| STOP 7 |
Copley Square:
The Art World’s Hub of the Hub
Copley Square, from St. James to Boylston
and Newbury Streets
Art Square (renamed Copley in 1883 to honor the famous eighteenth-century portraitist) was a microcosm of the best of the new Back Bay. On the site of today’s Fairmont Copley Plaza was the original Museum of Fine Arts (1876) and its School;
diagonally
across was H. H. Richardson’s Romanesque Revival masterpiece, Trinity Church
(1877), and opposite the church stood the magnificent Boston Public Library
(1895), designed in the Renaissance style and, like Trinity, ornamented
by renowned artists. Though men dominated these institutions, women were
also present. Sarah Whitman designed a window for the Trinity Church Parish
House to commemorate the life of its legendary rector, Phillips Brooks.
In Bates Hall, the Boston Public Library displays Anne Whitney’s bust of
Boston-based suffragist Lucy Stone, created for the 1893 World’s Fair. The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, which opened in 1877, welcomed aspiring women artists. Hundreds attended, either here or on Huntington Avenue, where the MFA relocated in 1909. Gretchen Rogers (1881–1967), one of its most talented pupils, became a popular portraitist and figure painter. She lived at 126 Newbury Street. Lilian Hale studied here on a scholarship. She successfully balanced an artistic career while raising a family—a feat many doubted was possible.
Studios, art associations, galleries, and schools were scattered throughout the area. Gertrude Fiske (1878– 1961), Marion Louise Pooke (1883–1975), and Marion Boyd Allen (1862–1941) all worked in the Copley Hall Studios at 198 Clarendon (at St. James). The Cowles Art School, where many women studied, was once two blocks behind the old MFA, in the New Studio Building at 145 Dartmouth, near Back Bay Station.
| STOP 8 |
The Art Club Scene:
Art & Acceptance
From the corner of Dartmouth and Newbury to
150, 158, and 162 Newbury Street
Three artists’ groups near Copley Square reveal the opposing positions that Boston organizations held toward women as professional artists. At the corner of Dartmouth and Newbury streets is Muriel Snowden International High School, named for a longtime African-American community activist. In 1880, this building was the Boston Art Club. Founded in 1855, the club’s members were both professional artists and laymen, but not women. Women could always exhibit there, but only in the midst of the Depression, when the brotherhood was in financial difficulty, were they invited to join. Without that reluctantly opened door, talented women such as sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) might never have become members. Fuller, a Philadelphia-born African- American sculptor, had studied in Paris. She came to Massachusetts after her marriage to Solomon Fuller, America’s first African-American psychiatrist. Her husband expected a conventional wife, but she used her own money to build a studio, where she produced works on suffrage, world peace, and African-American traditions. While standing on the corner of Dartmouth and Newbury, note DuBarry’s Newbury Street Mural, which includes many well-known Boston women, among them Anne Whitney and Isabella Stewart Gardner.
The
Copley Society (158 Newbury), America’s oldest nonprofit art association,
was created by the first women to graduate from the Museum School. The Society
served both men and women; among its distinguished female members were Sarah
Sears, Sarah Whitman, Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, and Lilian Hale. It sponsored
many exhibitions, including shows by internationally known artists such
as Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux. Women also helped to found the Guild of Boston Artists (162 Newbury) in 1914. Prestigious female members have included still-life and portrait painter Adelaide Cole Chase (1868–1944); Gertrude Fiske, the first woman named to the Massachusetts Art Commission; and painter Lilla Cabot Perry, among the first to interest Bostonians in the Impressionism of Claude Monet.