Henry Clews, Jr. was an American-born artist whose creative career flourished in France. Though born into a wealthy family with Wall Street credentials and society connections, his life was destined to be one instead of artistic achievement and imaginative creation.
Henry was born in 1876, the son of a Wall Street banker. He was a rebellious young man, bright though not especially academically inclined. Though school was not Henry’s forte, he was to follow his father’s footsteps into the same Wall Street career. With his interest in art rebuffed by his father, Henry eventually found himself working on Wall Street, per his father’s wishes. While Henry was successful, he was not happy in the regimented line of work, and left his career after a mild market panic.
After leaving the career he so hated, Henry dove full-bore into his artistic pursuits. He worked tirelessly to teach himself painting, first in a home studio, then a personal studio in New York, and finally, Paris. He also spent much time in Newport, Rhode Island, where he met his first wife, Louise Morris Gebhard. Henry and Louise married in 1901, and took up residence in Paris. They had two children, Henry Clews III and Louise.
While in Paris, Henry resisted the growing tide of Modernism, as the early works of Fauves and Cubists around him grew popular during this time. In 1909, Henry began regularly visiting the studio of Auguste Rodin. The artist’s influence on Henry is evident in many of his works, especially those featuring uneven surfaces and the effects of old age. Henry thrived in a community of artists and writers in Paris, but his unusual schedule and rowdy friends were not to Louise’s liking. The couple divorced in 1910, and Henry returned home to New York.
Henry met his future wife Elsie Whelen Goelet in 1910. Though she was married at the time to her husband, Robert Goelet, the union was not happy. Henry and Elsie bonded over their shared interest in art, something that was stifled in Elsie’s marriage and society world. Henry’s creativity and imagination captured Elsie; as described in her memoirs, she was “spellbound.” Despite her misgivings about upending her life as she knew it, Elsie and Robert divorced. After some time, Henry and Elsie (rechristened Marie by Henry) were married on December 19, 1914, in a union Henry’s mother described as “mad.” Henry and Marie left shortly thereafter for their new life in Paris.
The artistic couple thrived in Paris. Henry worked on his sculpture while Marie pursued her own love of music. Paris, however, became a harrowing place to live with the arrival of World War I and their newborn baby, Mancha Madison, became ill just after his birth. Their son’s diminishing health, combined with frequent air raids, forced the couple to relocate to the Mediterranean where they discovered the dilapidated and abandoned ruins of the Château de La Napoule. After staying for a summer, they bought the property and returned for good in 1919. Marie directed the building of a studio for Henry on the west side of the courtyard, with plenty of space and beautiful north light.
What began as a minimal plan to make the Château more comfortable quickly became a large-scale project. Henry and Marie became transfixed by the magic of the old walls, and as Marie described it, they let a “creative spirit loose in La Napoule.” Together, they worked incessantly for nearly twenty years, filling their courtyard with stones, sculpture, and a dozen Italian stonemasons. In addition to the studio, the couple added a gatehouse, Gothic dining room, seaside ramparts and terraces, and a wall around the courtyard. Marie served as the architect, while Henry adorned every surface inside and out with mystical creatures of his own creation.
With Marie as architect and Henry as artist, the couple’s grand studio workshop transformed the property, including the addition of a gothic cloister, its columns topped with Henry’s sculptures.
Henry created a fantastical land at the Château de La Napoule, inspired by “the grotesqueries of Romanesque sculptors.” He sculpted the original plaster models for these creatures of his own imagination–curious animals he called ogs, wogs, imps, and glicks–and a team of carvers worked from the models. From capital columns to architectural recesses, the Château was filled with “the denizens of an imaginary world, symbolizing or satirizing the one that he had put behind him, and embodying in this microcosm his vision of the universe and of humanity.” Henry’s rebellious nature–disrupting the status quo of his family’s expectations, and his denunciation of them–is clear in these works. His satirical streak was also evidenced in his writings, including the play Mumbo-Jumbo (published in 1922) and Dinkelspieliana, an unpublished manuscript from the early 1930s. Both critiqued American society, democracy, and modern art.
Henry’s artwork “falls into three separate veins: realistic portraiture, whimsical invention, and biting satire.” His many portrait sculptures exemplify his realistic work, such as the 1933 bust of Comte Gautier-Vignal. The whimsical creatures and beings Henry invented that populate the Château de La Napoule are rendered in a variety of materials, including bronze, wood, and porphyry. Henry’s satirical sculptures, caricatures of wealth and vanity, reflect his distinct worldview: a distaste of the overly moneyed world he left behind, and anger with an increasingly modern, mechanized world.
Henry’s most well-known sculpture, The God of Humormystics, was installed in the courtyard of the Château in 1921. Greeting visitors to this day, the Rodin-esque The God of Humormystics embodies Henry’s artistic vision, denouncing materialism and offering divine beauty to those who explore the Château de La Napoule.
Toward the end of his life, Henry reflected:
“As concrete villa, bungalow —
Good burghers now dub ‘beaux chateaux’,
Is it presumptuous on my part,
For me, an artisan in art,
To call our home, ‘the studio’?”
The Château de La Napoule had truly become a center for the arts–a place of constant creation, activity, and inspiration–home and studio intertwined. The fairy tale that Henry created is exemplified in the words he carved above the entrance: “Once Upon a Time.”
Henry Clews died in 1937, though Marie ensured his artistic legacy would live on. Immediately after his death, she arranged for an exhibition of his sculptures to be shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition of his deeply expressive sculptural busts opened in 1939, the first time his work had been displayed in the United States since 1914. Today, Henry’s artwork can be explored at the museum and grounds of the Château de La Napoule.
Mirth, Myth and Mystery are the words carved by Henry Clews above the doors at the Château de La Napoule. Unhappy with the traditional life laid out for him by his family and society, Henry bucked expectations placed on him, instead reinventing himself as an artist, writer, and designer of the creative world he desired.
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