Beyond the Iconography, Newton had sought to leave behind only good, worthy works. Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel. The Settlement House. Turk’s Head in Providence. But his legacy remains most intricately linked to the New York Public Library, the single Manhattan institution identified with the kind of serious, bookish life he led. In 1930, he bequeathed to the institution the prints from his collection, now much more valuable than the maps and pictures he had paid a few dollars for back at the turn of the century. The library dedicated the north end of its third floor as the Phelps Stokes Gallery, mounting a rotating display drawn from the thousand-print Phelps Stokes Collection.
By that time the main research library already sheltered plenty of Stokesiana, in the form of thirty boxes of Iconography research, notes and drafts. Newton petitioned the library to store the dead matter for him. He received permission from Harry Lydenberg, then assistant director, to stash the whole mess “in the space between the blowers and next to the garage.”
Also in the library are four murals sponsored by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration: The Story of the Recorded Word, whose creation Newton oversaw in the years after Edith’s death. Alone and lonely, he had all the time in the world to mentor Edward Laning, the twenty-eight-year-old artist whom the WPA had put forward to paint the murals. Newton took an interest in Laning and liked the sketches the young man showed him, then shepherded the project through the board’s approval process. Laning inserted a personal dedication in the scene of the last panel, with I. N. Phelps Stokes on a scroll in the lower right corner, like a miniature graffiti tag.
Newton especially loved this last panel, wherein Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Linotype machine, sits at his keyboard in the offices of the New York Herald. The scene depicted New York in 1886, Newton’s Manhattan glory days, when he was nineteen and everything was possible. He admired the mural’s view of the Brooklyn Bridge, which in 1886 was just three years old, visible out the window of the room where Mergenthaler sat at the Linotype.
“You know, I was the first person to cross the Brooklyn Bridge,” Newton told Laning, an old man turning garrulous when reminiscing about his youth. “I was about fifteen years old, and I stood all night at the Manhattan approach to the bridge. A great crowd gathered, but I was in the forefront, and when the ribbon was cut, I made a dash for it and reached Brooklyn ahead of anyone else!”
Later, Laning recalled approaching his benefactor for an additional two hundred dollars in payment for the murals. Newton sat in silence for a long moment, then said quietly, “If I had the two hundred dollars I would put it up myself. But I don’t have it.” He enumerated his fellow board members: “I would go to Mr. Baker for it, but unfortunately Mr. Baker is dead. I would ask Mr. Harkness, but Mr. Harkness is dead.”
Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes died in 1944, seven years after Edith, at the age of seventy-seven. The couple’s ashes occupy twin vaults beside the chancel of St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia, beneath the perfectly balanced Guastavino arches.
An extensive collection of Stokes memoirs, letters and papers exists at the library of the New-York Historical Society. As I delved into these pages, I looked up to see an oil portrait of its author hanging on the wall in front of me. A spooky, synchronous moment, since here was an image not of the young, brash dandy of the Sargent painting, but the older, emeritus scholar. The artist, DeWitt Lockman, painted Newton in 1930 without Edith, distinguished, penetrating and at the same time (it seemed to me) forlorn from having been battered around a bit by life.
The Iconography of Manhattan Island can be found in a number of private collections, but primarily in university libraries around the country, usually in either of two reprintings, that of the Arno Press in 1967 or the Martino Publishing version from 1998. None of the classic or contemporary histories of New York could have been written without the Iconography as a source. On the rare-book market, the reprintings may be had for something less than a thousand dollars. Much rarer, more prized and more expensive are the 402 copies of the original. In the uncommon instances that one comes onto the market, the original commands a hefty, book collector’s price, upward of fifteen thousand dollars, depending on its condition.
The New York Public Research Library holds four of the originals, their near-transparent onionskin paper and pristine printing values displaying Newton’s obsessive approach to quality. All told, the library catalog lists eleven copies of the Iconography, including both the 1967 and 1998 reprints, partial copies, microforms and originals. The trove is only fitting, given the long-standing relationship between the author and the institution. The whole of the Iconography has now been digitized by the library, so a visitor to the institution’s website need only click once or twice to summon up, say, Volume Two of the work and its Castello Plan frontispiece.
Helen Stokes inherited none of the physical infirmities of her adoptive parents, passing away in 2004, at age ninety-nine, after leading a full life of family and society. She made a home for most of her life in Bedford Hills, New York, twenty miles from her parents’ estate at Khakum Wood. After the death of her first husband she married the banker and investment manager, Donald Bush. She had four children and numerous grandchildren, among them scientists, bankers, lawyers, and schoolteachers.
John Singer Sargent’s reputation has waxed and waned with trends in the art world, but his lush realism currently enjoys huge favor. At Edith’s bequest, Sargent’s Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes became part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938. Feminist art historians in particular hail the portrayal of Edith as a milestone in the public presentation of the female form. Other viewers simply appreciate the woman’s dazzling, energetic beauty, caught in a fountain-of-youth moment, with the sober shadow of the husband by her side.
The portrait of Edith by Cecilia Beaux remains privately held by Edith’s descendants.
Select Bibliography
Unpublished Sources
“Diary of Helen L. Phelps Stokes for the Years 1883 and 1884.” Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University.
Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes Papers, 1898–1937. New-York Historical Society.
Stokes, I. N. Phelps. Architectural records and drawings, 1900–1940. Avery Classics Library, Columbia University.
Stokes, I. N. Phelps. Manuscript notebook. Avery Classics Library, Columbia University.
Stokes, I. N. Phelps. Papers, 1909–1944. Archival holding, New York Public Library.
Stokes, I. N. Phelps. Random Recollections of a Happy Life. Mimeographed. New York Public Library, 1941.
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Allison, Leslie Minturn. Mildred Minturn: A Biography. Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec: Shoreline, 1995.
Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Bolotin, Norman, and Christine Laing. The World’s Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Boyer, M. Christine. Manhattan Manners: Architecture and Style, 1850–1900. New York: Rizzoli, 1985.
Brosterman, Norman. Inventing Kindergarten. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997.
Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Caffin, M. Review of PAFA exhibit. Harper’s Weekly, January 28, 1899.
Charteris, Evan. John Sargent. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972.
Cohen, Paul E., and Robert T. Augustyn. Manhattan in Maps: 1527–1995. New York: Rizzoli, 1997.
Connor, Holly Pyne, ed. Off the Pedestal: New Women in the Art of Homer, Chase, and Sargent. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Cott, Nancy F. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Cresson, Margaret. Journey into Fame: The Life of Daniel Chester French. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947.
Daston, Lorraine
, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1990.
Davis, Deborah. Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin Group, 2003.
Deak, Gloria. Picturing New York: The City from Its Beginnings to the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Dearinger, David B., ed. Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925. New York: National Academy of Design, 2000.
Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Doell, M., and Christine Klim. Gardens of the Gilded Age: Nineteenth-Century Gardens and Homegrounds of New York State. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
Downey, Fairfax. Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson: A Biography. New York: C. Scribner, 1936.
Dube, Philippe. Charlevoix: Two Centuries at Murray Bay. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990.
Dunlop, M. H. Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York. New York: William Morrow, 2000.
“Eighth Annual Exhibition of the Architectural League of New York—Views in the George W. Vanderbilt Gallery.” Harper’s Weekly, January 28, 1893.
Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: Free Press, 1989.
Ford, James, with the collaboration of Katherine Morrow and George N. Thompson, and an appendix, mainly architectural, by I. N. Phelps Stokes. Slums and Housing, with Special Reference to New York City: History, Conditions, Policy. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1936.
French, Daniel Chester, Mrs. Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928.
“From the Tenth Annual Exhibition of the Architectural League of New York.” Harper’s Weekly, March 2, 1895.
Garmey, Stephen. Gramercy Park: An Illustrated History. New York: Balsam Press, 1984.
Greaves, James L. “Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).” Museum Training II, 1962–1967, submitted to Mr. Feld, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Hartog, Hendrik. Man and Wife in America: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hawes, Elizabeth. New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 1869–1930. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Hills, Patricia. John Singer Sargent. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1987.
Homberger, Eric. Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Hooker, Mildred Phelps Stokes. Camp Chronicles. Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y.: Adirondack Museum, 1964.
“In the Vanderbilt Gallery.” Harper’s Weekly, March 4, 1893.
“In the Vanderbilt Gallery.” Harper’s Weekly, March 1895.
“In the Vanderbilt Gallery.” Harper’s Weekly, March 1899.
Jackson, Anthony. A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976.
Jackson, Richard S. Houses of the Berkshires, 1870–1930. New York: Acanthus Press, 2006.
James, Henry. The American. New York: Signet Classics, 2005.
James, Henry. Daisy Miller and Other Stories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Joselit, Jenna Weissman. A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Laning, Edward. The Act of Drawing. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
Lehr, Elizabeth Drexel. “King Lehr” and the Gilded Age. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935.
Library of Congress. Behind the Scenes in Candy Factories. Washington, D.C., 1928.
Life in America: A Special Loan Exhibition of Paintings Held During the Period of the New York World’s Fair, April 24 to October 29. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1939.
Lockwood, Charles. Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976.
Lubove, Roy. “I. N. Phelps Stokes: Tenement Architect, Economist, Planner.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 23, no. 2, May 1964.
Maurice, Arthur Barlett. Fifth Avenue. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1918.
May, Elaine Tyler. Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Mayer, Grace M. Once Upon a City: New York from 1890 to 1910. New York: Macmillian, 1958.
McAllister, [Samuel] Ward. Society as I Have Found It. New York: Arno Press, 1890; reprint, 1975.
Melosh, Barbara. Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Members of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts. The Berkshire Hills. American Guide Series, 1939.
Merrill, Eliot Phelps Stokes. “The Career of Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes in American Urban Housing Reform, 1896–1936.” A thesis submitted to the Dept. of History in the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors. Harvard University, March 25, 1993.
Montgomery, Maureen E. Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York. London: Routledge, 1998.
Morrone, Francis. “The Ghost of Monsieur Stokes.” City Journal, Autumn 1997.
Museum of the City of New York. Gotham Comes of Age: New York Through the Lens of the Byron Company, 1892–1942. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1999.
“New York Water-Color Exhibition, The.” Harper’s Weekly, November 22, 1902.
Novotny, Ann. Alice’s World: The Life and Photography of an American Original, Alice Austen, 1866–1952. Old Greenwich, Conn.: Chatham Press, 1976.
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Stokes, I. N. Phelps. The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909; compiled from original sources and illustrated by photo-intaglio reproductions of important maps, plans, views and documents in public and private collections. New York: R. H. Dodd, 1915–28.
Stokes, I. N. Phelps. New York Past and Present: Its History and Landmarks, 1524–1939; one hundred views reproduced and described from old prints, etc., and modern photographs, compiled from original sources for the New-York Historical Society on the occasion of the New York World’s Fair, 1939. New York: Plantin Press, 1939.
Stokes, I. N. Phelps, and Daniel C. Haskell. American Historical Prints, Early Views of American Cities, Etc., from the I. N. Phelps Stokes and Other Collections. New York: New York Public Library, 1933.
Townsend, Reginald T. God Packed My Picnic Basket: Reminiscences of the Golden Age of Newport and New York. New York: New England Society in the City of New York, 1970.
Weinberg, H. Barbara. The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905.
Wharton, Edith. Hudson River Bracketed. New York: D. Appleton, 1925.
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Zeisloft, E. Idell, ed. The New Metropolis: Memorable Events of Three Centuries, 1600–1900; from the Island of Mana- hat-ta to Greater New York at the close of the nineteenth century. New York: D. Appleton, 1899.
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