Francis Davis Millet: A Titanic Life by Peter A. Engstrom

After reading Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage last week I was curious to learn more about an artist on board, Frank Millet, who went down with the ship along with his friend and possible lover, Archie Butt. In the acknowledgments to Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage, the author, Hugh Brewster, mentions this biography of Frank Millet he consulted while still in manuscript. The library didn’t own a copy, published in 2010, but I was able to find a used copy available online from a bookstore in Florida.

The book is quite thorough, quite dense, quite long – 368 pages of text with another 100 pages of notes and an Index. I can’t say I read every word. There was much more detail than I cared to know. But I continue to be fascinated with the subject and I’ll keep my eyes open for Millet’s art work in museums, and where his name might pop up in other places.

Millet was born in 1846 south of Boston. I won’t give a full story of Millet’s life, but the short version is that he attended Harvard and decided to pursue his interest in art. I was delighted to see that his family attended Unitarian and Universalist churches. He completed his education in Europe, as American artists did at the time, first by attending a school in Antwerp, and then on his own in Paris and Rome and Venice.

In Venice, he lived with a lover, Charles Warren Stoddard, whom he had met while in Rome. Millet was quite smitten as revealed by his letters to Stoddard that Stoddard fortunately saved. Millet described their relationship as creating a “bohemian” ideal that he sought to continue even after Stoddard moved on.

Stoddard himself is an interesting character. He was a writer who had written travel memoirs of his time in the south seas that included, apparently, barely disguised descriptions of his homosexual adventures there with the natives. Millet met Stoddard when Stoddard was on an extended assignment as a foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. Stoddard went on to write a large number of books including further non-fiction titles, fiction, and poetry. The library has copies of several of Stoddard’s books so I’ll find one to read.

Engstrom treats Millet’s affair with Stoddard frankly without speculating on what that might mean for Millet’s sexual orientation. It’s difficult to cast contemporary sexual categories on times when homosexuality was understood as something one did, rather than something one was, and when living as an open homosexual or homosexual couple was impossible. Whatever his inner inclination, Millet followed his affair with Stoddard in the culturally acceptable manner of marrying a woman, Elizabeth Merrilll, called Lily, one of the daughters of a family that Millet had lived with while attending Harvard. They remained married through the rest of his life and raised three children together (a fourth child died in infancy). They seemed to have had a relationship of mutual affection, although it’s also true that they spent much time apart. Lily traveled for pleasure. Frank traveled the world including Japan and China, the trans-Siberian railway, the American west by train with his friend Charles Francis Adams Jr., president of the Union Pacific railroad, Panama with Lily, and Canada with one of his sons.

Millet kept an apartment and studio in New York, where he spent much time, but also arranged a home in England, in a village called Broadway, south of Birmingham. At first the family rented property and spent only summers in England. Later they bought property and the children attended English schools. The Broadway home became a kind of artist’s colony. John Singer Sargent was a frequent guest. He painted portraits of both Lily and one of the children, Laurence. Henry James was also a friend of the family who visited annually. James wrote a long condolence letter to Lily after Frank’s death. That both James and Sargent lead closeted gay lives and were friend’s of Millet’s seems telling.

While Millet developed his career as an artist he supported himself as a writer. He wrote both non-fiction, as a journalist for papers back in Boston, and made a name for himself as a war correspondent during the Russo-Turkish war (the same war that Vronsky is traveling to join at the end of Anna Karenina), and short stories published in magazines and then collected in 1892 in a book titled A Capillary Crime and Other Stories.

He also was employed as an organizer of expositions, first art exhibits, and with that experience leading to larger international expositions, the most important being the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago where Millet had the title of Director of Decorations. Millet was selected to help organize the American Academy in Rome as a school for artists, with funding by John Pierpont Morgan and others. And he worked on projects for the Federal Government as the Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. It was work on the Academy in Rome that had Millet in Europe in April 1912 traveling with Archie Butt who was fulfilling diplomatic duties including an audience with the Pope while also enjoying some necessary rest. And it was Millet’s need to be back in Washington for work with the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts on the design and placement of the planned Lincoln Memorial, that put the two men together on the Titanic.

One of my disappointments in Engstrom’s biography is that it has very little information about Archie Butt. There are only a handful of page references to him in the Index, most of those having to do with the Titanic disaster and the aftermath. After Engstrom’s thorough coverage of Millet’s affair with Charles Warren Stoddard I had hoped for something similar about his later friendship with Butt, either to confirm or deny a romantic attachment. Brewster speculates much more about their relationship in Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage. Perhaps there was nothing there, there. But it would be nice to know.

Millet’s body was recovered from the North Atlantic. He was cremated and his ashes buried in East Bridgewater, where he had been raised. The two men are memorialized together with a fountain in their honor on the ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.