Empty Mansions

with unusual natural talent.”
    The Associated Press later carried a glowing report of the exhibition: “Her paintings received high praise from critics at an exhibition at the Corcoran galleries in Washington last year and now she is planning an exhibition in Paris. She is an accomplished musician.”
    Her paintings displayed at the Corcoran were titled
Scene from My Window—Night
;
Scene from My Window—After the Snow Storm
;
Typical French Doll
;
Typical Japanese Doll
;
La Rentrée d’une Soirée
(Returning from the Party);
Study of Hydrangeas
; and
Portrait of Myself
.
    Huguette apparently never exhibited her paintings again, but she had a fewprinted as holiday cards. Her friends and relatives could see, if they looked closely, her signature on the artwork. We don’t know how late in life Huguette continued her painting. She may have given away some of her work to staff or friends:The delicate barefoot geisha sold on eBay in 2010 for $104.
    • • •
    Huguette’s most affecting painting, of those we have seen, is a snowy view from her apartment window: The Manhattan skyline, streetlights, and automobile taillights are diffused by the moist air of a blue-gray night. The scene is reminiscent of the urban paintings of Edward Hopperor Georgia O’Keeffe, but with more warmth. The dominant feature is the brown grid of Huguette’s window looking south on Fifth Avenue toward the Empire State Building and the RCA Building. In the foreground, reflected in the window, glows a lamp with a golden base, its white shade supported by a delicate Japanese porcelain figure of a woman in a kimono standing on a golden pedestal. The artist reveals only this part of her private space illuminated by the lamp, nothing more. The woman in the kimono is smiling, her face partly hidden behind a lady’s fan.
    Outside the window, it is cold, dark, noisy, uncertain, offering the energy and engagement of city life. Inside, it is warm, bright, refined, cultured, offering the slow pulse and detachment of solitude.
    This view disappeared in the 1950s. The builder of 907 Fifth Avenue had outfitted these apartments with south-facing windows, looking down Fifth Avenue, but had failed to acquire the air rights above the townhouses to the south. This failure became manifest when the townhouses were torn down and the glazed, white-brick 900 Fifth Avenue was built in 1959—shouldering right up against the windows of the Clark apartments. The effect was that Anna and Huguette’s south-facing windows in the dining and living rooms were bricked up, part of their views snuffed out.
    • • •
    In early days at least, Huguette painted from live models. One of Tadé Styka’s portraits shows her, at perhaps age eighteen to twenty, working intently on a large canvas. She is seated on an upholstered bench in his studio, her legs stretched out to her full five feet six inches. She is dressed in a knee-length pencil skirt and an artist’s collared shirt with a necktie, affecting the “garçon look,” with her hair in an undulating marcel wave reminiscent of Jean Harlow. At the right of the canvas, almost out of sight, stands a well-toned nude male model, his back to the viewer. Perhaps to save her modesty, the artist shows Huguette’s eyes fixed firmly on her canvas. In her apartments, among her hundreds of paintings, Huguette had other nudes of men and women.
    Another of Tadé’s powerful images of Huguette, as a young woman of about eighteen, shows off her rose-colored cheeks, which match herhigh-necked blouse, offset by a short strand of pearls. Her blond-auburn hair is parted and falls to her shoulders. Her face looks warm and generous—not a model’s face, but with a Mona Lisa smile and cheerful blue eyes.
    Through the years, there was Clark family speculation that Huguette was in love with her handsome Cher Maître, or that he was in lust with her. Tadé Styka was mentioned occasionally in newspapers as a possible suitor of celebrities and the wealthy. In early 1923, when Huguette was just sixteen and Tadé was thirty-four, he was named as a rival to Charlie Chaplin for the affections of the sultry Polish actress Pola Negri, whom he had painted many times. But she moved on to the film heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, and Tadé wouldn’t marry until the 1940s.
BILL

 
    T WENTY-YEAR-OLD H UGUETTE was the most prominent debutante introduced to New York society in December 1926. Her father’s estate had been settled. She was free now to