Charlotte Osgood Mason

Charlotte Osgood Mason ( born May 18, 1854 in Princeton (New Jersey), † April 15, 1946 in New York City ) was an American philanthropist and patroness of writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Life

Charlotte Louise Quick was the daughter of Peter Quick and Phoebe Van der Veer, who died in 1864. Charlotte married at age 32 to 24 years older doctor Rufus Osgood Mason, who brought a daughter from his first marriage, was interested in hypnosis and is considered a forerunner of parapsychology. After seventeen years of marriage, Rufus died in 1903. Charlotte had taken part in his world of ideas and published in 1907 to their only known signature, the journal article " The Passing of a Prophet. A True Narrative of Death and Life "in the North American Review. Mason was now a wealthy widow, who with their financial resources promoted a number of artists and institutions, and it went about their own philosophical and social ideas.

As a philanthropist, she supported the ethnographic work of Natalie Curtis, which recorded the music of the North American Indian population and this ethnomusicological work published in 1907. With Curtis, it extended their interest on the African American music, and Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954), professor at Howard University, her mediated the artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

In contrast to Carl Van Vechten, who also sought a personal friendship with his African-American friend who preserved the old lady distance and was inspired by the artists who went into a dependence on her as " Godmother " titulieren. In November 1927 she became the patroness of Langston Hughes, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The ethnographic working Zora Neale Hurston was sustained by their between 1927-1931 financially, which went so far that Hurston had to give in return for a generous pay and equipped with car and film camera on the right to self- publish the results of their collecting, because Mason was convinced that only she could judge the publication. This, however, Mason also made sure that Hurston's folklore collection "From Mules and Men" not already tattered before publication. The employment relationship finally ended in 1931, and Hurston enhanced her literary work. In his autobiography, The Big Sea Langston Hughes describes that he enjoyed the patronage of the state for a while, because he had no more to do together as a material that has been Masons requirements of a " primitive black art " justice. Mason expected only "primitive" African-American art, which should still have some roots in Africa, to an art of blacks in the U.S., she was not interested. Among the artists who benefited from their patronage, were Claude McKay, Arthur Fauset, Hall Johnson, Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthé and José Miguel Covarrubias.

The last thirteen years of her life Mason was sickbed at New York Hospital and tied to the help of her sister, the sculptor Cornelia Van Auken Chapin (1893-1972) and her niece, the poet Katherine Garrison Chapin, instructed that also did their correspondence. Mason tried more likely to work in the background, so it has finally decreed that the New York Times devoted her no obituary.