| Notes |
- Many of the exiles first came to East Hampton as guests of Gerald andSara Murphy, an affluent but artistically inclined couple who had lived as expatriates in Paris during the 1920s and had been friends with many of the pioneers of the modern movement, including Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.(Fitzgerald had immortalized the couple as Dick and Nicole Diver in his1934 novel Tender is the Night.)
The Murphys returned to America in the 1930s and spent their summers at'The Dunes,' a sprawling oceanfront mansion that Saras father, FrankWiborg, had built near the Maidstone Club in 1895. Leger and his companion, Lucia Christofanetti, came out and took up residence at one of the guest cottages on the Wiborg estate.
Source: Convergence - Weekend Utopia[http://www.weekendutopia.com/convergence.html]
——
GERALD MURPHY OF MARK CROSS
Painter Turned Merchant, 76, Died in East Hampton
Special to The New York Times
East Hampton, L. I., Oct. 17-- Gerald Murphy, who gave up a promising career as a painter and later succeeded his father as president of theMark Cross Company, the New York leather goods firm, died today at his home here. He was 76 years old.
In his younger days Mr. Murphy had worked for his father, Patrick FrancisMurphy, in the Fifth Avenue leather concern, but after six years left the business and for several years lived in France. It was there that he decided to become a painter.
He stopped painting when a son, Patrick, became ill. The boy died abroad. After Patrick Francis Murphy died in the depression year of1931, Gerald Murphy returned to New York to become president of MarkCross. He found the company about a million dollars in debt, and under pressure to declare itself bankrupt.
*Company Made a Success*
During the 22 years that Mr. Murphy had full control of the company, he cleared it of debt, moved the store to its Fifth Avenue address, and applied his imagination and taste to a variety of new items. But hes aid the work never was congenial.
"The ship foundered, was refloated, set sail again, but not on the same course and not for the same port," he once wrote. He retired with a feeling of relief in 1956.
During the early years of his marriage, he and his wife, the former Sara Wiborg, who survives, were close friends of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda.
The novelist once said to Mr. Murphy that his book "Tender is the Night,"which he liked best of the four published during his lifetime, "was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of it is Zelda and me because you and Saraare the same people as Zelda and me."
*Friends of Artistic Figures*
The Murphys, while living the life of American expatriates in Paris andon the Riviera, became popular with many of the artistic and literary figures of their time.
John Dos Passos, who had known them for 40 years, said, "People werealways their best selves with the Murphys."
Archobald MacLeish once remarked that from the beginning of their life inEurope, "Person after person--English, French, American, everybody met them and came away saying that these people really were mastering the artof living."
The Murphys' friends included Ernest Hemingway, Picasso, Leger andStravinsky, who said they were "among the first Americans I ever met and they gave me the most agreeable impression of the United States."
Cole Porter, who died Thursday, was two classes behind Mr. Murphy atYale, where Mr. Murphy was voted the best dressed man in the Class of1911.
The Murphys were married in 1916. The next year he enlisted in the ArmySignal Corps. He was about to go to England when the Armistice was signed. Not wanting to return to Mark Cross after his discharge, he went to the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture for two years. It was then that the Murphys decided to live abroad.
*Formal Training Scanty*
It has been said that Mr. Murphy decided to become an artist after viewing for the first time the work of Braque, Picasso and Juan Gris.His only formal training in painting was with Natalia Goncharova, with whom Sara also studied for a time. As he developed a style of his own, his work began attracting attention.
He was exhibited at the Salon des Independents in Paris, and Leger announced that Mr. Murphy was the only American painter in Paris, meaning the only one who had shown a really American response to the new postwarFrench painting. Mr. MacLeish said tonight that Mr. Murphy was represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
While he was president of Mark Cross, Mr. Murphy was on the board of directors of the Fifth Avenue Association and was active in campaigns of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association.
Also surviving are a daughter, Mrs. Honoria Donnelly, and three grandchildren.
[New York Times, 18 October 1964]
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Old Dead Relatives
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
: Address
: Location
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