>> This was not a painting that was dashed off in a few strokes.
This was a painting that he spent an incredible amount of time, effort, and love in making.
>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen-- coming up on Open Studio, we span a trove of turn-of-the-century artists, including John Singer Sargent and his longtime African-American model.
Then, the world according to writer Henry James.
>> He and others in that, that orbit understood that artistic expression could come out in music, it could come out in dance, it could come out on the page.
And, in fact, he ends up really painting with words.
>> BOWEN: Plus James McNeill Whistler and his mother.
>> Because of her very conservative religious appearance, she was able to act as an anchor for him in this very sort of eccentric way that he led his life.
>> BOWEN: And at home with novelist Edith Wharton.
>> Edith Wharton had always done her best work writing in bed.
That was where the creative genius inspired her.
And so I think in building The Mount, she created a space where she could have the privacy she needed to get her best work done.
>> BOWEN: It's all now on Open Studio.
♪ ♪ Welcome to this special edition of the show.
We're taking a look at a group of artists who are friends, frenemies, or just traveled in the same circles at the turn of the century.
We begin with a look at painter John Singer Sargent.
And, to toot our own horn for a moment, we recently won an Edward R. Murrow Award for piece we aired in 2020 about Sargent and Thomas McKeller, his longtime African-American model.
The upper reaches of the Museum of Fine Arts rotunda is where the gods and goddesses live.
They stand in radiant glory, they ride chariots, and they soar on feathered wings.
They are white and idealized, but they... are him.
>> The man in these drawings was clearly Black, and I thought, "What's going on here?
"Who is this man?
Has anyone figured out who he is?"
>> BOWEN: These murals and figures have hovered over the MFA for roughly a century since they were conceived by painter John Singer Sargent in 1916.
But it's only now that there's been a comprehensive look at Thomas McKeller, the Black model behind the murals.
It's all thanks to an accidental discovery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by collection curator Nathaniel Silver.
>> In 2017, I was in our storage facility looking for another work of art, and I opened the wrong cabinet, and... And happened to find this portfolio-- it was huge.
And I thought, "What's that?"
So I pulled it out, and I had a look through it.
And I had never seen these Sargent drawings before.
>> BOWEN: That find has led to Boston's Apollo, an exhibition examining the relationship between Sargent and McKeller, who was the painter's principal model for the MFA murals-- an artistic relationship lasting eight years.
>> It wasn't that just anyone could have helped Sargent get to this point.
It was Thomas McKeller specifically that allowed Sargent to unlock a creative potential that had not been tapped before.
>> BOWEN: Sargent was a celebrity painter, and tired of doing the portraiture that was his bread and butter when he received the MFA commission.
There are no known pictures of Thomas McKeller, who was a 26-year-old bellman when he met Sargent at Boston's posh Hotel Vendome.
>> He was a veteran, a Roxbury resident.
He came from Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1890s, in the wake of devastating racial violence.
So certainly, coming to Boston meant the opening up of professional opportunities that he never would have been able to explore in Wilmington.
>> BOWEN: In these charcoal sketches Sargent ultimately gave to his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, we find the artist drawing the fine contours and musculature of McKeller, a sometime contortionist turned stand-in for mythological gods.
>> There were specific skills that a model needed to have.
You needed to be able to hold difficult poses for very long periods of time.
But you also had to be able to work with somebody who was constantly moving you around.
>> BOWEN: There is little known about the extent of the relationship between the two men, but consider this Sargent painting of McKeller.
It's Sargent's only major nude and was hung prominently in his studio, never intended for public view.
>> Sargent lavished attention in making this work.
You can see it in the highlights on the shoulders and on the chest here.
This incredible tiny little shadow just over the Adam's apple, and another one just under the bottom lip.
This was not a painting that was dashed off in a few strokes.
This was a painting that he spent an incredible amount of time, effort, and love in making.
>> The first thing I saw was all the drawings together, and so that impact, that first and initial impact on my eyes and on my senses and... That got me so excited!
>> BOWEN: Performance artist Helga Davis is a visiting curator who directed this short film, in which the last of McKeller's direct descendants literally comes face-to-face with his legacy.
>> The posing of my great-uncle for these sketches was... really a means of survival for him.
>> He had many jobs, but... the modeling feels like his work, his life's work.
>> BOWEN: Sargent was paid $40,000 for the murals, a tremendous sum in 1916.
McKeller, as this letter reveals, was cash-strapped, and for his modeling made just a few dollars a day.
>> He had this life that, that put him in a uniform, that put him in a box.
That perhaps people would see him and they identified him as one thing.
And we are never only one thing.
And he certainly was not one thing.
>> BOWEN: McKeller was also the model for Sargent's murals at Harvard University and for the body of onetime Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who had expelled Black students from freshman dorms.
He also stood for this statue of Massasoit in Plymouth.
But with the exception of census and military records, Thomas McKeller has been erased from this story.
>> How could we possibly forget somebody who was so pivotal, who played so pivotal a role in the production of Boston's public art?
That's a question that revolves around blind spots in the discipline of art history, of history, and of society in general.
>> BOWEN: The Gardner is confronting history here, calling out the erasure of a Black man by a white artist a century ago and what that looks like today, when there is finally a reclamation.
What do you see when you look up at those murals at the Museum of Fine Arts?
>> I see yes, and...
Yes.
You, you made Apollo, you made... You made these things, and... here's the body that inspired it.
Here's the body that really made it.
♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: We'll stay at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum now for a story we first reported in 2017 about John Singer Sargent's good friend, the writer Henry James, who committed his life to the page, but as fiction-ish.
This is the famed author Henry James, painted on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
The artist is his friend John Singer Sargent, one man looking at another after decades of friendship.
>> They were very close.
They were, in some ways, a mirror image of each other.
They're sort of rootless, in a way.
Extensive travelers across Europe.
>> BOWEN: Such was the life of Henry James, wandering the world with a tightknit artists' circle that included Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Art was in his blood and was the lifeblood of his writing, says curator Declan Kiely.
>> One of his earliest forms of writing was both criticizing fiction and also criticizing art.
He sort of did one with the left and one with the right hand.
And he remained an art critic for many years.
>> BOWEN: At this early age, when James was painted by his friend John La Farge, he'd hoped to become an artist himself.
But he soon became aware enough to realize he didn't have the skill, says Gardner Museum curator Christina Nielsen.
>> He and others in that orbit understood that artistic expression could come out in music, it could come out in dance, it could come out on the page.
And, in fact, he ends up really painting, with words.
>> BOWEN: His words, in novels like The Golden Bowl, did in prose what friends like Sargent were doing on the canvas.
>> He describes, in great, lengthy, parenthetical phrases, people in their environment or sort of deep psychological states.
And so he would look at us, and he would say, "Jared sat on the seat across from Christina, "the Persian rug before them.
A million flowers, and books were strewn on the table..." And, you know, he would...
He wouldn't just say we were having a conversation.
>> BOWEN: Ever the traveler, the New York-born James was a fixture in Whistler's fogged-in London and in Sargent's sun-kissed Venice.
>> James and Gardner and others would meet with people, whether it was in Boston, or London, or Venice, or Rome, for breakfasts.
Apparently Whistler was a very good maker of breakfasts.
The buckwheat pancakes were terrific, according to James.
But they would meet in each other's studios, in each other's homes.
They would meet in salons and have sort of grand parties or more intimate gatherings, clearly challenging and inspiring each other.
>> BOWEN: So much so that James' friends would often appear in his novels as thinly disguised characters.
>> Artists like Whistler crop up in later novels.
The Ambassadors, Whistler is sort of transmuted into Gloriani, the sculptor.
And both artists, their studios, and galleries are very important places in James' fiction.
>> BOWEN: James was a frequent guest at this Venetian palazzo rented by Isabella Stewart Gardner, painted by Sargent, and documented by Gardner herself with snapshots in her scrapbook.
Theirs was a friendship that deepened dramatically over more than 30 years and countless letters.
>> They grow deeply affectionate and passionate.
He goes from, "My very dear Mrs. Gardner," to, "Donna Isabella, I am picturing you lying on a chaise in Venice in a green gauzy gown."
He describes the green, and he distinguishes it from pea green, which is a very different green.
So even in his letters, he's writing like in his novels.
>> BOWEN: In her own palazzo, now the Gardner Museum, Isabella memorialized James, as she did with many writers, in her Blue Room.
>> She's showing how close she is to him and really revering him by keeping his letters and first editions that he gave to her and signed with his hand, and then clipping out little pictures of him from the newspaper and putting them in tiny little frames, almost like a teenage girl would do.
It's really sweet.
>> BOWEN: Here, the curtain is pulled back on an illustrious turn-of-the-19th-century moment, when Henry James and company poked and prodded one another.
They journeyed and jockeyed, and they recognized a spirit in themselves that would outlast them all.
♪ ♪ As we just heard, artist James McNeill Whistler was also a fixture in the London art circle populated by Henry James and John Singer Sargent, and London is where he painted what's become his most famous work.
We saw Whistler's Mother up close and personal at the Clark Art Institute in 2015.
She sits serenely, if not sternly, an older woman dressed in mourning clothes, staring into a room equally devoid of color.
She is Whistler's Mother, a painting much beloved... and bastardized.
But roiling with artistic furor.
>> He saw it not only as an artistic breakthrough, but it was, of course, a portrait of his mother with whom he was very close.
>> BOWEN: By the time James McNeill Whistler painted his mother in their London flat in 1871, the artist was already the darling of an artistic circle that included Oscar Wilde, Degas and Rodin, a long way from his birth in Lowell, Massachusetts.
A prolific portrait painter, he was long on ego and eccentricity.
>> He had this white lock of hair.
He had a very bad temper a lot of the time.
So he was known to have sued people.
>> BOWEN: Jay Clarke is the curator of Whistler's Mother at the Clark Art Institute.
Landing the painting is a coup for the museum situated in the Berkshire Hills of Williamstown.
It normally resides at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and rarely travels abroad.
Here the Clark explores how the picture came to be.
The 67-year-old Anna McNeill Whistler, Clarke says, was as she appears, which was the antithesis of her son.
>> Because of her very conservative, religious appearance, she was able to act as an anchor for him in this very sort of eccentric way that he led his life.
>> BOWEN: Anna Whistler championed her son's artistic career just as an agent would.
She loomed large in his life, even taking precedence over this voluptuous vision Whistler once captured.
>> He had a beautiful redheaded girlfriend named Joanne Heffernan, who was one of his models.
And he kicked her out promptly before his mother arrived.
That part of his life was certainly not something he discussed with his mother.
>> BOWEN: This marked the first time Whistler ever painted his mother, and it was spur of the moment.
>> As the story goes, his model did not show up for the day.
And so he said, "Mother, will you stand for my portrait?"
So she started out standing, but then after two days, she became tired and he changed the arrangement so she could be sitting down and more comfortable.
>> BOWEN: The piece's formal title is, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No.
1, and it was a direct move by Whistler to depart from his previous work, to be bold and radical.
It was not, he said, a portrait.
>> When it was first shown in London the year after it was painted, in 1872, people marveled at the emptiness of it.
What was popular in painting at the time was a lot of detail, subject matter, narrative.
And the art critics said things like, "Why didn't you paint your mother when she was alive?"
>> BOWEN: The less catty critics were also struck by Whistler's technique.
He was inspired by the noir-ish River Thames just outside his studio walls, a subject he returned to again and again.
>> One of the things that interested him at this time, the idea of a sort of hazy reflection on water.
He was trying that for the very first time in this painting, this idea of a sort of hazy, symbolic light.
There's one quote that people described it as, "like breath on glass."
>> BOWEN: Whistler loved the portrait.
His mother, we're not so sure.
He refused to part with it until bankruptcy forced its sale to the French government 20 years later.
The painting gained fame in America decades after that, when it toured the country during the Great Depression.
>> And that's really when it became an icon of motherhood, of solace and safety and security-- the mother.
After the stock market crash, the breadlines, it was a very difficult time in America.
>> BOWEN: Today the painting has all the appreciation Whistler wished for and the satire he'd despise.
Whistler's mother is an icon and a shill, a touchstone for all that is sacred and profane.
She is an arrangement in grey and a study in the power of painting.
♪ ♪ It wasn't totally a boys' club at the turn of the century, so we turn now to author Edith Wharton.
She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
It was for The Age of Innocence, and awarded 100 years ago this year.
Although an acclaimed novelist, she much preferred designing homes and gardens, where she would entertain friends like Henry James, as we discovered in a visit to her estate in 2013.
If ever a house could serve as an autobiography, The Mount is it.
The home of novelist Edith Wharton, it is Edith Wharton.
Situated on a hill overlooking a lake in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Mount was conceived by the writer from the ground up.
She dreamed its location, guided its aesthetic principles, and designed her elaborate gardens.
It was in a sense, her own House of Mirth, which she wrote while living here.
>> This house was an opportunity for her to really do things the way she thought they ought to be done, and that was to really champion a return of classicism, symmetry, balance, proportion, lots of light, and really opening up spaces, and to make them livable.
>> BOWEN: We spoke with The Mount's Kelsey Mullen in Wharton's drawing room.
The house's largest room when it was built in 1902, she used it to entertain frequent guests like fellow writer Henry James.
>> They were very, very good friends, and she matched him in literary skill, I think, towards the end.
>> BOWEN: Wharton designed her home practically-- no space went unused.
It was large, but not grand.
And it favored her predilection for privacy.
Despite carefully crafted images of Wharton as a writer staged in her library, she actually wrote elsewhere.
>> Edith Wharton had always done her best work writing in bed.
That was where the creative genius inspired her.
And so I think in building The Mount, she created a space where she could have the privacy she needed to get her best work done.
>> BOWEN: She did love her library, though, and a full two-thirds of her collection has been returned to The Mount.
What does her library tell us about her?
>> It's been a remarkable window into Edith Wharton's intellectual life.
She was reading across genres, really a voracious learner.
And she was reading in five different languages, sometimes ancient Norse when she was feeling up for a challenge.
She was reading books on astronomy and theology.
>> BOWEN: Her books are riddled with marks, notations, and destruction.
Dismayed with one publisher's choice to feature illustrations in one of her books, she found a remedy.
>> In her own copy of The House of Mirth, you can see on the title page she has crossed out the name of the illustrator in pencil, and then all of the illustrations have been razored out of the book.
>> BOWEN: Amazingly, Wharton considered herself a better landscape gardener than novelist.
Although that's slightly less astonishing when you see her gardens, which, fully recreated, appear as Wharton saw them.
>> She built the garden in stages as she was receiving advances from her books.
And it was during that time that she's taking these European ideas and placing them in an American context, and fitting together a French garden with an Italian garden and an English lime walk all on the shores of a Massachusetts lake.
>> BOWEN: All of this is a welcome second chapter to The Mount's history.
Threatened with foreclosure just five years ago, the home has managed to climb out of its fiscal abyss, says executive director Susan Wissler.
>> We've cut our debt from almost nine million down to less than four.
We are $1.5 million in the black as opposed to $4 million in the red.
And our programming is robust.
>> BOWEN: A footing regained, today The Mount is positioning itself as the Berkshires' literary hub, drawing the attention of writers the world over.
Its champions also include former First Lady Laura Bush, whose most recent visit was days before ours.
>> People read Wharton and realize that, in fact, while a lot has changed, a lot is still very much the same.
And she just is so clean and muscular in the way that she sort of expresses it and observes it that her writing is as relevant today than it ever was.
>> BOWEN: Meaning this is Edith Wharton's renewed Age of Resonance.
♪ ♪ Moving a little bit further into the 20th century, the Crane family built an equally glamorous home in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Like a cross between Downton Abbey and Wayne Manor, the Crane estate was the epitome of no expense spared, as we found in 2017 during a summer getaway.
On the outer reaches of the coastal town Ipswich is the house on the hill.
With 59 rooms and 30,000 square feet, it was designed to bring the best of English country living to craggy New England.
>> They pulled in a dream team of architects, landscape architects, and artists to help build what was really a saltwater farm on a drumlin into this great country place or estate.
>> BOWEN: They were the Cranes-- a Chicago family in the era of the Vanderbilts and Fricks-- who amassed a fortune in the plumbing business.
They built their home here in the late 1920s as a summer getaway.
Well, Susan, this isn't ugly.
(laughing) >> It's sublime.
In fact, we have a supporter who says people should come straight from Logan Airport right up to Castle Hill because this view is just magnificent.
>> BOWEN: Susan Hill Dolan is the property's curator, who has spent much of her career here restoring the home to its roaring heyday.
A model of English living, its interiors were imported directly from two English homes.
>> Industrialists and a lot of museums like the MFA and the Met were buying these antique rooms from English country houses that were being razed after the war, and so, it was this combination of looking like an ancestral home, but also with club chairs and these state-of-the-art, Art Deco bathrooms.
>> BOWEN: Of course, a plumbing magnate's bathrooms had to be flush with the most glamorous accents.
All in a home in which the family portraits came from the most sought-after artists, with Anders Zorn painting Mr. Crane and John Singer Sargent sketching Mrs. Crane.
>> There's a magnificent beauty here, whether it's the cultural, the architecture, the landscape architecture, the sculpture that was here.
>> BOWEN: For all of the house beautiful, this is the reason to come and never leave.
By very deliberate design, the Cranes crafted this Grand Allee, a half-mile promenade that rolls from the home's steps all the way out to the sea.
Expansive and enticing on the ground, overhead, it's a rippling green ribbon of another place, another time.
>> You're immediately drawn to it.
The scale and grandeur of it is quite remarkable and more along the traditions of European models.
>> BOWEN: These gentlemen look like they're having a good time.
>> Yes, that's right-- so this is Bacchus, who was the spirit of winemaking and debauchery.
So I think that's sort of an indication of the use of this place, to come down here and have fun sort of away from the house in a way, in a place that would be appropriate.
>> BOWEN: Or inappropriate, as that may be.
>> (laughing): That's right.
>> BOWEN: How long did it take the Cranes to build this space?
>> It took almost three years.
>> BOWEN: Bob Murray has overseen the ongoing restoration of the landscape, a seven-year, $2.5 million investment by The Trustees of Reservations, which operates the property.
Most recently this space, the casino-- Italian for "little house"-- has been made as it was.
>> Just recently, we completed the courtyard space that captures all those Italian design principles, sort of an enclosed garden space, with the central water feature, which was a saltwater pool at that time.
You know, strong architectural details, a lot of decorative elements and then a lot of use of greenery and topiaries and so forth.
>> BOWEN: Adding to the landscape this fall is a new installation by artist Alicja Kwade, fresh off rave reviews for her work at the Venice Biennale.
>> I will build it up in concrete walls and so I will create, like, in all this nature, I will create a very formal, you know, strong and straight thing.
>> BOWEN: When it's installed in September, Kwade's piece will be situated on the site of the estate's former maze.
Like a maze, her creation is an assemblage of spaces offering only little glimpses of nature.
Here they'll play with our senses and notions of what we're actually seeing.
>> It's more, like, about this question of what reality is and what information about reality is.
Because we are getting more and more in a world just made of information and no matter, and so we are forced to believe things or to deny things or to question things because they will just appear as an information to us.
>> BOWEN: Indisputable, though, is the nourishment of nature here, from a home that settles satisfyingly into its surroundings.
♪ ♪ And that is all for this edition of Open Studio and our turn-of-the-century tour.
I'’’m Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.
As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio and you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter, @OpenStudioGBH.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪