Alfred Corning Clark I (November 14, 1844 – April 8, 1896) was an American philanthropist and patron of the arts.

Early life

He was the son of

Edward Cabot Clark Edward Cabot Clark (December 19, 1811 – October 14, 1882) was an American lawyer, businessman and investor. Early life Clark was born on December 19, 1811 in Athens, New York, Athens in Greene County, New York. He was the eldest child of t ...

(1811–1882) and Caroline ( née Jordan) Clark (1815–1874). His father made a fortune as the partner of

Isaac Singer Isaac Merritt Singer (October 27, 1811 – July 23, 1875) was an American inventor, actor, and businessman. He made important improvements in the design of the sewing machine and was the founder of what became one of the first American multi-n ...

in the

Singer Sewing Machine Company Singing is the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. A person who sings is called a singer, artist or vocalist (in jazz and/or popular music). Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung with or without ...

, invested it in Manhattan, New York City real estate, and left a $25,000,000 (approximately $ today) estate at his death. His maternal grandfather was Ambrose L. Jordan, a

New York State Senator The New York State Senate is the upper house of the New York State Legislature; the New York State Assembly is its lower house. Its members are elected to two-year terms; there are no term limits. There are 63 seats in the Senate. Partisan compo ...

who served as the

New York State Attorney General The attorney general of New York is the chief legal officer of the U.S. state of New York and head of the Department of Law of the state government. The office has been in existence in some form since 1626, under the Dutch colonial government o ...

Personal life

On October 20, 1869, Clark married Elizabeth Scriven (1848–1909), the daughter of George Scriven and Ellen Rattan Scriven of

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, New York. Her parents had emigrated from Great Britain, and the wedding took place at ''Withecombe'' in

Manor of Raleigh, Pilton The historic manor of Raleigh, near Barnstaple and in the parish of Pilton, North Devon, was the first recorded home in the 14th century of the influential Chichester family of Devon. It was recorded in the Doomsday Book of 1086 together w ...

Devon Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devo ...

, England. Alfred and Elizabeth Clark were the parents of four sons: *

Edward Severin Clark Edward Severin Clark (July 6, 1870 – September 19, 1933) was an American businessman, and the owner of the New York City apartment building The Dakota. Early life Clark was born on July 6, 1870 in Neuilly, France. He was the eldest of the fou ...

(1870–1933) *

Robert Sterling Clark Robert Sterling Clark (June 25, 1877 – December 29, 1956), an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, was an American art collector, horse breeder, and philanthropist. Biography Known by his middle name, Sterling Clark served in the United S ...

(1877–1956) * Frederick Ambrose Clark (1880–1964) *

Stephen Carlton Clark Stephen Carlton Clark (August 29, 1882 – September 17, 1960) was an American art collector, businessman, newspaper publisher and philanthropist. He founded the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Biography Clark was the young ...

(1882–1960) Clark maintained three residences in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

: a city house at 7 West 22nd Street for his family, a nearby flat at 64 West 22nd Street for guests, and a large apartment in The Dakota overlooking

Central Park Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the fifth-largest park in the city, covering . It is the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated ...

for entertaining.Weber, p. 76. Clark's father built The Dakota (1880–84), but died during its construction. Edward Cabot Clark skipped a generation and bequeathed the building to his 12-year-old grandson and namesake, Edward Severin Clark. Clark died of

pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severi ...

on April 8, 1896, in Manhattan, New York City. Six years after his death, his widow became the second wife of Henry Codman Potter, the Episcopal bishop of New York, in 1902.

Other relationships

In 1866, Clark met Norwegian tenor Lorentz Severin Skougaard (1837–1885) in Paris, where the singer was studying. In 1869, the same year that he married Elizabeth Scriven, Clark began making annual summer visits to Norway, eventually building a house on an island near Skougaard's family home.Harold E. Dickson, "Barnard and Norway," ''The Art Bulletin'', vol. 44, no. 1 (March 1962), pp. 55-5
(JSTOR) $
/ref> He gave his son Edward, born 1870, the middle name Severin. When in New York City, Skougaard occupied Clark's flat at 64 West 22nd Street. During an 1885 visit, Skougaard was stricken with

typhoid Typhoid fever, also known as typhoid, is a disease caused by ''Salmonella'' serotype Typhi bacteria. Symptoms vary from mild to severe, and usually begin six to 30 days after exposure. Often there is a gradual onset of a high fever over several d ...

and died. Clark eulogized him in a privately published biographical sketch, and created a $64,000 endowment in his memory for Manhattan's Norwegian Hospital, 4th Avenue & 46th Street. Clark also commissioned ''Brotherly Love'' (1886–87) by American sculptor

George Grey Barnard George Grey Barnard (May 24, 1863 – April 24, 1938), often written George Gray Barnard, was an American sculptor who trained in Paris. He is especially noted for his heroic sized '' Struggle of the Two Natures in Man'' at the Metropolitan Museu ...

to adorn his friend's grave in Langesund, Norway. The

homoerotic Homoeroticism is sexual attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female. The concept differs from the concept of homosexuality: it refers specifically to the desire itself, which can be temporary, whereas "homose ...

sculpture depicts two nude male figures blindly reaching out to each other through the block of marble that separates them. According to Debby Applegate's review in ''

The New York Times Book Review ''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...

'' of Nicholas Fox Weber's group biography, ''The Clarks of Cooperstown'' (2007):Nicholas Fox Weber, ''The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-year Feud''. Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. .

Weber suggests that Alfred orning Clarkled a dual life: a quiet family man in America and a gay aesthete in Europe, especially in France, which he declared "the Mecca of brotherly feeling." He was a generous patron to male artists; for 19 years his closest companion was a Norwegian tenor named Lorentz Severin Skougaard. When his father's death forced him to return to Manhattan, Alfred installed Skougaard down the block from the town house where he lived with his wife and children. enry
James James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (disambiguati ...
's shadow lingers longest in this chapter; surely this was the sort of thing he meant by those uneasy intimations that beneath Europe's splendor and refinement lurked something unspeakable. Weber's bluntness, by contrast, highlights how much of that beauty was created by gay men seeking warm communities of free expression.

Following Skougaard's death, Clark became

Barnard Barnard is a version of the surname Bernard, which is a French and West Germanic masculine given name and surname. The surname means as tough as a bear, Bar(Bear)+nard/hard(hardy/tough) __NOTOC__ People Some of the people bearing the surname Ba ...

's patron, commissioning works and providing financial support to him in Paris. Clark paid Barnard $25,000 to carve a marble version of his '' Struggle of the Two Natures in Man'' (1888), which was completed in April 1894. Barnard exhibited the piece at the 1894 Paris Salon, where the jury, headed by Auguste Rodin, pronounced it a work "of superlative merit." Clark brought the larger-than-life-sized sculpture to New York City. Soon after his death, Clark's widow donated it to the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

Philanthropy

Between 1888 and 1891, Clark built the first

gym A gymnasium, also known as a gym, is an indoor location for athletics. The word is derived from the ancient Greek term " gymnasium". They are commonly found in athletic and fitness centres, and as activity and learning spaces in educational i ...

nasium in Cooperstown, New York. Although it remained popular, by the 1920s the facility had become obsolete and was demolished and rebuilt by his son Edward Severin Clark. A new ''Alfred Corning Clark Gymnasium'' opened in 1930, and featured such improvements as a swimming pool and bowling alleys. The current successor to the 1930 ACC Gym is th
Clark Sports Center
a greatly expanded facility, completed in the mid-1980s, located on the former grounds of Iroquois Farm (the F. Ambrose Clark estate) under the direction of Stephen Carlton Clark, Jr., the great-grandson of the gym's founder.

Jozef Hofmann

Clark's donation of $50,000 to the piano prodigy

Jozef Hofmann Josef Casimir Hofmann (originally Józef Kazimierz Hofmann; January 20, 1876February 16, 1957) was a Polish-American pianist, composer, music teacher, and inventor. Biography Josef Hofmann was born in Podgórze (a district of Kraków), in Aus ...

in 1887 spared the eleven-year-old from having to complete a fifty-recital American tour that had been criticized by Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.Harold C. Schonberg, ''The Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present'', 2nd ed., Simon & Schuster, 1987 With this financial security, Hofmann and his family returned to Europe where the boy could receive a broader education before resuming his concert career. In addition to becoming one of history's most outstanding piano virtuosi, Hofmann's study in science and mathematics enabled him to become an inventor in later life, earning over 70 patents.

Art collection

Clark assembled a collection of French academic paintings. He purchased ''Pollice Verso'' (''Thumbs Down'') (1872) by

Jean-Léon Gérôme Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The ra ...

from the estate of Alexander Turney Stewart. It is now in the collection of the

Phoenix Art Museum The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest museum for visual art in the southwest United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the museum is . It displays international exhibitions alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 18,000 works of ...

. In 1888, he purchased Gerome's ''

The Snake Charmer ''The Snake Charmer'' is an oil-on-canvas Orientalist painting by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme produced around 1879. After it was used on the cover of Edward Said's book ''Orientalism'' in 1978, the work "attained a level of notoriety matche ...

'' (1880), but his widow sold it after his death. His son Sterling re-acquired the painting in 1942 for the museum he founded, the

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, commonly referred to as the Clark, is an art museum and research institution located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. Its collection consists of European and American paintings, sculp ...

. Clark donated works to the

, including ''Madame Gaye'' (1865) by

Marià Fortuny Marià Josep Maria Bernat Fortuny i Marsal (; es, Mariano José María Bernardo Fortuny y Marsal; June 11, 1838 – November 21, 1874), known more simply as Marià Fortuny or Mariano Fortuny, was the leading Spanish painter of his day, with an ...

. Clarke commissioned Barnard to create a fountain sculpture for the courtyard of The Dakota. ''

The Great God Pan ''The Great God Pan'' is a horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write ''The Great God Pan'' by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the n ...

'' (1894-1898) was never installed at the apartment building, and Clarke's family donated it to

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

after his death.

Works once owned by Alfred Corning Clark

File:Madame Gaye MET DP-13445-001.jpg, ''Madame Gaye'' (1865) by Marià Fortuny, Metropolitan Museum of Art File:Mariano Fortuny The Court of the Alhambra.jpg, ''Court of the Alhambra'' (1871), Museu Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalí File:Jean-Leon Gerome Pollice Verso.jpg, ''Pollice Verso'' (1872) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phoenix Art Museum File:Gerome Snake Charmer.jpg, ''The Snake Charmer'' (1880) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Clark Art Institute File:The Ameya by Robert Frederick Blum.jpg, '' The Ameya'' (1893) by Robert Frederick Blum, Metropolitan Museum of Art File:Columbia University, NYC (June 2014) - 27.JPG, ''The Great God Pan'' (1894-1898), by George Grey Barnard, Columbia University

Legacy

In memory of her first husband, Elizabeth Scriven Clark Potter built the Alfred Corning Clark Memorial Chapel, at 240 East 31st Street,

, New York City, which was consecrated on December 7, 1904. ''Brotherly Love'', an opera based on the relationship between Clark and Skougaard, debuted in Norway in May 2016.''Brotherly Love'' (opera)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Clark, Alfred Corning 1844 births 1896 deaths Clark family LGBT people from New York (state) Philanthropists from New York (state)