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Helena Gilder

New York, 1846 - 1916, New York

BiographyGilder, Helena de Kay (14 Jan. 1846-28 May 1916), painter and cultural reformer, was born Helena de Kay in New York City, the daughter of Commodore George Colman De Kay, a naval officer, and Janet Halleck Drake. As a granddaughter of poet Joseph Rodman Drake and the great-granddaughter of shipbuilder Henry Eckford, Helena de Kay enjoyed great social and cultural prominence in New York City. Her father died in 1849, and ten years later Janet de Kay moved her family to Dresden, Germany, where Helena and her brother Charles absorbed both a love for the arts and a love for things German. When they returned to New York around 1864, Helena continued her education at a boarding school in Middletown, Connecticut. In 1866, fulfilling an old ambition, Helena enrolled in painting classes at the Cooper Union, where she entered into lifelong friendships with Molly Hallock (later frontier-author Mary Hallock Foote) and flower painter Maria Oakey (later Maria Oakey Dewing, wife of Thomas Wilmer Dewing). In 1869 she began drawing from plaster casts in the antique class at the National Academy of Design; two years later she was one of ten female students when the academy finally let women draw from live models. In the antique class she met Albert Pinkham Ryder, and her respect for his spirituality caused her to secure for him his first commissions and the support of dealer Daniel Cottier. With her encouragement, Charles de Kay became Ryder's first critical champion once Charles joined the New York Times in 1877 as its art reporter, later its art editor. During her student years at the National Academy of Design (1869-1875), Helena de Kay also studied intermittently with John La Farge, who became her mentor, and to a lesser extent with Winslow Homer, who painted a portrait of her modeled after Whistler's Mother.

Helena married poet Richard Watson Gilder in 1874. Gilder was then assistant editor of Scribner's Monthly, the predecessor of Century Magazine. In his role as editor in chief of Century from 1881 until his death in 1909, Richard Gilder became America's preeminent arbiter of educated tastes. Soon after their marriage, the Gilders opened their home at 103 East Fifteenth Street, an old stable renovated by their friend Stanford White, to artists, writers, and other creative individuals dissatisfied with reigning styles and institutions. The illuminati who graced the Gilders' Friday evening salon included Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Joseph Jefferson. The still-ostracized Walt Whitman wrote of the Gilders, "At a time when most everybody else in their set threw me down they were nobly and unhesitatingly hospitable." Artist Will H. Low spoke for many just back from study abroad when he called their home "an oasis" in the desert of New York culture.

In 1875 the jury of the National Academy's annual exhibition rejected two of the three still-life paintings Helena Gilder submitted and several works of Oakey, Ryder, and other artist friends. Gilder concluded that the jury rejected their work because it was too modern: painterly rather than narrative and lacking precise detail and polished finish. She responded by organizing a protest show featuring La Farge, Oakey, Ryder, herself, and numerous women students of Boston painter William Morris Hunt. Held at Cottier & Co., this exhibition was the first to challenge the National Academy's traditional role as the exclusive showplace for new American art. That same year she participated in a student secession from the academy and helped establish the Art Students League to provide more systematic art training. Gilder became its first women's vice president and made sure that during its first decade women retained a strong voice in school administration.

Two years later Gilder responded to the National Academy's refusal to exhibit a sculpture by Saint-Gaudens by agitating for the establishment of an institutional alternative to the academy. On 1 June 1877 she hosted the organizational meeting of the Society of American Artists and became one of its four founding members. The society thereafter sponsored its own art exhibitions, shows deliberately different from those at the academy, emphasizing works in painterly and pastoral styles inspired by modern European movements like the Barbizon school, aestheticism, and Munich realism. Gilder exhibited regularly at the society until 1886.

Gilder and her friends were not hostile to the idea of academies but disagreed with the National Academy's leadership over the proper way to fulfill its duty to educate and elevate public taste. The academy's annuals tried to encourage the progress of art by letting art lovers compare the best works in rival styles. Gilder, by contrast, shared with associates like J. Alden Weir and William Merritt Chase the European idea that popular taste improved only when people followed the lead of a natural elite endowed with inborn sensitivity to genius and beauty. Gilder believed that painterly styles that stimulated the viewer's imagination were so inherently superior to narrative styles that continuing to exhibit traditional works perpetuated bad taste and impeded America's cultural development. Thanks in large measure to the Gilders and Charles de Kay, this philosophy and the artists they championed, including La Farge, Ryder, Dewing, and Chase, came to dominate critical and genteel tastes at the turn of the century.

After 1880 Gilder devoted most of her time to raising her five surviving children (one child died in infancy). One of her daughters, Rosamond Gilder, later edited and published her father's letters and became New York's foremost theater critic. Despite her family and social responsibilities, Gilder continued to paint and sketch. She also translated several books, including Alfred Sensier's Jean-François Millet, Peasant and Painter (1881), wrote occasional articles on art and literature, and carried on a voluminous correspondence with Mary Hallock Foote in Montana. She campaigned for reform movements like international copyright and urban beautification. Gilder helped her husband and brother win copyright protection for foreign publications. Doing so helped their author friends by ending publishers' preference for reprinting unprotected English novels in lieu of publishing American fiction. Like her friend Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, Gilder became an outspoken opponent of woman suffrage because she deemed it inimical to the sacred boundaries between women's domestic duties and men's public responsibilities.

During the last decades of her life Gilder divided her time between the Fifteenth Street house and a summer home in Tyringham, Massachusetts. She died in New York City.

Bibliography

Vast archives of Gilder's papers remain in the possession of a descendant, including thousands of letters, her diaries, many of her paintings, numerous photographs, and a journal kept jointly by the Gilders between 1874 and 1878. Her letters to Foote are in the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Contemporary reviews of her paintings were often short and superficial but are still of value, such as Susan N. Carter, "First Exhibition of the American Art Association," Art Journal 4 (Apr. 1878): 126. The best contemporary account of her life focuses on her hospitality, Will H. Low, A Chronicle of Friendships (1908). Excellent information about the Gilders is found in Rosamond Gilder, ed., Letters of Richard Watson Gilder (1916). Gilder is a central figure in Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, "The Formation and Early Years of the Society of American Artists: 1877-1884" (Ph.D. diss., City Univ. of New York, 1983). See also Thayer C. Tolles, "Helena de Kay Gilder: Her Role in the New Movement" (master's thesis, Univ. of Delaware, 1990). Gilder is discussed in Rodman W. Paul, ed., A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (1972). Information can also be found in Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein, American Women Artists (1982), and Doreen Bolger Burke, In Pursuit of Beauty (1986). Obituaries are in the New York Times, 29 May 1916, and the American Art Annual 13 (1916): 315.

Saul E. Zalesch

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Citation:
Saul E. Zalesch. "Gilder, Helena de Kay";
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-01530.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 15:03:33 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.

Helena de Kay ("H. de K.G." and: deKay, De Kay, DeKay) Gilder was a portrait, still-life, ideal figure, and flower painter, and writer; born 1846 or 8; died 1916. Helena Gilder studied art with John La Farge and Winslow Homer. Professionally, she is often referred to by her maiden name. The Gilders played a central role in the founding of the Society of American Artists. Charles de Kay, an art writer, and founder of the National Sculpture Society and National Arts Club, is Helena de Kay Gilder's brother.
https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/richard-watson-and-helena-de-kay-gilder-papers-8209 I.S. 12/15/2017

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