5 Photos
Cryder Triplets, 1900. After their debut in 1900 the celebrated Cryder triplets became the talk of New York, appearing on magazine covers and inspiring rhapsodic copy in newspapers' social columns. Their oceanfront summer residence in Southampton has not survived but their presence is memorialized by Cryder Lane.
Grace Clarke Newton in her book “Poems in Passing,” 1916. She was an accomplished poet and a favorite of the East End equestrian set where her husband, Richard Newton Jr, was Master of the Suffolk Hounds. After her premature death, Richard, who was also a well-known artist, illustrated "Poems in Passing," a collection of her poetry.
Helen and Charles Barney, 1906. Helen Barney and her father Charles are in costume for a themed dinner party at the Barney townhouse on Fifth Avenue, just one of the many residences Helen's hard-working socialite mother, Lily was expected to manage. Lily, a sister of William Collins Whitney, was constantly on the job in Southampton where the Barney house on Lake Agawam was one of the first to add a ballroom.
Southampton Summer School of Art, 1905. Known for her artistic talent, her marvelous energy and exuberance, Janet "Nettie" Hoyt was credited in 1887 as the force responsible for "starting the fashion of cottage life at Southampton." Among other triumphs, she succeeded in bringing the celebrated artist William Merritt Chase to Shinnecock Hills where his students set up their easels among the bayberry bushes.
Ruth Wales du Pont and Henry Francis du Pont, 1916. As a young woman, Ruth Wales "kicked up her heels" in Southampton and other summer playgrounds before she fell in love with Henry Francis du Pont and became the mistress of Chestertown House in Southampton and Winterthur, the magnificent du Pont home in Delaware that became a world-renowned museum of American furniture. She and Henry, above, were married in June 1916.
With the arrival of the railroad in 1870, Southampton began its swift ascent to fashionable status. While many would say that moment was the beginning of the end for the East End, for the Southampton History Museum, it’s still a time worth celebrating.
With that in mind, on August 17, the museum opens “High Style in the Gilded Age: Southampton 1870-1930” at its Rogers Mansion, a home that was no doubt the center of Southanpton's high society back in the day. The women featured in the exhibition’s photographs were among Southampton’s most fashionable trend-setters — admired and envied by other women, and lavishly covered in the local and New York City society columns.
For New Yorkers, the building of the railroad was a game changer. Suddenly they were spared the grueling journey by stagecoach or an overnight boat trip, and the Hamptons became just a few hours away. While the early years of the Southampton summer colony were marked by a professed enthusiasm for the informal pleasures of country life, then, like now, it was perhaps inevitable that the taste for Gilded Age excess, which was then sweeping the city, would begin to assert itself among the colonists.
Afternoon teas, picnics and intimate soirees went out of fashion in favor of formal balls and extravagant entertainments that had been disdained by earlier arrivals. All pretense of rural simplicity was dropped when women began arriving with trunk loads of gowns and accessories to be worn at social agendas every bit as demanding and elaborately choreographed as those they knew in the city.
But as the new century dawned, the younger generation began moving away from the excesses and formality characteristic of the Gilded Age at its opulent height. The decade of the 1920s brought good times to Southampton, and with them the advent of the flapper, who had no use for styles that had kept women confined and corseted for too long.
After that, there was no going back.
“High Style in the Gilded Age: Southampton 1870-1930” opens with a reception on Saturday, August 17, from 4 to 6 p.m. at Rogers Mansion, 17 Meeting House Lane, Southampton. To reserve, call 631-283-2494 or email ggangi@southamptonhistory.org. The exhibition runs through August 2020.
Staff Writer on Aug 8, 2019