Alfred Corning Clark

Brotherly Love (1886-87), Skougaard gravemarker, Langesund Churchyard, Langesund, Norway

In 1866, Clark met Norwegian tenor Lorentz Severin Skougaard (1837–1885) in Paris, where the singer was studying.[10] In 1869, the same year that he married Elizabeth Scriven, Clark began making annual summer visits to Norway, eventually building a house on an island near Skougaard's family home.[10] He gave his son Edward, born 1870, the middle name Severin. When in New York City, Skougaard occupied Clark's flat at 64 West 22nd Street.[7] During an 1885 visit, Skougaard was stricken with typhoid and died.[10] Clark eulogized him in a privately published biographical sketch,[11] and created a $64,000 endowment in his memory for Manhattan's Norwegian Hospital, 4th Avenue & 46th Street.[12] Clark also commissioned Brotherly Love (1886–87) by American sculptor George Grey Barnard to adorn his friend's grave in Langesund, Norway.[13] The homoerotic sculpture depicts two nude male figures blindly reaching out to each other through the block of marble that separates them.[14]

According to Debby Applegate's review in The New York Times Book Review of Nicholas Fox Weber's group biography, The Clarks of Cooperstown (2007):[15]

Weber suggests that Alfred [Corning Clark] led a dual life: a quiet family man in America and a gay aesthete in Europe, especially in France, which he declared "the Mecca of brotherly feeling." He was a generous patron to male artists; for 19 years his closest companion was a Norwegian tenor named Lorentz Severin Skougaard. When his father's death forced him to return to Manhattan, Alfred installed Skougaard down the block from the town house where he lived with his wife and children. [Henry] James's shadow lingers longest in this chapter; surely this was the sort of thing he meant by those uneasy intimations that beneath Europe's splendor and refinement lurked something unspeakable. Weber's bluntness, by contrast, highlights how much of that beauty was created by gay men seeking warm communities of free expression.[16]

Struggle of the Two Natures in Man (1892–94), by George Grey Barnard, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Following Skougaard's death, Clark became Barnard's patron, commissioning works and providing financial support to him in Paris.[10] Clark paid Barnard $25,000 to carve a marble version of his Struggle of the Two Natures in Man (1888), which was completed in April 1894.[17] Barnard exhibited the piece at the 1894 Paris Salon, where the jury, headed by Auguste Rodin, pronounced it a work "of superlative merit".[17] Clark brought the larger-than-life-sized sculpture to New York City. Soon after his death, Clark's widow donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[17]

Clark's donation of $50,000 to the piano prodigy Jozef Hofmann in 1887 spared the eleven-year-old from having to complete a fifty-recital American tour that had been criticized by Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.[20] With this financial security, Hofmann and his family returned to Europe where the boy could receive a broader education before resuming his concert career.[20] In addition to becoming one of history's most outstanding piano virtuosi, Hofmann's study in science and mathematics enabled him to become an inventor in later life, earning over 70 patents.[21]

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  Madame Gaye (1865) by Marià Fortuny, Metropolitan Museum of Art
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  Court of the Alhambra (1871), Museu Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalí
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  Pollice Verso (1872) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phoenix Art Museum
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  The Snake Charmer (1880) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Clark Art Institute
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  The Ameya (1893) by Robert Frederick Blum, Metropolitan Museum of Art
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  The Great God Pan (1894-1898), by George Grey Barnard, Columbia University