Stanford White's house for Payne Whitney in New York City - architect

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2002 by Jenil Sandberg

White frequently commissioned replicas of existing antiques, again to follow the best examples of history. The reproduction market that thrived in late nineteenth-century Europe and the United States has been given little attention by scholars, but it flourished alongside the market for real antiques. Always, there was a hierarchy of objects: antiques were most desirable, but quality reproductions would suffice if originals could not be obtained. The art critic Clarence Cook (1828-1900) articulated this idea in The House Beautiful, as did Wharton and Codman in The Decoration of Houses. (20) The Whitneys clearly had sufficient wealth to purchase antiques in quantity, but reproductions were sometimes necessary For example, sections of needlework were stitched to fill in where needed on a pair of curtains, extra chairs were carved to complete a set, or architectural fragments were conjoined to create a piece of furniture.

Another example of this phenomenon was White's work with Edward F. Caldwell (1851-1914), a longtime friend who worked frequently with architects to design electric lighting fixtures in period styles that would complement their interiors. (21) At the Whitney house, Caldwell and Company executed exact duplicates of objects White purchased in Europe as well as original designs based on eighteenth-century models. A bill from Heilbronner the Paris antiques dealer, for instance, notes objects such as brackets and torcheres to be duplicated by Caldwell. A silver and silver-gilt sanctuary lamp was replicated by Caldwell and confirmed with a sketch at the bottom of a letter (see Fig. 4). (22) Most clearly with electric lighting, the new and the old had to function side by side to create the desired appearance in the room.

In the main dining room of the Payne Whitney house, White used both new and antique furnishings (Fig. 2). The table and chairs were made by the Boston furniture makers and decorators A. H. Davenport and Company (1880-1908), which, like Caldwell and Company worked extensively with McKim, Mead and White on various commissions, including the 1902-1903 renovation of the White House. (23) A sixteenth-century Italian ceiling purchased from Heilbronner was installed in the dining room, and the walls were lined with tapestries, which were often used to cover nearly every inch of wall space at the time. (24) Most of the hangings in the dining room were early sixteenth-century FrancoFlemish tapestries depicting a stag hunt, but new sections had to be woven to replace missing panels. Estimates for the repair of the old tapestries and weaving the new were provided by both William Baumgarten and Company and George P. Reinhard and Company The latter submitted a much lower bid and won the contract. In 1945 the entire set of dining room tapestries was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, (25) but regrettably the panels by Reinhard were never accessioned by the medieval department and were disposed of in 1946. (26)

The rooms on the upper floors, such as Helen Whitney's bedroom (Fig. 5), illustrate the changing trends in decorating during the early twentieth century. While Wharton and Codman, in The Decoration of Houses, had advocated rigorous architectural symmetry and simplified decorating schemes based on eighteenth-century European models, a more direct influence on the Payne Whitney house was the involvement of a budding New York City decorator and friend of White's, Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950). Helen Whitney's bedroom, and the octagonal breakfast room (Fig. 3) in particular, reflected the new attitude toward the less cluttered, more delicate interior advocated by de Wolfe. Pictures reveal that the breakfast room was a brightly lit space of Adamesque design painted in light colors (see Pl. VIII). In a letter to Stanford White, written during their collaboration on the first building of the Colony Club in New York City between 1904 and 1908, de Wolfe told the architect that she was ordering a small table for Helen Whi tney noting "that it is to be finished in pure white." (27)