On Beauty and the Cleveland Museum of Art
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jeptha Homer Wade
Every Clevelander knows who he is, the guy in the green glasses. A portrait of an otherwise unknown figure, by an otherwise undistinguished painter, hangs in our art museum and has become an icon of our great city by its sheer oddness. The real story of this painting–odd, humble, surprising–is the story of our city, hardscrabble and beautiful.
The guy in the green glasses is a portrait of Nathaniel Olds. It was painted in 1837 and hangs in the Federal American gallery of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), in the company of other works from the early- to mid-nineteenth century, including an Audubon painting of peregrine falcons and a doorway from an apparently magnificent house that once stood in Painesville. If you haven’t been to the CMA, first of all, what are you waiting for? Second of all, you might still recognize the painting. It’s the profile picture of Twitter (X) user @MNateShyamalan, who has over 200K followers.
The glasses alone get our attention, and render the painting remarkable enough to be a crowd favorite, even an emblem of the city. The last time Cleveland’s Major League baseball team was in the World Series, in 2016, the museum photoshopped the team’s uniform onto Nathaniel Olds and posted it on their social media accounts. This was in response to the Art Institute of Chicago outfitting the farmers from “American Gothic” in Cubs gear, which gives you an idea of how iconic this portrait is to Clevelanders.
The guy in the green glasses looks like a young Abraham Lincoln. His hair is tousled and he seems to have a five o’clock shadow. He wears a white shirt with a raised collar, a black jacket with a high cowl neck, and a band of black fabric that goes across his throat, holding the shirt collar in place. He gazes off, evading eye contact but concentrating on something not in view, as if watching a cat prepare to knock a fragile object off a table.
Nathaniel Olds, 1837. Jeptha Homer Wade (American, 1811–1890). Oil on canvas; framed: 87 x 71.8 x 5.7 cm (34 1/4 x 28 1/4 x 2 1/4 in.); unframed: 76.5 x 61.2 cm (30 1/8 x 24 1/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Seventy-fifth anniversary gift of Jeptha H. Wade III 1991.134.2
The glasses. Those glasses. The lenses are a light forest green, translucent so you can see his eyes through them. The lenses are in two pieces on each side—one flat against his face, the second hinged and flat against his temple. The frames are silver, and they line each of the four total lenses, extending to bisect the sides. They’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen in person, unless you’re into steampunk.
The glasses, the wall text will tell you, were accessories designed to protect their wearer’s eyes against the light of the Argand lamp, an oil-burning lamp that produced light brighter than had previously been possible. When first created, Argand lamps were luxury products—Thomas Jefferson was an early adopter and one of his Argand lamps hangs at Monticello—but by the time the portrait of Olds was painted, they were accessible to the masses. Argand lamps were often ornately decorated, and it may be that which is the object of Olds’ focus. The glasses allowed him to look directly at the lamp, a nineteenth-century precursor to today’s blue light glasses. The two-part side lenses were functional too: they could be folded over the front for double protective cover.
Who was Olds, besides the wearer of Argand lamp glasses and, presumably, the owner of an Argand lamp? He was the husband of Sally Avery Olds, whose own portrait hangs near his. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the painting of Sally, unless you love bonnets. Both portraits were painted by the same person, Jeptha Homer Wade. The Olds may have been Wade’s landlords, but I’ve only come across that suggestion on free-floating websites, not in any academic or institutional sources (although, for personal reasons, I choose to believe, as user @marilynbutler suggests on her Flashcards website, that Olds paid Wade $18 a piece for the portraits). Who was Olds? In short, we don’t know.
Who was Wade, however, is a much easier question to answer, but you won’t find his name in the annals of art history. Wade was born in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and in his early adulthood, worked as a limner, a kind of itinerant portrait artist typical of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. Limners were commercial artists painting portraits on commission. They operated independently of arts academies, with the result that their work often has a naive or folk quality. Wade was encouraged by his friend and teacher, one Randall Palmer, but his art career was short-lived. Fearing that the physical demands of the work would take a toll on his health, and in need of reliable income to support his family, Wade began to pursue an interest in the then innovative technology of the telegraph. Having already traveled around the country as a limner, Wade began building telegraph lines, work that brought him from New York into the Midwest. In the 1850s, he joined with other industrialists to found Western Union, at the time a premier telecommunications company. He also had a hand in railroads and banks. Wade settled in Cleveland, Ohio and until his death in 1890, he was hobnobbing with the likes of John D. Rockefeller on Millionaire’s Row during the city’s golden age. He was buried in Lake View Cemetery, which he founded.
And that’s who painted the guy in the green glasses.
•
This painting has always been in my life. When I think of it, I feel the coolness of the gallery in which it hangs, a feeling created in equal measure by both best-practices climate control and the smooth marble of the magnificent Beaux-Arts museum building. I think of it when I think of my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio. I thought of it when I stumbled on a book in the library where I now work, at a college outside Philadelphia, a book called Object Lessons: Cleveland Creates an Art Museum. I had been looking for something else (the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series), but when I found this book, I clutched it to my chest in an instinctive, protective gesture. Its cover is an azure-tinted image of the museum’s south facade, the side that faces the Wade Lagoon. Crouching in front of ionic columns is our exemplar of Rodin’s The Thinker, its feet blown off in 1970, maybe or maybe not by the Weather Underground.
Object Lessons was published in 1991 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the museum’s opening. It tells the story of the museum’s founding and growth, illustrated by photographs of curators, museum educators, visitors, and some of its most important acquisitions. Jeptha Homer Wade’s portrait of Nathaniel Olds is not included.
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A hometown that isn’t your home is a tricky thing. My childhood in Cleveland (ok, in the east-side suburbs) was more or less happy, but I yearned to be in a bigger city. I moved away when I was eighteen and haven’t lived there since. My adulthood in these bigger cities has been more or less happy too, but I’m always going back to Cleveland. I go because my family is there, so it’s the site of holidays, weddings, births, and deaths, but also because I love that city: a postindustrial underdog, an overlooked gem. I talk about Cleveland with a sort of aggressive pride. As a diaspora Clevelander, it behooves me to do this kind of promotional work. We all do it, too, preemptively suggesting to first-time visitors, “Isn’t Cleveland great?!”
But being in my hometown means being in the place I chose not to make my home, the place I have never lived as an adult. My relationship to the city is limited because it exists primarily in the past-tense; it was the site of my basic education, my first love, my struggles to distinguish and define myself. When I visit, I tend to return to places that I have gone my whole life–relative’s houses of course, but also restaurants where I always order the same thing (vanilla single in a sugar cone at East Coast Custard, the DB at Tommy’s), the Metroparks where we used to get high, the Cultural Gardens you see through the windows as you drive down MLK Boulevard. The repetition of these site-visits becomes ritualistic, so that I am not engaging with the city as it is, but rather enacting my nostalgia.
This is true everywhere except the CMA. It’s a unique site in my mental map of the city, because it’s the only place I associate solely with pleasure, serenity, learning, and growth. Here is what’s special about the CMA:
It’s free, and I mean free-free. Not suggested donation, not pay-what-you-can. You just walk right in.
It’s relatively small, meaning you can do the whole thing in an afternoon and not feel exhausted (go have an espresso and a slice of cassata cake in nearby Little Italy when you’re done).
It’s chockablock with masterpieces; there’s no filler.
The CMA set the blueprint for me of what an art museum should be. I’ve lived in New York and Boston and not found a museum to match. I’ve put down roots in Philadelphia, a great city, but one where the major museums are too expensive (the Barnes Foundation), too inflated and too expensive (the Philadelphia Museum of Art), or too problematic (the Penn Museum). The CMA remains my platonic ideal.
Unlike all my other favorite places in Cleveland, my experience at the CMA is different every time I go. With each visit, something unexpected attracts my attention, as much a result of changing exhibitions as changes in my tastes and interests. I’ve prayed to Tilman Riemenschneider’s sculpture of Saint Jerome and the Lion and lusted after Jacques-Louis David’s Cupid and Psyche. I’ve rolled my eyes at the gaudiness of a Fabergé egg and an earthenware asparagus box, then learned more about the decorative arts and yearned, yearned!, for a soup tureen in the shape of a chicken.
I don’t have a favorite piece in the museum—I have an autobiography of favorites. A new beloved may unseat the last, but I never regret my former pets. Those objects that I once adored join a growing cast of familiar friends, and I visit them all when I’m in town. I can’t predict what never-before-noticed piece might catch my eye, which gallery might beckon me. In the museum, I am always open to new experiences. Maybe, with apologies to Heraclitus, you never step in the same museum twice.
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In her book-length essay On Beauty and Being Just, theorist Elaine Scarry writes that the “willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.” In the category of beauty, Scarry counts entities as diverse as works of art, the natural world, and teachers. The “willingness continually to revise one’s own location” also, for me, calls to mind my eternal returns to Cleveland and, within those sojourns, my requisite visits to the CMA.
Scarry’s book is in two parts: “On Beauty and Being Wrong” and “On Beauty and Being Fair.” (I learned about it because Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty, about the entangled families of two dueling art historians, took its title from Scarry’s work.) “On Beauty and Being Wrong” concerns errors around beauty, by which Scarry means changing one’s opinion about whether an object is beautiful or not. She describes two major circumstances that cause us to revise our opinions on the question of beauty. The first circumstance is falling out of love. Romantic love, ironically, is the quotidian manifestation of this–when a person who has been an intimate partner suddenly, sometimes overnight, becomes unattractive, even repulsive. What Scarry describes is the loss we experience when we fall out of love with a work of art, or with the work of an artist. This loss may be equally sudden, equally devastating. She quotes Emily Dickinson:
It dropped so low—in my Regard—
I heard it hit the Ground—
And, just as we sometimes recall a former lover with a shudder, the fault here may be less in the thing itself than in our own judgment. The ending of Dickinson’s poem, not quoted by Scarry, is:
[…] I denounced Myself,
For entertaining Plated Wares
Upon My Silver Shelf —
In this case, realizing the mistake brings about embarrassment, even shame. I can’t believe I ever loved that song, that movie, that movie star whose photo wallpapered my room! Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.
I have committed this type of error in judgment (reader, I confess, I used to love The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but never at the CMA. It helps that the collection there is exquisite. So, I have more frequently experienced the second circumstance of revision: the sudden perception of beauty of an object or person long familiar. This, too, can be devastating, as in the Gershwin song “How Long Has This Been Going On?” which has the memorable lines:
Kiss me once, then once more
What a dunce I was before.
The realization may not feel so different from that described by Dickinson, but correcting this error feels like a gain, rather than a loss. Scarry shares a personal anecdote, of suddenly realizing how beautiful the palm trees outside her window were–trees she previously considered ubiquitous and tacky–and then finding traces of palm shadows in paintings by Matisse.
Myself, I was suddenly awakened to the beauty of the portrait of Nathaniel Olds, familiar for my whole life. Sure it’s goofy, but it’s also astonishing and unforgettable. When I started thinking critically about the painting, I was turned off by the privilege that undergirds its provenance. But as I learned more, I allowed myself to be moved by a series of impulses and gestures that were, and are, truly beautiful.
•
The Cleveland Museum of Art was incorporated in 1913 by a group of four industrialist-philanthropists. They were all old rich white men and I am not entirely comfortable heaping praise on them. Their names are straight out of a mid-century musical meant to make us nostalgic for America’s heyday: Hinman B. Hurlbut, John Huntington, and Horace Kelley (as in Kelleys Island). The fourth founder was Jeptha Homer Wade II.
But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
When Wade the First made his fortune, he began investing in the beautification and uplifting, as he understood it, of his adopted hometown. He was involved in the founding of the Case School of Applied Science, Miss Anne H. Hathaway Brown's School for Girls, and the Protestant Orphan Asylum (which closed its residential center, probably not because it was haunted, and continues to do community work under the name Beech Brook). Wade owned a huge swath of what is today University Circle, which he began developing as a public park in 1872. Ten years later, he donated 73 acres to the city as open greenspace: Wade Park. In the deed of transfer, and this is important, he stipulated:
Know all men by these presents that I, Jeptha H. Wade of the City of Cleveland County of Cuyahoga, and State of Ohio, being desirous of securing to the citizens of Cleveland for all time the opportunity of re-creating, having, improving and maintaining a beautiful and attractive Public Park therein for the benefit of all the people and being the owner of lands suitable for this purpose situated near the place where several important institutions of learning are about to be permanently located and on which grounds larger expenditures with a view to such a Park have already been made, do hereby freely give, grant, and convey unto the said City of Cleveland and its successors, to have and to hold forever… [emphasis added]
Wade the First had a son, Randall, and adopted four daughters, Delia, Eusebra, Myra, and Bessie. Randall had a son, Jeptha Homer. That’s Wade the Second. The grandfather and grandson had a close relationship, especially after the death of Randall, when the young Homer was only 19. In 1889, Wade the First wrote a letter to his grandson which begins,
My dear Homer,
You ask me to write out for you, to file with your genealogy of the Wade family, some account of my family history, which I feel some hesitation about, and yet I cannot refuse your request for the reason, among others, that nearly half a century of my life was passed before you were born.
This letter, though written as private correspondence, is the closest thing we have to a memoir by the elder Homer. In 2018, it was helpfully transcribed and developed, with accompanying essays, into a book published by the Western Reserve Historical Society, under the title The Autobiography of Jeptha Homer Wade: A Modest American.
What does modesty mean when we’re talking about a philanthropist, who specified in his deed of transfer that the land he donated to the city should “be called and known forever by the name Wade Park”? It may be my own cultural bias–in Jewish tradition, anonymous charity is among the highest rated forms of giving. And yet there is something humble in the tone of this letter, written to his beloved grandson. The contents are factual, if occasionally flowery, never self-aggrandizing. It isn’t the whole of his life’s story, which, after all, had by then been lived; he was almost 77 at the time of writing, and lived just one year more. Toward the end of the letter, he writes, “This brings my history down to where you know about it. I have given as much detail as you will probably care for. Having laid the warp I leave you to fill in the woof, which you can do after I am gone, better than I can now.” Honestly? Pretty modest.
In fact, Jeptha Homer Wade II was also noted for his modesty, which is even more surprising since he lacked the rags-to-riches biography of his grandfather. In Object Lessons, Wade II is described as exhibiting “innate modesty and wise counsel.” He was exceptional among the museum’s founders for being the only one to donate works of art during his lifetime. He also donated more pieces than the others, numbering over 2,000, and insisted they be installed in chronologically or thematically appropriate galleries, rather than have the museum create something like a Jeptha Homer Wade II Hall. (There is, however, a Jeptha Homer Wade II Gallery of Gems & Jewels in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, just on the other side of Wade Oval). His gifts were given free of restrictions, meaning that future museum leadership would be at liberty to sell Wade’s donations if the proceeds would better serve the institution, and he set up a trust fund for the acquisition not only of paintings but also textiles, jewelry, and metalwork. He served as the museum’s vice president when it opened in 1916, and became president in 1920, a position he held until his death six years later.
I suspect, moreover, that it was Wade II’s involvement which cemented the museum’s free admission policy. It was, after all, Wade I’s original 1882 deed which stipulated that the park should be “for the benefit of all the people.” This phrase was adopted as the museum’s motto, with the addition of one more crucial word, “forever.” It was emblazoned on banners when the museum opened and when it celebrated its centennial. It heads the mission statement and is even built into the museum’s digital infrastructure–learn more at https://www.clevelandart.org/for-the-benefit-of-all-the-people-forever
I know the CMA as well as I do because it is free. It has been a haven for me and formed the backbone of my cultural education, both formal and informal. Free admission makes field trips easier, especially for public schools like the one I attended. And it also gave me a place to go on weekends, for hours at a time, most often with my father, a deeply cultured man who was, nevertheless, frequently unemployed. In adolescence, it gave me a place to go when I was fighting with my parents, or craving an experience I couldn’t get in the suburbs.
In the first decade of this century, the museum underwent a massive renovation, reportedly valued at $320 million, prompting my father, whose ghost haunts this essay and some galleries in the museum, to say, “If they don’t start charging admission now, they never will.” For the benefit of all the people. Forever.
•
The second part of Scarry’s book is titled “On Beauty and Being Fair,” and it argues that appreciating beauty inspires work for social justice. A love of beauty, says Scarry, is far from a frivolous matter. It is, on the contrary, at the heart of environmentalism, equity, and cultural preservation. It is no coincidence, for example, that the word “fair” means both lovely and just.
Scarry dwells on beauty as a catalyst for its own reproduction, writing “Beauty brings copies of itself into being.” We see this play out literally, in the connection between erotic attraction and procreation, and Scarry shows how reproduction of the beautiful is at the heart of artistic creation too. When you sketch a lovely face, post a picture of your cat online, or write an ode on a Grecian urn, you are moved by beauty to appreciate, capture, reproduce, and share it. And it is by awakening our impulse to share that beauty can inspire us to act in ways that benefit our communities, as small or as large as we define them.
Scarry writes that “beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of ‘a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another.’” This is the principle that animates every communal act of appreciation, from hanging a painting to recommending a movie, from playing a symphony to sliding your cocktail across the table for your friend to taste. The pursuit of beauty may begin as a solitary act, but it is just as often accompanied by an impulse toward shared appreciation, connection, and, ultimately, community-building.
Many of us perform these sorts of minute acts every day, each according to her means. Although an increase in means enables the pursuit of beauty—nicer clothes, travel, fancy restaurants—it does not necessarily follow that one becomes more likely to share. Of course it doesn’t. The most lucrative market for art today is among private collectors, many of whom won’t ever display the works even in their homes, instead keeping them in storage or in a freeport purely as a financial investment. This recalls the art market before the advent of the public museum, when the super-rich, say European monarchies or the Catholic Church, would commission art for display accessible only to the elite.
Following Scarry’s reasoning, a private collection rooted in a love of art may inspire feelings of joy and even passion in the owner, but it does not does not transcend its materialistic foundation. A public art museum, however, is a gesture toward democratic distribution, providing access indiscriminately. Especially, or maybe only, when that museum is free.
Philanthropy, of course, is not a net good; it operates on a system of hierarchical values and enforces status quo capitalist power relationships. Museums, too, enshrine hierarchies of value–from acquisitions to interpretation–and I have no illusions that the CMA, a mega-rich institution, is an innocent player. Any museum that holds a coffin is likely to have some skeletons in the closet.
But for me personally, a working-class girl from Cleveland, the CMA has been a force for good, a site of refuge and wonder. The CMA is where I learned to appreciate beauty and why I should care. And I feel cared for by the museum, this place within the home that is no longer my home, this place that has allowed me to grow and change, because it grows and changes apace.
•
Let’s end where we started, with the portrait of Nathaniel Olds. The popularity of the painting, ironically, has nothing to do with the entrepreneurial success later enjoyed by Jeptha Homer Wade I, or his philanthropic work in the city of Cleveland, or the work done by his grandson, Jeptha Homer Wade II, in establishing the CMA. In fact, it was not part of Wade II’s significant collection, those donations and curatorial acquisitions which helped establish the CMA as a world-class institution. The painting was a later gift, bestowed in 1991 for the museum’s 75th birthday (part of the same celebration that gave rise to Object Lessons). The donor? Jeptha Homer Wade III.
Wade the Third was the grandson of the Second, great-great grandson of the First. This Wade wasn’t a Cleveland guy, he was a Harvard-educated Boston lawyer, but don’t hold that against him–he did a lot of work for nuclear disarmament and, like other Wades before him, served on museum boards.
Actually, though, the painting hadn’t always been part of a Wade family collection. Of his own art career, Wade I wrote, “My best productions, some of which I might be proud of, were burned, with all my books, implements, sketches etc. pertaining to the business, and thus ended that chapter in my history.” The story of the Nathaniel Olds portrait, we now know, is the unexpected epilogue to that chapter.
Having been commissioned by the subject, Nathaniel Olds, the painting stayed in the Olds family until Nathaniel’s granddaughter, Maude Tarr, died in 1963 (at age ninety-nine, kenahorah). She donated it to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where she lived. Their staff followed a hunch that the J. H. Wade who signed the back of the painting might be the same Cleveland industrialist. So they contacted the Western Reserve Historical Society, who contacted the living heir, Wade III. He hung on to the painting for just over twenty years, when, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, he decided to give a gift to the city of Cleveland.
I was astonished to realize this iconic painting, whose author played such an intrinsic role in the history of the CMA, had only entered its collection in 1991. To me it seemed unthinkable that it had ever not been there. But then, I was born in 1985, and while I feel I have been going to the CMA my entire life, I only really came into consciousness around age five. In Catholicism, a child is believed to have reached the “age of reason,” the ability to understand that their actions have consequences, at age seven. This is also the age neuroscientists believe children begin making long-term memories. I was six when Nathaniel Olds came to the CMA. That is, functionally, my entire life.
The portrait of Nathaniel Olds came to be in the CMA not because of any inherent value of the painting (as if such a thing is quantifiable) but because of the Wade family’s largesse. This is a clear-cut case of nepotism in curation, and yet the painting is wildly popular, neither because of nor despite its provenance, but irrespective of it. The painting’s popularity is essentially a fluke. Or more precisely, it’s a coincidence. A goofy-looking guy in green glasses, showcasing a technology past its prime, expressive, experimental, striking, Wade’s portrait of Olds managed to capture the imagination of Northeast Ohioans. He’s the hero Cleveland deserves.
Although he abandoned portraiture as a young man, Wade loved art ardently. So much so that he named his only son, Randall, after the portrait painter who had been his mentor. Randall Palmer, like Wade, did not achieve fame as a fine artist, but he too has a legacy: his influence on his student and friend was so great, it forms a link in the chain of our civic and cultural history.
Why, if he was so passionate about art, did Wade abandon his own creative practice? In the letter to his grandson, Wade explains:
As an artist, I am sorry to say, I reached no eminence to be proud of less perhaps than any other branch of business I have undertaken, nor is it very much to be wondered at, in view of all the circumstances. … [I] was without access to good works of art from which to learn, or I might say any works of art. … Had I lived in a large city, with access to plenty of good paintings… I of course could have done better, and as I look back upon it my wonder is that I done as well and got as comfortable a living out of it as I did.
So here is the connection between his philanthropy writ large and his own minor painting career. Wade knew first-hand that access to models was essential for artistic development. How beautiful, then, that his success in other realms translated into this gift for the city, this gift of access to art. Neither Jeptha Homer Wade, whose initial fortune made the museum possible, nor Jeptha Homer Wade II, whose vision brought the museum into being, ever knew the fate of the portrait of Nathaniel Olds. It’s goofy, it’s beautiful, and we Clevelanders love it so much.
A hometown that isn’t your home is a slippery thing—it keeps changing, without your input or help. But ultimately, it’s where you choose to make your home that matters. That’s where you invest your time and your labor. Jeptha Homer Wade’s legacy isn’t in his hometown, it’s in his chosen home. The portrait of Nathaniel Olds made it there, and stayed.