Elizabeth Astor Winthrop Chanler, Mrs. John Jay Chapman (February 23, 1866 – June 5, 1937), was an American heiress and socialite during the
Gilded Age.
At her father's death in 1871, his estate was valued between $1,500,000 (equivalent to $42,918,750) and $2,000,000 (equivalent to $57,225,000 in 2023 dollars).[10] John Winthrop Chanler's will provided $20,000 a year for each child for life, enough to live comfortably by the standards of the time.[11]
In 1892, Elizabeth, her sisters, Margaret and Alida,[12] and her brother
Winthrop and his wife
Margaret, were all included in
Ward McAllister's "
Four Hundred", purported to be an index of New York's best families, published in The New York Times.[13] Conveniently, 400 was the number of people that could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom.[14] Elizabeth was a member of the
Cosmopolitan Club of New York.[15]
In 1893, while she was in London for a brother's wedding,
John Singer Sargent, the most famous and sought after portrait artist of the day, painted a portrait of the then twenty-six year old Elizabeth. According to Sargent, she had "the face of the Madonna and the eyes of a child."[16] Her son donated the portrait to the
Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1980.[16][17]
On April 23, 1899, Chanler married author
John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), the son of Henry Grafton Chapman, a president of the
New York Stock Exchange, and Eleanor Kingsland (née Jay) Chapman, a great-granddaughter of
John Jay, the first
Supreme Court Chief Justice. Chapman was previously married to Minna Timmins, who died in 1897.[b] Elizabeth and her husband had one child together:
Chanler Armstrong Chapman (1901–1982),[21] who married Olivia James, a niece of
Henry James. They divorced and he married the former Helen Riesenfeld, a writer, in 1948.[22] After her death in 1970, he married Dr. Ida R. Holzbert Wagman in 1972.[23]
Her husband died at her home, "Good Hap", on November 4, 1933, near
Barrytown, New York.[18][24] After his death, Elizabeth spent several years working on a volume of his collected letters, which she completed just before her own death.[2]
Elizabeth died on June 5, 1937, and was buried at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard in
Bedford, New York.[15]
Residences
In 1902, Elizabeth bought the former Livingston mansion, known as
Edgewater, and located next to her childhood home,
Rokeby, in
Barrytown, New York, for $20,000 from the estate of the second owner,
Robert Donaldson Jr.[25] In 1905, she and her husband moved into a new house, known as Sylvania,[26][27] that was designed by architect
Charles A. Platt, and built on the hill above Edgewater. Thereafter, her mother-in-law lived at Edgewater from 1910 until at least 1914.[28][29] In 1917, Elizabeth sold Edgewater to her stepson, Conrad Chapman, for $1.00. Conrad lived abroad most of his life and eventually sold the house in 1947.[30] The house was later owned by writer
Gore Vidal and financier
Richard Jenrette.[31][32] Shortly before her husband's death, they moved into a cottage built on the grounds of Sylvania they named "Good Hap" and turned Sylvania over to her son, Chanler Chapman.[2][33]
References
Notes
^Elizabeth's grandfather, the Rev. Dr. John White Chanler, was married to Elizabeth Shirreff Winthrop (1789–1866), daughter of Benjamin Winthrop and Judith (née Stuyvesant) Winthrop (1765–1844). Judith's grandfather Peter Gerard Stuyvesant (1691–1777), was himself a grandson of
Peter Stuyvesant.[1]
^From his first marriage, her husband had three children:
Victor Emmanuel Chapman (1890–1916), the first American aviator to die in France during
World War I;[18][19] John Jay Chapman Jr. (1893–1903), who died in his youth in Switzerland;[18] and Conrad Chapman (1896–1989), who was engaged to Dorothy Daphne McBurney (1912–1997) in 1934,[20] but who married Judith D. Kemp (1906–1999) in England in 1937.
^Deed recorded September 17, 1902, Robert Bronson, executor, to Elizabeth Chapman, for $20,000.
^For the date of completion of the house, see: M. A. DeWolfe, Howe (1937).
John Jay Chapman and his letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 162. Retrieved June 13, 2022.