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Geoffrey Dodge (1887–1941)

Geoffrey Dodge (1887–1941)

Geoffrey Dodge was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 8, 1887. He was the fifth son of Arthur Murray Dodge (1852–1896) and Josephine Marshall Jewell Dodge (1855–1928), president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. Dodge graduated from Yale University in 1909 and then took an administrative position in the U.S. embassy in Argentina, where Robert Woods Bliss was secretary of the legation. Dodge moved to Paris by 1914, the year he began a proposed eighteen-month journey with Charles Haseltine Carstairs (1886–1919) to hunt and study the geography, anthropology, fauna, and flora of central Asia, visiting Turkey, the Caucasus, Turkestan, Persia, and India. With the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to Paris in December and began working for various wartime charities. He later became secretary of the Division of Help to Hospitals of the American Red Cross is Paris. Dodge became a chevalier in the French Legion of Honor and received the Serbian Cross for his relief work during the war. After the war, he opened an art, antiques, and interior design business on the rue Bayard, later moving to the Place Vendôme. He assisted Mildred Barnes Bliss in the decoration of the Blisses’ Parisian apartment, Stockholm House, and Dumbarton Oaks, and he frequently recommended artworks and decorative art objects to the Blisses. He became the agent of the American artist, Walter Gay. In 1939, he moved to Somerset Bridge, Bermuda, where he died on January 20, 1941.


James N. Carder, "Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss and American Art," in Sacred Art, Secular Context: Objects of Art from the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., Accompanied by American Paintings from the Collection of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, Asen Kirin, ed. (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005), 149–50.

William Rieder, Charmed Couple: The Art and Life of Walter and Matilda Gay (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 186–87.