A tragic story on the edge of the Gilded Age

Readers of Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent should begin with a careful examination of the 1906 cover photograph, which shows a lone woman playing the violin in silhouette beside a rustic cabin against the backdrop of two towering mountains. The haunting scene seems to recall two of the reviewer’s favorite films: Anatevka and Jeremiah Johnson. The caption on the back of the photograph gave author Farrelly the name of her book and began her extensive search for the underlying story it evoked.

Her book is about three people who fled the East Coast to escape their past in the new, sparsely populated state of Wyoming. The trio of protagonists were Robert Ray Hamilton, great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, who is depicted on our $10 bills and in the Broadway hit “Hamilton”; John Dudley (Jack) Sargent, neglected scion of a New England Brahmin family that included the famous portrait painter John Singer Sargent; and his wife, Edith Drake Sargent, pictured on the book’s cover, an “eccentric” who spent her final years in a psychiatric hospital.

Maura Farrelly is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. She proves her skill as a dogged researcher and historian, as many of the necessary records were hidden from the prying eyes of future investigators or buried in dusty archives. The stories she has compiled are both convoluted and fascinating.

All three characters were deeply flawed, and unsavory rumors of murder, child abuse, prostitution, incest, rape, blackmail, and suicide circulated. All of this was covered in a veneer of “sensationalist journalism” that makes today’s “fake news” seem bland. This book is definitely not light summer reading for the beach.

Fortunately, the author has provided five family trees and maps as well as seventeen old photos to avoid confusion between the families, which are referred to again and again throughout the rest of the book.

Readers of this site know that the reviewer likes to find connections to Nebraska in his reading selections. The penultimate chapter of this book offers a surprising connection to one of Lincoln’s most prominent citizens. Since the reviewer also doesn’t like “spoilers,” he leaves readers with the unexpected shock of discovering the familiar name for themselves.