Newport in the nineteenth century

Magazine Antiques, April, 1995 by Charles J. Burns

Henry James wrote that the first half of the nineteenth century "was the PURE Newport time, the most perfectly guarded by a sense of margin and of mystery."(1) Before the advent of the Gilded Age at the end of the century, Newport's style was characterized by the innocence of its amusements - bathing, boating, picnicking, tiding, and amateur theatricals - and its artistic and literary pretensions. Hudson River school painters, Boston literati, descendants of the old colonial families, and southern gentry were united in their love of Newport's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "old town" and the arcadian vistas of the sea on the outskirts.

The summer colony first found lodgings in eighteenth-century houses in town and farmhouses nearby, but by the 1830's they began to build simple cottages of their own. Gothic revival or Tuscan in design, the interiors were surprisingly light and airy - contrary to the popular impression. At Kingscote (p. 549, Pl. VII), for example, large bay windows with Nottingham lace curtains illuminated a picturesque, sparsely furnished interior complete with an aviary. The summer house was built in 1841 by Richard Upjohn (1802-1878) for George Noble Jones (1811 - 1876) of Savannah, Georgia. The side chair in the Gothic style shown in Plate X is part of a suite of furniture made for the house by Joseph Meeks and Sons of New York City.

In 1863 Kingscote passed to William Henry Hunter King (1818-1897), a retired China Trade merchant. Four successive generations of his family created an eclectic collection of American, European, and Chinese export objects, including the repousse tea and coffee service made by Samuel Kirk and Son of Baltimore shown in Plate IX.

The silver centerpiece shown in Plate IV was presented to Watts Sherman (1809-1865) in 1851 by the Albany City Bank in Albany, New York. His son, William Watts Sherman (1842-1912), brought it to Newport in the 1870's to the influential shingle-style house built for him between 1874 and 1876 by Henry Hobson Richardson (18381886) with Stanford White (1853-1906).

Artists of the Hudson River school and those influenced by it found a rich source of inspiration in Newport and its environs. Thomas Worthington Whittredge painted Whitehall, the house built in 1729 for Dean George Berkeley (1685-1753) in Newport (Pl. V).(2) John Frederick Kensett applied the same tonality to a view of the Italian island of Capri (Pl. VII) that he had when immortalizing Beacon Rock in Newport.(3) Edward D. Boit combined the Newport landscape with figures to create pastoral scenes bathed in soft daylight (see Pl. III).

The Italianate Newport villa Chepstow, designed in 1860 by George Champlin Mason (1820-1894) for Edmund Schemerhorn (d. 1891), is home to part of the Morris family collection that was bequeathed to the Preservation Society of Newport County by Alletta Morris McBean (1912-1986). The Morris family, like many of the early summer colonists, was drawn to Newport's beautiful natural setting and was inclined to collect the paintings of William Trost Richards, whose depictions of the rocky shore line remain unparalleled. The fine early painting by Fitz Hugh Lane shown in Plate I caught the eye of Alletta Nathalie Lorillard Bailey Morris (1883-1935), the first wife of Lewis Gouverneur Morris (1882-1967), who was an early connoisseur of Americana. Spending her summers in Malbone, a Gothic revival house designed by Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892) and completed in 1849, she became exceptionally sensitive to her surroundings and in 1932 even made a pioneering photographic study of Gothic revival architecture in America.(4) Her husband's grandmother, Emily Lorillard Morris, is shown with her children in the evocative portrait by Daniel Huntington shown in Plate VIII.

Each fall, the Morrises moved to their property along the Hudson River, where they were near their relatives the Lorillards, the Baileys, and other landed gentry. The attraction of that landscape was similar to Newport's, with its views of water and bucolic countryside, as seen in one of the paintings in the Morris collection (see Pl. Il). They even acquired the gilded phoenix shown in Plate VI that once adorned the pilothouse of a Hudson River steamship.

The Morrises' pier table made in Charleston, South Carolina (see Pl. II), is a reminder of the important antebellum presence of the Charleston and Savannah elite in Newport - an elite that was to vanish in favor of an industrial aristocracy after the Civil War.

1 The American Scene (1907; New York, 1946), p. 221.

2 In his survey of colonial architecture in New England the architect Charles Follen McKim (1847-1909) dwelt lovingly on the massing and texture of this romantic building, which became the inspiration for the shingle style fashionable in the 1880's (see Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead & White, Architects [New York, 1983], p. 46).

3 See John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat, John Frederick Kensett: An American Master (Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1985), pp. 106-107, Pls. 20 and 21.