Empty Mansions

musical afternoons and small dinners, but access was carefully controlled.
    Anna did add one touch from the Clark mansion: A door was concealed in the paneling of the gallery. A burglar could have spent a good while in Apartment 12W, wandering the parquet floors, meandering through the dining room with its wallpaper of pheasants and flowers,through the living room with Anna’s French harps, and through the study and the breakfast room—without finding any bedrooms. All were hidden behind this door, which led to its own hallway, four bedrooms, four walk-in closets, and two sitting rooms.
    In Anna’s bedroom, the furniture was all in an ornate Louis XV style, oak with gold trim: a rolltop desk, a dressing table with three oval mirrors. The bedside table had photos of a young Huguette in a red dress resting her head on her father’s shoulder and several photos of Andrée looking a bit forlorn. In the bathroom was one bit of modern technology: a scale built into the floor tile, with a dial on the wall showing the person’s weight.
    All of this luxury served only two Clarks, who soon expanded intoa second apartment in the building. Anna moved down to an equally sumptuous apartment on the eighth floor.
    The plan was for Anna to live alone and for Huguette to find a husband.
TADE

 
    N EARLY EVERY WEEKDAY AFTERNOON in her late teens and twenties when the Clarks were in New York, Huguette walked thirteen blocks down Fifth Avenue to Central Park South, then a block over to the apartments at No. 36, to visit the man she calledCher Maître, or “Dear Master.” It was time for her painting lesson.
    Tadeusz Styka, called Tadé, was the favorite artist of the Clarks. From a well-knownCzech-Polish family of painters, Tadé was a boy genius whose precocious talent at drawing was studied in Paris by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, inventor of the IQ test. After immigrating to the United States in 1921, he was popular among the New York social set of the 1920s and 1930s as a fast-painting portraitist, not only of people but also of family pets. He painted a lot of young women, though burlesque artistGypsy Rose Lee threw him out of her dressing room when he expected the teenage stripper to pose nude. He also painted presidents: His
Rough Rider
portrait of Theodore Roosevelt hangs in the West Wing of the White House, andHarry Truman sat for him, too. Tadé painted at least a dozen portraits of the Clarks and was well paid for it. But his first job for the family was as a painting instructor for young Huguette.
    Although becoming a painter was not a typical goal for one of Miss Spence’s young ladies, Huguette was raised in an artistic household with music lessons and a family home that doubled as a public art gallery. Her father was not the only voracious collector in the family. On a single day when Huguette was twenty-three, she and her mother bought Renoir’s
Chrysanthemums
, Pissarro’s
Landscape
, and a small, stunning Degas,
Dancer Making Points
, showing a ballerina pointing her toe, a gentle figure in bold yellow and orange. That day was November 11, 1929, just two weeks after the Wall Street crash, which began the Great Depression. For most people.
    Women at the time usually painted with pastels. They weren’t thought capable of handling oil paints, which require more skillful preparationof the canvas, mixing of the colors, and layering of the paint. Oils, used by male artists, were associated with fine art. Huguette, meticulous in all things, always painted with oils.
    One of her self-portraits shows her at the easel, turning to look over her shoulder as though surprised by a visitor. Her blond, shoulder-length hair is wavy, but not in a fancy do. She is wearing a simple peach-colored painter’s smock, not a debutante’s dress. For once, there is no strand of pearls at her neck. She holds an Impressionist’s palette of intense colors arranged from crimson to yellow to emerald green. The unglamorous smock, the uncertain look, and the large palette all combine as if to say,
This is who I am. I am an artist
.
    • • •
    Huguette had an early love of Japan, a love she shared with her mother. Much of France had fallen under the spell of Japanese art in the late 1800s—a craze known as Japonisme. Huguette developed that love into a quiet career as an artist.Her paintings, often life-size portraits of Japanese geishas, focus more on the costumes and hairstyles than on the revealed emotional lives of the