Joy Wheeler Dow

The milestones of art are the signboards of history. Political moves may or may not signify. Treaties international are usually effected by skilful diplomacy, foes may be bluffed by naval and military manoeuvres; but the art of a nation betrays its innermost confidences—the stuff whereof ’tis made.

If, however, as happened at the Centennial Exposition in 1876, a political advent coincides with one in art, that milestone becomes an epoch-marker extraordinary. In 1876 the arts of the world, for the first time, were made to pass before this people as an alluring pageant, and a general desire to avail ourselves of them returned to replace the vacuum that had existed since the platform of Andrew Jackson denounced the refinements of life as attributes of an overbearing aristocracy, patroons and manor-lords, and necessarily

PLATE LXII.

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ULTRA-FASHIONABLE, QUEEN-ANNE ARCHITECTURE.

FASHIONABLE HOUSE—EASTLAKE SCHOOL.

fraught with every danger to a nation’s liberty and strength.

But let us see how unintelligently, nevertheless, we went about the new art movement. Like the North American Indian who habitually first learns the vices of civilization, we were not slow to discover the meretricious in whatever art the old world chose to exhibit, and this we began assiduously to adapt, especially in the field of applied ornament.

A school of design called the “Eastlake school” (Plate LXII), I believe, was the first to emerge from the confused mass of ideas with which the American brain became suddenly surcharged. As the Rococo in France had been called down by the Empire, so was our Scaramouch architecture of the Reign of Terror, with all its extravagant circular work, called down by the Centennial, and straight lines innumerable—congeries of straight lines—became the rage. Mouldings were no longer returned, but died against perpendicular members the faces of which were also ornamented by lines. With the jig-saw still dangerously convenient there was shortly evolved from the Eastlake propaganda, at first devoted to the manufacture of furniture, an American travesty of the eighteenth century chÂlet of Switzerland. The historic chÂlets were covered with ornament. On close inspection, however, this ornament was easily seen to be hand carving of the most skilful description; but never mind, our jig-saws could fake it sufficiently well to please a not over-fastidious public taste, and it is hence we derive fashionable house number one.

But the Eastlake style was not the only product of the Centennial. Contemporary if not coÖrdinate was the Romanesque revival undertaken by H. H. Richardson (see Plate V), also a certain type of Victorian-Gothic (see Plate LXIII) associated more or less with the name of Richard Morris Hunt, neither of which could be expressed in wood, and therefore, represented the more expensive fashions. The references to the Romanesque revival which occur in Chapter I of this review will answer, I hope, for that fashion in architecture, so I will proceed with some desultory reflections upon the Victorian-Gothic style.

Mr. Hunt was probably the most remarkable

architect this country has produced. His professional training occupied some twelve years of his life, which he spent mostly in universities abroad. He told me this himself when I called upon him, now many years since, for encouragement and advice. He sat me upon a high stool in his private office, and related about twelve chapters of his memoirs, as nearly as I can recollect, i. e., one chapter for each year of his prodigious scholarship, all of which I have no doubt was intended for my good, which I trust it has, in some measure, accomplished. Returning to this country laden with scholastic honors, for twenty-five years this brilliant diplomÉ concerned himself principally with academic detail. Rarely did he go beyond the integument of a structure with his characteristic impress, apparently satisfied to decorate according to the canons of the Ecole des Beaux Arts the architecture sui generis of America.

About this time the Victorian-Gothic school of design was advertising its merits, in which school Mr. Hunt found a congenial medium to exploit his essentially grammatical detail, and Bellwood at Madison, New Jersey, supplies me a fine example of this once very fashionable architecture and of Mr. Hunt’s work of that period. In 1897 I was consulted by Mr. Bell, who had purchased the place from Mr. Twombly, regarding a proposed extension to the house. Although not at all in sympathy with what Montgomery Schuyler calls Mr. Hunt’s “staccato style,” I remembered the episode of Michelangelo and the plans of St. Peter’s by Bramante, and advised that the ruling spirit in any new work directly attached to the main building of the estate should be Victorian-Gothic notwithstanding that the style had gone completely out of vogue, and I, myself, had been obliged to remove some of the interior woodwork for Mr. Bell, which, while academic in every line, was crying ugly—so ugly that nobody could look at it a minute without irritability. But my devotion to art lost me the only profitable part of the work, for CarrÈre and Hastings were subsequently employed to erect an Elizabethan end which I have taken care not to show in the illustration, not because of lack of architectonic merit in the extension, but because it impairs just so much of the historic value of the subject.

Technically, Bellwood is admirable. It looks to me just like the Earl of Beaconsfield and the Congress of Berlin or the period at which the Victorian age was in the midst of glory, but from the standpoint of true, Anglo-Saxon home feeling, it does not satisfy. Mr. Hunt was an academician above everything. We see this one idea in all his early work, its culmination regardless of ugliness being exploited in the Tribune Building in Park Row.

But a new mission in life awaited Mr. Hunt. After all these years of mediocrity of talent, and when he was passed fifty years of age, it was as if some angel had descended in the night while he slept, and had whispered the one magic word with which he was ever after to immortalize himself, namely—“Adaptation!” For suddenly, without a word of warning, this remarkable man designed the house of W. K. Vanderbilt at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, the pioneer and a very beautiful adaptation of French Renaissance which made its architect famous almost before it was completed (Plate LXX). More than this his success with the new medium of expression in which Mr. Hunt soon received other commissions, attracted to his office the life-long clients of other architects to whom no angels had whispered, and who were without sensations of their own. Notably was it so in the case of Mrs. Gerry, who had just come into possession of her father’s money, and who did not hesitate to turn down her father’s architects as well as those who had faithfully served her husband in order that Mr. Hunt might build her new house at Sixty-first Street; while even the late Cornelius Vanderbilt would not positively decide upon the amplification of his enormous dwelling at Fifty-eighth Street until Mr. Hunt had consulted with his architect. This was a signal tribute to Mr. Hunt, and required the greatest delicacy upon his part, to which I believe he was equal.

In justice to the apparent partiality of the adaptation angel for Mr. Hunt, I must say that he was not entirely alone in her favors, but that there were other architects who had learned how to adapt English Renaissance of the Georges as cleverly as Mr. Hunt could adapt French chÂteaux, and who were, therefore, not seriously inconvenienced. But I see I am running before my

horse to market, and must reserve the consideration of this later architectural development for a chapter upon the art of adaptation while I return for the present to “Fashion in Architecture.”

And now I come to a much execrated style of architecture—the Queen Anne style, the last direct influence of the Centennial Exposition and the first fashion to incorporate the vital spark of Anglo-Saxon home feeling. It was the suggestion of historic home atmosphere, though much disguised with American nonsense, that appealed to the better educated people without their knowing it. They thought Queen Anne architecture to be merely another clever fashion, more clever because odder and stranger than any of its predecessors; indeed, the architects themselves, most expert with its vagaries, could not have told you the real secret of its popularity. Like all fashions in architecture, it was burlesqued and ruined while its most active votaries still living have passed on to a higher plane—the plane of adaptation—and do not like to reflect upon the Queen Anne houses they once erected. The fact of it was, the nation was groping in the dark, and if the truth must be told, it is groping in the dark still; but we have learned this much beyond refutation: a purely sensational and affected style of architecture such as was the Queen Anne style practised in this country is relegated now to the cheap speculative builder; the better class of Americans know that the secret of successful architecture does not lie in odd conceits and invention, at any rate.

There was once a young man named Frederick B. White, whose short and brilliant life is worth putting on record here. For if there was ever an architect who was facile princeps with Queen Anne architecture, it was he. He came from Princeton University at a time when the revival was in its first flush, and nobody, it seems to me, ever grasped the spirit of the style in so admirable a way. In Plate LXIV I have the honor of presenting an edifying example of this architect’s work, the Queen Anne dwelling-house at its best, and between this example and the Queen Anne house shown in Plate LXII the reader will, without doubt, note many degrees of deterioration in both taste and harmony.

To make his audience at the Brooklyn Tabernacle laugh the late Dr. Talmage called the Queen Anne style the most abominable of all styles of architecture. But when legitimately developed there is nothing the matter with the Queen Anne style at all. It was the Jacobin and bastard features without antecedents and raison d’Être that brought it into ridicule, and caused a composite style of American dwelling-house, Queen Anne in motive but Romanesque in detail, to make the necessary apologies to the public in the guise of an improved substitute. (See Plate LXV.) Though an avowed composition crossed by this strain and by that, the Queen Anne substitute was yet academic and correct in all its detail, and has survived to this day. I mean to say that this ingenious composite style is still exploited by representative architects. It can be made to simulate home-feeling after a fashion, although there is always that bizarre note present which characterizes fashion as its first object, while by no stretch of the imagination may we associate our ancestors or history with such a palpably modern American suburbanite as is illustrated herewith.

I know not whose perspicacity it was that first discovered in the Colonial exemplars of the Grand Epoch a fashion the popularity of which was soon to eclipse all the foregoing fashions I have enumerated, and which, moreover, continues to be most in vogue. But the Colonial germ, during the early eighties, seems to have been in the air and sporadic throughout the country. It is the greatest fallacy, however, to say, as many learned reviewers of Colonial architecture do, that its symmetry, restfulness and good proportion generally caused it to rise superior to other schools of design, because that is not true. The preceding styles properly developed all had compensating virtues. The secret of the Colonial revival was the same inherent vital spark that had previously commended the Queen Anne architecture, only the Colonial houses possessed it to a far greater degree. For it was not only English history, always intimately associated with our own, that they expressed, but authentic memoirs of the American people themselves.

To the first Colonial revivalists the true merit of the Colonial houses was entirely latent in them, though

influenced by it as by a magnet: and I regret that the cleverest architects to-day are still working upon the fallacious formula of symmetry, restfulness and good proportion while they often garble American history with much interpolated foreign material and anachronism. I do not want the reader to suppose that the ultra-fashionable Colonial house herein illustrated (Plate LXIV), was the work of the cleverest architect in America, but I needed to make clear this point about interpolated material, and so have selected a most unblushing example of it.

On page 129 I submit a hurriedly executed sketch of one of our earliest adaptations of a Colonial house of the Grand Epoch. This house was designed in 1885 by some of our cleverest architects indeed, though it is extremely doubtful if they had any deeper purpose in it than to exploit a fashionable dwelling for Newport at the time. To-day, these same architects would do it very differently. On no account would they put two Palladian windows with huge sheets of plate glass in such close conjunction as is seen in the sketch imposing triplet windows with cornices, elaborated by

applied ornament directly overhead. Such modern obtrusion would be relegated to their draughtsman who has set up in business for himself, and to whom they might direct the poorer-class client seeking a low-priced plan. Experience alone has taught these architects that the closer the adaptation up to a certain point, the greater the success. I do not believe that they ever think of expressing history in executing their designs. Certainly, they do not look upon their profession as eleemosynary to make the world a more beautiful world, a kindlier world, a happier world for mankind generally. The chances are they are still figuring very closely with American cunning and expediency for commercial martinets, whose favor means the largest commissions, and whose unwelcome personal influence we so often run across when least expecting in modern architecture, and which is sure to disenchant us with it.