Empty Mansions (54 page)

Authors: Bill Dedman

This painting by Huguette captures her view down Fifth Avenue in the snow, toward the Empire State Building. It emphasizes the cold, moist air in the blue-gray night, contrasted with the warmth inside her room, lit by the glow from a Japanese lamp.
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Huguette’s art teacher, Tadé Styka, painted this portrait of her painting a nude male model at the Styka studio on Central Park South.
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Huguette painted this tiny painting of a geisha bathed in gold, paying special attention to the colors and the exquisite detail in the fabrics. She studied Japanese culture and collected elaborate kimonos and hairpieces. But visiting Japan was a different matter.
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Huguette poses uncomfortably in furs, a cloche hat, and her emerald and diamond bracelets after her wedding to Bill Gower in 1928, when she was twenty-two. This photo appears to be from her honeymoon trip and was republished in newspapers in 1930, when she divorced him. She would live until 2011 but no newer photo was published during her lifetime.
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Bellosguardo, the Clark summer estate in Santa Barbara, California, was purchased by former senator Clark in 1923. His widow, Anna, had this mansion built in the early 1930s. She and her daughter Huguette stopped visiting in the early 1950s, although today it remains fully furnished and carefully preserved. Huguette, who inherited Bellosguardo in 1963, insisted that it be kept unchanged, in “first-class condition.”
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Bellosguardo, at lower right, sits in privacy on a mesa by the Pacific Ocean, above Santa Barbara’s East Beach. The pond at right is the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, created by Huguette as a memorial to her sister. When this photo was published on a picture postcard, Huguette’s property manager bought up every copy to protect her privacy.
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In a photo from about 1940, the library at Bellosguardo is dominated by a portrait of Huguette’s sister, Andrée, over the mantel. The painting and the library are still as they were then, but now with the furniture covered.
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The bedroom at Bellosguardo of Huguette’s mother, Anna, features one of her ornate pedal harps, her bed with damask upholstery on the footboard, a John Singer Sargent painting of a dancer enticing a man on a rooftop in Capri, and photos of her daughters, Andrée and Huguette.
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