CAROLINE ANN STEWART
July 21, 1952 – December 2, 2022
Louis St. Lewis took this picture of Ann, which he later used for an article about her in Raleigh Metro Magazine:
“Ann Stewart was destined to have an exciting life and share her passion for art. I can’t think of any other person who has been featured as a ‘Youthquaker’ in “Vogue,” has flown across the country on Malcolm Forbes’ gold jet, “The Capitalist Tool,” and has had a private viewing of artwork in both the public and private quarters of the White House conducted by the President and First Lady personally. . . . ”
Ann outside the White House
Ann’s grandfather, the beloved UNC Chancellor Robert B. House, was a mastermind of the creation of the NC Art Society with a view of establishing a proper art museum for the State. Decades later, after the current museum had become a reality, Ann served several terms on the Board of the Art Society. She initiated a visionary show of video art by Iranian-born Shirin Neshat that was canceled for budgetary reasons. She persuaded the NCMA to undertake its first photography exhibit by a North Carolina artist with Bill Bamberger’s photographs of the closing of the White Furniture Company, with the workers of the closed factory bused to the Museum for the opening. This lady truly has art in her veins.”
And as John Rosenthal told Louis for that article:
“Ann understands and appreciates that a good photograph is an intersection where reality and fiction meet. She likes photographs that ‘THINK’. She likes to be surprised by the collision between what a photograph sees and what is imagined.”
Artist and photographer John T. Hill is donating his entire archive of Edna Lewis in Ann’s honor to the Southern Historical Collection of the UNC Library. Ann had many, many exhibitions in the libraries of UNC and donated a permanent collection of photographs by the eminent artists she represented to the RB House Undergraduate Library.
Another artist’s view of Ann, this time from Frances Mayes, author of Under The Tuscan Sun, from her book A Place In The World:
“Ann’s house—one of the oldest in Chapel Hill. Prim and upright, facing historic Franklin Street, which should have been protected from traffic but was not. All the lovely old houses pounded by noise. You can imagine the former leafy neighborhood of Yore, gracious professors’ homes, but now most have become sororities and fraternities, who were allowed willy-nilly expansions so that Ann’s house is the petunia in the pumpkin patch. During fall rush, as we sit out on the backyard patio sampling Ann and Randall’s exquisite hors d’oeuvres, we hear the Chi Omega (ah, my old sorority!) sisters chanting about how great they are. I’m sure they are. Randall, a trial lawyer, will bring up politics and soon we’re raving, loud as the coeds. Ann grew up here, adored her grandfather, whose house this was. He is revered as an enlightened Chancellor of the University of North Carolina. There’s the original sprigged wallpapers against which Ann has hung, above her grandmother’s piano, and oversized photograph of an androgynous child in drifty white, and a dramatic shot of wildfires raging across California in the narrow hallway. There’s a shot of a prisoner at Guantánamo and a portrait of Edna Lewis, one of Ann’s idols. Who can explain the back sunporch furnished with tramp art—pyramidal squat table and floor lamps made from popsicle sticks, other tables from crates, and humpy cane furniture. A hanging lamp from pick-up sticks. At her oval dining table, Ann lights many votives. Because Ann is droll, a perfectionist, and likes to surprise, we sit down to eat what we’ve never tasted before, a little soup of radishes and curry, quail stuffed with pecans and herbs, long simmered in cognac, a tian of vegetables arranged like a mosaic. Monograms on vintage linen napkins rise like veins on the hands of Grandmother House. And always flowers. Not roses or sunflowers but seductive ranunculus and anemones in julep cups. The past has been brought along, not sent to the attic. The grandparents, long interred, could join us for dinner.”
Family and love were the watchwords of Ann’s beginnings in the Franklin Street home of her grandparents Robert Burton House and Harriet Palmer House and her parents Caroline House Stewart and William Stanton Stewart.
As her grandfather wrote to her in a birthday note in 1970 about a lecture, he gave in 1952:
“I made this lecture in 1952, the very year you were born. It treats of the things we have enjoyed together and I began to carry you in my arms, then in your carriage, then in your stroller, all among the nature and the people everywhere in Chapel Hill from the brook in the Arboretum. Then we walked together and visited all sorts of places. It deals with books from the times you sat in my lap and I read to you, till the time we sat together and dramatized stories from Homer to Robert Frost to Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Also, much of the Bible. Hence you ought to have this for your birthday when you are 18 and I am 78. All love. . . .”
Ann was herself a gifted writer and one of her passions was cooking. She wrote a regular column on food and cooking for the Spectator Magazine. She was in a cooking group led by Judith Olney that included Georgia and Carroll Kyser, Jenny Fitch and Bill Neal. Around this time Bill Neal was the chef at the Chapel Hill Country Club and Ann was his assistant. Bill and his wife Moreton went on to create La Residence, then a farmhouse located where Fearrington House is now.
“Randall and I amazingly made it to the Farmers’ Market before the 7:00 a.m. opening bell today. The farmers, almost all on social media, have been tempting us all week with Memorial Day weekend offerings. We succeeded in getting the very first of the sungold tomatoes, a thrilling warm-up for the red ones ahead. Plus, sugar snaps, strawberries, fresh shelled English peas, beets and carrots in all the colors, and lots of georgous flowers, including peonies. And the always delicious and positively political bread from our favorite vendor, which I posted about today:
#whatethebreadsaid #chickenbridgebakery #carborrofarmersmaket #votelikeyourlifedependsonit. ”
The Chapel Hill Historical Society published a calendar in 2009 with a tribute by Ann to Hallie Webb Nunn:
“For over 40 years, Hallie Webb Nunn ran the kitchen, producing some of the best Southern cooking imaginable for our large and extended family and for many University guests who came regularly to visit. . . .
My grandfather’s long tenure as Chancellor, and the decades that Hallie cooked in his kitchen, were long before the concept of ‘catering’ – much less ‘development’ – took on their present meaning. But I remember well the hum and buzz at our house and the steam and stir in the kitchen when ‘Uncle Mot,’ John Motley Morehead, came to dinner. . . .
Georgia Kyser, a regular guest at our table, describes Hallie’s cooking a ‘Southern fancy.’ What is remarkable to me is that it was never not perfect. Everything was always delicious and also very pretty – a piece of parsley here, toasted almonds on top, a shake of paprika for color – and those
biscuits: at once crisp and moist, dented with three pricks of a fork, baked then broiled to a perfect shade of tan, and hiding within, a melting pat of butter. Like magic – from the four glowing burners on the stove and the three oven racks below – a meal came together all at once. And then it came steaming to the table. . . .
I asked Hallie how she managed, almost daily, to create these flawless feasts. To me, her answer so perfectly describes the tenor of the household. ‘Everyone kept busy and loved what they were doing.’ My grandfather, who began each day at 4 a.m., took a midday break from the University to come home for lunch. Afterwards, he covered his bald head with a stocking cap, made by my grandmother, and took a short nap before returning to the worldly rigors of South Building.”
From 4:00 a.m. on, Chancellor House studied literature and classics, but at 6:00 a.m. each day, he took a break and made Ann’s breakfast. No surprise then, later in life, Ann returned home to Chapel Hill in order to take over the care of her grandfather for the final years of his life.
She wanted to do more, planned to do more, and did not want to go. In the end she felt as Dylan Thomas proclaimed:
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
