Shakespeare Collector Emily Jordan Folger and First Lady Grace Goodhue Coolidge

by | Aug 21, 2021 | Amherst, Biography, Folger, Library, Literature, Shakespeare, Vassar College

Emily Folger née Jordan was a bluestocking: an educated, intellectual woman with a scholarly bent. In 1875, she followed her two sisters to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Elected president for life of her class of 36 women, she went home to Brooklyn with a Phi Beta Kappa key in her pocket. Emily went on to earn a master’s degree in Shakespeare Studies at Vassar in 1896, a year in which only 250 women in the country attained that level. Born in Ohio, she never lost the folksy way of ending sentences with “doncha know.”

Photo 1: Emily Jordan Folger portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, 1927.
Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library.

Grace Coolidge née Goodhue was born in Vermont in 1879, the year Emily Jordan graduated from Vassar. Emily and Grace’s mothers were both born in New Hampshire. An only child, Grace graduated from the University of Vermont in 1902 with a B.A. in teaching. Grace and Emily each served as teachers. Grace taught at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, employing lip reading rather than signing. Emily taught general studies at the Nassau Institute in Brooklyn. After their marriages to Henry Folger in 1885 and to Calvin Coolidge in 1905, both wives were obliged by law to stop teaching. The Folgers and the Coolidges joined the Congregational Church. Emily led Sunday School lessons at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church, where the pastor was the abolitionist firebrand, Henry Ward Beecher. Emily and Grace both loved the theatre. They were both active in alumnae affairs. Both were outgoing, and married shy, quiet men. The two husbands went to the very top of their fields in the early 20th century. Folger was CEO of Standard Oil Company of New York and assembled the largest collection of Shakespeare items in the world. Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States of America. Despite this renown, the two couples were modest and simple folks.

Photo 2: Grace Coolidge portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, 1928.
Courtesy of Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site.

Both Emily Folger and Grace Coolidge were subjects of paintings by the same British artist, Frank O. Salisbury. Known as Britain’s “Painter Laureate,” Salisbury painted 25 members of the Royal House of Windsor from King George V to Princess Elizabeth and four American presidents. Salisbury was more motivated to paint women because their attire was generally more colorful; he had apprenticed in a stained-glass factory that had left its mark. Salisbury was known to rummage around in his subjects’ closets looking for an inspiring outfit. In 1927, he painted Emily Folger seated indoors wearing her Vassar academic gown with flowing pink hood. She held in her hand an 18th-century fan decorated with a wedding scene from Shakespeare’s Henry V. In 1928, Salisbury depicted Grace Coolidge bedecked in jade jewelry, with hair pulled back, sitting outdoors in a flowing gown over a floral dress and with a red ostrich feather fan on her lap.

Grace Coolidge was the subject of another painter’s fancy. Howard Chandler Christy in 1924 was commissioned by sorority sisters at Pi Beta Phi to paint the First Lady. In a sleeveless red dress, standing on the White House south lawn flanked by her new white collie, Rob Roy, she was captivating. Coolidge biographer Amity Shlaes calls it “among the most beautiful paintings of a First Lady ever made.” The painting hangs in the White House China Room, where the rug was selected to match the color of Grace’s dress. At the time, however, President Coolidge was not sure he approved of Grace’s arms being bared for the world to see. When he grilled the artist, he preferred to bring up the color, why the dress needed to be red. Christy replied that it was to contrast with the white dog. Coolidge shot back, “Why not dye the dog red?”

(This post was originally published on Johns Hopkins University Press Blog on April 23, 2019)

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Shakespeare Collector Henry Clay Folger and President Calvin Coolidge

by | Oct 19, 2020 | Amherst, Books, Folger, Shakespeare

Shakespeare collector Henry Clay Folger and President Calvin Coolidge were 6th cousins, once removed; surely, they never knew it. They both graduated with a B. A. degree from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts; Folger in 1879, Coolidge in 1895. They would not have met at college reunions, held every five years, because they were not in the same cycle. They were not in the same college fraternity. They may never have met.

Photo 1: Henry Folger oil portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, 1927, hanging in the reading room at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

They each enjoyed the friendship of an Amherst classmate who would become well-known. Henry’s roommate for four years was Charles Millard Pratt, also from Brooklyn, who became vice-president of Standard Oil Company of Kentucky while Henry was president of Standard Oil Company of New York. Calvin’s classmate was Dwight Morrow, attorney at J. P. Morgan and Ambassador to Mexico. After Henry Folger died in 1930, the terms of his will became known whereby the Amherst College trustees would administer the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. When the first chairman of the trustees’ Folger library committee, Dwight Morrow, died in 1931, Calvin Coolidge became the second chairman.

Photo 2: Calvin Coolidge oil portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, 1928. This copy he painted in 1934–commissioned by members of the
American Antiquarian society–was hung in the Oval Office at the request of President Ronald Reagan.

It is not generally known that Folger and Coolidge had decided to have their portraits painted by the same artist, the Brit, Frank O. Salisbury. Known as Britain’s “Painter Laureate,” he is responsible for portraits of twenty-five members of the House of Windsor from King George V to Princess Elizabeth. The painter divided his time between England and America, doing very well for himself financially. On the highest hill overlooking London, he built a property called Sarum Chase on Hampstead Heath that sold in 2005 for over £9 million. Folger sat for Salisbury on January 29, 1927 in the painter’s studio in the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. He was delighted when Folger agreed to pose in his colorful academic robe with an Amherst purple hood. Salisbury beseeched Folger to bring something to hold in his hands. He arrived with a small stout book from his collection, the first attempt at a collected edition of Shakespeare’s works called the Pavier quartos, printed in London in 1619. The seventeenth-century book buyer, Edward Gwynn, had stamped his name in gold letters on the original binding. Folger came to the sitting alone by subway, with the precious volume wrapped up in a newspaper.

Photo 3: Photo of Salisbury while painting the Coolidge portrait, 1928 from the painter’s book, Portrait and Pageant, 1944.

Salisbury’s first trip to Washington, D.C. was during a snowy Christmas season in 1928. When Coolidge greeted the painter, he apologized by saying, “There is very little in these days that I can offer you,” for it was the Prohibition era. The artist related in his memoir, “There was a dish of fruit on the table, from which he took an apple and pared it, cutting it in two, and offering me the top half.” Salisbury remarked on how little the president spoke to his guests. During lunchtime, Coolidge directed “most of his conversation to his white collie dog.” The chief executive invited Salisbury to accompany him by special train to Georgia for a stay on Sapelo Island which included a wild turkey hunt at dawn. When the time came for the first sitting, Coolidge appeared in a black suit, “but he looked like a parson.” He agreed to change into a light suit. A photograph taken during the sitting shows Salisbury could not dissimulate an irascible scowl. Having apprenticed in a stained glass factory, the painter came to adore vibrant colors, throwing up his hands in despair in front of a plain suit.

Photo 4: Frank O. and Maude Salisbury on board the S.S. Olympic, 1932.

 

(This post originally appeared on Johns Hopkins University Press Blog on April 03, 2019)

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