Julia Ellsworth Ford collected celebrities, one contemporary said, the way other people collect stamps. Gibran was glad to be collected. Two photographs from her papers at Yale — one of them previously unknown — show him at her house in Rye.
By Francesco Medici
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KAHLIL GIBRAN COLLECTIVE
By Francesco Medici · Kahlil Gibran Collective · 2019 · kahlilgibran.com
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"Mrs. Ford is one of the powerful women of New York… Last Sunday she took me in her car to her great country house in Rye, N.Y.," Gibran wrote to Mary Haskell in 1913. And a year later: "We had a dinner with the Fords. I enjoyed the evening very much — such rare people."1
Julia Ellsworth Ford (1859–1950) was a New York socialite, philanthropist, art collector and fervent patron of the arts, as well as an author of children's books, plays and art criticism. She was married to Simeon Ford (1855–1933), a financier and co-owner, with his wife's brother Samuel T. Shaw (1861–1945), of the Grand Union Hotel in New York. Mrs. Ford presided over a twice-weekly salon at her town house at 43 West 74th Street, which drew W. B. Yeats, Bertrand Russell, Isadora Duncan, Ezra Pound, Charlie Chaplin, Witter Bynner, Anna May Wong, and many others. As the author Nina Wilcox Putnam put it, in a less alluring tone than Gibran's, "Mrs. Ford collected celebrities as some people collect postage stamps."2
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In Mrs. Ford's wide circle of acquaintances there was also a well-known Indian lecturer on Middle Eastern politics, Syud Hossain (1888–1949), who in 1925 invited Gibran to join the board of the New Orient Society in New York and to become a regular contributor to The New Orient (1923–1927), a quarterly magazine seeking to encourage the meeting of East and West, of which Hossain was editor. It is very probable that Gibran — who always accepted Mrs. Ford's invitations to stay at her summer house in Rye, about ten miles north of the Bronx3 — met Hossain there.
Their mutual frequenting of Julia Ellsworth Ford is attested by an undated photograph, exhibited at the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, which portrays the three of them together in Rye. The Julia Ellsworth Ford Papers are now held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and consist of correspondence, writings, scrapbooks, printed material, photographs and other papers documenting her life and work and her relationships with literary and artistic figures of the early twentieth century. That collection includes the same picture held by the Soumaya Museum — or rather one of its copies, owned by Mrs. Ford and carrying her handwritten annotations:
We all motored from NY to Rye that day. Gene took the picture.
Rye, NY — Kahlil Gibran, Syud Hossain, Julia Ellsworth Ford.
Under the tree that Kahlil called "Harp of the Winds."
Gene Vanya [?] was also in Rye that day.4
The collection also includes another hitherto unknown photograph, probably dating from some years before the one with Hossain, which portrays only Mrs. Ford and Gibran in an undetermined place, both smiling, standing outdoors on a sunny day at the stairs leading to the veranda of a house.5
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1 The Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, arranged and edited by Annie Salem Otto (Houston: Smith & Company Compositors – Southern Printing Company, 1970), pp. 262, 297 (27 May 1913; 7 January 1914). ↩
2 Nina Wilcox Putnam, Laughing Through: Being the Autobiographical Story of a Girl who Made Her Way (New York: Sears Publishing, 1930), p. 213. ↩
3 Cf. Salim Mujais, The Face of the Prophet: Kahlil Gibran and the Portraits of the Temple of Arts (Beirut: Kutub, 2011), p. 29: "My dear Mrs. Ford: I wish I could tell you how much I have enjoyed each and every one of your Friday dinners. Indeed they were unique and enchanting… Whenever it is possible I shall be only too happy to come and share with the others the charm of your friendship and the delight of your enthusiasm." ↩
4 Julia Ellsworth Ford papers, "Photographs of children, dancers, and friends of Julia Ellsworth Ford, including Kahlil Gibran," YCAL MSS 638, object ID 15260648, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
5 Julia Ellsworth Ford papers, "Photographs of Julia Ellsworth Ford," YCAL MSS 638, object ID 15260647, Beinecke Library, Yale University. ↩
This article is based on an excerpt from "Tracing Gibran's Footsteps: Unpublished and Rare Material," in Gibran in the 21st Century: Lebanon's Message to the World, edited by H. Zoghaib and M. Rihani (Beirut: Center for Lebanese Heritage, LAU, 2018), pp. 93–145.
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