Arthur Jerome Eddy

"Arrangement in Flesh Color and Brown: Portrait of Arthur Jerome Eddy" by legendary American artist, James McNeill Whistler

Arthur Jerome Eddy (November 5, 1859 - July 21, 1920)

Author, Attorney, Art Critic, Art Collector

At the turn of the century, Flintstone Arthur Jerome Eddy was one of the first to author a book about the invention that would soon make Flint world renowned: the automobile. In 1902, his book "Two Thousand Miles in an Automobile" was published. The book described how he set a record traveling by car from Chicago to Boston and back again in 1901.  Writing under the nom de plume of A. Chauffeur, the story told the tale of his trip in a Winton Motor Carriage Company car. 
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On A different Car Ride, during a visit to flint

The same year he published his travelogue, during a visit home to see his family, Eddy was tooling around Flint in a Panhard, and offered a ride to his very young cousin, Margery Durant.  Margery rushed home to share her exhilarating experience with her father.  None too pleased, he berated her for taking her life in to her own hands with such a foolish action as taking a car ride. Her father, Eddy’s cousin by marriage, was William C. "Billy" Durant. Later changing his mind on the topic of car rides, Durant went on to save Buick, invent AC Spark Plug, Chevrolet, Frigidaire and General Motors.

Eddy's 1901 travelogue, the first book written about an automobile

Margery Pitt Durant, daughter of auto tycoon and father of General Motors, William Crapo Durant

Arthur Jerome Eddy:  The Writer

​Eddy had begun his writing career in Flint with the Genesee Democrat, his father's newspaper, well before penning a book. He also studied law at Harvard after graduating from Flint High School (later rebuilt and named Flint Central), relocating to Chicago in 1888.  Once there, he joined a corporate law firm, Wetten, Matthews & Pegler, which later became Eddy, Wetten & Pegler. The practice played a major role in creating a number of major American firms, including the National Carbon Company, American Steel Foundry Corporation, National Turbine, and American Linseed Company.

Eddy wrote on a variety of topics including travel, economics, short stories, novels, and plays. Perhaps his most important works were on art. Eddy was a revered maven of the first generation of American Modern art collectors. His books "Delight, The Soul of Art", "Recollections of James McNeill Whistler", and "Cubists and Post Impressionism" are considered outstanding examples of turn-of-the-century art observation.

Despite this incredible career, perhaps his most timely, prescient and lasting observation still comes from "Two Thousand Miles in an Automobile", where he opined “Michigan roads are all bad, but some are worse than others.”

Eddy died at 61 in New York City, and is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Flint.

"The Genesee Democrat", January 8, 1886 (link)

Click the links to view the contents of the books 

"Two Thousand Miles on an Automobile" (1901) Travelogue

The Law of Combinations (1901) Economics

"Delight the Soul of Art: Five Lectures" (1902) Art

"Recollections and Impressions of James A McNeill Whistler" (1904) Art

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"Tales of a Small Town by One Who Lived There" (1906) (No link) Memoir

"Ganton &Co" (1908) Fiction

"The New Competition" (1912) Trusts, Industrial, Competition

"Cubists Post-Impressionism" (1914) Art

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"Property" (1921) Property and Wealth

"Tiled Roofs" appearing in Gustav Stickley's magazine "The Craftsman" (date unknown) Arts and Crafts Movement, Architecture

"The Farmer's Complete Encyclopedia" (1891) Agriculture

Arthur Jerome Eddy:  The Art Enthusiast and Critic

"Since the exhibit at the Columbian Exposition (1893) nothing has happened in the world of American art so stimulating as the recent INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF MODERN ART.  New York and Chicago, spring of 1913.

'Stimulating' is the word, for while the recent exhibition may have lacked some of the good, solidly painted pictures found in the earlier, it contained so much that was fresh, new, original --eccentric, if you prefer--that it gave our art-world food for thought--and heated controversy."

--Arthur Jerome Eddy, excerpt from "Cubists and Post-Impressionism"

There were two seminal moments in the development of Eddy's tastes in art.  The first was his visit to the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and the Palace of Fine Arts, and then his modern art purchases at the 1913 Armory Show in New York of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, which catapulted him into legendary status as a modern art collector, and he was the first American collector to acquire pieces by Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Many of the 250 items in his famous collection can be found at the Chicago Institute of Art.

 Sources:

https://alchetron.com/Arthur-Jerome-Eddy
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/8961/head-of-arthur-jerome-eddy
​The Armory Show - http://armory.nyhistory.org/about/
https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/ADLDecArts (His works)
http://www.mycitymag.com/flint-renaissance-man/​
https://archive.org/ (His works)

Image Credits:  
Background Texture: "Paint canvas texture" by irisb477 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Written by:  Gary L. Fisher

About Gary:  A man of many talents, Gary runs a wealth advisory office in downtown Flint, he is a Flint historian, the radio host of Fish & the Flint Chronicles, and Vice President Genesee County Historical Society.

Arthur Jerome Eddy: The Art Enthusiast and Critic contributed by Tracy Leigh Fisher