Utah's Leading Ladies of the Arts

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 38, 1970, No. 1

Utah's Leading Ladies of the Arts

BY RAYE PRICE

THE LONG CHAIN of covered wagons was loaded with seed, powder, foodstuffs, clothing, portable furniture, and farming implements — only that which would help to make civilization of a wilderness, jewelry and trinkets, table linens, and heirloom silver, had been sold or abandoned with other luxuries in the tragic flight from Nauvoo, Illinois, It was a serious journey, there was no room for frills, but the Arts went West with the Mormon pioneers.

Days on the trail were fraught with rivers to be forded, oxen to be driven, wagons to be jostled over rutted mountain tracks and endless prairie, yet evening bonfires rang with music of Captain William Pitt's Brass Band and blistered feet danced gaily on the frozen ground. A stanza of poetry, the soothing lyrics of a hymn, sounds of flute or trumpet — and the ordeal was made more bearable.

Thomas L. Kane described it:

Some of their wind instruments, indeed, were uncommonly full and puretoned, and in that clear dry air could be heard to a great distance. It had the strangest effect in the world, to listen to their sweet music winding over the uninhabited country. Something in the style of a Moravian deathtone blown at day-break, but altogther unique. It might be when you were hunting a ford over the Great Platte, the dreariest of all wild rivers, perplexed among the far-reaching sandbars and curlew shallows of its shifting bed; — the wind rising would bring you the first faint thought of a melody; and, as you listened, borne down upon the gust that swept past you a cloud of the dry sifted sands, you recognized it — perhaps a homeloved theme of Henry Proch or Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, away there is the Indian Marches!

And when the exhausted emigrants had reached their new Zion, when small huts were thrown up against the elements, streets laid out in geometric regularity, and seedlings rooted to insure survival in a desert land, the Arts were present.

There were poems and hymns by "Zion's Poetess," Eliza Roxey Snow. The Deseret Musical and Dramatic Association was formed in 1850 and their first play, Robert Macaire, was presented in the Bowery in 1851. Eighteen fifty-two saw completion of the Social Hall, where newcomers were astounded to discover Dominico Ballo, a former West Point band-master and graduate of the Milan Conservatory of Music, conducting the Social Hall Orchestra in far-off, isolated Great Salt Lake City. In the sixties Joseph H. Ridges built the great tabernacle organ and "made possible a culture in music that could not have existed without it."

The Salt Lake Theatre raised its curtain on a new dramatic era in Utah in 1862. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a traveling journalist, found little to praise about the Mormons, but did admit that

The Opera-House was a subject we could agree upon. I was greatly astonished to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of public amusement which for capacity, beauty and comfort has no superior in America, except the opera-houses of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Jtossessing beauty, comfort, and capacity were not the Salt Lake Theatre's only distinctions; it was on this stage that one of America's most famous actresses made her first appearance.

To say that an actress made her theatrical debut as a roast of beef, peaked her career in the role of a little boy, and made one of her final performances disguised as a barnyard cock would not be saying much — unless it was added that the star in question was the great Maude Adams.

She was Maude Kiskadden at birth, in Salt Lake City, November 11, 1872. Her parents were Asenath Ann (Annie) Adams and James Henry Kiskadden. Annie was the daughter of Barnabas and Julia Adams, staunch pioneers of the Nauvoo exodus, but James was a Gentile. So, when it was decided that Annie and James would marry, it seemed diplomatic to perform the ceremony at the old Adams home in Iowa.

Perhaps it is significant that on their wedding journey to San Francisco, Annie and James were on the first transcontinental railroad and witnessed the "Wedding of the Rails" at Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869, for their only child 5 was later to be claimed by Americans from coast to coast.

Annie Kiskadden was involved in Utah theatre productions from the time she played childrens' roles in the Social Hall until she became a leading lady on the Salt Lake Theatre stage. Unlike other Mormon settlers, whose "playacting" was a pleasant avocation, Annie took her dramatics seriously. It is not surprising that her precocious daughter should follow in her footsteps.

Painting by S. de Tvanowski of Maude Adams in her most famous role, of Peter Pan. The painting is owned by the Utah State Institute of Fine Arts. The insert is a photograph of Maude Adams in the first year of her career. The photograph is from the George D. Pyper Collection, Western Americana, University of Utah Library.

It was late in the summer of 1873. Little Maude was in a cradle backstage at the Salt Lake Theatre while her mother performed in the play The Lost Child. One scene called for a platter to be carried on-stage with a sleeping child in place of a roast, but, at the time of the cue, the regular baby was having a noisy tantrum. Annie, waiting in the wings, offered her nine-month old offspring as a stand-in. Maude was place on the platter and carried in, but, rather than stay asleep, she sat up and looked around in fascination and her first triumph in front of the footlights was accomplished.

Miss Adams could not have remembered her first performance, but she always remembered the persons who helped her along the way. Phil Margetts, a blacksmith who acted at the Salt Lake Theatre in his spare time, had been the one who insisted upon using a real child, rather than a doll, for the platter scene. Years later, when Miss Adams brought her company to Salt Lake City, she heard that Phil was ill and would not be able to come to the theatre he had done so much to build. She therefore arranged to have him carried on a stretcher to a place where he could enjoy the play.

Apparently, this early emphasis on realism influenced Miss Adams. At the age of five, when she played her first speaking role in San Francisco, she was prepared for the "make-believe" of the scripts but insisted that her properties be authentic.

When she was told to fetch a pitcher of beer, she refused to return carrying the traditional cold tea, and still be obliged to call it beer. She won her point, to the satisfaction of the actors destined to drink it ... . Besides, she liked to see it fizz, and to watch the froth spill over the top. This was the early start of what was to be her greatest interest in the theatre: the staging of the plays—the production end.

Perfectionism carried over into her acting as well. When playing Susanne opposite John Drew in The Masked Ball, she was required to do a tipsy scene.

She had skirted vulgarity in all of the rough and tumble days in the West. She had been pathetically revolted as a child by a drunken woman taken to jail by the police in San Francisco. Every time she swayed it seemed vulgar to her. Then one day at rehearsal someone gave her a long-stemmed rose. As she held it, she noticed it swayed in a "dignified manner." So she and the rose went home together to practice.

A career as legendary as Maude Adams's is well chronicled — her triumphs in San Francisco billed as "La Petite Maude" in La Belle Russe, Across the Continent, Barney's Courtship, Fritz, and others; with Charles Frohman's stock company in All the Comforts of Home, Men and Women, Lost Paradise, My Geraldine, and Diplomacy; and John Drew's leading lady in The Masked Ball, The Butterflies, Christopher, Jr., etc.; and in her own company with such plays as The Little Minister, Romeo and Juliet, Quality Street, Peter Pan, and Chantecler.

Although her time in Salt Lake City was relatively brief, her triumphs have been shared in spirit by Utah thespians throughout the years. Until the old Salt Lake Theatre was razed, initiation ceremonies for the local chapter of Theta Alpha Phi dramatic fraternity were held in the famous Green Room over Maude Adams's cradle.

In 1909, when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was on tour in New York, Miss Adams arranged for complimentary seats for her Brooklyn performance of Peter Pan. When the curtain fell, the choir stood and sang "Auld Lang Syne" in her honor, and the entire audience joined in the singing.

Perhaps the inspiration she evoked is best described in Miss Adams's own reaction to her most famous role, Peter Pan. It was

... a situation absolutely new to the stage to make an assemblage of people suddenly a part of the play, and to call upon them to respond with the same readiness the trained actor would take up his cue .... But when an actress steps down to the footlights and says, "Clap your hands and wave your handkerchiefs, if you would save Tinker Bell," there is no means in the world of knowing what the people on the other side of the footlights are going to do.

. . . There was a pause — it seemed to me a long interminable pause, and I shuddered. Then, all at once, the wonderful thing happened. In a moment everybody became an actor in the play. The house broke into the applause that I had called for; they waved their handkerchiefs, and Tinker Bell's life was saved. It was glorious, a happy, a triumphant moment for me and I believe that the audience experienced the same delight that I did.

Maude Adams never married. There were rumors that she was the mistress or secret bride of Charles Frohman, but one of her biographers wrote "She has never married, or rather she has been much married ever since she can remember to her profession .... Her thoughts of romance, her close friends say, have always taken the direction of effective stage scenes."

In 1918 Miss Adams retired, due to ill health and exhaustion. It was during this time that she did her work with stage lighting. In 1931 she staged a short comeback and made her final Salt Lake City appearance in The Merchant of Venice at Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah campus. She became professor of drama at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri, from 1937 until 1946. She died at her little farm in the Catskill Mountains on July 16, 1953.

"Utah's first lady of music" combined a brilliant international operatic career with a determination to foster music in her home state.

That Emma Lucy Gates Bowen possessed talent and devotion to home and church is not surprising as she was a granddaughter of Brigham Young and daughter of Susa Young Gates, an accomplished writer, organist, head of the choir at Brigham Young Academy, and in charge of the Music Department at the academy.

At the age of fourteen, having won the Welsh Eisteddfod competition held in the Salt Lake Tabernacle by performing Gottschalk's "Last Hope" on the piano, Lucy Gates was bent on a musical career. When she was eighteen, she joined Dr. John A. Widtsoe and his wife Leah (her sister) on a trip to Germany. Miss Gates was to study piano under a Professor Freiberg.

One day the professor entered her practice room unobserved, and "heard her singing to herself. Impressed by the beauty of her untrained voice, he advised that she take vocal lessons."

On November 8, 1898, she wrote her parents,

I have not fully decided which I shall take as a specialty but feel in my heart that it will be vocal. I have thought it all over and this is what it is; first my whole soul seems to be brought out more when I sing. I love to sing and I think one of the greatest pleasures of my future life will be in singing praises to God in His Holy Temples. There is no good Mormon teacher or singer in Utah.

The following May Susa Young Gates and her mother, Lucy B. Young, attended the International Council of Women in London, England, and Miss Gates joined them there. It was decided that she would apply to the Berlin Royal Conservatory of Music and her grandmother would accompany her as chaperone.

At the conservatory, she was tutored by Professor Adolphe Schulze, head of the school, but, when he commented that she had "a very sweet voice" and said, "I don't know whether you could earn your living by singing or not, but you wanted to be teacher, didn't you?" temperament got the best of Miss Gates and she wrote her parents,

He thinks nobody can be a great singer unless he has a large voice. I have noticed so much in all of his speakings of his pupils he says, "She is my best soloist and she has a fine large voice," and generally they are the ones that make the most noise.

After six months, she quit the conservatory and started her tutelage under Madame Blanche Corelli.

Of all her coaches Lucy Gates was most indebted to Madame Corelli. Professor Shulze had despaired of her small voice, but Madame Corelli devised a new method to strengthen it. She was to have one halfhour lesson daily, no practicing, and not to attempt actual songs for three months. Within ten months Madame Corelli arranged an audition with a famous concert director, who claimed that Miss Gates was for opera and possessed the voice, figure, face, and artistic sense to be a great singer. In later years study with other coaches in the United States and Paris strained her voice until it failed. Miss Gates returned to Madame Corelli and her singing was restored in five months.

After many years of study, travel back and forth between Europe and the United States, and frequent visits to Utah, Miss Gates made her debut as Anchen in Der Freischuetz, conducted by Dr. Carl Muck at the Royal Opera House in Berlin. As far as she knew, she was the first American girl to debut at the Royal Opera House in a role that demanded dialogue in a foreign tongue.

Two years later she transferred to His Majesty's Royal Opera House in Kassel, where she sang coloratura roles as prima donna until the advent of World War I. During her four years in Germany, "she sang more than fifty roles, ranging from 'Queen of the Night,' the highest role written for a coloratura soprano, to 'Carmen,' written for mezzo-soprano." She was invited to perform at Kaiser Wilhelm's palaces, was guest artist in many opera houses, and made numerous concert appearances.

Wartime brought an end to Lucy Gates's international career, but it heralded the fruition of her long-time goal of fostering music in Utah.

She was a leading music teacher and, in 1915, became the first prima donna impressario to organize her own company when she started the Lucy Gates Opera Company with her brother B. Cecil Gates. With the purpose of bringing grand opera to the Rocky Mountains, she became organizer, stage manager, and artistic director of the group.

Marriage came late, but after becoming the bride of widower Albert E. Bowen and stepmother to his twin sons Albert and Robert, she commented, "looking back on my life now, if I had to choose between home and children and a career, I'd take the home and children."

Her reputation as a homemaker and gourmet cook thrived, but Lucy Gates was ever the prima donna. Her friends remember her "holding court," seated on a bag of potatoes in ZCMI grocery department, calling her order good-naturedly to a host of scurrying salesclerks.

She was hostess to visiting musical dignitaries and often entertained them at her home after their concerts. It is said that following a delightful luncheon, Alec Templeton, the blind pianist, was asked what he thought of Lucy Gates. He answered that she was probably heavy, wore a good deal of jewelry, and "had a bit of an ego."

On October 25, 1948, Lucy Gates closed her musical career when a testimonial concert was given in her honor at the Assembly Hall on Temple Square. An overflow crowd, whose admission fees were donated to the Utah Symphony at her request, and numerous letters and telegrams paid her tribute. Arthur Judson, a leading musical manager from New York, wrote

To me her artistry as a singer has been most enjoyable, but what she has been able to do in Salt Lake City is of much greater importance. What we need is not so many touring artists but men and women of great musical ideals who will make their influence felt in their own city.

When the concert ended, Lucy Gates mischieviously responded to a standing ovation by remarking

The last time I sang was La Traviata at the last performance at the Salt Lake Theatre before it was torn down. And that was the last time I remember, right off, that I sang with orchestra. It wouldn't be fitting for me to sing a little ditty with the piano. So with the consent of Mrs. Wooten I will repeat just the 1-a-a-a-st bit of the same thing they have just sung.

The encore was her last public performance. Lucy Gates died April 30, 1951. For her funeral her long-time friend and accompanist, Miss Becky Almond, wrote,

To present a song in a way that satisfied her high ideals was to establish a standard; she took into consideration everything; the composer, the musical conception, the projection. It had to be a fusion of all things . . . and above all it must impart a message or it was worthless.

Very little has been written about artist Mary Teasdel, but, since she was the first Utah woman to be accepted in the French Salon (at a time when society frowned upon women having a profession or achieving much distinction) it seems fitting that she take her place among Utah's Leading Ladies of the Arts.

Miss Teasdel was born in Salt Lake City on November 6, 1863, to Mr. and Mrs. S. P. Teasdel. Her father was a well-to-do merchant, proud that he was able to provide his three sons and two daughters with a beautiful home and the cultural opportunities of education and travel. Mary inherited aesthetic tendencies from both parents, but was also of a practical nature. She studied art and music at the University of Deseret, graduating in 1886, and painted under the instruction of J. T. Harwood in 1891.

Her father insisted that it was his place to support his daughter, but Mary always banked a portion of her allowance with the dream that some day she would study abroad. Her frugal nature was fortunate, for her father's trusting way with debtors eventually led to financial ruin. Unable to collect a number of accounts, his business failed when a contractor for the railroad to Park City became insolvent and could not pay a bill amounting to thousands of dollars. Tragedy compounded a few months later when two of Mary's brothers died and she lost her only sister in childbirth.

However, Mary's savings and a legacy left her by a brother allowed her to realize her ambitions. In 1897 she and a friend, Cora Hooper (later Mrs. Ernest Eldredge), headed for New York where she spent the winter studying at the National Academy. Paris followed two years later.

Mary and a companion, May Jennings Farlow, found Paris stimulating but not an easy place for women to study. There were separate studios for men and women, and facilities were dirty — barren rooms furnished with a few wooden stools and a model's platform. There were no extra frills in the women's studios, but prices were double; the proprietors claimed it was more expensive to keep them cleaner for "fussy" women.

After applying three months in advance, Mary was accepted in the classes of Jules Simon. She took two of three possible periods, studying four hours in the mornings and evenings. Studio facilities improved appreciably when James McNeil Whistler moved from England to Paris and opened a spotlessly clean studio in a quaint old house with tinted walls and harmonizing draperies and furnishings. Mary enjoyed classes with the immaculate Whistler, whose black kid gloves darted over a picture when he was criticizing.

During the summers eight or ten girls pooled resources to secure a teacher and rent a house in some scenic location. Mary favored her sketch classes in the old fortified town of Normandy, where she summered in a lovely farm house with a bright little garden. Every afternoon the group would walk three miles to the river, picnicking along the way, then stroll homeward, carefully studying subtle twilight effects so they could make the two memory sketches required at class next morning.

Admission to the French Salon was an achievement coveted by late nineteenth century artists; Miss Teasdel was the first Utah woman and second Utah artist to achieve this honor when a group of her ivory miniatures was accepted. The next season, one of her oil portraits was added to the collection, and the following summer Miss Teasdel became the only Utah painter to exhibit in the International French Exposition when two of her ivory miniatures were placed in the show.

Mary remained in France three years (1899-1902). Shortly after her return to Salt Lake City, Mary's father died and she devoted her energies to her mother and spent a year in Holland with her. Miss Teasdel then opened a private studio and taught painting at West High School. Governor Heber M. Wells appointed her to the board of the Utah Art Institute, and she was later elected president of that body.

An impressionistic scene of City Creek Canyon in autumn brought her the grand prize at the Utah State Fair in 1908, and during her stay in Utah she won all major prizes offered by the Utah Art Institute. Many of her paintings are in private collections, two hang in the State Capitol, and thirty-two works are at the Carnegie Public Library in Smithfield, Utah, and the University of Utah. She died on April 11, 1937, in Los Angeles, California.

Maud May Babcock championed women's rights and insisted that "our women must and are freeing themselves from the false ideals of our grandmothers that little girls should 'sit still,' 'be quiet,' 'fold their hands,' and grow up 'little ladies.' " 38 But she deplored inadequacy. In a talk presented at the National Speech Association in November 1950, Miss Babcock said, "I told my students with all the power I could command that unless they were willing to do some honest thinking that they would fail to complete the first step .... Yes, I found that asking people to think was asking a great deal." It was this combination of crusader and perfectionist that made her an inspiration to students for over forty-six years.

Miss Babcock was born in East Worcester, New York, on May 2, 1867. Her family moved to Binghamton when she was ten. The petite, blue-eyed girl was rather frail and, as she matured, some unexplicable affliction weakened her voice so it was a great shock to her family and teachers when, at fifteen, she delivered a stirring Webster oration to her class — her voice returned, clear and strong. It was then that she decided to be an elocutionist.

She pursued her goal by earning a bachelor's degree in elocution at the Philadelphia National School of Oratory (1886) ; receiving a diploma from the American Academy of Dramatic Art (1890) ; studying under Alfred Ayers, Eleanor Goergen, and Franklin Sargent; and undertaking independent study in London and Paris.

With the light calisthenics and Delsarte system of exercise required in her oratorical classes, Miss Babcock noticed a gradual improvement in her health and became impressed with the importance of further study and experiments in the line of physical culture. In time her condition was perfect.

Following her schooling, Miss Babcock taught in New York schools and private homes and, in 1890, started to teach practical physical culture in the Hemingway Gymnasium at the Harvard Summer School. It was during her second year there she met Susa Young Gates.

Mrs. Gates, daughter of Brigham Young and editor of the Young Woman's Journal, had come to Cambridge to take Miss Babcock's summer class. The two women became close friends and, as Miss Babcock told a Deseret News reporter,

She gave most wonderful descriptions of the land among the mountains, the beauty of its scenery and the intelligence of its people. Above all this charming woman spoke of the intense need of physical culture and elocution, and that one coming here now would be, as it were, a missionary or chief reaper in this field already white for the harvest.

By 1892 Miss Babcock had accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Utah at a salary of $500.00 a year, canceling a position as supervisor of Physical Education and Oral Expression in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, schools for three times the salary. She accepted the position despite warnings of friends "who considered the plan a fanatical and even a dangerous one." Her former student, Ethel Baker Callas, imagined her arrival.

She had taught at Harvard, lived in the East, she had every kind of refinement and culture and beautiful clothes. She never had a shoe that wasn't handmade. She came out here . . . muddy roads, everything dirty . . . imagine how it would be for her with those beautiful handmade shoes going down in the mud.

She intended to stay one year, but, within four months Maud Babcock was baptized into the Latter-day Saints Church. Mrs. John A. Widtsoe described Mrs. Babcock's reaction to her daughter's conversion when she was informed the following summer.

Her mother was shocked beyond words to express her disappointment and disgust. She and her mother spent a whole night discussing the awful disgrace that Miss Babcock had brought upon her family .... She believed all the lies about the church. You couldn't convince her that Miss Babcock wasn't guarded, and that if she left the church, she'd be murdered, and that somebody was watching her all the time, and that she wouldn't leave because she daren't.

But Maud Babcock claimed her religion was the "keystone of her life" 44 and, upon her death, she bequeathed her personal genealogical records and real estate valued at $10,000 to the Mormon church.

As the first woman to hold professorial rank at the University of Utah, Miss Babcock conducted classes in oratory, speech, and physical education. In 1893 her brother Dr. William Wayne Babcock, a noted specialist in spinal surgery and author of several medical texts, joined her in a supervisory capacity. Together, they purchased $2,500 worth of equipment from Harvard University and opened the first gymnasium in the remodeled Social Hall. Later, she started a physical education summer school which featured outstanding visiting professionals in the field.

The blending of oratory and physical culture developed into what is reputed to have been the first university theatre in the United States.

Miss Babcock directed her students in their first public performance in the Salt Lake Theatre May 23, 1893. While the production was largely a demonstration of drills with dumbbells, wands, Indian clubs, and dances, it possessed dramatic elements of picturization, selection, and climax.

In 1895 "An Exhibition of Educational Gymnastics" combined drama and dance in a presentation based upon the Greek harvest festival of Eleusthenia, and by December 11, 1897, the newly organized University of Utah Dramatic Club offered the plays The Happy Pair and A Box of Monkeys in the Eighteenth Ward amusement hall. From that time one or two productions were given annually.

Maud May Babcock received many honors. She was a guest director for the Washington Square and Provincetown Players (1916) ; organized the first University Little Theatre west of the Mississippi (1917); was largely responsible for the University of Utah being among the first to offer undergraduate classes in dramatic production; was charter member, national president, and honorary member of several professional associations; served twenty years on the board of the State School for the Deaf and Blind; and, as president, was the first woman to preside over the trustees of a state institution. She was a friend of Maude Adams and Ruth St. Denis; Madame Chiang Kai-shek wrote her a personal note to thank her for her efforts in behalf of Chinese victims of the Sino-Japanese War; her letter to George Bernard Shaw procured for Joseph F. Smith an interview with the playwright, who had formerly written for catalogues of the renowned University of Utah Speech Department; she authored several books and traveled the world.

But the inspiration she gave her students came on a very human level. Lila Eccles Brimhall remembers, "She opened up for all of us a whole new world of culture. And we needed it; it was a young age, where everyone had been struggling for survival and existence."

Ethel Baker Callas said,

I can remember when we used to go up to her cabin at Brighton. It seemed that we knew a woman who was different from our teacher . . . we knew the woman, the mother. We'd have to take nuts in our pockets and have raisins, prunes and all the things to give us energy for the hike. And she always had interesting foods to eat. She taught us how to eat artichokes, avacados, Chinese food . . . things we'd never heard of.

Yet, professionally, Maud Babcock was all business. She insisted that her students select only pieces of literary excellence and then read them "with brains" — understand the thought, hold the thought, and give the thought. She claimed, "Literature was written to be voiced. A poem is not truly a poem until it is voiced by an accomplished artist. It must be born again."

Mrs. Brimhall remembers that she was so positive in her high standdards that "she dominated us so much that it took me a long time to dare to like anything without her approval."

It was very difficult for Miss Babcock to retire. "The theatre has been my life," she said, "and it cannot stop." But, when problems of old age made it necessary, her former students tried to soften the blow. A "University Theatre Golden Jubilee" was planned with a special production of Pygmalion directed by Miss Babcock.

Ethel Callas remembers,

. . . she just wasn't able to function as she should. So to show you how much love we all had for her, we would meet and Harry Allen would direct us and we would do all the blocking of the play so we knew all our positions and we'd go back with Miss Babcock and Harry would let her think she'd directed the whole thing.

And after all the hours of double rehearsals, the play triumphed. Mrs. Callas continued "I will never forget as long as I live the thrill it was for me that night in the theatre when all the bows were given to her and all of us with our heart and soul loving to know that she was honored . . . and Harry Allen taking nothing."

Miss Babcock died December 31, 1954. As a final tribute to her, the University of Utah gave her name to the little theatre on the lower level of the Pioneer Memorial Theatre.

T. he Arts could not flourish without patrons, and Utah art had a dedicated champion in Alice Merrill Home. While the nineteenth century saw a flowering of literature in the New World with authors such as Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Longfellow, Mrs. Home despaired that "American art has not found opportunity to take root in the rich soils needful for its development because, from its very foundation, America has been passing through stages of rapid transition."

Yet she saw cultural kernels in activities of the Mormon pioneers and devoted her life to their nurture. "If art reigns in the home," she wrote, "there will grow out of it beautiful parks, streets, thoroughfares and cities."

Alice Merrill Home was born in a log cabin at Fillmore, Utah, on January 2, 1869, the fourth of fourteen children born to Clarence and Bathsheba Merrill. She attended classes in Fillmore's old rock schoolhouse and won prizes in reading and spelling before her eighth year, when she moved to Salt Lake City to live with her widowed grandmother, Mrs. George A. Smith. Her grandfather had been historian for the L.D.S. church, and his home was furnished with many hand-crafted pieces, hand-woven fabrics, and mementos from his travels throughout the world. Mrs. Smith, an artist herself, encouraged young Alice's interest in art.

Alice became an organizer at an early age. When she was nine, she started the Juvenile Association, which in later years became a part of the L.D.S. Primary Association; at seventeen she organized thirty young men and women in the Shakespeare Society for the purpose of reading, studying, and acting works of the Bard. She studied painting under J.T. Harwood and Mary Teasdel, and in 1887 graduated from the University of Deseret as valedictorian of her class.

Marriage and six children worked no barrier on Alice's cultural and civic interests. As she wrote,

A life consumed by following society's unprofitable and foolish fashions has a parallel in that of a woman who never takes a moment for study and self-improvement, but makes herself a very slave to her home. The home must be kept sweet and clean, but the brain is as prone to get cobwebby as the best room.

Alice's brain was not "cobwebby." As a member of Utah's Third Legislature, she helped secure a congressional grant of land for the first buildings at the University of Utah; she introduced a bill to offer fouryear scholarships for students majoring in education with a provision that they remain to teach in the state for two years following graduation. Mrs. Home was the first chairman of the Public Health Commission which sponsored a "Clean Milk for Utah" campaign, worked in behalf of smokeless fuel, was the first secretary and second president of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, and served on the general board of the national Relief Society.

Alice Home's greatest contributions were in the field of art. While in the legislature, she wrote a bill to establish the first state association in the country for the fostering of fine arts. The Utah Art Institute (now the Utah State Institute of Fine Arts) was established in 1899 "to advance the interests of the fine arts, including literature and music, in all their phases within the state of Utah." The bill called for annual art exhibits (not to be held in the same city twice in succession) and a collection of artworks owned and paid for by the state. This collection became known as the "Alice Art Collection," in her honor.

The state sponsored shows in Salt Lake City, Ogden, Logan, Provo, and the first exhibition in Springville High School. The Utah Agricultural College and Brigham Young University held winter exhibits which were so enthusiastically attended that children from nearby farming communities came to them in large bobsleighs.

When "hard times" caused the governor to refuse to appoint a governing board of the Utah Art Institute, the exhibitions ceased and art sales rapidly declined. Alice was furious; she said that the state seemed to be able to buy cars for all of their departments, but could not help theartists. 59 Alice Merrill Home devised many ways of helping artists. She wrote a program of art study for the Relief Society, believing if art were taken to older people, children would be influenced. After two years the series was canceled, but a portion of the text was published in 1914 under the title Devotees and Their Shrines: A Hand Book of Utah Art. The book was later adopted as a text in the state public schools and has long been a primary source of material on early Utah artists. She also wrote a children's play Columbus, Westward Ho!

She believed in introducing art throughout the state and often carried pictures to sparcely settled outlying communities. When artist John Hafen died, Mrs. Home arranged a memorial exhibition of his works at the Layfayette School. When J. T. Harwood moved to California, she gathered his works for a show at Webster School. Exposing school children to art works was one of her greatest ambitions. She loaned her private collection to West High School, West Junior High School, and Washington School.

Mrs. Home did a little bargaining when she was asked to serve as president of the P.T.A. She said she would accept the position if there would be a school exhibition of works by Utah painters. She made her point, and the following September a show featured paintings by Waldo Midgley from New York; Lawrence Squires, Lee Green Richards, and Mahonri Young from Paris; A. B. Wright, LeConte Stewart, Joseph A. F. Everett, Florence Ware, Henri Moser, and Mary Teasdel from Los Angeles; and J. T. Harwood from San Francisco.

In 1922 Mrs. Home started to hang informal exhibits in Salt Lake City, Provo, and Ogden banks and personally carried the pictures each week via interurban trains. She also opened a gallery in the ZCMI tearoom and the Oak Room of the Newhouse Hotel.

The Homes bought the former home of Dr. Ernest Van Cott at 868 Second Avenue when Alice decided that she needed more gallery space and a place to entertain artists. The Alice Merrill Home Gallery financed the combined exhibitions of the Utah Art Institute and the Utah Art Colony when they were without state funds and commissioned Oriental rugs from Syria and the Holy Land. In less than ten years, Mrs. Home sold 474 paintings for which she received $49,000 and placed over 30 collections of works by Utah artists. She never charged an artist a commission for his first picture sold by her gallery.

Mrs. Home was honored many times. In 1904 she was a speaker at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, she was named among the first group in the Utah Hall of Fame by the Utah Federation of Women's Clubs, and, in 1942, she received the Medal of Honor from the Academy of Western Culture. Mrs. Home died October 7, 1948.

There are many who could be included in Utah's Leading Ladies of the Arts, some whose contributions were local, some who achieved national or international acclaim. They lived in a forbidding frontier country at a time when women were struggling from the bonds of "civil death." Perhaps the roles of the sexes were equalized in their common struggle on the westward trek; perhaps there was need for a persecuted people to seek solace in the Arts. In the words of Alice Merrill Home, "Strange indeed, it is, that this isolated west, forbidding in its isolation, became to an earnest people a guerdon in its forbiddance."

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