For someone who shunned publicity and died 56 years ago, Kate Buckingham, one of Chicago’s great eccentrics, certainly has been in the news a lot recently.
In October, the overwhelming monument to Alexander Hamilton in Lincoln Park, built with a $1 million trust fund she left for that purpose, was torn down.
Then on Nov. 1 an exhibition celebrating the Art Institute of Chicago’s 100th birthday opened with a room devoted to art objects left to the museum by Buckingham and her family.
And a few days later, the Chicago Park District announced that this summer it would dismantle and rebuild Grant Park’s Buckingham Fountain, built by Kate Buckingham in 1927 in memory of her brother.
Little-remembered today, Buckingham was a larger-than-life character in her day. She was an heiress, a patrician with a blunt, plain-spoken manner that was a bridge from the city’s pioneer past into the 20th Century.
If it is possible to be flamboyant and modest at the same time, she was that too. She was a very private woman who put up spectacularly public monuments.
More Top Picks Best House Slippers For Men
Never married and the last survivor of her family, Buckingham knew the power of the considerable fortunes made in Chicago in grain elevators and banking and left to her by her grandfather, father and brother.
She spent it freely and usually wisely and took great pleasure in changing her mind frequently about who would control it and how it would be used after she died.
“I feel fine today,” she once remarked in a note to a friend. “Just had a new hairdo, a cocktail and made a new will.”
She demanded that her name be removed from the Social Register and avoided society reporters, therefore far less is known about Buckingham than about her contemporary, Bertha Honore Palmer, another great patron of the arts.
But in her lifetime Buckingham was a familiar sight at the city’s great cultural events, faithfully attending exhibition openings, the symphony and the opera, all of which she generously supported.
When she attended such occasions, Buckingham, tall, white-haired and regal, usually was accompanied by an entourage of young artists on whom she lavished attention and financial support.
When a distant relative from Oklahoma, Joseph Benton, showed promise as an operatic tenor, she took him under her wing. He became Giuseppe Bentonelli, training and performing in Europe and at the Chicago Grand Opera.
When he took a starring role in the Chicago company’s 1934 production of “La Traviata,” a newspaper reporter couldn’t resist watching for Buckingham’s reaction.
Buckingham, the reporter noted, smiled with satisfaction from the sixth row at Bentonelli’s capable performance but appeared upset by “the unbecoming reddish-brown” hairpiece he wore.
“Scalp him,” Buckingham whispered, evidently a bit too loudly, to the amusement of others around her. “He looks like an Oklahoma rabbit hunter in that wig.”
Buckingham’s lack of airs and her love of fine art were a combination that apparently grew from her pioneering family’s rise with Chicago from a frontier boom town into a city.
She was born in Ohio in 1858, and a year later her family moved to Chicago, where her maternal grandfather, Solomon Sturges, had put up one of the city’s first grain elevators and made his fortune. Her father, Ebenezer Buckingham, went on to make even a larger fortune building grain elevators, banks and the South Side elevated railway.
Coming from such a family, Buckingham was imbued with an appreciation of the American dream of rising to success and riches from humble beginnings.
But growing up in a wealthy household, she and her brother, Clarence, and sister, Lucy Maud, were taught about the finer things in life, too, often during extensive European touring holidays.
Kate and Clarence especially came to develop eyes for art, forming lifelong habits of collecting on their travels.
They were collecting at the same time as two other early benefactors of the Art Institute, Bertha Honore Palmer and Martin Ryerson. Altogether, the four left the Art Institute some of its most admired, valuable and inspired collections.
None of the Buckingham children married, and after their father died in 1912, each was independently wealthy. When Clarence died suddenly in 1913, his estate of $1.5 million was divided between the sisters. When Lucy Maud died in 1920, Kate inherited the $2.5 million Lucy Maud left.
Then in her 60s and alone in the world, Buckingham continued her world travels and her incessant collecting.
In the 1920s developer Howard Van Doren Shaw announced that he was putting up an elegant cooperative apartment building facing Lincoln Park at 2450 N. Lakeview Ave., still standing as 2450 Lakeview Cooperative.
Traveling in Europe while it was being built, Shaw cabled Buckingham that he had taken an option to buy two complete rooms from a famous castle and wondered if she wanted to buy one of them.
“I will buy both,” she cabled Shaw, “one for the Art Institute and one for the apartment you are building for me.”
She indeed installed the castle room in the new apartment, which was to become her final home. Inexplicably but characteristically, she added a final, jarring touch by insisting on placing her favorite old rocking chair in the midst of all the medieval, Gothic glory.
During her frequent forays to Europe, Buckingham used to marvel at public fountains. In 1924 she hit on the idea of establishing in Grant Park a memorial to her brother, a gift to the city of one of the world’s largest fountains. It was based on the design of a fountain at Versailles, near Paris.
She commissioned Edward H. Bennett as principal architect. To adorn the fountain basin, Parisian sculptor Marcel Loyau made four colossal pairs of bronze seahorses, which in 1927 won the French government’s Prix National, France’s most prestigious art award.
Just before the fountain was completed in the summer of 1927, Buckingham, then 69, was at the construction site every night. She experimented herself with the colored glass lenses that projected lights onto the spouts of water.
She made a rare public appearance at the the formal opening of the fountain, a highly publicized affair attended by 50,000 people on Aug. 26, 1927.
More Top Picks Best Leather Iphone Cases
Despite her great public works, Buckingham was so successful at keeping out of the limelight that few people recognized her in public. One day she stopped in at a downtown bank where, many years before, she had been a major stockholder.
Trying to withdraw money, she realized she had forgotten to bring along proper identification. She tried to explain who she was to the teller, who suggested that Buckingham get one of the bank employees who knew her to vouch for her.
Glancing around, Buckingham snapped, “They’re all dead.”
By the time she died, she had tied most of the loose ends for her elaborate gifts to the city she loved. The bulk of the artwork she and her brother had collected went to the Art Institute, although she insisted that the gifts be in the name of her brother and sister.
She also provided handsome trust funds with her gifts to make sure that they were looked after in perpetuity without cost to taxpayers. The $300,000 fund for Buckingham Fountain, for instance, now is worth $2.2 million, and its income is paying for the fountain’s rebuilding.
It is as if, 56 years after her death in 1937, she still is able to give voice to her tastes and ideas on cultural and historic matters.
Modest and self-effacing, Kate Buckingham probably would take exception to that. She once bridled angrily when a friend suggested that she didn’t take enough credit for her generosity to the city.
“I never did anything more than I should as a Chicagoan,” she said.