A. Piatt Andrew, the “A” to Mrs. Gardner’s “Y”

There’s the Rat Pack, the Brat Pack, and Isabella Stewart Gardner’s “Dabsville” Pack—and its beating heart(throb).

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Perched like an icon in a corner of the Blue Room, Anders Zorn’s striking portrait of the economist Abram Piatt Andrew, Jr. (1911) testifies to the deep friendship between its subject and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Andrew, known as Piatt, first met Gardner just a few months after the opening of Fenway Court in 1903 and the day after her sixty-third birthday. It was a red-letter day for the thirty-year-old Andrew, who earlier that morning was named an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard. Charmed by his hostess, he wrote in his diary of the “delightful experience” he had touring her collection.”1

A blue-upholstered wall covered with framed paintings. A painting of a white man in a tan colored suit and red cravat is in the upper left corner.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Photo: Sean Dungan

The Blue Room with Anders Zorn’s Abram Piatt Andrew, Jr., 1911 in the upper left corner

Four more years would pass before Gardner accepted an invitation to Andrew’s Gloucester, Massachusetts home, Red Roof. “What fun all this will be for me,” Gardner wrote him in anticipation of her September 1907 visit.2 In the affectionate note she sent Andrew on the afternoon she returned home, Gardner exclaimed:

In a few hours what a change! The land change does not make one into something rich and strange – alas! Your village is Fogland with the sea’s white arms about you all. Don’t let others crawl in – Only me! For I care. I love its rich, strange people, so far away… 

 

— Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 12 September 1907 [3]

Dabsville

It is worth noting that Andrew and Gardner’s subsequent, intense connection caught fire only after Gardner met the “rich, strange people” that formed Andrew’s community of friends. Dubbing themselves “Dabsville,” an acronym drawn from the first letters of the friends’ surnames, this group of Eastern Point neighbors included the painter Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942), who had brokered Andrew’s initial visit to Fenway Court; interior decorator Henry Davis Sleeper (1878–1934); educator Joanna Davidge (1872–1931); and arts patron Caroline Sinkler (1860–1949). As a set, the Dabsvillians were lively, witty, creative, and intellectually curious; snobs regarding personal merit rather than social standing, they were frequent and hospitable hosts, yet could also be clubbish and insular.

A white man in a suit and a white woman in a long coat and skirt sit on a stone bench in a walled garden overlooking Gloucester Harbor.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (ARC.008519)

Thomas E. Marr (Canadian-American, 1849–1910), Isabella Stewart Gardner and A. Piatt Andrew at Red Roof, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 6 October 1910. Gelatin silver print, 19.4 x 24.3 cm (7 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.)

By insisting that Andrew let no “others crawl in,” Gardner not only acknowledged the group’s exclusivity but she also recognized Andrew as its beating heart(throb). Defying stereotypes of the Ivory Tower academic, this young professor was blessed with matinée-idol good looks, a deeply charismatic personality, and a passion for all forms of athleticism. Despite the thirty-four-year gap in their ages, and Andrew’s romantic attachment to his own sex, Gardner adopted a playfully flirtatious tone with him. By January 1908 the pair adopted nicknames for one another, Gardner becoming “Y” for the archaic spelling of her name (“Ysabella”) to Andrew’s “A”—or in one instance, “A. No.1”4 She could not have devised a more fitting reminder than this, that Andrew would always come first among the Dabsvillians. Its members eagerly accepted Gardner as his second-in-command.

 Four women motioning with their thumbs down stand behind four seated men with their hands up.

Historic New England (MS061.01), Gift of Corinna T. Fisk and Piatt A. Gray

A Dabsville gathering at Red Roof, October 13, 1907 in Red Roof Guestbook Vol. I (1902-12). Standing left to right: Caroline Sinkler, Joanna Davidge, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Cecilia Beaux. Seated left to right: A. Piatt Andrew, Henry Davis Sleeper, and two unidentified guests

In July 1908 Andrew resigned his Harvard position to join the National Monetary Commission, a role that would bring him to Europe for the rest of that summer and fall. Dabsville responded with grief (“fancy a lot of enchanting people missing one man,” Gardner wrote Andrew) and plans for a grand costume party.5 Describing the July 30 event, held at Beaux’s studio, Andrew wrote his parents:

I was made to wear the robe of a Roman emperor, with a jeweled fillet on my forehead, and I sat on a kind of throne of red velvet with R.R. [for ‘Red Roof”] in gold. Mrs. Gardner sat opposite me on a less imposing throne of purple emblazoned with a large Y… the air of the studio was heavy with incense and tube roses, the tables were gorgeous with old rose damask and fruit. I shall never forget the picture. 

— Letter from A. Piatt Andrew to his parents, Summer 1908 [6]

Signing their names above those of the other guests that night, Andrew styled himself “Piatt R.I” [for “Romanus Imperator”] while Gardner signed “Ysabella – R” [for “Regina,” the Latin form of “Queen”]. Beside her name she sketched a coronet.

A man in a turban stands next to a banquet table with a seated woman raising a glass and a reclining man with his arm raised and head thrown back. A second woman in a dark evening gown reclines on the floor.

Historic New England, Gift of Corinna T. Fisk and Piatt A. Gray

Posing before Piatt Andrew’s farewell party at Cecilia Beaux’s home, Green Alley, in Red Roof Guestbook Vol. I (1902-12), 30 July 1908. From left to right: Natale Gavagnin (Green Alley’s major domo), Cecilia Beaux, A. Piatt Andrew, and an unidentified reclining woman. Note Andrew’s Red Roof “throne” with the initials RR

Isabella Tries to Play Matchmaker

At the Easter celebration Andrew hosted the following spring, Gardner exchanged her crown for the role of matchmaker. Sharing the news of their mutual friend George Proctor’s engagement, Gardner asked Andrew, “When does your turn come?”—a question she hoped to answer by bringing the twenty-two-year-old heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney to Red Roof.7 Beautiful, well connected, and worth nearly twenty million dollars, Whitney struck Gardner as Andrew’s perfect mate. In April 1911, after two years of persistence, Gardner brought him to a half-hearted marriage proposal. Rebuffed by Whitney, Andrew wrote her a followup letter that began well—“I long for the chance to be with you”—but included the likely unwelcome observation that he was “with S [Henry Davis Sleeper] at my elbow as I write.”8 Whitney married Willard Straight that fall.

A black and white photograph of a white woman with dark hair wearing a large hat holding a bouquet of flowers.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Unidentified photographer, Dorothy Payne Whitney (Mrs. Willard Straight), 1915

Anders Zorn’s Portrait

When Gardner commissioned Andrew’s portrait from Zorn that year, she surely knew her friend’s personal charisma might not easily translate to the canvas—this, despite Zorn’s well-known talent for drawing out the character of his sitters. The final result succeeded in ways that neither Gardner nor Andrew might have at first appreciated. To anyone familiar with Andrew’s many photographic portraits, his gaze in Zorn’s painting is surprising. The sitter’s apparent strabismus, sometimes called a “walleye,” is a feature that Andrew himself—as vain as he was personable—must normally have disguised in portraits. (It is perhaps for this reason that Andrew nearly always chose to turn in profile when depicted). By choosing to emphasize rather than downplay this trait, Zorn captured a vulnerability in Andrew’s affect that was, however ironically, part of the power of his charm.

In the portrait’s remarkable central passage, Zorn’s bravado rendering of Andrew’s crimson cravat, the painter summoned more than just his subject’s reputation as a dandy. As early as the first decade of the twentieth century, urban gay men enlisted red ties as a code by which to recognize one another; whether Zorn himself was aware of this practice, he would certainly have known, through Gardner, the numerous associations between his sitter and the color red. These began but did not end with the name of Andrew’s home—where Gardner’s dedicated guest room was, in fact, the Red Room. So closely associated with the color was Andrew, whose birthday fell two days shy of Valentine’s Day, that its reference became a running joke with his friends. Writing Andrew on the eve of his return home in 1908, Sleeper found “heavy blood-red” paper to welcome him back.9 Not to be outdone, Gardner used her own plain stationery to assure Andrew she would be “blood-red glad” to see him.10 With Zorn’s portrait installed in her Blue Room three years later, Gardner could entertain her friend even in his absence.

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Notes

R. Tripp Evans‘s most recent book The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home was published with Rowman & Littlefield in 2024.

1A. Piatt Andrew, 15 April 1903 in E. Parker Hayden and Andrew L. Gray, eds., Diary of Abram Piatt Andrew 1902–1914 (Princeton: privately printed, November 1986). 

2Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 7 September 1907 in Andrew L. Gray, ed. From Y to A: Letters from Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, (New York: privately printed, 1967), p. 1. 

3Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 12 September 1907 in Gray, 1967, p. 2. 

4Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 9 August 1908 in Gray 1967, p. 5. 

5Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 26 September 1908 in Gray, 1967, p. 8. 

6Cited in E. Parker Hayden and Andrew L. Gray, Beauport Chronicle: The Letters of Henry Davis Sleeper to Abram Piatt Andrew, Jr., 1906-1915 (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1991), p. 26. 

7Andrew L. Gray, “Mrs. Gardner as Matchmaker,” Fenway Court (1982), p. 52. 

8Cited in Joseph E. Garland, Eastern Point: A Nautical, Rustical and More or Less Sociable Chronicle of Gloucester’s Outer Shield and Inner Sanctum, 1606-1990 (Beverly: Commonwealth Editions, 1999), p. 321. 

9Editors’ note, Hayden and Gray, 1991, p. 57. 

10Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 26 September 1908 in Gray, 1967, p. 8.