Scrapbook
Port Jefferson - August 5, 1882
Painters John Moran, Ed Moran, Thomas S. Clarke and John White Alexander outdoors.
Fernbrook featured in an advertisement
An advertisement for Cabot's Creosote Stains from Samuel Cabot Incorporation, Manufacturing Chemists located at 1 Oliver Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Pictured in the image is the residence of Thomas Shields Clarke. Architect: Wilson Eyre.
THE WELL-CONSIDERED GARDEN
by MRS. FRANCIS KING
ILLUSTRATED -- WITH PREFACE BY GERTRUDE JEKYLL
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS -- NEW YORK :: :: :: MCMXVH
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BT -- CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published May 1915
Reprinted October 1915
May 1916; April 1917
There is at Lenox, in the Berkshire Hills, a place with the musical name of Fernbrook Farm. It is high on one of the glorious hillsides between Pittsfield and Lenox and reached by a romantic drive through pretty by-roads. The house itself is of white stucco and dark wood and here the eye catches first of all, perhaps, the decorative use of fruit, especially of rich black grapes, as the vines are caught upward above windows of the second story. The clusters hang clear and beautiful from the stem all the way up; few leaves are allowed to remain. Japanese plums and crabapples grow as espaliers, and the effect of this bold decoration of fruit and leaf against the white stucco gives an Italian touch, a lovely reminiscence of that land of sun and shadow.
At the back of this house, looking into the mountainside, there is first a grass terrace in a court made by the projection of two wings of the house upon it; a few steps down a second and much larger terrace. Here is a fine sun-dial, a bronze cupid astride a globe "Love Ruling the World," modeled by the artist-owner of Fernbrook. Flowers are so disposed about the pedestal as to beautifully adorn it. At the farther side of this main terrace, through a small pergola covered with berried matrimony-vine occurs a descent of a few steps into a long pleached walk of apple-trees running through the kitchen garden. In places, the steep balustrades leading from the first to the second terraces are accented by the use of dwarf apple-trees in pots. These were in fruit when I saw them, and the shining red globes in the green leaves against that Italianesque wall of white were again good to see. Italian gourds hanging through roofs of light pavilions and against trellises showed a fine use of what to me was a new horticultural subject, physalis, the Chinese lantern plant, with its vermilion fruit lighting the borders against the house on the upper terrace, and higher up its color was repeated by festoons of scarlet peppers and tomatoes hung with careless art against the plastered wall. Actinidia arguta, the fine creeper from Japan, and our native bittersweet were in evidence here, very much thinned as to branches but full of fruit. The garden proper at Fernbrook Farm has been built on a bit of level and projecting ground before and to the left of the entrance front of the house. This is an oblong hedged garden planted gayly in long narrow beds with delphiniums, roses, and very fine scabiosas. At the garden's end farthest from the entrance is a circular pavilion, an informal gazebo, its roof a light framework of rods or canes. Along these run bold vines full of blue-black clusters, this fruit of the vine hung against a distance of valley and mountain rich in every autumn color and bound together by that heavenly October haze of blue.
1894 Midwinter Fair CA Statuary Queen Isabella Print
Statuary
This is an original 1894 halftone print of some of the statuary at the 1894 California International Midwinter Exposition. Shown in this print are: "Queen Isabella," by Harriet Hosmer; Frank Happersberger's mining group; and "The Cider Press," by Thos. Shields Clarke. Photography by I. W. Taber.
Also known as the "Midwinter Exposition" or the "Midwinter Fair" this Exposition was a World's Fair, designed to follow the successful 1893 Chicago World's Fair. It was located in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco where it enjoyed a run of six months.
AN ARTIST'S FLORIDA
By Thomas Shields Clarke
Taken from Country Life in America magazine, Volume 21, December 1, 1911
An artist's Florida
Clarke, Thomas Shields.
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amIa0c
19880322104730.0
871005s1911 nyua 00010 eng d
ocm16811536
(Sirsi) ABB-0899
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917.59 C611
[New York, N.Y. : Doubleday, Page & Company], 1911.
pp. 49-50, 4 p. of plates : ill. ; 36 cm.
Caption title.
"This is the first of a series of art photographs of picturesque America."
Florida--Description and travel. ^A208729
nnas Country life in America. (Dec. 1, 1911) (OCoLC)4340584
STA-FLA
Thomas Shields Clarke and The Landing of Carteret
A detail from "The Landing of Carteret" by Howard Pyle
Below is a blog entry from Ian Schoenherr's blog on the artist Howard Pyle. It features TSC.
A detail from "The Landing of Carteret" by Howard Pyle
After resigning from McClure's Magazine in the summer of 1906, Howard Pyle threw himself into work on “The Landing of Carteret”, his mural for the Essex County Court House in Newark, New Jersey. It had been commissioned by architect Cass Gilbert and was the largest thing Pyle had yet tackled - about six feet high and 16 feet wide - and it was supposed to be completed and installed by the end of the year.
On October 16, 1906, Pyle anxiously wrote to fellow muralist Edwin Howland Blashfield, “my work upon my picture has hardly advanced beyond the elementary stages.” But by December 1, he was able to report to Cass Gilbert, “I have laid everything else aside and have been working unremittingly upon it Sundays and holidays as well as other days. I now hope to have the painting completed, D.V., perhaps by the 15th and almost surely by the 20th of the month.”
On Sunday, December 16, Gilbert and his wife inspected the painting in Wilmington. Pyle was still at work, however, as on the following day he wrote the following letter to sculptor Thomas Shields Clarke:
1305 Franklin Street,
Wilmington, Delaware.
December 17th 1906
Dear Mr Clarke:—
I do not know how I can sufficiently thank you for the most interesting document with seals attached which you sent me.
It is exactly the kind of thing which interests me and you have guessed it as by intuition[.]
Not only is it valuable to me in itself but it came just at the opportune moment when I wanted precisely such a detail to put into my picture of the Landing of Carteret, which I am painting for the new Essex Co Court House.
Sometime, perhaps, you may see it in the picture.
With best wishes for the season and with heartiest regards I am—
Very Sincerely Yours
Howard Pyle
According to news reports, Pyle finished the mural on Christmas Eve, but for all the hurry it wasn’t set in place until March 9, 1907.
I first encountered the above letter in 1992 and had despaired of ever figuring out who “Mr Clarke” was, but I just learned that Thomas Shields Clarke also gave “seven old vellum documents, with very interesting seals” to his alma mater, Princeton University, according to the Princeton Alumni Weekly for May 26, 1909. Below is a scan of the original letter which features what Pyle called his “dreadful chirography.”
Fernbrook: The Summer Home of Thomas Shields Clarke
From American Home and Gardening, May 1909
Color Studies of My Garden
by Thomas Shields Clarke
from Country Life, Volume 36 (August 1919)
- Click on the cover to read the article. -
The Play Scene in Hamlet
Upon this picture, Edwin Austin Abbey was to concentrate for the next two months (October 1896) until a relapse in the condition of Mrs. Mead in December made it necessary for her daughter again to cross the Atlantic, and this time Abbey went too. The crisis was safely passed when they arrived, but Mrs. Mead being still in a very weak state, Abbey decided to remain in New York, and he sent for his man to bring the "Hamlet" and the "Pavane" and the "Silvia," and all the necessary costumes that he might go on with his work there. Mr. Thomas Shields Clarke put his studio at Abbey's disposal, and it was there that the "Hamlet" progressed (with Mr. Clarke's little daughter as the child who stands' beside the jester).
~ "Edwin Austin Abbey, royal academician: the record of his life and work, Volume 2", By Edward Verrall Lucas
Beautiful Gardens in America
"Fernbrook," Lenox, Mass. Thomas Shields Clarke, Esq.
From a photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals. As featured in Beautiful Gardens in America, by Louise Shelton. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. 1915. An online Second Edition, 1916, is available HERE.
Here is what Shelton wrote:
"At Fernbrooke is found the garden of an artist and sculptor, a study in color and in garden design most artistically planned, but rambling enough to prevent a connected view in photography. Golden Italian gourds pendent from the pergolas; standard currant bushes bordering a path and covered with red berries as late as September; dwarf fruit trees too, used decoratively, are among the happy points of interest."
"A Mind That Found Itself / An Autobiography"
-- Third Edition Revised (INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR TO SCULPTOR THOMAS SHIELDS CLARKE)
By Clifford Whittingham Beers. Published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1914
A lovely copy with bright gilt titles, minor foxing to page edges, inscribed to Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Shields Clarke and signed with the author's full name, beneath which he has stamped "Secretary of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 50 Union Square, New York." (Thomas Shields Clarke (1860-1920) was an American classical painter and sculptor, best known for his bronze sculpture The Cider Press, in San Francisco.) The book introduced with two printed letters of endorsement from Wm. James, "late professor of Harvard University, one of the most eminent of American psychologists," to "cut off incredulity at its source." Beers (1876-1943), a Yale graduate, was a pioneer in advocating for improved treatment of mental illness. In 1900, while working for an interior designer, Beers broke down mentally and attempted suicide. He suffered from hallucinations and delusions, believing even visiting family members were impostors and police spies. From August 1900 to September 1903, he was hospitalized in three different institutions. The hospital conditions, along with Beers' torments, both mental and physical, are thoroughly documented in his 1908 autobiography, "A Mind That Found Itself." He records petty punishments, forced feedings, the use of straitjackets and hand-restraints, quaintly called muffs. Patients were regularly denied the ability to shower for upwards of three weeks at a time. Beers was often choked and physically beaten by attendants much larger than himself. Amazingly enough, he got better, and grew more and more determined to record all the transgressions visited upon him and his fellow patients. He realized that to be believed, to be credible, he needed to know more about what went on in other sections of the hospital -- especially "the violent ward." There, "stripped of my outer garments; and clad in nothing but underclothes, I was thrust into a cell" with no bed or other furniture, and little ventilation. "For over a month I was kept in a half-starved condition. Worst of all, winter was approaching and these, my first quarters, were without heat." After his release, friends advised Beers to keep quiet about his illness. He refused. Through the publication of this book, Beers found support for what would become his life's work. He would speak for the patients who no one would listen to, the invisible ones. Beers declined to name the scene of his tortures -- insisting he wanted to reform the industry overall, not just one or two facilities -- but it was clearly the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane, on a hill overlooking the scenic old river port of Middletown, an institution whose buildings today stand dark, cavernous and mostly empty. In 1908 Beers founded the "Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene" -- now Mental Health Connecticut. In 1909 Beers went on to found the "National Committee for Mental Hygiene" -- now "Mental Health America." 363 pp. including appendices. Bookseller Inventory # 008278
[Source: AbeBooks.com]
List of Known Works
Paintings
- Head of a Moorish Woman
- Study of Roses (pastel)
- Still Life Sketch
- Sketch in Belluno, Italy
- Evening Study - Pittsburgh
- Study of Chrysanthemums
- Study of Wall Flowers
- St. Giorgio, Venice
- A Spanish Girl (pastel)
- Roses in the Corridor
- Maternity (pastel)
- Roses in a Brown Pitcher
- Japanese Girl
- Dawn of a New Life
- A Fool's Fool
- A Gondola Girl
- The Night Market in Morocco
- Portrait of Madame d’E.
Sculptures
- The Apple Cider Press
- The Future/Crystal Gazer
- Cupid's Sundial
- Fountain Boy
Pairs of bronze andirons
- 'The Monks'
- 'Knight and Lady'
Miscellaneous
- DIPTYCH "MORNING AND EVENING" Cartoon for Stained Glass.
- "Night" -- a decorative panel.
WORK IN PROGRESS