For years, Urania Sheldon Nott was an afterthought.
She was aging none so gracefully. Hanging around Union College, but not too visible.
“I never noticed” her, said James Underwood, the school's interim president.
Urania, see, is a portrait of the third wife of Eliphalet Nott, one of the school's first leaders. Her visage was on display, unappreciated, in the President's House.
But when Nott finally caught Underwood's eye, he knew at once: She had to come out of hiding.
And she's getting one of the most prime pieces of real estate at the school. Her uncompromising visage, put on canvas by the renowned portraitist Thomas Sully, now hangs behind Chester A. Arthur's desk in the president's office. As far as anybody at the campus knows, it's the first time a woman's portrait has been displayed there. The painting was unveiled last week.
Urania's perch behind the president is an appropriate spot for her. When she married Eliphalet Nott in 1842, he was 69 and she 35. By 1860, Nott began to suffer a series of strokes and his wife took more and more control of the school.
Details of her role are scanty. Jonathan Pearson, a Union professor and treasurer, wrote in an 1860 diary entry that Eliphalet Nott “is completely under 'Uranie's' thumb now, and has to do just as she says.”
Not everybody was thrilled about that. Some thought she had too much influence over the school's coffers, and that she should step aside for the official second-in-command.
After Nott died, Urania continued living in the president's house, doing community service, and was given a glowing tribute upon her death in 1886.
Union archivist Ellen Fladger said the lack of information about Urania isn't unusual. “I think the kinds of things that were left behind about women were not necessarily the same things that were left behind about men,” she said.
Nothing about their May-December courtship has been found, nor about their life together.
Yet even though she didn't leave a long paper trail, when people see her, they're taken.
Her skin has a rosy luminescence. Her gaze is piercing. You can just feel the softness of her fur stole, the delicacy of her lace collar and cuffs.
Underwood said he's been asking people to give their impressions of her in one word. His choice: Striking. Others he's collected are “formidable,” “judgmental,” “sorrowful.”
Cynthia Luk, the conservationist who restored the painting at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, was taken as well.
“I loved this portrait,” she said. “I work on many, and very few of them really catch my interest in a big way. And this one did.”
Problems with the painting added to the allure. The varnish on top had gone dull, and old retouchings weren't up to snuff. “Even through all those layers, you could tell what a striking and important picture” it was, Luk said.