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 128, and Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America, 185, discuss MGVR’s strident criticism of Ruskin; see also Kinnard, “Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer,” 184. On Ruskin, truth to nature, and Turner, see Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, passim; Ricci, “Ruskin Reconsidered,” 4. For MGVR’s remark on Turner, see “Artist and Amateur,” 341. 18. Stillman, “John Ruskin,” 357–58; Philistine comment quoted in Fraser, “ ‘Century’s American Artist Series,’ ” 319. 19. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, xi; MGVR, “Mr. Arnold and American Art,” Century 36 (June 1888): 314. For the Froth comment, see MSVR, Six Portraits: Della Robbia, Correggio, Blake, Corot, George Fuller, Winslow Homer (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1889), 95. 20. MGVR, “Mr. Arnold and American Art,” 314. On Arnold, see Landow, “ ‘Style Is the Man.’ ” The Arnold quotation is in DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene, 114. 21. Arnold is quoted in Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 223. On Arnold, also see Beers, “Matthew Arnold in America,” 155; Landow, “ ‘Style Is the Man.’ ” 22. MGVR, “Mr. Arnold and American Art,” 314–15; Arnold, “Civilisation in the United States,” 486, 488–89. 23. MGVR, “Artist and Amateur,” 383. On Burroughs and Taine, see Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 220–21. On Taine’s objective, sensuous idea of art, see Goetz, Taine and the Fine Arts, 62. 24. Taine, Lectures on Art, 12. 25. For “milieu,” see Taine, Lectures on Art, 30. 227

Notes to Pages 14 – 17 26. MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch VIII: The Love of Nature,” G&F 2 (14 Aug. 1889): 387. 27. Taine, Lectures on Art, 37–38. On Taine’s partiality, see Goetz, Taine and the Fine Arts, 97. 28. Taine, Lectures on Art, 36; MGVR, “Recent Architecture in America: Public Buildings I,” Century 6 (May 1884): 51. 29. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 159, 161. For the comment on Miss Mason’s garden, see MGVR to AJ, 29 July [1912], Jaccaci Papers, Archives of American Art. The landscape architect Rose Standish Nichols, who with Platt was part of the Cornish colony, added the formal gardens. They were intended to supplement the indoor rooms with a series of enclosures where visitors could sit and walk out of doors in seclusion, surrounded by flowers. On Miss Mason’s house and garden, see Nichols, “Newport House and Garden.” 30. Taine, Lectures on Art, 87, 93, 164 (original emphasis). 31. Baym, American Women of Letters, 2. Also see Warner, “Science Education for Women,” 191–200, 3. Frank Luther Mott points out the astonishing growth of American interest in scientific matters from the 1860s in History of American Magazines, 3: 104. Also see Bruce, Launching of Modern American Science, 79. On MGVR, see Joseph B. Gilder, “An Eminent New Yorker,” New York Times, 26 Jan. 1934. 32. Rosenberg, No Other Gods, 3. 33. Shi, Facing Facts, 116; Mott, History of American Magazines, 3: 105. George E. Pond of the Galaxy is quoted in Mott, History of American Magazines, 3: 106. On magazines and Darwin, also see Wells, Literary Index to American Magazines, 100–103. According to Wells’s introduction, the magazines selected for the index were “the most prominent of the age that contain significant literary content” (x). He cites, among others, the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly (Century after 1881), and the North American Review, all of which published hundreds of articles on Darwin. 34. Fiske, “Triumph of Darwinism,” 90–91. Smith and Higginson write that Fiske’s article “really set the seal on the new evolutionary faith embodied in the pages of the NAR”; see “ ‘Improvised Europeans,’ ” 171. Wilson notes that John Fiske was a popular lecturer on what he labeled cosmic philosophy — a reconciliation of evolution, religion, and Christian morality, which was, in fact, more in line with Herbert Spencer’s version of evolution. See Darwinism and the American Intellectual, 34. 35. Darwin on Humboldt is quoted in Jason Wilson’s introduction to Hum228

Notes to Pages 17 – 21 boldt, Personal Narrative, xxxvi. On Darwin’s method, see Darwin, Charles Darwin: The Voyage of the “Beagle,” 10. 36. Larson, Interpreting Nature, 116. Also see Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos, 228. 37. Quotation is from Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, vi. 38. On Agassiz at Harvard, see Menand, Metaphysical Club, 97–99. In 1847 the Harvard Corporation voted to establish “an advanced school of instruction in theoretical and practical science and in the other usual branches of academic learning” that was called “the Lawrence Scientific School in the University at Cambridge.” In 1890 the Lawrence Scientific School was combined with the College Faculty. 39. On Gray and Agassiz, and for the Agassiz quotation, see Wilson, Darwinism and the American Intellectual, 8–10. On Agassiz’s views, see Bruce, Launching of Modern American Science, 29. 40. Shaler, Autobiography, 105–11, 225, 243. Shaler’s autobiography also tells the story of the battles between Agassiz and Gray at Harvard: “It was dangerous for a student [of Agassiz] to be seen ‘in parley with the enemy.’ ” Shaler remembered that the “Darwinian hypothesis” had little support from anyone except Gray. Charles E. Rosenberg disputes this claim: “Bitter hostility did on occasion mark the relationship between science and religion in American history. Yet such conflict has been much exaggerated, originally by some of the protagonists.” See Rosenberg, No Other Gods, 3. Shaler had limited contact with Gray until after his mentor’s death, but with his gradual acceptance of Darwinism and his general interest in botanical questions, he developed a bond with the older man. They grew to be close friends when Shaler became a teacher of paleontology and geology in the school. 41. Bedell, Anatomy of Nature, 3, 7; Shaler, First Book in Geology, iv–vi, 196. 42. Shaler, Aspects of the Earth, vii–viii. 43. For “conscientiously scientific student,” see MGVR, “A Woodland Tragedy,” G&F 1 (19 Sept. 1888): 351; MGVR, “Flower and Fruit Pictures at the Academy of Design,” G&F 1 (25 Apr. 1888): 108. 44. Ruskin quotations are in J. Smith, Charles Darwin, 166–67. 45. Perry, “Science and the Imagination,” 54–56. 46. MGVR, “Chamisso,” G&F 4 (18 Mar. 1891): 122–23. Chamisso published his experiences in a book: Adelbert von Chamisso, Voyage around the World, 33. He made discoveries on the coast of California including the now familiar California poppy, naming the flower Eschscholtzia californica in homage to Ivan Ivanovich Eschscholtz, the doctor, naturalist, and entomologist on the brig Rurik. 47. Transcendentalist poet Ellery Channing quoted in Thoreau, Walden, x; Baym, “Thoreau’s View of Science,” 221; Botkin, No Man’s Garden, 1–2, 69. 229

Notes to Pages 21 – 26 48. Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints,” in Walden, 743; MGVR, “Some Questions of Color,” G&F 10 (20 Oct. 1897): 416. 49. Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints,” 712. In reference to Thoreau, Baym uses the phrase “subjective interpretation and objective reporting.” See “Thoreau’s View of Science,” 221. In the mid–1880s, Ruskin picked up on Thoreau’s metaphor: “So also, the blush of a girl, when she first perceives the faltering in her lover’s step as he draws near, is related essentially to the existing state of her stomach; and to the state of it through all the years of her previous existence. Nevertheless, neither love, nor chastity, nor blushing, are merely exponents of digestion.” Quoted in J. Smith, Charles Darwin, 168. 50. MGVR, “Some Questions of Color,” 416. 51. Keith, Richard Jefferies, 160. Also see Looker, Jefferies’ England, xvi. Looker remarks that Jefferies was a poet-naturalist in the sense of Wordsworth and Thoreau. 52. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1893), 339–41, 343–44. Jefferies’s “Wild Flowers” was originally published in Longmans’ Magazine in July 1885 and then republished in The Open Air, a collection of Jefferies’s writings that appeared the same year. For Jefferies and wildflowers, see Looker, Jefferies’ England, 128. 53. Burroughs, “Taste of Maine Birch,” 853. This essay is included in Burroughs, Signs and Seasons. 54. Burroughs, “Taste of Maine Birch,” 854. 55. Walt Whitman is quoted in Burroughs, “Nature and the Poets,” 293. For “what science gives,” see Burroughs, “Nature and the Poets,” 295. For “study of nature,” see Burroughs, Signs and Seasons, 22.

2. A Career Begins 1. Tatham, “Elihu Vedde’s ‘Lair of the Serpent,’ ” 41. For “poor little scribblers,” see MGVR to SRK, 14 Sept. 1881, Koehler Collection; for “best opportunity,” see MGVR to SRK, 16 Sept. 1881, Koehler Collection. On Koehler, see Ackley, “Sylvester Rosa Koehler,” 143–50. 2. On Van Rensselaer and professionalism, see Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 72–73. Also see Dinnerstein, “When Liberty Was Controversial,” 77; Cane and Alves, “American Women Writers,” 1–2. 3. FLO to MGVR, 21 Dec. 1887, Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 4. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 111–12; Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place, 47. 230

Notes to Pages 26 – 31 5. Ruutz-Rees, “Women’s Wages,” 475. Van Rensselaer mentions these members of her household in her correspondence. 6. MGVR to Messrs. Estes & Lauriat, 14 June 1879, Koehler Collection. On women writers, see Koenigsberg, “Arbiters of Taste,” 360; MGVR to SRK, 2 Dec. 1879, 16 Sept. 1880, Koehler Collection. For “driveling little art sheets,” see MGVR to SRK, 9 Aug. 1881, Koehler Collection. 7. MGVR, “The Plague of Formal Calls,” Scribner’s 19 (Mar. 1880): 787. Maureen E. Montgomery devotes a section to “Daytime Rituals” in her book Displaying Women (27–30). 8. MGVR, “Plague of Formal Calls,” 787–88; Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, 20–21. 9. MGVR, “Plague of Formal Calls,” 788; Darwin, Origin of Species, 171–72. 10. Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America, 185. For “morals or mere records,” see MGVR, “The Recent New York Loan Exhibition,” AABN 15 (19 Jan. 1884): 30. On MGVR and nudes, see Steffensen, “Americanization of The Blessed Damozel,” 22. 11. Aidé, “Social Aspects of American Life,” 890. See MGVR to Cecilia Beaux, n.d., box 2, folder 9, Cecilia Beaux papers, 1863–1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The letter is an invitation to dine; other guests included Mrs. Gilder and Mr. Sargent. MGVR’s friendship with Beaux is discussed in chapter 8. Although Van Rensselaer and Edith Wharton were contemporaries and occupied the same social circles in New York City and Newport, I have found no evidence that they were friends or that they corresponded. 12. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 112–13. In the summer of 1880, Van Rensselaer’s letters to Koehler mentioned Mrs. Ayer. See MGVR to SRK, 16 and 18 Aug. 1880, Koehler Collection; Livermore, Livermore’s History, 229. For this period in the life of Mrs. Ayer, see Ayer and Taves, Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, 92–105. Also see the biography by Annette Blaugrund, Dispensing Beauty. On Van Rensselaer’s delayed work, see MGVR to SRK, 30 Aug. 1880, Koehler Collection. 13. MGVR to SRK, 5 Aug. 1881, Koehler Collection. For Wheeler, see Marling, “Portrait of the Artist,” 51–52; Peck and Irish, Candace Wheeler, 50. 14. Marling, “Portrait of the Artist,” 47–49, 52. According to Marling, Chase’s Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler (1883) “records the attainment of full professional status in the visual arts by women at the precise moment of its occurrence.” See Nochlin, “Why Have There Been,” 27–28. 15. MGVR to SRK, 30 Aug. 1880, Koehler Collection. On the Tenth Street Studio Building, see Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square, 36, 99. For a de231

Notes to Pages 31 – 36 scription of Chase’s studio, see Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 50–51. MGVR to SRK, 1 and 4 June 1881 (Koehler Collection), were sent from Jamaica, Long Island. 16. MGVR, “In the Heart of the Alleghanies,” Lippincott’s, new series, 4 (July 1882): 84–86. 17. MGVR, “In the Heart of the Alleghanies.” An unsigned illustrated article appeared in Harper’s in 1883 that was also entitled “In the Heart of the Alleghanies.” It contained additional information about the same areas of Pennsylvania, including more details on the Cambria Iron Company. It is written in a more popular style and offers less personal information about Van Rensselaer. See [MGVR], “In the Heart of the Alleghanies,” Harper’s 67 (Aug. 1883): 327–39. Her publishers corrected the spelling of the mountain range when the Lippincott’s articles were reprinted in book form in 1885. See MGVR, In the Heart of the Alleghenies: Historical and Descriptive (Philadelphia: Allen, Lane & Scott, 1885). 18. MGVR, “In the Heart of the Alleghanies,” Lippincott’s, new series, 4 (Aug. 1882): 171; Dunlap, American Iron Trade Manual, 149. Also see Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/DiscoveryCenter/steel.html. 19. MGVR, “In the Heart of the Alleghanies” (Aug. 1882), 171. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 172. On the “record night, “see Dunlap, American Iron Trade Manual, 188. 22. R. H. Davis, “Life in the Iron-Mills,” 430. Shi discusses Davis’s “grim story” in Facing Facts, 36–37. 23. Glück, John Mitchell. Warshaver writes about MGVR’s “picturesque mode of cognition” in relation to the urban conditions of New York in “Psychogeographic Traditions of City Folk,” 75. 24. MGVR, “In the Heart of the Alleghanies” (Aug. 1882), 168. 25. The account of Schuyler Van Rensselaer’s life and work published in Harvard University’s “Twentieth Anniversary Class Report” is quoted in Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 31. Given the personal details in this account, I believe Van Rensselaer is the author. There is one curious error, however: the year 1878 is given for the family’s stay in Cresson Springs; see the chapter “Capital and Labor” in Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 70–100. 26. Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, 9. See also Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America, 45. 27. MGVR to SRK, 26 Sept. 1881, Koehler Collection. 28. Ibid. Complaints of ill health frequently appear in Van Rensselaer’s personal and business correspondence. 29. Ibid. 232

Notes to Pages 36 – 41 30. MGVR to SRK, 16 Sept. 1881, Koehler Collection. 31. MGVR to SRK, 12 July 1882, 12 Nov. 1882, Koehler Collection. Her trip to Bayreuth resulted in a lengthy article for Harper’s on Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, first performed at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882. 32. Other magazines in this group, according to Kramer (“Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons”) included the Atlantic, the North American Review, and Scribner’s. 33. Schuyler Van Rensselaer to SRK, 12 Sept. 1883, Koehler Collection. Schuyler tells Koehler that his wife is at Mrs. Wheeler’s in the mountains and will be delayed. In 1888 Wheeler’s brother bought more land, which was developed into building lots; he laid out roads and trails and named the new summer resort and artist community Onteora. Women professional writers, including Van Rensselaer and Mary Mapes Dodge, were summer visitors, as were John Burroughs and the Gilders. Mark Twain was an occasional resident, and Dora Wheeler eventually built a studio there. For Onteora, see Wheeler, Yesterdays in a Busy Life, 138–39, 268–71; Peck and Irish, Candace Wheeler, 57–63. Also see Evers, Catskills, 539–43. I find no evidence that Van Rensselaer built a cottage named “The Twigs” in Onteora, as claimed in Gaillard, Ladies of Early Onteora, 30. 34. Henry Adams and his wife, Clover, knew both Olmsted and Richardson, and the previous year, Van Rensselaer in her capacity as art critic of the New York World had paid a visit to Mrs. Henry Adams to see the family’s collection of watercolors and drawings. See Thoron, Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams; MGVR to FLO, 4 Oct. 1883, Olmsted Papers. She misspelled his name “Olmstead” in the salutation. The next month, Van Rensselaer asked for another meeting in Washington, where Olmsted was dealing with problems concerning the Capitol terrace. See MGVR to FLO, 10 Nov. [1883], Olmsted Papers. On Olmsted’s work on the Capitol terrace, see Roper, FLO: A Biography, 363–99. 35. MGVR, “Recent Architecture in America: Public Buildings I,” 58, 52–53. Olmsted’s name was still misspelled in the article, although he was sent the proofs. For Olmsted’s design principles, see Beveridge, “Frederick Law Olmsted’s Theory,” 41. 36. Floyd, “H. H. Richardson,” 227. For Olmsted’s general opinion of architects, see Kowsky, “Veil of Nature,” 72. 37. MGVR to SRK, 31 Mar. 1884, 25 May 1884, Koehler Collection. 38. MGVR to SRK, 17 Aug. 1884, Koehler Collection; MGVR to RWG, 26 July 1884, Gilder papers. 39. MGVR to SRK, 28 June 1885, Koehler Collection. 40. MGVR to JP, 29 May 1885, Joseph Pennell correspondence, box 5, folder 5, 233

Notes to Pages 41 – 45 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; Pennell, Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, 150. 41. Pennell quoted in Kinnard, “Life and Works,” 25. For the tricycle comment, see MGVR to JP, 13 Aug. 1885, Pennell correspondence; for “exact day,” see MGVR to JP, 10 Sept. [1885], Pennell correspondence. 42. MGVR to SRK, 28 June 1885, Koehler Collection. For “newly established neighbor,” see MGVR, “Fifth Avenue,” 11. 43. Stiles, “Riverside Park,” 911–18. 44. Ibid. 45. [Johnson], “Civic Rivers,” 968. Johnson wrote to Olmsted in Aug. 1885 and enclosed the proof of his forthcoming editorial. Purportedly, Olmsted had given Johnson permission to record him in favor of the preservation of Hell Gate. He hoped Olmsted agreed with his interpretation. See RUJ to FLO, 26 Aug. 1885, Olmsted Papers. The former Gracie estate was added to East River Park in 1891, and a new landscape design by Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons was completed in 1902. 46. RUJ to FLO, 26 Aug. 1885, Olmsted Papers; Olmsted, “ ‘Healthy Change in the Tone,’ ” 963–65. 47. FLO to MGVR, 17 May 1887, Olmsted Papers. For the Boston Harbor report, see Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted, 96, 108. 48. FLO to MGVR, 2 May 1886, 6 [May] 1886, Olmsted Papers. Although dated 6 Apr., the letter was written after Richardson’s death, and the penciled-in month is in error. Olmsted had just read Van Rensselaer’s review of the English art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s Paris in Old and Present Times: With especial reference to changes in its architecture and topography, and he wanted to get her opinion of Hamerton’s Landscape, published the same year — an impressive book with numerous etchings, photogravures, and pen sketches. He was greatly disappointed in its content and thought he had wasted money in his eagerness to buy the expensive book. Olmsted commented, “With regard to what it seemed to promise, it is most unsatisfactory.” He knew of nothing that satisfactorily addressed the subject of landscape. See FLO to MGVR, 6 [May] 1886, Olmsted Papers; MGVR, review of Paris in Old and Present Times, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton, AABN 19 (2 Jan. 1886): 8–9; Hamerton, Landscape. 49. FLO to MGVR, 6 [May] 1886, Olmsted Papers. This is the second letter of the day. 50. FLO to MGVR, 12 June 1886, Olmsted Papers. For “public mission,” see FLO to MGVR, 11 Aug. 1886, Olmsted Papers. There is no evidence to suggest that Van Rensselaer was a close friend of Richardson. Carla Yanni also concludes this in 234

Notes to Pages 45 – 52 “ ‘Richardson Memorial,’ ” 28. C. S. Sargent was a cousin of the amateur horticulturist Henry Winthrop Sargent. 51. MGVR, “Recent Architecture in America: American Country Dwellings I,” Century 32 (May 1886): 17. 52. For a brief history of Newport, see David Chase’s “introduction” in Cheek, Newport Mansions, 6; MGVR, “Recent Architecture in America: American Country Dwellings II,” Century 32 (June 1886): 211. 53. MGVR, “American Country Dwellings II,” 211–12. 54. For “happy in expression,” see MGVR, “American Country Dwellings II,” 214. 55. Gardiner, Special Report of New York State Survey. Contemporaries active in the movement gave Olmsted the prime credit for saving Niagara’s scenery. For Olmsted and the Niagara Reservation, see Sears, Sacred Places, 184–89; Roper, FLO: A Biography, 378–82, 395–97. 56. FLO to MGVR, 17 May 1887, Olmsted Papers. 57. Ibid.; MGVR to FLO, 19 May [1887], Olmsted Papers. The report is reprinted in Olmsted, Creating Central Park, 535–75. 58. [MGVR], “The Niagara Reservation,” Century 34 (Aug. 1887): 631–32. 59. FLO to MGVR, 17 May 1887, Olmsted Papers; [MGVR], “Niagara Reservation,” 633; MSVR, Niagara: A Description (New York: Gilliss Brothers, 1901), 13. 60. For “art motives,” see FLO to MGVR, 17 May 1887, Olmsted Papers. For “danger,” see FLO to MGVR, 18 May 1887, Olmsted Papers; [MGVR], “Niagara Reservation,” 633. 61. For Niagara today, see Strand, Inventing Niagara.

3. A New Field of Study 1. MGVR to FLO, 19 May [1887], Olmsted Papers. 2. For “Nature,” see MGVR, “Landscape Gardening II,” AABN 22 (3 Dec. 1887): 263. 3. Dinnerstein, in “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” devotes a chapter to “expression” in Van Rensselaer’s work (105–88). MGVR’s remark regarding “true art” refers to the acting of Sarah Bernhardt; see Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 154. 4. See MSVR, “Architecture as a Profession,” Chautauquan: Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle 7 (May 1887): 451–54; [MGVR], “Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America,” Century 34 (June 1887): 313. Evidence of her authorship is in MGVR to FLO, 19 May [1887], Olmsted Papers: “I trust it 235

Notes to Pages 53 – 59 will not be long before I have a chance to elaborate it a little for the Century’s readers.” 5. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening I,” AABN 22 (1 Oct. 1887): 158. 6. Ibid., 157–59. 7. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening II” (AABN), 263. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. On “chromos,” see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 160. 11. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening II” (AABN), 264. 12. Ibid. On Van Rensselaer and “things French,” see Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 107–16. 13. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening II” (AABN), 264. 14. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening III,” AABN 23 (7 Jan. 1888): 3. 15. Ibid., 4. 16. On the cultural exclusion of photography, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 160–61. 17. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening III” (AABN), 4–5. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. Information on the difficulties attending the start-up of G&F can be found in a series of letters from WAS to FLO written in Dec. 1887 and Jan. 1888 (Olmsted Papers). See also [MGVR], “Landscape Gardening and Forestry,” Century 35 (Mar. 1888): 803. 20. For the prospectus, see G&F 1 (29 February 1888): ii. 21. Stiles told Olmsted that he and Munro held personal contracts with Sargent for two years of service; see WAS to FLO, 25 Dec. 1887, Olmsted Papers. “Mr. Munro Surprised,” New York Times, 20 Nov. 1887, announced that Munro had resigned from Harper & Brothers at the first of the month to take the new job. The only other woman listed as a correspondent in the prospectus was Mary Treat of Vineland, NJ. Vera Norwood writes that Mary Treat, who wrote Home Studies in Nature (1885), lived a middle-class, intellectual life in much the same domestic circumstances as Susan Cooper, author of Rural Hours (1850): “[Treat] provided detailed studies of birds, spiders, ants, wasps, and insectivorous plants, referring the reader to her articles in various scientific and popular journals, quoting from her correspondence with Asa Gray and Charles Darwin, and pointing out her own contributions in the field.” See Norwood, Made from This Earth, 41. 22. FLO to MGVR, 22 May 1887, Olmsted Papers. 23. FLO to CE, 28 Oct. 1886, Olmsted Papers. For more specific information on Eliot’s writings for G&F, see Hou, “Magazine of Nature,” 175–78. 236

Notes to Pages 59 – 63 24. FLO to CE, 28 Oct. 1886, and FLO to MGVR, 21 Dec. 1887, Olmsted Papers. On Richardson, see FLO to MGVR, 14 June 1888, Olmsted Papers: “Here and there I have heard . . . [nothing] but admiration and gratitude for all your part of the [Richardson] work. Sargent evidently feels triumphant.” 25. WAS to FLO, 7 Jan. 1888, Olmsted Papers. 26. WAS to FLO, 13 Dec. 1887, Olmsted Papers; “The Falls of Minnehaha” and “A Park for Wilmington, Del.,” both G&F 1 (29 Feb. 1888), 12. The second feature brought Bostonians up to date on Olmsted’s report to their park commissioners regarding his plan to reforest the harbor islands and headlands (“Tree Planting on Boston Harbor,” G&F 1 [7 Mar. 1888]: 24). 27. WAS to FLO, 24 Dec. 1887, 30 Dec. [1887], 4 Jan. [1888], Olmsted Papers. For more information on Stiles, see Andersen, “ ‘Master of a Felicitous English Style,’ ” 39–43. 28. Olmsted was designing the grounds of Leland Stanford Jr. University at Palo Alto; later in 1888 he would begin work on George Washington Vanderbilt’s estate, Biltmore, in North Carolina. His office was also working on a number of public, private, and institutional grounds. See Roper, FLO: A Biography, 406. 29. For a detailed study of G&F and its contributors, see Hou, “Magazine of Nature”; FLO to Rick Olmsted, 5 Sept. 1890, Olmsted Papers. Appendix A offers a list of the G&F editorials and unsigned articles written by Van Rensselaer. 30. Robbins, “Gendering Gilded Age Periodical Professionalism,” 48. 31. On the circulation of G&F, see Sutton, Charles Sprague Sargent, 132–33. The Chicago Evening Journal quotation is in G&F 5 (21 Dec. 1892): iv–v; Edmunds’s quotation is in G&F 5 (6 Apr. 1892): vi. 32. Olmsted relayed the information about the young men in FLO to MGVR, 9 Apr. 1888, Olmsted Papers. 33. FLO to CE, 28 Oct. 1886, Olmsted Papers. Evidence of a discussion between FLO and MGRV is found in FLO to MGVR, 21 Dec. 1887, Olmsted Papers: “Sometime I must discuss the question of ‘Landscape Architecture’ with you.” Kinnard also cites another letter, dated 19 May 1887, from MGVR to FLO that is missing from the LOC microfilm of the Olmsted Papers. Kinnard writes that Van Rensselaer “thanked Olmsted for his explanation [about gardening versus landscape architecture] and also for pamphlets he had sent.” See Kinnard, “Life and Works,” 255. In Hou’s detailed study of G&F (“Magazine of Nature”), she finds that the editors most often used the term landscape gardening, but they also used landscape architecture or landscape art. 34. Cleveland, Landscape Architecture, 5; O. C. Simonds, quoted in [MGVR], “The Landscape-gardener and His Work,” G&F 10 (21 July 1897): 282. On the 237

Notes to Pages 64 – 69 debate about an appropriate title for the profession, see Way, Unbounded Practice, 25–26. 35. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — A Definition,” G&F 1 (29 Feb. 1888): 2. Eighty years later, the American architect Louis Kahn commented in a lecture: “I hope they become land architects instead of land-scraping architects.” He suggested that architecture schools could have two courses, one called “architecture and land,” the other “land and architecture” (quoted in Khaleed Ashraf, “Taking Place,” 55, 58). 36. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — A Definition,” 2; Cleveland, Landscape Architecture, 5; FLO to MGVR, 22 May 1893, Olmsted Papers. Eliot’s comments are in CE to MGVR, 3 Dec. 1890, cited in [Eliot], Charles Eliot, 272–73. 37. [MGVR], “When to Employ the Landscape-Gardener,” G&F 2 (9 Jan. 1889): 13–14. 38. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — A Definition,” 2. Ethan Carr writes, “To Olmsted’s great satisfaction, [Van Rensselaer] helped establish the professional status of landscape architects by defining their practice as a fine art, unlike the craft or trade of gardening.” See Carr, “Garden and Forest,” 5, 7. 39. Olmsted, Spoils of the Park, 134. 40. Ibid., 139, 135. 41. Weidenmann to FLO, 15 Sept. 1887, Olmsted Papers; Cleveland to FLO, 17 July 1888, Olmsted Papers. In the same letter, Cleveland asks Olmsted about G&F ’s prospect of success: “That journal contains a good many interesting articles  — but somehow — as a whole, I cannot feel that it can prove attractive to a very large class in this money worshipping age.” 42. MGVR, “Artist and Amateur,” American Art Review 1 (1880): 342; MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — A Definition,” 2. 43. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — II,” G&F 1 (7 Mar. 1888): 14–15. 44. Ibid., 14; MGVR, “Great Hill: A New American Country-seat — I,” G&F 4 (21 Oct. 1891): 494–95. 45. MGVR, “Great Hill: A New American Country-seat — II,” G&F 4 (28 Oct. 1891): 506–7. 46.  MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — III,” G&F 1 (14 Mar. 1888): 27. Van Rensselaer was chiefly concerned in her art criticism with “expression.” See Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 105. 47. On Whistler and art for art’s sake, see Bedell, Anatomy of Nature, 151. 48. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — III” (G&F), 27; [MGVR], “Natural Beauty and the Landscape Gardener,” G&F 1 (5 Dec. 1888): 481. 49.  MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — IV,” G&F 1 (21 Mar. 1888): 38. MGVR 238

Notes to Pages 69 – 74 offered a specific example of what she considered appropriateness of feeling: “We must make up our minds what it is we wish to commemorate. I think we shall decide that it is our soldiers and sacrifices they made to secure freedom and peace for the world, and not their military triumphs as such, not the alleged ‘glory of war.’ ” See MSVR, “Appropriateness in War Memorials,” American Magazine of Art 10 (May 1919): 274. 50. Olmsted, “On Gardening,” 34. 51. Brownell, “Younger Painters of America,” 7–8. Shi describes the debate between realists and idealists in the art community after the Civil War in Facing Facts, 126–53. On Church, see Bedell, Anatomy of Nature, 69: “Church was following in the footsteps of [the] panoramacists.” 52. Humboldt, Cosmos, 82, 90; Frederic E. Church to Bayard Taylor, 9 May 1859, quoted in Gould, “Church, Humboldt, and Darwin,” 94. Humboldt died at the age of ninety before the painting reached Berlin. 53. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — IV” (G&F), 39. On Church, see Franklin Kelly, “Passion for Landscape,” 57–58. 54. The article was initially published as MSVR, “Corot,” Century 38 (June 1889): 255–70. The article later appeared in MSVR, Six Portraits, which was a collection of art essays from various magazines. All citations are from Six Portraits; the Humboldt quotation is in Humboldt, Cosmos, 2: 94. 55. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 135; Humboldt, Cosmos, 2: 97. 56. Humboldt, Cosmos, 2: 97; Ruskin quoted in Bedell, Anatomy of Nature, 51. 57. MSVR, Six Portraits, 170, 1. 58. Ibid., 161–62, 186. On “realist” painters, see Shi, Facing Facts, 126–53. On Church, see Bedell, Anatomy of Nature, 71: “[Church] has delivered the facts about the [natural] bridge. He has informed us.” 59. MSVR, Six Portraits, 162. 60. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — IV” (G&F), 39. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid.; Ruskin, Modern Painters, 3: 34–55, quoted in Bedell, Anatomy of Nature, 49. 63.  MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V,” G&F 1 (28 Mar. 1888): 51. For a discussion of “second Nature,” see Hunt, Greater Perfections, 33. 64. Olmsted and Vaux’s collaboration in the firm of Olmsted, Vaux & Company ended in 1874, but they agreed to complete some of their design projects under the name Olmsted & Vaux, Landscape Architects. For “the beauty of the fields,” see Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (1870), in Olmsted, Writings on Public Parks, 190. 239

Notes to Pages 74 – 82 65. On forest clearance in Britain, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 193. All MGVR quotations are from MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V ” (G&F), 51. 66. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V ” (G&F), 51; Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 109–11, 317–22. 67. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V ” (G&F), 51–52. For “bright with gladness,” see Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 62. 68. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V ” (G&F), 52. 69. FLO to MGVR, 9 Apr. 1888, Olmsted Papers. Olmsted added later in the letter: “Most of them were very unpromising.” 70. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V I,” G&F 1 (4 Apr. 1888): 63. 71. Ibid. The English philosopher Francis Bacon observed, “When ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection.” See Bacon, “Of Gardens,” 194. 72. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V I” (G&F), 63. 73. Ibid., 64; FLO to MGVR, 9 Apr. 1888, Olmsted Papers. 74. Olmsted cited in Beveridge, “Frederick Law Olmsted’s Theory,” 41. 75.  MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V II,” G&F 1 (11 Apr. 1888): 75–76; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees I: Form,” G&F 1 (4 July 1888): 218; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees III: Color,” G&F 1 (18 July 1888): 242. 76. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V II” (G&F), 75. 77. Olmsted, Spoils of the Park, 143; Cleveland to FLO, 25 July 1888, Olmsted Papers. 78. [MGVR], “Formal Flower Beds,” G&F 1 (6 June 1888): 169. 79. MGVR, “The Boston Public Garden,” G&F 1 (12 Sept. 1888): 345–46. 80. Doogue’s annual report is in City of Boston, Documents of the City of Boston; his response to MGVR and accusations against Sargent ran on for eleven pages interspersed with photographs of the garden (12–33). On Doogue, see Mulvoy, “He Brought Living Color.” 81. Doogue, Documents of the City of Boston. On this controversy, also see Andersen, “Matter of Taste,” 40–44. On cultural hierarchy in the Gilded Age, see Litwicki, “Influence of Commerce,” 189. 82. MGVR, “July on the Shores of Buzzard’s Bay,” G&F 1 (5 Sept. 1888): 327. 83. MGVR, “The Responsibilities of Florists,” G&F 1 (31 Oct. 1888): 430–31. A later editorial also criticized the Boston Public Gardens: see [MGVR], “Public Gardens,” G&F 4 (11 Nov. 1891): 529–30. 84. On the Vanderbilts and Rough Point, see FLO to MGVR, 29 June 1888, Olmsted Papers. 85. MGVR, “Newport II,” G&F 1 (5 Dec. 1888): 483. 240

Notes to Pages 82 – 84 86. MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V II,” G&F, 75. 87. FLO to MGVR, 17 May 1887, Olmsted Papers; MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V II,” G&F, 75. The project referred to by Olmsted was likely Shelburne Farms, an estate on Vermont’s Lake Champlain owned by William S. Webb. Olmsted and his son J. C. Olmsted submitted a preliminary study in 1887, envisioning the completed design as “the most interesting and publicly valuable private work of the time on the American continent.” The scheme featured an arboretum of all the trees and shrubs native to Vermont, which followed the curving roadways Olmsted had laid out. The arboretum would be an integral and visible part of Shelburne Farms; its ultimate aim was to reproduce the native plant diversity that had existed in the region a century or two earlier. Alan Emmet writes, “Webb’s ideas for planting began to diverge from Olmsted’s as soon as he fully understood what Olmsted was proposing.” The only nonnative plants to be included were two western evergreens, and Webb would not agree, for he wanted to include ornamental varieties such as rhododendrons, weeping willows, and tea roses. Olmsted became frustrated and turned the project over to his sons and associates in the summer of 1888. See Emmet, “Park and Garden in Vermont,” 15, 16 (citing FLO to William Seward Webb, 17 Mar. 1887, Olmsted Papers). 88.  MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V II,” G&F, 76. Olmsted’s correspondence suggests that he often found himself in a position of having clients — “gentlemen of education and culture, supposing themselves to have a special aptitude” — who undertook what they regarded as simple improvements of their own country place and then hired him to contrive expedient solutions to the problems caused by their mistakes. His opinion of the vast majority of gardeners was clearly stated in an 1890 letter to the Earl of Meath, the chairman of the Park Committee of the Council of London, who had visited a large number of American parks the previous summer: “The training of gardeners seems to have the effect of limiting their ambition and their exercise of ingenuity and judgment to petty, pretty local effects, the display of specimens and other things properly of detail, and to disqualify for the exercise equally of landscape art and of administrative ability in any broad way.” On “gentlemen of education and culture,” see FLO to RUJ, 9 Oct. 1889, Olmsted Papers. On gardeners, see FLO to the Earl of Meath, 9 May 1890, Olmsted Papers. 89. MGVR, “American Country Dwellings III,” Century 32 (July 1886): 434. 90. MGVR, “Artist and Amateur,” 341; Colvin, “Art and Criticism,” 321. On Colvin, see Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 66–68. FLO commented to MGVR, “The interpretation of artists to the public — is your public mission”; see FLO to MGVR, 11 Aug. 1886, Olmsted Papers. 241

Notes to Pages 85 – 92

4. Historical Sketches on the Art of Gardening 1. On Van Rensselaer’s art criticism and its historical perspective, see Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 77; MGVR, “American Etchers,” Century 25 (Feb. 1883): 483–84; MGVR, “Recent Architecture in America: Public Buildings I,” 48–50; [MGVR], “History of Gardening,” G&F 2 (20 Mar. 1889): 134. 2. For the coverage of the award ceremony, see “Topics of the Week,” New York Times, 11 June 1910. 3. MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch I,” G&F 2 (20 Mar. 1889): 134. 4. [MGVR], “History of Gardening,” 134; MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch V. Judea and Phœnicia,” G&F 2 (22 May 1889): 242; MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch XVII. Ancient India,” G&F 3 (12 Feb. 1890): 75; MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch XXI. The Mohametons in India,” G&F 3 (11 June 1890): 283. 5. MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch XIV. Suburban Rome,” G&F 2 (4 Dec. 1889): 580; MGVR, “Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch XVII,” 74. 6. [MGVR], “History of Gardening,” 133. On Anglo-Saxonism, see Richmond, “Historical Novels,” 192; MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch VIII: The Love of Nature,” G&F 2 (14 Aug. 1889): 388; Prakash, “Orientalism Now,” 203. 7. Conder, “Art of Gardening in Japan,” 176–85; Conder, Landscape Gardening in Japan. On Conder, see Checkland, Japan and Britain after 1859, 199–202. 8. For the Oriental “material imagination,” see MGVR, “Japanese Gardening I,” G&F 2 (30 Jan. 1889): 52. Also see MGVR, “Japanese Gardening II,” G&F (6 Feb. 1889): 63–64. 9. Edward Said quoted in Prakash, “Orientalism Now,” 208. 10. [MGVR], “Recent Publications,” G&F 2 (27 Feb. 1889): 106–7. 11. Ibid., 107. 12. [MGVR], “A German Sketch of American Gardening,” G&F 2 (6 Mar. 1889): 111. 13. Ibid., 110. 14. MGVR, “Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch I,” 134–35. 15. Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, 233–34; MGVR, “The Art of Gardening —  An Historical Sketch II. Egypt,” G&F 2 (27 Mar. 1889): 147; MGVR to RWG, 1 Apr. 1896, Gilder papers. 16. MGVR, “Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch II,” 147. 17. In her essay on Egypt, Van Rensselaer failed to cite Jäger. For the figure of 242

Notes to Pages 93 – 101 the “Villa mit Garten,” see Jäger, Gartenkunst und GärtenSonst und Jetzt, 14. For Van Rensselaer’s description, see MGVR, “Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch II,” 147. For potted plants, see Jäger, Gartenkunst und GärtenSonst und Jetzt, 16; MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch III. Egypt and Mesopotamia,” G&F 2 (1 Apr. 1889): 170. I am grateful to Elisabeth Thompson for her translation of Jäger’s chapter on Egypt. 18. Perrot and Chipiez, History of Art in Ancient Egypt, 2: 112–19. 19. [MGVR], “Horticulture in Egypt,” G&F 2 (12 June 1889): 278. 20. Downing, “Philosophy of Rural Taste,” 57, 59. 21. MGVR, “Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch VIII,” 387. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 388. 24. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons.” 25. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 139, 299–302; MGVR’s speech reported in “General News from New York,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 Nov. 1896. The racial thinking of the Harvard geologist Nathaniel S. Shaler typifies the most scientifically accepted late-nineteenth-century attitudes about the Negro, the immigrant, and the so-called “inferior races.” In the 1880s and 1890s, Shaler wrote articles for respected periodicals including the North American Review, the Atlantic, and Popular Science Monthly that expounded on his racialist beliefs. Titles ranged from “The Negro Problem,” to “The Immigration Problem Historically Considered,” to “The Nature of the Negro.” Although Van Rensselaer recommended Shaler’s writings on geology, there is no evidence that she agreed with his more extreme views on race or with his advocacy of immigration restriction. 26. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 44. The Edinburgh Review is quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 60. See also Hall, “Mid-NineteenthCentury American Anglo-Saxonism.” 27. MGVR, “The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch VI. Persia,” G&F 2 (19 June 1889): 290. 28. MGVR, “Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch XXI,” 283. 29. MGVR to RWG, 21 Sept. 1889, Century Company records; for Pennell, see 31 July 1890, Gilder papers.

5. Traces in Garden and Forest 1. MSVR, “To Rent for the Summer,” Scribner’s 68 (July 1920): 105–14. 2. [MGVR], “Balcony Flower Boxes,” G&F 1 (30 May 1888): 158. In the summer of 1886, Van Rensselaer sent invitations to Koehler and Olmsted to join her and her family in Southampton. 243

Notes to Pages 101 – 109 3. Van Rensselaer wrote of the house in Marion in a letter to Olmsted: see MGVR to FLO, 19 May [1887], Olmsted Papers. 4. MGVR, “July on the Shores of Buzzard’s Bay,” G&F 1 (5 Sept. 1888): 327. 5. Ibid.; Saint-Gaudens wrote to Van Rensselaer to respond to her invitation: see Augustus Saint-Gaudens to MSVR, 25 July 1888, Saint-Gaudens’s Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College Library, ML–4(19):43. 6. MGVR, “A Woodland Tragedy,” G&F 1 (19 Sept. 1888): 351; Swinburne lines quoted in J. Smith, “Une Fleur du Mal,” 133. 7. Darwin, Insectivorous Plants, 1–3. On Darwin and the sundew, see Scourse, Victorians and Their Flowers, 157. 8. Lindley, Ladies’ Botany, 81. 9. Swinburne line from “The Sundew” quoted in J. Smith, “Une Fleur du Mal,” 135; MGVR, “Woodland Tragedy,” 351; Erasmus Darwin quoted in Scourse, Victorians and Their Flowers, 157. 10. MGVR, “Woodland Tragedy,” 351; Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 62. 11. Ernst Mayr in the introduction to Darwin, On the Origin of Species, xvii; Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 62 (my emphasis). 12. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 81. 13. MGVR, “A Glimpse of Nantucket,” G&F 1 (14 Nov. 1888), 447. A historian of nineteenth-century Nantucket offers a more complete account of the changes that Van Rensselaer noted in her essay. See Newell, “ ‘No Harvest of Oil.’ ” 14. Although Van Rensselaer did not mention the author of the guidebook, she undoubtedly referred to Owen, Catalogue of Plants. See MGVR, “Glimpse of Nantucket,” 447; MGVR to SRK (sent from Block Island), 5 Aug. 1880, 16 Aug. 1880, Koehler Collection. 15. MGVR, “Glimpse of Nantucket,” 447–48; Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 69. 16. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 72; MGVR, “Glimpse of Nantucket,” 447. 17. MGVR, “Glimpse of Nantucket,” 447; Owen, Catalogue of Plants, 37, 52. 18. MGVR, “Glimpse of Nantucket,” 447. 19. This preference is expressed in MGVR to RWG, 23 Aug. [1905], Gilder papers; MGVR to AJ, 18 Aug. [1910], Jaccaci Papers; MGVR to AJ, 5 July [1912], Jaccaci papers. For “it suffices,” see MGVR to AJ, 25 July [1911], Jaccaci papers. For Jekyll Island, see MGVR to RWG, 14 Mar. [1906], Gilder papers; MGVR, “Glimpse of Nantucket,” 448. 20. MGVR corresponded with Gilder while she was in France, writing of her companions, her apartment, and her cold. See MGVR to RWG, 6 Aug. [1889], 21 Sept. 1889, 30 Sept. 1889, Century Company records. For the hotel in Le Puy, see MGVR to RUJ, 20 Apr. [1893], Century Company records. 244

Notes to Pages 109 – 119 21. [MGVR], “The Exhibition Grounds, Paris,” G&F 2 (27 Nov. 1889): 566–67. 22. MGVR, “Down the Rhone I,” G&F 3 (8 Jan. 1890): 14. 23. Ibid., 15. 24. Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 90; MGVR, “Down the Rhone II,” G&F 3 (15 Jan. 1890): 27. 25. MGVR, “Down the Rhone II,” 27. 26. MGVR, “Down the Rhone I,” 15. 27. MGVR to RWG, 18 Dec. 1890, Century Company records. 28. MGVR to RUJ, 20 June 1891, Century Company records; MGVR to RWG, 30 Sept. 1891, Gilder papers. 29. MGVR, “Nature’s Nurseries,” G&F 4 (9 Sept. 1891): 429. 30. Ibid. 31. MGVR, “Early Autumn near Cape Cod,” G&F 5 (28 Sept. 1892): 465–66. The title of Gebhard, Accents as Well as Broad Effects, is from this essay. 32. MGVR, “Early Autumn near Cape Cod,” 465–66. 33. Ibid., 466. 34. [MGVR], “The General Design of the Columbian Fair Grounds,” G&F 5 (15 June 1892): 278. This editorial was followed by [MGVR], “The Plan of the Columbian Fair Grounds,” G&F 5 (22 June 1892): 289–90, with the Apr. 1892 “General Plan” reproduced on p. 291. See also [MGVR], “The New Jersey Building at the Columbian Fair,” G&F 5 (3 Aug. 1892): 362–63. 35. MGVR, “Triumph of Beauty,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 Aug. 1892 (reprinted from the New York World). 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. For details of the construction of the fair, see Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 75–113. Trachtenberg entitles one of his chapters the “White City”; see Incorporation of America, 208–34. 39. MGVR, “Triumph of Beauty.” 40. MGVR, “Lofty as St. Paul’s,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 Aug. 1892 (reprinted from New York World). 41. Ibid. On Pretyman, see Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 98–99. 42. MGVR, “Color in Rural Buildings,” G&F (30 Mar. 1892): 147. A. J. Dow­ ning’s argument against white paint had appeared forty-five years earlier in the similarly named “On the Colour of Country Houses.” 43. MGVR to FLO, 9 Oct. [1892], and FLO to MGVR, 7 Nov. 1892, Olmsted Papers. 44. FLO to John Cleveland Olmsted and Henry Sargent Codman, [28 or 29] 245

Notes to Pages 119 – 124 Apr. 1892, quoted in McLaughlin, “Selected Letters of Frederick Law Olm-­ sted,” 418. 45. MGVR, “The Artistic Triumph of the Fair-Builders,” Forum 14 (Dec. 1892): 527–28. For the Rome analogy, see Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 115. 46. MGVR, “Artistic Triumph of the Fair-Builders,” 529. 47. MGVR, “Triumph of Beauty.” 48. MGVR, “Artistic Triumph of the Fair-Builders,” 540. For a description of the Sunday opening controversy, see Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 90–91. 49. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 209.

6. A Turning Point 1. Mumford, Brown Decades, 4. The United States went through great changes in the years leading up to the fair. The country had yet to recover from the depression precipitated by the panic of 1873, and another financial panic had occurred in 1893. An unprecedented and diverse stream of immigrants was arriving in the United States, supplying workers for factories and the iron and steel industries. In 1890, almost 15 percent of the population was foreign born, the highest in U.S. history. Hostility between capital and labor continued after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and a year after the fair, violence broke out in Pullman, IL, as the American Railway Union called a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Four transcontinental railroads had been completed, and with them came the tragic dispersal of Native Americans. Seven western territories had been brought into the Union: Colorado in 1876; the Dakotas, Washington, and Montana in 1889; and Idaho and Wyoming in 1890. 2. The book cost $1.50, equivalent to $35.00 today. 3. The book’s preface was written in New York and dated Mar. 1893. By then, Van Rensselaer had also completed eight editorials for Garden and Forest. See appendix A for a complete list of her editorials in 1893. All quotations are from MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), vii–viii. On Downing, see Major, To Live in the New World, 130. (Unless otherwise noted, the edition of Art Out-of-Doors cited in subsequent text and notes is the 1893 edition.) 4. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 3–23. For “dismal,” see ibid., 5. 5. Ibid., 27–50; MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V I,” G&F 1 (4 Apr. 1888): 63; MGVR, “Landscape Gardening — V II,” G&F 1 (11 Apr. 1888): 75–76; MGVR, “Great Hill: A New American Country-seat I,” 494–95; MGVR, “Great Hill: A New American Country-seat II,” 506–7. The description of the beautiful subur246

Notes to Pages 124 – 128 ban home laid out by a “non-professional” is in MGVR, “Landscape Gardening I,” AABN 22 (1 Oct. 1887): 158. 6. On Olmsted, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 30; FLO to MGVR, 22 May 1893, Olmsted Papers. 7. FLO to MGVR, 22 May 1893, Olmsted Papers. 8. FLO to MGVR, 24 June 1888, Olmsted Papers. 9. [MGVR], “The Planting of Home Grounds,” G&F 4 (15 July 1891), 325–26; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 53–63. For “union” and “main picture,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 53, 61. 10. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 62–63. 11. Ibid., 67–89; [MGVR], “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House I,” G&F 2 (24 July 1889): 350; [MGVR], “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House II,” G&F 2 (31 July 1889): 362; [MGVR], “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House III,” G&F 2 (14 Aug. 1889): 386; [MGVR], “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House IV,” G&F 2 (28 Aug. 1889): 409–10; WAS to FLO, 28 Aug. 1889, Olmsted Papers. 12. [MGVR], “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House I,” 350. 13. For “trumpet creeper,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 75. 14. Ibid., 84–85, 88–89. 15. Ibid., 93–120; [MGVR], “Walks and Drives,” G&F 1 (20 June 1888): 193– 94; [MGVR], “Walks and Drives II” G&F 1 (18 Sept. 1888): 446–47; [MGVR], “Drives and Walks I,” G&F 2 (11 Sept. 1889): 434; [MGVR], “Drives and Walks II,” G&F 2 (18 Sept. 1889): 446–47; [MGVR], “Drives and Walks III,” G&F 2 (25 Sept. 1889): 458; “Drives and Walks IV,” G&F 2 (2 Oct. 1889): 470; Repton, Enquiry into the Changes of Taste, 109; Downing, Treatise, 268. For “gray paper,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 106. 16. [MGVR], “Walks and Drives,” 194; FLO to MGVR, 21 June 1888, Olmsted Papers. 17. MGVR to FLO, Friday [22 June 1888], Olmsted Papers. 18. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 123–35; [MGVR], “Piazzas,” G&F 1 (7 Nov. 1888): 433; [MGVR], “Piazzas II,” G&F 1 (14 Nov. 188): 446–47. 19. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 139–54; [MGVR], “Formal Flower Beds,” G&F 1 (6 June 1888): 169–70; [MGVR], “The Court-yard of Charlecote Hall,” G&F 1 (6 June 1888): 171–72; MGVR, “Boston Public Garden,” 345–46; Some of the French garden pieces are [MGVR], “Ornamental Planting in Paris,” G&F 2 (11 Dec. 1889): 590–91; [MGVR], “An Alley in the Tuilleries Garden, Paris,” G&F 3 (26 Feb. 1890): 98–99; and [MGVR], “The Parterre, Fontainebleau,” G&F 3 (9 Apr. 1890): 174. For the remainder, see appendix A. 247

Notes to Pages 129 – 134 20. On Charlecote Hall, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 148–49. 21. On gardens in Paris, see ibid., 150–53. 22. Ibid., 157–88; [MGVR], “Formal Gardening: Does It Conflict with the Natural Style?” G&F 6 (15 Mar. 1893): 119–20; [MGVR], “Formal Gardening: Where It Can Be Used to Advantage,” G&F 6 (22 Mar. 1893): 129–30. See also [MGVR], “Formal Gardening in America,” G&F 3 (11 June 1990): 282; [MGVR], “Some Uses of Formal Gardening,” G&F 6 (12 Apr. 1893): 161–62. 23. See chapter 1 for a discussion of Taine. On “natural gardening” and English books, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 161, 159. 24. W. R., “Nature and Art in the Garden,” Garden 39 (6 June 1891): 525; Blomfield and Thomas, Formal Garden in England, 15; FLO to MGVR, 7 Nov. 1892, Olmsted Papers. 25. For “prescribed shapes,” and on Dresden and Central Park, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 167–71. 26. For “good sense,” see ibid., 185. 27. Ibid., 191–201; [MGVR], “Architectural Fitness,” G&F 4 (19 Aug. 1891): 385–86. Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 8n, writes that this editorial was attributed to Olmsted by S. B. Sutton in 1971. For “art,” and on Franklin and Prospect parks, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 197–99; for “progeny,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 194. 28. FLO to MGVR, 23 Sept. 1893, Olmsted Papers. 29. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 205–27; [MGVR], “Monuments in Public Places I,” G&F 4 (26 Aug. 1891): 397–98; [MGVR], “Monuments in Public Places II,” G&F 4 (2 Sept. 1891): 410; [MGVR], “Monuments in Public Places III,” G&F 4 (9 Sept. 1891): 421–22. For “well-meaning,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 206. 30. On Burns and Lincoln, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 206–7. 31. For “rows,” see ibid., 214. For “monotonous” and “opportunities,” see ibid., 227. 32. Ibid., 231–40; [MGVR], “Improvement in Rural Cemeteries,” G&F 2 (24 Apr. 1889): 194; [MGVR], “The Management of Cemeteries,” G&F 5 (25 May 1892): 241–42; [MGVR], “Good Taste in Our Cemeteries,” G&F 5 (1 June 1892): 253–54; [MGVR], “Restful Burial Grounds,” G&F 5 (29 June 1892): 301–2. For “clumsy,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 238. 33. For “nature,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 232. 34. For “all the artists,” see ibid., 240. 35. Ibid., 243–69; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees I: Form,” G&F 1 (4 July 1888): 218–19; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees II: Texture,” G&F 1 (11 July 1888): 230; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees III: Color,” G&F 1 248

Notes to Pages 135 – 139 (18 July 1888): 242–43; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees IV,” G&F 1 (3 Oct. 1888): 373–74; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees V,” G&F 1 (12 Dec. 1888): 493. 36. For “outline,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 243. 37. For “character” and “silken threads,” see ibid., 248. 38. Ibid., 253–54. 39. Ibid., 254–55. 40. For “red cloak,” see ibid., 257. 41. Ibid., 267–69. 42. Ibid., 273–87; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspect of Trees VI — The Lombardy Poplar and the Weeping Willow,” G&F 2 (6 Feb. 1889): 62–63; [MGVR], “The Artistic Aspects of Trees VII,” G&F 2 (8 May 1889): 217–18. For “conspicuously peculiar,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 273. 43. On the Lombardy poplar, weeping willow, purple beech, and white birch, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 274, 278–79, 282, 285–86. 44. Ibid., 291–304; [MGVR], “Sentimental Objections to Felling Trees,” G&F 1 (5 Sept. 1888): 325; [MGVR], “Sentimental Objections to Felling Trees II,” G&F 1 (17 Oct. 188): 397–98; [MGVR], “Do Not Spare the Axe,” G&F 1 (7 Nov. 1888): 433. See appendix A for other editorials that addressed this issue; John Lindley, Gardeners’ Chronicle 7 (9 Oct. 1847): 667, as quoted in [Downing], English and American Landscape Gardening, 262. 45. On removing trees and the superintendent’s axe, see MSVR, Art Out-ofDoors, 293–94, 302–4. 46. Ibid., 307–21; [MGVR], “The Love of Nature I,” G&F 5 (27 Apr. 1892): 193– 94; [MGVR], “The Love of Nature II,” G&F 5 (4 May 1892): 205–6; [MGVR], “The Love of Nature III,” G&F 5 (11 May 1892): 218–19. The omitted editorial is [MGVR], “The Love of Nature,” G&F 5 (20 July 1892): 337–38. For “gabble,” see MGVR to RWG, 8 Apr. [1894], Gilder papers. 47. For “mingled,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 308. 48. For “true lover,” see ibid., 310. 49. For “gladly,” see ibid., 311. 50. For “art appeal,” see ibid., 319. 51. For “faithfully” and “enlarged,” see ibid., 320, 321. 52. Ibid., 325–48; [MGVR], “Botany for Young People,” G&F 3 (26 Feb. 1890): 97–98; [MGVR], “Elementary Botany for Young People,” G&F 3 (31 Dec. 1890): 629. 53. On botany for women and children, see Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, 161. MGVR’s comments on botany for young people first appeared 249

Notes to Pages 140 – 144 in an 1890 G&F editorial and a letter to the editor. MGVR integrated this information with two other editorials into the chapter “A Word for Books” in Art Out-of-Doors. For “milkwort,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 326. 54. For “strange wild flower,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 330. 55. Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted in ibid., 324. 56. Gray, Manual of the Botany, 11; Lindley, Ladies’ Botany, iii. 57. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, 156–65. 58. The “Handbook” is either Gray’s Introduction to Structural and Systematic Botany or First Lessons in Botany, each of which he mentions as an “inseparable companion.” See Gray, Manual of Botany, 20. For “all my life,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 344. Apparently, ticks were the only hazard that kept her from botanizing. Vacationing in South Carolina, Van Rensselaer found some interesting plants, but after encountering a number of ticks, she did not touch another leaf. See MGVR to RWG, 23 Apr. [1906], Gilder papers. 59. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 489; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 345, 348. 60. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 351–83; [MGVR], “Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America,” 313; MGVR, “Landscape Gardening I” (AABN), 157–59; MGVR, “Landscape Gardening II,” 22 (3 Dec. 1887): 263–64; MGVR, “Landscape Gardening III,” 23 (7 Jan. 1888): 3–5. 61. FLO to MGVR, 7 Nov. 1892, Olmsted Papers. For “enthusiastic recognition,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 357. 62. For “surely,” see [MGVR], “Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America,” 313. On prosaic things, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 361–65. 63. On clients, see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 372–81; MSVR, “Client and Architect,” North American Review 151 (Sept. 1890): 319–28. 64. For “your garden,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors, 382–83. 65. “Art In and Out of Doors,” New York Times, 21 May 1893. Kinnard notes that reviews of the book were generally favorable. She mentions the Review of Reviews, the Literary Digest, the Critic, the Dial, and Garden and Forest. See Kinnard, “Life and Works,” 263. 66. “Art In and Out of Doors.” 67. Ibid. 68. Edouard André to C. S. Sargent, 14 July 1888, quoted in Andersen, “Mon cherami,” 16. 69. For opera attendance, see MGVR to AJ, 13 Mar. [1912], Jaccaci Papers. The performance by Will Rogers was noted in the New York Times, 16 Apr. 1912. For a discussion of culture in the Gilded Age, see Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 8–9, 140–81. 250

Notes to Pages 145 – 152 70. MGVR, “Spring in Virginia,” G&F 6 (10 May 1893): 208; MGVR to RUJ, 20 Apr. [1893], Century Company records. 71. MGVR, “Spring in Virginia,” 208–9. 72. MGVR to RWG, 27 Aug. [1893], Century Company records; MGVR, “The Mountain Maple,” G&F 6 (26 July 1893): 318. During this time, Van Rensselaer’s letters to her editors at Century were written from the Hotel Ruisseaumont. 73. MGVR to [Century] Editors, 22 June [1893], Century Company records. 74. MGVR to FLO, 24 June [1893], Olmsted Papers; MGVR to FLO, 27 Aug. [1893], Olmsted Papers. 75. FLO to MGVR, 22 May 1893, Olmsted Papers. 76. See FLO to MGVR, 11 June 1893, 17 June 1893, Olmsted Papers; MGVR to FLO, 24 June [1893], Olmsted Papers. In this same letter, MGVR told FLO that she had heard about the intention by Harvard and Yale to bestow a degree on FLO. See the subsequent [MGVR], “Bestowal of Degrees by Harvard and Yale,” G&F 6 (5 July 1893): 281–82. 77. MGVR to RUJ, 10 July [1893], Century Company records. 78. MGVR to FLO, 27 Aug. [1893], Olmsted Papers. 79. FLO to MGVR, 23 Sept. 1893, Olmsted Papers. 80. MGVR, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” Century 46 (Oct. 1893): 860. 81. MGVR, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” 860–63; FLO to MGVR, 23 Sept. 1893, Olmsted Papers. 82. Van Rensselaer told Johnson that Olmsted wanted something said about the difficulties in the making of the park; see MGVR to RUJ, 10 July [1893], Century Company records. Olmsted asked her not to mention specific names; see FLO to MGVR, 11 June 1893, Olmsted Papers. See also MGVR, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” 863–64. 83. MGVR, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” 864. Olmsted asked his son to send the material to MGVR; see FLO to JCO, 13 June 1893, Olmsted Papers. 84. MGVR, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” 867. 85. Ibid., 865. 86. For “frivolity” and “products,” see MGVR to RWG, 25 Nov. [1893], Century Company records; MGVR, “At the Fair,” Century 46 (May 1893): 6–7. Two days after the fair opened, G&F ran a two-paragraph notice; see [MGVR], “The Work of Frederick Law Olmsted at the Columbian Exposition,” G&F 6 (3 May 1893): 192. 87. MGVR, “At the Fair,” 6. For crime in Chicago, see Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 67. 88. MGVR, “At the Fair,” 10 (my emphasis). 251

Notes to Pages 152 – 160 89. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 208; Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handbook, 216, 212. 90. MGVR, “At the Fair,” 10–12. 91. MGVR, “The Fair Grounds,” in Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handbook, 58–64. 92. Ibid., 59. 93. Ibid., 63; American Architect quoted in Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 143–44. 94. For Wheeler and the fair, see Peck and Irish, Candace Wheeler, 63–70; Wheeler, Household Art; MGVR, “The Development of American Homes,” Forum 12 (Jan. 1892): 667–76. 95. MGVR, “Fair Grounds,” 64; Bellamy quoted in Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 215, 231; Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893, 73. 96. [MGVR], “The Photograph Monopoly at the Columbian Exposition,” G&F 6 (7 July 1893): 292. 97. [MGVR], “Horticulture at the World’s Fair,” G&F 6 (16 Aug. 1893): 341–42. 98. [MGVR], “The General Design of the Columbian Exposition,” G&F 6 (30 Aug. 1893): 361–63. 99. [MGVR], “Landscape-gardening at the Columbian Fair,” G&F 6 (6 Dec. 1893): 501–2. 100. MGRV to FLO, 18 Sept. [1893], Olmsted Papers. 101. For “frivolous,” see MGVR to RWG, 25 Nov. [1893], Gilder papers. 102. Havard, “Botanical Aspect of Pike’s Peak,” 452–53. For MGVR and wildflowers, see, e.g., “Save the Wild Flowers,” G&F 3 (1 Oct. 1890): 473–74. See appendix A for the editorials that she wrote in Colorado. 103. The “Dear Great Chief ” letter, with the report of the accident, is in MGVR to RWG, 25 Nov. [1893], Gilder papers. For “horrid for you,” see 30 Nov. [1893], Gilder papers. 104. MGVR to RWG, 25 Nov. [1893], 30 Nov. [1893], Gilder papers.

7. While Garden and Forest Lived 1. MGVR to RWG, 15 Jan. 1894, Century Company records. 2. For “barbaric place,” see MGVR to RWG, [16] Jan. [1894], Century Company records. The letter is dated 15 Jan., but the previous day’s letter that she refers to is also dated 15 Jan.; on Denver, see MGVR to RWG, 28 Feb. [1894], Century Company records. 3. On the doctor’s advice, see MGVR to RWG, 14 Mar. [1894], Century Com252

Notes to Pages 161 – 164 pany records. On Glenwood Springs, see MGVR to RWG, 8 Apr. [1894], Gilder papers; MGVR to RWG, 19 Apr. [1894], Century Company records. 4. William Morgan, introduction to MGVR, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), v–vi; DuBois, “Working Women, Class Relations,” 39. 5. Kinnard, “Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer,” 200; Colvin, “Art and Criticism,” 321. 6. MGVR to RWG, [late 1893 or early 1894], Century Company records. This page of the letter has been separated in the collection and bears no date. For “as a revenge,” see MGVR to RUJ, [Feb. or Mar. 1894], Century Company records. 7. MGVR writes about the state’s political situation in MGVR to RWG, [late 1893 or early 1894], Century Company records, and in MGVR to RUJ, [Feb. or Mar. 1894], Century Company records. For a discussion of populism, see Wiebe, Search for Order, 95–97. 8. For “very silly way,” see MGVR to RWG, 20 Mar. [1894], Century Company records; MGVR to RUJ, [Feb. or Mar. 1894], Century Company records. 9. For “daft,” see MGVR to RWG, 8 Apr. [1894], Gilder papers. On Sherry’s, see MGVR to RWG, 19 Apr. [1894], Century Company records. 10. “Society Women Want Votes,” New York Times, 11 Apr. 1894. 11. DuBois, “Working Women, Class Relations,” 37. See also Marshall, “In Defense of Separate Spheres,” 327–51; McCammon, “ ‘Out of the Parlors.’ ” 12. MSVR, Should We Ask for the Suffrage? (N.p.: De Vinne Press, n.d.), 5–6, 52–53. See Kinnard, “Life and Works,” 281–85, for a discussion of MGVR and woman suffrage. She figures that the pamphlet was published sometime in the fall of 1894. 13. MSVR, Should We Ask for the Suffrage? 6–30. 14. Ibid., 30–31; Pateman, “Women, Nature, and the Suffrage,” 569. 15. Brady, Ida Tarbell, 114–15, 201–11. When Tarbell moved in 1899, she settled in an apartment a block from Van Rensselaer. In a note from 1911, MGVR invites Tarbell and her sister to have lunch with her, Miss Beaux, and Miss Pope. See MGVR to Ida Tarbell, 22 Jan. [1911], Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA. In MGVR to AJ, 11 Nov. [1912] (Jaccaci Papers), Van Rensselaer writes to Jaccaci that she was inviting Tarbell to dine and to meet her nephew George, who was living with her in New York City. MGVR and Tarbell corresponded at least until 1927, when Tarbell wrote about how she was trying to straighten out in her mind what was happening in Italy with Mussolini and the Fascists. See MGVR to Tarbell, 19 Apr. 1927, Tarbell Collection. 16. MGVR to TPR, 11 June [1914], Riddle Papers. 253

Notes to Pages 165 – 175 17. MGVR to TPR, 13 Sept. [1914], Riddle Papers. 18. MGVR to TPR, 14 Aug. [1913], L–1799, Riddle Papers. 19. [MGVR], “ ‘Nature and the Rich,’ ” G&F 7 (27 June 1894): 251; “Nature and the Rich,” Atlantic 73 (June 1894): 858–59. 20. Levine devotes a chapter to “Order, Hierarchy, and Culture” (Highbrow/ Lowbrow, 171–242). See also Wiebe, Search for Order, 111–13; Downing, “On the Mistakes of Citizens,” 307. 21. MGVR to RUJ, 21 Jan. 21 [1910], Century Company records. 22. [MGVR], “The Defacement of Scenery,” G&F 8 (27 Feb. 1895): 81–82. 23. [MGVR], “A Great Battle Park,” G&F 8 (18 Sept. 1895): 371. 24. Ibid. MGVR was referring to Boynton, “National Military Park.” 25. [MGVR], “Great Battle Park,” 371. 26. [MGVR], “Landscape Art in the Military Parks,” G&F 8 (25 Sept. 1895): 381. 27. Ibid. 28. [MGVR], “The Work of Women in Village Improvement,” G&F 8 (27 Mar. 1895): 121–22. That summer, Van Rensselaer sent a letter to the editor from the seaside resort of Narragansett Pier, telling of the improvements brought about in the village by a ladies’ improvement association. See MGVR, “The Good Work of an Improvement Association at Narragansett Pier,” G&F 8 (31 July 1895): 308–9. 29. [MGVR], “School-grounds,” G&F 8 (11 Dec. 1895): 491. 30. Lawson, City Bountiful, 60–67. 31. MGVR to JP, 30 Sept. 1889, Pennell correspondence; “Women Talk of Schools,” New York Times, 26 Feb. 1896. For MGVR’s involvement with school reform, see Kinnard, “Life and Works,” 278–79. For “women in the public eye,” see Montgomery, Displaying Women, 141–62. For a detailed account of the issues involved with the Pavey Bill and school reform and teachers’ resentment, see Ravitch, Great School Wars, 147–58. 32. MGVR to RUJ, 26 Feb. [1896], Century Company records. 33. MGVR to RWG, 1 Apr. [1896], Gilder papers. John Francis Ahearn was a Tammany Hall politician. 34. Ibid. 35. [MGVR], “The Artistic Element in Engineering,” G&F 9 (14 Oct. 1896): 411. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 412. 38. [MGVR], “Hitch your Wagon to a Star,” G&F 9 (24 June 1896): 251. 39. Riis, Battle with the Slum. 40. [MGVR], “Hitch your Wagon to a Star,” 251–52; Robinson, “Improvement 254

Notes to Pages 175 – 180 in City Life III,” 774. See Wiebe’s chapter “Progressivism Arrives,” in Search for Order, 164–95. 41. [Sargent], “Notes,” 518. Sargent’s biographer S. B. Sutton (Charles Sprague Sargent, 19) describes his personality as “cold roast Boston.” His children and his peers addressed him as “Professor,” and Olmsted and Stiles both referred to him as the “Professor” in their correspondence. 42. [MGVR], “A Garden for Children,” G&F 10 (21 Apr. 1897): 151–52. 43. Information on these nature pamphlets is on a Cornell Library exhibition website, “Liberty Hyde Bailey: A Man for All Seasons,” http://rmc.library .cornell.edu/bailey/naturestudy/index.html. Anna Botsford Comstock became a leader of the nature study movement and was known for her insect illustrations. She wrote and illustrated many nature books, including The Handbook of Nature Study (1911). 44. [MGVR], “Vacant-lot Farming,” G&F 10 (19 May 1897): 192. 45. Helen Moore, “A Great Democrat,” New York Times, 8 Feb. 1934. Moore was the editor of research publications for Charities and Commons: A Weekly Journal of Philanthropy and Social Advance (later called the Survey). She was a former student of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and an intimate friend of MGVR. Moore was left a bequest in MGVR’s will. 46. [MGVR], “City Playgrounds,” G&F 10 (8 Dec. 1897): 479–80; http://www .tenement.org/encyclopedia/parks.htm; http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M015/. See also Jackson, Sense of Place, 107–16. 47. MGVR to RWG, 19 Apr. [1897], Century Company records; MGVR to RWG, 24 Apr. [1897], Century Company records. 48. [MGVR], “The Care of Park Trees,” G&F 10 (21 Apr. 1897): 151; [MGVR], “The Field of Landscape-art,” G&F 10 (28 Apr. 1897): 161. 49. See “William A. Stiles,” G&F 10 (13 Oct. 1897): 399–400; [MGVR], “American Trees for America,” G&F 10 (29 Dec. 1897): 509; Downing, “Shade Trees in Cities,” 345–49. 50. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening, new and enlarged edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 482. 51. Mott, “Magazine Revolution,” 195–96. 52. Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight,” 286; Moore, “Great Democrat.”

8. Changes 1. MSVR, Niagara: A Description. As she did for the World’s Columbian Exposition, Van Rensselaer contributed to the official handbook of the Pan-American Exposition: MSVR, “From an Art Critic’s Point of View,” in Art Hand-Book: 255

Notes to Pages 181 – 193 Official Handbook of Architecture and Sculpture and Art Catalogue to the PanAmerican Exposition, ed. David Gray (Buffalo: David Gray, 1901), 25–28. 2. [MGVR], “Taste Indoors and Out,” G&F 5 (10 Aug. 1892): 373–74. 3. [MGVR], “Taste Indoors and Out,” G&F 5 (14 Sept. 1892): 433–34. 4. [MGVR], “Women as Landscape Architects,” G&F 5 (12 Oct. 1892): 482; Way, Unbounded Practice, 35. 5. [MGVR], “Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America,” 313. 6. MGVR to AJ, 16 Sept. [1910], Jaccaci Papers. 7. On Tuxedo, see Evers, Catskills, 541. 8. Beaux, Background with Figures, 209; Richard J. Boyle, foreword to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cecilia Beaux, 7. 9. For a discussion of early automobile owners, see Flink, America Adopts the Automobile, 70–74; Flink, “Three Stages,” 452. 10. In the early 1910s, MGVR often mentioned automobiles in her personal correspondence. See MGVR to AJ, 17 Aug. [1911], 23 Aug. [1911], and 11 Sept. [1911], Jaccaci Papers. On the Adirondack State Park, see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 116–21. 11. MGVR to TPR, 22 May [1912], Riddle Papers; MGVR to AJ, 19 Aug. [1912], Jaccaci Papers; MGVR to TPR, 28 July [1913], 6 July [1914], Riddle Papers. On Theodate Pope, see Katz, Dearest of Geniuses. 12. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening, new and enlarged edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 398; Yard, Book of National Parks, 77. 13. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 409, 414. 14. MGVR to AJ, 4 Mar. [1913], Jaccaci Papers; T. Davis, “ ‘Pleasant Illusion of Unspoiled Countryside,’ ” 234. See also the website of the Municipal Art Society of New York: http://mas.org/publicpolicy/illegal-outdoor-advertising. 15. Flink, “Three Stages,” 460. 16. Cranz, Politics of Park Design, 62; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 398. 17. Huth, Nature and the American, 189; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 412. 18. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 399; Huth, Nature and the American, 186–91; McFarland quoted in Huth, Nature and the American, 187. 19. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 477; Caparn, “State Parks,” 600. Information on Harold A. Caparn can be found in Chamberlain, “Harold A. Caparn.” Ethan Carr discusses the development of “regional plans” for Boston and New York in Wilderness by Design, 197–200. 20. Caparn, “State Parks,” 589. For Jensen, see Grese, Jens Jensen; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 400. 256

Notes to Pages 194 – 203 21. Cameron, National Park Service, 16–17; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 389; Carr, Wilderness by Design, 111–13. 22. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 411–12. 23. Hijiya, “Four Ways of Looking,” 406; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 402. 24. See Buder, Visionaries and Planners, 146–48. 25. Nola, Chronicle, 8–11. The quotation is from a speech given by Mrs. H. B. Fullerton. 26. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 403–4. 27. Nason, “Rural Planning,” 1–2. 28. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 408–9. 29. California Recreational Inquiry Committee, Report, 11–13. See, e.g., publications between 1900 and 1925 by the National Recreation Association, the National Educational Association of the United States, the American Sociological Society, public health societies, and social reform organizations. 30. Fisher, “America after Fifteen Years,” 338. 31. MGVR to TPR, 6 July [1914], Riddle Papers; MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 426–27. 32. For “manifold tasks,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 428; for “here and now,” see MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 428. Landscape Architecture Quarterly changed to Landscape Architecture Magazine during this time. See a summary of the study done by Susan Monte in Landscape Architecture 75 (Jan.–Feb. 1985): 68–69. 33. MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors (1925), vii. 34. Gilder, “Eminent New Yorker.”

9. The Aesthetics of Life 1. [MGVR], “The Language of Science,” G&F 3 (24 Sept. 1890): 461. 2. MGVR, “Artist and Amateur,” American Art Review 1 (1880): 386. 3. MGVR to RWG, Apr. 19, 1897, Century Company records. She asked for $30 a thousand, which today is over $760; André to Sargent, 12 Jan. 1894, quoted in Andersen, “Mon cherami,” 18. The first women to practice professionally were Annette McCrea and Elizabeth Jane Bullard, who began practicing in the early 1890s. See Way, Unbounded Practice, 16–19. On Eliot, see [Eliot], Charles Eliot, 261. 4. Warshaver, “Psycho-geographic Traditions of City Folk,” 62, quoting John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 5; MGVR to SRK, 12 June 1881, Koehler Collection. 257

Notes to Pages 204 – 205 5. [MGVR], “Matters of Taste,” G&F 4 (3 June 1891): 253. For “what men like,” see [MGVR], “Restful Burial Grounds,” G&F 5 (29 June 1892): 301; American Association of Museums, Proceedings, 66–67. 6. On Pray’s course at Harvard, see Simo, Forest & Garden, 113; King, Variety in the Little Garden, 104, 114. Louisa Yeomans King (1863–1948) studied and practiced gardening as an ardent amateur before starting a successful career as an author. Owens is quoted in MSVR, Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893; reprint, Philadelphia: National Council Books, 1959), vi.

258

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274

Index

Atlantic, 22, 24, 33, 160, 174, 179 automobile. See motorcar(s) Ayer, Harriet Hubbard, 28, 29, 30

Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations. Adams, Henry, 37 Addison, Joseph, 73 Adirondack State Park, N.Y., 184–85, 194 Agassiz, Louis, 18–19 Aidé, Charles Hamilton, 28 Allston, Washington, 29, 31 American Architect and Building News (AABN), 26, 35, 50, 51, 52, 56, 59, 62, 121, 123, 124, 142, 153 American Art Review, 11, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35, 36, 60, 66 American Association of Museums, 204 American Magazine of Art, 68–69 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), 181, 199–200 André, Edouard, 54, 55, 144, 203, 204; L’art des jardins, 54 Arnold, Matthew, 13; Literature and Dogma, 13 Arnold Arboretum, 44–45 Associated Artists, 29 Art Out-of-Doors (1893 and 1925). See under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: writings Astor, John Jacob, 6

Bacon, Francis, 76 Bailey, Liberty Hyde, 176; Home Nature Study Course, 176. See also Comstock, Anna Botsford Beaux, Cecilia, 29, 157, 183, 184; Green Alley (home in Gloucester, Mass.), 183 Bellamy, Edward, 153; Looking Backward, 153 Bishop, William H., 24 Block Island, R.I., 2, 29, 106 Blomfield, Reginald, 130; The Formal Garden in England, 130 Bois de Boulogne, Paris, 8, 9 Bonpland, Aimé, 17 Boston Evening Transcript, 79 Boston Public Garden, 78–79, 79, 90–91 Boynton, Henry Van Ness, 168 Bronx River Parkway, N.Y., 191–92, 192 Brownell, William C., 69 Buffalo, N.Y., 180 Burnham, Daniel H., 118 Burns, Robert, Central Park statue of, 132, 133, 133 275

Index Burroughs, John, 13, 22–23, 138, 141; “Nature and the Poets,” 23; “A Taste of Maine Birch,” 22–23 Buzzard’s Bay, Mass., 1, 20, 67, 101–2, 112–13, 153. See also Marion, Mass. Cambria Iron Works (   Johnstown, Pa.), 29, 32–33, 33, 111 Cameron, Jenks, 193 Caparn, Harold A., 191–92; State Parks, 191–92 Cape Cod, Mass., 106, 112–13 Carlyle, Thomas, 13 Castaigne, Jean André, 151 Cautley, Marjorie S., 195 Centennial Exposition (Philadelphia, Pa.), 24 Central Park, N.Y. See under Olmsted, Frederick Law: projects; Vaux, Calvert Century, 11, 14, 24, 26, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 59, 70, 76, 84, 85, 98, 101, 109, 111, 121, 123, 126, 142, 146, 147, 148, 150–52, 157, 159, 166, 167, 168, 171, 179, 180 Chamisso, Adalbert von, 20–21 Channing, Ellery, 21 Charlecote Hall, near Stratford-onAvon, England, 128–29, 129 Chase, William Merritt, 29, 30; Portrait of Dora Wheeler, 31; Portrait of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, 30 Chatauquan, 52 Chicago, Ill., 113, 119, 151, 157. See also World’s Columbian Exposition (1893, Chicago, Ill.) Chicago Tribune, 114 Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, 167–68, 170

Chipiez, Charles, 86, 93; A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, 86, 93, 94. See also Perrot, Georges chromolithography (chromos), 54, 78 Church, Frederic Edwin, 69–71; The Heart of the Andes, 69, 70, 70; The Icebergs, 69; Twilight in the Wilderness, 69 Civil War, 6–7, 15, 164, 167–68 Cleveland, President Grover, 161 Cleveland, H. W. S., 63, 64, 66, 78, 84, 203; Landscape Architecture: As Applied to the Wants of the West, 203 Codman, Henry Sargent, 84, 114, 124, 150, 156 Colorado Springs, Colo., 147, 157–58, 159–60, 160 Columbia University, 183 Columbus Park, New York City. See Mulberry Park (now Columbus Park), New York City Colvin, Sir Sydney, 161 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Mass., 132 Comstock, Anna Botsford, 176; Home Study Nature Course, 176. See also Bailey, Liberty Hyde Conder, Josiah, 88; “The Art of Landscape Gardening in Japan,” 88; Landscape Gardening in Japan, 88, 89 conservation, national policy of, 190–91 Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., 175–76, 204 Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille, 70–73, 75, 111; Beach near Etretat, 72 Cosmopolitan, 179

276

Index Cox, Kenyon, 28 Crayon, 12, 24 Darwin, Charles, 15, 16–17, 21, 103–4; Insectivorous Plants, 104; Origin of Species, 15, 16, 17, 21, 28, 74–75, 105, 106–7, 141–42; Voyage of the Beagle, 21 Darwin, Erasmus, 105; “The Botanic Garden,” 105 Davidge, Clara, 157 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 33; “Life in the Iron Mills,” 33 de Forest, Robert Weeks, 194 de Kay, Helena (Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder), 1, 102, 158 Denver, Colo., 159 Doogue, William, 79–80, 90. See also Boston Public Garden Downing, A. J. (Andrew Jackson), 53, 54, 55, 64, 67, 73, 90, 94–95, 122, 127, 130, 134, 134, 166, 170; Horticulturist, 94, 122, 178; Treatise on the Theory and Practice of  Landscape Gardening, 127 Dresden, 8–10, 9 Drosera rotundifolia (sundew), 103–5, 104 Druid Park, Baltimore, Md., 132 Dunlap, Thomas, 32; American Iron Trade Manual, 32 Durand, John, 14, 24 Eakins, Thomas, 203 Edinburgh Review, 86, 97 Edmunds, George F., 61 Eliot, Charles, 56, 58–59, 63, 64, 84, 124, 150, 203 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 141, 173, 202 Engineering Magazine, 156

English Cathedrals. See under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: writings Exposition Universelle, Paris. See Paris: Exhibition of 1889 Farmers’ Bulletin, 195–97, 196 Farmington, Conn., 185 Fergusson, James, 86; History of Architecture, 86 Fisher, H. A. L., 198–99; “America after Fifteen Years,” 198–99 Fiske, John, 16 F. L. Olmsted and Company, 115. See also Olmsted, Frederick Law Foote, Mary Hallock, 36 Ford, Henry, 189 Forum, 119, 120, 153 Freedley, Durr, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, 204 French, Daniel Chester, 116; Republic, 116–17, 117, 120 Friends of Our Native Landscape, 192–93 Galaxy, 16 Garden and Forest (G&F    ), 2, 13, 14, 20–21, 24, 42, 50, 52, 56–120, 61, 121– 46, 154–57, 159–79, 180, 182, 201, 205 Gardiner, James T., 47 Gautier, Théophile, 86; Voyage en Espagne, 86 Gilded Age, 2, 120, 166–67, 183 Gilder, Joseph, 200 Gilder, Richard Watson, 1, 3, 36, 37, 40, 92, 98, 99, 102, 109, 111, 145, 150, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 171, 172, 177, 183, 202; family of, 102; house of (in Marion, Mass.), 103

277

Index International Federation of   Town and Country Planning and Garden Cities, 195

Glenwood Springs, Colo., 160 Gloucester, Mass., 157 Gray, Asa, 18–19; Manual of Botany, 23, 141, 157 Great Hill (country seat of Albert W. Nickerson in Marion, Mass.), 67, 124 Green, Andrew, 149 Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, N.Y., 134. See also rural cemeteries Harper’s, 10, 24, 35, 36, 51, 172 Havard, V., 157–58; “The Botanical Aspect of Pike’s Peak,” 157–58 Hayden, Sophia G., 153, 182. See also World’s Columbian Exposition (1893, Chicago, Ill.) Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works. See under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: writings History of New York City, The. See under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: writings Honesdale Improvement Association, Honesdale, Pa., 169–70 Hubbard, Henry V. and Theodora Kimball, 204; An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design, 204 Humboldt, Alexander von, 16–18, 21, 87, 92, 97, 118, 157–58; Aspects of Nature, 17; Cosmos, 17, 69, 70–71, 93–95; Essai sue la Géographie des Plantes, 17, 18; Personal Narrative, 17 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 144; Königs­ kinder, 144 Hunt, Richard Morris, 7 Independent, 24, 51, 98, 101 Indiana Dunes, Lake Michigan, 192

Jacacci, August, 183, 185 Jackson, J. B. 176–77 Jäger, H., 86, 89–91, 92; Gartenkunst und Gärten Sonst und Jetzt (Garden Art and Gardens in Former and in Present Time), 9, 86, 89–91, 91, 92, 93, 98 Jameson, Mrs. Anna Brownell, 11–12; Sacred and Legendary Art, 12 Jefferies, Richard, 22, 141; “Wild Flowers,” 22 Jekyll Island, Ga., 108 Jensen, Jens, 192 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 43–44, 111, 167, 171 Kern, G. M., 55; Practical Landscape Gardening, 55 King, Louisa Yeomans (Mrs. Francis), 195, 204; Variety in the Little Garden, 204–5 Koehler, Sylvester Rosa, 24, 25, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 40, 41, 60, 203 La Grange Terrace, New York City, 6, 6 Lake Placid, N.Y., 145–47; Hotel Ruisseaumont, 145, 146 Lambert, John, Portrait of Cecilia Beaux, 184 Lanciana, Rodolfo, 86; Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 86 Lazarus, Emma, 36 leisure time, 189, 199; dangers of, 198 Lenox, Mass., 2

278

Index Lindley, John, 104, 137; Ladies’ Botany, 104, 141 Lippincott’s, 26, 32, 34, 35 Loudon, John Claudius (J. C.), 64, 86, 134; The Encyclopedia of Gardening, 86 Manning, Warren H., 84 Marion, Mass., 1, 67, 78, 80, 99, 100, 101–2, 111–13 Marvin, Frank O., 173 Mason, Miss Ellen, 15 McClure’s, 179 McFarland, J. Horace, 190–91 McKim, Charles, 109 McKim, Mead & White, 15; Samuel Colman residence (Newport, R.I.), 46, 48 Mitchell, Lucy M., 86; A History of Ancient Sculpture, 86 Moore, Helen, 176, 179 motorcar(s), 181, 184; impact of, 167, 168, 182–83, 186, 187, 188, 186–90, 191, 192, 193; and landscape architects, 189. See also under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: opinions and characteristics Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore, Md., 130 Mulberry Bend, New York City, 176, 177 Mulberry Park (now Columbus Park), New York City, 176 Municipal Art Society (MAS), 189 Munro, David A., 57 Munsey’s, 179 Nantucket, Mass., 20, 106–8, 108 Nason, Wayne C., 196; “Rural Plan-

ning: The Social Aspects of Recreational Places,” 196–97 National Council of State Garden Clubs, 205 National Park Service, 191, 193–94; and landscape architects, 193–94 Newport, R.I., 2, 15, 20, 130, 183, 186, 199; architecture of, 45–46; Bellevue Avenue, 45, 46; Cliff Walk, 47, 82 New York Times, 3, 85, 143, 171, 178 New York World, 24, 28, 35, 112, 114, 117, 118–19, 162, 166 Nestledown (Jamaica, Long Island, N.Y.), 31, 40 Niagara, New York State Reservation at. See under Olmsted, Frederick Law: projects Niagara Falls, N.Y., 180 Nickerson, Albert W. See Great Hill (country seat of Albert W. Nickerson in Marion, Mass.) North American Review, 16, 20, 24, 143 Olmsted, Frederick Law (FLO), 15, 25–26, 36–39, 43–44, 51, 52, 53, 54–55, 56, 57–60, 63, 65–66, 74, 75, 77, 81– 83, 90, 118, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127–28, 130, 142, 147–50, 148, 182. See also F. L. Olmsted and Company —projects: Capitol Grounds, Washington, D.C., 131; Central Park, New York City, 41, 42, 42–43, 53, 65, 74, 124, 130, 132, 133, 137, 147, 149, 150, 174, 176; Franklin Park, Boston, Mass., 131, 132; New York State Reservation at Niagara, 47– 50, 49, 194; Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y., 131, 137, 147; Rough Point, Newport, R.I., 81–82, 81, 83; World’s

279

Index Olmsted, Frederick Law: projects (continued   ) Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Ill., 114–16, 115, 116, 117, 118–19, 150, 151, 156 —writings: “General Plan for the Improvement of the Niagara Reservation,” 48–49, 180; “A Healthy Change in the Tone of the Human Heart,” 43–44; “On Gardening,” 69; “Report upon the Landscape Architecture of the Columbian Exposition,” 155–56; The Spoils of the Park, 65–66, 78 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr., 60, 191 Olmsted, John C. (nephew, stepson of FLO), 124, 150 Olmsted, Rick. See Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr. Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot, 115. See also Olmsted, Frederick Law Onteora, N.Y., 157 Owens, Hubert B., 205 Owens, Maria L., 106, 107; Catalogue of Plants, 107 Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, N.Y., 50, 55, 180 Paris: Exhibition of 1889, 98, 100, 109, 110, 114–15, 119, 152–53 (see also under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: writings); pleasure grounds in, 129 (see also under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: travel abroad) Parsons, Samuel, Jr., 57, 84, 203; How to Plan the Home Grounds, 203; Landscape Gardening, 203 Pavey, Bill, 171

Pennell, Joseph, 40–41, 98–99, 171 Pennyroyal (Tannersville, N.Y.), 37. See also Wheeler, Mrs. Candace Perrot, Georges, 86, 93; A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, 86, 93, 94. See also Chipiez, Charles Perry, Thomas Sergeant, 20 Platt, Charles A., 15 Pope, Alexander, 80 Pope, Theodate, 29, 163–66, 165, 182, 186, 199; 1913 Packard (“the yellow peril”), 186, 187 Populist Party, 161 Pray, James Sturgis, 204 Pretyman, William, 118 Rand, McNally & Co., 121; Handbook of the World’s Columbian Exposition, 121, 122 Recreation Magazine, 189 Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, 194 Repton, Humphry, 127, 204 Richardson, Henry Hobson (H. H.), 2, 15, 38, 38–39, 44, 56, 76, 101, 126, 131, 134; Ames Memorial Library, North Easton, Mass., 38–39, 39; Town Hall, North Easton, Mass., 38–39, 126 Riddle, Theodate Pope. See Pope, Theodate Riis, Jacob, 176 Riverside Drive, New York City, 43 Robbins, Mrs., 181 Robinson, Charles Mulford, 174–75 Robinson, William, 125, 130; The Garden, 130 Rogers, Will, 144 280

Index Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 18, 19– 20, 106; Aspects of the Earth, 19–20; First Book of Geology, 19 Should We Ask for the Suffrage? See under Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: writings Simonds, O. C., 63 Smith, John Jay, 134 Southampton, Long Island, N.Y., 2, 100, 101 Spencer, Herbert, 16 Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio, 90, 91 Stein, Clarence S., 195 Stiles, William Augustus, 42, 56, 57, 58, 59–60; death of, 178; “Riverside Park,” 42 Stillman, William James, 12 Stockbridge, Mass., 2, 183 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 61; Hearth and Home, 61 Strauch, Adolf, 90 Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, N.Y., 195 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 103, 105; “The Sundew,” 103

Roosevelt, Theodore, 190 Rough Point, Newport, R.I. See under Olmsted, Frederick Law: projects; Vanderbilt, Frederick W. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 91 rural cemeteries, 133–34 Ruskin, John, 12–13, 20, 32, 43–44, 73–74, 76; Modern Painters, 12, 71 Russell Sage Foundation, 194 Ruutz-Rees, Janet E., 26 Said, Edward, 88–89; Orientalism, 88 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 1, 51, 102, 109, 132; Abraham Lincoln, 132; Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer (Mariana Griswold) (bas-relief), xiv, 1 Saint Nicholas, 139 Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 2, 183, 184 Sargent, Charles Sprague, 44, 56, 57, 57, 59, 80, 125, 126, 127, 144, 147–48, 150; Holm Lea (estate, Brookline, Mass.), 127–28, 127, 172; as the “professor,” 80, 131, 175 Sargent, John Singer, 9 Schnaase, Karl, 11 School of Horticulture for Women, Ambler, Pa., 195 Schuyler, Lydia (pseud. Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer), 1, 180 Scott, Frank J., 53, 55, 57; The Art of Beautifying Suburban Homes Grounds, 53 Scribner’s, 23, 24, 27, 35, 179, 203 Seurat, Georges, 109; Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 109 Shakespeare, William, 105; Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, 105

Taine, Hippolyte, 13–15, 129–30; The Philosophy of Art, 14 Tarbell, Ida, 29, 163, 164; History of Standard Oil Company, 163 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 105 Thoreau, Henry David, 21–22, 138, 141; “Autumnal Tints,” 21–22 Tiarella cordifolia (false-mitrewort), 139, 140 Turner, J. M. W., 12 Tuxedo Park, N.Y., 183 281

Index Vanderbilt, Frederick W., 81–82 Van Rensselaer, George (Gris; MGVR’s son): birth of, 26; at Block Island, R.I., 29; in Chicago, Ill. 157; in Colorado Springs, Colo., 157–58, 161; death of, 120, 160, 175; in England, 40; in Europe, 36; in France, 109; at Harvard, 113, 138, 144; illness of (tuberculosis), 144, 157, 158, 159; in Lake Placid, N.Y., 145–47; in Marion, Mass., 113; opinion of his mother’s writing, 138 Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold (MGVR; Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer), ii, xiv, 102, 185, 202, 204 —biography: birth of, 5; burial place of, 134; during Civil War, 6–8; in Cresson Springs, Pa., 29, 31; death of, 172, 200; Dresden years, 8–10; education of, 5, 8, 11–23, 139;; marriage of, 10; in New Brunswick, N.J., 26–27, 34; in Newport, R.I., 7–8, 186, 199; payment for writing, 202–3; position in society, 2–3, 9, 27–28, 203; —, problems with, 27, 31, 166–67; residences of, 5, 41, 60; and science, 19–21, 22–23, 100–107, 139–42, 201, 205; summers in Connecticut, 6; writing during marriage, 35–36 —family: Lydia Alley (mother), 5; grandfather, 5; Emily (née Post) Griswold (sister-in-law), 183; Frank Gray Griswold (brother), 5, 10; George Griswold Jr. (father), 5; —, death of, 40; George Griswold III (brother), 183, 184, 186; George Griswold IV (nephew), 183; John N.

A. Griswold (uncle), 7; —, house (Newport, R.I.), 7; Louisa (Lily) Griswold (sister), 40, 111; Edith Higginson (née Griswold; sister), 113–14, 157, 158; —, death of, 177; Anna Murray Vail (niece), 109. See also Van Rensselaer, George (Gris; MGVR’s son); Van Rensselaer, Schuyler (MGVR’s husband) —opinions and character: “aesthetics of life,” 203–4; Anglo-Saxonism, 96–97; appearance of, 171, 183; dislike of mountains, 146, 157; fear of public speaking, 171, 172; on grief, 165–66; leisure habits of, 199; love of music, 10, 144; love of New York City, 146, 147, 159; love of the sea, 108; on the motorcar (automobile), 181, 183–90; personality of, 1, 2–3, 23, 28, 144, 171, 172, 176, 179, 203; racialist thinking of, 87–89, 95–98; on woman suffrage, 160–65, 169; on women as landscape architects, 181–82, 195 —professional life: as architecture critic, 2, 12, 14–15, 26, 37–39, 40, 44–45, 51, 59, 62, 76, 84, 85, 97, 101, 112, 114, 126, 131, 143, 166, 173, 183, 201, 203; as art critic, 2, 12, 14, 24, 26, 51, 62, 66, 68–69, 70–73, 84, 85, 97, 101, 111, 112, 114, 116–17, 127, 131, 134, 136, 139, 161, 166, 169, 183, 201, 203; as fiction writer, 180; as garden historian, 85–98; —, on gardens of Egypt, 92–93, 93, 94; —, on gardens of Greece, 93, 94–95; —, on gardens of India, 97; —, on gardens of Japan, 53, 88–89; —, on 282

Index Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 2, 183, 184; Southampton, Long Island, N.Y., 2, 100, 101; Stockbridge, Mass., 2, 183; Tuxedo Park, N.Y., 183; Virginia Beach, Va., 144–45, 145; Winnetka, Ill., 177 —works: “American Etchers,” 85; “American Trees for America,” 178; appendix to American edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, 28; “Architectural Fitness,” 131; “Architecture as a Profession,” 52; “Art at the Fair,” 150–52; “Artist and Amateur,” 11, 202; “The Artistic Aspect of Trees,” 134–37; “The Artistic Aspect of Trees III: Color,” 77, 136; “The Artistic Element in Engineering,” 173; “The Artistic Triumph of the Fair-Builders,” 119–20; Art Out-ofDoors (1893), 2, 15, 60, 121, 122–44, 123, 204–5; —, review of, 143–44; Art Out-of-Doors (1925), 51, 124, 180–200, 204; “At the Fair,” 121; “Balcony Flower Boxes,” 101; “The Care of Park Trees,” 177; “City Playgrounds,” 175, 176–77; “Client and Architect,” 143; “Color of Rural Buildings,” 118; “Corot,” 70–73; “Defacement of Scenery,” 167; “The Development of American Homes,” 153; “Early Autumn Near Cape Cod,” 112–13; English Cathedrals, 40–41, 112; “The Exhibition Grounds, Paris,” 109; “The Field of Landscape-art,” 177–78; “Fifth Avenue,” 157; “Formal Flower-Beds,” 128–29; “Formal Gardening: Does

gardens of Judea and Phoenicia, 87; —, on gardens of Persia, 97; —, on gardens of Rome, 87, 93, 94; —, on gardens of Spain, 97, 98; as historian, 85–86, 180; as landscape gardening critic, 2, 8, 14, 15, 23, 47–50, 51–84, 101–20, 121–79, 180–200, 201–5; as poet, 51, 180–81; professional honors, 85–86, 183 —public service: American Branch of the French Wounded Emergency Fund, 3; Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, 3; New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 176; New York Infirmary for Women and Children, 3; New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women, 163; Public Education Association (PEA), 3, 96, 171, 172; University Settlement Society, 175 —travel abroad: Bayreuth, 36; Berlin, 40; Dresden, 36, 40; England, 40; Le Puy, France, 109; Paris, 36, 98, 109, 129; Prague, 40; Rhone River cruise, 100, 109–11 —travel in U.S.: Adirondack State Park, N.Y., 184–85, 194; Block Island, R.I., 2, 29, 106; Buffalo, N.Y., 180; Chicago, Ill., 113, 119, 151, 157; Colorado Springs, Colo., 147, 157–58, 159–60, 160; Denver, Colo., 159; Farmington, Conn., 185; Gloucester, Mass., 157; Lake Placid, N.Y., 145–47, 146; Marion, Mass., 1, 67, 78, 80, 99, 100, 101–2, 111–13; Nantucket, Mass., 20, 106–8, 108; 283

Index Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: works (continued) It Conflict with the Natural Style?,” 129–30; “Formal Gardening: Where It Can Be Used to Advantage,” 129–30; “Frederick Law Olmsted,” 121, 147–50; “A Garden for Children,” 175–76; “A Glimpse of Nantucket,” 105–8; “Great-Hill: A New American Country-seat,”124; Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, 2, 45, 76, 126, 160; The History of New York City, 85, 183; “Hitch your Wagon to a Star,” 173–74; “Horticulture at the World’s Fair,” 155; “Horticulture in Ancient Egypt,” 93; “How to Mask the Foundations of a Country House,” 125–26; “Japanese Gardening I,” 88; “Japanese Gardening II,” 88; “July on the Shores of Buzzard’s Bay,” 80, 101–2; “Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America,” 51; “Landscape Gardening I,” (AABN), 52–53; “Landscape Gardening II,” (AABN), 53–55; “Landscape Gardening II,” (G&F), 66–67; “Landscape Gardening III,” (AABN), 55–56; “Landscape Gardening III,” (G&F), 68; “Land­scape Gardening IV,” 68–74; “Landscape Gardening V,” 74–75; “Landscape Gardening VI,” 75– 77; “Landscape Gardening VII,” 77–78; “Landscape Gardening — A Definition,” 63; “The Language of Science,” 201; “The Love of Nature,” 138–39, 153; “Monuments in Public Places,” 131–32; “Natural Beauty and the Landscape Gar-

dener,” 68; “Nature and the Rich,” 166; “Nature’s Nurseries,” 112; Niagara: A Description, 180; “People in New York,” 159; “Piazzas,” 128; “The Plague of Formal Calls,” 27–28; “The Planting of Home Grounds, 125; “Recent Architecture in America,” 38, 76, 85, 126; “The Responsibilities of Florists,” 80; Should We Ask for the Suffrage?, 162; “Some Questions of Color,” 21–22; “Taste Indoors and Out,” 181–82; “Thoughts on Woman Suffrage,” 162; “The Triumph of Beauty,” 120; “Vacant-lot Farming,” 175, 176; “Walks and Drives,” 127–28; “What Mrs. Van Rensselaer Says: The Fair Grounds,” 121, 152–53; “When to Employ the Landscape-Gardener,” 64; “A Woodland Tragedy,” 103–5; “A Word for the Axe,” 137–38; “The Work of Frederick Law Olmsted at the Columbian Exposition,” 121; “The Work of Women in Village Improvement,” 169 Van Rensselaer, Schuyler (MGVR’s husband): in Cresson Spring, Pa., 29; death of, 34, 40; at Freiburg Mining School, 19; at Harvard, 19; marriage of, 10; opinion of his wife’s writing career, 35–36; work of, 34–35 Vassar, Matthew, 10 Vaux, Calvert, 43, 65, 74, 84, 124, 147, 149, 150, 180. See also Olmsted, Frederick Law: projects Vielé, Egbert, 149 Virginia Beach, Va., 144–45; Princess Anne Hotel, 145

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Index Wilson, Woodrow, 191 Winnetka, Ill., 177 women: education of, 10–11; as landscape architects, 181–82; as professionals, 26; and science, 15–16; suffrage, 160–65, 169; as writers, 25 Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural Association, 195 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893, Chicago, Ill.), 46, 114–20, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125, 142, 150–57, 151, 154, 156, 169. See also under Olmsted, Frederick Law: projects; Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold: writings: “The Work of Frederick Law Olmsted at the Columbian Exposition” Wright, Henry, 195

Waite, Davis H., 161 Wakefield, Va., camp at, 191 Walnut Hills Cemetery, Brookline, Mass., 134, 135 Wamego, Kans., 197–98; City Park, 197 Waring, Colonel George E., Jr., 173; on New York City street cleaning, 174–75, 174 Weidenmann, Jacob, 55, 66, 84, 203; American Garden Architecture, 203; Beautifying Country Homes, 55, 203; Modern Cemeteries, 203 Weir, John F., 13–14, 20 Wheeler, Mrs. Candace, 29, 36, 40, 135–36, 153; Household Art, 153 Wheeler, Dora, 28–31, 31 Whistler, James Abbott McNeil, 68 White, Stanford, 109. See also McKim, Mead & White Whitman, Walt, 23; Leaves of Grass, 23

Yard, Robert Sterling, 187; The Book of National Parks, 187 Yellowstone National Park, 193

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