BEDTIME STORY, PART II

Where would a Dilettante be without his readers?  Tracing design sources is a great interest of mine, but sometimes the answers elude me.  When I mentioned in last week's post that the remarkable bed of former Red Sox owner Thomas Yawkey rang a faint bell, but I couldn't remember why, Toby Worthington stepped up to the plate, as it were, with the answer:

The Yawkey bed was based on plate 41 in Thomas Sheraton's The Cabinet Maker's and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, published in 1791---"A Summer Bed in Two Compartments". (above)

Thomas Yawkey's bedroom at 992 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, photographed in 1935 (MCNY)

Sheraton, along with his near contemporary Thomas Hepplewhite, and the earlier Thomas Chippendale, was one of the three great furniture designers (four, if one counts the architect Robert Adam, who often had Chippendale execute his designs), and like the others, spread his style and fame by publishing pattern books that could be used by other cabinetmakers.   

Designs for bed posts from Thomas Chippendale's  The Cabinet-Maker's  Directory

Just as with the architectural pattern books of the era, like Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion, these books provided suggested designs, often with mix or match options, along with rules for achieving correct proportions, that helped many a provincial cabinetmaker turn out pieces of compelling beauty, rarely making a wrong move.

Two bed designs, with suggestions for hangings, by Thomas Chippendale

 The Yawkey bed does not appear to be antique in the photos, but rather a decorator's inspiration carried out by a talented cabinetmaker.   Rather than the neo-classical design of Sheraton's bed, the rococco cornice details are earlier, and more Chippendale in inspiration. as seen in the plates above from Thomas Chippendales The Cabinetmaker's Directory.

Cornice designs by Chippendale

Readers may remember the Chinoiserie bedroom in 'Huntland', the Joseph Thomas house in Virginia, with its dramatic bed later owned by Doris Duke, the design taken directly from plates in Chippendale's Directory.

The bedroom at 'Huntland', and  design sources for the bed, below

Plates from Chippendale's Director from Metropolitan Museum website

MRS. ASTOR'S THRONE

Since the death of doyenne Brooke Astor, the longtime queen of New York Society, those who care about such things have wondered and discussed who might be her successor on the throne---or if  New York society could even be ruled again by just one person.  About all this I know little, sitting up here in Down East Maine, where paying the oil bills or the declining price of lobster worry one far more than who will preside over the leaderless elite of Manhattan.  

This wonderful photograph pictures neither Mrs. Astor nor her throne, but is a scene captured  at another end-of-era auction, the effects of Miss Julia Berwind at 'The Elms' in Newport Rhode Island.  The photograph is by Nancy Sirkis from her marvelous book 'Newport, Pleasures and Palaces' (Viking/Studio, 1963) 

An auction of Mrs. Astor's lesser effects was held three weeks ago at Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York.  Her leftover possessions were typical  goods of a well placed lady of the second half of the 20th century---pretty and decorative, with a French accent. Several friends and acquaintances attended the auction, and depending on whom one asks, and what they hoped to buy, prices were either terribly high or terribly low.  My own observation is that the sale followed the current market---where style and eye appeal trump age or quality, or even provenance--- many of the pieces were chosen for her by Parish-Hadley.  I scratched my head at some of the prices---$5500 for a Metropolitan Museum reproduction of St. Gauden's iconic statue of Diana---available in the Met Gift shop for considerably less----down to a mere $15.00 for the Louis XV style Chaise Percée pictured below.

I was immediately reminded of another wonderful Sirkis photograph, of an elegant woman examining a chaise Percée in a bathroom at 'The Elms'.


And then, in a flash, it came to me.  Whoever paid that $15.00 for the chaise Percée now sits on Mrs. Astor's throne. All Hail.  Society need wonder no longer.

OBELISKS, REGRETS, DEBTS, SWANS, BULFINCH & A LITTLE OGDEN CODMAN

I often tell my customers, when they clearly love something but are wavering in their decision, that I never regret what I buy nearly as much as what I don't buy.  And it's not a sales pitch.  I mean it, and learned the truth of it from bitter experience.

I won't list all of my many regrets here, but remembering one in particular this afternoon gave me the impetus for today's post.  Years ago, I was vacationing with a few of my very favorite people in Key West.  Anyone familiar with the snowy weather and below normal temperatures here in Maine over the past week might think that not being there now is cause enough for regret, but stick with me.  There used to be, on a corner of Fleming St., an antiques shop, I forget the name, run by a man who had once had a shop on Madison Avenue.  His extraordinarily refined and entertaining taste was reflected in his wares.  I bought quite a few things there over the years----a set of black and white 18th century Creil faience plates with elegant black transfer scenes of French Chateaux comes immediately to mind---and wish I'd bought more.  One winter, while looking in his dusty window, I saw something quite thrilling.  It was a large gray and white marble obelisk, probably a model for a cenotaph, and it bore the engraved legend 'James Swan, An Honest Man'.  I assumed that it referred to James Swan, a colorful 18th century Boston financier who had been a major player in the affairs of the early Republic, and is now best remembered for spending the last 22 years of his life in a French Debtor's prison.  The obelisk, about 18" high, was $700.00, not out of reason, but I had a moment of irrational thrift (ask me how much was probably spent on martinis all over Key West in that same ten day period. Actually, don't), and I didn't buy it.   As soon as I had returned to Maine, I  realized my mistake, and immediately called the shop, only to find that the obelisk had been sold a few days before to a committee seeking a present for the outgoing director of the Key West Art Museum.  I was stricken.  Can anyone say 'Rosebud'?

James Swan, by Gilbert Stuart, 1795.  Collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

But enough of my material regrets.  James Swan was born in Scotland, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1765, where he went to work in a counting house.  When Revolution came, he was a member of the Sons of Liberty and participated in the Boston Tea Party.  Married to heiress Hepzibah Clarke, one of Boston's most fashionable women, he succeeded in a variety of business enterprises, from privateering during the Revolution to real estate and finance.  Mrs. Swan was a founder of the exclusive Sans Souci Club, Mr. Swan a member of the wartime assembly, and of the Scots Charitable Society.  In 1786, he purchased what is now Swan's Island in Blue Hill Bay near here, with an eye to its settlement and development ( two centuries later, it remains a fishing community of a few hundred souls, with a small summer colony).

Hepzibah Clarke Swan by Gilbert Stuart, 1808  (MFA)

In 1787, over-extended and in debt from his many ventures, Swan went to France for the first time, where he successfully conducted much business, including the structuring of millions of dollars in debt owed France by the United States.  His entree was impeccable, with letters of introduction to the Marquis de LaFayette.  Swan formed Swan, Gallarde et cie, a firm that supplied the new French Government after the Revolution.  While there, he purchased elegant French furniture that had been made for a French Musketeer, Marc-Antoine Thierry de Ville d'Avray general administrator of furniture for the French Crown, whose great misfortune it had been to order the pieces before the Revolution, and when he was imprisoned, it was seized and auctioned by the new government.  Back home in Boston, Mrs. Swan's elegant modern French wares were the talk of local society.

Pieces from the collection of French furniture and accessories purchased in France by James Swan.  For a Boston Globe article about the restoration of the furniture and re-creation of the silk lampas upholstery, click HERE

 James Swan returned to America in 1794.  After traveling to Philadelphia, where he sat for Gilbert Stuart, he returned to Boston in 1796 and commenced construction of a country house in Dorchester quite unlike any other in the area, its design clearly informed by the stylish neoclassical pavilions he had seen in France, with the extraordinary feature of a two story circular drawing room, 32 feet in diameter, with a domed ceiling.  Though the architect is unknown, it is widely assumed to be Charles Bulfinch, who had recently completed a country house just down the road for his cousin, Mrs. Perez Morton. Whomever the designer, it is clear that Col. Swan's architectural taste, like that of another American, Thomas Jefferson, had been much informed and inspired by his sojourn in France.

The James Swan House in Dorchester.  The central drum originally had a balustrade also, and without it, the oddity of the house is further emphasized.

A rear view of the Swan House shows the tall windows of the two story dining hall on axis with the domed drawing room on the front, as well as the high basement with kitchen and service areas

First floor plan of the Swan house, drawn by Ogden Codman (Codman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Cross section of the Swan House, drawn by Ogden Codman (Codman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In addition to her French furnishings, Mrs. Swan commissioned pieces, such as this games table, from Boston's finest cabinetmakers.

Still in debt, and in trouble with his business partner, Swan returned to France in 1798.  This stay was not as successful as his first, and in 1808, he was taken to debtor's prison, where, contradictorily, he lived in some luxury until just before his death in 1830.

A detail of the drawing room mantel of the Swan House.  The mantel appears to be of the type imported to America from Leghorn Italy

Meanwhile, back at home, Mrs. Swan, with some business head of her own, was apparently not left destitute.  She was one of the original Mt. Vernon Proprietors, developers of Beacon Hill, where on Chestnut St. she built a row of three elegant brick townhouses as dowry for her daughters.  Famously included in the deed for those houses was a height restriction for the houses backing up to them on Mt. Vernon St., which to this day are but one story high. In Dorchester, surrounded by her elegant French furnishings, she played hostess to Marquis de LaFayette when he visited America in 1824.

The three houses on Chestnut St. on Beacon Hill, built in 1806, 1807 and 1817 by Mrs. Swan for her daughters (AIA Guide to Boston)

The former stable to the Swan houses, restricted by deed to 13 feet in height

I have always been captivated by the Swan house, New England Federal style clapboard in its details and execution, French neoclassical in its inspiration. To my eye it had much in common with the elegant small pavilions of late 18th century Sweden, similarly inspired, with similarly humble materials and scale.  It was one of a group of country houses that appeared in the Boston area after the Revolution, in the new style with circular or oval rooms centering their facades, and radical new plans, so different from the center hall and square rooms of pre-Revolutionary America.  Concurrent with these houses, General Henry Knox, whose youngest daughter Caroline was married to the Swan's son, was building what was then the most palatial house in the Province of Maine, Montpelier at Thomaston, featuring the first oval room in the new style, inspired, perhaps, by the bow front on the White House, under construction at the same time.

19th century stereoptican view of Montpelier, the General Henry Knox mansion in Thomaston, Maine.

Mrs. Swan died in 1825, and as the neighborhood continued to be developed and subdivided, and fell out of fashion, the house declined, and was demolished in the late 1880s. It was not far from the site of the present Dudley St. station of the Boston subway. 

Fortunately, the young Ogden Codman, who was as passionately interested in the architecture of early America as he was that of France, measure and drew the house, thus recording its details for posterity.  The Swan drawing room, with its false dome hidden within the volume of the house obviously made an impression on him, for just a few years later, when he designed the very French neoclassical Rollins Morse cottage in Newport, he used the same feature for the ballroom of that house.  It was far more elaborately decorated than the original, with treillage walls and ceiling, but it would seem, at least to me, inspired by the example at the Swan House.

Pavillon du Bagatelle (Architectural Notecards.com)

The Pavillon du Bagatelle, outside Paris,seen here in an 18th century engraving, was designed by Belanger, was  likely familiar to Swan, and may  have served as inspiration in the design of his country house.  Equally clear is its influence on Codman's design for Villa Rosa, below.  Six degrees of architectural separation

Villa Rosa, the Rollins Morse cottage at Newport, designed by Ogden Codman.  Now demolished, this house was immediately south of the Elms on Bellevue Avenue

The Ballroom at Villa Rosa, like the drawing room at the Swan House, is domed within the volume of the house.

The French furniture was divided amongst Mrs. Swan's heirs, and several pieces, including what was known in the family as the Marie Antoinette bed, are now in the collection of the museum of fine arts.  

As for the obelisk, I never saw it again, but I read that the Swan monument in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston is an obelisk of sandstone, and intend to find out if it resembles the one I didn't buy in Key West all those many years ago.

In other news:  Speaking of Charles Bulfinch, who also designed our State House here in Maine, TPR has brought to my attention this video, a comment on our Governor's unilateral removal of a mural that offended him at the Department of Labor.  Click HERE for the video (and enjoy the sight of the snow that has delayed Spring up here), and HERE for my post on the subject.  Unfortunately, as the Governor is vacationing in Jamaica after three months at his new job,  he missed the 'bombing'.

JCB and the Purple Chair

JCB Sat Here:
The tedium of renovation, of meeting deadlines, and of dealing with the insurance company was splendidly broken a few days ago by a visit from JCB and The Gentleman, bearing wonderful wine and even better conversation (click here for her photos from the visit).  What felicity that the mile between her parent's house and my shop is punctuated by an excellent wine store. In a normal year, one in which I haven't just moved shop and blown up cars, I always have wine glasses on hand for just such visitors, but they were not to be found, so we took some ruby goblets from inventory, and settled in to a variety of chairs----I in a shabby Directoire knock-off, The Gentleman in a Russell Woodward wire chair, and Janet in a bergere upholstered in somewhat startling purple velvet. Elegant she was, green sweater draped around her neck, against a black chinoiserie screen----my camera refused to appear for this Kodak moment while they were here (I think JCB hid it), so instead I can only offer a glimpse of the recently vacated chair.

For the Lady, A purple bergere

For the Gentleman, a Russell Woodward Wire Chair

The Purple Chair
After I took the photo, I started thinking about that purple chair: Who else had sat there? A chair like this one has witnessed many lives.  Usually we can but guess the stories, but in this case, I had some knowledge of the last seventy years of the chair’s history.

I first met the purple chair nearly 40 years ago in the Down East drawing room of Mme. Pierre Monteux, widow of the great conductor who had so famously introduced Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps to a not entirely receptive world. The chair had come to Hancock, Maine, Mme. Monteux’s hometown, by way of San Francisco, where Monteux conducted the San Francisco symphony, after leaving France on the eve of World War II. Left behind in their house at Versailles were most of their furnishings, confiscated and vandalized during Nazi Occupation, and back in America, Mme. Monteux, a woman of great and bold style,  acquired new furnishings for their San Francisco apartment, chic and smart in the style of the day---pale mauve, with jabs of black lacquer and emerald green satin and the chair, upholstered in its unlikely deep purple. After they left San Francisco, everything was shipped to their solid old village house in Hancock---the Venetian chandelier, the lacquer screens, the black and red and green Bessarabian rug, the shimmering mauve satin curtains and pelmets, the French paintings....first time visitors were always stunned, for like Alice through the looking glass, one walked up to the door of this typical Maine house, and passed through to this urbane fantasy, always ready for the tinkle of champagne glasses..

Pierre Monteux

Short and plump, Monteux was known in his family as Chummy, and I remember Mme. once referring to the chair as 'Chummy's Chair'. So, Monteux had sat there. As a young musician, he had met the elderly Brahms. So, a man himself famous in the 20th century, who had known one of the greatest composers of the 19th century had sat in this chair. Who else? Monteux had engaged Marian Anderson to sing with the San Francisco symphony. They had a party in her honor. Had she sat in this chair? Who knows? The Monteuxs entertained many of the leading musicians and society figures in their day----they knew San Francisco bon vivant Whitney Warren, son of the architect of Grand Central. Had he sat here? Monteux's students, Leonard Bernstein, Andre Previn--had they? Monteux's brother-in-law was the society bandleader Meyer Davis. Surely he'd sat here. And I'd sat more than once on a mauve satin love seat, talking to the Monteux's lovely, kind, daughter Nancie, one of my favorite people, as she sat in the purple chair.

I went to dozens of gatherings in that room over the years; many distinguished guests attended. Think Dilettante, think, who sat in that chair then? Sculptress Chenoweth Hall? Maestro Charles Bruck, who carried on Monteux's tradition of teaching at the summer school bearing his name? Hmmm, maybe a certain socialite, distantly related to me by marriage, of whom I think far better now than I did then, when I just saw her as brittle and chic, pursuing shallow ambitions in her Bergdorf perfection?

I'm sorry I don't have a picture of that stylish and improbable room, a bit of 1940's movie set glamor  transported from another time and place to Down East Maine.   I first entered it, for my first grown up party, as a late teenager, only a couple of years after Woodstock, and I can conjure it in my mind still, every objet de vertu, every fold of the curtains, and the wonderful people who were there. Still, I wish I had taken a picture....when one is young, one takes it for granted that the people and places one loves will always be there. Now that I'm older, I know sadly better, but how glad I am that they were----and that for the moment, the purple chair is here to remind me of them on the way to its next act.

Favorite Room: Billy Baldwin & the Green Sconces

While preparing last Saturday's post about an old friend's apartment, I was flipping through The Finest Rooms by America's Greatest Decorators, a wonderful compendium given me back in 1967 when I was fourteen. (Yup, the die was already cast.  Someday I'll tell you about the silk neckerchief I affected that same year.  But be kind when I do.)

Pictured in the book is this wonderful stair hall designed in the 1930's by Billy Baldwin, the master of edited chic.  The interplay of stair carpet runner, the sensational patterned floor , and the wonderful fabric on the chairs is nearly perfect.  Looking at the stair carpet, I think it is safe to guess that Baldwin was familiar with the grand circular stair of the Kersey Coates Reed House in Lake Forest, decorated by Frances Elkins. The interplay of scale between patterns is masterful.  The photo caption gives a hint of the color scheme: "Lacquer, a black and white still modern stair carpet, Dutch in quilted beige linen, a remarkable beige floor in patterned stone, brilliant emerald glass sconces".  Wham! Pow!

The only mystery remaining is what color was that amazing barometer on the wall?  It looks as if its faceted frame is eglomise glass (gilded in reverse), but what color glass?  Black?  Green?  I'm hoping green.

Despite the caption, written 25 years after the hall was photographed, I find myself wondering if the inlaid floor isn't actually Zenitherm, once a favored flooring material of decorators and architects like David Adler, who often used it to stylish effect.

Apologies for the lousy photograph of the sconces--they were on a table top, not on the wall, and I was still figuring out my first primitive digital camera and the concept of resolution, ten years ago. Bad case of old horse, new tricks.

As my seven or eight regular readers know, I enjoy connecting the dots.   It happens that I once owned a pair of those snappy emerald green sconces.  They were sold to me as Victorian, and the seller's idea was that they had perhaps once been arms to a chandelier.  Later, I chanced across an identical pair in clear glass, which were positively known to be Steuben, from the 1930's, making it most likely that these were also.  Their very Vogue Regency style would support the latter. thesis.  Whatever their origin, what really matters in the end was that, like the room above, they were GORGEOUS, and I hope the person who bought them from me is still enjoying them.

Still to come at Down East Dilettante:  My focus returns to New England with 'The Third Mrs. Astor,' 'A Favorite House', 'When Bad Things Happen to Good Houses', and 'Shelter in New England Gardens'

Speaking of Chairs---An Old Friend Reappears

The family antiques business has been going for 45 years, and I have been running it for 25 years now, a temporary gig until I figure out what I want to be when I grow up.  We've been in business long enough that we are beginning to see things we sold years ago coming back into the marketplace.

I discovered an old friend back on the market this evening as I was surfing the auction news over at the always entertaining Homer's Odd, Isn't He.  I realized with a frisson that the Weschler's auction that he was reviewing was  the estate of a beloved long time customer of our shop, a founder of the Washington Antiques Show who died last year at 103.  She was a marvelous woman who had  been a client of the fashionable decorator Mrs. Joseph Weller, who did many of Georgetown's best houses in the middle of the last century (and was the mother of another well-known decorator, Nancy Pierrepont).  The client had a marvelous eye, and the innate knack for placement that was so characteristic of certain ladies of that era.  I recognized a few things that I'd sold her, including this wonderful Regency chair with its swoon inducing painting of Turban clad figures sitting in a landscape,  I'd chased the chair for awhile.  It had been love from the moment I saw that delicious little painting on the back. The eight or nine of you who regularly visit this blog may even remember that I have a slight chair problem.  This one had belonged to friends who inherited it from their grandmother, who had owned a grand estate outside Albany (the chair can be seen in a photograph of the music room of that house in an article in Magazine Antiques, December 1967, should anyone care).

I remember the sale well.   I had brought the chair into the shop, absolutely delighted with it, and it was immediately spotted by my most tiresome customer, a surgeon's wife who summered in a nearby town whose collective denizens are considered by most of us in the pretty things business to be collectively the most annoying customers in the area.  Funny how different communities can take on different personalities.  At any rate, she put the chair on hold, as was her wont.  She then called too many times to beg a better price (for the record, the 1987 price was $325.00).  I turned a cold heart to her pleas, and she finally agreed to take it, but would not be in for several days to pay for it and pick it up (of course), blah blah blah, etc.  Then as was his wont, her husband--like his wife, a pain in the ass (in those gawd awful red trousers with a red gin nose to match)---told her she could absolutely not have the chair.  This was a typical transaction for this customer---hold, whine, renege.  Consider the foregoing to be the Dilettante's Dish on How NOT to be a Favored Customer.  Then, as this drama was winding to its inevitable tiresome conclusion, the favored customer came in, took one look at the chair, said she must have it, could I please put it in the car right now, and her man would bring the check by this afternoon.   And off it went, and the check was delivered by the faithful servant within the hour.  And now, here it is, 22 years later, back on the market.  Think, the dear lady was 81 when she bought it, still taking joy in the pursuit of beauty.  I'm tempted to call Weschler's and leave a bid.....I'm sentimental that way.

Also up at the sale is this Creil transfer ware tray and 4 matching pot de cremes.  I purchased them, along with many other pieces of Creil, my favorite china, at the estate sale of one Mary Meeker Cramer, a Chicago meat packing heiress, whose architect husband Ambrose had been an associate of the great David Adler.  The Cramers had just the sort of taste one would expect of associates of David Adler.  Stylish.  I'd love to see that sale come by again---but enough about the past.

The chair is not the only old item that I recognize going up at auction this week----a pair of swagged tables from the 30's, pictured in this post a few days ago, which I sold to another delightful customer a few years ago, are going up at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries this week.

Diary of a Mad Antique Dealer

It's Antiques Week, and though sometimes I fire up the trusty steed and hightail it for the Armory, this year I must stay in Maine.

Darling Reggie, I mean,  Reggie Darling, requested more photos of the shop from time to time, and herewith I amuse you with some of the junque that passes through.  His exact request included the comment that it gave such good insight into my fevered mind.....oh dear...be careful what you wish for....

I loved this 1840's American Gothic Revival pier table, probably Boston, with a wonderful gold and black marble top.  The 18th century French pier mirror, much like the one over the mantel in the Duck Creek dining room, belonged to the late Society decorator Nancy Pierrepont

I should have kept the plaster column lamp.  I really should have.  You can't really see it, but the amusing little print to the left is an 18th century French fashion print, done during the balloon craze of the late century, of a woman with a high hairdo done up to resemble the Montgolfier balloon.  The print leaning on the chair, a rare English print showing a fencing match before the Prince Regent, featuring a cross-dressing swordsman.  Oh those English!

 Okay, here's the key to my taste:  if it's painted, pale, and slightly classical, then I'm a goner, gotta have it.

 As I said, if its off white, classical...guess I'm just an old fashioned boy.  I was going to keep this, but a nice friend of JCB passed through and away it went.  At least it went to a good home.  Looking for all the world like a Roman Emperor, it's actually Daniel Webster. 

And how about this? Had to be seen to be believed.  And it was a pair.  TWO of them