Walt Kuhn

Kuhn, who always painted from the model, also developed another expansive source of female posers, whom he said less about to “the girls.” He wasn’t shy about targeting young, bright, art-interested, painter-student wives, daughters, nieces and friends of wealthy Florida collectors. “The shrewdest approach for me is via the women,” he wrote to Vera. Going after Bert and Olive Taylor, he wrote first to the wife: “I have been wondering how your painting has been progressing. I’m beginning to think about Florida….From gossip one hears up here in New York it’s going to be difficult to get accommodations….I want the simplest kind of quarters….I’m mostly interested in what you have been painting and am curious to see whether I have started you on your way.” Of his first “two month’s trip to [the Taylor’s] one of Hobe Sound’s richest [families],” he wrote to a pal: “A 35-cent cigar after breakfast, a fifty-cent one after lunch, and a $1.00 one after dinner! I wore the boss’ pajamas and hobnobbed with all the feminine pulchritude of the land of The Fountain of Youth. They gave me my own car to drive….Nine miles of coast with 20 millionaires to the mile. From now on I shall never have to worry about ‘shoes for baby,'" using the crap shooter cry. He had learned from the close relationship he formed much earlier with legendary art collector John Quinn at the time of the Armory Show (1913). Kuhn knew just how necessary a wealthy patron could prove.

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Then came the Harriman's, five women named Mary. In 1929, Kuhn’s "The White Clown" achieved masterpiece status and was exhibited at the newly established Museum of Modern Art in New York, bringing intense publicity. Kuhn jumped to a new gallery established by Marie Norton Harriman, second wife of financier and diplomat W. Averell Harriman, and ex-wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney. She shared a life-long close personal and professional liaison with Kuhn. In 1931, Kuhn traveled with the Harriman’s to Europe, where the husband and wife visited major private collections, acquiring modern art as advised by Kuhn. He claimed to have met the grandmother, Mary Williamson Averell Harriman (1851-1932), wife of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, at the Armory Show in 1913. She was then a widow and one of the richest women in the country. She purchased Kuhn’s “Green Plums” (1923) for her own collection. Kuhn was even closer with her daughter, W. Averell Harriman’s widowed sister, Junior League founder Mary Harriman Rumsey (1881-1934), wife of polo player and sculptor, Charles C. Rumsey, who died in in a car crash in 1922. She purchased Kuhn’s “Concert” directly from the artist in 1923 for $1200, and Kuhn personally repaired the work at her Virginia estate, The Plains, in 1930. She acquired her favorite, “Apple Basket” (1933), at its debut exhibition. She served as FDR’s New Deal Consumer Board chief, and when called to Washington (where she owned a Georgetown mansion) while Kuhn was spending the weekend at The Plains in October 1934, slipped a note under his door saying, “See you to-morrow or any day you want to come to Washington. The house is yours at any and all times. Its only treasure is your picture & you should come to guard that often. Blessings on you. Mary H. R.” The blessings were probably owing to Kuhn for devoting even more attention to her father-less daughter, Mary Averell. Young Mary’s grandmother passed in the same year. Worse, her mother died in December 1934, after a fall from a horse, leaving Mary a very, very wealthy orphan at age 21.  And tragedy continued when her younger brother Bronson died while flying a plane in Mexico in 1939. Mary became an extremely close friend of Kuhn, as her correspondence reveals. She learned painting at his hands, as he later told Vera: “I certainly have been finding the way to her heart. She’s actually painting again and likes it.” Mary regularly purchased Kuhn’s work, including, “Red Roses” (1934) and “Red Roses” (1935) and “Orange Roses” (1937 not 1938 in Adams). Mary commissioned Kuhn to paint a portrait of her gal pal and later sister-in-law, Mary Maloney Rumsey (1935 not 1936 as in Adams) which she also displayed.  And Mary Maloney later purchased works directly as well (per Vera). 

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​But if anyone really knew Kuhn, it was his socialite painter protégé Lily Cushing (1909-1969). She was the third child of Bell heiress Ethel Cochrane and artist Howard Gardiner Cushing. She studied painting in Paris from 1926-1927 and became Kuhn’s dedicated student in 1928. As he explained to Vera: “Lily insists that she go off sketching for a week or so with me.” They painted together and toured galleries together. When the second of her three husbands, William Temple Emmet, Jr., rented a farm in Connecticut in 1938—Kuhn visited and stayed. When Lily and her girlfriend, the illustrator Daphne Hodgson, went off to Dorset, Vermont, Kuhn joined their painting expedition. Kuhn painted Lily Cushing at least four times. In 1942, he showed her en face above the neckline of a deep green blouse—this portrait Vera’s records always refer to as “Lily Cushing.” There is also what he called in a last (1/2/49) inventory, “Lily Emmet in Big Hat,” which Adams (No. 429) entitles “Lily with Feathered Hat” (1942—1943 correctly per Vera). But in the same inventory we also find “Lily Emmett in Black Lace,” which Adams fails to catalog even though it was known and shown in Kuhn’s lifetime and still exists. Kuhn exhibited these works, but he heavily marked them as  “NFS,” meaning “Not for Sale,” in  exhibition catalogues. Lily acquired Kuhn works herself, and got her friends to do the same. A number of sales catalogues were annotated by Vera as “sold to a friend of Lily Cushing Emmet,” as was the case with the clown study “Sylvester.”