Edith Minturn Stokes

She was the President of the New York Kindergarten Association,^[6] ran a sewing school for immigrant women, and was a benefactor of St. George's Church in New York City.

Edith Minturn Stokes began modelling by participating in the then popular pastime known as tableaux vivants; she was spotted at these and became a model for Daniel Chester French in his Greenwich Village atelier.^[7]

So it was that she posed for his sculpture The Republic, which was a centerpiece of the Court of Honor of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. It was a 65-foot-high (20 m) plaster statue covered in gold leaf, and with an illuminated crown. The sculpture was decommissioned and deliberately destroyed in 1896 and the sculptor was commissioned to produce a smaller version, the Statue of the Republic, a 24-foot-tall (7.3 m) gilded bronze sculpture that was erected in 1918 and still stands.^[8]

Peter Marié accumulated a collection of watercolor-on-ivory miniatures of society beauties, and she was one of those he selected. These are now on display at the New-York Historical Society Museum.^[9]

John Singer Sargent’s portrait Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes is on display in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[8][10]

On 25 August 1895, at Pointe-á-Pic, Quebec, she married Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1867-1944).^[11]

The couple had no biological children, but in 1908 adopted a 3 year old girl, Helen, a daughter of Raj Lieutenant Colonel Maldion Byron Bicknell and his wife Mildred Bax-Ironside, who did not want to raise children in India, where they were stationed.^[12] Helen married twice, first in 1928 to Edwin Katte Merrill, a lumber speculator from Bangor, Maine, and had two daughters and two sons. Her second husband was Donald Bush. Helen died in 2004.^[13]

Edith suffered from a series of strokes in late life, and died on June 12, 1937, in her home at 953 Fifth Avenue, New York City.^[6]