Beneficiaries called her "Godmother". A major patron of Harlem Renaissance artists, Charlotte Louise Van der Veer Quick Mason, saw the redemption of depleted and weakened white America, coming from blacks unsullied by civilization. Thoughtful enough to take young Langston Hughes to Philharmonic Symphony concerts, she disapproved of his deriving too much inspiration from contaminated sources. Envisioning the fetishized poet as a potent primitive savior, Mrs. Mason was as oppressively emasculating as any lynching klansman.
From youth, whether in drawings or déors I've devised, I've always been attracted to aesthetic influences rooted in the elite past. Terribly backward, even reactionary, the art, architecture, costume, cuisine and manners from history I've most responded to, are those associated with aristocrats, royalty and the rich.
1966
1990
63 Hamilton Terrace
Soon after discovering Stan Hywet Hall, Charles Adams Platt's and Warren Manning's Gwinn, a compact estate built for iron ore mining and shipping baron William G. Mather, which gracefully embraces the shore of Lake Erie, became a lode star of perfection to me. Somewhat later, following Newport's great 'cottages', Villa Vizcaya was added to my private pantheon of notable houses.
Villa Vizcaya
1957
For someone holding the convictions of a democratic Socialist, such conservative tastes might have been, to say the least, problematic. It has helped a little to ease my conscience, coming to the realization that the designers, artists and craftsmen who created the beauty of places which appeal to me most, were themselves seldom well-off. Frequently, through attempting to live with a measure of the loveliness they offered to those who were affluent, some became, if not poor, financially frustrated, living a life devoid of security, ever near the verge of disaster, a life as illusory as a Facebook page. Among the best creative artists, notwithstanding the largess of patrons and friends, near-ruin results from generosity, their own. Knowing the pathos of poverty sometimes helps one to become a cheerful giver. Striving to realize the better part of perfection can also drive one to ignore mere physical well-being in pursuit of something nobler.
As an historian, my striving to identify and extol the critical diversity of the contributions of all kinds of people, be they slaves, gay and lesbian, impoverished immigrants, or others adjudged to be outsiders, to my preferred aesthetic of luxury, has a purpose. I am attempting to redeem any selfish exclusivity implicit in my tastes, into a mighty weapon of subversion.
Lake Erie
Biscayne Bay
Many have been encouraging of my mission as an outsider historian. Once, coming to dinner on Hamilton Terrace with a lovely young lady co-worker
from Marilyn Evins Public Relations, renowned jazz and social historian James T. Maher, was one heroic supporter. Being given James Maher's small majestic book, The Twilight of Splendor, in 1978, was like being handed a flashlight in Ohio's dark chasm. As much as anything, it helped to direct me to New York. Interspersed between a polite flirtation he maintained with my colleague, Maher had praised the drawings I'd made to inexpensively embellish the walls. Reassuringly, he wrote in my book,
"To Michael Adams.-Never let the echoes be silenced-they are all we have to nourish the future. With all good wishes for your success. James T. Maher 2 December 1988".
The consummate scholar, Maher was someone with vast and varied interests. Among the first to show me how everything is connected to everything else, he could discourse with considerable authority on an array of topics. Asked about gays in jazz, he spoke of the predatory philanthropy of John Hammond and recounted band members' reoccurring tales of "Count Basie's man."
Commenting on my muraled walls, he talked of Elsie de Wolfe, Ogden Codman, Stanford White, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Julian Abele and then, Paul Chalfin.
Who was Paul Chalfin? I had learned only after getting Maher's book. He was born a century before I graduated from high school, on November 2, 1874, in New York. He grew up on the Hudson River near 148th Street, the same neighborhood where I would live while a graduate preservation student at Columbia.
The raffish Paul Chalfin!
In 1894 Chalfin began studying at Harvard University. But he left after two years to become an artist, enrolling at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied painting. After graduation in 1898 he was accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the world's most famous art and architecture school. Chalfin studied painting with Jean-Léon Gérôme, an historic genre painter who had previously taught Thomas Eakins. Later he studied with Whistler.
Returning to Boston in 1903 he succeeded his ill friend Walter T. Cabot as Curator of Chinese and Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts. Author of a small catalogue, Japanese wood carvings, architectural and decorative fragments from temples and palaces, he was an intimate of Mrs. Gardner. So, one wonders, did Paul Chalfin, with his advanced tastes, cultivated abroad, assist Mrs. Jack in arranging her electrically eclectic rooms at Fenway Court?
Isabella Stewart Gardner
Soon enough, by 1906, the Lazarus Scholarship committee granting him a three-year scholarship to study mural painting, sent Chalfin to Rome. In the Eternal City he lived at the American Academy where, due to the virtuosity of his work, he was quickly named a fellow. A catholic group of old masters such as Piranesi, Fra Angelico, Tiepolo, and Jacopo Pontormo, all then deemed unfashionable, most inspired the American student.
Conceeded to be brilliantly learned, with impeccable tastes, openly gay Chaflin has been acessed by several sources as, flamboyant, astringent and contrarian. However, with highly intelligent women at least, Paul Chalfin exhibited a great talent for enduring friendships. In addition to Isabella Gardiner his close chums included Gertrude Stein and, most notably, another Gertrude: Gloria Vanderbilt's aunt, the accomplished sculptress, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the accomplished sculptress.
Another woman friend was actress-turned-decorator Elsie de Wolfe. In fact, it was she for whom the young muralist worked as an assistant and who, in 1910, directed Chalfin to the most notable and celebrated project of his career. Collaborating with the just-starting but highly capable gentleman-architect Francis Burrall Hoffman, he designed Villa Vizcaya on Biscayne Bay in Florida for the industrial magnate James Deering.
The reluctant industrialist James Deering.
Gentleman-architect Francis Burrall Hoffman.
Already suffering from pernicious anemia and so, always careful to ration his energy, Deering, an heir of the International Harvester fortune, was an unlikely pleasure-dome builder. But the reticent and restrained bachelor's partnership with Chalfin was so magnificently fruitful, that shots of its gardens were employed by Orson Wells to represent those at Xanadu in his famous film Citizen Kane.
Following an initial meeting to place a fountain at Deering's Chicago house, apprised of the multi-millionaire's plan to develop a winter retreat on 180 acres of mangrove jungle, Chalfin imediately made plans and was soon made responsible for the overall design, decoration, furnishing and landscape of one of the most charming houses ever erected anywhere in the world.
Early on, conflicts as to detailing, and later over authorship, arose aplenty. Hoffman was largely relegated to devising a plan, overall massing, and working out the house's structural and mechanical elements. It cannot have been an easy task. In all four men worked as 'architects' on this project with, one landscape architect as well. Fitting disparate, frequently fragmentary treasures plundered by Deering from abroad on the recommendation of Chalfin, into a coherent and comfortable whole had to be trying. Julia Morgan would do it well at San Simeon, but she had only a mostly appreciative Hearst and not Paul Chalfin to deal with. This was surely an ironic situation, as to begin with, Chalfin was neither trained nor licensed as an architect.
With genteel generosity Hoffman allowed Chalfin to take credit as his associate architect, who with credit for Vizcaya was able to register in New York. Headed off to serve in the First World War as the villa neared completion, Hoffman could hardly have contemplated that his good deed would be so rudely rewarded, by Chalfin's steady and gradual claim of exclusive credit as the creator of Derring's widely publicized and critically acclaimed new estate.
Chalfin's eventual total usurpation of credit for Vizcaya cavalierly glossed over even James Deering's crucial and constant role, one which extended far beyond merely paying bills. Yet one thing remains clear: Chalfin's indisputable key part as impresario in an enterprize that produced a work of art, where others might have only built a house. It is appreciating his ambition to become a successor to Stanford White as cosmopolitan society's designer, architect and decorator of choice, which enables one even to manage to forgive his unbecomming self-promotion.
Vizcaya's northern Italian prototype, the 17th-Century Villa Rezzonico.
1914: Lacking false center windows at the 'towers'' top storey and essential decoration introduced by Chalfin late in the game, Vizcaya's bay-front facade, like all other aspects of Deering's villa, gained immeasurably from the designer's insistent and incessant quest for refinement.
Sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, father of the Modernist, was selected to execute Vizcaya's fanciful barge-form breakwater, in part, because his brother Ralph worked as one of Chalfin's draftsmen. This highly romantic conception of a highly functional feature was once exuberantly described as like a stone nef, referring to the ship-form table ornaments popular in courtly circles from the 13th through the 17th-Centuries.
'The Continents', terminal deities of the depths, by Calder for Vizcaya's barge-breakwater.
'The Pleasures and Terrors of the Sea', like his other figures, was judged to be overly sensual and Calder was asked to 'tone down' his voluptuous mermaids.
Replanted under Chalfin's guidance, following the 1926 hurricane, Vizcaya's gardens were flourishing when this photograph was made in 1934. Without intended palms the breakwater is forlornly diminished, if still magical...
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