biography
| name: |
Adams, Marian Hooper
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known as Clover Adams
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1843–85)
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| biography:
| Hostess and photographer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Her mother died when she was five, and she remained close to her wealthy physician father. Privately educated in Cambridge, MD, she volunteered for the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, then travelled abroad (1866) where she met young Henry Adams in London. Back in Cambridge, they married (1872), and their home in Boston soon became a salon for intellectuals. In 1877 they moved to Washington, DC, where their home on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, again became the gathering place for a lively circle of intellectuals, politicians, and all who aspired to be among the elite. (Her gossipy letters to her father provide a superb view of the Washington of the day.) By now a professional photographer, she did her own developing. She and Henry were planning a new home on Lafayette Square when her father died (1885). Profoundly depressed, she took her own life with a developing chemical. Henry Adams commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt the brooding figure that marks her (and his) burial place in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. |
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