The Woman Who Loved Beautiful Things

On the evening of April 4, 1913, Manhattan’s fashionable set crowded into the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. Though the audience wore evening dress, no society dance was taking place. No formal candlelit dinner, either, and no debutante’s graceful curtsy amid a stage-set garden of American Beauty roses hemmed by boxwood hedges. Instead, the second half of an invitation-only auction enticed the city’s grandees into the gilded double-height space to marvel as one of Manhattan’s notable private collections of art and antiques was being dispersed beneath titanic crystal chandeliers, under the direction of American Art Galleries, the first auction house in the country and an ancestor of Sotheby’s. The 178 lots of Gothic and Renaissance works of art would have been enough of a draw, but the consignor’s identity guaranteed eager attendance and feverish international headlines. Glamorous, unpredictable, and prone to sartorial extremes—her daringly backless evening dresses were stuff of editorial cartoons and arch witticisms—the society figure Rita Lydig was mysteriously exiting her exquisite little palazzo at 38 East 52nd Street, one of architect Stanford White’s last projects before his murder at Madison Square Garden in 1906, and selling most of its contents.

“Why does Mrs. Lydig sell the treasures that she has placed far beyond all of her other possessions?” the Idaho Statesman queried in a syndicated article published a few days after the auction brought $362,555, or about $11.5 million in today’s money. Precisely why Mrs. Philip M. Lydig, née de Acosta, aged thirty-seven, a broker’s wife invariably called exotic because of her Hispanic origins, was divesting wasn’t clear. Unspecified health reasons were given. Her grandson, Houston H. Stokes, tells ANTIQUES that she had lifelong stomach issues; a contemporary noted that she barely ate anything—two spoonfuls of soup and a couple of lettuce leaves were considered dinner. Drug addiction has been suggested by Robert A. Schanke, a biographer of Lydig’s sister Mercedes de Acosta. Another deaccessioning factor could have been that her marriage was also reportedly crumbling. The couple would separate in 1914 and divorce five years later. (She went on to have romantic entanglements, real and unrequited, with sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, French theater director Jacques Copeau, and the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant, a celebrated Episcopal priest.) In any case, Lydig was not at American Art Galleries for the first half of the sale nor at the Plaza Hotel that evening, having gone to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for unspecified treatments, more than a week earlier. Her conspicuous absence, a reporter at American Art News noted on April 12, gave “a pathetic touch to the sale.”

Unlike the flimsy auction catalogues produced today, the 308-page Lydig compendium is impressively thick, heavy, and properly bound. A scan of a copy that was owned by the dealers M. Knoedler and Co. can be found online, posted to the Internet Archive. In addition to contemporary news articles about the sale pasted inside, it is fully annotated with handwritten results as well as the names of the successful bidders, from a Ming Dynasty green-glazed ceramic bowl purchased by a P. J. McCullah for $125 to a seven-by-eight-foot wall hanging made of seventeenth-century Venetian damask that sold for $200 to a Miss Cheney, likely Mary Cheney of the Cheney silk family. Other attendees represented the dealers who had been patronized by Lydig and her husband—he had an interest in majolica, one example of which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—such as Jacques Seligmann et Cie., French and Company, Böhler and Steinmeyer, and Duveen Brothers.

Other auction-goers were “mondaines of note,” the American Art News reporter observed, members of the financial world, industry, and connoisseurship. Real-estate heir Potter Palmer Jr. focused on the Chinese ceramics. Financier Mortimer L. Schiff won several lots, including a seventeenth-century Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo portrait of the Infanta Margarita as a child and an eighteenth-century Spanish ecclesiastical banner. Opera star Enrico Caruso took home a sixteenth-century bronze statuette of a satyr and a fifteenth-century plaque of the Madonna and Child with Saint John, in the style of Benedetto da Maiano, which Lydig had found at a gallery in Florence. Emily L. Trevor, a Stanford White client like Lydig, purchased a sixteenth-century bronze equestrian statuette from the school of Giovanni di Bologna, depicting Henri IV of France. Elsie de Wolfe, the interior decorator, a talent whom Rita Lydig patronized, was the winner of a sixteenth-century-style Italian walnut table. American Art News called the assemblage of personalities “almost unique in the history of New York art auctions,” adding: “There was, for several obvious reasons, much curiosity, both in the social and art trade worlds, regarding this sale, and, quite naturally, numberless rumors and stories regarding its cause, the method of its management, etc. The dailies, always eager for sensation, had ‘played it up’ for weeks in advance, and so the sale became more than an incident—and was an event.”

Few individuals wore the mantle of celebrity in Manhattan of the early 1900s with as much purposeful panache as Rita Lydig. An egoist, she was painted by John Singer Sargent (“She herself is art,” he once said), Giovanni Boldini, and Ignacio Zuloaga and photographed by Baron Adolph de Meyer and Edward Steichen. French artist Paul Helleu said that she possessed thirty-nine of the forty cardinal points of beauty; only her coloring, he said, lacked warmth. Sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, a onetime object of her desires, called her “a perfected personality . . . a masterpiece of civilization.”¹ Daughter of a Cuban father who relocated to New York City in the 1860s and adopted a particule at some point, she had begun collecting in 1902, when she became the wife of Philip M. Lydig, following a tumultuous, headline divorce from W. E. D. Stokes, a splenetic older multimillionaire whose fortune was based in mining and real estate. Her first newlywed purchase was Portrait of a Noblewoman, aka The Girl in Red, attributed to Alonzo Sánchez Coello, which she acquired in Paris through Stanford White, then developing the couple’s East 52nd Street house, which has been demolished. Sold at the 1913 auction to New York City’s Blakeslee Galleries for $10,300 ($326,868 in 2024), the painting is now in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum, renamed Portrait of a Young Noblewoman and has been downgraded to a circa-1630 school of Madrid work. Over the next few years, Lydig and her husband, with the assistance of advisors such as White, Bernard Berenson, and Joseph Duveen, amassed a relatively small if formidable array of Spanish, German, and Dutch paintings, European tapestries, and more, as well as a Botticelli Venus, much heralded at the time, that turned out to be “school of.” It is now in a private Swiss collection.

Lydig’s connoisseurship was laureled by the twenty-three-page introduction that opened the American Art Galleries catalogue, written by Wilhelm R. Valentiner, a young German-born art historian who was, at the time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of decorative arts, a position to which he had been appointed in 1907. (He was assisted in the task by Durr Friedley, an assistant curator.) According to Valentiner’s unpublished memoirs, the catalogue was supposed to have been a private publication, a vanity volume that would be circulated among friends, family, and other collectors. “I had no idea she was going to use it as a salesbook or else I would have refused,” he wrote. “But unaware of this I was flattered to be called to Mrs. Lydig’s house . . . furnished with rare taste and understanding.”² In a letter to Valentiner, though, she uses the term “sale catalogue” and in a note dated February 26, 1913, writes, “I know you will do everything in your power to make my sale a success!”³ It is entirely possible that the curator could not extricate himself from a private project that had changed course, though Lydig’s flirtatious yet demanding letters to Joseph Duveen, held by the Getty Museum, make it clear, as Valentiner observed, that she was fond of “cat and mouse game[s].” A friend of Valentiner’s, museum curator Perry Townsend Rathbone, recalled in an oral history in the Archives of American Art that the former fell very much under Lydig’s vivacious spell. “He told me that sometimes he would sit next to her at the dinner table, and she was a very animated woman, and told stories in an exciting and dramatic way. And in the midst of the excitement of the story, she would sometimes reach out and grab him by the arm, grasp his arm, you know, and he said it just sent shivers all through him, because he was so thrilled to be that intimate with this glamorous, good-looking gal.”

Plans were drawn up for the Lydig house beginning in 1903 and construction was completed in 1905: an English-basement house five stories high and three bays wide. Given that White was also a superb antiquar- ian and magnificent decorator—see Stanford White: Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiquities (2005) by Wayne Craven for an overview of these understudied talents of White’s—it is logical to suspect that he would have had significant impact on the Lydigs’ decor. Valentiner rejects that presumption: “White’s work was almost exclusively confined to the architectural part,” he wrote in his introduction to the Lydig sale catalogue. As published in Good Furniture: A Magazine of Decoration in September 1917, in a posthumous appreciation of White, the Lydigs’ spacious rooms are spartan in effect, with a monastic purity well outside the White norm but very much reflective of Rita Lydig’s own taste, a powerful combination of luxury and restraint. Valentiner remembered his slim-hipped heroine wearing hostess dresses of antique red velvet so close fitting and unadorned that she looked like a “straight thin line.”⁴

Walls are clad in veined marble, stretched with worn red velvet, or gridded with paneling beneath centuries-old coffered ceilings. The furniture, largely Italian Renaissance originals, is joined by convincing copies and contemporary upholstery, albeit clad in seventeenth-century Venetian damask in shades of crimson with matching antique velvet portières. The rigor and simplicity, purest Florentine in feeling, thrusts the art into prominence. Rooms display a single painting or two and little more. The marble-walled dining room was adorned with one large framed circa-1510 Flemish tapestry of the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene and antique ceramic plaques of the Madonna and Child. A recurring theme throughout the Lydig collection, the latter were ironic presences to contemporary eyes. More than one newspaper reported that it was widely believed that Lydig had given her first husband custody of their only child, a son, in exchange for $1 million. (The rumor was false.) As for that tapestry, it brought $41,000 at the 1913 auction and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Auction proceeds pocketed, Lydig began to change addresses, from deluxe rented apartments to a house on Washington Square North in Manhattan, with her remaining works of art and a favorite Ispahan carpet being shuttled back and forth from storage at Duveen Brothers. She also continued to acquire, and in Washington Square she conjured another series of magnificent decors, this time eighteenth-century English, with all the complementary works of art and objects, and, as she wrote to Valentiner on March 5, 1913, in praising his catalogue essay, “I hope you will be able to write as much [of a] eulogy of my new home.”⁵ (He seems to have declined the suggestion.) It would be the last of her spending sprees. Money was running out, despite efforts to economize—she supported various charities and underwrote art exhibitions—and her ill health continued. Her personal library of rare books was sold at Anderson Galleries on May 18, 1920, and in 1927, she filed for bankruptcy, “a contingency that [her friends] foresaw,” the Omaha World-Herald noted on May 8. “She finally became so reduced that she was no longer able to pay her servants. . . . Grocers, laundries, dressmaking establishments—all the concerns that cater to the carrying on of an existence even in a modest way—deluged her with accounts long past due.” Not even writing a roman à clef about New York society (Tragic Mansions, 1927) could stave off penury. Once again, Lydig’s belongings were sent to the block; only her son’s sterling silver baby mug was spared. Her aesthetic sense, though, remained unabated, even to her last moments. As Lydig lay on her deathbed in 1929, at Manhattan’s Hotel Gotham, her sister Mercedes began fanning her—only to be startled to hear her semi-conscious sibling ask, “Is it a Spanish fan?”⁶

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¹ Quoted in Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion (New York: Rizzoli, 2014), pp. 165–166. ² Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner Papers, 1853–1977, Archives of American Art, box 4, folder 33, On Art Collectors, circa 1940–1950. ³ Ibid., box 2, folder 71, Lydig, Rita de Acosta, 1912–1913. ⁴ Ibid., box 4, folder 33. ⁵ Ibid., box 2, folder 71. ⁶ Mercedes de Acosta, Here Lies the Heart: A Tale of My Life (New York: Reynal, 1960), p. 204.