MRS. WHARTON GOES CANOEING

NOTE:  January 24th marks Edith Wharton's birthday.  This piece was originally published a year ago in 'New York Social Diary' to commemorate the 150th anniversary of her birth. Young Edith Jones. Significant events of Edith Wharton's early life played out in Bar Harbor, and  naturally those of us who are partisans of this part of Maine speculate about what would have happened had it been Maine, rather than Lenox, where Wharton chose to live after departing Newport. For all we know, Ethan Frome might have been a Lobsterman, and under the influence of the good clean Maine air, Lily Bart might have married a college professor who summered in Northeast Harbor, and lived happily ever after. In 1880, the future Mrs. Wharton's older brother Frederic Jones and his wife Mary Cadwalader were putting the finishing touches on Reef Point, their new summer house on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor.  Their architects were a leading Boston firm, Rotch & Tilden, who designed a number of Bar Harbor's grander estates. That same summer, the senior Joneses and young Edith forsook their usual Newport season, spending it instead at Bar Harbor. Accompanying them was Harry Leyden Stevens, the son of social parvenu Mrs. Paran Stevens. Harry Stevens was rumored to be engaged to Edith, although friends, who called him her 'shadow', felt the romance would not last.

Reef Point, the Frederic Jones cottage at Bar Harbor, as originally built

The Shore Path, like the Cliff Walk at Newport, traversed between the ocean and large estates, a favorite destination for late afternoon walks.

The Jones spent the next two summers in Europe, where it was hoped that the climate would prove beneficial to Mr. Jones' health. It did not, and he died there in March of 1882. Returning to Newport, Edith Jones' engagement to Harry Stevens was officially announced, and nearly as soon ended, apparently due his mother's interference (on this score, Wharton would later exact her revenge by using Mrs. Stevens as the model for the comic Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the arriviste widow of a shoe polish manufacturer, in The Age of Innocence). In 1883, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, wishing to put the sad event behind them, took Edith once again to Bar Harbor.

Steamers at the Bar Harbor pier c. 1880. The buckboards transported arriving visitors to the hotels. It is likely here that Wharton & Walter Berry rented their canoe 
(Courtesy Maine Historic Preservation Commission)

That July in Maine, two of the defining relationships of Edith Jones' future life were begun. Bar Harbor was reaching its stride as a major stop on Society's summer rounds, as the anti-Newport, (relatively) simpler, (relatively) less formal, with healthy emphasis on outdoor activities. With less rigid chaperoning of  young people, it was considered an ideal spot for romance. This is the Rodick Hotel, newly enlarged to 400 rooms in 1881, as it appeared when Walter Berry stayed there. Its 500-foot wooden veranda was a favorite spot for flirtation and gossip. Recreational pastimes included dances at the big hotels, notably Rodick's, where the huge lobby was known as 'The Fish Bowl", hiking on the mountain trails, and canoeing in the bay.  It was against this idyllic backdrop that Edith met and fell in with Walter Berry, a well connected young lawyer and budding aesthete staying that summer at the Rodick Hotel, whom she would later refer to as 'the great love of my life'.

Canoeists paddle out to view the visiting Eastern Yacht Club Fleet in Bar Harbor Whether their friendship was ever actually romantic has long been a subject of speculation, as Wharton later destroyed most of her correspondence with Berry.  A surviving letter from Berry to Wharton in 1923 hints cryptically at that summer, and of a previous conversation: "Dearest — The real dream — mine — was in the canoe and in the night afterwards, — for I lay awake wondering and wondering, — and then, when morning came, wondering how I could have wondered, — I a $-less lawyer (not even that yet) with just about enough cash for the canoe and for Rodick's bill — And then, later, in the little cottage Newport, I wondered why I hadn't — for it would have been good, — and the slices of years slid by. Well, my dear, I've never 'wondered' about anyone else, and there wouldn't be much of me if you were cut out of it. Forty years of it is you, dear. W."

A young couple canoeing, illustration from 'Bar Harbor Days' by Mrs. F. Burton Harrison 1886.

Berry's tennis holiday came to an end, and the friendship begun in Bar Harbor was apparently not picked up again until the 1890s in Newport, but no matter, for on the scene appeared an old friend of Edith's older brother Harry, Edward Wharton of Boston, a 33-year-old gentleman of leisure. Though he had known Edith since childhood, it was that summer at Bar Harbor that he began to pay her court, and two years later they were married. Only by chance of timing did another of Mrs. Wharton's great friendships not receive its initial spark. Only days after the Joneses left Bar Harbor that summer, Henry James arrived for a visit. That friendship instead would have to wait until the latter part of the decade to begin. Edith Wharton in at 'The Mount' in 1905 By 1898, Wharton was a published writer, suffering suffering from bronchial complaints and  at odds with her editors over publication of some short stories, She and and Teddy, feeling an escape from the dampness of Newport might help, went up to Bar Harbor for a change of scenery, visiting her former sister-in-law, now divorced from Frederic Jones. To supplement her reduced income, Minnie Jones was managing Henry James' literary affairs in the States (and would soon become Edith's agent also). Wharton's niece Beatrix, later Mrs. Max Farrand, was embarked on her own career as a landscape designer. Though the weather was not always reliable (the very definition of a Maine summer — leaving damp Newport for Maine would be analogous to carrying coals to Newcastle), Wharton recovered from her ailments. While on Mount Desert, the Whartons visited Teddy's cousin Mrs. James Terry Gardiner, whose cottage was to Edith an 'ideal of a country place', inspiring her desire to have a place away from the seashore, which would culminate in the purchase of a farm overlooking Laurel Lake at Lenox, where she would build 'The Mount' (the classical style of which bore little resemblance to the plain shingle style of the Gardiner house she had previously found so ideal). Although this view of the interior of the Gardiner cottage at Northeast Harbor is the antithesis everything Wharton wrote about houses and interiors, she reported that she found it an 'ideal of a country place' Within a few years of course, Wharton the renowned novelist, would give up America entirely and remove herself to France. Although she remained devotedly close to Mary Jones and Beatrix Jones Farrand, her closest relatives, Wharton did not again visit Bar Harbor, although over the more than one of her fictional characters were sent to that "remote island off the coast of Maine" in the course of their navigation through the ever perilous Social waters. Edith Wharton's Bedroom at the Pavilion Colombe, her house near Paris, as painted by Walter Gay in 1926. Wharton died at Pavilion Colombe in 1937

In July, novelist Roxanna Robinson also covered this topic in a lecture at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. For many of the details in this piece, I am indebted to the works of Wharton's many excellent biographers – R.W.B. Lewis, Hermione Lee, Louis Auchincloss, Shari Benstock, and Eleanor Dwight (who herself summered on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor).   Thanks to Willie Granston for pointing me to the interior view of the Gardiner cottage.

INTERMISSION: OF RED SOX AND BOWERED BEDS

I really don't know from baseball.  I once made a home run during a mandatory softball game in elementary school---but only because I was being chased by a big mean kid determined to ensure that I did (I don't know how that plays out in official rule books).  As for baseball in general, I think Roger Angell is one of the finest essayists writing today, but I've never gotten all the way through one of his baseball pieces in the New Yorker---I intend to, I'm seduced by his elegant prose and love of subject, but somehow, next thing I know, I'm in the movie reviews. On the other hand, if none of you have read his autobiographical Let Me Finish, stop reading my scribblings right now and go order a copy--or better yet, order a copy from my favorite bookstore.  Coincidentally, the next and only other time I ever managed to swing a bat and have it hit a ball, was about 35 years later under the tutelage of the very same bookseller, who refused to believe that I lacked the coordination to properly swing a bat (he believes me now)  As I remember, the bat was a green plastic one belonging to his then young son.  I swung the bat per instruction, concentrating on making contact with the ball, and to my astonishment did make contact. The bat went crack, and so nearly did the ball, as it missed his young son's head by a quarter inch.  After that, I permanently retired from baseball and stuck to the sports I excel at---Olympic picture book browsing, competitive cookie eating, extreme lawn mowing...

The Dilettante plays baseball

So what brings me to baseball this morning?  After all, I concern myself on these pages mostly with matters of decorative arts and design, and human foible, not sports--otherwise, I would have a few tart things to say about Lance Armstrong and Manti T'eo,

 Anyway, getting to the point, I was wandering through the Gottscho Schliesner archives on the Museum of the City of New York website, when I came across a couple of photos of Tom Yawkey's New York apartment, at 992 Fifth Avenue, taken in 1935.  I vaguely remembered Yawkey as having something to do with baseball---and a quick trip to Wikipedia later, found that he was a mid-western lumber heir who realized his big dream---to own a baseball team, no matter what it cost him, which over the years was apparently a lot---at very least enough to finance several ballet companies, a new opera at the Met, and perhaps the restoration of the entire downtown of a dying city, or send thousands of underprivileged kids to college..   One thing certain from the pictures, is that the money wasn't spent on the decor.  His dining room, with its stolid portrait, of Mother Yawkey, no doubt, and its very ordinary Grand Rapids dining room furniture in the Hispano-Tudorbethan vein, certainly lacks the chic or glamor one associates with fine New York apartments of the era.

No, what caught my attention was the bed in the master bedroom---an astounding pale confection of two twins beds, joined by an archway under a vast floating canopy inspired by the works of Mr. Chippendale.  Quite something, no?  Just what does that gate symbolize?

  

Stubbornly lodged in the back of my overstuffed brain, I know somethign else about this design---or at least it reminds me of something---but it isn't coming to me.

TODAY IN NEW YORK SOCIAL DIARY

In the early 1900s, when Bar Harbor socialites were  not busy evoking Marie Antoinette's France or Gainsborough's England, they channeled ancient Greece.  The Dilettante tells you why in today's New York Social Diary.

Click HERE for the story.

GILDED AGE MANHATTAN DOWN EAST

Whenever I pass this townhouse at 9 East 68th St. in Manhattan, I stop in my tracks, enchanted by the odd arrangement of the balustrade sitting on the columns of the facade, which are evocative of Palladio's Vicenza, yet break all the rules.  Despite its attention getting style, I've only recently  learned more about it and connected a few dots in the process. Sometimes these things are in the air:  two weeks ago, even as the facts were filtering into my consciousness, 'Daytonian in Manhattan' blogged about the house.  Then, as I began writing this post a week ago---before a Fairpoint 'upgrade' undid my internet service for three days, a friend, not knowing of my recent interest, rang to mention that he had been to a party that evening in one of the apartments that now occupy the house, and his surprise that the elegant rooms lacked original woodwork.  Well, for those who don't already know, here's the rest of the story---and the answer to Monday's quiz.

A photograph of the Bliss house under construction, 1907, underscores its inspiration from Palladian buildings in Vicenza (courtesy Bowdoin College Archives)

Loggia del Capitano, Vicenza

Palazzo Schio

 The house was designed by Heins and LaFarge in 1907 for Jeanette Dwight Bliss, the daughter of a wealthy cotton merchant, and widow of George T. Bliss, the namesake son of  the partner of former Vice-President Levi P. Morton in the banking house of Morton, Bliss & Co.   Bliss Jr., who died of appendicitis in 1901, was a collector of  rare books, and his wife continued his collecting, in addition to her own fine collection of French decorative arts.  For her new house, Mrs. Bliss and her architects collected, in the manner of the day, an assortment of antique European interiors and architectural elements to provide the proper atmosphere for her collections.  Mrs. Bliss attended the 1906 sale of Stanford White's collections, including architectural elements, it is certain that some of her purchases were made there.

The dining room of Stanford White's New York townhouse, showing mantel sold at the sale of White's effects..

Stanford White's dining room mantel as used in the reception room of the Bliss house with 17th century French painted paneling (Courtesy Bowdoin College Archives)

Catalog entry for dining room mantelpiece from the catalog of the Stanford White estate sale

One wonders where these doors are today

The music room occupied the entire frontage on the piano nobile, overlooking  East 68th  St.  an alley between  the Bliss House and the neighboring J.J. Emery-Anson house allowed two exposures a rare commodity in townhouse interiors.

Above one of the two fireplaces in the music room hung  a self -portrait of  Rose-Adelaide Ducreaux, attributed in the Bliss's time to Vigeé-le Brun

Among the glories of the house were a small boudoir originally designed by Pierre-Adrian Paris for the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, a sixteenth century Neapolitan ceiling for the library, and early 18th century boiserie designed by Lasurrance for the music room of the medieval Hôtel de Sens in the Marais.

Boudoir from Hôtel de Crillon, as installed in the Bliss House (courtesy Bowdoin College Archives)

Two views of the library, with woodwork designed by C. Grant LaFarge, and 16th century Italian ceiling and antique Istrian  marble fireplace (courtesy Bowdoin College Archives)

The Bliss salon, with boiserie originally designed for the Hôtel de Sens (courtesy Bowdoin College Archives)

Hôtel de Sens, Paris

Not all the interior decoration was antique.  Mrs. Bliss's architect, Christopher Grant LaFarge, was the son of the stained glass artist John LaFarge, who created the 'Welcome' window for the stair landing, with Mrs. Bliss's daughter, Susan posing for the central figure.

"Welcome" by John LaFarge (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Susan Dwight Bliss never married, and lived with her mother at East 68th Street. When they left town for the summer, they apparently preferred to lease, and they varied resorts from season to season, sometimes Newport, sometimes the Hamptons or the New Jersey shore, and sometimes here in Maine, at Bar Harbor, where their quarters ranged from 'Cornersmeet', a modest cottage on the Malvern Hotel grounds, to the more opulent surroundings of George Vanderbilt's 'Pointe d'Acadie' in 1910 (the Vanderbilts were economizing in Paris after financial reverses, all things being relative)  By 1912, they were in Seabright in New Jersey, and the New York times reported, with some consternation, that thier houseguest of the previous season, Count Eugene de Villa-Franca Soissons, a grandson of Prince Eugene of Savoy-Carignan, was 'noncommital' about reports that he was engaged to Susan Bliss, and speculated that his family did not approve of marriage to a commoner, no matter how rich.

17th century painted reception room from the Bliss house.  Location unknown
(Courtesy  of Bowdoin College Archives)

In 1924, Mrs. Bliss died, and Susan Dwight Bliss continued on at 9 East 68th, through the Depression and World War II, caring for and adding to her parent's collections, quietly supporting her many charities.

By 1945, it was thought that the age of the great town houses was over forever--the neighboring Marquand house by Richard Morris Hunt, on the corner of Madison Avenue and 68th St., had been demolished years before and replaced by an apartment house.  Many other houses in the neighborhood had fallen to institutional uses or been divided into apartments.  Rather than leave her house for an apartment, as many of her set had done, Susan Bliss decided to remain, but divided the house into several apartments, creating for herself in a 20 room duplex on the 3rd and 4th floors.   Her mother's grand interiors were gutted and dismantled, and Miss Bliss dispatched several of them to new homes.  

The Crillon boudoir, and many art objects, including the Harpsichord and self-portrait of Mme. Ducreaux, went around the corner to the Metropolitan Museum, where the boudoir is one of the delights of the Wrightsman Rooms .  

The Crillon Boudoir as installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, decorated by Jansen  for the
Wrightsmans.

The library paneling designed by Christopher Grant LaFarge, supporting the antique Italian ceiling, was offered, along with a collection of her father's books and fine bindings and light fixtures and furniture, to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.  Bowdoin, although surprised---Miss Bliss had never before had direct involvement with the college--accepted the gift with alacrity.  Other portions of the rare book collection went to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

As originally installed in Hubbard Hall at Bowdoin, the Bliss Library, with modifications designed by McKim, Mead & White, perfectly evoked the luxe of Gilded Age Manhattan, transplanted to the coast of Maine. (courtesy Bowdoin College Archives)

The library ceiling (Bowdoin)

The Bliss Room as it appears today.

Also to Bowdoin went the boiserie from l'Hotel de Sens, where it was installed in Harvey Dow Gibson Hall, also by McKim, Mead & White, which houses the music department.

A contemporary photograph of the music room is not available---it may be viewed here in a Quicktime movie on the Bowdoin website. (The modern bookcase on one wall is undeniably regrettable.)

Portrait of a Lady, attributed to Alonso Sanchez Coello
(Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of Miss Susan Dwight Bliss)

 And that, children, is the long answer to Monday's quiz question.  Congratulations to Anonymous, who answered it correctly (and in several hundred fewer words)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

A Few Links:

For more about the Bliss House, click HERE.  More about the Bliss Room at Bowdoin, HERE .  For the complete set of Bliss House photographs in the Bowdoin Archives, several of which are reproduced here with permission, HERE.  For a plan of the piano nobile of the Bliss house, click HERE

PS.  As I continue to research for my book (Acanthus Press, early 2014, start saving your pennies), I keep passing the clothes of former owners of the houses, mostly in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum.  Here is one of Miss Bliss's boots, from that collection

TODAY'S QUIZ

There are so very many things I don't know.  I just found out another of those things this week (I should have been able to put it together years ago, as I was in possession of all the pieces of the puzzle, but sometimes the obvious eludes my Dilettantish brain).

What common thread do Hubbard Hall at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York share (aside from symmetrical facades?)

The answer is to be found in an upcoming post, if none of you sharp witted folk come up with it before then. There is no prize for correct answers to this quiz, aside from the satisfaction of being smarter than I am.