| This lively scene of poets and artists gathered at the Petipas boardinghouse
at 317 West Twenty-ninth Street features a circle of Sloan’s friends. Shown
from left to right are Van Wyck Brooks, biographer and literary historian; John
Butler Yeats; Alan Seeger; Sloan’s wife, Dolly; Celestine Petipas (standing);
Robert Snedon, fiction writer; in the foreground, Mrs. Charles Johnston, the
Russian niece of Madame Blavatsky, the theosophist, whose Irish husband was working
for the New York Times; behind her, Eulabee Dix, model and miniature painter;
Fred King, an editor of Literary Digest; and John Sloan. Run by the French Petipas
sisters, the bohemian West Side gathering spot became famous as a result of the
presence of Yeats, philosopher, artist, and father of Irish poet William Butler
Yeats. Sloan first met Yeats in 1909, the year after the Dubliner had come to
New York. When it was time to return to Ireland, Yeats refused to leave the “huge
fair” of New York and settled at the Petipas boardinghouse, where he attracted
a cult of young artists and writers, who would gather there in the evenings.
Van Wyck Brooks touched on some of the reasons the senior Yeats was so popular: “Whatever
the virtues of Americans may be, wisdom is not one of them and most of [Yeats’]
friends had never seen a wise man. So all-pervasive was the cult of youth at
the time when he was living in New York that wisdom indeed was all but unrecognized
there...”
- Dorothy Moss, formerly Assistant Curator of American Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art |
Text excerpted from A Capital Collection: Masterworks from
the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
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