Alfred Corning Clark

Alfred Corning Clark I (November 14, 1844 – April 8, 1896) was an American philanthropist and patron of the arts.[1][2]

Alfred Corning Clark
Clark c. 1893
Born(1844-11-14)November 14, 1844
Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
DiedApril 8, 1896(1896-04-08) (aged 51)
Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Spouse(s)
Elizabeth Scriven
​
​
(m. 1869; his death 1896)​
Partner(s)Lorentz Severin Skougaard
George Grey Barnard
ChildrenEdward Severin Clark
Robert Sterling Clark
F. Ambrose Clark
Stephen Carlton Clark
Parent(s)Edward Cabot Clark
Caroline Jordan Clark

Early life

He was the son of Edward Cabot Clark (1811–1882) and Caroline (née Jordan) Clark (1815–1874). His father made a fortune as the partner of Isaac Singer in the Singer Sewing Machine Company, invested it in Manhattan, New York City real estate, and left a $25,000,000 (approximately $662,328,000 today) estate at his death.[3]

His maternal grandfather was Ambrose L. Jordan, a New York State Senator who served as the New York State Attorney General.[3]

Personal life

On October 20, 1869, Clark married Elizabeth Scriven (1848–1909), the daughter of George Scriven and Ellen Rattan Scriven of Brooklyn, New York.[4] Her parents had emigrated from Great Britain,[5] and the wedding took place at Withecombe in Manor of Raleigh, Pilton, Devon, England.[6] Alfred and Elizabeth Clark were the parents of four sons:

Clark maintained three residences in Manhattan: a city house at 7 West 22nd Street for his family, a nearby flat at 64 West 22nd Street for guests, and a large apartment in The Dakota overlooking Central Park for entertaining.[7] Clark's father built The Dakota (1880–84), but died during its construction. Edward Cabot Clark skipped a generation and bequeathed the building to his 12-year-old grandson and namesake, Edward Severin Clark.[8]

Clark died of pneumonia on April 8, 1896, in Manhattan, New York City.[1] Six years after his death, his widow became the second wife of Henry Codman Potter, the Episcopal bishop of New York, in 1902.[9]

Other relationships
Brotherly Love (1886-87), Skougaard gravemarker, Langesund Churchyard, Langesund, Norway

In 1866, Clark met Norwegian tenor Lorentz Severin Skougaard (1837–1885) in Paris, where the singer was studying.[10] In 1869, the same year that he married Elizabeth Scriven, Clark began making annual summer visits to Norway, eventually building a house on an island near Skougaard's family home.[10] He gave his son Edward, born 1870, the middle name Severin. When in New York City, Skougaard occupied Clark's flat at 64 West 22nd Street.[7] During an 1885 visit, Skougaard was stricken with typhoid and died.[10] Clark eulogized him in a privately published biographical sketch,[11] and created a $64,000 endowment in his memory for Manhattan's Norwegian Hospital, 4th Avenue & 46th Street.[12] Clark also commissioned Brotherly Love (1886–87) by American sculptor George Grey Barnard to adorn his friend's grave in Langesund, Norway.[13] The homoerotic sculpture depicts two nude male figures blindly reaching out to each other through the block of marble that separates them.[14]

According to Debby Applegate's review in The New York Times Book Review of Nicholas Fox Weber's group biography, The Clarks of Cooperstown (2007):[15]

Weber suggests that Alfred [Corning Clark] led a dual life: a quiet family man in America and a gay aesthete in Europe, especially in France, which he declared "the Mecca of brotherly feeling." He was a generous patron to male artists; for 19 years his closest companion was a Norwegian tenor named Lorentz Severin Skougaard. When his father's death forced him to return to Manhattan, Alfred installed Skougaard down the block from the town house where he lived with his wife and children. [Henry] James's shadow lingers longest in this chapter; surely this was the sort of thing he meant by those uneasy intimations that beneath Europe's splendor and refinement lurked something unspeakable. Weber's bluntness, by contrast, highlights how much of that beauty was created by gay men seeking warm communities of free expression.[16]

After Skougaard's death, Clark became Barnard's patron, commissioning works and providing financial support to him in Paris.[10] Clark paid Barnard $25,000 to carve a marble version of his Struggle of the Two Natures in Man (1888), which was completed in April 1894.[17] Barnard exhibited the piece at the 1894 Paris Salon, where the jury, headed by Auguste Rodin, pronounced it a work "of superlative merit."[17] Clark brought the larger-than-life-sized sculpture to New York City. Soon after his death, Clark's widow donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[17]

Philanthropy

Between 1888 and 1891, Clark built the first gymnasium in Cooperstown, New York.[18] Although it remained popular, by the 1920s the facility had become obsolete and was demolished and rebuilt by his son Edward Severin Clark. A new Alfred Corning Clark Gymnasium opened in 1930, and featured such improvements as a swimming pool and bowling alleys. The current successor to the 1930 ACC Gym is the Clark Sports Center a greatly expanded facility, completed in the mid-1980s, located on the former grounds of Iroquois Farm (the F. Ambrose Clark estate) under the direction of Stephen Carlton Clark, Jr., the great-grandson of the gym's founder.[19]

Jozef Hofmann

Clark's donation of $50,000 to the piano prodigy Jozef Hofmann in 1887 spared the eleven-year-old from having to complete a fifty-recital American tour that had been criticized by Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.[20] With this financial security, Hofmann and his family returned to Europe where the boy could receive a broader education before resuming his concert career.[20] In addition to becoming one of history's most outstanding piano virtuosi, Hofmann's study in science and mathematics enabled him to become an inventor in later life, earning over 70 patents.[21]

Art collection

Clark assembled a collection of French academic paintings. He purchased Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) (1872) by Jean-Léon Gerome from the estate of Alexander Turney Stewart.[22] It is now in the collection of the Phoenix Art Museum. In 1888, he purchased Gerome's The Snake Charmer (1880), but his family sold it after his death. His son Sterling re-acquired the painting in 1942 for the museum he founded, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.[23] Clark donated works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including Madame Gaye (1865) by Marià Fortuny.[24]

Works once owned by Alfred Corning Clark
  • Madame Gaye (1865) by Marià Fortuny, Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Court of the Alhambra (1871), Museu Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalí
  • Pollice Verso (1872) by Jean-Léon Gerome, Phoenix Art Museum
  • The Snake Charmer (1880) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Clark Art Institute
  • Struggle of the Two Natures in Man (1892–94), by George Grey Barnard, Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • The Ameya (1893) by Robert Frederick Blum, Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • The Great God Pan (1898), by George Grey Barnard, Columbia University

Legacy
  • In memory of her first husband, Elizabeth Scriven Clark Potter built the Alfred Corning Clark Memorial Chapel, at 240 East 31st Street, Manhattan, New York City, which was consecrated on December 7, 1904.[25]
  • Brotherly Love, an opera based on the relationship between Clark and Skougaard, debuted in Norway in May 2016.[26]

References
  1. "Alfred Corning Clark" (PDF). The New York Times. April 12, 1896.
  2. Portrait of Alfred Corning Clark by William Jacob Baer, from Clark Art Institute.
  3. Buckman, Jack (2016). Unraveling The Threads: The Life, Death and Resurrection of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, America's First Multi-National Corporation. Dog Ear Publishing. pp. 12–14. ISBN 9781457546617. Retrieved 25 April 2019.
  4. Miller, Tom (22 January 2018). "The Lost Elizabeth Clark House - 347 West 89th Street". Daytonian in Manhattan. Retrieved 25 April 2019.
  5. Edgar Warner Clark, History and Genealogy of Samuel Clark, Sr. and His Descendants from 1636 – 1892 (St. Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Company, 1892), p. 41.
  6. "FUNERAL OF MRS. POTTER.; Bishop Greet Officiates at Services for the Widow of the Late Bishop" (PDF). The New York Times. 15 March 1909. Retrieved 25 April 2019.
  7. Weber, p. 76.
  8. Stephen Birmingham, Life at The Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address, (Open Road Media, 2015).
  9. Weber, pp. 104-105.
  10. Harold E. Dickson, "Barnard and Norway," The Art Bulletin, vol. 44, no. 1 (March 1962), pp. 55-59.(JSTOR) $
  11. Alfred Corning Clark, Lorentz Severin Skougaard: a sketch, mainly autobiographic, (privately published, 1885), from WorldCat.
  12. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 26, 1911, p. 1.
  13. Glenn C. Altschuler, "Meet 3 Generations of American Originals," The Baltimore Sun, June 17, 2007.
  14. "George Grey Barnard (1863 – 1938)," in Lauretta Dimmick and Donna J. Hassler. American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A catalogue of works by artists born before 1865. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999. pp. 421-27.
  15. Nicholas Fox Weber, The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-year Feud. Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. ISBN 0307263479.
  16. Debby Applegate, "Outrageous Fortune," The New York Times Book Review, May 20, 2007.
  17. N.Y.), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Dimmick, Lauretta (1999). American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A catalogue of works by artists born before 1865. Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 421–423. ISBN 9780870999147. Retrieved 25 April 2019.
  18. Alfred Corning Clark Gymnasium, Copperstown, N.Y. from Postcards of the Past.
  19. Mark Simonson, "Clark family helped keep public in shape with gyms," The Daily Star (Oneonta, New York).
  20. Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present, 2nd ed., Simon & Schuster, 1987
  21. Aubrey D. McFadyen, "Invention—Hobby of Great Men," Popular Science, January 1928, p. 136.
  22. Weber, p. 83.
  23. Jori Finkel, "Jean-Léon Gérôme's 'The Snake Charmer': A Twisted History," The Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2010.
  24. Madame Gaye - Provenance, from Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  25. Episcopal Diocese of New York, Journal of the One Hundred and Twenty-Third Convention, A. D. 1906, (New York: J. J. Little & Co., 1906), p. 244.
  26. Brotherly Love (opera) Archived 2017-02-23 at the Wayback Machine
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