A reverence for the Old World

Magazine Antiques, April, 1995 by Armin Brand Allen

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and Ogden Codman Jr. (1863-1951), the undisputed arbiters of taste during the Gilded Age, declared in The Decoration of Houses:

Beautiful pictures or rare prints produce little effect on the walls of a gala room, just as an accumulation of small objects of art, such as enamels, ivories and miniatures, are wasted upon its tables and cabinets. Such treasures are for rooms in which people spend their days, not for those in which they assemble for an hour's entertainment.(1)

Despite this dictate, the "cottages" of Newport contain a remarkable assemblage of European paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and objets de verta that reflect a sophisticated taste for fine and decorative arts not often associated with the extravagant interiors of these belle epoque buildings. Some of the works came to the houses through their original owners, decorators, and architects, while others were later contributions by patrons of the Preservation Society of Newport County.

It would be incorrect to assume, however, that European art was introduced to Newport for the first time by the leaders of society who lived there at the turn of the twentieth century. Opulent textiles and rare works of art were part of Newport life in the eighteenth century, when it was a commercial center, and particularly in the final quarter of the century after French troops were stationed there in 1780 under Admiral Charles Louis d'Arsac (1722-1780), chevalier de Ternay. The elegant formal style of life introduced by the French during the Revolutionary War was quickly taken up by the populace, chief among them William Vernon Jr. (1759-1833). A francophile, Vernon frequented the court of Louis XVI in Paris and on the death of his father spent his entire eighty-thousand-dollar inheritance on a collection of fifty-two Old Master paintings, thereby forming one of the first important collections of such works in this country.(2) They hung for many years at Vernon House (which still stands on the corner of Clarke and Mary Streets) and undoubtedly enticed other Newport residents to collect within the same parameters.

Of course, not all early summer colonists shared this love of the antique. In the mid-nineteenth century, the William Shepard Wetmores of Chateau-sur-Mer and William Henry Hunter King (1818-1897) of Kingscote, for example, collected contemporary paintings and furniture very much in keeping with their comfortable, up-to-date interiors. It was their children and other relatives who expanded the collections to include fine European antiques. The Wetmore collection was dispersed in 1969,(3) but the King collection, incorporating much material added by their Armstrong and Rives descendants, remains intact. It includes such objects as a sixteenth-century Italian albarello (Pl. III) displayed at Kingscote alongside nineteenth-century Spanish and Italian earthenwares, German and Chinese-export porcelain, American art pottery, and fine English silver (see Pl. XI), creating the pot-pourri of styles and mediums so fashionable among the aesthetes of the 1880's.

The influx of new money and a more ostentatious style of life in the 1890's demanded grander settings to display more impressive, monumental furnishings supplied by the leading decorator of the day, Jules Allard (1832-1907; see p.607, Pl. IV), who worked on four of the Preservation Society's houses - Marble House, The Breakers, The Elms, and Rosecliff. For each he provided princely fixtures, paintings, and sculptures, some purchased directly from European palaces and town houses. For the exterior of The Elms he supplied two limestone reliefs of Apollo (see Pl. XIV) and Aphrodite that had been removed from the facade of the chateau of the marquis d'Argenson at Asnieres, France, the prototype for The Elms. In the dining room and entrance hall, Allard mounted a series of ten monumental paintings commissioned by Bernardo Corner di S. Polo (b. 1656) about 1706 for the Ca' Corner in Venice. Depicting scenes from the life of the ancient Roman general Scipio Africanus, they were painted by various Venetian artists, including Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (see Pl. XVII), Giambattista Piazzetta (1682-1754), and Paolo Pagani (1661-1716).(4)

For The Breakers, Allard provided Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899) with a fine Louis XVI reception room with boiseries by Gilles Paul Cauvet removed from the Paris hotel of Megret de Serilly, a paymaster of Louis XVI (see Pl. XVI).(5) Although this gem of French neoclassical craftsmanship was the first important French period room installed in an American interior, no effort was made by the Vanderbilts' decorator to create an authentic period setting. Instead it has remained today as Allard intended, an allusion to a romantic and elegant moment in the history of French decorative arts, filled with its original banal suite of Louis XVI revival furniture covered in Aubusson tapestry.

Although never interested in upgrading the Louis XVI style suite in the Cauvet reception room, Cornelius Vanderbilt II did have a keen interest in French and Italian Renaissance and later works of art. With his father, William Henry Vanderbilt (1821-1885), he was a major purchaser at the sale of the Demidoff Collection at the Palazzo San Donato in Florence, Italy, in 1880,(6) and he later acquired in Paris for the library at The Breakers an impressive Tonnerre stone fireplace (Pl. IV) of about 1530 from the sixteenth-century chateau of the Juilly family at Arnay-le-Duc in Burgundy.(7) He may also have purchased the late eighteenth-century Italian console table shown in Plate XIII around the time of the Villa Borghese sale in Rome about 1890. It is one of four designed for Prince Marcantonio Borghese, each mounted with a central panel emblematic of one of the seasons. The tables were made for the ground-floor gallery of the Villa Borghese and removed when the villa was assumed by the state in 1890-1891.(8)