A rare portrait housed at Mobile’s Historic Oakleigh House Museum traveled to Washington, D.C. this month, where it was set to be unveiled at the Sewall-Belmont House Museum in honor of Women’s History Month.
The painting depicts Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, a nationally influential suffragist who was born in Mobile in 1853. The Sewall-Belmont House Museum is named in her honor, and museum officials in both cities said the loan represented a meaningful partnership between two institutions dedicated to preserving different chapters of her story.
“This is a dynamic partnership between two house museums, with two different missions,” said Melanie Thornton, museum collection manager for the Historic Oakleigh House Museum, which is operated by the Historic Mobile Preservation Society. “We are very excited that one of our most historical works of art will be introduced to newer, broader audiences.”
Belmont was born to Murray Forbes Smith, a Mobile cotton factor, and Phoebe Desha Smith. Her family relocated to New York not long after the Civil War. At 22, she married William Kissam Vanderbilt, and the couple had three children before divorcing in 1895, an unusually public split for the era that left her with a substantial settlement, including the Marble House estate in Newport, Rhode Island. She remarried the following year, to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, and after his death in 1908 devoted her fortune and public influence to the women’s suffrage movement. She became president of the National Woman’s Party after ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 and held that role until her death in 1933.
“We have quite a few influential historical female figures with strong ties to Mobile,” Thornton said. “By loaning Belmont’s portrait, we are contributing to her story on a national level.”
The portrait, painted by Benjamin Curtis Porter shortly after Belmont’s marriage to Vanderbilt in 1875, is believed to be the only commissioned portrait of her still in existence. According to museum officials, one biography of Belmont claimed she had the portrait destroyed after devoting herself to the suffrage cause, but the painting survived and was later willed to the Historic Mobile Preservation Society by Belmont’s daughter, Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, in 1965.
Page Harrington, executive director of the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, said the loan would allow the Washington institution to highlight Belmont’s national impact on the suffrage and equal rights movements over the following two years.
The loan underscored Mobile’s often-overlooked connection to national women’s history, a link the Historic Oakleigh House Museum has worked to spotlight through its collection of Gulf Coast artifacts and portraiture.