Ellen Emmet Rand, great painter of her time

SALISBURY — Art historian Dick Boyle said that the painter Ellen Emmet Rand is not as well-known today as she should be, given her ability and her connections with “the movers and shakers” of her time.

Boyle was speaking at the Scoville Memorial Library in the finale of the “Era of Elegance” series of talks this spring. The talks were sponsored by the library and the Salisbury Association Historical Society.

Boyle said that Rand was one of three American female portrait painters operating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with Cecilia Beaux and Mary Foote.

The former is quite well-known, he added, while Foote, who was a friend of Rand’s, is almost completely unknown.

Boyle said Rand became a national figure in part by painting national figures — she painted Franklin D. Roosevelt three times.

“Her client list was an incredible array — chairmen of boards, businessmen, academics.”

But along with the portraits of members of the DuPont family are the paintings of family members and ordinary people in Salisbury. (Rand was the grandmother of First Selectman Curtis Rand.)

Rand was taught and encouraged by some of the biggest names of the art world — John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase and Frederick William MacMonnies.

Rand and Foote studied with MacMonnies in Paris at the very end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th. 

MacMonnies, alas, was something of a ladies’ man. “It wouldn’t be going too far to say he was a womanizer,” Boyle said.

Foote fell in love with MacMonnies. “She was devastated when he refused to marry her, and had a breakdown.

“An art historian friend of mine said she went ‘bonkers.’ That’s a legitimate art history term, bonkers.”

Foote, interestingly enough, consulted famed psychologist Carl Jung to get over the heartbreak. 

“She ended her days at The White Hart inn.”

MacMonnies had the distinction of being banned in Boston. His “Bacchante and Faun,” originally intended for a courtyard at the Boston Public Library, was deemed unsuitable.

“Boston being Boston,” said Boyle, “even if he called it ‘Drunk on Knowledge’ it would have been banned.”

Salisbury residents are likely familiar with Rand’s portrait of the Scoville sisters, which Boyle said is “Sargentesque” in style. The painting hangs in the library.

Boyle said Rand’s unique style came from her informality. She usually worked from sketches, and tried to capture the character of her subject — as opposed to a posed studio portrait.

One of her paintings, of a small child of indeterminate sex standing in front of a mid-17th century American cupboard, reflects the Colonial Revival that was popular in the U.S. from  roughly 1880 into the 1920s.

Even the portrait of one of the DuPonts, with the subject seated and clearly at ease while wearing correct morning dress, manages to convey the informal and formal at the same time.