Hay, John (1838-1905)
Role:Dates:
Portrait Location: John Hay Library 310
Artist: Sargent, John Singer (1856-1925)
Portrait Date:
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 29 1/2 x 24 in. (74.93 x 60.96 cm.)
Framed Dimensions: 38 x 32 1/2 in. (96.52 x 82.55 cm.)
Brown Portrait Number: 228
Brown Historical Property Number: 638
John Hay, born in Salem, Indiana, was the third son of Dr. Charles Hay and Helen Leonard. He studied at a private Episcopal school, and in 1855, entered Brown, where his grandfather Leonard had graduated in 1792. Although he could have graduated within two years, he found the collections in the college's libraries much too enticing, and stayed another year. At graduation, he was Class Poet, and only reluctantly returned to his family in Illinois. In a letter to poetess Nora Perry back in Providence Hay wrote,
"If you loved Providence as I do, you would congratulate yourself hourly upon your lot. I turn my eyes Eastward, like an Islamite, when I feel prayerful. The city of Wayland and Williams, that smiles upon its beauty glassed in the still mirror of the Narragansett waves, is shrined in my memory as a far-off mystical Eden, where the women were lovely and spirituelle, and the men were jolly and brave; where I used to haunt the rooms of the Athenaeum, made holy by the presence of the royal dead?."
Hay remained in the Midwest, studying law in a practice located next door to the office of Abraham Lincoln. Shortly afterward, Lincoln was in Washington and Hay was invited to be his private secretary. In 1864, Hay was commissioned to the army, quickly rising to the rank of colonel. A year later he joined the American legation in Paris, where he remained two years, followed by tours of duty in Vienna and Madrid. Upon returning to the United States, he married Clara L. Stone, the daughter of wealthy Amasa Stone of Cleveland, whose fortune he managed while devoting himself to writing. In 1878 he returned to Washington as assistant secretary of state, but three years later decided to give up politics to travel. When his friend William McKinley became president in 1897, Hay was appointed ambassador to England and, in 1898, was called back to Washington as secretary of state. In the years prior to his death, he oversaw the end of the Spanish-American War, the "Open Door" policy with China, the Alaska boundary treaty, and the Panama Canal treaty.