Edith Wharton

Born New York City

Before embarking on her celebrated writing career, Edith Newbold Jones Wharton experienced a privileged childhood as a member of New York City’s social elite. Extensive European travel was an important element of that lifestyle. Between the ages of four and ten, Wharton sojourned with her family in Italy, Spain, and France. While eight-year-old Edith was living in Paris, the Anglo-American artist Edward Harrison May painted this portrait.

Although Wharton would later chronicle the frustrations of her childhood, it was during the European trips of her youth that she came to enjoy “making up”—inventing the fictional worlds she would write about as an adult. From the mid-1890s, Wharton spent much of her life abroad, where she formed friendships with other American expatriates, such as Henry James. Yet she owed her fame to incisive depictions of New York’s upper class, as in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence (1920).

Nacida en la Ciudad de Nueva York

Antes de su celebrada carrera literaria, Edith Newbold Jones Wharton tuvo una niñez privilegiada dentro de la élite social de Nueva York. Un aspecto importante de esa vida fueron los extensos viajes por Europa. Entre los cuatro y diez años de edad, Wharton vivió con su familia en Italia, España y Francia. El artista angloamericano Edward Harrison May le pintó este retrato a los ocho años, en París.

Aunque Wharton luego relataría las frustraciones de su infancia, fue en aquellas estadías juveniles en Europa que empezó a disfrutar la “invención” de mundos ficticios que luego abordaría en sus escritos de adulta. Desde mediados de la década de 1890, pasó gran parte de su vida en el extranjero e hizo amistad con otros expatriados estadounidenses, entre ellos Henry James. No obstante, debe su fama a sus penetrantes descripciones de la clase alta neoyorquina, como en La edad de la inocencia (1920), su novela ganadora del Premio Pulitzer.

The sitter’s parents; the sitter; bequest to her niece Mrs. Beatrix Farrand, Bar Harbor Maine; sitter’s godson Colin Clark, England, [son of Kenneth Clark];(Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, Los Angeles); purchased 1982 NPG

Letter from Jacob Zeitlin to Robert G. Stewart, 12 July 1982. Whatron stipulated in her will [1937] that her niece give the portrait tot Kenneth Clark’s son, her godson Colin. A photograph at Yale University, Beinecke Library, documents the portrait in her parents’ house in Newport, Rhode Island. See also correspondence with Erica Donnis, Curator of Collections, The Mount, Lenox, Mass. NPG curatorial file.