The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (4 page)

Claribel must have seen something of herself in her young friend—a disinterest in the approval of her peers and an unshakable self-confidence. And intellectually, Claribel's and Gertrude's time had come. The “new woman” or “bachelor girl” debunked Victorian myths of womanhood. She was mentally assertive and physically vigorous. Exercise was the rage and the tall, thin, and athletic Gibson girl was the image of the age.

Even Lillian Russell, the former standard bearer of beauty, got in on the craze. In the second half of the 1890s, the American press ran columns of copy on Russell's struggle to drop pounds from the voluptuous figure that had made her famous.

Etta, however, was not a new woman, intellectually or physically. Her immediate fate was to live retiringly among her family in the home where she was raised, caring for her nearest relations while their lives changed and expanded. In fact, by age 30, the only real mark she had made were the five Robinson paintings she purchased and hung on the parlor walls.

But those paintings did not just represent the past for Etta—they represented the future. They were evidence of a world beyond her family—windows into a world of light made from swift brush strokes and rich earth oozing from ochre. They represented a world where a child's delicate movement was forever frozen in a mesh of thinly applied blues and yellows and pinks—where a mother's love was conveyed by a barely discernible thread of paint.

The Robinson artwork transformed the dark, formal rooms of the Cone home in the same way a brilliant newcomer enlivens a dull family gathering. For Etta, the five paintings would turn out to be the first of hundreds of new and welcome friends.

There was an open door in her prison wall! If she chose to slip through it, who could follow? The voice of scandal was loud and bitter, but it would be lost in the great breadth of the Atlantic.

—Sidney Nyburg,
The Buried Rose: Legends of Old Baltimore,
1942

D
uring the years Gertrude attended medical school at Hopkins, she summered with Leo in Europe and brought back to Baltimore numerous stories of their wild escapades abroad, including nude bathing and drunken revelries. But, thanks to Leo, summer vacations also involved an immersion in art. Etta's fantasy of life on the other side of the ocean must have been fueled by the Steins’ tales, but it was not until 1901 that she finally embarked on a similar excursion.

After their father's death, she and Claribel began receiving an annual stipend of $2,400—their brothers gave them their share of the inheritance because, by then, they assumed that neither sister would ever marry. Celebrating her new financial independence, Etta boarded a ship that May with her cousin Hortense Guggenheimer and a friend, Harriet Clark, to make a summer tour of Europe.

In addition to trunks, hat boxes, travel guides, and numerous books, Etta took with her a leather bound diary, its cover
engraved
“Etta Cone, Baltimore, Maryland,”
in gold lettering. That diary detailed a transformation in Etta that has been described in other women as a “holiday from Victorianism.”

On the very first day of her Atlantic crossing, Etta threw overboard the woman her family knew—the retiring, eager-to-please, sexless helpmate—to become an adventurer. By the second day's diary entry, she was drinking champagne.

On May 23, the ship reached Naples. “Awoke at 4:30 am to find the steamer had anchored and on looking out of the port hole the most wonderful spectacle I have ever seen greeted me,” she recorded. “There in the dim dawn was Vesuvius just in front and the densest, blackest smoke I have ever seen issuing from the crater. As the sun gradually arose from behind one of the peaks of the mountains that completely surround Naples on the three sides, the smoke of Vesuvius became lighter until with the sun's full rays it was almost white by reflection.

“Leo Stein surprised us by being at the docks and we almost hugged him with delight.”

A travel book, published in 1900, offered suggestions for women venturing abroad alone. . . . “As a general rule, if the woman will dress quietly, walk quickly, and look ahead of her, she will not be molested.” But when the three women docked in Naples, the travel guide was jettisoned. Shedding the constraints of family and society, Etta and company had only one goal—to enjoy themselves with the inimitable Leo.

The Etta who visited Italy that May was not a beautiful woman. Her mouth was thin and straight, her jaw protruding and large, and her body, though curvaceous, was not sensuous. “Isn't it odd,” she once remarked, “that someone who loves beauty as much as I do should look the way I do?” But
as in so many people with a vivid inner life, her eyes betrayed a keen eagerness for beautiful things.

Etta's diary entries from her first excursion to Italy contain the usual tourist outbursts on native charms. After visiting the Colosseum in Rome by moonlight on May 29, 1901, she wrote: “It was glorious. The quiet with only the crickets in the ruins and exquisite shadows was delightful. We walked backwards down a street so as to get last glimpses of the magnificent spectacle.”

But the diaries also contain page after page on the world of art according to Leo. It is quite clear from Etta's private writing that she loved even the sound of his name—it dots every page like a punctuation mark. With the help of his friend, Bernard Berenson, Leo would introduce Etta to the art he had been studying in Italy for more than a year.

Whether it was Leo himself who inflamed Etta, or the world he was unveiling before her, is unclear. But whatever the source, her writings in Italy contain a passion and intensity it would be difficult to ascribe to the woman who left Baltimore less than a month before.

While in Naples, the group stayed at the Grand Hotel, a luxurious five-story building on the bay whose shuttered windows looked out on Mount Vesuvius, the Castel dell'Ovo, and the bustling city that smelled of the sea. From their rooms, they could see the huge white rocks that littered the shore as if they had been spit up and deposited there by the hovering volcano.

Fishing boats bobbed off the coast, and the morning air was filled with the shouts of fishermen as they pulled up their nets and brought in the day's catch. The cobble-stone streets clattered with horse-drawn carriages. The intense heat of the place made everything shimmer.

Etta and company used Naples as a base for side-trips to
Pompeii, Amalfi, Sorrento, and Capri. Day after day, they dragged themselves and their long dark skirts along the dirt roads of southern Italy, beneath a scorching sun that rose early and set late. Leo, it appears, accompanied them on these journeys. Etta appreciatively acknowledged his contributions in her diary.

En route to Rome on May 27, 1901, she wrote: “Saw women ploughing and working the fields side by side with the men. Also saw the women washing in the streams, using rocks as wash boards. (Leo tells us this is a common practice). . . the beautiful red poppy fields are a delight to our eyes. Had veal sandwiches and wine on the train.”

While in Europe, Leo added a long beard to the mustache he sported in Baltimore, and now looked even more the intellectual that he aspired to be. He still did not have an occupation, but continued to immerse himself in art history, and considered writing a book about the Italian Renaissance painter Mantegna.

In Florence, he visited often with Berenson at his villa, I Tatti, to discuss art and to use his library. Berenson, thirty-six, was also a Harvard graduate, and had been living in Florence for sixteen years. Mary, Berenson's companion and soon-to-be wife, observed that all Leo appeared to want in life was “an ear.”

That is precisely what he had in Etta. She had been trained to do nothing so well as listen. Soon, she would also learn to see.

Leo's pet maxim when looking at paintings at that time was simple: “Keep your eye on the object and let your ideas play about it.” But Etta rarely had “ideas” that were not someone else's, or if she did, she didn't express them. That deference to others, rooted in a lack of self-confidence, began to change as she became more acquainted with art.

On May 28, during a visit to the Vatican, Etta saw her
first original Michelangelos and Botticellis. Her comments are full of a neophyte's exclamations, but also include the bold observation that the
Last Judgment
is “too much covered in drapery to still belong to ‘Angelo.’” The phrase may in fact have been Leo's and only copied into the diary as Etta's own, but in either case it is the first time in writing she criticized an object of art.

On June 1, the touring party arrived in Florence, where Etta would spend nearly a month—mostly at the Uffizi—immersing herself in the Italian masters. It was expected that a traveler, on her first visit to Florence, would pay an obligatory visit or two to the great museum. Then her attention would likely turn toward the city's other charms—especially its many shops and restaurants. For Etta, Florence held one main attraction—art. On June 3, she made her first trip to the Uffizi and returned there nearly every day during her stay.

“Made our third visit to the Uffizi and as usual had Leo in his own leisurely way flitting (I should say creeping) from one to the other of us, each one of us delighted to welcome this wonderful brain.”

Based on her journal entries, Etta's initial interest in art appears to have been literal. Fascinated by the stories behind the paintings, she wrote of being “keenly” interested in Filippo Lippi's
Madonna with Child and Angels
because the madonna was actually a nun the artist married.

On June 13, 1901, she wrote: “Finally reached Uffizi by 11 am, had a delightful time wandering around among my pets, reading up stories of saints, gods and bible characters. I had a long sit before Botticelli's ‘Birth of Venus’ and then had a good time going from picture to picture becoming better acquainted with my St. Jean the Baptists, St. Sebastians, and the other saints and saintesses.”

Etta had not yet developed to the point where she could
look at a painting and appreciate it as a painting. She still looked at it as a picture of something. In fact, her taste in art was largely limited to the Renaissance. Late in June, she went to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see modern paintings, but wrote, rather matter-of-factly, that those works did not appeal to her.

On June 18, Leo left the group. For the first time since arriving in Europe, not only were they without male escort, but the driving force behind their little group was gone. Etta described their “lonely march” without him down the arched, marble tile walkway to dinner at Gambrinus on the Piazza della Republica. As their footsteps echoed in the dark shadows of the city's many monuments, Florence must have seemed more melancholy than usual.

Two weeks later, the band of traveling Victorian ladies left Florence, first for Venice, then for Germany.

An independent woman for more than two months, Etta first encountered her distant German relatives on the Munich leg of their trip. In her diary entry for July 21, 1901, she barely disguised her resentment, writing that she found their “hospitality touching but I am glad I do not live among them.”

Etta's diary in Italy was sun-drenched, light-hearted, and bursting with enthusiasm. It was the journal of a woman doing what she wanted, when she wanted to do it, without thinking for a moment how her actions might be viewed.

The woman in Germany was suddenly shuttled from place to place by a hovering family whom she did not really know, and whose tastes were unlike her own. Irritated by the place and the people, she found herself annoyed even by the art. During a visit to Dresden, she saw a Rembrandt and proclaimed it “vulgar but beautiful.” By the time the group left to
head south to France, Etta was weary of traveling, more thrilled to receive letters from home than intrigued by her exotic environment.

When Etta and company arrived to the heat and haze of Paris in August, they had been touring Europe for three months. “I was not in the mood to enjoy the prospect of living in one of the narrow obscure Paris streets,” she wrote. “However, we ended up at the Quai de Voltaire and found to our amazement that Leo and Gertrude had arrived an hour before us. Of course we talked a lot and had dinner at the Boeuf a la Mode and it was fine. Coffee at the Café American on the Italian Boulevard and Paris with a vengeance.” In less than one day, Etta had revived.

The Hotel Quai de Voltaire was a small, intimate, woody place on the left bank of the Seine. An occupant of one of the hotel's front rooms had a commanding view of the Louvre directly across the river—to the left the Tuileries, and to the right, Notre Dame. It was a picture postcard world that evidently captivated Etta.

“Went to the Louvre and had a perfectly delicious time. In fact the whole place is so redolent of glorious warm color and form that I actually felt enthused once more and forgot any fatigue I had.”

If Leo had been the commanding presence in Naples and Florence, Gertrude became the driving force in Paris. Etta had not seen Gertrude for several months, and even when together in Baltimore before Etta's trip, Gertrude had been closer to Claribel because of their work at Hopkins. But Gertrude dropped out of school two weeks before graduating, saying that her medical education was a farce and that she had no interest in pursuing medicine as a career.