Lost Letters Of Miss Letta Crapo Smith

A letter to her brother, Crapo Cornell Smith, that she wrote from Egmond, a Dutch art colony.

This post is the fourth in a series about a fascinating and little-known turn-of-the-century Detroiter, painter Letta Crapo Smith. Granddaughter of Michigan governor Henry Howland Crapo, she traveled the world and found fame as the first woman from Detroit to exhibit in the Paris Salon. Earlier reports of her can be found here:
On The Trail Of Miss Letta Crapo Smith, 789 E. Jefferson
Letta and the Detroit Society of Women Painters
Letta Crapo Smith At Home and Abroad
     I found her letters while looking for something else (my usual method of detection). I had thought that my search for her had ended, albeit incompletely, but there it was, a reference to a box of letters, under her mother's name, Lucy Anna Crapo Smith.

At first, when I went to find the box, I was foiled by the lack of a card in the card catalog. I searched under every permutation of the name I could think of. It had to be there somewhere. It had just been catalogued, referenced in a finding aid, not two years before.

So I turned to the mistress of the library, she of vast memory and nuanced understanding of the labyrinthine corridors of the Burton Collection, the reference librarian. In short order, she brought me not just a box filled with the words of Letta, but two folders of photos! I never imagined when I first saw Letta's picture how she would come to life.

If only I could read her handwriting. This may take a while.

Seriously, though, in a cursory glance of several hours, I was able to learn enough to flesh out gaps in her story. The box contains correspondence to and from Letta, her mother, and other close family members and friends, from 1893-1911.

Letta has pointed out her room on this hotel stationery. In her typical fashion, she covered the paper front, back and sideways, with room barely left for her name in the bottom middle of this photo.

Remember when I said it seemed as though Letta had traveled extensively in Europe during her twenties and thirties, although I had scant documentation? Here it is, her letters written on the letterhead of steamships and hotels from Paris, Florence, Naples; from Germany and Spain, from all the great cities and seas of the continent. She writes of the weather, visitors, shopping, local scenery, filling the pages from edge to edge, and then turning the letters on their sides and writing in the margins, with barely room for her name at the end.

From Gibraltar, onboard a steamship, traveling with her friend Mrs. McCabe.

She received many letters from the well-known painter Julius Rolshoven, also from Detroit, who was often in Europe at the same time she was. He comments on an influx of students, a letter written from the famous Avenue Studios in London (where John Singer Sargent painted)....

"There are many of my students here only, how to advise them is beyond me." Julius Rolshoven, undated letter to Letta Crapo Smith from the Avenue Studios, Fulham Road, London, England.

..one of several letters from Gertrude McCabe, mother of archaeologist Richard B. Seager, with whom she had a romantic friendship typical of women in the Victorian era, who writes from Paris of the latest fashions....

The letters begin when she is traveling with her mother (she is usually traveling with her mother) in 1893 and 1894, when her mother is the head of the Foreign Loan Committee for the Art Loan Exhibition, the precursor to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Her mother, Lucy Anna, is procuring foreign works to be loaned for exhibit. They follow her travels and studies throughout Europe, continuing during her studies at the Academie Julian in Paris, then on to the art colony at Egmond, through her visit to Helen Hyde in Japan, and then her summers painting throughout the continent (in between her winters running the Detroit Society of Women Painters).

The letters end shortly after the death of her father in 1910. Notes on the back of photos, written by Helen Elizabeth Keep, a neighbor, comrade in the DSOWP, and local historian, shed light on Letta's final years. Previously, I hadn't been able to find mention of Letta, other than her death in 1921, after 1915.

Once H.H.H. Crapo Smith, Letta's father and Lucy Anna's husband, died, the inseparable mother and daughter spent little time in Detroit. They summered at a home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and wintered at the Hotel Vendome in Boston, near their relatives.

Old Lyme was home to an art colony where Letta would have known many friends. Referred to as the "American Barbizon" and then the "American Giverny", during its heyday from 1900 to 1915 it was best known for the painter Childe Hassam.  Many artists who summered at Dutch art colonies and who had studied at the Academie Julian visited Lyme. The daily routine, emphasis on "plein air" painting, and the camaraderie would all have been familiar comfort, like the art colony at Egmond.

A descendant of Letta's was kind enough to send me notes of diary entries regarding Letta's last days. From the 1921 diary of Emma Morley Crapo, Letta's cousin,

1-24-21  Called upon Letta- she is pathetic

3-16-21  Crapo Smith says Letta is not so well

3-17-21  Dr. said Letta could not live over 24 hours.  She has been so utterly wretched that she has not cared to live.

3-20-21  I drove to meet Crapo Smith who arrived from Boston with Letta's remains

3-21-21  Letta buried beside her parents and grandparents

Although the notes of her death are sad, her life was filled with the wonders of the world. In an era when travel was difficult and slow, she danced from great city to greek ruins, from museums to dutch countryside, from the Detroit River in her backyard to the Atlantic Ocean she crossed regularly.

Be assured that I will continue to wrestle with Letta's calligraphy, and keep you apprised of any further interesting tales.

-All letters from the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. My thanks to the dedicated librarians following in the footsteps of M. Agnes Burton and Gracie Brainerd Krum.
-Photo of the Hotel Vendome, Boston, from the Library of Congress Archives.
-Notes from Emma Morley Crapo's diary courtesy of her family.