Jazz Age Luminaries at Clinton
“Living Well Is the Best Revenge: A Jazz Age Fable of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” an exhibition of photographs, paintings, decorative arts, and memorabilia, will open tomorrow at the East Hampton Historical Society’s Clinton Academy with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. It will remain on view through Oct. 10.
Inspired by a gift to the East Hampton Historical Society of nine file boxes of family papers from Laura Donnelly, the Murphys’ granddaughter and The East Hampton Star’s food writer, the exhibition will chronicle the couple’s lives in Europe at a culturally fertile time as well as in East Hampton, where they met in 1909 and later lived.
Ms. Murphy’s parents, Frank and Adeline Wiborg, owned extensive oceanfront acreage in the Village of East Hampton, now known as Wiborg’s Beach, where they built a vast summer cottage, the Dunes, in 1912. Mr. Murphy’s family owned the Mark W. Cross leather goods company in New York City.
The couple, who were married in 1915, moved to France in 1921. Their expatriate friends were giants of 20th-century art and literature, among them Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cocteau, Picasso, MacLeish, Léger, and Fitzgerald. The Murphys have generally been acknowledged as the inspirations for Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”
The Murphys returned to this country and the Wiborg estate in the 1930s. After the Dunes was demolished in 1941, they moved into the dairy barn, which they called Swan Cove. In 1959, they sold Swan Cove and built a smaller house they called La Petite Hutte. Mr. Murphy died in 1964; his wife died 11 years later.
Another East Hampton couple, Mary and Lorenzo Woodhouse, are the subject of a second exhibition that will run concurrently with “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.”
Ms. Woodhouse, a philanthropic summer resident who gave the community the building that is now Guild Hall, among many other gifts, and her family made a grand tour of Europe in the early 1900s. The exhibition will display photographs of their trip, which were recently developed from negatives donated to the society.