Empty Mansions

Butte, she became the second wife of the copper millionaire W. A. Clark, who was thirty-nine years her senior.
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    W. A. purchased the golden room called the Salon Doré in Paris and had it shipped to New York. Huguette recalled that their father would not let the girls play in the eighteenth-century room, which is now in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
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    W. A. Clark’s new mansion in New York, finished in 1911, was known as the most expensive in America. Its 121 rooms included five galleries for works of art, including this painting by Degas.
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    On a summer visit to Montana in about 1917, W.A. posed with daughters Andrée, left, and Huguette at Columbia Gardens, the family park he built for the people of Butte. The girls were about fifteen and eleven. W.A. loved to show off his flowers at Columbia Gardens.
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    The Clark mansion at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Seventh Street by Central Park, “the most remarkable dwelling in the world” and Huguette’s childhood home, was occupied for only fourteen years. It cost about $180 million in today’s dollars, but after her father died in 1925, it was deemed too expensive for anyone to maintain and was torn down. In this view in 1927, a demolition debris chute extends from the window of the Salon Doré toward Fifth Avenue. A sign on the building advertises modern apartments to come.
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    Believed to be a self-portrait, this unsigned painting shows Huguette Clark in her twenties. At a time when most women painted with pastels, Huguette was a serious art student, mixing her own oil paints.
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    This painting by Huguette captures her view down Fifth Avenue in the snow, toward the Empire State Building. It emphasizes the cold, moist air in the blue-gray night, contrasted with the warmth inside her room, lit by the glow from a Japanese lamp.
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    Huguette’s art teacher, Tadé Styka, painted this portrait of her painting a nude male model at the Styka studio on Central Park South.
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    Huguette painted this tiny painting of a geisha bathed in gold, paying special attention to the colors and the exquisite detail in the fabrics. She studied Japanese culture and collected elaborate kimonos and hairpieces. But visiting Japan was a different matter.
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    Huguette poses uncomfortably in furs, a cloche hat, and her emerald and diamond bracelets after her wedding to Bill Gower in 1928, when she was twenty-two. This photo appears to be from her honeymoon trip and was republished in newspapers in 1930, when she divorced him. She would live until 2011 but no newer photo was published during her lifetime.
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    Bellosguardo, the Clark summer estate in Santa Barbara, California, was purchased by former senator Clark in 1923. His widow, Anna, had this mansion built in the early 1930s. She and her daughter Huguette stopped visiting in the early 1950s, although today it remains fully furnished and carefully preserved. Huguette, who inherited Bellosguardo in 1963, insisted that it be kept unchanged, in “first-class condition.”
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    Bellosguardo, at lower right, sits in privacy on a mesa by the Pacific Ocean, above Santa Barbara’s East Beach. The pond at right is the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, created by Huguette as a memorial to her sister. When this photo was published on a picture postcard, Huguette’s property manager bought up every copy to protect her privacy.
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    In a photo from about 1940, the library at Bellosguardo is dominated by a portrait of Huguette’s sister, Andrée, over the mantel. The painting and the library are still as they were then, but now with the furniture covered.
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    The bedroom at Bellosguardo of Huguette’s mother, Anna, features one of her ornate pedal harps, her bed with damask upholstery on the footboard, a John Singer Sargent painting of a dancer enticing a man on a rooftop in Capri, and photos of her daughters, Andrée and Huguette.
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    Although Huguette’s sister, Andrée, did not live to see Bellosguardo, she is present everywhere.
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    The Clarks named this Tudor playhouse Andrée’s Cottage in honor of their