'Ernesta Beaux': A Woman of Distinction!

 

1894: Child with Nurse, Ernesta Dinker by her doting and gifted aunt, Cecilia Beaux.

 

America's promised opportunity is real enough. So people continue to flock here from around the globe.  Perpetually under assault, the possibilities offered here are never absolute. Presidential election theft, ratified by the Supreme Court's coronation decision, warrantless war in Iraq, income redistribution to the richest, via the Bush tax cuts, corporations cast as persons with wealth deemed to be "speech" and ascendancy of Tea Party revolutionaries as menacing as Brown Shirts, have all given one cause for alarm. Yet I and other concerned progressives have not decamped abroad to some welfare-state-paradise.  Confident that our system is robust enough to reform the worst that comes our way, even as slavery was dismantled, we stay and work on for redemption. Like President Obama we are aware, as Dr. King and Robert Kennedy were, that more, is more: the more one does, the more good and justice can be achieved. Buttressing our efforts, Thomas Jefferson's admonition is always in the background reminding us how democracy requires taking the trouble of 'eternal vigilance'.

 

 

 

 

 1916: Mrs. William Christian Bullitt.

 

It is not because we have triumphed over race, class, gender and other biases that makes us great. Rather, it is that, notwithstanding our persisting prejudices, we are able to utilize and uplift outstanding individuals from otherwise disadvantaged and despised groups, in a way that literally saves us. Offering extraordinary symbolic hope among the nation's most down-trodden 'minorities', President Obama was able to pursue policies that restored banks, Wall Street and the auto industry, utterly at odds with this group's immediate interests. Thanks to his racial identity and eloquent tact, he did so without unduly inflaming racial strife. It's reasonable to conclude that no white president could have offered poor blacks and Latinos so little by way of job-creation and mortgage relief with so negligible a rise in crime and unrest.

 

 

 

William Christian Bullitt.

 

But just as the unprecedented tenure of Franklin Roosevelt ought not be mistaken as a signal that physical handicaps were and are, no longer regarded prejudicially, so Obama's election ought not to be seen as heralding a 'post racial' age of harmony. No, more remarkable is how much like Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson, demonized for being black, or Franklin Roosevelt, hiding his disabling polio, Obama has persevered despite the encumbrances of opposition-rooted in bigotry.

 

 

 

 

 Rockwell Kent.

 

 

 

 

 

White gays and women have always had reason to remember the calculus of reconciling ambition and ability to the proscriptions of bias. Beauty or wealth, which ultimately can lend one sufficient power to overcome convention, initially often reinforce the call for conformity and oppression. 

 

 

 

 

 

Composer Samuel Latham Mitchell Barlow.

 

Cultivation has always been a key factor in being able to realize one's full potential. English aristocrats long availed themselves of a European grand tour to acquire polish and reinforce useful contacts. And a century ago, so too did upper-class Americans, emulating this English example through education,  seek a similar luster. Henry Sturgis Dinker, the president of Lehigh University and his wife Etta certainly were careful to secure such advantages for their 4 sons. This was not at all unusual and the effort bore fruit in their abundant success. More audacious was the way they nurtured their daughters.  Aimee Ernesta Dinker became an accomplished interior decorator, earning $75,000 a year in the 20's, and her younger sister Catherine Dinker, known as 'Kitty' by her family, became an acclaimed author, whose talents were later recognized by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. 

 

 

 

 

1931: Portrait by French painter Bernard Boutet de Monvel, known for his clear, uncluttered and geometric style of an elegant Mrs. Samuel L. M. Barlow.

 

Poignantly acknowledging the oddly alienating transformation inherent in cultivation, in sometimes seeming "brand new", Kitty had asked of her mother when her big sister returned from school, "Why does she sound funny?" "She's becoming educated...,"her mother responded, mindful of how her more limited home-schooling had left her far less worldly and sociable than many contemporaries. Better-educated people had acquired the distinctive identifying clipped but flutety voice of their group, an unmistakable intonation and cadence which today, beyond theatrical ridicule and outside of recordings of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt or the Bouvier sisters, has largely disappeared. On account of her dropped g's and what he disdained as her imperious demeanor, one of Eernesta Beaux's brothers would revile her until his death.  

 

 

 

1933: Still elegant, Mrs. Samuel L. M. Barlow, by Scotish watercolorist and society portrait painter William Bruce Ellis Ranken.

 

 

In a way, both Dinker sisters' splendid careers, like their failed first marriages, can be traced directly to the example of their mother and that of her sister, their brilliant aunt, Cecilia Beaux the eminent portrait painter. During the long course of their parent's marriage, it was their father who had assumed primary responsibility for directing their brothers' lives. As to his girls Henry Dinker believed that they "needed no better example than that of their mother." If the brothers Dinker were lucky enough to emulate the happy pattern established by their parents, the Dinker sisters were not as fortunate. Selflessly devoted to her family, but insecure as to her choices, awed by her sister's glamour and independence, Etta Dinker twice suffered nervous breakdowns.  Worse, where the lovely Ernesta, repeatedly serving as her aunt's model from the time she was a toddler, was cosseted and encouraged to express herself and to excel by the artist, the more serious, less vivacious Kitty, was actually ridiculed by her aunt on account of her desire to write.

 

 

1928: Library by Eernesta Beaux at the Patterson estate, 'The Far Hills', Dayton, Ohio.

 

In 1916 Ernesta married William Christian Bullitt, a "proper Rittenhouse Square Philadelphian", voted the most brilliant member of his class at Yale. A foreign correspondent, he also wrote the best-selling novel, It Isn't Done.  A confidant to Franklin Roosevelt, Bullitt was later the first United States ambassador to Russia. Ernesta and 'Billy' Bullitt spent their first year of married life traveling throughout wartime Germany and the soon to vanish Austro-Hungarian empire. Mining these experiences Ernesta Bullit wrote a book, An Uncensored Diary from the Central Empires (1917). Buoyed by the exhilaration of being at the center of history-in-the-making, she had envisioned herself as a modern emancipated woman, her husband's partner and help-mate, but discovered soon enough, that he preferred a compliant, decorative and smiling hostess. The premature birth and death of their son in 1917, dealt a blow from which neither could recover their old regard, and in 1923 Billy and Ernesta Bullit had divorced.

 

 

 

1928: Dining Room by Eernesta Beaux at the Patterson estate, 'The Far Hills', Dayton, Ohio.

 

 

The year that Ernesta's divorce from William Bullitt was in the courts, she started renting an apartment in the former Stuyvesant Fish house on Grammercy Park,  the same building where Aunt Cecilia lived. Even at thirty-one, Ernesta was still her aunt' spet. Anxious for her impetuous and beautiful niece, Cecilia Beaux remarked  to her friend George Seymour that "She is too like me. I am worrying over her."

 

 

 

The Samuel Barlow Residence, 11 Grammercy Park.

 

 

She need not have worried. Divorce, all but unheard of in Ernesta's parents' time, was a commonplace occurrence by now, and her next husband would be divorced as well.  As 'Mrs. Dinker Bullit', embarking on a career as the in-house decorator of fashionable residential architect Harry Lindeberg, she did not lack for either invitations or admirers. Rockwell Kent, the celebrated graphic artist, was one lover during this period.  

 

 

 

 

 

Ca. 1935: Guests arriving in the ground floor hall for a musical at the Samuel Barlow residence, by incomparable illustrator  Pierre Brissaud. Trained at the Beaux Arts, Brissaud was the nephew of sophisticated painter Maurice Booutet de Monvel. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Houdon's busts of the  Marquis de Lafayette and Robert Fulton, the inventor, were the glory of the Barlow's Library. They were inherited from the composer's diplomat ancestor, Joel Barlow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A fine collection Chinese export porcelain was also prominently displayed in the Barlows' handsome green and crimson Library.  

 

 

Two years before Ernesta Bullit, who worked and eventually wrote as Ernesta Beaux, moved to 15 Gramercy Park, Samuel Latham Mitchell Barlow, in 1921, had bought the remodeled brownstone house next door, number 11. Four stories high, 26 x 106 feet, with a new basement entrance, it cost $65,000. Further alterations, including Louis XVI boisserie for the drawing room, cost more besides.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ca. 1935: The Samuel L. M. Barlow's Wednesday night musical, depicted by Pierre Brissauld for House & Garden. The Barlows' candle-lit musical evenings were a feature of the New York season. Lined with Louis XVI boiserie from a Normandy chateau, which retained its original paintwork, the Barlows' lofty Drawing Room was considered to be acoustically perfect.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Early American diplomat Joel Barlow, portrayed by Houdon.  

 

 

 

 

 

  

Blue Bristol glass on an orange table cloth, proclaim the originality of Ernesta Beaux!

 

 

Ernesta Dinker Bullit and Samuel L. M. Barlow wed in her aunt's apartment in 1929.  Revising number 11 into something far more elegant than just a repository of Barlow heirlooms, the couple soon established a salon, consisting of relished musicals interrupted by spirited conversation and smart suppers on Wednesday nights. The William Rhinlander Stewarts, the Kirk Askews, Burdens and Whitneys, all the finest families, came to the Barlows, but so did Paul Robeson, Leontyne Price and Joan Sutherland. An illustrious composer, writer and liberal activist, Barlow, like his predecessor, came from an old and distinguished family with lots of money. Here, however, similarities end.

 

 

 

 

Primarily Barlow's time was devoted to music. In addition to his opera "Mon Ami Pierrot", which earned him a decoration from the French Republic, he wrote another opera, a ballet, six orchestral works and more than a half-dozen pieces of chamber music. His oeuvre also included "Babar, the Little Elephant" which was performed in 1938 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. That same  year he also composed the incidental music for "Amphitryon", a Broadway musical starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ernesta Beaux's refinement at River House.

 

By now, working on her own, shortly after she remarried, in 1930 Ernesta Barlow received the most momentous decorating commission of her career, to appoint the lobby of River House and the rooms of the adjacent highly select River Club, at 52nd Street on the East River. Still regarded as one of New York's most sought-after addresses, River House preserves 'Ernesta Beaux'' quietly shimmerimg neo-Regency drawing room-like lobby intact.  Beaux' collaboration with South African muralist Jan Juta, who supplied eglomosie fantasy scenes of Mexico here, no doubt resulted from earlier work he had undertaken for her husband.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

So delighted was Samuel Barlow with his hilltop villa at Èze, that he presented the tiny village with its only public fountain outside of his door. For decades to come, it remained the hamlet's sole sorce of water without a hike down the 'hill'.

 

 

 

 

 

     

 Jan Juta provided fresco decorations throughout the Barlow retreat.

 

 

 

Before they met in the early 1920's while vacationing in the south of France, Samuel Barlow fell in love with a charming but desolate medieval village. Èze occupies a rocky promontory 1,400 feet (427 meters) above Cape Ferrat on the French Riviera. A clear day spent on the terraces of Èze reveals the peaks of Corsica to the south and virtually all the Riviera westward toward Toulon. Receiving permission to purchase a dozen crumbling masonry structures still clinging to the cliff’s side, over the next few years Barlow built a picturesque estate that merged into its romantic surroundings to became not only a family retreat but also an artistic shrine beckoning a steady stream of intellectual and creative pilgrims.

 

 

 

 

Ca. 1903: Painter Cecillia Beaux with two of her gay admirers on a leash outside her Glouchester summer house. 

 

 

Fond enough of France, the land of her mother's ancestors, Ernesta Beaux loved best the wind-swept New England coast at Gloucester, where, attended by an Italian man-servant and feted by a coterie of high-minded, fun-loving, artistic and intellectual 'bachelors', her painter-aunt summered at 'Green Alley'. Before inheriting Aunt Cecilia's beloved home, where in time her sister and a brother established summer places, Ernesta Beaux acquired her own 'farmhouse' hideaway nearby. Combining an inspired melange of Provencal European and early American furnishings, she devised perfectly edited spaces of considerable elan.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cecilla Beaux's Big Room at 'Green Alley', decorated by her niece Ernesta, featured rustic European antiques from Spain, Italy, France and England. Influenced by her aunt's friend and neighbor, the antiquarian-decorator Henry Davis Sleeper, she has introduced Colonial window shutters, used as screens on either side of the fireplace.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I926: A bedroom in Mrs. Dinker Bullit's South Ashfield, Massachucetts country house.

 

 

 

 

I926: A charming guest room at Mrs. Dinker Bullit's South Ashfield, Massachucetts country house boasts a spatter-dash floor.

 

Increasingly  well known on the national lecture circuit and as a writer commenting on social issues of the day, including, during the Depression, a piece outlining the need for upper class women to work, and  over the war years, others, calling for drafting women for national service, Ernesta Beaux was a woman of vision with dash and distinction.

 

 

I926: The needlepoint-coverd chair in a bedroom at Mrs. Dinker Bullit's South Ashfield, Massachucetts house, is one of a group that were later used in the Barlows' Library.



 

If the accomplishment of women, blacks or others who are marginalized is possible, notwithstanding prejudice, why mandate a Black or Women's History Month?  The two-part answer is simple enough. The difficulties overcome make these marks of achievement special occurences, occurrences against the odds, that might empower others with the possibility inherent in focused determination, teamed with talent and training. Moreover, the much broader productivity and unexploited excellence they suggest are available to us, powerfully demonstrate something of how much richer and fulfilled we will all be in America, once the day arrives when no one is any longer arbitrarily held back.