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The Goddard Women
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GODDARD WOMEN 1922
GEORGIA GRACE WATSON GODDARD (1866-1935), ELEANOR GRACE GODDARD
DANIELS
(1889-1981), ELEANOR DANIELS (b. 1917), 1922
Mary Fairchild Low (1858-1946)
Oil on canvas
58 x 48"; 147.3 x 121.9 cm.
Hewes #60
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This large portrait of three generations of the Goddard Family by
Mary
Fairchild Low, a major artist, was a substantial commission that
suggests
the status of the Goddard and Daniels families in Worcester
society.(1)
The painting has always been displayed in what is now called the
music
lounge, in the wing that includes an elegant dining room that was
added
to their Salisbury Street house, at the time of the marriage of
Eleanor
Grace Goddard to F. Harold Daniels in 1915. This portrait depicts
three
generations of women of the Goddard and Daniels families. The
story of
Grace Goddard is described in conjunction with the portrait by
Arthur
M. Hazard, and that of Eleanor Goddard Daniels in the portrait by
Mary
L. Cheney. The youngest of the three is Eleanor Daniels (Bronson
Hodge),
painted when she was five years old. She is nestled against her
grandmother
as her mother stands in the background. To the right of her
grandmother's
head is a shadowy representation of a woman's figure, perhaps
recalling
Marion Goddard, who died in 1918.
Like her mother, Eleanor Bronson Hodge was a graduate of Smith
College.
Her junior year in France in 1937-38 was the first extended period
that
she lived abroad. Following that, she served with the American Red
Cross
in Europe during World War II, and years later spent two years
(1969-71)
in Vienna, with her family. For many years before and immediately
after
her marriage to Samuel G. Bronson, she worked as an editor for the
trade
department of Houghton Mifflin in Boston and for the Macmillan
Company
in New York. They had two children, Peter and Amy. Bronson died
unexpectedly
on January 31, 1981, coincidentially the same day as Eleanor
Goddard Daniels.
G. Stuart Hodge, whom she married 1985, had, like her, grown up
in Worcester,
but they had known each other slightly as teenagers. Their paths
crossed
in France at the end of the Second World War, occasions that
Eleanor mentioned
in her diary. Then, after he retired from the position of director
of
the Institute of the Arts in Flint, Michigan, their paths crossed
again
and led to marriage. He died in 1997. She is the author of several
books:
Sojourner: People and Places I Have Loved, Highlights from a
Daughter's
Life which honored her mother, Fifty Favorites in Fifty Years
inspired
by her fiftieth college reunion, and Thither and Yon: Travels with
a Sketchbook,
illustrated with her own drawings recording her travels to Europe,
Australia,
South America, and Antarctica.(2)
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1) The artist Mary Fairchild Low, born in New Haven,
Connecticut,
studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, and then in Paris
with Carolus-Duran
and with Bouguereau, Lefebvre, and T. Robert Fleury, at the
Academy Julian.
Her figure paintings were frequently exhibited in both France and
the
United States. Will H. Low was her second husband. After their
1909 marriage,
they lived in Bronxville, New York. Low, a renowned mural and
landscape
painter, had also studied with Carolus-Duran and the Écoles
de
Beaux Arts. Mantle Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters,
Sculptors
& Engravers (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Apollo Books, 1986), 557;
Peter H.
Falk, Who was Who in American Art, 2069-70.
2) Information about the life of Eleanor D. Bronson Hodge
is drawn
from her memoir, Sojourner: People and Places I Have Loved
(Falmouth,
Mass., 1997).
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This site and all contents © 2004 American Antiquarian
Society
Last updated December 10, 2004
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