Helena de Kay Gilder

Although she began her career as a painter, Helena de Kay Gilder (1846–1916) increasingly dedicated her considerable energy and talent to advocating for art, artists, and women, according to her own vision. She is remembered as a founder of the Art Students League and the Society of American Artists, and for her vibrant creative partnership with her husband, Richard Watson Gilder, poet and editor of Scribner's and Century magazines.

According to local historians, the Gilders "forever changed" Marion, Massachusetts when they began summering there in 1881. Their presence ushered in a "Golden Age," as authors, artists, and musicians of artistic Bohemian America followed the Gilders to Marion. Helena and Richard bought a ramshackle old house in the village and an old stone building in the woods behind it, dubbing the house "Gilder Lodge" and the building "The Old Stone Studio." The building, which still stands on Spring Street in Marion, served as a place for Helena to paint and for Richard to read manuscripts. It became a gathering place for their many friends, and they held amateur theatricals there, as well as amusements for children. One summer, Helena shared The Old Stone Studio with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, by then the leading sculptor in America. First Lady Frances Folsom Cleveland posed for him there when he was commissioned to create a bronze medallion portrait of her. Henry James was a frequent visitor and set part of his novel The Bostonians in a town called "Marmion," modeled after Marion. In 1893, the Gilders changed their summer residence to Tyringham, Massachusetts in the Berkshires, buying Four Brooks Farm there in 1899.

Born in New Jersey in 1846 to naval officer George Coleman de Kay and Janet Drake de Kay, Helena was the sixth of seven children. After Helena's father died when she was two years old, her mother moved the family to Dresden, Germany, a renowned center of art, architecture, and culture, nicknamed "Florence on the Elbe." There Helena learned French, German, and Italian and developed a passion for art. In 1861, the family moved again, this time to Newport, Rhode Island, to be near Helena's sister Katharine. Helena was enrolled in a Connecticut boarding school and spent her vacations in Newport, where the de Kays were friendly with the family of Henry James — Helena and Henry became lifelong friends. In Newport she also met stained-glass artist and painter John LaFarge, who became her teacher and mentor.

Helena continued her art studies at the Free School of Art for Women at the Cooper Union in New York City from 1866 to 1869, making an intimate friendship with fellow student Mary (Molly) Hallock — later a famous illustrator and novelist who chronicled her life in Idaho, Colorado, and California after moving west with her husband Arthur Foote. Helena and Molly remained close friends throughout their lives, corresponding through letters over fifty years. Helena also attended the Ladies' Art Association and the Antique School of the National Academy of Design (NAD), developing expertise in figure and still-life painting. With fellow student Maria Oakey she shared a studio in New York and associated with the intellectuals and artists of the day, including LaFarge and Henry James. Maria and Helena attended the first life drawing class open to women at the NAD in 1871. During this time Helena also met Winslow Homer through her brother, art critic Charles de Kay. Homer's letters suggest that he fell in love with Helena and proposed marriage, which she refused.

In 1872, Helena was introduced by novelist Helen Hunt Jackson to Richard Watson Gilder, then managing editor for Scribner's Monthly. Their daughter Rosamond Gilder later wrote: "With her family traditions, her familiarity with European literature, her knowledge and appreciation both of art and music, she opened new fields of interest and enjoyment to her eager 'comrade.' Together they went to concerts and art exhibitions, they listened to lectures, read poetry, and studied Dante, with an ever-increasing pleasure and intimacy." Helena and Richard married in 1874 and moved into an old carriage house near Union Square that had been remodeled under the direction of their friend, architect Stanford White.

They named the carriage house "The Studio," and it became a salon for "artists, and actors, musicians and writers, who mingled with a varied collection of philanthropists, millionaires, and penniless philosophers." The Gilders' "Friday Nights" at The Studio were legendary. In 1875, frustrated with the National Academy of Design, Helena joined other students to form the Art Students League — dedicated to progressive instruction, founded on the European atelier model, and committed to equality between women and men as students and as teachers. The League still exists today, with a long and diverse list of famous artists who studied there, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Alexander Calder, Norman Rockwell, Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Mark Rothko, and Louise Bourgeois.

In 1877, Helena, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and painters Wyatt Eaton and Walter Shirlaw gathered at the Gilders' home and formed the Society of American Artists to provide a forum for new and diverse trends in art and to encourage women artists. The Society's first exhibition in 1878 included works by Helena, Saint-Gaudens, John LaFarge, J. Alden Weir, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. By 1890, the Society had 100 exhibiting artists. Over the following decade, as the trends it had championed entered the mainstream, the Society lost members and eventually merged with the NAD.

Helena gave birth to her first child, Marion, in 1875, and to Rodman in 1877. Marion died at age three in 1878, and the Gilders lost another child, Richard Jr., as an infant in 1880. Their daughter Dorothea was born in 1882, son George in 1885, daughter Francesca in 1888, and daughter Rosamond in 1891. Helena continued painting professionally until 1886, when she resigned her membership in the Society of American Artists and shifted her primary focus to her family — though her involvement in the arts continued through her support of other artists. Over the course of their thirty-five-year marriage, Helena and Richard befriended and mentored scores of writers and creators, continuing to host salons in New York and at their summer homes in Massachusetts. They used the publishing power of Scribner's, which became Century under Richard's editorship — the most prestigious periodical of the day — to advocate for their friends' work. President Grover Cleveland and his wife Frances were close friends and frequent guests, as were Henry James, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Stanford White, Saint-Gaudens, Edith Wharton, Joe Jefferson and Helena Modjeska, Cecilia Beaux, Marianna Griswold Van Rensselaer, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

In the 1890s, as the women's suffrage movement gathered energy, Helena's vision of advocating for women took the form of an adamant opposition to a political role for women. In 1894 she wrote a letter to her friend Molly Hallock Foote detailing her reasons; before she could mail it, Richard took the letter to the offices of The Critic, edited by his sister and brother, who published it as a lead article. The letter was widely circulated as a pamphlet, and Helena served on the executive board of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

In 1909, Richard died of a heart attack, and their long partnership came to an end. Helena, at age 63, was bereft and withdrew from public life. She died at age 70 in 1916 and was buried near her husband in Bordentown, New Jersey. Cecilia Beaux remembered her this way: "Although she had the softest and most caline of smiles to bestow… her spirit was as old, as experienced, as wise, and as enigmatic as an innumerable series of lives could make it. It was also as tolerant of the weaknesses of humanity, and even its stupidities. She accepted but rarely explained why. The warm tones of her marvelous voice had a vibration brought from depths of what she knew, what she suffered, and what she could give of support. One could follow her counsel unafraid."