THE CLARK BROTHERS

The Champion Collectors

"The End of an Era," said the local newspaper, and the thousands of bidders and bystanders, flocking through the auctioneer's striped tent on the grounds of the Iroquois Mansion were well aware of it. This is what had brought them all the way to Cooperstown on its quiet lake in the middle of New York State. The white-gloved men from Christie's bringing out the objects to be sold were also trundling cartloads of nostalgia. There was nothing very unusual about the objects: they were miscellaneous bric-a-brac, leftovers after the most valuable possession had been disposed of in London and New York.. There was English furniture, Oriental furniture, Colonial furniture, pots and pans. There were Franklin stoves from the 1820's; mint-julep cups by Kentucky silversmiths; about a hundred sporting prints. There was a bronze statue of Kellsboro' Jack, the bay gelding which in 1933 won the British Grand National for Frederick Ambrose Clark, owner of the Iroquois Mansion.

He was the third of four brothers, the grandsons and heirs of a man named Edward Clark. Clark had graduated from Williams College in 1831 and studied law in the office of Ambrose Jordan in Hudson, New York. He was shrewd and intelligent and in a few years he was both Jordan's son-in-law and his partner. The firm prospered, and moved to New York City. One day a new client walked in, a man named Isaac Singer, also from upstate New York, a wandering Shakespearean actor who considered himself on the best Richard IIIs of the day. But there was little money to be gained in tragedy, and Singer had turned his hand to puttering with inventions. He had patented a type-carving machine in 1839, but it was unsuccessful. He then went to work on an improved version of the sewing machines which had been patented by Elias Howe and others a few years before. Singer's was the first truly practical model on the market, but it would obviously require all the business acumen and legal craft of a man like Clark to get it financed, into production, and safely through the patent-infringement court cases Singer could hardly afford to pay for these. He was living with three different mistresses in three different homes at the time, and found it hard to support them and the 14 children they had borne him, not to speak of his legal wife and their two legitimate children. Clark agreed to take on Singer's affairs for 50 percent of what was to become the Singer Manufacturing Company.

Edward Clark came to loathe Singer, whom Mrs. Clark described as a "nasty brute," and Singer in turn despised Clark, "the most contemptible-looking object I ever saw with his wig off." Nevertheless, they were able to match their talents perfectly and make the sewing machine an international institution, one of the first of the mass-produced articles that revolutionized home life throughout the world. There were other sewing machines on the market, but the Singer Company had such marketing and financial skills that by 1870 it dominated the field.

Brose's legacy was the stuff of folklore. With his gaiters and his gray bowler and his ruddy face, he might have stepped out of one of his own hunting prints as he daringly rode or drove his four-in-hand down the lanes of Saratoga, Westbury or wherever sportsmen gathered. Between the horses and high living, he had, or so they said, broken almost every bone in his body by the time he was 70, and when he broke his left hip in what turned out to be his last fall, he would not get into the ambulance until they had brought him a bottle of champagne and a Havana cigar. Even in his 80s he rode a pony every day. In Cooperstown where he made his home, you cannot to this day walk without running into someone who had served "Uncle Brose." His spirit, they say, watches over the place still, for at his request he was buried between Kellsboro' Jack and his favorite dog in a hill overlooking the town.

The Clarks have contributed enormously to Cooperstown. They built a hospital, a library, a gymnasium, and owned a weekly newspaper there. The Clark Foundation provides scholarship funds for as many as 700 local youngsters for higher education. At one end of Lake Otsego, they built, and still own, the imposing Otsego Hotel; when the front porch was put in 1909, the wooden columns were said to be the tallest ever seen in America.

Edward Severin, the oldest of the brothers, was known in Cooperstown as the Squire. In his youth he had inherited the Dakota apartments, that great stone fortress built by his grandfather on Central Park West in New York City, which set the standard for luxury-apartment living in the big city, with its 20-foot ceilings, huge closets and baronially dimensioned rooms. His first love, however, remained Cooperstown, and there, a few years before he died, he built a vast and stately home which he called Fenimore House, which his brother Stephen would later give to the New York state Historical Association.

The massive stone barn where Edward Severin Clark kept his cows has been turned into the nucleus of the sprawling Farmers' Museum, which aims, in a style currently fashionable in the museum world, to bring visitors in touch with the realities of workaday life among the ordinary people, the noncelebrities of the past. The barn s flanked by old stone and wooden buildings, which have been picked up and moved from farms and villages within a 50-mile radius of Cooperstown, typical of the days when upper New York State was still frontier country. There is a church, school-house, general store, druggist's shop, printing shop, doctor's office, lawyer's office, tavern. In these surroundings, authentic blacksmiths, broom makers, spinners and weavers exercise their crafts. Women in long gowns perform such obsolete tasks as braking and hatcketing (combing) flax, acting out the standard duties and drudgeries that filled the rural day before electcrcity and the mail-order catalog came to bring a measure of freedom.

One day in the mid 1930s, a persuasive neighbor talked Stephen Clark into buying, for $5, a ratty-looking clump of twine bound up in crooked hide, which he assured him was the very ball used by young Army cadet, later Major General, Abner Doubleday, who is popularly supposed to be the inventor of the game of baseball The new owner had little interest in the sport, but he had his grandfather's eye for potential value lurking behind scruffy exteriors. Out of that sorry ball has gown the massive National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, inaugurated in 1939 and almost immediately established as the Jerusalem of the national pastime, to which pilgrims come on the order of 200,000 a year.

The remaining brother, Robert Sterling, shared Stephen's passion for the arts and Brose's for horses; he also had a pronounced taste for bourbon and an eye for beautiful women. He was a tall bluff military man who had served in the U. S. Army fighting the Moros in the Philippines. He had led a scientific exploration into the deserts of northern China, and authored a book about it. He bred and raised thoroughbreds on a Virginia farm in accordance with experimental principles of his own devising, He loved Paris above all other cities and there he met and married a handsome sprightly Frenchwoman named Francine. His brothers were said to have disapproved.

Sterling was an enthusiast for French cooking and spent hours whisking up sauces in his kitchen. His honest meat-and-potatoes neighbors could only peck nervously at his dishes, wondering what horrors in the way of frogs, snails or umentionable organs might be hidden in those sauces. An opinionated man, Sterling went on cooking as he pleased, and he never let his brothers interfere with his lifelong devotion to Francine. He valued her taste, and she quietly collaborated with him on what became the consuming interest of his life: building up the collection of rare and beautiful works that was to be part of the Clark family's finest legacy, the Sterling and Francine Art Institute.

He began collecting in 1912 and the following year made a trip to Europe, with his younger (but more knowledgeable) brother Stephen and George Grey Barnard the sculptor along to give advice. But he was never a man for advice, and from the start made it clear that he was not an ordinary young dilettante out to asoop up the treasures of the past. His eye from the start was eclectic and idiosyncratic. One of this first purchases was of a Piero della Francesca, who at that time was relatively unknown to the general public. It was only later that critical opinion made him one of the supreme figures in the history of art.

Sterling Clark never gave a fig for critical opinion. He thought critics were bores who were always counseling him against buying paintings because they were of a bad school or a bad period, whereas he was only interested in individual works that were well painted and celebrated his own zest for life.

He became a familiar figure on the premises of dealers liked Knoedler and Durand-Ruel, listening to shoptalk, waving his cane like a saber at pictures he liked (the staffs were always afraid that he one day would poke a hole in one of the canvases.) In 1916 he bought his first Renoir -- there were to be 80 of them in his various homes - and this was the nucleus of one of the finest private collections of late 19^th-century painting in existence.

One day during World War II, Durand-Ruel learned that thee was a large painting, some 9 by 6 feet, lying forgotten in a New York warehouse. Since it was in a slotted crate, he was able to peek in and recognized it at once. It portrayed four naked nymphs frisking around a muscular satyr. It was the work of Bouguereau, one of the most honored artists of his day. At the turn of the century it had hung in the saloon of New York's Hoffman House to be admired by visiting bloods like Sterling Clark. Bouguereau in the 1940s was all but forgotten, and Durand-Ruel had no trouble picking up the painting for the cost of the unpaid storage bills. When they put it on exhibition for the benefit of French war relief, it was a tremendous success. Clark bought the painting for $12,000, never doubting, though he did not live to see the day, that fashion would swing around again and people tired of the stark fanaticisms of modern art and would turn back with pleasure to the opulent extravagances of Bouguereau ad his ilk. And to the post-modern eyes that are beginning to blink in the art world these days, the sparkling liveliness of Boldini's fish market on the beach of Etretat can be just as stimulating as Monet's study of the flash and ripple of sunlight on the same beach, which hangs near it on the walls of the Clark Institute.

Sterling Clark had once proposed to his brother Stephen that they jointly leave their collections to a museum they would set up in Cooperstown, but bad blood between them put an en to that idea. Later he thought of offering his collection as the nucleus of a museum in New York similar to the Frick. He was distressed, however, by the modern tendency to drop bombs on big cities. At length, he found a safer refuge for his beloved works of art in bucolic Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The Clarks visited there, and began to create what was to become the Clark Art Institute, perhaps the most pleasant small art museum in the country. Sterling himself superintended the construction and dictated much of the design of the building that was to house his treasures. He wanted a Greek temple of white marble, and that is what he got - a chaste, gracious little temple fitting perfectly into the green Berkshire hills. It fits in so well that when years later, a new building had to be put up alongside it for the library and administrating services and additional exhibition space, the new structure - blockhouse-modern at its most ungainly - was taken under the wing of the old, and somehow the incongruous pair sit side by side in harmony.

The interior rooms, light and airy, with wide windows opening on the outside green look like enlarged rooms of private houses, and in a sense they are, for the Clarks kept a small apartment within the museum while it was being built and stayed on until Sterling's death in 1956. Few of the works on the walls had been bought with a view to public display. They had been meant for the various Clark homes in Paris or Virginia or Cooperstown, or the apartment on Park Avenue. They were bought because Sterling (with Francine's quiet advice and consent) liked to have them around.

Sometimes, in his racy letters in English or French, he documented the reasons for his attraction to particular works. There is a remarkable Remington of horses being led off while dismounted cavalrymen fire at unseen Indians. Clark admired it for the way the horses, brilliantly foreshortened, seem to be galloping straight out of the canvas, and for the leathery mustachioed faces of the riders, which epitomized the old Army he had served in and loved.

One of his favorite paintings was Renoir's Onions, a paean to the eternal vigor of vegetable life. He enjoyed telling of how he hung this painting on his dining-room wall when the man from Knoedler's came o dinner. The visitor could hardly take his eyes off those pink, lavender and ivory tubers - with their two attendants heads of garlic, all with stems waving like pennants over a battlefield - even when he had to turn his attention to the splendid repast cooked by Clark himself (perhaps with the brown sauce on the guinea hen saved from overacidity at the last minute by a judicious admixture of Grand Marnier)). Visitors to the Clark Institute can often be seen smiling, not the most usual sight in museum halls, They are responding to the collector's warm pleasure in the good things of life, the bold intricacies of 18^th-century English silver, the exotic color harmonies of mock-Oriental scenes like GÈrÙme's The Slave Market, Degas' race-horses pawing the ground, lavish interiors, richly rolling landscapes. Clark had no taste for the tragic and problematic in art, or anything he regarded as merely experimental. He had no use for Picasso or Matisse, and he could never understand why one of his favorite dealers, Knoedler, would waste his time trying to get him interested in Milton Avery. His spiritual home was 19^th-century France, land of solid comfort and brilliant color. He loved its women - Renoir's pinkcheeked shoppgirls, Degas' coltish dancers, Alfred Stevens' introspective society ladies - though it must be admitted that he was catholic in his taste for handsome women and responded equally to an ethereal actress like Gainsborough and a healthy outdoor girl by Winslow Homer.

Sterling Clark was an old man when work began on the Institute in Williamstown, and he was infirm by the time it was inaugurated in 1955. He died only a year and a half later. Francine served as president of the Institute until her own death in 1960. Both Clarks were buried under the building's marble steps.

The last years of the dashing old Army officer were not at all melancholy. Not only did he have the satisfaction of outstripping his brother Stephen, who may have collected more valuable paintings but never had a museum named after him, but he outdid hi brother Brose on his own turf as well. In the year before the Institute was dedicated, Sterling's colt Never Say Die won the Derby at Epsom Downs, the first time in the 174-year-old history of the race that an American-owned-and-bred horse had done so.

Never Say Die went on win the St. Leger and was expected to win England's Champion Stakes as well. But, according to Humphrey Finney's memoirs (he looked after Clark's racing interests), tat would have put him ahead of the Queen in victories for the year. So as a last sporting gesture, Clark retired Never Say Die from racing and presented him to the British National Stud too achieve immortality as the sire of future champions. He was also put on the bookplate that Sterling designed for his rare volumes: the stallion's noble head surrounded by interlocking patterns of fleurs-de-lis in honor of Francine's native land) and sewing machines (as a reminder of where it had all come from)

Smithsonian Magazine, April 1984