Helena Gomez, Curator
May, 2024
This post offers new insights into the identities of two marble portraits by Josep Clarà in Vizcaya’s collection.
An Artistic Legacy
Vizcaya is home to two marble busts (figs. 1 and 2) by renowned Catalan sculptor, Josep Clarà (1878-1958). Unlike most objects on display at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, these sculptures were not acquired by Vizcaya’s owner James Deering. They were part of his older brother Charles Deering’s art collection and were donated to the museum by the Deering family in the 1980s and ’90s. Today, they symbolically connect the two Deering brothers, who not only shared the business acumen to lead the family company but also an affinity for arts and culture.
In the 1910s, as James was conceiving Vizcaya, Charles embarked on a journey of his own with the creation of Palau Maricel across the Atlantic in the Catalonian town of Sitges, Spain. Lured by the views and artistic life of this Mediterranean town, Deering went on to build an impressive residence, where he would spend seasonal sojourns while amassing a world-class collection of Hispanic Art. This venture was the fruit of a collaboration with engineer, painter and art critic Miquel Utrillo (1861-1934), who served as designer and art advisor to the American collector, in a similar vein to the role that Paul Chalfin played at Vizcaya.
During this period, Charles Deering grew an impressive art collection, cultivated his arts patronage, and made long-lasting friendships with a remarkable group of modern Spanish artists, including Ramón Casas (1866-1932), who first introduced him to Sitges. Casas was also instrumental in connecting Deering to Utrillo and to the author of Vizcaya’s marble busts, the sculptor Josep Clarà. The American collector acquired several pieces from Clarà over the years, most notably a version of La Serenitat (Serenity) for the entrance courtyard at Maricel, which would be installed later at Meridiam Hill Park, in Washington, DC. However, Deering’s artistic venture in Sitges came to an end in 1921, after falling out with Utrillo.
The Portrait Commission
In 1923, two years after leaving Sitges, Charles Deering invited his friends Casas and Clarà to visit the United States. Like John Singer Sargent or Gari Melchers had done before them, the Spanish artists visited Deering’s winter residence in Cutler (now The Deering Estate). During this time, Clarà was asked for portraits of his host and patron’s daughters, Marion and Barbara Deering. The sculptor first captured in plaster the likeness of the two young heiresses to form preparatory works, before delivering two marble portraits that remained in the Deering family, with each piece eventually going to the sitters’ descendants.
After James Deering’s death in 1925, Marion and Barbara Deering ultimately became Vizcaya’s owners and ushered the private estate into its future as a museum. In the 1980s, when the first marble sculpture by the Spanish artist was gifted to the museum with the descriptive title Bust of a girl, the portrait was presumed to be of Barbara Deering Danielson, James Deering’s younger niece. Its title was changed to reflect her identity in museum records. Consequently, when the second sculpture entered the collection the following decade, the newly gifted marble portrait was assumed to be the companion piece Clarà produced over half a century earlier, so it became identified as Deering’s older niece, Marion Deering McCormick. With both busts now in the collection, the presumed portraits of Deering’s nieces were displayed together in the North Arcade to convey the sisters’ commitment to the estate.
The Sitters
The two marble busts at Vizcaya were long thought to represent Barbara and Marion Deering, whose portraits were commissioned by their father in 1923. At first glance, these two sculptures are very different: one shows a frontal view of a woman’s head with an impassive demeanor and hair pulled back in an elegant bun (fig. 1), while the other captures a tilting head with lose locks of hair framing her face, eyes closed and soft smile (fig. 2). The former responds to the artistic conventions of society portraits, and the latter evokes the freedom of artistic expression. Even though they were made by the same artist, it seemed unlikely that these two busts ever formed a pair of society portraits. Moreover, museum records revealed a discrepancy in the titles, which begged further research.
Preliminary comparisons of the busts with photographs of Marion and Barbara Deering, as well as with the plaster models kept in Clarà’s studio (now in the local Museu de la Garrotxa, in Clarà’s hometown of Olot), provided some clarity. One of the sculptures was indeed Barbara Deering – the younger Deering sister born in 1888, who contributed to museums, hospitals and educational organizations. However, the other one didn’t match its plaster model. Further research located evidence that the portrait of Marion Deering McCormick, the older sister by two years, remained in a private collection. So, the question remained, who is the woman behind the charismatic smile and subject of Vizcaya’s second bust?
Josep Clarà, a champion of naturalism, found inspiration in movement and music, capturing modern dancers throughout his career. While his drawings of American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), remain among the artist’s most well-known sketches of dancers, the sculptor also immortalized the expressiveness of the Spanish Isabel Rodríguez (fig. 5), known as “Mignon” (French for beauty). Clarà presumably encounter the dancer in Paris and captured her portrait in 1914, before she moved to New York. Her name appears in newspapers as early as December of 1914, in which she’s dubbed “the queen of the castanets” after appearing in numerous theatrical shows in New York, Boston, and Chicago. Clarà first modeled Isabel’s head in plaster before sculpting it in marble, and years later, in 1920, the prestigious Parisian foundry, Père Godard, cast a copy of the bust in bronze (fig. 6). In Le somriure, Clarà captured a fleeting moment or the “fugitive charm of rhythmic motion,” as the German-born photographer Arnol Genthe (1869-1942) would express of his own work in The Book of Dance (1916), which included two portraits of the Spanish dancer.
The match between the marble bust and its versions in different media, as well as the portrait’s resemblance to photographs of the dancer, confirm that Isabel Rodíguez is the subject of Vizcaya’s bust, also known as El somriure (Catalan for smile) and formerly identified as Marion Deering McCormick. It is also possible that Le somriure is the “marble head by Clarà” itemized in the list of artworks that were shipped to Florida after Charles Deering cut ties with Trujillo and Sitges. The newly identified bust of Isabel Rodríguez provides an opportunity to highlight the Deering family’s patronage of arts and friendship with contemporary artists, while Barbara Deering Danielson’s presence honors the sisters’ legacy of preserving the estate that would become Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.
