I j y\JL y Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 http://archive.org/details/salmagundiclubbeOOshel THE SALMAGUNDI CLUB A History J. Scott Hartley Joseph Hartley W. H. Shelton F. S. Church Will H. Low THE SALMAGUNDI CLUB Being a History of its Beginning as a Sketch Class, its Public Service as the Black and White Society, and its Career as a Club from MDCCCLXXI to MCMXVIII with illustrations BY WILLIAM HENRY SHELTON BOSTON AND NEW YORK - MCMXVIII HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE COPYRIGHT 1918 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY All rights reserved FOREWORD The Salmagundi Club, after hard upon fifty years of moving from one house to another, like a poor tenant, and being but a tenant at will, owning only movable property, and little of that, and having no claim upon a square foot of the earth on which it walked — having been at the mercy of eleven landlords, and at one period (for want of a landlord) passing like only the shadow of a club, among the studios and homes of its members — has itself become a landlord and a landowner. During the aforesaid somewhat vagrant period, uncon- scious of its destiny, the club was drifting from one chance mooring to another, always within a certain lim- ited area of the ocean of the city's traffic; never below Prince Street, where the studios began, or above Twenty- second Street, and lying at anchor for twenty years just of the pleasant shore of Greenwich village, but always circling and circling about Washington Square, not so much like a rudderless ship as like a wise old bird pre- paring to alight, and alighting at last in a nest of its own. Forty-seven Fifth Avenue, with its additions and im- provements, its ^furnishings {which came in generous donations like the fund that made its possession possible), its comforts, and its precious atmosphere, transferred undisturbed and intact, is that nest. The new house is fairly set between comely and respectable neighbor houses and opposite to the Old First Presbyterian Church, which rises from its ample glebe against the eve- ning shy behind its massive bell-tower borrowed from Magdalen College, Oxford, and doubtless built seventy- four years ago to give joy to the members of an artists* club that in the fullness of time was destined to sit at its feet and dwell in its shadow. Finding itself thus comfortably established, domiciled^ situated, and settled down in some degree of affluence, the mind of the club naturally reverts to its early days and demands the story of its beginning, its vicissitudes, strug- gles, trials, and successes, which will be found in the fol- lowing pages. WILLIAM HENRY SHELTON Forty-Seven Fifth Avenue March First, 1918 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword v I. The Birth of the Club .... 1 II. The Revival of the Club . . . .14 III. The Exhibition Period .... 31 IV. The Salmagundi becomes a Real Club 49 V. Fourteen West Twelfth Street . . 74 VI. The Library 95 VII. Some Social Occasions 115 Appendix 133 Index 143 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Salmagundi Club Book-Plate . . Opposite first half-title Portraits of Early Members — J. Scott Hartley, Joseph Hartley, W. H. Shelton, F. S. Church, Will H. Low Frontispiece Solitude, two sketches by Will H. Low .... 2 Boxing in Hartley's Studio, from a drawing by Will H. Low 6 Solitude, by Alfred E. Emslie, and Abandoned, by W. H. Shelton 12 "The Longshoreman's Morning," by F. S. Church . 13 Portraits of Early Members — George Inness, Jr., Carl Hirschberg, C. Y. Turner, G. W. May- nard, A. C. Morgan 20 Something Fresh, by Howard Pyle 26 From sketch in possession of Mr. Alexander Morgan Finis, by A. C. Morgan 30 Club Members, 1879, by H. P. Share .... 34 Drawn for u Young Artist Idfe in New York" by William H. Bishop, in Scribner's Monthly Sarony's Invitation to George Inness ... 42 Invitation to Reception, November 30, 1883 . . 48 Drawn by Frank Russell Green Invitation to House Warming, at 49 West 22nd Street 60 Drawn by Frank Russell Green House Front, 14 West l%th Street, by Charles S. Chap- man 74 t x 3 Billiard-Room, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chap- man 76 Office, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chapman . 78 Gallery, 14 West 12ih Street, by Charles S. Chapman 80 Glimpse into Grill-Room from Billiard-Room, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chapman ... 82 Hall, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chapman . . 86 Grill-Room, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chap- man 90 Stairway, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chapman 94 J. Sanford Saltus, in Court Costume of Edward VII, by George Reevs . 98 Library Mugs 100 The Abbey Mug . 104 Reproduction of Title-Page of "Costumes of the Nineteenth Century" 108 Library, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chapman 112 Halloween Dinner, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chapman 116 Parlor, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chapman . 120 Card-Room, 14 West 12th Street, by Charles S. Chap- man 124 Stairway, 14 West 12th Street, by Howard Giles . . 128 House Front, 47 Fifth Avenue, from a photograph . 135 THE SALMAGUNDI CLUB A History A TOAST FOR THE SALMAGUNDI CLUB Old Friends and new who gather here, May kindly thoughts and friendly cheer Pervade our feast and warm our hearts. May we play fair in all the parts That life assigns. May Arty not pelf, Be boss, and Justice stand upon our shelf. And old f riends gone, we greet you too — We drink a silent toast to you. Old Friends and new — the old — I give my hand to you, The new — why, some day you '11 be old — / give my hand to you. J. B. CARRINGTON A HISTORY OF THE SALMAGUNDI CLUB CHAPTER I ITS BIRTH The infant Salmagundi was born at 596 Broad- way, in the City of New York, at eight o'clock on a Saturday night in the month of November (it may have been December), in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-one. It is a comfort to be precise about the hour of the day and the day of the week, and a comfort to feel that the circumstance of the child's eyes opening, as they did, on the skylight of a studio, had some- thing to do with its after career in the world of art. The infant was an infant club, or rather an in- fant destined to grow up into a club. Like its predecessor, the Century Association, the Salma- gundi Club had an humble beginning in a group of art students who formed a sketch class for mutual improvement. The first meeting of the original Sketch Class was in the studio of the late Jonathan Scott Hartley, in the old building then standing at 596 Broadway, just below the [ 2 ] corner of Broadway and Houston Street. It was a custom inaugurated at the beginning to select a subject for illustration, and on the following Saturday evening a half-dozen sketches would be displayed on the Studio easel for mutual admi- ration and friendly criticism. The members of the class during the first win- ter were F. S. Church and Will Low from the studio building adjoining Grace Church, and Fred Vance, from a neighboring Broadway studio, and from the studios in the building where the class met, besides the Hartleys, W. H. Shelton and Alfred E. Emslie, an English artist who was then illustrating Robert Bonner's "New York Ledger 99 and who is now a portrait-painter in London. J. P. Andrews, who painted still life, mostly shells and English walnuts, was always present, but never showed any of his work on the easel. There were some at those early evening gath- erings who were not artists (the club was never without laymen), notably Joseph Hartley and John, a younger brother, who led in the boxing, and Will Symons and Alec Kirkman and one McDonald, friends of the Hartleys who came from Brooklyn to join in the festivities. There was no formality or any official proceed- ) SOLITUDE Two sketches by Will H. Low i 3 : ings in these early meetings, but at a later period Joseph Hartley was secretary as well as chair- man, and was regarded as the highest authority on parliamentary law by virtue of his long serv- ice as secretary of a Masonic lodge in Brooklyn. Mr. Hartley's acquaintance in Brooklyn was the natural result of having, on his arrival in New York, made his home on the Brooklyn side of the river with his maternal uncle Kirkman, who was an eccentric and very pious old gentleman, a Hard-Shell Baptist, and the proprietor of a small soap factory. It was under the management of his son Alec, who succeeded him, that the small factory grew into a great business. Although • Alec is long dead, a millionaire layman, it should be remembered that he was an active participant in the festivities that surrounded the birth of the club, and Salmagundians should take off then- hats to the great Kirkman vans when they pass in the street. The studio was a large room lighted by a broad skylight and by three windows looking down on Broadway. From these windows a few weeks be- fore the first meeting of the Sketch Class, we had watched the passage up Broadway of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis, escorted by the Ninth Regi- C 4 3 ment of the National Guard, led by its famous Colonel, Jim Fisk, who was shot a few weeks later at the Grand Central Hotel. The room along its walls was crowded with statuary and barrels and plaster casts. There was a cook-stove in one corner and bunks behind screens. The dining-table was a dry-goods box from the Hartley brothers' store in Walker Street, and the conveniences for living were on a scale of elaboration quite in keeping with the fur- niture. The Hartley brothers, who kept a unique store for the outfitting of pack-peddlers, were able to live more comfortably, but the bohemian life in the studio just suited them. It was bache- lor housekeeping; the plaster used in casting changed the windows to ground glass and frosted the furniture and silvered the cobwebs that clung to the angles of the walls and to the frame of the skylight. Among the occasional visitors to the studio on those early Saturday nights were some choice characters who contributed generously to the fund of amusement. "Alf " Becks, a young Eng- lish actor who delighted in howling recitations in a broad Lancashire dialect, imparted a theat- rical flavor to these picturesque meetings of the C 5 3 Salmagundi. " Shamus O'Brien," "Laying a Gas- Pipe down," "The Explanatory Showman," and countless stories more broad than brilliant were then received with shouts of merriment by the boys whose bald heads nowadays wag wearily at better things at our own meetings and elsewhere. George David Brown, of the "New York Her- ald," who did the police reports and who, with his swarthy features and straight black hair, looked more like an Indian than like a white man, was a frequent guest in those days and enter- tained us with ghost stories from his own abun- dant experience. He was a firm believer in spirit- ual phenomena, and when he could gather an appreciative group around him in some shadowy corner of the studio, he spun his awful yarns with a droll humor that never failed to fascinate his hearers. He had seen strange sights — or rather his ghost had — standing at the window of his Christie Street room looking out into a blinding snowstorm while his dead body lay behind him on the bed. One of his girls, who died young, had a strange way of coming to the outside of a Ful- ton ferryboat window when he crossed the river on stormy winter nights when the broken cakes of ice were crunching and grinding under the C 6 3 paddle wheels. He was dramatizing Bret Harte's "M'liss," and claimed that he was writing a life of Christ. Brown was an original member of the Thirteen Club and a conspicuous figure at Pfaff's. Marshall, the engraver, in a rusty silk hat, who was at about that time engraving his famous head of Lincoln, and O'Donovan, the sculptor, a Virginian, who was afterwards one of the orig- inal members of the Tile Club, were sometimes present at these early meetings. "Ferd" Ward, then a handsome boy, who afterwards achieved notoriety in Wall Street and wrecked the fortune of General Grant, came once or twice with his brother Will, who was employed in the sub-treas- ury, and was regarded as a literary person be- cause he was doing night work on Appleton's En- cyclopaedia. Young Crab tree, a son of the sprightly Lotta, was another visitor at our early meetings. Another frequenter of these early meetings was Eugene Pfister, a young sculptor, who had fallen in love with the daughter of his master, a famous sculptor in a neighboring city. He had written a paper on Art for the 44 Atlantic Monthly" which not being returned, he assumed had been accepted, and he had come to New York all aglow with his success to win further fame as a C 7 1 writer and so to win the hand of his lady-love. After the criticisms and after the semi-official proceedings, which ended in the selection of a subject for illustration at the next meeting, the crowd smoked a good deal and ate sausages baked in a top coat of pie-crust and drank coffee. Sometimes there was singing, and always rounds with the gloves that made the plaster casts dance on their pedestals and filled the air with dust like the dust in a mill. Occasionally the foils cut some figure in the entertainment, but no member was much up in the art of fencing. The rusty blades with buttons on their tips and the wire masks were more for studio decoration than for use. A drawing now hanging in the library of the club shows one of those early meetings in the Hart- ley studio. It was made by Will Low, who is looking in at the left side of the picture, and was used to illustrate an article on "Young Artists' Life in New York" in "Scribner's Monthly," which afterwards became the "Century Maga- zine." Mr. Hartley, the sculptor, in a linen tunic is preparing the sausages over a cook-stove and at the same time warning off the boxers who are dodging about the center of the room. The screen, covered with the sketches of the evening, stands C 8 ] to the right, and it is John Hartley who is setting the table. H. P. Share sits on a turn-table in the right-hand foreground, and behind him are M. J. Burns and Alfred Becks. W. H. Shelton sits astride a chair in front of the easel, and in the group behind him W. W. Denslow is recognizable in the silk hat. C. Y. Turner, who was then employed by a photographer on crayon work, joined the class the second winter. During that winter F. S. Church brought to one of the meetings Carroll Beckwith, a slender lad from Chicago who was on his way to Paris to study art as the protege of his uncle Sherwood. There were some interesting characters in the studios opening on the long hall at 596 Broad- way, who were not identified with the Sketch Class. Mr. Whitehorn was one of the old Academicians, who painted portraits from photographs, and was noted for his gallantries. John Lane was a myste- rious and forbidding-looking party, who colored photographs and was a receiver of smuggled cigars, which he stored under the floor of his studio, a section of which was movable for that purpose. His studio was a dark and mysterious region, said to be not over-clean, to which no one was admitted. C 9 D John Watts, a son of Mrs. Sefton, the famous old actress, occupied a small studio on the hall, whose walls were covered with water-color draw- ings on woolly paper, of picturesque old buildings about town. When he was not smoking his pipe and contemplating these productions of his brush, he was roaming in bystreets and through unfre- quented sections of the old city in search for an- cient rookeries (lurching on corner lots preferred) sufficiently dilapidated to be worthy of reproduc- tion and a place in his collection. He was never known to sell a picture and seemed to live in mod- est dependence on his family's theatrical past. My room-mate, J. P. Andrews, who painted conch shells and English walnuts and certain other inanimate objects, not likely to shrink or decay or otherwise perish, during the long period of reproduction, usually effected a sale of his masterpiece by promoting a lottery among his friends and neighbors, and this success was some- times followed by a celebration that made it necessary to rearrange the poor shells and wal- nuts for another effort. There was one studio on the hall that turned out campaign heads on banners at election time. Mr. Fowler, the agent or the owner of the I 10 3 building, was a frequent and often an unwelcome caller at the studios. He was an old man, slightly- palsied, of a hesitating and diffident manner, and no match for some of his artist tenants. He was watched for on the stairways, dodged in the halls, and doors were locked against him. The particular studio wherein the club was born, when occupied by George David Brown and a sculptor friend (who will appreciate my delicacy), was a guarded citadel into which he could not enter, although the inmates of the castle ob- served his distress through a hole in the door. The building at 596 Broadway was next to the famous Helmbold drug-store, which separated us from the Metropolitan Hotel. Niblo's Garden, then a fashionable theater, was a building behind the hotel, with a stage entrance on the rear street and the main Broadway entrance through the ho- tel. Niblo's Garden was destroyed by fire in the summer of 1872, and the fire was a rare spectacle from the south window of the studio I occupied with J. P. Andrews, until the heat of the confla- gration obliged us to close the iron shutter. Niblo's Garden was not considered, at that time, as too far downtown, although it was never rebuilt. In fact it was quite a theatrical and C 11 3 "show" neighborhood, affording a peculiar out- of-door atmosphere that surrounded the cradle of the infant Salmagundi Club and doubtless rose up to mingle with the atmosphere within that sacred nursery of Art. Tony Pastor's was just around the corner in Houston Street, hard by two English chophouses known as the "House of Lords" and the "House of Commons." The Globe Theater, where George Fox played Humpty Dumpty the year 'round, was on Broadway just above the corner of Houston Street. Niblo's, in 1871, had just passed the Black Crook period, but every cellar in the neighborhood was a free- and-easy, or a "Dew Drop Inn," where girl- graduates of the famous ballet served the drinks in pink and blue and red tights. There were lot- teries and gambling-houses on every hand, con- fident of the protection of police headquarters which was close by in Mulberry Street. It was the ambition of most of the members of the Sketch Class to do something in illustra- tion, and the art managers of the various illus- trated publications were regarded with expecta- tion not unmixed with awe. The art department at Harpers' was presided over by Mr. Charles Parsons, an amiable gentleman, who held out a i C 12 ] cordial hand to new men. The Appletons were preparing an ambitious work, " Picturesque Amer- ica," under the art control of a Mr. Bunce, a nervous gentleman, who was said to be in priv- ate life the gentlest and most lovable of men, but who was liable, on the least provocation from a visiting artist, to fly into a rage and explode like a box of fire-crackers. Will H. Low was already in the employ of this dreaded Cerberus, and we listened with awe and trembling to his reports of events of which he had been a witness. "Scribner's Monthly," then published at 743 Broadway, was an approachable market. "Frank Leslie's," at the corner of Pearl and Elm Streets, near the shot tower, was a possible market for jokes, and farther downtown were "Wild Oats" in Ann Street, and "Phunny Phellow," and <; a : . . ,.> ft 1 ;; m