A. Piatt Andrew, the “A” to Mrs. Gardner’s “Y”

Perched like an icon in a corner of the Blue Room, Anders Zorn’s striking portrait of the economist Abram Piatt Andrew, Jr. (1911) testifies to the deep friendship between its subject and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Andrew, known as Piatt, first met Gardner just a few months after the opening of Fenway Court in 1903 and the day after her sixty-third birthday. It was a red-letter day for the thirty-year-old Andrew, who earlier that morning was named an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard. Charmed by his hostess, he wrote in his diary of the “delightful experience” he had touring her collection.”¹

Four more years would pass before Gardner accepted an invitation to Andrew’s Gloucester, Massachusetts home, Red Roof. “What fun all this will be for me,” Gardner wrote him in anticipation of her September 1907 visit.² In the affectionate note she sent Andrew on the afternoon she returned home, Gardner exclaimed:

It is worth noting that Andrew and Gardner’s subsequent, intense connection caught fire only after Gardner met the “rich, strange people” that formed Andrew’s community of friends. Dubbing themselves “Dabsville,” an acronym drawn from the first letters of the friends’ surnames, this group of Eastern Point neighbors included the painter Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942), who had brokered Andrew’s initial visit to Fenway Court; interior decorator Henry Davis Sleeper (1878–1934); educator Joanna Davidge (1872–1931); and arts patron Caroline Sinkler (1860–1949). As a set, the Dabsvillians were lively, witty, creative, and intellectually curious; snobs regarding personal merit rather than social standing, they were frequent and hospitable hosts, yet could also be clubbish and insular.

By insisting that Andrew let no “others crawl in,” Gardner not only acknowledged the group’s exclusivity but she also recognized Andrew as its beating heart(throb). Defying stereotypes of the Ivory Tower academic, this young professor was blessed with matinée-idol good looks, a deeply charismatic personality, and a passion for all forms of athleticism. Despite the thirty-four-year gap in their ages, and Andrew’s romantic attachment to his own sex, Gardner adopted a playfully flirtatious tone with him. By January 1908 the pair adopted nicknames for one another, Gardner becoming “Y” for the archaic spelling of her name (“Ysabella”) to Andrew’s “A”—or in one instance, “A. No.1”⁴ She could not have devised a more fitting reminder than this, that Andrew would always come first among the Dabsvillians. Its members eagerly accepted Gardner as his second-in-command.

In July 1908 Andrew resigned his Harvard position to join the National Monetary Commission, a role that would bring him to Europe for the rest of that summer and fall. Dabsville responded with grief (“fancy a lot of enchanting people missing one man,” Gardner wrote Andrew) and plans for a grand costume party.⁵ Describing the July 30 event, held at Beaux’s studio, Andrew wrote his parents:

Signing their names above those of the other guests that night, Andrew styled himself “Piatt R.I” [for “Romanus Imperator”] while Gardner signed “Ysabella – R” [for “Regina,” the Latin form of “Queen”]. Beside her name she sketched a coronet.

At the Easter celebration Andrew hosted the following spring, Gardner exchanged her crown for the role of matchmaker. Sharing the news of their mutual friend George Proctor’s engagement, Gardner asked Andrew, “When does your turn come?”—a question she hoped to answer by bringing the twenty-two-year-old heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney to Red Roof.⁷ Beautiful, well connected, and worth nearly twenty million dollars, Whitney struck Gardner as Andrew’s perfect mate. In April 1911, after two years of persistence, Gardner brought him to a half-hearted marriage proposal. Rebuffed by Whitney, Andrew wrote her a followup letter that began well—“I long for the chance to be with you”—but included the likely unwelcome observation that he was “with S [Henry Davis Sleeper] at my elbow as I write.”⁸ Whitney married Willard Straight that fall.

When Gardner commissioned Andrew’s portrait from Zorn that year, she surely knew her friend’s personal charisma might not easily translate to the canvas—this, despite Zorn’s well-known talent for drawing out the character of his sitters. The final result succeeded in ways that neither Gardner nor Andrew might have at first appreciated. To anyone familiar with Andrew’s many photographic portraits, his gaze in Zorn’s painting is surprising. The sitter’s apparent strabismus, sometimes called a “walleye,” is a feature that Andrew himself—as vain as he was personable—must normally have disguised in portraits. (It is perhaps for this reason that Andrew nearly always chose to turn in profile when depicted). By choosing to emphasize rather than downplay this trait, Zorn captured a vulnerability in Andrew’s affect that was, however ironically, part of the power of his charm.

In the portrait’s remarkable central passage, Zorn’s bravado rendering of Andrew’s crimson cravat, the painter summoned more than just his subject’s reputation as a dandy. As early as the first decade of the twentieth century, urban gay men enlisted red ties as a code by which to recognize one another; whether Zorn himself was aware of this practice, he would certainly have known, through Gardner, the numerous associations between his sitter and the color red. These began but did not end with the name of Andrew’s home—where Gardner’s dedicated guest room was, in fact, the Red Room. So closely associated with the color was Andrew, whose birthday fell two days shy of Valentine’s Day, that its reference became a running joke with his friends. Writing Andrew on the eve of his return home in 1908, Sleeper found “heavy blood-red” paper to welcome him back.⁹ Not to be outdone, Gardner used her own plain stationery to assure Andrew she would be “blood-red glad” to see him.¹⁰ With Zorn’s portrait installed in her Blue Room three years later, Gardner could entertain her friend even in his absence.

Notes

R. Tripp Evans‘s most recent book The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home was published with Rowman & Littlefield in 2024.

¹A. Piatt Andrew, 15 April 1903 in E. Parker Hayden and Andrew L. Gray, eds., Diary of Abram Piatt Andrew 1902–1914 (Princeton: privately printed, November 1986). 

²Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 7 September 1907 in Andrew L. Gray, ed. From Y to A: Letters from Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, (New York: privately printed, 1967), p. 1. 

³Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 12 September 1907 in Gray, 1967, p. 2. 

⁴Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 9 August 1908 in Gray 1967, p. 5. 

⁵Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 26 September 1908 in Gray, 1967, p. 8. 

⁶Cited in E. Parker Hayden and Andrew L. Gray, Beauport Chronicle: The Letters of Henry Davis Sleeper to Abram Piatt Andrew, Jr., 1906-1915 (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1991), p. 26. 

⁷Andrew L. Gray, “Mrs. Gardner as Matchmaker,” Fenway Court (1982), p. 52. 

⁸Cited in Joseph E. Garland, Eastern Point: A Nautical, Rustical and More or Less Sociable Chronicle of Gloucester’s Outer Shield and Inner Sanctum, 1606-1990 (Beverly: Commonwealth Editions, 1999), p. 321. 

⁹Editors’ note, Hayden and Gray, 1991, p. 57. 

¹⁰Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, 26 September 1908 in Gray, 1967, p. 8.