Illustration by William Meade Prince (1893-1951), a prolific but largely forgotten contributor to magazines, especially The Country Gentleman and The Saturday Evening Post, in the 1920s and ’30s. He certainly nailed the smoke-filled room in this one.
“The Tiff” (1902) by Canadian artist Florence Carlyle (1864-1923)
When William Meade Prince (1893-1951) did the art for the front and back program covers of the 1926 Stanford Cal game, he took no chances. As it was, Stanford won 41-6, and the back cover turned out to be more appropriate.
“Put Me Off at Buffalo” (1895) was a song about an intoxicated Pullman porter who put the wrong man off at Buffalo.
An engineer on the “Western Mail” leaps off his cab to save a little girl on the tracks, but is run over by his own train while saving her life.
Davis was a retired Pullman porter who composed this 1896 song and other hits such as “The Fatal Wedding.”
American artist George Lambdin mostly painted flowers, but during the Civil War he also did scenes of camp life and soldiers in domestic settings. “The Consecration” dates from 1865.
By Charles Dana Gibson, 1901
John Singer Sargent’s 1899 painting of the three daughters of Percy Wyndham, a British soldier, politician and art collector. From the left, the sisters are Madeline Adeane, Pamela Tennant and Mary Constance, Lady Elcho. Sargent painted the sisters in the drawing room of their family’s residence at 44 Belgrave Square in London. On the wall above the sisters is George Frederic Watts’ 1871 portrait of their mother, Madeline Wyndham, a nod to their genealogy.
Mrs. Potter Palmer (Bertha “Cissie” Honoré) by Anders Zorn
“She was beautiful, dashing, quick, and smart; and more than that, she was sure of herself,” wrote historian Ernest Poole.
The gallery, and the Potters’ mansion, “The Castle,” on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago’s Gold Coast
So fabulous were Bertha Potter’s jewels, wrote author Aline B. Saarinen, that when she appeared on the S.S. Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, with a tiara of diamonds as large as lima beans, a corsage with diamonds, a sunburst as big as a baseball, a stomacher of diamonds, and pearls around her neck, a singer from the Metropolitan Opera, performing at the ship’s concert, was stopped in the middle of a high note.
Mr. Potter Palmer had made a fortune by buying cotton and woolen goods before the U.S. Civil War, and devoted much of his fortune to rebuilding Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. He died in 1902, and in his will left money to whoever next married Bertha. When asked, at the time he was writing the will, why he would be so generous to his own replacement, he replied, “Because he’ll need it.”
However Mrs. Potter never remarried, and over the next 16 years she doubled the value of the estate left to her. In 1910, she bought 80,000 acres in and around Sarasota, Florida; in 1914, she bought 19,000 acres as a hunting preserve called “River Hills” in Temple Terrace, Florida. She encouraged the Florida ranching, citrus, dairy, and farming industries, and was one of the first famous people to winter in Florida. After her death in 1918, at her winter residence, The Oaks in Osprey, Florida, her body was returned to Chicago to lie in state at The Castle. Her remains were buried alongside those of her husband in Graceland Cemetery.
Read, Seen, Heard 