Newport in the gilded age

Magazine Antiques, April, 1995 by Paul F. Miller

At the close of the 1893 Newport season the French critic and writer Paul Charles Joseph Bourget (1852-1935) commented:

Newport is the most beautiful of places. I find here a splendor of houses, a refinement of life that I have scarcely seen elsewhere.... There are few centres of civilization that I do not know, but here in Newport, I find everything combined - the luxury of Paris, the art of Italy, the hospitality of the East, and the natural beauty of the Riviera.(1)

The post-Civil War industrial aristocracy found the mid-nineteenth-century Newport "cottage" to be the symbol of American insularity and provincialism. The prevailing aspiration was to conform to historicism, the internationally accepted standard of the time, which, for the wealthy and confident, provided safe ground in matters of good taste.

The new patrons, usually the grandes dames of society, after consulting the late nineteenth-century Dictionnaire de l'ameublement by Henry Havard and architects trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris,(2) came to feel that their ballrooms, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and boudoirs - all required for elegant entertaining - should be French. The decorative programs for Newport interiors in any number of French historical styles range from the Gothic Room in Marble House, with its stained glass reminiscent of the thirteenth century (re-created through the generosity of the Evelyn A. J. Hall Charitable Trust),(3) to the Second Empire reception rooms of The Breakers. Cohesion of design often fell prey to a client's desire for an encyclopedic range of styles. Moreover, little distinction was made between antique elements and modern ones "in the manner of," since the greater prestige of the former had not yet been firmly accepted.

Imitation was not, however, an obstacle to creativity, particularly in the hands of Parisian artisans, who excelled at adapting historical models in both the decorative and fine arts. The acknowledgement of their fine work at international exhibitions led to their dominance in the realization of Newport's late nineteenth-century dream - a dream that today both bewitches and bewilders.

When John Wolfe (d. 1894) and his niece Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828-1887) went to the Paris Salon of 1873 to acquire modern paintings for their Newport and New York City residences, he demonstrated his connoisseurship of Salon painting by paying thirty thousand francs for Nymphes and Satyr by Adolphe William Bouguereau (1825-1925),(4) which displayed a chaste treatment of an erotic subject. It is full of the precisely painted flesh tones and photographic realism that must also have inspired Wolfe to buy the painting in Plate XIII at about the same time in Paris.

While not wholly shunning the impressionist avant-garde embraced by Henry Osborne and Louisine Havemeyer of New York City,(5) fashionable Newport preferred the lightness and frivolity of early works by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. The Garden Bench [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. I OMITTED] depicts Boldini's model Berthe in an impressionistic flowering garden, evoking the rococo spirit of Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), whose celebrations of the bucolic delights of eighteenth-century aristocracy were so cherished by the Newport elite. Boldini's painting was probably presented to the young but appreciative Consuelo Vanderbilt (1877-1964) by her father William Kissam Vanderbilt (1849-1920).

As the Paris dealers could not keep pace with the increasing demand for period accessories, the French porcelain maker Edme Samson began producing notable reproductions. The ormolu-mounted vase in the Chinese famille verte colors shown in Plate II, one of a pair, was part of the Borghese collection in Rome before being bought by Harold Brown (1863-1900) and John N. Brown (1861-1900) for their mother, Sophia Augusta Brown (1825-1909). In a Newport interior of the 1890's such vases might have been flanked by similarly mounted temple jars fitted with ormolu candle arms scrolling upward to inspiring heights.

The decorator, who was responsible for co-ordinating an architect's plan, the client's preferences, and executing decorative work in a period style, found himself assuming the role of antiques dealer, middleman, and design source in what frequently became a battle of wills. Thus, with the French in the ascendancy, it seems fitting that J. Allard et ses Fils, one of the largest Paris decorating firms, should have established a New York City office in 1885. Jules Allard (1832-1907; see p. 607, Pl. IV) sought to maintain the high standard of carving in his workshops that had been a specialty of the company since its inception as a cabinetmaking firm in 1830.

In 1901 Allard provided Edward Julius Berwind (1848-1936) with Renaissance objects from the collection of Emile Gavet of Paris and designed a library at The Elms in which to display them. The crucial component was the carved walnut table shown in Plate XII, which evokes the French Renaissance designs of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (c. 1520-c. 1584)(6) in its architectural construction (in contrast to the supports, which are muscled baroque atlantes). It is an adaptation of great virtuosity. With equal ingenuity, Allard adapted a variety of models for the statues he provided for the grounds of The Elms. There are animalier bronzes after those by Auguste Nicolas Cain (1822-1894) and marble copies of eighteenth-century originals by Lambert Sigisbert Adam (1700-1759) and Jean Baptiste Vinache (c. 1696-1754) that belonged to Edmond de Rothschild (1845-1934) and James de Rothschild (1878-1957). For a pair of monumental vases in the foyer of the grand staircase (see cover and Pl. VII) Allard adapted in bronze the preliminary plaster for La Danse, showing the dancing graces, by the French sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875). Carpeaux's final version was intended for the Paris opera house. The Allard metal shops were known for the complexity of their wrought iron, gilt bronze, steel, and brass stair railings after royal prototypes, but they also excelled in comparatively more mundane productions such as the flamboyant gilt-bronze andirons in the rococo style shown in Plate VIII.