 |
©Suzanne Fox 2020 May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission Sources: stock images plus |
In addition to being the author of one of my favorite novels, The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton was an influential interior decorator, the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and a close friend of Henry James. Born as Edith Newbold Jones to wealth and social status (it's said that the idiom "keeping up with the Joneses" refers to her father's family), her priorities and opinions weren't always admirable—for example, she was a committed supporter of French colonialism. Yet she did extensive and important charitable work during the First World War, and she was an extraordinarily astute observer of the ways elite society damaged as well as eased the lives of those born into it. And of course, suffering is no respecter of privilege: among other sources of distress in her life, the mental illness of her husband Teddy caused Edith years of deep difficulty and pain.
My piece plays with her extensive travel as well as some of the residences in several countries she inhabited, wrote about and/or designed. Chief among these is The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she wrote The House of Mirth and which I'd love to visit some day. It's pictured here in snow at the top left. Clockwise from there, the compass frames display images of the Pavilion Colombe, her estate about an hour from Paris; Land's End, the home in Newport she bought and redesigned; and an outbuilding at the Villa Borghese, which appears in the book on Italian villas and gardens Wharton created with illustrator Maxfield Parrish. Though the title doesn't show, the book cover on which her portrait rests is that of an 1865 edition of Owen Jones' seminal The Grammar of Ornament, which Wharton would certainly have owned and used and which I've altered into a mirror-image block that looks a bit like a figured carpet. (I couldn't find a Wharton original book cover that would work.)
It was fun to work on a piece that could be quite dense and over-the-top, and also to play with warm reds and browns, which are not colors I'm generally drawn to. It was pure serendipity to find David Dashiell's wonderful photograph of Wharton's copies of her own books, which I used to line the borders. I layered a mostly transparent antique marbled book endpaper over them just to bring down their contrast and detail a bit: even in a piece that could serve as an illustration of horror vacui, the fear of empty space, too much is just too much.