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"Striking in its promise"
The Artistic Career of Sarah Gooll Putnam

ERIN L. PIPKIN


WHEN MRS. EDNAH D. CHENEY surveyed Boston's social climate in 1880 she wrote: "Surely never before to women were nobler opportunities open than those which the near future promises." She filled her chapter on "The Women of Boston," published in Justin Winsor's four-volume The Memorial History of Boston, with praise for the "strong and recognizable type of Boston women whose characteristics are clear," from her "physical frame delicate and supple, but enduring," to her intellectualism and "gentle purity." Modern Bostonian women, she wrote, especially those who lived a "single life," faced new, unprecedented opportunities. Cheney, a Boston writer, reformer, and philanthropist, assured her readers that, should she want to, a Boston woman of the late nineteenth century could earn her own living "by labor of any kind, if she be honest, intelligent, and pure in her life, without losing the respect or the companionship of the most refined and respected."1 1
      If Sarah (Sally) Gooll Putnam (1851–1912) had read Winsor's Memorial History of Boston, Cheney's article would have captured her interest.2 Twenty-nine years old, unmarried, and a member of Boston's social elite in 1880, Putnam stood on the brink of a successful professional career as a portraitist. Although largely unknown today, Putnam deserves our attention not only because she was a talented artist, but because of the new perspective she gives us on gender roles and art in late-nineenth-century Boston. Putnam studied with the first class of students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1877, and associated with a group of pioneering female artists remarkable enough to attract the notice of the press in Boston and in more distant cities. William Brownell, a critic for the New York-based Scribner's Monthly magazine, described these Bostonians as a "coterie of women artists, whose work has already gained some distinction and is still more striking in its promise." By 1880, she was drawing commissioned crayon portraits of friends and family (fig. 1) and had contributed a self-portrait in oil to the November "Living American Artists" exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. Her first commissioned oil portrait (1883) would lead to more than a decade's worth of patronage from members of Boston's high society. She publicized her work in solo shows at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery (1895), Doll & Richards (1898), and the Charles E. Cobb Galleries (1904, 1908). By the end of her career she had showcased her paintings in group exhibitions at venues such as the St. Botolph Club and the Museum of Fine Arts. Her portrait of Bessie Hooper was accepted into the Exhibition of Massachusetts Art in the Mechanics Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This exhibition also included work by American Impressionists from the Boston School such as Frank Weston Benson, Ellen Day Hale, William Paxton, Lilla Cabot Perry, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Joseph DeCamp.3 2

 
Figure 1
    FIGURE 1.
    Mrs. Chester Inches, #9. Photograph of 1887 crayon sketch. Sarah Gooll Putnam diaries, volume 28. All subsequent figures are from this same collection and will be cited by volume only.

    All artwork except photographs by Sarah Gooll Putnam.
 
 
      Putnam benefited immensely from what Cheney called the "respect [and] the companionship" of Boston's high society. Born in 1851 to John Pickering Putnam (1813–1867) and Harriet Upham Putnam (1820–1905), she was one of a growing number of well-to-do Boston women who, according to many, came to dominate Boston high culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her father, an attorney who owned a house in Boston and a farm in Andover, also served as the treasurer of the famed Pemberton Mills Company in Lawrence. Her maternal grandfather, Phineas Upham, had been president of the old Boston Bank, and her paternal grandfather, Hon. Samuel Putnam, served as a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court beginning in 1814. Her extended family tree held a stunning array of revered Bostonian surnames such as Cabot, Peabody, Lawrence, Loring, Lyman, and Lowell. As an adult, Sarah vacationed at her mother's summer home in Nahant, Massachusetts, and spent part of many summers at "Beede's," an old hotel and farmhouse in the Adirondacks jointly owned by the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James, Henry P. Bowditch (dean of Harvard Medical School), and her cousins Charles and James Putnam.4 In 1882, her name appeared along with those of William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other invitees "eminent in letters, art, science, statesmanship, and philanthropy" as guests at a "Birthday Garden Party to Harriet Beecher Stowe" in a special supplement to the Atlantic Monthly.5 3
      From an early age, Putnam had a marked aptitude and appetite for art. By supplementing the written narrative of her twenty-eight-volume diary with lively sketches and attaching items in multiple media to its pages, she produced a remarkably vivid record of her life and career. Her diary offers a unique opportunity to enjoy her youthful skills and trace how her development as an artist fit into the culture of late-nineteenth-century Boston. Leisure-class women's professionalism was a concept new enough to require delicate handling in the most traditional circles of a city as tradition-bound as Boston. Although popular attitudes about gender threatened to hinder her career, she adroitly used her social standing to overcome such prejudices. Putnam protected her social standing and achieved professional success by carefully maintaining, not flouting, social rituals, even using them to advance her career as a portraitist. She created an identity for herself outside the artistic roles traditionally available to women, skillfully exploiting the line between amateur art, already considered acceptable for women to practice, and professional art, a genre still mostly reserved for men.6 4

 
Figure 2
    FIGURE 2.
    Self-portrait in crayon, Sarah Gooll Putnam (#4). Putnam contributed a self-portrait in oil to the November 1880 "Living American Artists" exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The current location of Putnam's oil self-portrait is unknown. Photograph of 1879 crayon sketch. Volume 28.
 
 
On the pages preceding her first entry in her diary, Sally's mother, Harriet Upham Putnam, inserted a four-page note in her own hand. She recorded the time and place of Sally's birth, her birth weight, the date of her first steps, her early schooling, the dates and details of her early illnesses and vaccinations, and "all the accidents of any consequence which befell her." Putnam's mother also commented on her daughter's moral character, disposition, and ambitions. She described Sarah as an "affectionate generous child, and honest as the sun." She "was very happy always, and amused herself—a great part of her time was spent in imagining herself a horse, and prancing around the shrubbery—and in trying to be an Artist." Apparently, Harriet Putnam understood that her daughter's interest in drawing and painting surpassed a simple desire for polite dabbling. Sarah not only wanted to do artwork but to be an artist. This sort of ambition, which Putnam's mother discovered in her nine-year-old daughter, was uncommon and difficult to fulfill in mid-nineteenth-century America.7 5
      The traditional European art education that for generations had prepared young men for careers in the fine arts did not become available to male or female American artists on their own soil until the nineteenth century. Americans in the early republic, John Adams among them, believed the study of art was a luxury they could not afford as they struggled to form a new government for their country. This sentiment, along with the existence of only a relatively small upper class with limited resources, left little opportunity for patronage for early American artists who wished to paint historical or religious scenes, the most respected forms of artistic expression according to traditional academic standards. Early American artists also lacked the rigorous training available to students in European art academies, which dictated a rigidly constructed curriculum in drawing. This curriculum required that students begin with simple drawing classes, progress to drawing the shapes of plaster casts, and then proceed through antique sculptures, nude models, and in some cases, cadavers in anatomy classes. Students in European academies completed each step before choosing a specialization. American-born artists could study abroad, but if they wished to return and work in America, their labors would be largely confined to the genre of portraiture. The best American painters, such as native Bostonian John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), left home to study and work abroad.8 6
      Although the first American art academy, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, opened in 1806, it did not accept female students for thirty-eight years. The academy began to offer sexually segregated drawing classes in 1844, but it did not provide women with the crucial nude life drawing classes for another quarter of a century. Nonetheless, American women's opportunities for artistic training proved far superior to the opportunities available to women in Europe. The Royal Academy in London, for instance, did not open its life classes to women until 1893.9 7
      Boston had no art academy until 1877, when the Boston Museum of Fine Arts opened its school; aspiring female artists enrolled that first year. However, many of the women in what William Brownell would call the city's "coterie of women artists," such as Elizabeth H. Bartol, Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, Ellen Day Hale, Helen Mary Knowlton, Annette Perkins Rogers, and Sarah Wyman Whitman, had embarked on their training as early as 1870, when popular artist William Morris Hunt (1824–1879) began offering a private art course for women.10 In his classes, according to one of his students, women were "criticized as roughly, made to work as strenuously, praised as frankly, as men."11 Hunt taught for three seasons between 1868 and 1869, after which one of his leading pupils, Helen Mary Knowlton, took over the classes. From that point until about 1875, Hunt frequently visited the studio and served as an advisor to Knowlton's students.12 8
      Before she attended her first classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Putnam studied in several private sketching classes, including Knowlton's. She also took lessons from George Chickering Munzig (1859–1908), a Boston-born artist who specialized in crayon portraits, and she participated in a "sketching class" organized by Louisa Crowninshield Bacon. This class consisted of about six artists who met in the evenings, worked together, and dined on simple suppers of bread, cheese, and lager beer. In April 1877, Putnam gained admission to the school of the Museum of Fine Arts. By the time she arrived at the museum school she was selling her crayon portraits to friends and family, charging $25.00 each for them. She confided to her sister Mary in a letter of January 16, 1877, that "I shall not ask any one, any more than that, until my name is very celebrated!" This statement reveals both Putnam's ambition to be known publicly for her artwork and her lingering lack of confidence in her credentials as a professional artist. It was not until fall of 1880 that she began accepting $50.00 payments for her crayon works.13 9
      Sarah stood out from a young age as a talented and driven artist. She must have taken pleasure in the art classes common to the education of most young ladies of her social class. Although Putnam's diary gives little information about her early education, histories of women's education indicate that the curriculums of the schools Putnam attended probably included instruction in drawing and painting. She probably also received lessons from a private tutor. Sarah and her sisters likely received similar if not identical artistic training, despite differences in their talent or ambition, following the customs of mid-nineteenth-century elite circles. This training seems to have resulted in some artistic enthusiasm on the part of all three Putnam daughters. Sarah's maternal grandmother, Mary Avery Upham (1790–1872), recorded in her diary receiving "a very pretty painting" from Sarah's sister Harriet.14 The girls took turns painting each other, as shown in the sketch Sarah did of herself posing for an oil painting by her sister Mary (fig. 3). However, the training Sarah and her sisters received was not intended to prepare them for serious artistic careers. 10

 
Figure 3
    FIGURE 3.
    "Mary made a picture of me in oil colors." Pen and ink sketch. May 17, 1862. Volume 28.
 
 
      Young girls of Putnam's economic class in the 1860s often learned to draw and paint for the same reasons that they learned to play musical instruments or to embroider. The careful cultivation of a woman's artistic skills enabled her to add to the general ambience of her home and entertain her family, thereby making her more attractive to potential husbands. The mother of young Berthe Morisot, a future French impressionist, explained to her daughter that art lessons could help her to make her place in bourgeoisie society: "You'll see later how glad you'll be to give pleasure to others and some moments to yourself." This pleasure which Morisot referred to was private, unpaid pleasure only. Amateur work was seldom created with public display or financial profit in mind.15 11
      In their amateur art, young ladies concentrated on the production of small-scale pencil, pen-and-ink, or watercolor sketches that they could exchange with friends or give as gifts, hang inside the family home, or keep in sketchbooks or in diaries as Putnam did. They typically used a linear artistic style and focused on real rather than imaginary subjects. Female amateur artists primarily confined their work to a few subject matters, almost all of which Putnam included even in her early sketches. Putnam, like countless other women, drew portraits of her family and friends, interior and outdoor scenes of family life, and landscape scenes that highlighted trips abroad or time spent at family vacation spots (plates 2–7). 12
      Examples of pieces appropriate for the female amateur fill Putnam's diaries. The carefully detailed 1863 sketch of herself at age twelve posing for her sister Mary is typical (fig. 3). An intimate, indoor domestic scene, it features finely detailed patterns on the furniture, wallpaper, and clothing. Putnam took care to include each item that appeared on her chest of drawers, the buttons on her and Mary's dresses, the laces on her shoes, and even the landscape visible through the window behind her. A sketch from her first journal volume shows the family at dinner with a guest, a "Mr Ladd." Putnam paid special attention to the layout of the interior, drew separate prongs for each fork, food on each plate, and took pains to vary the positions of each person seated at the table. The care with which Putnam drew each family member's position in relation to the others reveals the importance of interpersonal relationships, especially family relationships, in amateur work.16 13
      Women's amateur artwork suited their familial duties, just as the genre's subject matter corresponded directly to their roles as sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers. The small scale and portability of amateur work allowed the artist to paint while chatting with friends, watching children, or caring for ill relatives. A 1901 photograph of Putnam at the family's summer house in the elite resort town of Nahant, Massachusetts, reveals that she could even put the finishing details on larger paintings while entertaining friends or family (fig. 4). 14

 
Figure 4
    FIGURE 4.
    "Mother, Mary & I, on our piazza at Nahant. Summer of '1901' Photographed by Harold B. Hayden." Volume 23 (frontispiece).
 
 
      The compatability of amateur work with family duties was alluring to Putnam. Although she received her first oil portrait commission in 1883, she decided to devote her summer to painting flowers, a conventionally amateur subject matter, "as I could be more with the family while doing this kind of work." A single woman dependent on her family for emotional and financial support, Putnam was liberated from the full-time demands of marriage and motherhood but also obligated to arrange her supposedly free schedule around the needs of her parents, siblings, and the large social network that overlapped with her extended family. Aside from her familial duties, Putnam taught Sunday school classes, took music lessons, belonged to a sewing circle, and attended numerous dinners, luncheons, meetings, and lectures. Putnam eagerly pursued her coursework at the museum school, but other demands on her time remained. Her diary entry for October 29, 1884, includes a typical expression of frustration: "I began going to an afternoon sketch class at the Art Museum, which met six afternoons a fortnight. But I only kept it up for a week, or two, as I had work in my own studio & elsewhere, to finish." Another entry from the same month provides a better insight into the household and social pressures that caused her to quit her classes: "I took a singing lesson of Miss Bingham, but I only kept it up a very little while (6 lessons) as I found that my painting and home chores and calls and going out in the evening took up my strength." Putnam might have chosen to incorporate competing personal and professional obligations more smoothly into her life by confining herself to the world of amateur sketching. Instead, she actively pursued a professional career based on academic training, even as she continued to do amateur work in social settings.17 15
      Putnam's decision to continue producing amateur art as well as professional art pulled her in opposite directions. Her professional work complicated her schedule and kept her away from home. Her association with amateurism, though more compatible with her household duties, proved a detriment to her professional art career. Critics and art professors disparaged the amateur artistic experience upon which their female students based their confidence. Either they dismissed women's talent as part of a presumably inferior tradition or they advised young ladies to separate themselves as much as possible from amateurism. In 1882, French art critic Charles Bigot warned members of women's painting organizations: "Beware of amateurs, ladies, beware of nice young women who send you a drawing or a watercolor they would have done better to leave in the boarding-school parlor; beware of society women who think they are painters because they're bored and they bought a paint-box to distract themselves." The author of an 1895 article praised Frances Benjamin Johnston, a professional photographer from Washington, D.C., for her professionalism by separating her from amateur photographers, declaring: "Many women dabble ... but Miss Johnston has made (photography) a business."18 16
      Putnam, too, wanted to be more than a mere dabbler, but turning her art into a successful business depended upon her ability to win the favor and support of other members of Bostonian high society. Whereas her identity as a professional artist was revolutionary, she chose to practice one of the more conservative portrait styles of the era. Her portraiture appealed to the insecurities of Bostonians in the 1880s, who believed that their city's identity had reached a turning point. Fashionable Boston was moving into the newly landfilled Back Bay, and the city's energy spread into the institutions built there. Among these new institutions was the Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1870. The Boston Symphony Orchestra opened in the Back Bay in 1881, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1861, moved there in the late nineteenth century. For some, these new developments symbolized a shift away from a longstanding agrarian, literary tradition to a more modern one based on
the expansion of Boston's idea of culture to include arts more sensuous than literature; the attempt to establish the most advanced and accessible educational institutions anywhere, but now with a realization that the word is a vehicle to realms other than theology, philosophy, and law, that numbers are also useful, and that indeed there are organs to be trained other than the tongue; and finally, the development of its idea of Woman.19
 		17
      Putnam chose to take a complicated position between the new and the old Bostonian eras. Her brother, an architect who built primarily in the Back Bay, pioneered the concept of the modern apartment building. Putnam was a student of the school of the Museum of Fine Arts and a beneficiary of the city's new ideas about women. Nevertheless, she played the part of portraitist to the older, scholarly Boston. She publicly downplayed her allegiance to the new Boston and exploited her ancestral connections to old Boston, both in her painting technique and in her social life in general. 18
      Putnam's traditional style of portraiture concentrated on the faces of her sitters. In many of her best paintings, the contrast of her subjects' faces with dark, solid backgrounds and clothing gives their silent, serious faces an illuminated effect, as if to emphasize the radiance of their carefully cultivated intellects (plate 1, fig. 5). Few of her portraits were larger than half-length, and usually the only props she used were the chairs upon which her subjects sat. The straightforward quality of her paintings conveys none of the sense of originality that might have earned her long-lasting fame, but her clients believed that she had a particular talent for capturing their personalities on canvas. For instance, an unidentified newspaper review of Putnam's solo show at Cobb's Gallery in 1904 describes her portrait of Charles G. Loring as "of unusual excellence in the way of likeness.... [T]he artist has been fortunate in choice of pose and of the expression which is a most characteristic one. The color scheme as a whole, is quite dignified, and subordinated to the interest of the head. And the observer is impressed agreeably with the whole picture."20 19

 
Figure 5
    FIGURE 5.
    Mr. A. B. Hall. Photograph of 1905 oil portrait. Volume 28.

    Putnam pasted photographs of her portraits throughout her diaries. She used all of volume 28 to record details about her career between 1877 and 1911. She pasted photographs of over 45 oil and crayon portraits in the volume, along with charts that show the sitters, dates, and prices of 226 of her works.
 
 
      Sarah's portraits contrasted sharply with those of the stylish expatriate artist John Singer Sargent, who received a great deal of attention from Bostonians. In 1889, he had gained enough respect to merit a large solo exhibition (almost 130 works) sponsored by the Art Students' Association. Sargent dressed his lively subjects in sumptuous clothing and posed the—sometimes in unusual, even slightly contorted position—against highly detailed backgrounds. The clothing that Putnam de-emphasized in her portraits shines with a brilliant lustre on Sargent's patrons. 20
      The reviewer of her Chase's Gallery show in the January 19, 1895, Boston Transcript appeared to refer directly to Sargent when he followed his admiration of Putnam's "expression of character, of mind and of personal sentiment," with the statement that "the most discriminating and cultivated people prefer to trust to her acumen and intuition rather than to the ... flighty modern manipulators of paint whose touch is magical and whose color is a dream and whose silk gowns are fairy visions." The clothing and positioning of Sargent's subjects not only served as subtle indicators of Boston's changing cultural tone but sometimes led to outright controversy. One of the most noted instances in Boston was that surrounding Sargent's painting of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a vivacious social leader and art collector known locally as "Mrs. Jack."21 21
      In this full-length portrait, Gardner gazes directly at the viewer. She stands in front of a piece of sixteenth-century, Italian cut-velvet brocade, her head positioned directly in the center of the brocade's radiating pomegranate motif. The design suggests a halo, and Henry James said the portrait reminded him of a "Byzantine Madonna." Whereas James, a friend of Gardner, may have felt her charisma and intelligence merited such idolization, the painting shocked many Bostonians. The combination of Gardner's apparent deification with her tight, low-cut dress and the ropes of pearls draped to accentuate her waist sent Bostonians into a frenzy of gossip when the painting was displayed at the St. Botolph Club in 1888. Gardner's husband never allowed the portrait on public display afterward.22 22
      Putnam not only steered away from the flamboyance that characterized Sargent's painting of Gardner; she also criticized his work directly on numerous occasions in her diaries. She could become highly moralistic, as in her November 20, 1895, entry:
Harriet & I went early to the Academy to see the portrait exhibition. It seemed to me this first day that I saw the pictures that about each one we looked at (among the modern work) was perhaps worse—more coarse—or ridiculous than the one we had seen before! Was I stark, staring mad or were all the artists crazy? Take John Sargent's portrait of Mrs. Twombly, for instance, an enormous canvass, splendidly painted, as far as mere brush work is concerned, but the face! Good gracious, why it was one of the worse caricatures of a face that I ever saw. The features were all askew, and skrewed up. It seems as if Sargent must have meant the thing as a joke, to see how much the Twomblys would stand! The general coloring of the whole picture was too prominent in the details, and accessories, I thought. I think everything should be subordinate to the face, in a portrait. The clever modern men paint portraits of flashy vulgar gowns, I think. It makes my blood boil. And the faces they paint, are apt to express nothing but a coarse vanity! It is astonishing to me that the public will accept such libels on human nature.... Alas! Alas! It makes one almost weep.... Sargent's portrait of Mrs. Marquand was splendidly painted, but even she was spoiled somewhat by the painty red slits of lips that he had given her.23
 Putnam not only went so far as to call Sargent's works "libels on human nature," but she believed that some of his work bordered on the sacrilegious:
Did you hear what Dr. Emerson said? 'If that is art, I would rather have potatoes.' Some one wrote (previously) that Sargent 'always approached a new canvas in the spirit of prayer, and he is reported to be most humble in his attitude towards art. A great question with him is how far it is right to seek for more than the eye alone sees in a face.' Now I do not see how he could have prayed much before he painted 'Mrs. Jack'. I can imagine him saying 'Lord deliver us,' when it was finished, if it looks like what people say. And if he painted those pictures I saw in London 'in the spirit of prayer,' his religion must be very different from ours.24
 Putnam's talent, training, and subsequent fame do not compare to Sargent's, but her paintings do contrast with his in meaningful ways. Her clients' decisions to commission a Putnam portrait instead of a Sargent portrait, while probably influenced by matters of finance and loyalty, also reflected their feelings about modernity. Trevor J. Fairbrother writes that some of Sargent's portraits drew "dangerously close to the ostentation that Bostonians censured in New Yorkers and many foreigners." One critic wrote in 1887 that Bostonians demanded "more dignity in dress and pose of subject, more painstaking and consecration" than Sargent provided in his portraits. Putnam's use of a painterly style that allied her with that more dignified, traditional side of society served to deflect any criticism its members might have made concerning her status as a female professional.25		 23
      Putnam very evidently won the support of her family and friends, who frequently and lovingly referred to her identity as an artist. Along with her sketches and reviews of her portrait exhibitions, Putnam pasted place cards and invitations into her diaries. Often, the cards set by her place at table featured pictures of artists or short verses referring to her artistic identity. One diary entry from 1876 reveals that "When Mary, and I were starting for church this morning, we discovered a parcel outside the front door. I found that it was addressed to me and inside, was a bunch of violets, with a card, on which was written 'For the Artist.'"26 24
      Putnam's social position was a great asset to her career. By combining her desire to pursue a career with her belief that her good social standing was worth careful and time-consuming maintenance, she ensured that her family and friends would generously encourage her work. At the most concrete level of support, they made up the initial base of her clientele and networked on her behalf to expand that base. Putnam's social calendar teemed with luncheons, teas, and dinner parties, all of which she took very seriously. In March 1886, for example, Putnam not only attended many social events outside her home but also hosted two dinner parties, her sewing circle, and a meeting of the Musical Club, with a dinner afterward. The kinds of social gatherings she attended, which may sound merely recreational to the modern reader, were for many upper-class women an unnegotiable duty. Through participation in social rituals, they maintained and expanded the social networks upon which their husbands', fathers', and brothers' business transactions relied. Putnam found these events essential to her own career.27 25

 
Figure 6
    FIGURE 6.
    "Painting Ellen Putnam in the 'barn.' Adirondacks, September '86'" Photographer unknown. Volume 16.
 
 
      The substantial commitment she showed to her social calendar often resulted in commissions from friends or acquaintances of the family. In January 1884, for instance, during a visit at which Putnam accepted an invitation from Mrs. Henry P. Bowditch to attend the Winter Carnival in Montreal, she also accepted the commission for a portrait of Mrs. Bowditch's daughter, Dora. In a July 1884 diary entry, Putnam describes making calls to Mrs. Edward Sohier for the purpose of artistic research: "I had begun a crayon of [her] from a photograph, and she knew nothing about it. So I have had to go over to get stolen glances at her face."28 26
      Another diary entry illustrates how her business thrived on her ability to socialize with others and to maintain relationships even with those friends whose interests she did not share. While working on the portrait of Annie Phillips, a friend who was passionate about social work, she adapted her schedule to attend the functions her friend normally attended. "Annie Phillips sat for me, and stayed to dinner. Then she and I went to see the Vasseurs & I 'hung round' while she called on some of her poor 'drinking' families. (Miriam Rollins says that the only way to see anything of Annie, would be to go down to the North End, and get drunk!) Afterwards, we went to an Associated Charities meeting, at Chardon St."29 Before and after Putnam painted Annie Phillips's portrait, few if any of the social events she recorded in her diary involved charity work. Her desire to please her client probably motivated her to vary her social calendar in order to include some of this activity. By doing so, Putnam became acquainted with new circles of people, enlarging her potential clientele. 27
      Putnam's skillful use of social networking gained her a distinguished clientele that included such figures as Dr. Henry P. Bowditch; John Lowell; Gen. Charles G. Loring, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts; musical composer Francis Boott; the wife of Asa Gray, founder of the Harvard Botany department and Darwin's chief American advocate around the mid-nineteenth century; and poet and critic Amy Lowell (plate 1). Each of these clients was connected with Putnam by blood, marriage, or her family's social circles. The fact that Putnam won male as well as female clients reveals their acceptance of her as a professional woman artist. She also enjoyed the respect of men within the profession, as in the incident she recorded about a September 1884 visit to her sister Mary's house at Beverly Farms: "I went to Mary Loring's to spend a day or two. Mr. Bartell, the sculptor and his son Paul (also a sculptor) were passing the night there. They were both very pleasant. M. Bartell Sr. complimented me about my crayon likenesses (Had seen Dora Bowditch's) said they were the best in Boston."30 28
      While some men disregarded Putnam's gender when considering her work, most newspaper reviewers praised and criticized Putnam's art in ways that modern scholars recognize as decidedly gendered. They praised the sentimental, psychological, and spiritual qualities of her work—presumed to be inherently feminine qualities—but criticized the strength of her technique. In doing so, they never succeeded in accounting for Putnam's ability to achieve the former without at least some successful use of the latter. One critic from the Transcript damned Putnam with dubious praise for work that "without any of the allurements of so-called technique, goes straight to the mark, tells the story admirably, seeks out the very heart of its subject.... [The portraits] are painted with the hesitating, groping, timid touch of an amateur painter, yet they vie with the works of the greatest masters in their expression of character, of mind and of personal sentiment." By so limiting women artists' talents to assumedly inherent traits, such critics failed to accord women artists like Putnam the respect and recognition their work deserved. In a particularly unfortunate example, one critic, presumably well meaning, assigned a childish innocence to Putnam, then fifty-three years old, by likening her to the little girls in some of her portraits—"Charming little girls ..., unconscious, like the artist, of their own sweetness, not thinking much of the music, but just waiting to see what will happen next."31 29
      Critics praised women artists such as Putnam in terms of their femininity, but at times they reserved higher praise for women whose technique displayed more masculine qualities. For some critics, the mere fact that Putnam could paint portraits of men warranted praise: "Miss Putnam's style is so vigorous that she paints men well." Another critic praised a self-portrait by Ellen Day Hale, one of Putnam's peers, by attributing to her work "a man's strength in the treatment and handling of her subjects—a massiveness and breadth of effect attained through sound training and native wit and courage." Putnam was sometimes praised for the breadth of her brush strokes, but for the most part her technique was described in feminine terms. It was her subject matter—her interest in depicting men in her sketches and portraits—which set her work apart from that of her feminine peers.32 30
      Of the numerous sketches and watercolors she pasted into her diaries, Putnam did many of men of all social classes in various scenes of everyday life. Putnam also had an unusually large male clientele for her portraits. Other women artists, perhaps concerned about the amount of unchaperoned time they would have to spend with men during sittings, painted children and women exclusively or with a much greater frequency than they painted men. As British novelist Margaret Oliphant pointed out in her 1899 autobiography, issues of modesty posed a serious dilemma for women artists, whether the medium was prose or painting:
Sometimes we don't know sufficiently to make the outline sharp and clear; sometimes we know well enough, but dare not betray our knowledge one way or other: the result is that the men in a woman's book are always washed in, in secondary colours. The same want of anatomical knowledge and precision must, I imagine, preclude a woman from ever being a great painter; if one does make the necessary study, one loses more than one gains.
 For a woman to make men the subjects of her artwork constituted an especially bold act. Although painting men well, as Putnam did, was a necessary skill, it defied social convention. As one reviewer for The Living Age wrote, late-nineteenth-century women were expected to be the subjects, not the creators, of artwork:
[We] naturally, if not necessarily, associate together woman and art.... The two terms may almost be said to suggest one another.... From this point of view, however, woman is exclusively the source, and not the recipient, of inspiration. She presents herself to us as the paramount subject of art, in right of her nearest approximation, among terrestrial forms, to ideal beauty; but the majority of us are utterly ignorant what substantial claims she can advance to a more active participation in the honors and rewards of art-culture.33
 In order to paint men, a woman artist would have to spend long hours studying their forms. Social conventions governed the ownership of direct glances, which held power, sometimes sexual in nature. Men conventionally wielded the power of the gaze, and women were the objects of it. In the world of visual art, then, women in late-nineteenth-century paintings seldom look straight out of the canvas but gaze modestly downward or off into the distance. Those women who stare straight out of a canvas appear bold, if not brazen. The way that Isabella Stewart Gardner stared out of her portrait by Sargent, for instance, contributed to the controversy surrounding it. Men who gaze out directly, however, simply emphasize the professional or economic power that enabled them to commission paintings—and to paint—in the first place.34		 31
      Putnam's sketches of men, such as one of three men sitting in a train car (fig. 8), become especially telling when the viewer tries to imagine Putnam's own place within the scenes she portrayed. In order to draw them, Putnam must have sat a few yards away, staring at the men. Her subjects look out of the window as the train speeds along. They appear unaware of their participation in the exchange of power taking place as Putnam watches them and records what she sees. Putnam's position in a scene from her trip to Europe aboard the Cephalonia is even more powerful (fig. 9). In this image, Putnam stands, apparently unobserved, on the "stairs which lead to saloon passenger's deck." Putnam is drawing a bearded gentleman who, in turn, draws the passengers aboard the steerage deck of the ship. If creating the train image gave Putnam theoretical power over the subjects of her sketch, Putnam's sketch of the Cephalonia can be interpreted as an assertion of her power over the subjects of the sketch, who are the men in steerage, and over the male artist standing between her and the subjects. 32

 
Figure 7
    FIGURE 7. "People at refreshment table—at Bellows Falls Station Thursday, Oct. 22nd '1874.'" Pen and ink sketch. Volume 12.
 
 

 
Figure 8
    FIGURE 8. "April 5, 6 Nebraska Travelling—Sofa on this side—" Pencil sketch. Volume 19.
 
 

 
Figure 9
    FIGURE 9.
    "Cephalonia—Thurs–June 16th '87.' Looking out at steerage deck from stairs which lead to saloon passengers' deck." Pencil sketch. Volume 16.
 
 

 
Figure 10
    FIGURE 10.
    "June 13th 1887 Cephalonia steerage 'Virginia Reel.'" Pencil sketch. Volume 16.
 
 
      By the time she created these sketches of men, Putnam had cemented her social reputation to such an extent that those surrounding her on the train and on the Cephalonia regarded her unconventional subject matter more liberally than they might otherwise have done. Young women of her station did their artwork in domestic settings more often than in trains or near stairways on ships, but the scale of her sketches of men correlated with the amateur work to which many of them devoted themselves. 33
      In her refusal to abandon the unprestigious but feminine genre of amateur artwork and the careful maintenance of her social life, as well as her portrait style, Putnam made life choices that conformed to the traditional expectations of the Bostonian social elite. In doing so, she limited the amount of time and creativity she could apply to her artwork. The same choices, however, were key to her success and social acceptance in a field new to women. Because of her skillful navigation of this new field, other members of Putnam's social class accepted her identity as an artist and, perhaps, saw for themselves new options for the future. 34

 

ERIN L. PIPKIN is Assistant Editor of Publications and Web Manager at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

[Image Gallery]

NOTES

1. Ednah Dow Cheney, "The Women of Boston," in The Memorial History of Boston (Boston, 1880–1881), ed. Justin Winsor, 4:331–356. Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney (1824–1904), Bostonian writer, reformer, and philanthropist. For a brief biography of Mrs. Cheney, see Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Notable American Women, 1607–1950, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 1:325.

2. Sarah Gooll Putnam died in Chocorua, New Hampshire, October 4, 1912. Her oldest sister was Mary Upham Putnam (1843–1920), who married Charles Frederick Fearing. Her other sister, Harriet Putnam (b. 1845), married Horace John Hayden and had three children. Her brother, the third child, was John Pickering Putnam, Jr. (1847–1917), an architect of some note who married Grace Cornelia Stevens.
      Putnam is included in some standard biographical dictionaries. See Clara Erskine Clements, Women in the Fine Arts: From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. (Boston, 1904), 277–278; Jim Collins and Glenn B. Opitz, eds., Women Artists in America: Eighteenth Century to the Present (1790–1980) (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1973); and Janice H. Chadbourne, Karl Gabosh, and Charles O. Vogel, eds., The Boston Art Club: Exhibition Record, 1873–1909 (Madison, Conn., 1991), 319. See also Stephanie Schorow, "Portrait of a Lady: Detailed Entries Offer In-Depth Look at Woman's Life in Hub," Boston Herald, Mar. 27, 1998.

3. H. Winthrop Pierce, The History of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, 1930), quoted in Erica E. Hirshler, "'Sisters of the Brush: Artistic Education for Women in Nineteenth-Century Boston," in Laura Combs Hills: A Retrospective, ed. Historical Society of Old Newbury (Newburyport, Mass., 1996), 7; William C. Brownell, "The Younger Painters of America," Scribner's Monthly 22 (July 1881), 327; Sarah Gooll Putnam, Diary, Nov. 9, 1880 (vol. 14), Sarah Gooll Putnam diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston [hereafter SGP with date and volume]; "The Fine Arts: Massachusetts Art at Chicago: Private View Today of the Exhibit at the Mechanics Building," in SGP, Sept. 17, 1893, vol. 19.
      In 1877, the first year that the museum school was open, all classes were coeducational. The next year, women were excluded from the school's new life drawing class. The school began offering a separate life drawing class for women in 1879.

4. Henry Pickering Bowditch (1840–1911) established the first physiological laboratory in the United States at Harvard Medical School in 1871. He served as the dean of the school from 1883 to 1893. Charles Pickering Putnam (1844–1914) was a Boston pediatrician and orthopedic specialist. James Jackson Putnam (1846–1918), expert in structural and functional neurology, started one of the first neurological clinics in the United States at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1872. For a description of Beede's, see Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), 2:195; and Lizzie W. Champney, "The Summer Haunts of American Artists," The Century: A Popular Quarterly 30 (Oct. 1885): 838.

5. William L. Vance, "Redefining Boston," in Trevor J. Fairbrother, The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870–1930 (Boston, 1986), 21; Peter A. Ford, "'Father of the whole enterprise': Charles S. Storrow and the Making of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1860," Massachusetts Historical Review 2 (2000): 104; "The Stowe Garden Party: A Supplement to August Atlantic Monthly," The Atlantic Monthly 50 (Aug. 1882).
      See Ford, "Enterprise," for information in John Pickering Putnam, Sr.'s involvement in the Pemberton Mill disaster that caused the deaths of approximately 88 people in 1860. See also Deborah Fulton Rau, "John Pickering Putnam (1847–1917), Visionary in Boston: A Systematic Approach to Apartment House Design," Architectura 22 (1992): 109–110, n. 2.
      For information on Sarah Gooll Putnam's genealogy, focusing on Putnam's paternal grandparents and their descendants, see Elizabeth Cabot Putnam and Harriet Silvester Tapley, The Hon. Samuel Putnam and Sarah (Gooll) Putnam, with a Genealogical Record of their Descendants (Danvers, Mass., 1922).

6. Putnam used multiple media throughout her life to accompany her written diary records. The original pen-and-ink and watercolor sketches, fabric swatches, photographs, place cards from luncheons, magazine cutouts, and newspaper clippings that she pasted into her journals bring immediacy and a tangible charm to the most minute or important details of her life story. Putnam's diaries were donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society in May 1964 by Mrs. Harold Buckminster Hayden, who was the daughter-in-law of Sarah Gooll Putnam's elder sister Harriet.
      Kathleen D. McCarthy discusses the ways in which a high social class both limited and benefited the painting career of impressionist Mary Cassatt. See her Women's Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago, 1993), 107.

7. Harriet Upham Putnam, introductory notes in SGP, 1860, vol. 1.

8. Trevor J. Fairbrother, "Painting in Boston, 1870–1930," in The Bostonians, 31; John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780, in Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield and Marc Friedlaender (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 3:342; Erica E. Hirshler, "Lillian Westcott Hale (1880–1963): A Woman Painter of the Boston School" (master's thesis, Boston University, 1992), 2–3; Wayne Craven, American Art: History and Culture (New York, 1994), 42, 95, 99–102.

9. Hirshler, "Lillian Westcott Hale," Chapter 1; Alice A. Carter, The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love (New York, 2000), 15. For more information on the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, see Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, In This Academy: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1805–1976 (Philadelphia, 1976).

10. Researchers will find varying amounts of information on each of these artists. William Morris Hunt was a New England-born painter influenced by the work of his friend Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), a French Barbizon-style painter. Hunt was known for his portraits and figure studies as well as landscape paintings. Elizabeth Howard Bartol (1842–1927) not only produced paintings but also sculptures, metal works, and posters. Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott Duveneck (1846–1888) was brought up in Italy by her father, musician and art critic Francis Boott. She married the noted American artist Frank Duveneck (1848–1919). Biographer Leon Edel thinks her to be the model for Pansy Osmond in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. Ellen Day Hale (1855–1940) studied abroad in the atelier of Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran (1838–1917) and at the Academie Julian. She was the daughter of the popular author and Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909), niece of watercolorist Susan Hale, sister of American Impressionist Philip Leslie Hale (1865–1931), and sister-in-law of American Impressionist Lilian Westcott Hale. Accomplished painter Helen Mary Knowlton (1832–1918) published several early sources on William Morris Hunt's artistic and educational philosophies. She became art critic for the Boston Post in 1879. Sarah De St. Prix Wyman Whitman (1842–1904) received honorable mentions at the 1889 and 1900 Paris Expositions and a medal at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. She operated her own stained glass studio, the Lily Glass Works, and worked as a book cover artist for the Houghton Mifflin Company. Little information has been published on the life of Annette Perkins Rogers (1841–1920). See Martha J. Hoppin, "Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1900: The Pupils of William Morris Hunt," The American Art Journal (Winter 1981); and Erica E. Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston, 2001). A Studio of Her Own, published a few weeks before this article, is a much-needed new source of information on some of Putnam's peers.

11. E. H. B., "Some Women Artists of Massachusetts," unidentified newspaper clipping, Richard Morris Hunt archive, American Institute of Architects, Washington, D.C., quoted in Hoppin, "Women Artists in Boston," 19. According to Hoppin, the author of the newspaper clipping must have been Elizabeth Howard Bartol, a pupil of Hunt's (see preceding note). It would have been written around 1880.

12. Hoppin, "Women Artists in Boston," 18, 19.

13. SGP, Feb. 1, Feb. 20, Mar. 2, Jan. 16, 1877, vol. 13. Louisa Crowninshield Bacon (1842–1928) was Putnam's cousin. See her book, Reminiscences (Salem, Mass. 1922), for her brief description of what she called "the happy days of our sketching club in Boston" (72). Some of her childhood memories, addressing neighborhoods and family members, also provide a different prespective on Putnam's childhood experiences.

14. Harriet Upham Putnam, introductory notes in SGP, 1860, vol. 1; Mary Avery Upham, Diary, Dec. 16, 1857, Mary Avery Upham diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society. In her introduction to Sarah's diaries, Mrs. Putnam reported that Sarah began to "study with Mr. Blaisdale" in 1856 and that she later studied at "Miss Desmond's school" (probably in 1858 or 1859). Mary Avery Upham's diaries fill six narrow volumes and range in dates from 1822 to 1871.

15. Marie Cornélie Morisot to Berthe Morisot, quoted in Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot's Images of Women (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 38.

16. Higonnet, Berthe Morisot's Images of Women, 46, 48, 44–45. Putnam's sketches of indoor scenes are reminiscent of the work of mid-nineteenth-century British amateur watercolorist Mary Ellen Best. For more information on Mary Ellen Best, see Caroline Davidson, Women's Worlds: The Art and Life of Mary Ellen Best, 1809–1891 (London, 1995).

17. SGP, June 7, 1883, Oct. 29, Nov. 20, 1884, vol. 15. Mary Orne Bowditch (1883–1971), a Bostonian sculptress whose social standing made similar demands on her time, also struggled to make time for both her artwork and her social duty. Her neice Mary Clapp wrote that "She seemed to always have to stop what she was doing to go to a luncheon party or the Symphony or something, so she broke her train of thought and creativity." Mary Clapp to Kathryn Greenthal, July 27, 1981, quoted in American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ed. Kathryn Greenthal, Paula M. Kozol, and Jan Seidler Ramirez (Boston, 1986), 397.

18. Charles Bigot, "Beaux Arts," La Revue Politique et Littéraire, Mar. 4, 1882, quoted in Higonnet, Berthe Morisot's Images of Women, 85; Constance W. Glenn and Leland Rice, Frances Benjamin Johnston: Women of Class and Station (Long Beach, Calif., 1979), 9.

19. Vance, "Redefining Boston," 10, 13.

20. SGP, 1904, vol. 26. For information about the career of John Pickering Putnam, see Rau, "John Pickering Putnam," 109–119.

21. "The Fine Arts: Exhibition of Portraits by Miss Putnam," Boston Transcript, Jan. 19, 1895. The review is pasted into SGP, Jan. 3, 1895, vol. 20.

22. Henry James to Henrietta Reubell, Feb. 22, 1888, quoted in Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York, 1997), 72; Erica Hirshler, "Isabella Stewart Gardner," in John Singer Sargent, ed. Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 139.

23. SGP, Nov. 20, 1895, vol. 20.

24. SGP, Mar. 18, 1888, vol. 18. This comment appears in a letter Putnam wrote to her mother and sisters while in Munich and later pasted into her diary.

25. Fairbrother, "Painting in Boston," 45; "Art in Boston," Art Amateur, Jan. 1887, quoted in Fairbrother, "Painting in Boston," 45.

26. SGP, Nov. 26, 1876, vol. 13.

27. Higonnet, Berthe Morisot's Images of Women, 56.

28. SGP, Jan. 16, Jul. 4, 1884, vol. 15.

29. SGP, Nov. 16, 1886, vol. 16.

30.SGP, Sept. 26, 1884, vol. 15. In another instance Putnam recounted that a Mr. Hardcastle "made a pleasant, long call one afternoon. I took him up to the studio, and we talked 'art' steadily, for about two hours." SGP, Mar. 27, 1884, vol. 15.

31. "The Fine Arts: Exhibition of Portraits by Miss Putnam," Boston Transcript, Jan. 19, 1895, pasted into SGP, Jan. 3, 1895, vol. 20; "The Fine Arts: Exhibition of Portraits by Miss Putnam," Boston Transcript, [n.d.], 1904, pasted into SGP, Feb. 9, 1904, vol. 23. Tracy B. Schpero, "American Impressionist Ellen Day Hale" (master's thesis, Tufts University, 1989), 45, notes that "Although the women met with considerable approval in Boston, mixed response from the critics was typical. On the one hand, their works were usually praised as vigorous, fresh, and sincere in feeling. On the other, they were judged deficient in technique."

32. "Some Portraits of Bostonians: Miss Sarah G. Putnam's Exhibit Includes Pictures Lent by Francis C. Welch, Francis Boott, Mrs. William Lawrence and Dr. Rotch," unidentified newpaper clipping (1904), pasted into SGP, Feb. 9, 1904, vol. 23; "Art in Boston," Art Amateur, May 1891, quoted in Fairbrother, "Painting in Boston," 44.

33. McCarthy, Women's Culture, 107; Margaret Oliphant, Autobiography, quoted in Higonnet, Berthe Morisot's Images of Women, 74; review of Women Artists in All Ages and Countries, by Mrs. E. F. Ellet, The Living Age, Jan. 28, 1860.

34. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York, 2000), 34–47. In one diary entry, 12-year-old Sarah wrote that she had her photograph taken. It is interesting to note that her father objected to the photograph because Sarah is gazing straight out at the viewer: "When I got home, and showed [my photograph] to Father, he did not like mine.... Father does not like so much front face." SGP, Feb. 7, 1863, vol. 4.

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