Lily in Greek Costume

The information below references Frank’s travelling chest of costumes and the photo of Lily in Greco-Roman costume was taken in Washington, DC, in February 1884 by Clover Adams, the daughter-in-law of Frank’s friend and benefactor Charles Adams:

“In February 1884, Rebecca Dodge came back for another day of photography, this time joined by Elizabeth, wife of the American painter and illustrator F D Millet…..The three women spent a rainy afternoon experimenting with Clover’s camera. Clover positioned Rebecca and Elizabeth in “different poses as statuary”, draping them in free-flowing garments that they’d found in the art trunk Millet took with him when he travelled. The images look more like a classical fantasy than traditional portraiture. The style of drapery which Clover had called an “Eden-like costume” in her description of her visit to Millet’s studio the previous spring and the poses themselves reflect those of Millet’s work including his “Reading the Story of Oenone (1882).”

In Clover’s letters now deposited with the Massachusetts Historical Society, Clover Adams referred to the Millets and described Lily as “pretty and nice”.

Reference: Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life – Natalie Dykstra – 2012

“Clover” was the nick name for Marian Hooper Adams, but she went by Clover her entire life. In December of the year following this photo, Clover’s life came to a very sad ending. As recounted by author Natalie Dykstra, in her book:

“Clover Adams, a fiercely intelligent Boston Brahmin, married at twenty-eight the soon-to-be-eminent American historian Henry Adams. She thrived in her role as an intimate of power brokers in Gilded Age Washington, where she was admired for her wit and taste by such luminaries as Henry James, H. H. Richardson, and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Clover so clearly possessed, as one friend wrote, “all she wanted, all this world could give.”

Yet at the center of her story is a haunting mystery. Why did Clover, having begun in the spring of 1883 to capture her world vividly through photography, end her life less than three years later by drinking a chemical developer she used in the darkroom? The key to the mystery lies, as Natalie Dykstra’s searching account makes clear, in Clover’s photographs themselves.”

Clover’s husband, Henry Brooks Adams, son of Charles Francis Adams, a close friend of the Millet’s, was devastated by his wife’s suicide and commissioned another friend of the Millet’s, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to create a bronze memorial sculpture for Clover’s grave site.  It has become one of Saint-Gaudens most famous sculptures.