Masterman’s Image, Re-Examined

      Recently, three staff members visited Masterman to perform routine maintenance on the portrait of Julia Masterman (1876-1958). While cleaning the frame, a label on the back of the canvas was discovered with clues to the picture’s provenance and maker. The label, marked June 1949, reports the artist as “J.A. List” and the sitter as “Mrs. Norbert R. Black.” This surprising discovery adds a layer of complexity to an otherwise unremarkable painting. While no records exist for the artist, the newfound identity of the sitter throws the already-unsteady identity of the school into doubt; if the only known image of the school’s namesake is not actually of her, then who is it of, and why is it here?

      Mrs. Black, nee Emily Calvert Blakely, was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1881, the only daughter of a lumber baron with an exceptional mustache and predilection for scotch. At age eight, she was sent to Portland, Maine to attend an exclusive boarding school for girls from families anxious to flaunt their obscene wealth. After her school years, she traveled extensively, with tepid introductions to the American high society of London, Paris, Trieste, Cairo, and Buenos Aires. On her return trip, in Charleston, South Carolina, she met Norbert Regis Black, a dashing young disbarred attorney from an old Philadelphia family. After a brief engagement period marred by a near-fatal bout of emphysema, they were married in Charleston’s Episcopal Cathedral and settled in Black’s native Chestnut Hill. Mrs. Black’s hobbies at the time included horse breeding, hosting culturally insensitive (for the time!) parties, and a polite interest in public education, through which she met Julia Masterman. 

      Julia Reynolds Masterman (née Reynolds) was the daughter of an itinerant preacher in West Virginia, and her early life lacked much of the glamor of Mrs. Black’s. Her father died when she was seven, and her mother moved her and her eleven sisters to Marcus Hook, where her mother was a bookkeeper for a financially unstable sugar refinery that went dramatically out of business when Reynolds was nineteen. Through local church groups, she met John Masterman, the son of the head of the Port of Wilmington, who was studying, after a lackluster career as a starving artist, to be a civil engineer in Philadelphia. They returned to Philadelphia that fall, were engaged the next year, and married in June of 1899 to no great fanfare of the press (instead the Inquirer marked the weekend with the tantalizing headline “Phillies are Good”). When she met Mrs. Black, Mrs. Masterman was a full-time mother zealously interested in social causes, which would become the cause of her conflict with Mrs. Black.

      Mrs. Black, a member of high society interest groups, met Mrs. Masterman through her objection to Mrs. Masterman’s presence at a social conference. Masterman's group was crusading against City Hall corruption and Mrs. Black, whose cousin-in-law was District Attorney, took personal offense at some of Mrs. Masterman’s statements. The family filed a defamation lawsuit that was dismissed as the D.A. in question had been indicted on 22 counts of “corrupt solicitation.” As such, Mrs. Black was none too fond of Mrs. Masterman, and when the two crossed paths again on the cause of public education, they solidified their roles as each other’s nemeses. At the zenith of their enmity, Masterman told the Superintendent of Schools that Black was a socialist and encouraged schoolchildren to flaunt Prohibition. Black responded by having Masterman’s Olney address listed in the city directory as a “house of ill repute” run by one “Madame Yolanda” and her leopard-taming partner “Serje” [sic?] and attempted to tamper with the census and record the inhabitants as “six howler-monkeys and an old toad.” At one point, the rivals crossed paths in a City Hall corridor and had a twenty-two-minute staring contest entered into the City Council record by a bored stenographer, which remains the longest in Philadelphia history. 

      Despite the best efforts of both women, their efforts and names became inseparable, and when Mrs. Masterman founded the Home and School Council and was appointed its first president, Mrs. Black was naturally appointed as well, to the horror of Mrs. Masterman, who made her chairwoman of the subcommittee on restrooms. When Mrs. Masterman died in 1958, Mrs. Black lost all will to live and died two weeks later, publically inseparable in life and death. 

It is presumably from their association with each other that the portrait ended up next to the main office, as their estates were listed together and both women had an uncanny resemblance in old age. The School District, in their report, valued the portrait of Mrs. Black at $225 at a conservative auction, so until a relative shows up to claim the painting, it will remain on the walls as a reminder of the works of an illustrious champion of education in Philadelphia, just not the one we all predicted.