The portal of Saint Bartholomew's Church in New York City

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2001 by Percy Jr. Preston

Adams and French chose the Roman Bronze Works to cast their doors but Martiny selected the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company. After some discussion as to the alloy, the Henry-Bonnard firm wrote White that they would use the same alloy as the Roman Bronze Works. They also assured him that "we will have the doors made an etruscan green, and that they will be exactly the same color and tone as the others." 16

Henry-Bonnard succeeded in casting each fold of the south doors in a single piece, a significant accomplishment. The decorative panels of other doors were cast in three sections each and then transferred to the John Williams foundry, which made the frames and backs for the doors. The three pairs of doors were hung in August 1903. The center doors are eleven feet high and eight feet, four inches wide. The side doors are eleven feet, three inches high and six feet wide.

The coloring of the doors was a vexing problem for the architect and sculptors; at one point White wrote: "the color on French's doors is wholly unsatisfactory. It is entirely too green and looks too much like paint....On the whole, so far, infinitely the best doorway is the right hand side of Martiny's door, on which the bronze shows through." [17] Their difficulties were noted in a review of the portal appearing in March 1904:

The several sets of doors have resisted, thus far, the efforts of founders to make their color a uniform green. The natural tendency in New York is for bronze to go black, as the Trinity Church doors prove. In the effort to produce a patina of rich dull green, the bronze workers have made the middle doors too light, and all of them show traces of a residuum of greenish gray powder in the deep parts, which contrasts oddly with the dark surfaces, in high relief, of the recalcitrant metal--in effect, it "turns the modeling inside out," to use a sculptor's term. But time will doubtless tone and mellow these panels. (18)

As the design for the doors took shape, it became obvious that their rich decoration would be at odds with the existing, plain front of Saint Bartholomew's Church. A completely new entrance was agreed upon, giving White the opportunity to design a portal based on the one at Saint Gilles. This was not the first time that Saint Gilles had served as the inspiration for a building commissioned by the Vanderbilts. in 1885, when Richard Morris Hunt designed their family mausoleum on Staten Island, he adapted the same triple portal. (19)

White designed arches embellished with archivolts for each of the doorways. The doorways would be connected with a colonnade of twenty-four cipollino (bluish-white) marble columns with Romanesque capitals. The architrave includes a Greek key design and other symbols, and the side archivolts are decorated with acanthus leaves. The large frieze panels connecting the archivolts form the entablature of the columns. Each sculptor's responsibility was expanded to include carving a tympanum in white marble to be placed over his respective door. The contract prices for the tympana were $10,000 for French and $3,900 each for Adams and Martiny. The firm of B. A. and G. N. Williams of New York City received a contract to supply the columns, their capitals, the archivolts, architrave, large frieze, and door surrounds for $39,750. (20) The Williams firm then subcontracted the carving of the large friezes in Indiana limestone to Andrew O'Connor for $3,900. The friezes were to be three feet, six inches high and twelve feet, two inches long depicting Old Testament scenes on one side and New Testament scenes on the other. This contract also included a pair of three-foot statues, representing Elijah and Moses, each with an angel hovering over him, to be placed atop columns on either side of the main door.