Old Madison Pike in East Walnut Hills, near Cincinnati (2012) Though born in Paris, Larz Anderson spent most of his childhood and early teen years in Cincinnati, Ohio. Until 1878, the Col. Nicholas Longworth Anderson family lived in downtown Cincinnati in a simple red brick town house at 120 East Fourth Street that had been built […]
August 2020
Isabel’s Morning with Lillian Gish | The Gilded Age in America
After Larz Anderson’s death in 1937, Isabel Anderson simplified her life, divesting herself of real estate and other assets that she no longer wanted, and focusing her life on her home in Massachusetts and her simple camp in New Hampshire. In Boston, she took an active part in the cultural life of the city, not […]
The Man Behind the Portrait | The Gilded Age in America
Larz Anderson’s “Field Marshall” Portrait, by DeWitt Lockman (1914). Anderson House, Washington, DC When we think of Larz Anderson, our mental image of him is one that has in large measure been defined by the portraiture in oils, photographs, and sculpture that he commissioned during his lifetime. In these artistic works, he memorialized his sense of himself […]
Art & Architecture | The Gilded Age in America | Page 19
In the fall of 1911, President William Howard Taft named Larz Anderson to be American Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Belgium. Larz arranged to lease the Palais d’Assche, in the heart of old Brussels, as his legation and residence. Though the large and elegant hôtel particulier was exactly what he had hoped for, it was in much […]
Elsie’s Font | The Gilded Age in America
In the late 1930s, Larz and Isabel Anderson made arrangements to donate an Italian baptismal font to the Washington National Cathedral in memory of Larz’s sister, Elsie Anderson McMillan (1874-1921). The font had been in the private chapel of a villa near Farrara, Italy, and is said to represent the virtues of prudence and chastity. The font […]