Olivia, 1911

This charming full-length portrait represents Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes (1908–1983), one of three children born to the Episcopal clergyman and educator Reverend Anson Phelps Stokes and his wife, Caroline Green Mitchell. Active in New York and Massachusetts, Lydia Field Emmet was one of the leading society portraitists of her generation. Particularly admired for her portraits of women and children, at the height of her career she was considered one of the most talented American woman artists, second only to Cecilia Beaux. Her fluid, painterly style was influenced by John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase. The latter had been one of her teachers at the Art Students League in New York, and she taught at his Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island.

One of Emmet’s most popular works, Olivia amply demonstrates why she was considered particularly adept at painting children.[1]  [1]
Illustrations of Olivia appeared in Art and Progress 3 (June 1912): 619; Fine Arts Journal 29, no. 2 (Aug. 1913): 477; St. Nicholas 42 (Dec. 1914): 106; and Ladies Home Journal 33 (Apr. 1916): 17. According to the artist’s Account Book, Emmet Family Papers, Archives of American Art, Reel 4765, frame 1015, she charged $1,500 for the portrait. Her contemporaries found this spontaneous image of a young girl irresistible, and the portrait was awarded an honorable mention when it was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in 1912.[2]  [2]
Emmet had taken pains to enter Olivia in the Carnegie Institute exhibition and was delighted at receiving the award. In a letter of May 9, 1912, she informed the Institute’s director, John W. Beatty, “I feel more glad to have received this from the Carnegie Institute than any other art institution in the country as its international character makes it much the most important and interesting one we have.” This letter and other correspondence relating to the early exhibition history are in the Papers of the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, 1911–1912, Archives of American Art, Reel 21, frame 730. No less a critic than Guy Pène du Bois admired the “most decided truth” in

that picture [of] a little golden-haired girl in white, holding her hat at her back with its ribbons. The attitude is spontaneous, quick, vivacious. Her eyes sparkle, her mouth opened in a half smile discloses teeth that add a spot of animation to the composition. The handling of the head has been accomplished, in the matter of solidity and simplicity, with unusual success—the planes of light, well kept, are broken only just enough. So with the short white dress which is saved from monotonous simplicity by a well-placed necklace.[3]  [3]
Guy Pène du Bois, “The Essentially Feminine Art of Lydia F. Emmet. Women Painters of Today. First Article,” Arts and Decoration 2 (Oct. 1912): 418.

The portrait also impressed the modernist collector Duncan Phillips, who described it to the sitter’s husband as representing “a very small & lovely child holding on to a sunbonnet which seems to have just slipped off her little blonde head. She is bright-eyed and smiling and the artist was evidently enraptured with the subject.”[4]  [4]
Duncan Phillips to John Davis Hatch, Sept. 7, 1939, NGA curatorial files.

The portrait was commissioned in 1911 by Olivia’s father, the son of a New York banker who had aided in founding the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while he was secretary of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and serving as assistant rector of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church there.[5]  [5]
He later served as resident canon of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, from 1924 to 1939. For biographical information on Stokes, see Who Was Who in America, vol. 3 (Chicago, 1960), 823. The sitter’s brothers were also notable in their day: Anson Phelps Stokes Jr. became the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes II was a philanthropist. Born in New Haven, Olivia graduated from the Foxcroft School near Middleburg, Virginia, and attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania from 1925 to 1930. A member of the Junior League of Washington, DC, and the Colony Club of New York, she was an active member of the American Red Cross and the American Conferences of Social Work. She lived the life of a fashionable debutante until 1939, when she married John Davis Hatch Jr., a noted historian of American art and museum administrator.[6]  [6]
In 1979 the National Gallery of Art acquired his collection of nearly three hundred American 19th- and 20th-century drawings. The couple had four children. From the 1940s until her death in 1983 she worked and volunteered with many organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the Race Relations Group, Recording for the Blind, and the Berkshire Music Center. She traveled extensively throughout her life and coauthored with Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Olivia’s African Diary: Cape Town to Cairo, 1932 (1980), which describes their trip throughout Africa. Stokes died in an automobile accident in 1983.[7]  [7]
For a more detailed biography of Olivia Stokes Hatch, see the finding aid for the Olivia Stokes Hatch papers housed at Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/pacscl/ead.html?id=PACSCL_BMC_USPBmBMCM86.

In addition to their many philanthropic interests, the Stokes family had a tradition of commissioning portraits from the most fashionable American artists. Beaux had painted a full-length portrait of Stokes’s parents (Mr. and Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes, c. 1898, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Sargent’s portrait of the subject’s architect brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes (1897, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is a celebrated work.[8]  [8]
For discussions of the Sargent and Beaux double portraits, see Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 3, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1846 and 1864 (New York, 1980), 204–205 and 247–251; for the Sargent portrait, see also Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT, 2002), 122–124. More than just a stylish portrait in the vein of Beaux and Sargent, Emmet’s Olivia, with its tilted floor, slanted ground line, and slightly off-center figure placed within an evocative interior, most strongly recalls Chase’s depictions of children lost in the wonder of exploring the richly appointed rooms of their extensive homes, such as Hide and Seek (1888, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC).

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018