Living with antiques: a New York City apartment

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1998 by Ralph Harvard

The collectors' early passion for Oriental carpets is exemplified by a fine mid-seventeenth-century Persian Ispahan (see Pl. VI), a frequent choice of the first wave of American collectors of decorative arts in the 1920s. Also in the living room are two eighteenth-century Chinese Kansu carpets.

Much of the strong collection of silver was made, suitably, in New York City, but there are also examples from Philadelphia and a smattering of English, French, and Persian pieces. The collectors acquired a large group of eighteenth-century Boston silver with the help of a school friend, who joined his family's long established Boston silver firm after college.

The dining room (Pl. VIII) is emphatically Federal in appearance, dominated by an immense mahogany dining table made about 1805 for Martin Van Buren (1782-1862). The accordion action that allows the insertion of extra leaves copies the one patented in 1800 by the English cabinetmaker Richard Gillow (1734-1811). Probably made in New York City and perhaps used in the White House, the table stood for many years in the hall of Van Buren's country house in Kinderhook New York, where it could be extended to a length of more than twenty feet. The Federal mahogany side chairs from Salem, Massachusetts, that surround the table bear swag and tassel carving associated with Samuel McIntire (1757-1811). They are upholstered in horsehair with decorative nailing that duplicates the original nailing pattern. The wallpaper is a modern printing by Zuber et Compagnie of the Monuments of Paris series, first produced in the second quarter of the nineteenth century by Joseph Dufour et Leroy of Paris. The panorama includes the Palais Royale, where the collectors have their Paris apartment. The chair rail behind the sideboard holds a selection of prints mostly related to French food, wine, and dining. Also in the dining room, but not pictured, is a Philadelphia tall-case clock with dial and works signed by Thomas Wagstaff (w.c. 1756-1793) and the case labeled by Francis Gottier (w. c. 1750). It retains its original finish.

The library (Pl. VII) was created to house one of the collectors' family portraits and memorabilia from the Qajar dynasty in Persia and was purposely kept dark and mysterious. Dominating the room are larger than life-size portraits of the Persian rulers Mohammed Shah (r. 1834-1848) and the then crown prince Nasr-al-Din (1831-1896), both painted about 1845. There is also a variety of Persian armor, as well as two nineteenth-century watercolors of Nasr-al-Din, who ruled Persia for almost fifty years. The eighteenth-century Chinese wine table has an unusual top of petrified wood. The upholstery of the eighteenth-century Chinese armchairs made of huanghuali wood follows period prints in its use of raw indigo-blue silk.

The monumental Floral Still Life painted by Abbott Fuller Graves (1859-1936) in Paris in 1888 dominates one wall of the principal bedroom (Pl. IX). Graves was the only American whose floral still lifes were accepted by the jury at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 to represent the United States. Below the painting is a French gilded wood settee of about 1785 attributed to Georges Jacob (1739-1814). It is covered with extravagant French upholstery in a documented eighteenth-century style. On the floor is a large fragment of a very early seventeenth-century Aubusson rug that is thought to be one of the first Aubussons made as a floor rather than a wall covering. The painted and gilded armchair in the French style was made in Philadelphia about 1795 and is among the best preserved of its type, having not only much of the original composition and gilded decoration but also the original Pompeian red wool upholstery on the back panel. Nearly identical chairs are in the Winterthur Museum, the Bayou Bend Collection in Houston, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, and the collection of Joe and June Hennage. Two similar armchairs of about 1800 are in the foyer.