AN INTERESTING HOUSE, & QUESTIONS WHOSE ANSWERS I DO NOT KNOW

I have a particular fondness for the houses of Federal era New England---and if that house, as is increasingly rare, has survived in untouched condition---free of replacement windows, plastic shutters, or any of the dozens of injustices so often inflicted upon them by well intentioned (or not so well intentioned) owners, then so much the better.  A little faded neglect?  Better still.  I understand all too well when I read Nancy Lancaster's musings on how the shabby and pure Virginia houses of her youth affected her aesthetic sensibilities, for so too is it for me with the faded houses that still populated New England in my own youth some fifty years later.  

I love these buildings for many reasons---for their reflection of the aspirations of a new country, for their classically inspired proportions and details, and for a certain provincial quality that pervades all but the most sophisticated examples.  I wonder at their details, executed in the pine that was so plentiful in New England, but based on examples that would have been executed in stone in England, or in Italy whence came their ultimate inspiration.  I mused recently in other posts about a pair of country houses in Dorchester, built for members of the glittering new society that formed around Boston after the Revolution.

Thus, when I came across the photograph above in the course of searching pictures for my posts about the Swan (click here) and Morton (here) Houses, I was, as they might have said in Federal America, 'smote' between the eyes.  Here it all was---and with the bravura gesture of the high pediment, a detail traveled from Palladian Italy via Georgian England.  In years of passionate architectural tourism, I thought I had encountered them all, but this one, at least to me, was news.  And its condition!  Untouched, unimproved, shabby but not derelict.  If I could marry a photograph, this would be the one.  But, being an old fashioned guy, I thought we should become acquainted first, yet maddeningly little information could be found about my new love.  The caption stated that it was the 'Dearborn Mansion, Grove Hall' and that the picture was taken in 1868, and apparently, like the Swan and Morton houses, had been in Dorchester.  I googled myself into a stupor, and nearly went without dinner trying to find out more about my mysterious new love, but came up empty.  I roamed through my own library, and not a bit more solid information could be found.  A General Dearborn had been prominent in Roxbury and Dorchester affairs.  A neighborhood in Roxbury, which borders Dorchester, is known as Grove Hall, after a long demolished mansion---but, that mansion was not Dearborn's.

Plate 55, Design for a House, from Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion

And what of its amazing design?  What early designer had created this? One of the many talented carpenter builders?  One of the early and rare architects, like Charles Bulfinch?  Had its design come from a pattern book?  And how, without knowing it, had he nevertheless so evoked the Veneto in this house, while he was probably only thinking of England?  There are several related houses in New England that follow the general design  of this house, but none quite have its elan. In Asher Benjamin's Builder's Companion, one of the designs shown is for a house with a tall central pavilion, and the fanlight in the Dearborn house, with its spiderweb tracery, follows one in Benjamin.  Charles Bulfinch, like Stanford White, has more buildings attributed to him than are reasonable, but the central pavilion on the Dearborn house certainly makes one think of the library building that centered his design for the long vanished Franklin Crescent, Boston's echo of Adamesque London (and whose ambitious development ruined Bulfinch financially).

The Franklin Crescent, and Bulfinch's original drawing for the library at center.

And then, what of those grand and graceful spandrels that flank the pavilion and give the design its unexpected Bravura?  It is a composition and motif one sees over and over in English work, in turn inspired by Italian originals.  One is immediately reminded of the end pavilions at Palladio's Villa Barbara at Maser.

End Pavilion of Villa Barbaro at Maser, by Andrea Palladio

And Bulfinch mined the composition for his brilliant masterpiece, the so-called 'Brick Church' at Lancaster Massachusetts.

The First Church of Christ Unitarian, Lancaster Massachusetts, by Charles Bulfinch, 1816

The composition of the Dearborn house had been used before in New England.  An early example is a house built around 1800 for Samuel Tenney in Exeter, New Hampshire.  This house was built by a housewright named Ebenezer Clifford, working with a designer-housewright named Bradbury Johnson.  Although probably nearly contemporary with the Dearborn house, its design, thought to be based on a plate in a pattern book by English architect Roger Morris, looks backward, and Georgian, rather than neo-classical in aspect appears to be earlier than it is.

The Samuel Tenney House, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1800 (Historic American Buildings Survey)

A few years later, Johnson would design his verion of Bulfinch's crescent for the New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company on Market Square in Portsmouth, again utilizing the high central pavilion (the right wing is now much altered).

The New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company building, now the Portsmouth Athenaeum, 1803

In Kennebunk, Maine, the William Lord mansion, built in 1801, closely echoes the design of the Dearborn mansion, but without the quite the scale and bravura and perfect integration of parts.

The William Lord mansion, Kennebunk, 1801 (White Pine Monographs, Volume IV, no. 2, 1916)

The Sullivan Dorr house in Providence, Rhode Island, designed in 1809 by John Holden Greene follows the center pavilion composition, but with a flat roof.

Here I digress for a moment, with a picture of the portico on the Dorr House, in an American Federal Version of the Strawberry Hill Gothick style, as applied to a house of American inspiration and otherwise neo-classical detailing.

Sullivan Dorr House, by Samuel Holden Greene, Providence

Portico of the Sullivan Dorr house combines Gothick details with neo-classical detailing on the ceiling cove.

But now I've wandered a bit far from my original points, which were curiousity about the Dearborn house in particular, and in general the beauty with which the architects of the early Republic designed buildings that hark back to England of the 18th century, when her architects in turn were borrowing from 16th century Italy.  And the tradition continued---compare for example, Phillip Trammel Shutze's 'Swan House', designed for the Inman family in 1928.  It is fascinating to me to consider two designers, working in very different eras and circumstances, the later probably knowing nothing of the earlier house, but dealing with some of the same inspirations that had created the earlier house, arriving at the same design solutions, if on a grander and more sophisticated scale, 125 years later.

Once again, the Dearborn house (Prints & Drawings Department, Boston Public Library, via Flickr)

'Swan House' in Atlanta, designed in 1928 by Philip Trammel Shutze

 Postscript:  The first comment below mentions the modernist influence.  To that end, here is a photo of the house William Welles Bosworth designed for himself in 1928 at Matinecock, Long Island, a sort of Vogue Regency modern take on Schinkel does ancient Rome.

And another Postscript:  Thanks to commenter Anonymous, of the Hudson River Anonymouses, for bringing Locust Lawn, one of the purest adaptations of Asher Benjamin's design, to the fore.  I remember driving past it years ago, and naturally nearing going off the road (My bumper sticker reads "I brake for unusual Federal houses").  

"Locust Lawn", the Josiah Hasbrouck House in Gardiner, New York, 1814.

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'.