Hay, Clara Louisa Stone (1849-1914)
Role: benefactor of the John Hay LibraryDates: 1905
Portrait Location: Library Annex
Artist: Zorn, Anders (1860-1920)
Portrait Date: 1883
Medium: Watercolor painting on paper
Dimensions: 29 3/8" x 21 1/8"
Framed Dimensions: 37 3/4" x 29 1/2"
Brown Portrait Number: 313
Brown Historical Property Number: 0
Born in Cleveland to Amasa Stone and his wife Julia Gleason in 1849, Clara was the middle of three children raised in the lap of affluence. Her father was a successful railroad magnate, banker and noted local philanthropist, and his children wanted for nothing. Nevertheless, Clara experienced a grievous loss during her teens when her older brother Adelbert, then a student at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, tragically drowned while on a geology expedition in 1866. In the mid-1870s, Clara -- by then a young debutant -- met John Hay, a budding diplomat, newspaperman and literary bon vivant, whom she married in 1874. At her father's behest, her new husband soon quit the newspaper business and they removed to Cleveland to set up house. Clara soon had a parcel of small children to wrangle, as she gave birth to daughter Helen in 1875 and son Adelbert just a year later.
The stay in Cleveland lasted only a few years, however, and the Hays returned to Washington where John Hay served as Assistant Secretary of State, and Clara's last two children (Alice, 1880, and Clarence, 1884) were born. Her private domestic happiness was shattered by her father's suicide in 1883, after the failure of the Ashtabula Bridge, which he had designed. But she eventually recovered and led an active social life, hosting friends, foreign diplomats and literary associates in her Washington home, and later in London, where she accompanied her husband on his duties as Ambassador to Great Britain from 1897-1898. The tragic loss of her beloved and promising son Adelbert in 1901, at age 24, took a severe toll on her health from which she never completely recovered. After John Hay's death in 1905, she donated his papers and his book collection to Brown University as a legacy in his honor.
Anders Zorn was the leading portrait painter of turn-of-the-century Sweeden. His likeness of Clara Hay is signed and dated Zorn 1-5-83, when he would have been 23 years old.