The Wickham House in Richmond: neoclassical splendor restored

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1999 by Jane Webb Smith

Neoclassical wall paintings concealed under many layers of paint for 135 years are at the heart of the new interpretation of the first-floor public rooms of the house built for John Wickham in Richmond, Virginia, in 1812. Owned by the Valentine Museum, the house had for many years been furnished and decorated to reflect the tastes of its fourth owner, Mann S. Valentine II (see Pl. IV). However, upon the discovery of the wall paintings in the 1980s the museum decided to restore it to its neoclassical splendor as part of its continuing research into Federal period Richmond.(1)

The key to understanding the original appearance of the house lay in understanding John Wickham, a successful lawyer who came to Richmond in 1790 with conspicuous consumption on his mind. Born on Long Island, New York, Wickham, a Tory, began collecting debts owed to British merchants by patriots impoverished after the American Revolution. In 1805 a fellow. Virginia lawyer William Wirt (1772-1834), later attorney general of the United States, wrote that Wickham was one of a small number of lawyers "now amassing at the bar in this country wealth as fast as their hearts can desire."(2) In 1805, Wirt wrote further of Wickham:

He is, I'm told, upwards of forty years of age, but his look, I think is more juvenile. His form genteel, his person, agile. He is distinguished by a quickness of look, a sprightly step, and that peculiar jaunty air, which I have heretofore mentioned as characterizing people of New York. It is an air, however, which (perhaps because I am a plain son of John Bull) is not entirely to my taste. Striking, indeed it is, highly genteel and calculated for "eclat"; but then I fear, it may be censured as being too artificial, as having too little appearance of connection with the heart, too little of that amiable simplicity.... This remark applies only to the mere exterior of his manners; and even the censure which I have pronounced on that is purely a result of different taste, which is, at least as probably as wrong as his.(3)

Wickham was generally considered "eloquent, ... witty, ... graceful, ... of the most polished and easy manners, ... whether at the bar or festive board, always distinguished, always profound as a lawyer, brilliant as a companion."(4) First and foremost a public man, for whom the city and courts of Richmond were his stage and his peers and colleagues his audience, Wickham required a private residence that not only reflected but actively promoted this image.

In 1795 Wickham purchased the house and property of Colonel John Harvie (1742-1807), a hero of the American Revolution and register of the Land Office, on Shockoe Hill. Named as the site for the statehouse, courts, and governor's mansion when the state capital was moved to Richmond from Williamsburg in 1780, Shockoe Hill had become a well-to-do neighborhood of government officials who lived in what have been described as "miniature plantations."(5) The statehouse, a classical temple-form building designed by Thomas Jefferson in 1785, dominated the landscape and set an early precedent for the neoclassical style in this country.(6) Harvie's clapboarded frame house was situated on land that occupied the entire block between Tenth and Eleventh Streets and between I and K Streets (now Marshall and Clay Streets). By 1803, according to a Mutual Assurance Policy, Wickham had a "well furnished house" surrounded by a wood kitchen, wood smokehouse, and a brick stable and carriage house across Clay Street.(7)

In 1811 Wickham commissioned Alexander Parris to design and build a grand new residence large enough to accommodate his growing household, which at the time included nine children (six under ten years of age) and ten male slaves older than sixteen.(8) Then a relatively unknown house carpenter from Massachusetts, Parris was in Richmond designing a house for the merchant John Bell, and his success on the Bell and Wickham jobs subsequently led to a commission to build the governor's mansion on Capitol square.(9)

Wickham evidently asked Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), who had designed a new house in Richmond for John Harvie after Harvie sold the old one to Wickham, to comment on Parris's initial plans.(10) Latrobe, who at the time was in Washington, D.C., working on the United States Capitol, replied with a vehemence that gives some idea of his dismay at the grandiosity that Wickham intended his house to convey:

In the first place then from what I can judge by the plan, your house is in the style of Charles the 9th of France, in the decoration of the hall at least. The expense of this decoration of wooden columns, pilasters, & niches is your affair - mine is its taste. Reform it altogether. It is wrong.

1. Because it is absurd to decorate the entrance, the rendezvous of servants, the mere passage into rooms of utility or entertainment, in a manner more expensive and laborious than any of the other apartments. For the purpose of deception often taken is well enough, it is like driving about in an expensive carriage & living at home on crusts. In the decoration of rooms, there should be a regular gradation from the plaine Hall to the ornamental drawing room, & the Lady's boudoir. But a Hall surrounded with wooden columns, empty niches & all of wood, cracked, faded and smoked and whitewashed or papered plain wall in principal apartments, inverts all of my ideas of good taste.(11)