It's stirring to read in the 1921 Atlanta Constitution the soaring flights of Paul Chalfin's praise for Phllip Trammell Shutze's Howard Theatre. "Without question, the exterior of the theatre and its placing would be an adornment to any city in Italy----to London or to Paris...dignity...makes it comparable to the Odeon...while its great charm places it in the company of Covent Garden...", he states rapturously.
If a century ago French style, by way of architecture, design and decoration, prevailed in favor amongst the most chic Americas, a strong parallel and concurrent admiration of Italian classicism appealed to the cognoscenti as well. Edith Wharton, Maxfield Parish, Charles Adams Platt, Charles Follen McKim and William Rutherford Mead each had an important part in promoting an aesthetic rooted in Italian taste. And through her much praised ‘palace of art’, at Fenway Court in Boston, so did Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Each of these notable figures, in turn, were to contribute to the distinctive aesthetic development of young Paul Chalfin, too. It was Stanford White, I believe, however, who influenced him the most. In the late 1890’s, when Chalfin was an art student there, all over New York, White’s talents had helped enhance and transform the city with buildings, interiors and monuments, all unlike anything anyone had ever produced in America before. The elegance and sophistication of White’s oeuvre were, as Chalfin might have said as his highest acolade, comparable to great European examples.
Paul Chalfin
Did Paul Chalfin ever actually meet and know Stanford White? So far, this is a question I have yet to discover an answer for. He did come, all the same, through his long-term exposure to the interiors White was most proud of, to learn all about White’s artistic method and his harmonies of contrast. How propitious it was that Chalfin’s art-patron-artist friend, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, after her father-in-law died, had agreed to live in his vast Fifth Avenue house at 68th Street.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney portrayed by Robert Henri.
White’s particular genius lay in his ability, with artful success, to cobble together desperate elements, which were very often of divergent quality. He liked to combine together cherished fragments scavenged from aristocratic European sources, and similar, newer, fabric salvaged from the demolition of early American landmarks. Such assemblages might also be complimented by art and custom hand-crafted elements produced by his friends and protégés. The technologically advanced construction and systems forming the gem-setting-like matrix in which his old and new treasures shown forth, were sometimes relatively inexpensive. In many cases, steel I-beams, electric lights, concrete or terra-cotta, were even frankly employed without disguise.
The Hall of Stanford White's Vizcaya-like masterpiece, William Collins Whitney House at 871 Fifth Avenue. It was leased on Whitney's death to James Henry 'Silent' Smith, in 1904. After Mr. Smith married and later died, it was occupied by Whitney's son, Harry Payne Whitney and his talented wife, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the sculptor.
Such juxtapositions invariably combined old elements in a novel and original way. And it was the boldness of his invention and treatment, which make it impossible to mistake what Stanford White created for something which existed before. This was equally true of Mrs. Gardner and of Paul Chalfin as well. Photographs below, showing three fountains fashioned by each of these talented designers, using old materials, from different periods, serve to illustrate something of the great scope of their ability.
Fountain in the Stanford White residence on Gramercy Park North and Lexington Avenue. Formed from a Renaissance lavabo set against a wall of Hispano-Moresque tiles, it features a modern bronze figure with shells and, like the fountains below, well-chosen plants. The essence of the appeal of these groupings is the authority with which an unrelated collection of parts from different periods and of different types, are made into a 'new' and pleasing whole.
At Fenway Court ancient Greek, Roman and Italian Renaissance marble fragments, depicting fish or celebrating water, are effectively displayed against a contrasting backdrop of rough stucco and blooming plants.
Chalfin's fountain group at Vizcaya's entrance is suitably impressive. It incorporates a much-restored Roman Bacchus, with an ancient sarcophagus as a basin. Banked and backed by lush plants, it stands beneath a scrolling iron-work archway on Sienna marble columns.
One of Paul Chalfin's many seahorses ornamenting Vizcaya, is carved on a console. Hard and durable, the local limestone used for so much of Vizcaya's exterior was a fortunate choice, as it gave an instantaneous appearance of weathered antiquity that might have even moved John Ruskin.
Travel abroad, with direct and deep immersion into the world and context that had devised what were then acknowledged to be the world’s most beautiful buildings, was what most underlined for people like Gardner, White and Chalfin, the deficiencies of American architecture. Like Robert Adams’ grand tour, publication and fashionable practice, all Chalfin’s efforts had a greater purpose too. Incessant activity is hardly ever merely about having a career or making a living. With White as his role model Chalfin also mixed advising clients on matters of taste, large and small. He followed his example as well, undertaking the design of pennants and other ephemera for parades, dances and charity street fairs, with the same enthusiasm he brought to decorating a room or a house.
Chances to undertake such seemingly minor commissions, much like invitations to dances or to sit in a wealthy friend ’s opera box, were always eagerly sought. Like White, Chalfin understood how one good thing can lead to the next. So in the same calculated way in which he amplified his fashionable social activities with press coverage, he was diligent about seeing to it that all his design work got published too.
If working for Elsie de Wolfe had constrained his self-promotion with Vizcaya, and after, Chalfin never looked back.
Marshaling all the energy and deft skill of the cleverest press agent, Chalfin promoted Vizcaya, and so promoted himself. With each subsequent publication, praise for the dazzling Deering villa was more effusive and Chalfin’s role in its conception and realization, grew more aggrandized and absolute.
Not unexpectedly, the flurry and fanfare that proceeded Vizcaya’s completion inspired others to obtain splendid Italian villas. Some, like tire magnate Harvey Firestone, were rather slapdash in their attempt to imitate Vizcaya’s well-heralded magnificence. Designed by Herbert L. Bass & Company, Firestone’s holiday home on Miami’s Collins Road where the Hotel Fontainebleau is now, had originally been built for James H. Snowden. Compared with Vizcaya, only superficially ‘Mediterranean’ with a red tile roof and an arcaded loggia, stuccoed Harbel Villa, named in tribute of Harvey and Idabel Firestone, was a large but pedestrian house.
Built in a much older preserve of privilege, Villa Lewaro, at Irvington, New York, though far from a mild Italianate climate, was not the same stylistic failure. Built for African-American beauty and hair-care products manufacturer, Madame C. J. Walker, this smaller house, named by Caruso for Lila Walker Robinson, the owner’s daughter, made the most of an elevated, sloping site. Vertner Woodson Tandy, the architect, was also African-American and trained at Cornell. Villa Lewaro’s white decorators, Righter & Kolb, who maintained workshops in Venice, like Tandy, did a remarkable job considering their client’s resources, which, astronomical to blacks, relative to Deering’s or Firestone’s were rather modest.
Madame C. J. Walker
Villa Lewaro
Deciding to build a house for himself in the wake of Vizcaya’s success, Paul Chalfin first took on a city residence. Keeping in mind the shrewd career trajectory Chalfin had set himself, the reason why seems fairly clear.
Diminution of Hoffman’s participation in Deering’s house by Chalfin had been shameful. After all, it was only through Hoffman’s proven ability that all of Chalfin’s delightful and diverting set-pieces were finally knitted together into a well-resolved whole entity. Certainly it was his on prodigious ability and experience that emboldened Chalfin to be so dismissive.
Still working for Miss de Wolfe, Chalfin twice had a chance to work with a decorative designer of equally august aptitude. Moreover, Ogden Codman, beyond his erudite design capabilities, was also skilled, like Robert Adam, at reworking ordinary, pre-existing houses into dwellings that looked every bit as wonderful as they were to live in. It was this skill, and not just her snobbery, nor even Codman’s reputation for keeping down cost, which made de Wolfe hire him to remodel two houses on the East side of Manhattan.
Ogden Codman, a scholarly, once handsome gay architect married a wealthy widow, with courtesy enough to die after a few years and leave him very rich.
The first house, 131 East 71st Street, was widely publicized in her celebrated book, The House in Good Taste, ghost-written by Ruby Ross Wood. Giving this old house a metamorphsing makeover was basically an advertisement-investment on de Wolfe’s part. It functioned as the city's first of many decorator-show houses. Crowds of the curious happily paid a fee to tour. They all wanted to see how one could take the ubiquitous old-fashioned 3-floor-and-basement brownstone, and render it charming and comfortable. After the maximum of publicity was gained the renewed old house was sold at a tidy profit. This was what Chalfin decided to copy.
Elsie de Wolfe
De Wolfe’s second collaboration with Codman, doing over an old, ordinary and inexpensive house was a labor of love, for herself and her longtime lover, Bessie Marbury, the renowned, rotund literary agent. Located at 123 East 55th Street, it only got underway in 1910. So it’s uncertain how much, if anything, Chalfin had to do with this project. Without a doubt he was familiar with it though, and seeing such a dramatic transformation a second time, he was 'off to the races!' himself, securing and refurbishing a 19-foot-wide, three-storey house at 349 Lexington Avenue in 1915. By August of 1918, Chalfin's bandbox of a house appeared in two journals, most conspicuously in Good Furniture Magazine, in a piece titled, "Italian Directory Furniture In The House Of A New York Architect". Who was the architect, making a 19-foot-wide house seem so much more expansive, and characterizing all of his mostly small-scaled and delicate furniture as exceedingly large, but through the architect's intelligence, made to visually fit a confined, if 'wide' space? It would be quite easy to guess that this finely crafted article was by Paul Chalfin, as it bears his name at the end. But at the start, just under the title, it reads, 'Editor, Good Furniture Magazine'. Could it be true, that still working away at Vizcaya, well after Deering had moved in, Chalfin also held so influential a post? If so, for how long?
Chalfin's exquisite Drawing Room, with an Aubusson identical to the one in James Deering's Vizcaya Bedroom.
The Dining Room.
The Library, where a neat pile of books serves as an occasional table.
Chalfin's Sitting Room, but who is the man in the photograph?
Chalfin's room showing his pastel portrait by English artist Albert Sterner, brother of Frederick Sterner, the New York architect who would make a specialty of creatively transforming 'brownstones'.
1916: Paul Chalfin by Albert Sterner
That Chalfin would quickly flip his house after doing-it-up is no surprise. The new owner was Ziegfeld Follies star Justine Johnstone, anticipating her marriage to producer Walter Wanger in 1919. They divorced in 1938, with Johnstone claiming that Wanger was "abrupt, surly, and discourteous".
Isabella Stewart Gardner. As much as Vizcaya, Mrs. Jack's Brookline country house, Green Hill, must surely to have inspired Chalfin's own retreat.
How like Chalfin to amusingly re-name the historic Voorhis homestead and quarries from 1798, at Bryan Harbor, Greenwich, Connecticut, "Vestiges". Buying the 30-acre property in 1918, with $40,000 he borrowed from Deering, Chalfin propagated a quaint garden with climbing roses, clematis, magnolia, azaleas and rhododendrons. He was looked after by Italian men servants. Moving nearby he sold Vestiges in 1938.
Chalfin's country interiors, employing all his continental painted furniture, were sophistication itself.
Seeing the smart display that Paul Chalfin made for John Wanamaker's 'Venturus' exhibition of modern French furniture and decorative art, in 1927, just two years after France's groundbreaking Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes makes one yearn all the more to know how he decorated his second estate.
Elegant, unadorned and functional, Japanese-inspired lanterns that Chafin designed to light up the night at Vizcaya, are indicative of his prescient modernist symphaty, his openness to experimentation.
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