Mabel ringling biography

The true force behind the Ca d'Zan aesthetic, Mable Ringling made Sarasota her dream home

     The only thing that can be said with certainty about Mable Ringling is that she was beautiful. Although she never agreed to be photographed by the press, studio portraits and family snapshots show her to have been a slender, dark-haired woman with fine bones and porcelain skin.
     Mable gave but one interview in her lifetime, in which she talked to a reporter for a newspaper in Seattle about traveling with the circus. She never spoke publicly about her personal life.
     Even the most basic facts are open to question. She was probably born on March 4, 1875, but an archivist from Mable's hometown of Moons, Ohio, once set the date at March 16, 1874. The Ellis Island Website shows that she began to whittle years off her age with each trans-Atlantic crossing as John Ringling's wife, which she became in 1905. It's uncertain how, or even where, they met.
     Mable, born Armilda Burton, is believed to have left her parents' farming community home when she was 15. She probably lived in Chicago for a while, working as a waitress or a store clerk, and eventually relocated to Atlantic City, NJ, where she most likely met John.
     Whatever commercial motives John had for Ca d'Zan, for Mable it was a home -if only a seasonal one. Although she spent time at their summer residence in New Jersey after 1918, Mable followed her husband's gypsy itinerary with the circus for much of each year. Ca d'Zan was to be the place where she, at least, could unwind for three months at the end of the circus season.
     As John involved himself in all the financial aspects of the project, Mable invested an artist's passion in its design and decoration. While she worked with several assistants, including architect Dwight Baum, Ca d'Zan

American art collector

Mable Burton Ringling (March 14, 1875 – June 8, 1929) was an American art collector who with her husband created the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

Biography

She was born in Moons, Ohio, on March 14, 1875. She had four sisters and one brother. Mable left her Ohio factory job and headed to Chicago in pursuit of a husband. There in Chicago, she met John Nicholas Ringling. They wed in Hoboken, New Jersey, when Mable was 30 and John was 39 years old. John and Mabel, in 1924, began the creation of their dream home in Sarasota, Florida. They called the house Cà d'Zan, meaning 'House of John'. Mable, however, played a much larger role in the creation of the home. In fact, the blueprints were titled Mrs. John Ringling's Home. Two years and one and a half million dollars later the home was finished. Mable hand picked items for her home at estate auctions and on her travels to Europe. She filled the home with Venetian style decor and several shades of green, because green was her favorite color. Her rose garden was her passion, and she chose to have her room face her beloved rose garden rather than face the Sarasota Bay. John and Mabel never had children, but they had a passion for their animals. Mable had gates installed in the home, so the pets could roam through the house while being kept out of the eating areas. She died on June 8, 1929, at the age of fifty-four due to Addison's Disease and Diabetes. In 1991, John and Mable Ringling and his sister, Ida Ringling North, were moved and buried at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, just in front and to the right of the Ca d'Za

Art museum in Sarasota, Florida, US

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is the official state art museum of Florida, located in Sarasota, Florida. It was established in 1927 as the legacy of Mable Burton Ringling and John Ringling for the people of Florida. Florida State University assumed governance of the museum in 2000.

The institution offers 21 galleries of European paintings as well as Cypriot antiquities and Asian, American, and contemporary art. The museum's art collection currently consists of more than 10,000 objects that include a variety of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and decorative arts from ancient through contemporary periods and from around the world. The most celebrated items in the museum are 16th–20th-century European paintings, including a collection of Peter Paul Rubens paintings. Other artists represented include Benjamin West, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Kostabi, Diego Velázquez, Paolo Veronese, Rosa Bonheur, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Giuliano Finelli, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Frans Hals, Nicolas Poussin, Joseph Wright of Derby, Thomas Gainsborough, Eugène Boudin, and Benedetto Pagni.

In all, more than 150,000 square feet (14,000 m) have been added to the campus, which includes the art museum, circus museum, and Ca' d'Zan, the Ringlings' mansion, which has been restored, along with the historic Asolo Theater. New additions to the campus include the McKay Visitor's Pavilion, the Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion exhibiting studio glass art, the Johnson-Blalock Education Building housing The Ringling Art Library and Cuneo Conservation Lab, the Tibbals Learning Center complete with a miniature circus, the Searing Wing, a 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m) gallery for special exhibitions attached to the art museum, the Chao Center for Asian Art, and the Monda Gallery for Contemporary Art.

History

John (1866 -1936) and Mable (1875 - 1929) Ringling: Short Biographies

John Ringling test was born in McGregor, Iowa, on 31 May 1866, the sixth of seven surviving sons and daughter born to August and Marie Salomé (Juliar) Ringling. Five of the brothers joined together and started the Ringling Bros. Circus in 1884.

Although John began his career at 16 performing as a song and dance man, he moved to overseeing the circus route. After he persuaded his brothers to convert the show from wagons to rail in 1890, The New York Times observed, "he became a human encyclopedia on road and local conditions." It was a driving ambition that propelled the Ringling Bros. Circus into a world-class show crossing the country in nearly 100 rail-cars each season.

The acquisition of the Barnum & Bailey show in 1907 made the Ringling brothers a dominant force in the American circus scene. Profits from this boom period of the circus gave Ringling the initial wealth he then invested in rail lines, Western oil, and some 30 other enterprises. He also invested in Madison Square Garden and became a member of the board of directors.

In the 1920s, Ringling joined the Florida land boom, buying and developing land on the Sarasota Keys. He attempted to make Sarasota a fashionable metro-resort to rival those on Florida's popular East Coast.

With his wife, Mable, Ringling began accumulating a collection of Old Master paintings that they displayed in their homes in New York City; Alpine, New Jersey; and Sarasota. In New York's crowded auction rooms, they found a rich source of furnishings, tapestries, and paintings from the homes of wealthy and prominent families. In the 1920s, the Ringlings traveled annually to Europe to locate new circus acts, while also making purchases of art objects.

An imposing figure, John Ringling stood more than six feet tall. In speech, he was soft- spoken and reserved to the point that one journalist wrote,