Ca. 1878.
1884.
Ca. 1892.
Thank goodness for the relative high standard of popular culture during my youth. Otherwise, it surely would have taken far longer for me to become familiarized with the overblown personality and the opulent architectural and decorative out-pouring, of Gilded Age architect Stanford White. White was the genius of an epoch, who taught the elite to love the lavishness of historic European design and the finer points of aristocratic life. Better than anyone else of his generation, he could successfully apply his prodigious artistry to make anything more elegant and interesting than it might have been otherwise. Whether designing a magazine cover, great buildings or a table setting, his decisive Très Riche taste was thought impeccable and he was avidly sought after.
My introductory breakthrough was a late-show movie, watched with my great-grandmother, Mama Willie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. Released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1955, the year before I was born, the film was originally planned with Marilyn Monroe in mind for the title role. In Monroe’s place director Richard Fleischer secured the services of the more appropriately brunette Joan Collins, making her Hollywood début.
Just 22, Joan Collins, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.
The film vividly relates the story of teen-aged femme fatale Evelyn Nesbit. At the turn of the last century, a bit less than 100 years ago, Miss Nesbit was a virginal-looking, dreamy-eyed artists’ model and actress. Ever the acquisitive connoisseur concerning all things beautiful, White must have thought the 15 year-old quite a find. Bidding his time, he paid her dental bills, bought her becoming frocks and had her educated at a finishing school run by Mathilda DeMille, the mother of the soon to be noted film director, Cecil B. DeMille. He took special pains to ingratiate himself with Evelyn’s appreciative and trusting mother. Imagining he was the ancient goldsmith Pygmalion, how White must have enjoyed his slowly seductive, transforming metamorphosis. Certainly, however debased his intentions might have been, he had preferred to view his motives as strictly honorable and even charitable.
However she might be pictured today, either as an earlier version of “My Fair Lady” or “Pretty Woman”, eventually Evelyn Nesbit became embroiled in what some have termed “the Scandal of the Century”, the scandal surrounding the June 1906 murder of Stanford White, her former lover, by her erratic husband, rail and coal tycoon Harry Kendall Thaw.
Bewitching Evelyn Nesbit.
For the sake of authenticity, grown grandmotherly by 1955, Miss Nesbit served as a technical adviser on the rather bowdlerized bio-pic, which stared Ray Milland, as White and Farley Granger as Thaw.
1955: Farley Granger as Harry K. Thaw with Joan Collins, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.
My next lucky encounter of Stanford White occurred a few years later, in September of 1966, when I was 10 and far more sophisticated. This was when a pictorial essay on White’s architectural practice and his many marvelous monuments appeared in Life Magazine. The architect's numerous photogenic descendants, evocatively posed at each location, not only made White's creations come to life, but enhancing the beauty of each backdrop, were made to appear all the more beautiful in turn themselves. Whether young Jerome Buttrick sitting on the heart-shaped staircase at Rose Cliff, or a throng of family gathered on the lawn at Box Hill, the White country house at Saint James, Stanford White's progeny, by their attitude of élan and a slight aloofness, suggested they were rarified denizens of a more decorous realm of graciousness. In these illustrations by a pioneering woman photo-journalist, Toni Frissell, their environments devised specially by White, seems to edify and uplift its inhabitants. This touch that White had, of creating surroundings as flattering to a patron as a couture evening dress, or of a well-tailored suit, was what had made him so in demand.
For a long time I could not recall if The Splendor of Stanford White: The Great Landmarks of the Architect Who was Society's Darling at the Turn of the Century, had appeared in Life or Look. Both regularly included stories related to historic preservation. If this hardly matters, what does, is that living in a modernist America, a land obsessed with a minimal aesthetic of pragmatic functionality, this introduction to McKim, Mead & White’s diverse oeuvre was a revelation. It really was a personal discovery, even an epiphany, confirming that the more sensual and comprehensible arts and decoration of the past, were an alternative to alienation often inherent in contemporary design. The pictures in this journal similarly established that for people like me, people for whom ‘more is more’, alternatives to convention and the ordinary, would always beckon as alluringly as they did for Stanford White.
Decorations conceived by Stanford White for a dinner hosted by his friend, patron and financial adviser, Charles T. Barney .
According to at least one historian, at the start of the 1890's, while working on the New York Building for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, a fatherly Stanford White advised a young man, the would-be architect Author Acton, that an independent income was imperative to an architect's success. In circumstances like his own, White is supposed to have counseled Acton, it was best to make a favorable marriage. Having himself taken the precaution of wedding twenty-two-year-old heiress Bessie Springs Smith in 1884, the older architect, Acton might have concluded, must have known what he was talking about. The Junoesque Mrs. White hailed from a socially prominent Long Island family. Her ancestors were early settlers of Smithtown, New York, named after them and her father was a judge. Moreover Bessie Smith White and her sisters were heirs to the fortune of their aunt, the widow of department store magnate A. T. Stewart. Seemingly Acton followed the advice of the more experienced and already acclaimed White, inasmuch as not long after this chat he was promptly betrothed. Mrs. Acton, in time Lady Acton, was a Chicago girl, Miss Hortense Mitchell, the daughter of John J. Mitchell, the President of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank.
1884: The Junoesque Bessie Springs Smith on her wedding day in 1884.
"Running through the world of McKim, Mead & White was a sense of the exploration of life's pleasures. A circle of bisexual and homosexual entertainment can be traced within the office,"
maintains Mosette Broderick in her sensational and compelling book, Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age.
" The circle included Stanford White, [Augustus] Saint Gaudens, Joseph M. Wells, Frank Millet, Whitney Warren, Thomas Hastings and probably [William R.] Mead, and many others. Aline Saarinen, while working on her proposed biography of White over thirty years ago, came to the conclusion that White was homosexual. It seems clear that White was bisexual, but there are batches of letters unmistakably revealing times in his life when he was part of an active gay circle---evidence that is still present despite the sharp obscuring blade of his son Larry White.”
Recovering one's composure after such a spectacular bombshell, it's impossible to agree with such a conclusion made by the writer that White's sexual identy, does not matter. Fortunately then, Ms. Broderick can't help but contradict herself. All throughout her unflinching examination of some of late 19th-Century America's most notable artist, architects and patrons, she suggest how crucial to the development and outcome of commissions, friendships and inter-personal interaction was the very shared sexual orientation she so cavalierly dismisses at the start as, 'of no importance'. Thomas Wilmer Dewing, White’s painter-friend, connoisseur and industrialist Charles Lang Freer and James L. Breese the magnate-turned-amateur photographer and White client, are each purported to be gay as well.
What can it mean, gay men who married and lived as straight men? Were series of serial encounters with under-age girls, only a kind of denial, an ostentatious cover for someone gay in a day when one dare not admit to so utterly outlawed a sexual preference? Truly, like some LGBTSGL men who came after him, White and his coterie thought themselves part of some ultra-smart, wickedly fun sort of secret society. Anywhere they ventured, around the world, their members were legion. Yet, the question remains: Are we today even capable of divining such long hidden aspects of history so vehemently denigrated and so deliberately masked?
As a wedding gift for Stanford White and his wife, his close friend and possible lover, Augustus Saint-Gaudens produced this arresting bas relief. Bessie White is shown adjusting her wedding veil. The gilt frame is among innumerable examples designed by White, who also turned his hand to book covers, furniture and decorations for special events like gala performances at the opera.
A rented farmhouse that he later purchased, Stanford White’s country place, started out as an exceedingly modest affair. Quite near where his wife grew up, from a hilltop site it enjoyed a lovely vista over the glittering waters of Smithtown Bay. Box Hill was named for old boxwood White transplanted from Virginia that was to flourish on the grounds. With the birth of the White’s son, Lawrence Grant White in 1887, their country retreat increasing became the center of Mrs. White’s cosseted existence. For her husband however, it was more than just home. Much like the brownstone house he rented on Gramercy Square as a house in town, ever increasingly, Box Hill was also a showplace. As much from a desire to emulate the privilege, ease and elegance of clients, who were often enormously rich, as from the need to express himself as an artist, White was continually altering and improving his houses. This was even the case with rooms he rented for private liaisons. Workshops at which he might experiment to perfect his deluxe sensibility, White’s environs were calculated to entrance his friends and prospective patrons with the idea of what was possible under his insightful guidance. Rooms White devised for himself seemed to say to others, if he might live in so princely a manner, under somewhat limited means, what might the ideal client, one with more abundant recourses, achieve?
Ca. 1891: The happy family: Stanney, Bessie and Larry White with a monkey!
Utterly unprepossessing, Box Hill as Stanford White found it.
Proximity and indeed intimacy with the richest in the land made Stanford White long for wealth. All his life, it seems, White yearned for greater resources for himself, for the possibility of affording his superior tastes, free reign. Very likely laboring furiously to gain great affluence, not only by maintaining an enormous workload, but by borrowing from his wife, friends and acquaintances, to speculate on stocks and investments, purchased on margin, he miscalculated. For not unlike Robert Adam before, so much of White’s most inspired effort resulted from proscription and limitation. Like Adam, for instance, his reworking of existing houses always produced brilliant results. White’s particular genius lay in his ability, with artful success, to repeatedly cobble together disperate 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.
Ca.1901.
Stanford White as a gentleman-architect and Mrs. White as the lady bountiful.
Box Hill's aggrandizement was a gradual process, only curtailed by lack of funds.
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 had ever existed before.
With oil jars and sarcophagi used as planters, the serpentine drive of Box Hill was lined with standard bay trees, bonsai, flowering potted plants, and quaint topiaries.
Ca. 1901: Box Hill.
Ca. 1904.
Comfortably furnished, Box Hill's extensive porchs served as summer living rooms in the open air.
Even after losing its shutters, multi gabled Box Hill, with two-over-two windows characteristic of a farmhouse and a frieze of Chinese fretwork indicative of the grandest Colonial mansion, remains highly distinctive. Stucco embedded with beach pebbles was a typical White touch that added interest inexpensively. This was an economy that to White's way of thinking, permitted the indulgence of an Italian well-head and Grecian herms, used to form a formal fouuntain and forecourt at Box Hill's entrance.
Mrs. White, her sisters and their brother acting as muses at Box Hill's wooden excedra.
As the focus for Box Hill's postage stamp size formal garden, a reproduction Crouching Aphrodite adorned a lily pool.
White's Century plants, oleanders and bay trees required a greenhouse.
White's pergola assumed the form of an Ionic temple.
Commissioned by Stanford White, as a weather-vane for his Madison Square Garden, a variant of "Diana of the Tower” by his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens was place on Box Hill's highest point. White had talked his close friend and possible lover into creating the statue's initial version for free!
Nominally Colonial Revival, Box Hill was entered via a center hall at the heart of the house, extending from the front entrance to the back door. Both portals were salvaged early Greek Revival examples with leaded glass sidelights. The quarry tile floor was both impervious to the wet shoes and muddy boots associated with an active country life of sport, as well as an effective contrast for Eastern carpets.
Sensually twisting, exuberantly carved, gilded and painted, bold Baroque Solomonic columns, entwined by fruited grape vines, were a delightful, almost talismanic lite motive which White avidly employed for himself and clients alike. As a contrasting background, White used inexpensive honey-colored split-bamboo matting, commonly used as porch sunshades. Mats were stretched across the walls of of Box Hill's Entrance Hall, the Stair Hall beyond it and in the Drawing Room.
How dearly White loved the display of antlers and of animal pelts with mounted heads. Polar bear skins were especially fashionable, but as on the seat beside Stanford White's simple stairway with a stepped, mat-covered parapet, a brown bear skin might do as well. Tigers, lions and leopards were similarly sacrificed in the pursuit of beauty.
Starkly unachitectural and largely unembellished, Whites's rooms at Box Hill, like Louis Tiffany's at Lauralton Hall, were meant to showcase antiques and works of art. A profusion of plants and flowers helped to tie such assemblages, carefully considered to form satisfying color harmonies into a pleasing, picturesque uniform whole. Producing uniformity out of such diversity and abundance was White's strong suite.
Discovering a pair of partly-gilded 16th-Century North European lion carvings he admired, White had no compunction about reproducing more, so that he might enjoy them at both of his houses.
Almost a cult in High Society, the fashion for animal skin rugs with mounted, snarling heads, was made sensational not only by photographs White and others commissioned showing Evelyn Nesbit reclining invitingly on a bearskin, in her kimono or nude. Three Weeks, a romance by English novelist Elinor Glyn, relating how "it" occurred on fur rugs before the fireside, gave rise to charming doggerel that helped sear tiger skins and the like, in association with "it", indelibly on public consciousness:
"Would you like to sin? With Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin? Or, would you prefer to err with her on other fur?"
Paired with a Eucharistic relief as an over-mantle, White's antique stone inner Hall chimney-piece, supported by bearded atlantes, is unabashedly pagan.
Made possible by the introduction of a steel I-beam, which White judiciously left exposed with carved wooden escutcheons appliqued as decoration, the Drawing Room at Box Hill was the largest space in the many-gabled house. Here, even the broad ceiling was covered with split bamboo matting.
Essential among the mostly 18th-Century furniture in Box the Hill Drawing Room, was a much-used piano and harp.
1966: Portrayed by Toni Frissell an elegant Stanford White descendant at Box Hill admires the handiwork of an ancestor made newly famous by the photo essay in Life Magazine.
If panels of Persian tiles survive above windows flanking the fireplace in the Drawing Room at Box Hill, besides a quantity of furniture and assorted ceramics, more ephemeral elements that contributed to a magical atmosphere, Venetian lanterns, standard bay trees and sofa cushions covered with Indian silk sewn with bits of mirror, are gone forever.
Already at the start of the White's residence at Box Hill, Stanford White had definite ideas for his Dining Room. Throughout decades of experimentation, gleaming silver, a fireplace covered with Delft tiles and a collection of Majolica plates, arranged decoratively around the walls, remained a constant here,
The two most original and most memorable features of the Whites' Dining Room are opposing wall of glass and Delft tiles, each running the entire length of the room.
Mahogany Chippendale chairs and a Federal sideboard laden with gleaming silver, standing below an American Empire convex mirror, these conventional elements of Box Hill's remarkable Dining Room, effectively act as a deceptive foil. Delft tiles might well have been used in part as a celebration of New York's Dutch Colonial heritage. The massive bay, with its inviting window seat, may have been inspired by Georgian precedent, but the room demonstrates how for White at his best, as here, the past is always only a point of departure.
As in the Stair Hall of the Ogden Mill's house at Stattsburgh, instead of having expensive wood paneling, White made do with a highly affordable substitute, in this case, Lincrusta.
White was so pleased by his idea to create a fireplace with a mantle shelf and Delft tiles cladding an entire wall, that he repeated the idea at least three times more.
White's large collection of tin-glazed earthen ware, both Majolica and faience, was on display all around the room.
Crowned by a frieze of tin-glazed plates encircling the room, Box Hill's Dining Room bay window was curtain-less from the start!
In addition to geraniums in pots and bouquets of flowers lined up along the window sill, flame-sticthed cushions enlivened the Dining Room at Box Hill.
A salvaged door with leaded sidelights allows direct, ready access from the White family's sunny Dining Room, to the outdoors.
Externally, Box Hill's long, low bay widow, was a definitive expression of the airy Dining Room.
MR. AND MRS. STANFORD WHITE
121 EAST TWENTY-FIRST STREET
Number 121 East Twenty-first Street, Mr. and Mrs. Stanford White's much-remodeled city residence. By eliminating the old-fashioned high stoop to the principal parlor-floor on the first storey and by adding a ground-floor entrance, White had greatly enhanced the size and usefulness of his Drawing Room.
Across the nation, Stanford White was to help to establish the fashion for iron and glass front doors like his own . His work also helped to popularize the adaptation of ancient sarcophagi as planters.
Guests ushered into the White's ground-floor Reception Room found a magnificent Persian carpet fragment, an 18th-Century sleigh chair and a milles fluers tapestry depicting a courtly hunting scene.
The over-scaled, ill-proportioned, too short Corinthian pilasters used in White's Hall and Drawing room, were suggested by examples from late 1830's row houses. Paired with the marble columns imported from Italy, of the kind White customarily used to screen stairs, they represent his favored form of neo-Classical synthesis, one hardly at odds with twisted balusters of the railing to the second floor. The dramatic draping of the stair with tapestry was a recurrent idea adopted by White.
Stanford White's city Drawing Room was, as historian Christopher Gray says, "practically a salesroom for European decorative arts..." The walls were hung with antique crimson silk-velvet. The marble mantelpiece, imported for a New York row house in the 1820's, was surmounted by a looking-glass overlain with an elaborate gilt triumphal arch, flanked by twisted Solomonic columns, entwined by fruited grape vines.
Stanford White's investments in art and antiques, destined for eager clients were by far more successful than his speculation in the stock market. The early 18th-Century painted ceiling of his Drawing Room, from an Italian villa, was eventually acquired by William Randolph Hearst after White's death for his palace at San Simeon. As in many English country house collections, religious art, as employed by White to decorate interiors, managed never to suggest piety so much as a celebration of material success and earthly attainment.
A refreshingly unexpected touch in White's city Drawing Room, was his use of the same tied-back ruffled organdy curtains others used in ordinary spaces. Cut flowers and a profusion of plants were another hallmark of the masterful designer.
Eliminating the high stoop outside not only enabled White to widen his Drawing Room, he was also able to add in one corner, in place of the old front door, a bright, plant filled oriel window.
In every possible spot, White enlivened his Drawing Room with dynamic figures, frozen in motion, carved from marble, cast in bronze and made from gilded wood.
If the Hall's Vitruvian Scrolled frieze lends a light-hearted note to the space, the fireplace, crowned by a bust of Henry IV of France, though richly ornamented, is correspondingly sober. Composed from at least three different components, White's mantelpiece was untied by tone, texture and antiquity. A provincial French chair drawn beside the fire is in its humble simplicity, even more disarming than either the Bengal tiger skin or the tall palm trees.
As a convivial setting for superb meals, White's Dining Room featured eagle supported console tables which were the basis for those made for the White House State Dining Room, a columned screen and ceiling imported from Europe, a cassone utilized as a sideboard, ala Hitchcock's Rope, and towering rubber trees.
What did it matter, to an originator like Stanford White, if his over-mantel's scrolling volutes failed to fit on the chimney breast? The bronze on the mantel shelf is a reduction of Frederick MacMonnies' Bacchante that public outrage had banished from the courtyard of the Boston Public Library. The Levantine pierced brass censors, recalling Sargent's painting, were doubtlessly used to perfume festive banquets.
As in some swank restaruants of today, from a marble basin presided over by a marble figure of Silenus emptying a water bottle, the Whites' guests were able to select swimming trout to dine on. Besides a varied panoply of candles and oil lamps, as in Henry Villard's Drawing Room and elsewhere, White uses electricity. He has hung six glass bead covered light bulbs at strategic intervals around the room; what must the effect have looked like?
Over half a dozen harps and various other antique musical instruments adorned White's white and gold Louis Seize Music Room.
Supported by columns and a mermaid queen, once owned by Rome's noble Colonnas family, Stanford White's early 18th-Century harpsichord was particularly fine.
The 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 amid well-chosen plants like the cast-iron plants on the terrazzo stairway's marble parapets. 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.
Added to the end of an ell, White's third-floor picture gallery had a beamed, skylighted ceiling and a Baroque Spanish doorcase with a broken pediment and Solomenic columns. White’s collection of Renaissance and contemporary art was, with a few exceptions, was less superlative in terms of artistic quality, than it was decorative. As prized as classic neon trade signs of the 1930's-1950's are today, were the painted and guilded, iron and copper figuerative shop signs White collected. Note the ubiquitous tubbed bay trees and the imaginative idea of having a border, cut from a tapestry, hung from three pairs of stag antlers, as a window valance.
Arranged so as to promote guests' conversation and interaction, even empty White's antique chairs animated his rooms.
Flanked by heraldic marble lions, White's 16th-Century Henry II stone mantelpiece, carved with a strapwork interlace, displays no less than six frolicsome gilded boys as well a surreal-seeming mounted moose head. Through White's influence, both big game trophies and antique fireplaces became much admired elite status symbols.
Exuding intimacy, White's green sitting room displayed an eclectic collection of art made by his broad circle of friends. These works included Robert Van Vorst Sewell's redition of a bacchante above the wooden Federal mantel, graced by bouquets of peacock feathers.
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