Arthur Kingsley Porter
Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883–1933) was an American archaeologist, art historian, and medievalist. He was chair of Harvard University's Art History Department, among other major achievements. Born to a wealthy family in Darien, Connecticut, Porter was a graduate of Yale University. He initially had intended to study law like his father and brother, but turned his attention to architecture while traveling in Europe after a "mystical" experience in front of the cathedral of Countenances, France. Porter claimed to have seen a light shine round him, as if he were in a trance. He decided then he could never be a lawyer and went on to complete a two-year study of architectural practice at Columbia University. (1) After publishing several books in his 20s, he was hired by Harvard University as one of its first professors of art history. In 1912, he married Lucy Bryant Wallace, a member of a prominent New York family. Porter and Lucy settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but traveled extensively throughout Europe, eventually purchasing a second home in Donegal, Ireland: Glenveagh Castle. Lucy Porter became a trained photographer, managing Porter's photographic materials. Her photographs accompanying Porter’s publications are recognized today as critical documents in the study of Romanesque architecture. (2)
In July 1933, Porter disappeared while staying at his fishing cottage on Inishbofin, an island near Glenveagh Castle off the coast of Ireland. The local coroner eventually ruled his death as “misadventure,” essentially concluding that he fell into the ocean. It was the first time an inquest was held in Ireland without a body, and the disappearance has remained a mystery ever since. (3) Sometime later a small group of American archaeologists claimed to have seen Porter in Spain, and other sightings were reported--though never confirmed--in Brussels and Paris. (4) It was not until the 1980s that Porter’s homosexuality came to light, when Phyllis Grosskurth, biographer of famed British sexologist Havelock Ellis, discovered communication between Porter and Ellis. Ellis’s archive in the British Library in London includes several letters from Porter, who had long struggled with depression and who had only come to the realization or accepted the fact that he was sexually attracted to men in midlife. Ellis put Porter in touch with a young gay charge of his, American writer Alan Campbell, who was almost twenty years Porter’s junior and living in England. Ellis had had an open marriage himself to his lesbian wife Edith Lees. (5) Porter’s wife Lucy accepted the arrangement between her husband and Campbell, and the two men began an affair that began at Glenveagh Castle. A few months later the Porters invited Campbell to live with them in Cambridge, where they hired him as a secretary as cover for the true nature of their relationship. Not long after, rumors began to circulate and Porter was called to the office of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell on multiple occasions. The exact nature of the meetings is still unknown, but letters from Ellis’s archive suggest that Porter was threatened with the loss of his job. In 1920, President Lowell had overseen a now notorious “secret court” persecuting students and faculty rumored to be gay--several were permanently expelled and two committed suicide--so it is not surprising that Lowell would have threatened Porter. (Harvard’s secret court was largely kept under wraps until 2002, when an investigative report was published by The Harvard Crimson. The university issued a formal apology, but still refuses to grant posthumous degrees to the expelled students.) Ironically, Lowell’s sister was venerated lesbian poet Amy Lowell. (6)
Ellis’s archive also includes communication with Alan Campbell, and it is apparent that Campbell became restless not long after arriving to live with the Porters. He yearned for privacy and to be able to write again. Porter made attempts to ease any tensions, going as far as to suggest that Campbell take male lovers of his own age, though he drew the line at age thirty-five. Around the time that Porter was being threatened with his job, it appears that Campbell called off the affair. Shortly thereafter, Porter, his wife Lucy, and Campbell all sailed together across the Atlantic. The Porters disembarked in Ireland and Campbell in England. Several days later, Porter went missing in Ireland. While today his disappearance can most likely be attributed to suicide, there are others who believe he may have escaped to mainland Europe to begin life anew. (7)
Following Porter’s disappearance, Lucy Porter established an anonymous research fund with Ellis with an aim to forge more progressive societal views on homosexuality and to help gay individuals to better understand themselves. Her suggestion to Ellis for the study, more specifically, was to come "into contact with... homosexual people so as to give and take information…with the hope that they may lead happy and useful lives.” Ellis convinced her they should work with American psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Wortis, with whom Ellis was already in touch, to helm the project. Wortis subsequently received a series of stipends from Lucy Porter via Ellis. As a condition of acceptance, Wortis asked to travel to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. Lucy initially balked at this, but eventually gave in. Wortis wrote a book about the sessions later, which infuriated Freud. He later reported in an interview with Todd Dufresne: “Porter was a homosexual, in the closet, who in the 1930s could not afford to come out with his homosexuality. He fell in love with a young man, whom I knew, Alan Campbell, and the young man spurned him and [Porter] went into a deep depression. He had a summer home in Ireland and threw himself off the cliffs; his body was never recovered. The bereaved widow, Mrs. Porter went to Havelock Ellis, who was a friend of Kingsley Porter, saying she wanted to use her wealth to do something for the cause of homosexuality. Ellis, with whom I was in touch at this time, suggested that the best investment would be in a person, not an institution. In turn, he proposed me and I received the fellowship." (8) Lucy Porter and Wortis came to disagree about the nature of homosexuality, and the results of the study did not meet her hopes and expectations (9). In the 1960s or early 1970s, historian Jonathan Ned Katz interviewed Wortis and recalls Wortis reporting the same story about Porter that he relayed to Dufresne.
Arthur Kingsley Porter is still widely regarded as the first important American academic of early medieval art. Given his expertise, he was the only foreigner invited by the French government to assist in the preservation of French monuments and churches after World War One, cataloging damage and work needed to restore medieval and Romanesque churches to their original state. He wrote several books, but his most well-known may be Beyond Architecture, which many students of architecture and certainly of medieval architecture will know. His biggest academic achievement, however, is his bold theory--demonstrated in his 1923 book Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrim Roads--that there were no real national boundaries to Romanesque art, as previously believed. Instead, there was an international and homogenous school following the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, Rome, and Bari. This shocked many and especially infuriated the French, who essentially claimed that they had invented and owned the Romanesque. Through very well documented research and evidence, Porter proved that this was not so and that the Romanesque style evolved across countries and borders along the pilgrimage route. (10) Porter’s revolutionary research on medieval architecture and the Romanesque lives on. Since 1957, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize has been awarded to a promising young academic in the field of art history. The award is given by the College Art Association, of which Porter was a founding member.
Notes
1. John Beckwith, “Kingsley Porter: Blazing the Trail in Europe,” Apollo Magazine, Dec. 1970.
2. LaNitra Michele Walker, “A. Kingsley Porter, Dictionary of Art Historians, https://arthistorians.info/portera.
3. Rory Carroll, “Mystery of US Archaeologist’s Irish Disappearance to be Examined on TV,” 4 Sept. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/04/inishbofin-mystery-us-archaeologists-irish-disappearance-tv-examination.
4. Beckwith, “Kingsley Porter.”
5. Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1980).
6. William Wright, Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006).
7. Marc Menamin, “The Mystery of the Missing Millionaire in Donegal, 26 July 2021, https://www.rte.ie/culture/2021/0723/1236740-the-mystery-of-the-missing-millionaire-in-donegal-doc-on-one/
8. Todd Dufresne, “‘The Man Who Was Analyzed by Freud’: Joseph Wortis on Freud, Freudians, and Social Justice, Interviewed by Todd Dufresne," in Dufresne, ed., Against Freud: Critics Talk Back (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).
9. Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis.
10. Beckwich, “Kingsley Porter.”
Andrew Houchens is an award-winning filmmaker and film festival consultant. His work has focused on highlighting social justice issues such as immigration reform, LGBTQ+ representation, and the lingering effects of colonialism. His films have been supported by organizations including the Sundance and Tribeca Film Institutes, IDA (International Documentary Association), IMCINE (the Mexican Film Institute), and NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities), and have been distributed by Criterion Collection, MUBI, Netflix, and PBS, among others. He is a Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow, has consulted for the Berlinale Film Festival since 2016, and is working on a screenplay about Arthur Kingsley Porter.