Three volumes of Lillian Tiffany scrapbooks will be up for auction June 24th, 2017. Pictured is Lillian Tiffany, photo from the scrapbook. Heloise Durant Rose (Ella Durant) the main character in my novels, was writing her father's biography about a decade before she died. That's what I found out when I drove a few hours south to Accord, NY in the Catskills to look through three scrapbooks dated from the 19302-1950s that once belonged to an artist named Lillian Tiffany, famous for her dog sketches.
Lillian was married to Ella's son, pictured below, Durant Rose, grandson of Doctor Thomas C. Durant, and nephew of William West Durant. Lillian and Durant Rose lived in New City, NY in the 1930s-60s. They were wealthy, and famous for their time, and Lillian tried to capture their lives in scrapbooks. Three ended up at the auctioneer in Accord, and volume 4 with a family in Pennsylvania, which I wrote about in another blog here. Volumes 1-2 are missing. Hopefully one day they will all end up in a library archive together.
Lillian was married to Ella's son, pictured below, Durant Rose, grandson of Doctor Thomas C. Durant, and nephew of William West Durant. Lillian and Durant Rose lived in New City, NY in the 1930s-60s. They were wealthy, and famous for their time, and Lillian tried to capture their lives in scrapbooks. Three ended up at the auctioneer in Accord, and volume 4 with a family in Pennsylvania, which I wrote about in another blog here. Volumes 1-2 are missing. Hopefully one day they will all end up in a library archive together.
Durant Rose was the Vice President of the Armed Service Corporation during the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, Ella's son Durant Rose was the VP of a corporation that transported large sums of money in the streets of New York City. There are numerous articles in the scrapbooks about his work. He and Lillian were also entrepreneurs. They started their own corset company. She designed the corsets herself.
Madame X company was a girdle/corset company. Lillian Tiffany artist. Lillian's artwork and sketches fill the pages of the three volumes of scrapbooks, that and numerous news articles about the couple and their work. Also interspersed in Volumes 3, 5, 6 are articles about Heloise Durant Rose. That is how I found out she was writing a biography of her father before she died in 1943. From what I can gather, Ella must have lived with her son and daughter-in-law after her husband Charles died in 1937. They had a large estate in New City, the studio, pictured below was also designed by Lillian.
Most intriguing to me though is that the scrapbooks do not contain an obituary for Ella. There is a small obituary for her husband, Charles Rose, who died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1937. Ella died in 1943, at least that is what previous biographers have stated. Yet, the scrapbooks went beyond that date and I could not find an obituary for her. From conversations with Durant descendants no one knows where she was buried.
I imagine this was one of her last regrets, not being buried in the Durant family mausoleum in Green Wood Cemetery Brooklyn, alongside her father and mother. But Ella wouldn't pay the upkeep fee her brother William insisted she pay while she was suing him for her share of the inheritance. I contacted the Green Wood Cemetery to find out who was buried in the lot, and they told me Durant Rose did end up paying a fee and he and Lillian were interred there in 1962 and 1967 respectively.
Even more mysterious is why so few of Ella's photos, letters and, especially the biography she was writing about her father, never survived. Her son and daughter-in-law did not have children. Perhaps all of the scrapbooks ended up at a garage sale when their house was sold in the 1960s. Perhaps one of their relatives claimed volumes 1-2 of the scrapbooks which may have contained some of this missing information about Ella. If they are still intact, perhaps they are sitting in someone's attic. If so, I hope my blogging about them assist in their discovery one day.
The art portfolios of Lillian Tiffany Rose have been discovered in two locations. Volumes 3,5,6 are now housed at an auction house in Accord, NY and Vol. 4 with a family in Pennsylvania.
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