The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (3 page)

Then we went to Baltimore and there everybody knew us and it did not make any difference about our knowing them since they all knew us. . . So Baltimore was full of everything which was natural enough and soon it was natural enough that there were so many and we knew them. Not now but then.

—Gertrude Stein,
Everybody's Autobiography,
1937

C
laribel continued her medical studies until 1893, first at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then at the University of Pennsylvania, and finally at the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane, known as Blockley.

Though granted two of Blockley's five medical residencies, she and a female colleague did not receive the same treatment as their male counterparts, they discovered. The women were put in charge of arranging teas for the male members of the medical staff. Claribel returned home.

Much had changed while she was away. Her brother Monroe had died of a syphilis-related illness. Her brother Moses had married and built a country estate near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. In 1890, the family dissolved H. Cone and Sons. The following year, Moses and Ceasar established the Cone Export and Commission Company in New York as
a selling and financing agent for forty-seven southern cotton mills. While Etta managed the family household, a brother and sister duo from San Francisco arrived to breathe new life into the Eutaw Place social scene.

In 1892, Gertrude and Leo Stein, accompanied by their older sister Bertha, moved to Baltimore to live with a maternal aunt, Fannie Bachrach. Gertrude was eighteen and Leo twenty. Their family was financially insecure—their father habitually made speculative investments and lost, often requiring them to relocate. The two youngest Stein children were so accustomed to physical upheaval that they stocked up on books during the good times in anticipation of their father's subsequent and not-too-distant ruin.

When Gertrude was fourteen, her mother died, leaving her and Leo with almost no parental guidance. They began raising themselves and each other. Three years later, their father died, and they went to live with their oldest brother, Michael.

Michael Stein was a bit of stability in an otherwise tetherless existence. An assistant superintendent at a cable company, he scored a financial coup by selling his father's railroad franchise to Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific Railroad. From the proceeds of the sale, he was able to give each Stein child a modest income for life. Leo and Gertrude took the money and headed east to Baltimore.

To the Cone circle of wealthy children and settled families, Leo and Gertrude Stein must have appeared like two unbridled horses. Fiction often depicted women from the West as independent. Now the genteel Baltimore society of gloved men and mute women saw that independence first-hand.

Gertrude was a dark, attractive, buxom young woman with flashing eyes. Her cousin, Helen Bachrach, said she was “quick thinking and speaking. . . you found yourself laughing
at everything she found extremely amusing, even yourself. . . .” Everyone, according to Bachrach, found themselves drawn to Gertrude—even casual acquaintances.

Leo, a tall, slender, serious young man, had strong ideas on just about everything. It was Leo who first attracted the attention of the women in the Cone circle. He was something of a dandy compared with the industrious Baltimore men Etta and her friends knew, and he flirted with women. Rather than discuss money and business—perhaps the only two things he knew nothing about—he spoke of art and music and travel.

Claribel, having by now moved back to her family's home on Eutaw Place, hosted Saturday evening salons where people from the worlds of art and science would meet. The Baltimore
Sun
said Claribel's “weekly gathering together of friends more nearly approaches the old idea of the salon than any other drawing-room coterie in the city.”

The Steins attended, but knew no rules and had no regard for appearance. While other women, shored up with corsets of bone and wire, sat politely—if uncomfortably—on the edge of their chairs, Gertrude put her sandaled feet up on the furniture and let her chubby, corset-less body breathe freely.

The eighteen-year-old Gertrude was among the youngest of the Cone entourage, but she was most like Claribel, ten years her senior. In fact, Dr. Claribel would serve as a role model for Gertrude. Her friendship was to be the first important relationship Gertrude had outside her own family.

It is easy to imagine the younger Stein roaring out her reaction to Claribel, who held forth during evening salons, or see her cheeks flushed or her eyes streaming with laughter, while others less appreciative of the bold doctor's wit sat quietly aghast. Etta, a mere shadow participant, no doubt delighted in the proceedings just the same.

As Gertrude looked up to Claribel, Etta would look up to Leo. At twenty-two, Etta was two years older than Leo, but his grasp of a world much wider than her own must have made him seem more mature. It may have been his influence that brought Etta out into Baltimore's cultural life—to recitals and lectures. It was clearly Leo who awakened in Etta an interest in visual art.

Leo's stay in Baltimore, however, was brief. He left for Harvard in the fall of 1892—the first time he and Gertrude had ever been apart. During their separation, Gertrude wrote that she became more “humanized and less adolescent.” But by the next fall, though she hadn't graduated from high school, she enrolled in the Harvard annex for women, later called Radcliffe, and rejoined her older brother.

That fall, everyone was busy except Etta. Claribel was doing research, and Gertrude and Leo were attending college, but Etta had no activity to call her own. With no immediate prospect of marriage or a career, Etta fell into managing the growing Cone household and caring for her elderly parents. Her world revolved around the many gas-lit corridors of Eutaw Place, and especially her brother Moses, who had assumed the role of patriarch as their father grew more frail.

Moses was a large, handsome, square man with arresting brown eyes under dark brows. Inside the family, he was warm, passionate, but stern. Despite his marriage, he was, Etta felt, especially fond of and dependent upon her.

Hands crossed neatly on her lap, Etta became the nurturer, the manager, the helpmate. She was the epitome of “a redundant woman”—without a home and family of her own. And though she liked and took part in music, she had no truly consuming interest. Hers was not a world of William
James’ philosophy, as it was for Gertrude, or scientific research, as it was for Claribel, or history and art, as it was for Leo.

But, thanks to brother Moses, art would soon become Etta's world, and her passion.

In the 1890s, artists began to attract the attention of Americans who might not have thought of them a decade before. Popular magazines featured stories on the artists’ bohemian lifestyles, and etiquette books described the proper ways for women to visit artists in their studios. In 1894, George Du Maurier added to the craze with his racy novel
Trilby,
about an artist's model in Paris. The book became a huge hit in the United States.

Interest in artists grew at about the same time home decorating began to focus on culture rather than simply comfort, and the trend became one of filling a home full of stuff. Against that background, Etta made her first grab at independence.

A year after their father's death, Moses gave Etta $300 to buy something to freshen up the family home. It would have been reasonable to expect her to buy new curtains or rugs, or furniture for the parlor. But Etta had been introduced by Leo Stein to the world of art, and it was to art that she turned with her brother's money. After seeing paintings by American Impressionist Theodore Robinson, she authorized a bidder to get “as many for the money as possible” during an estate sale in New York on March 24, 1898. Her money purchased five Robinson paintings.

When the purchases arrived in Baltimore, most of the family was shocked, though Moses’ wife Bertha admired the pictures. Not only were they of the ultra-modern Impressionist school, but they were astronomically expensive.

Most families that hung art in their homes then show-cased
reproductions of Italian Renaissance Madonnas whose prices started at 15 cents. Louis Prang and Company of Boston offered popular facsimiles of paintings touted as equal to the original, and cost from 10 cents for landscapes and floral paintings, to $15 for a large Madonna based on an original by Murillo. But few families paid $300 for original art.

For Etta, these purchases did not represent decoration but personal rebellion. She had taken one of the few liberties afforded a woman in Victorian society—the opportunity to buy something—and she had made a bold statement.

In the fall of 1897, after concluding her studies at Radcliffe, Gertrude Stein chose not only to remain in Baltimore, but, following in Claribel's footsteps, enrolled in medical school. Johns Hopkins Medical School had opened its doors in 1893, with fundraising assistance provided by a group of women on the condition that the school accept women students. Hopkins became the first major U.S. medical school to do so. The place had the excitement of an experiment.

Apparently having nothing more pressing to do, Leo decided he, too, would return to Baltimore and to take up research at Hopkins in biology.

Claribel at the time was one of forty-six people at Hopkins taking special courses for doctors with the renowned Dr. William Welch. Her interest in science was based on a love of abstract principle—the mysteries of life under a microscope. Gertrude was interested in the meat of life—blood, birth, and death. For her, medical school was a way to continue studying human behavior.

Until 1900, Gertrude and Leo lived together in a house on Biddle Street, not far from Etta and Claribel's Eutaw Place residence. The four were good friends, mingling socially and
taking part together in the city's meager cultural offerings. Leo, declaring he could “do nothing in a laboratory,” disrupted the relationship and routine, declaring that he would go to Florence (Italy) to study art history and to find his “great idea.” With that proclamation he was gone.

Gertrude, however, remained in Baltimore to continue her medical studies. Claribel and Gertrude would ride the trolley together and then stroll leisurely toward the school and hospital—two black, mountainous, hat-topped shapes, their skirts swaying as they walked.

It was during one of these walks that Claribel asked Gertrude to address a Baltimore women's group. Gertrude philosophized often on the role of women in society, based partly on her scrutiny of classmates at Harvard, and partly on the women she saw at a Hopkins clinic for poor patients, where she put in time. Seeing the socio-economic gap between the two groups, Gertrude came up with a theory that Claribel asked her to lecture on. The result was the first public piece by Gertrude Stein: “The Value of a College Education for Women.”

Anyone who knew Gertrude wouldn't have expected her to mince her words. Her years in school hadn't tamed her. In fact, she had recently begun sparring with a welter-weight boxer to improve her health. But those at Claribel's lectures unacquainted with Miss Stein were in for a surprise. Women's rights were a favorite subject among the enlightened group assembled before her. What was not common ground was an open discussion of sexuality.

Gertrude's thesis was that women used sex to pay for their keep. She explained that as women spent less time with household duties—such as making clothes, growing vegetables, caring for children—in the maintenance of their homes and households, they would become more like sex objects than their husbands’ equal partners. If women did not use their freedom
from household responsibilities to go to college, Gertrude concluded, they would become mere “peacocks,” spending useless years “learning the mysteries of self-adornment.”