VANDERBILT, GERTRUDE

VANDERBILT, GERTRUDE. [1894] Daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, she was heiress to one of New York’s great shipping and railroad fortunes. She married a wealthy banker, Harry Payne Whitney, and later strayed from her social set into Greenwich Village, where she kept a studio for sculpture. Her works and those of other American artists later found a home when the artist- socialite founded the Whitney Museum of American Art. This entry, in which the young heiress, Gertrude Vanderbilt, describes her own place in the world, is found among the unpublished papers of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney at the Archives of American Art.