St. Botolph Club
Private social club in Boston
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The St. Botolph Club is a private social club in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1880 by a group including many artists. Its name is derived from the English saint Botolph of Thorney.
The St Botolph Club Foundation is a 501(c)(3) Public Charity affiliated with the club. In 2024, it reported total revenue of $222,262 and total assets of $1,557,584.[1] The Club is itself organized under 501(c)(7) Social and Recreation Clubs; in 2024, it claimed total revenue of $1,907,843 and total assets of $3,223,417.[2]
The club's activities in its quarters at 2 Newbury Street have included an extensive and long-running series of fine arts exhibits, particularly new work from painters of the American Impressionists: Dennis Miller Bunker, Dodge MacKnight, Joseph Thurman Pearson Jr. (in a 1912 dual exhibition with animalier sculptor Albert Laessle[3]) and Willard Metcalf, who first showed his landscape May Night at the club in 1906. The club also exhibited work by Wilton Lockwood,[4] Adelaide Cole Chase, Frances C. Houston, and the sculptor Bela Pratt.[5] The Club also sponsored a baseball team that played against other Boston institutions such as the Tavern Club.[6]
Among its members have been the architect Charles Follen McKim,[7] Boston composer Frederick Converse,[8] Sculptor Cyrus Dallin,[6] artist William McGregor Paxton,[6] and U.S. Army brigadier general Charles Brewster Wheeler.[9]
Originally exclusively a men's club, the St. Botolph Club has been open to women since 1988[10] in advance of a Supreme Court ruling against sexual and racial discrimination in social clubs that would have mandated it.[11]
The club appeared in fictionalized form as the "St. Filipe Club" in two novels written by Arlo Bates, The Pagans (1884) and The Philistines (1888).[12]
Since 1972 at 199 Commonwealth Avenue,[13] the club maintains reciprocal relationships with a large number of social clubs worldwide.
