Gerald Clery Murphy and Sara Sherman Wiborg were wealthy, expatriate Americans who moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century and who, with their generous hospitality and flair for parties, created a vibrant social circle, particularly in the 1920s, that included a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation. Gerald had a brief but significant career as a painter.
Gerald Clery Murphy (March 26, 1888 – October 17, 1964) was born in Boston to the family that owned the Mark Cross Company, sellers of fine leather goods. He was of an Irish-American background. His father was Patrick Francis Murphy (1858–1931); he had two siblings: Esther Knesborough (1897–1962) and Patrick Timothy Murphy (1884–1924).
Gerald was an aesthete from his childhood. He was never comfortable in the boardrooms and clubs for which his father was grooming him. He failed the entrance exams at Yale University three times before matriculating, but he performed respectably there. He joined Delta Kappa Epsilon and the Skull and Bones society. [1] : 237 He befriended a young freshman named Cole Porter (Yale class of 1913) and brought him into Delta Kappa Epsilon. Murphy also introduced Porter to his friends, propelling him into writing music for Yale musicals.
Sara Sherman Wiborg (November 7, 1883 – October 10, 1975) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio into the wealthy Wiborg family. Her father, manufacturing chemist and owner of his own printing ink and varnish company Frank Bestow Wiborg, was a self-made millionaire by the age of 40, and her mother, Adeline Sherman Wiborg, was a member of the noted Sherman family, daughter of Hoyt Sherman and niece to Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman and Senator John Sherman. Raised in Cincinnati, she moved with her family to Germany for several years when she was a teenager, so her father could concentrate on the European expansion of his company. The Wiborg family was easily accepted into the high society community of 20th-century Europe. While in Europe, Sara and her sisters Hoytie and Olga sang at high-class assemblies. Upon returning to the United States, the Wiborgs spent most of their time in New York City and later East Hampton, where they built the 30-room mansion The Dunes on 600 acres just west of the Maidstone Club in 1912. It was the largest estate in East Hampton up to that time. Wiborg Beach in East Hampton is named for the family. [2]
In East Hampton, Sara Wiborg and Gerald Murphy met when they were both adolescents. Gerald was five years younger than Sara, and for many years, they were more familiar companions than romantically attached; they became engaged in 1915 when Sara was 32 years old. Sara's parents did not approve of their daughter marrying someone "in trade," and Gerald's parents were not much happier with the prospect, seemingly because his father found it difficult to approve anything that Gerald did. [3]
After marrying they lived at 50 West 11th Street in New York City, where they had three children. In 1921, they moved to Paris to escape the strictures of New York and their families' mutual dissatisfaction with their marriage. In Paris Gerald took up painting, and they began to make the acquaintances for which they became famous. Eventually they moved to the French Riviera, where they became the center of a large circle of artists and writers of later fame, especially Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Archibald MacLeish, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.
Prior to their arrival on the French Riviera, the region was experiencing a period when the fashionable only wintered there, abandoning the region during the high summer months. However, the activities of the Murphys fueled the same renaissance in arts and letters as did the excitement of Paris, especially among the cafés of Montparnasse. In 1923 the Murphys convinced the Hôtel du Cap to stay open for the summer so that they might entertain their friends, sparking a new era for the French Riviera as a summer haven. The Murphys eventually purchased a villa in Cap d'Antibes and named it Villa America, where they resided for many years. When the Murphys arrived on the Riviera, lying on the beach merely to enjoy the sun was not a common activity. Occasionally, someone went swimming, but the joys of being at the beach just for sun were still unknown at the time. The Murphys, with their long forays and picnics at La Garoupe, introduced sunbathing on the beach as a fashionable activity.
They had three children, Baoth, Patrick, and Honoria. In 1929, Patrick was diagnosed with tuberculosis. They took him to Switzerland, and then returned to the U.S. in 1934, where Gerald stayed in Manhattan to run Mark Cross, serving as president of the company from 1934 to 1956; he never painted again. Sara settled in Saranac Lake, New York to nurse Patrick, and Baoth and Honoria were put in boarding schools. In 1935, Baoth died unexpectedly of meningitis as a complication of measles, and Patrick succumbed to tuberculosis in 1937. [4] Archibald MacLeish based the main characters in his play J.B. on Gerald and Sara Murphy. [5]
Later they lived at The Dunes. By 1941, the house proved impossible to rent, sell or even maintain; the Murphys had it demolished, and they moved to the renovated dairy barn. [6]
Gerald died October 17, 1964, in East Hampton, two days after his friend Cole Porter. Sara died on October 10, 1975, in Arlington, Virginia.
Nicole and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald are widely recognized as having been based on the Murphys, mainly from the marked physical similarities, although many of their friends, as well as the Murphys themselves, saw as much or more of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald's relationship and personalities in the couple than those of the Murphys. Ernest Hemingway's couple in The Garden of Eden is not explicitly based on this pair, but given the similarities of the setting (Nice) and of the type of social group portrayed, there is clearly some basis for such an assumption. Guests of the Murphys often swam at Eden Roc, an event emulated in Hemingway's narrative.
Calvin Tomkins's biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy Living Well Is the Best Revenge was published in The New Yorker in 1962, and Amanda Vaill documented their lives in the 1995 book Everybody Was So Young. Both accounts are balanced, unlike some of the portrayals in the memoirs and fictitious works by their friends, including Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
In 1982, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, the Murphys' daughter, with Richard N. Billings, wrote Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After.
On July 12, 2007, a play by Crispin Whittell titled Villa America, based entirely on the relationships between Sara and Gerald Murphy and their friends, had its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival with Jennifer Mudge playing Sara Murphy. [7]
Gerald only painted from 1921 until 1929; he is known for his hard-edged still life paintings in a Precisionist, Cubist style. During the 1920s Gerald Murphy, along with other American modernist painters in Europe, notably Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis, created paintings prefiguring the pop art movement that contained pop culture imagery, such as mundane objects culled from American commercial products and advertising design. [8] [9] [10]
Gerald Murphy’s jazz-rhythmed painting titled "Razor" (1924) and the 6-by-6-foot "Watch" (1925) are part of the Dallas Museum’s permanent collection and are two of eight remaining paintings in Murphy’s 14-work oeuvre. [11]
Pablo Picasso, a friend of Sara, painted her in several of his 1923 works:
The Sara and Gerald Murphy Papers are held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Some Mark Cross Company objects are located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, playwright, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After traveling abroad to Europe, Zelda's mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet and writer, who was associated with the modernist school of poetry. MacLeish studied English at Yale University and law at Harvard University. He enlisted in and saw action during the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years, MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. From 1949 to 1962, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Precisionism was a modernist art movement that emerged in the United States after World War I. Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and suggest the sleekness and sheen of machine forms. At the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, Precisionism celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called "Cubist-Realism." The term "Precisionism" was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr although according to Amy Dempsey the term "Precisionism" was coined by Charles Sheeler. Painters working in this style were also known as the "Immaculates", which was the more commonly used term at the time. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists.
Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients. The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole descends into mental illness.
The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc is a resort hotel in Antibes on the French Riviera. Built in 1869 as a private mansion, it opened as a hotel in 1889.
Hoyt Sherman, a member of the prominent Sherman family, was an American banker. He served as a member of the Iowa House of Representatives in 1866.
Philip Jerome Quinn Barry was an American dramatist best known for his plays Holiday (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939), which were both made into films starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Charles Green Shaw was an American painter, poet, writer, and illustrator. He was a key figure in early American abstract art. Shaw's paintings are part of most major collections of American Art, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Whitney Museum.
Calvin Tomkins is an author and art critic for The New Yorker magazine.
Islands in the Stream (1970) is the first of the posthumously published novels of Ernest Hemingway. The book was originally intended to revive Hemingway's reputation after the negative reviews of Across the River and Into the Trees. He began writing it in 1950 and advanced greatly through 1951. The work, rough but seemingly finished, was found by Mary Hemingway among 332 works Hemingway left behind at his death. Islands in the Stream was meant to encompass three stories to illustrate different stages in the life of its main character, Thomas Hudson. The three different parts of the novel were originally to be titled "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being". These titles were changed, however, into what are now its three acts: "Bimini", "Cuba", and "At Sea".
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is a college-affiliated art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is located on the Williams College campus, close to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Clark Art Institute. Its growing collection encompasses more than 14,000 works, with particular strengths in contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is free and open to the public.
Rackstraw Downes is a British-born realist painter and author. His oil paintings are notable for their meticulous detail accumulated during months of plein-air sessions, depictions of industry and the environment, and elongated compositions with complex perspective.
Mary Hoyt Wiborg was an American playwright, art patron, and socialite. She wrote the 1922 play Taboo that starred Paul Robeson.
Frank Bestow Wiborg was a businessman from Cincinnati who, with Levi Addison Ault, created the ink manufacturer Ault & Wiborg Company.
Crispin Whittell is a British director and playwright.
Amanda Vaill is an American writer and editor, noted for her non-fiction. She lives in New York City.
The villa Aujourd’hui is a Modernist villa built by the American architect Barry Dierks (1899-1960) for the Palm Beach, Florida socialite, Mrs. Audrey Chadwick. Located in Antibes and built in 1938, the villa Aujourd’hui is one of the most distinctive of Dierks’ Riviera homes and was one of the last expressions of the Modernist style to have been built on the Riviera prior to the outbreak of World War II.
Frederic Timothy Murphy was the heir of a wealthy Bostonian family who served during World War I in France and at the Battle of the Somme, was decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and died few years later due to his wounds.
The Villa La Vigie is a villa in Juan-les-Pins on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. It was built in 1912 and was bought by the American railroad magnate Frank Jay Gould in 1927. The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso was resident at the villa in the summer of 1924.
Sidney Webster Fish was an American lawyer and military officer who retired from the law and moved to California, becoming a rancher at the Palo Corona Ranch.