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Stay by Me, Roses Alice Archer Sewall James with her infant son David, ca. 1914. Stay by Me, Roses The Life of American Artist Alice Archer Sewall James, 1870–1955 ALICE BLACKMER SKINNER Swedenborg Foundation Press West Chester, Pennsylvania © 2011 by the Swedenborg Foundation. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Skinner, Alice Blackmer. Stay by me, roses : the life of American artist, Alice Archer Sewall James, 1870-1955 / Alice Blackmer Skinner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-87785-338-1 (alk. paper) 1. James, Alice Archer Sewall, 1870-1955. 2. Artists- -United States--Biography. I. James, Alice Archer Sewall, 1870-1955. II. Title. III. Title: Life of American artist, Alice Archer Sewall James, 1870-1955. N6537.J3245S59 2011 700.92--dc22 2011015766 Edited by Morgan Beard Design and typesetting by Karen Connor Special thanks to Carol Skinner Lawson for her help in preparing the manuscript for publication. Manufactured in the United States of America Swedenborg Foundation 320 North Church Street West Chester, PA 19380 www.swedenborg.com Stay by me, roses; For you too have eluded The natural end of June, Bloomed when you could, concluded, And swelled with another boon; And drooped with prescience terrible and meek To feel the sun upon your western cheek. Stay with me, roses. Something will come of this That is not of earth’s order You have long known, I wis, That spirit-garden’s border Where clustered works are monthly seen Without such thirsty droughts between. Leave me not, roses; Into decay we go Each for our proper blooming, So well the way ye know Accustomed to entombing. Trustful of resurrections, stay ye near! And ’tis the dew that glitters; not a tear. —Alice Archer Sewall James, 1931 < CONTENTS > List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xv PART I: SHAPING AN ARTISTIC LIFE 1. A Young Artist 3 2. I Bear a Jewel with Me Here 17 3. Gathering Life’s Reins 25 4. A Life Partner 43 5. Return to Urbana 61 PART II: COPING WITH ADVERSITY 6. A Low Point 79 7. Stir No More, Holy Muse 95 8. The Path Steepens 103 9. Drive Deeper, Life 121 10. See the Great Words Assemble 131 PART III: A PROPER BLOOMING 11. Not of Earth’s Order 149 12. The Muse Returns 163 13. The Urbana Movement 173 14. A Second Career 193 15. Realities 217 Notes 233 Bibliography 251 < ILLUSTRATIONS > Alice Archer Sewall James frontispiece Portrait of the author by Alice Archer Sewall James xii The Sewall family in Glasgow, Scotland, circa 1886 18 Early self-portrait by Alice Archer Sewall 30 The “James Mansion” 49 Wedding of John James and Alice Archer Sewall, 1899 55 The Awakening of the Soul by Alice Archer Sewall James 64 Adoring Virgin by Alice Archer Sewall James 88 Unfinished and undated self-portrait by Alice Archer Sewall James 99 Alice Archer Sewall James with her son and father 104 Sketch of John H. James by Alice Archer Sewall James 141 Painting of a tree by Alice Archer Sewall James 150 Portrait of Marian May Clarke by Alice Archer Sewall James 164 Portrait of Louise Orth and her children by Alice Archer Sewall James 165 Alice Archer Sewall James on the steps of the James Mansion, 1935 191 Mural on the wall of St. Paul’s Church, Urbana, Ohio, by Alice Archer Sewall James 208–9 The Holy Supper by Alice Archer Sewall James 225 ix < PREFACE > Memories of my early childhood home reflect the creativity of a family friend, the artist-poet Alice Archer Sewall James (1870–1955). Several portraits she had painted hung on our walls; she hand-carved the stand for the open Bible, representing the presence of the divine so important in a Swedenborgian household; at Christmastime her silhouettes of the Three Kings’ visit to Bethlehem decorated our living room windows. Although we children called her Aunt Archie, she instructed our parents to call her “Mrs. James.” In the small Ohio town of Urbana, where we lived until I was six, I recall walking with my mother and younger brother to Aunt Archie’s house to sit for our portrait. Oddly, I remem- ber nothing of its creation, for my memory focuses on my two-year-old brother collecting small green apples in the very basket he holds in the painting. When I was six, we moved to Massachusetts, where some of Archie’s distinctive creations were again present in the form of various early childhood portraits of my brother and myself, the carved Bible stand, and the silhouetted manger scene that again graced our living room windows every Christmas. When I was twelve, Aunt Archie did another portrait of me. She selected a smocked yellow dress that I considered unduly childish and posed me in an uncomfortable position, hold- ing a vase of freesias. I indeed felt relieved when the portrait was completed. At the same time she did a portrait of Lewis Hite, the philosophy professor at the Swedenborgian theologi- cal school in Cambridge. She wanted to get the expression she had observed on Mr. Hite’s face as he was explaining some- xi Portrait of the author by Alice Archer Sewall James thing to a child and asked me to read Plato’s Republic so I could discuss it with him while she painted. A child who felt more at home reading Little Women found The Republic a challenging task. Little did I realize that someday I would try to unravel the mysteries of my portrait-painter’s life. Years later, however, when I was doing a longitudinal study on women’s careers— which required visits to the participants every five years— I was inspired to investigate one woman’s life in its entirety. Whose life would it be? As often happens in women’s lives, serendipity prevailed. After my parents died, it fell to me to prepare their home for sale. In a dark corner of the attic I found a box of papers written years before by Aunt Archie. When I took them to the archives of the Swedenborgian church, I learned that a similar package had recently arrived from Archie’s goddaughter along with a letter suggesting that someone should write her biography. I was intrigued by the prospect and responded to this opportunity to study one xii Preface woman’s whole life. What a subject! As a news reporter once summarized, “She painted, she danced, she wrote, she taught: more than anything else, Alice Archer Sewall James spent her life creating.” Consider some of the accomplishments that interested me— her namesake—in the study of Archie’s life: < By the time she was thirty, Archie’s Portrait of Cornelia had been accepted in Paris by the prestigious Salon de Mai for exhibition at the Musée de Louvre. Today, a century later, portraits by Archie are treasured possessions in homes from Maine to California. < She received national acclaim for her 1904 painting The Holy Family, created when she was in her thirties. The work was selected as one of three noteworthy contem- porary American Christmas paintings presented in the December 12, 1909, Sunday Arts section of the New York Herald. < In her sixties, in 1934, Archie founded the Urbana Movement, offering affordable instruction in the arts in her hometown. An average of thirty students attended these classes, depositing whatever tuition they could afford in a box in the classroom. < In her seventies, upon scaffolds, Archie accepted com- missions to paint two wall-size murals in the chancels of two black churches in still-segregated Urbana. I found Archie to have been a writer as well as an artist. She left a legacy of poems and plays, some of which may be found today in the Library of Congress and in Swedenborgian archives. The plays, most written during her forties and fifties when she was not able to paint, seemed to depict odd collec- tions of characters and plots until I realized they represented Preface xiii Archie’s way of coming to grips with difficult family situations with which she could not deal candidly. Among her poetry is a lengthy work entitled The Wanderings of Eros written entirely in iambic pentameter. The title of my study, Stay by Me, Roses, comes from a poem Archie wrote when she was about sixty and had chosen some late-blooming roses as a symbol of her second painting career. Although she sensed and celebrated the return of her painting muse, she did not know when she invoked it that some twenty years of painting and teaching lay ahead of her. One of the questions facing me as a biographer was how to refer to an individual who preferred to be called Mrs. James but was not married until she was twenty-nine. Her par- ents and sisters called her Archie; her husband and childhood friends knew her as Alice. I chose to write of her as Archie even though she would not approve of such informality herself. As a child, I had collected many memories of the James fam- ily and their hometown, Urbana. But when I began to research Archie’s life, I discovered how little I actually knew about her. I learned that she was an unusually enterprising woman, much more career-involved than I had assumed women of her era to be. I also found, however, that she had encountered circum- stances that discouraged and challenged her when her prom- ising early career was cut short in 1906 by “nervous prostra- tion.” Her determined program to regain her health was an astounding discovery.

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