Monet in Chicago: Art, Life and After Life
Dale O'Connor
Visitors to the Art Institute can make a right turn from the main
Impressionist galleries and see a bigger than life portrait of
Bertha Palmer painted in 1893 during the Columbian Exposition by
the Swedish artist Anders Leonard Zorn. In a long white dress and
diamond tiara, holding a gavel like a magic wand, Bertha in this
picture may have inspired Frank Baum's idea of the good witch in
"The Wizard of Oz." Baum was from Chicago, too.
This was the public Bertha Palmer. In 1894 she wrote this to a
woman who was trying to raise funds for a Memorial Building that
would contain many of the exhibits in the Women's Building at the
Columbian Exposition.
Bertha Palmer: "I am positively unwilling to mortgage my whole
life to any cause and to take away from myself absolute freedom
to travel or to make use of my hours as seems good to me at any
time."
Potter had left his entire $8 million fortune to Bertha --
against the advice of his lawyer, who asked: "What if she marries
again." Said Potter: "If she does, he will need the money."
She was beautiful in her 50s and -- sometimes accompanied by her
niece, the Russian princess, and sometimes alone -- she was welcome
in the best international company, including playing bridge and
golf with Edward VII.
Back in Chicago in January 1910, she saw a small classified ad in
the real estate section of The Chicago Tribune. She asked her
father, who lived until 1916 -- well into his 90s -- to check it
out for her. A short time later Bertha, her father and her
favorite brother Adrian were in Sarasota, Florida, where she
purchased a couple of tracts of land, one of which is now a state
park. Bertha became a successful cattle rancher and exporter of
Florida grapefruit to the Midwest. She didn't run through the $8
million, as Marshall Field thought she would, when he told
Potter: "A million dollars is more than enough for any woman."
The Potter Palmer estate was worth $20 million when Bertha died
of breast cancer in 1918. She was 69 years old.
In her will, she left $100,000 worth of paintings to the Art
Institute of Chicago. It took until 1922 for the estate to be
settled, since no one in the U.S. Treasury Department or
elsewhere knew how the estate should be taxed. Potter had died
years before the income tax law was passed in 1913.
Bertha in those final years had figured out how to minimize the
tax bite, including turning over her entire inheritance from her
father's estate to her sister Ida. Her sons, Honore and Potter,
were feeling very generous. The Art Institute received 50
paintings from the Potter Palmer collection valued at $900,000 in
1922.
"...The Art Institute was delighted to receive it, especially since
they were allowed to choose the works themselves," Margo Hobbs,
graduate student at the School of the Art Institute, wrote in her
master's thesis in 1990. The title: "Bertha Palmer's Philanthropy
in the Arts."
Ida Honore Grant said that her sister's favorite paintings were
those that had a personal meaning for her. A painting that she
took with her as she traveled from her home to Chicago to her
apartments in London and Paris to her ranch in Florida was the
one by Renoir she called "Little Circus Girls." In that main
Impressionists gallery at the Art Institute, the painting is
called "Jugglers at the Circus Fernando." The painting is of
two young girls. The one on the right holding oranges looks like
the Bertha Palmer in an 1862 photograph, the 13-year-old girl who
captured a millionaire's heart.
And in Gallery 223 filled with Corot landscapes donated by Mr.
and Mrs. W. W. Kimball, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson, Mr. and Mrs.
Larned Coburn and Florence S. McCormick is one of Corot's much
rarer portraits. He didn't paint portraits on commission but for
his own artistic pleasure and didn't allow them to be exhibited
until after his death in 1875.
Bertha called her Corot painting of a thinking woman "Reverie."
The official title is "Interrupted Reading."
The Art Institute has such a high opinion of this painting that
it is on the map of the galleries. But after visiting the Art
Institute for three decades, I just discovered this painting when
-- after seeing the Monet retrospective -- I wanted to check out
all of the other paintings at the Art Institute donated by the
Potter Palmers.
Just yesterday two women looking at the Corot portrait said that
they agreed with me that the model could be Bertha Palmer in her
20s. It probably isn't, but I think that for Bertha looking at
the painting was like looking in the mirror.
It reminds viewers of Rodin's sculpture, "The Thinker." By the
way, Bertha Palmer was sculpted by Rodin -- in marble -- and no
one in Chicago seems to know about it. I saw the bust on a 1981
visit to the Rodin museum in Paris.
The woman who wrote this 1892 letter to Mary Fairchild MacMonnies
(Mrs. MacMonnies and Mary Cassatt did the murals for the Woman's
Building at the Columbian Exposition) wasn't ready to show what
Rodin had been so impressed by doing her bust.
"...I am very much pleased with the photograph which you so
kindly sent...It carries quite a suggestion of Puvis, and I can fancy
an approach to his delightful grays and blues in the coloring...The
only point about which I would make a suggestion, would be the
draperies. You know we have an infinite number of people taking
the standpoint of the 'British Matron' and that art of any kind
is so new to our country west of the Mississippi River that even
semi-nudity attracts much more comment than it would in art centers
like Paris..."
Between the main Impressionists Gallery at the Art Institute and
the large gallery (222)with the Palmers' Millets and Delacroix
paintings and English masterpieces collected by their friends, the
W. W. Kimballs, there is a painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
that does look like the sculptures and murals from the Columbian
Exposition. Puvis worked on "The Sacred Grove Beloved of the
Arts and Muses" for five years from 1884 to 1889.
The focal point of the painting is a Greek temple by a lake.
Angels provide the music. An easel is on the grass in front of
one of the semi-draped goddesses.
Art, life and after life. The Palmers recreated the temple by
the lake for their resting place, Graceland Cemetery. It's about a
mile from the entrance to Graceland Cemetery at Clark and Irving
Park. Arrive well before 4:30 p.m. and drive right to the Palmer
Temple. Or take the No. 22 Clark Street bus and walk through the
most peaceful place in Chicago, which should be especially
photogenic as the many trees take on autumn colors.
Across from the Palmer Temple is the Honore memorial reminiscent
of French cloisters. And close by also is an even larger Greek
temple constructed by Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball. Daniel Hudson
Burnham, father of The Chicago Plan which opened up Chicago's
akefront to public enjoyment, is buried on a wooded island just
to the north of the Palmer Temple. His monument is a large pink
granite boulder uncarved with a brass plate. There is no epitaph.
There is no epitaph either at the Palmer Temple. I like the words
that Bertha Palmer spoke on Oct. 21, 1892, at the Columbian
Exposition dedication ceremony. That was Oct. 21 and not the
12th, because of the unprecedented scope of the undertaking which also
delayed the fair itself until the summer of 1893.
And Bertha Palmer said more than a century ago --
"Even more important than the discovery of Columbus, which we are
gathered together to celebrate, is the fact that the general
government has just discovered women."
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