at Monmouth Beach Cultural Center
Watercolors on exhibit
at Monmouth Beach Cultural Center
BY SHERRY CONOHAN
Staff Writer
MONMOUTH BEACH — Agnes Harvey Stone was a woman both of her time and before her time.
The wife of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, she looked after her home and her husband, as did most women in the first half of the 20th century, according to her grandson Harlan F. Stone II, of New York City and Monmouth Beach.
She oversaw their staff of servants, took charge of raising the children, and presided over elegant dinners in their house that drew some of the most prominent figures in the nation’s capital.
"She became a Washington hostess," Stone said.
"She played the typical role of women of her day — in support of her husband," Stone’s wife, Helen, added.
But Agnes Stone also had another life. She was an artist — an accomplished one. Her watercolor paintings were exhibited in museums and art galleries in and around Washington, D.C.
Stone has the catalogs listing the titles of the paintings from several of them.
Today, nearly half a century after Agnes Stone’s death in 1958, her art work is again on exhibit, this time at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center, 128 Ocean Ave. The exhibit will run through Aug. 1.
Watercolors painted by Agnes Harvey Stone, pictured at right with her husband, former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, are on display at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center through Aug. 1.
The show has been brought together by four of her five grandchildren, who have loaned the cultural center some of their grandmother’s paintings. A reception, open to the public, to celebrate the exhibit will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on July 31 with several family members present.
Stone said that when his grandparents built their house, his grandfather had a special wing constructed to hold his law books and library. The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t have its own building at that time, so his grandfather had to keep his law books at home, Stone explained.
"It was not until 1935 that the Supreme Court had a building of its own," he said.
His grandmother, he continued, turned the attic of the house into her art studio. He said she would make sketches of scenes and then come home to paint them.
Agnes Harvey Stone
When they built their summer home on Isle au Haut, Maine, he said, she turned a shed on the property into an art studio. On the island, she painted some of her works at their site, he added.
Agnes Stone was very much a part of the artists’ community. A two-page color spread on her in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of Nov. 2, 1941, featuring five of her paintings, said: "Because of her interest in art, parties at the Stone house are likely to have as many painters as jurists."
Stone’s grandfather served as U.S. attorney general in 1924-25. He served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and as the chief justice from 1941 to 1946. He died in April 1946.
The elder Stone was initially appointed to the Supreme Court by President Calvin Coolidge and was named chief justice by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Helen Stone said that while Harlan Fiske Stone’s accomplishments would later overshadow those of Agnes, when they were children in Chesterfield, N.H., Agnes was the more "auspicious" of the two.
"While he was growing up on a farm just outside the village, she was living in the biggest house in town," Harlan Stone II said.
Stone said that while his grandfather was still a child, his family moved to Amherst, Mass., to be near better schools. His grandfather would go on to the University of Massa-chusetts Agricultural College, which he got kicked out of as a freshman, making for what Stone said has become a popular trivia question: Which U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice was booted out of college?
Stone explained there was an annual rite between the freshmen and sophomores at the Agricultural College, in which the sophomores would occupy a building and the freshmen would try to take it over. He said there was a lot of pushing and tussling involved.
"My grandfather was big — he later played football — and somebody clapped him on the shoulder from behind," he related. "My grandfather turned around without looking and punched him."
The guy turned out to be a faculty member.
"So he had to go across town to Amherst," Stone said.
At Amherst, Stone continued, his grandfather got involved in another caper in which his grandmother and her brother partook. A tradition for students at Amherst was to steal and hide a statue of a mermaid, named Sabrina, Stone and his wife said. They said his grandfather stole Sabrina and hid her in a barn behind Agnes Stone’s house. Her brother, Herman Harvey, dug a hole in the floor of the barn, they lowered Sabrina into it, and then they covered her with hay.
"They entrusted her to Agnes," Helen Stone said.
Stone said that after his grandparents began going to Isle au Haut, his grandfather got a row boat that he kept there. "And guess what the name of the boat was?" he asked. "Sabrina!"
Eight of the paintings in the show at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center are scenes from Isle au Haut. There also are paintings of the "White Mountains" of New Hampshire, a "Taxco Hilltop" in Mexico, and the "Brooklyn Bridge." Stone, who owns the Brooklyn Bridge painting, said the view is from somewhere near his parents’ home in Brooklyn Heights, where he grew up.
Stone said his grandfather liked the isolation of Isle au Haut so he could work uninterrupted while there during the summer. Life was pretty primitive. There was no ferry. Other than using one’s own boat, access to the Penobscot Bay island was only by a mail boat that operated seven days a week. The Stones had an outhouse. Their water came from a well, drawn with the help of a windmill. When the first telephone arrived in the mid-1980s, it made the front page of The New York Times.
Stone said the Times reported it was the last community in America to get telephones, although he’s not sure that’s true.
"My grandparents … became islanders and were totally accepted by the natives," Stone reported. "They had lifelong friends among the lobstermen, also with a sheepherder and a couple who ran a boarding house, which I believe is where they stayed when they first went up there."
Stone said that when he was riding out to the island on the mail boat one time, the pilot told him how much his grandparents were loved — that they were unassuming, genuine people who fit right in.
Agnes Stone captured the cragginess of the landscape, the beauty of the water and the color of the boats in her paintings from Isle au Haut. Stone thinks that "Brooklyn Bridge" is the most complex of her work on display. Contemporary reviewers of her art praised her direct approach to scenes of nature and noted her bold compositions, sense of spaciousness and warm colors.
Records retained by her grandchildren show that Agnes Stone took part in annual exhibitions of the Washington Water Color Club. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington devoted a 1937 exhibition to 24 of her paintings and a 1941 exhibition to 31 paintings. Her largest exhibition, with 64 paintings, took place in 1943 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
Other venues for her exhibits included the George Washington University Library in Washington, where she had a show in 1953 near the end of her active painting years.
Stone, a retired writer and editor who began his career as a reporter for the Stroudsburg, Pa., Daily Record, now the Pocono Daily Record, near the Delaware Water Gap, became a frequent visitor with his wife at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center because of his interest in both history and art, and made the arrangements to bring the show of his grandmother’s work there.