Franklin County (MA) Gazette, January 27, 1873
Edward S. Stokes: a sad and shameful career
In the year 1838, Edward H. Stokes, a successful cloth merchant of New York, and nearly connected with some of the most prominent representatives of the wealth and beneficence of that city, retired from business with a handsome competency.

Eight years previous he had married a Miss [Nancy] Stiles, a daughter of a leading Philadelphian, and seeking a home of ease and elegance, Mr. Stokes chose Philadelphia as his future residence. There his eldest son was born in 1839, and named Edward Stiles, after a maternal relative.

The lad was a boy of unusual beauty and promise, a quick, active mind, a generous and loving disposition - these traits being remembered well after the lapse of years by those who knew him at that time. Two daughters and two other sons were born in the period between 1840 and 1850.

The family is recalled as being rarely endowed with all that seemed needed to ensure the happiness of a household. The home was one of wealth and luxury, the culture of the best.

Edward was educated at the University and took high rank as a scholar. He went to New York at the age of 17 to enter into the store of Samuel Perry of South Water St., an extensive cheese dealer. Perry failed 3 years later, and young Stokes made a new partnership with a junior of a collapsed house, and they, as Stokes & Budlong, opened a cheese store on Vesey St.

They had excellent success, their foreign shipping trade being very large, calling Stokes to visit Europe several times within the next few seasons.

About this time the senior Stokes was induced to remove to New York, where he made his office with his son, though not originally intending to become entangled in business. Such was the result, however, and not only were the father, but other and prominent wealthy realties, gradually but heavily involved in the extended ventures of Stokes & Budlong.

The failure of the firm followed, and father and son were thrown into bankruptcy.

With the wreck of his fortunes, young Stokes embarked next in the enterprise of establishing an oil refinery at Hunter's Point. $300,000 were expended in the works, which were to be of the best class, when the company fell into difficulties, and at this juncture the baleful light of Jim Fisk's countenance comes into the story.

Jim was in the full tide of his operations with Erie. He held the advantage (we wish it were less employed by even more scrupulous railway managers than he), supplied by his corporation, in transportation and control of market, as the Erie was the greatest thoroughfare to the oil regions. A compact was struck.

Fisk entered the refining business, reinforcing its capital; and with a change of name and heavy "drawbacks" on the Erie freight bills, the Hunter's Point refinery sailed strongly into successful competition. Stokes was secretary as well as partner. At one time his profits from the refinery gave him $1,000 per week.

In 1864, Stokes married the daughter of J.W. Southwick, a prominent furniture dealer in New York, one of the oldest in his line in the city.

The wedding of Stokes and Miss Southwick seemed to lack nothing that wealth, positions and social surroundings could bring to insure happiness. They made their sumptuous home in the Hoffman House, and moved among the most brilliant life of the metropolis.

The next scene in the drama brings the infamous woman [Josie] Mansfield into the plot. A quarrel between Fisk and Stokes followed. It was carried into affairs of business. Fisk refused to allow the Hunter's Point concern to make a dividend, and thus cut off Stoke's supplies.

The disgraceful [Stokes] relation with Mansfield became more shameless, and the father-in-law, Southwick, sent his daughter and her child to Europe early in 1871, to remove her from the scene of the scandal.

Stokes, enraged at Fisk, used his position as Secretary to collect $30,000 from Devoe, an oil merchant, which sum he held openly and defiantly as his share of the profits. Fisk caused his arrest on a criminal charge.

Stokes turned to his wealthy family. No one of them would bail him, and he was forced to make terms and submit, and refund the money. His relations with Fisk were bitter, and out of the intensity of the evil passions and criminalities of his position with Mansfield grew murder.

The story of family grief and reverses is not all told. The senior Stokes, after 30 years of retirement and enjoyment of a luxuriant home, is bankrupt and homeless in his old age.

One of the daughters died two weeks after marriage. The second daughter [Mary Jane], the wife of Mr. Sutton, attached herself so strongly to the fortunes of her brother, that her husband discarded her, and she is in refuge with her aged and penniless parents. [She later remarried]. The second son [Horace], a young man of great promise, died two months ago, of grief and shame at the family reverses, and the whole tale of the innocent and suffering victims by this complication of crime and shame, is not to be fully told without including some of the best known and esteemed of New York families. [Note: I believe the article is incorrect about Horace, who is described as being alive in 1901 when his brother's will became the object of yet another lawsuit filed by W. E. D. Stokes.]

Time Magazine, January 25, 1943
A fabulous painting which scandalized the '80s was seen in public last week for the first time since 1901. In Manhattan's Durand-Ruel Galleries visitors could look upon Adolphe William Bouguereau's nearly 12-foot masterpiece, “Nymphs and Satyr.” A quartet of ripe, naked maidens prancing around a preoccupied faun was for 24 years the despair of Victorian moralists and the delight of the clubmen who crowded Manhattan's Hoffman House bar.

In 1901, after the death of owner Edward S. Stokes, the Hoffman House's art treasures (valued around $200,000) were sold. “Nymphs and Satyr” vanished until last year, when Durand-Ruel Director Herbert H. Elfers stumbled on the legendary canvas in a Manhattan warehouse. Today it is anonymously owned.

Bouguereau's plump-bottomed girls, vainly trying to get their shaggy, Pan-piping friend to romp with them, are depicted in academic, sugary fashion. But the draftsmanship is strong, the painted human flesh masterly. In its time the picture has traveled widely on boxes of Hoffman House perfectos, in a comic lithograph showing a bum leaning on the Hoffman bar, staring at the nymphs by their woodsy creek. The caption: "I've been looking all over the world for that creek, but darned if I can find it."

Legend says that when P. T. Barnum, James Gordon Bennett, Edwin Booth or Colonel Joe ("Gin") Rickey began to brim over at the Hoffman, Bouguereau's girls came to life. In 1934 a smaller “Nymphs and Satyr” appeared in Trenton, N.J.'s Stacy-Trent Hotel, where novices are told that on the stroke of midnight the picture turns around, reveals the nymphs to better advantage. Robert R. Meyer, owner of the smaller painting, thinks that Bouguereau may have painted a second, but has not proved it.

Considering his 19th-Century fame, the prolific number of paintings he produced, and the fact that he taught French Modernists Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse in their youth, also British Painter Sir John Lavery, astonishingly little is known about Adolphe William Bouguereau.

He was born at La Rochelle, France in 1825, clerked in Bordeaux under his father, an olive oil trader, attended Bordeaux's Ecole des Beaux-arts.

Painter Bouguereau went to Paris, won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1850. He was twice married, the second time at 71 to Mrs. Elizabeth Gardner of Exeter, New Hampshire.

He fought twice for France, never forgave Germany's Empress- Dowager who invited French painters to exhibit in Berlin. Most French painters objected.

Bouguereau said: "If I have to go to Berlin alone, I shall go. I consider it a patriotic duty to conquer the German painters in the very capital of German Empire."

In 1905 the 80-year-old artist, brush in hand, died of a heart attack.

New York Times, November 10, 1901
Edward S. Stokes was for many years owner of Fenwick Hall at Fenwick. The hotel was owned by the Charter Oak Life Insurance Company of this city, which came into possession of it by forclosure on the Fenwick Hall Company. It was to be sold at public auction and Stokes intended to buy it, but learned another New Yorker was to bid on the property.

Stokes planned to prevent a rival bid and invited the bidder, on his arrival, to take a sail with a party of friends the morning of the auction. An early start was made, but Stokes remained on shore, and with the yacht not returning in time for the auction, he secured the property.

He made himself prominent a few years later by refusing to pay his share of the Fenwick bridge claim. The case was carried to the courts until a final decision in the United States Supreme Court granted the town the full amount of the $7,000 claimed.

Even then Stokes refused to pay, but at this juncture a party of the cottagers headed by ex-Gov. Morgan G. Bulkeley offered to buy the hotel on condition that the town’s claim should first be paid. The offer was accepted and the matter closed.

Fenwick is located at the mouth of the Connecticut river, which flows into Long Island Sound. George Fenwick, who helped establish the Connecticut colony in the 1630s, and his wife, Lady Alice Fenwick, settled on the peninsula that now bears their last name.

Nothing much happened in Fenwick until 1870 when the New Saybrook Company was started there to create a seaside resort. After several years and several problems, the New Saybrook Company went belly up and was taken over by its biggest financial backer, the Charter Oak Life Insurance Company. But in 1887 that company, too, went bankrupt and the resort known as Fenwick Hall was up for auction.

Edward S. Stokes' bidding rival was Lawrence S. McMahon, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Hartford, who wanted it for an orphanage. And, true, on the day of the auction, Stokes arrived with his Tammany Hall pal, Richard Croker, and persuasively invited the bishop's agents to take a ride on a yacht which conveniently broke down. In this version of the story Stokes may have been on the yacht, with an agent sent to the auction to make the purchase

According to the New York Times story:

"Under Mr. Stokes, the inn became a very lively place, with guests smoking big cigars arriving on big yachts. But the Stokes regime was fairly brief. Accustomed to dealing with New York City officials, he could not fathom Yankee town practices, like an insistence on collecting taxes. He got into an argument with the town of Old Saybrook not only over taxes but also over the upkeep of a small wooden bridge from Saybrook Point to Fenwick, that the town reasoned was only used by people going to the inn and therefore was the inn's responsibility. In a huff, Mr. Stokes shut Fenwick Hall.

"In 1894, Morgan Gardner Bulkeley bought it, for $500 at a tax sale. Mr. Bulkeley was one of the most powerful, Connecticut figures of the time – president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company, Mayor of Hartford, Governor of Connecticut, United States Senator, first president of the National Baseball League ...

"What Mr. Bulkeley wanted was a shore haven for the best people of the Hartford area, whcih by the criteria of the times, meant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant people."

Among the early Fenwickians were Dr. Thomas N. Hepburn and his wife, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, parents of Katharine Hepburn, who continued to spend summers there most of her life.