Play & Book Excerpts
The Club
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
© Jennifer Dasal
Frances Cranmer (later Frances Cranmer Greenman, 1890-1981) stepped out of a Renault hackney carriage into the darkest of nights on the rue de Chevreuse in 1911. Pulling her coat tighter around her waist, she paused for a moment before knocking at the large double doors, then painted green, in front of her. Did the driver deliver her to the correct address? The streetlamp nearby only illuminated so much, and the batîment appeared so plain and, well, boring: was this place truly her new Parisian home?
The only daughter of Emma A. Cranmer, a Midwestern suffragist and temperance activist, Frances Cranmer was raised to be proud and confident, developing into a woman who rarely hesitated to go after what she wanted (attending art schools in four different states? No problem! Training with two of the top American teachers in New York City? Done!). At that moment on the shadowed street, Cranmer had little to do but forge ahead as she had always done. She thus rang the bell of her temporary home at the American Girls’ Club in Paris with characteristic vivacity. Nerves be damned!
In the quiet of the evening, the Club was still, its garden and corridors empty. The concierge, however, was always on duty, and she “roused with the clang of the bell, popped her head, in its nightcap, out the little window and soon shuffled to a door wide enough to allow a carriage to drive through and opened it,” Cranmer wrote in her 1954 memoir, Higher Than the Sky. “The headmistress, expecting me, led me through the narrow stone halls to my room. With the bed rocking from the ship’s rhythm and my few pennies tied around my neck, I went to sleep.” There was little time for exploration of her new home—she would have to wait until morning.
And oh, that morning: the golden dawn washed away any slight misgivings that the typically bold Cranmer secretly carried.
“It was a new world to me, that next morning,” Cranmer recalled dreamily. “Breakfast under ancient trees in the old world garden of the club hidden behind high walls and chimney pots. My little yellow table, on a carpet of white pebbles and ivy, shone in the sunlight.”
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Cranmer’s 1911 arrival at the Club followed a script that was repeated by a generation of artists since its opening in 1893: arrival at the Club’s doorstep was marked by the uncertainty befitting the start of any new adventure, but once a new tenant passed over the building’s threshold, she would typically fall under its spell quickly and deeply. There was a lot to love about the charming, historic structure. “We paid little board but lived in the midst of luxury and romance,” asserted resident Anne Goldthwaite.
The rue de Chevreuse property improved upon the Newells’ early vision of the Club, just as Elisabeth Mills Reid had planned. To begin with, it was significantly larger: the building’s original footprint, little-changed since the eighteenth century, housed over forty rooms, providing enough space for private lodgings, public reception rooms, storage facilities, and onsite accommodations for the concierge. The gentle elegance of the American Girls’ Club was naturally situated primarily in those public spaces, particularly its inviting library and reading room. In the Club’s earliest days on the rue de Chevreuse, it housed over 600 books in floor-to-ceiling shelves, forming “a fine and comprehensive library, with two valuable divisions devoted to French literature and art,” per a 1909 article in Town & Country. It was greatly expanded in the 1910s, but the 1890s version was especially cozy, with a rocking chair seated adjacent to a glowing fireplace. Nearby, the reading room supplied both French and English periodicals across a large central table that women often occupied to take French lessons or pen letters to send home. Not that everyone spent a great deal of time perusing said periodicals. “We have all the American magazines and papers here at the club and a large library but no time to read,” resident Alice Morgan Wright (1881-1975) confessed in a letter to her mother in late December of 1909.
Helpfully, the reading room also contained a bulletin board brimming with useful information such as “church services, and summer sketching classes, addresses of doctors, dentists, French teachers, boarding houses, and announcements of the sale of students’ furniture,” noted resident Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one; 1856-1932). Members also used the Club as their post office (“I get my mail at the club so don’t bother to remember this address,” Wright wrote to a friend after she moved away from the Club in 1912). It thus functioned as a hub connecting its members to greater Paris and its communities beyond its walls.
In both private correspondence and news reports, the comfortable, homey atmosphere of the Club’s salons and garden were widely extolled. The rented rooms were equally praised for their capacity to house approximately forty to fifty women. The residential rooms’ ambiance, though, was less appealing. They were not shabby by any means, but they were sparsely furnished and lacked decorative details. Later generations described them as akin to college dormitories, an apt comparison. Upping the ante, male American students jokingly baptized the Club as “the nunnery” for the purported sparseness of the private rooms and the seemingly pious nature of its residents, too (one wonders it this joke went a bit too far, because by 1902, the New York Herald incorrectly reported that “Tradition has it that [the Club] was once a convent”). Sure, the rented rooms were nothing to write home about, but no matter— they became an artist’s blank canvas. “It is left for the taste and purse of the occupant to make them homelike and attractive,” Florence Blanchard of the San Francisco Call asserted in 1895.
And what attractive rooms they became, scattered lovingly with objects sourced from flea markets and European travel—and far beyond. A fine, if rather unique, example is the room of the Ohio-born Taylor, a fascinating naturalist, artist, writer, and a “true collector of experiences,” in the words of her biographer. In 1892—only a year before the Club’s opening—Taylor temporarily abandoned her artistic training at the Académie Délécluse to take an extended summer trip through Canada’s Upper Northwest Territory to the Arctic Circle. Returning to Paris to resume her studies in late 1893, she sought relief and convenience above all else—no surprise, given that her Arctic excursion was a difficult one. To her great excitement, she procured a room at the newly-opened Club, a move that made her one of its earliest residents. It is evident that Taylor cherished living there. The following year, she composed “The American Girls’ Club in Paris” for The Churchman, an Episcopalian magazine, delighting readers with glowing descriptions of the still-new facilities, afternoon tea, and one of the bedrooms:
The only daughter of Emma A. Cranmer, a Midwestern suffragist and temperance activist, Frances Cranmer was raised to be proud and confident, developing into a woman who rarely hesitated to go after what she wanted (attending art schools in four different states? No problem! Training with two of the top American teachers in New York City? Done!). At that moment on the shadowed street, Cranmer had little to do but forge ahead as she had always done. She thus rang the bell of her temporary home at the American Girls’ Club in Paris with characteristic vivacity. Nerves be damned!
In the quiet of the evening, the Club was still, its garden and corridors empty. The concierge, however, was always on duty, and she “roused with the clang of the bell, popped her head, in its nightcap, out the little window and soon shuffled to a door wide enough to allow a carriage to drive through and opened it,” Cranmer wrote in her 1954 memoir, Higher Than the Sky. “The headmistress, expecting me, led me through the narrow stone halls to my room. With the bed rocking from the ship’s rhythm and my few pennies tied around my neck, I went to sleep.” There was little time for exploration of her new home—she would have to wait until morning.
And oh, that morning: the golden dawn washed away any slight misgivings that the typically bold Cranmer secretly carried.
“It was a new world to me, that next morning,” Cranmer recalled dreamily. “Breakfast under ancient trees in the old world garden of the club hidden behind high walls and chimney pots. My little yellow table, on a carpet of white pebbles and ivy, shone in the sunlight.”
---
Cranmer’s 1911 arrival at the Club followed a script that was repeated by a generation of artists since its opening in 1893: arrival at the Club’s doorstep was marked by the uncertainty befitting the start of any new adventure, but once a new tenant passed over the building’s threshold, she would typically fall under its spell quickly and deeply. There was a lot to love about the charming, historic structure. “We paid little board but lived in the midst of luxury and romance,” asserted resident Anne Goldthwaite.
The rue de Chevreuse property improved upon the Newells’ early vision of the Club, just as Elisabeth Mills Reid had planned. To begin with, it was significantly larger: the building’s original footprint, little-changed since the eighteenth century, housed over forty rooms, providing enough space for private lodgings, public reception rooms, storage facilities, and onsite accommodations for the concierge. The gentle elegance of the American Girls’ Club was naturally situated primarily in those public spaces, particularly its inviting library and reading room. In the Club’s earliest days on the rue de Chevreuse, it housed over 600 books in floor-to-ceiling shelves, forming “a fine and comprehensive library, with two valuable divisions devoted to French literature and art,” per a 1909 article in Town & Country. It was greatly expanded in the 1910s, but the 1890s version was especially cozy, with a rocking chair seated adjacent to a glowing fireplace. Nearby, the reading room supplied both French and English periodicals across a large central table that women often occupied to take French lessons or pen letters to send home. Not that everyone spent a great deal of time perusing said periodicals. “We have all the American magazines and papers here at the club and a large library but no time to read,” resident Alice Morgan Wright (1881-1975) confessed in a letter to her mother in late December of 1909.
Helpfully, the reading room also contained a bulletin board brimming with useful information such as “church services, and summer sketching classes, addresses of doctors, dentists, French teachers, boarding houses, and announcements of the sale of students’ furniture,” noted resident Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one; 1856-1932). Members also used the Club as their post office (“I get my mail at the club so don’t bother to remember this address,” Wright wrote to a friend after she moved away from the Club in 1912). It thus functioned as a hub connecting its members to greater Paris and its communities beyond its walls.
In both private correspondence and news reports, the comfortable, homey atmosphere of the Club’s salons and garden were widely extolled. The rented rooms were equally praised for their capacity to house approximately forty to fifty women. The residential rooms’ ambiance, though, was less appealing. They were not shabby by any means, but they were sparsely furnished and lacked decorative details. Later generations described them as akin to college dormitories, an apt comparison. Upping the ante, male American students jokingly baptized the Club as “the nunnery” for the purported sparseness of the private rooms and the seemingly pious nature of its residents, too (one wonders it this joke went a bit too far, because by 1902, the New York Herald incorrectly reported that “Tradition has it that [the Club] was once a convent”). Sure, the rented rooms were nothing to write home about, but no matter— they became an artist’s blank canvas. “It is left for the taste and purse of the occupant to make them homelike and attractive,” Florence Blanchard of the San Francisco Call asserted in 1895.
And what attractive rooms they became, scattered lovingly with objects sourced from flea markets and European travel—and far beyond. A fine, if rather unique, example is the room of the Ohio-born Taylor, a fascinating naturalist, artist, writer, and a “true collector of experiences,” in the words of her biographer. In 1892—only a year before the Club’s opening—Taylor temporarily abandoned her artistic training at the Académie Délécluse to take an extended summer trip through Canada’s Upper Northwest Territory to the Arctic Circle. Returning to Paris to resume her studies in late 1893, she sought relief and convenience above all else—no surprise, given that her Arctic excursion was a difficult one. To her great excitement, she procured a room at the newly-opened Club, a move that made her one of its earliest residents. It is evident that Taylor cherished living there. The following year, she composed “The American Girls’ Club in Paris” for The Churchman, an Episcopalian magazine, delighting readers with glowing descriptions of the still-new facilities, afternoon tea, and one of the bedrooms:
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The room of a student who has been over sometime shows the result of many such expeditions. A gray-greenish net makes misty shadows as it hangs in graceful curves from the ceiling. Photographs and summer sketches are pinned up on the walls, a great Dutch milk can by the window is filled with holly, and by it stands a pair of Breton sabots [clogs]. On a charming writing desk, improvised from an orange box, is a quaintly carved old hour glass; a Botticelli bas-relief and a graceful Tanagra figure catch the light from a side window; a brass kettle is singing, and a huge ladle of Spanish copper gleams like a coal from a dusky corner.
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Though she coyly notes that the room simply belongs to “a student,” the room described here is undoubtedly Taylor’s own, as confirmed when Taylor’s compatriot-writer, Caro Lloyd, noted, “One of the quietest [residents of the Club] is a passionate explorer, the only woman who has penetrated the lower Mackenzie [River, in Canada]. Her room is adorned with presents from the Eskimo, and a wonderful Norway fish-net.” Taylor’s room, albeit brimming with items specific to her travels, is nevertheless indicative of the artsy mishmash preferred by Club residents. “Within a couple of weeks every student has provided herself with the few yards of scrim or cretonne, the etchings and the half-dozen little decorative knick-knacks to be had for a song in Paris,” author Emily Aylward asserted in her 1894 article for Scribner’s, “The American Girls’ Art Club in Paris.” Shabby chic was the order of the day— but some enterprising residents also shopped at Le Bon Marché department store, selling their goods at a markup “to repair the fatal damage to [their] allowance.”
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Jennifer Dasal is an art historian, lecturer, and tour director. She is the author of the two books on art history: “The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris,” (Bloomsbury, 2025) and "ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History" (Penguin, 2020). She is also beloved as host of the worldwide hit podcast, ArtCurious. Dasal frequently lectures and hosts international tours focused on artists like Vermeer, Van Gogh, Kahlo, and O'Keeffe. She previously served as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art for thirteen years.
Dasal earned her M.A. in Art History from Notre Dame University and pursued Ph.D. work at Penn State University. You will most often find her devouring books about the Beatles and planning her latest global adventure. She lives in Wendell, North Carolina. |
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Author Appearance Bookmarks Winston-Salem, NC Saturday, February 7, 2026 Author Lecture Falmouth Arts Center Cape Cod, MA Thursday, April 2, 2026 "ArtCurious" Lecture Saint Louis Art Museum Saint Louis, MO Thursday, April 23, 2026 |
