IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY, #7

My morning distraction was set in motion by an 18th century engraving of the Cabinet de Treillage at the Petite Trianon at Versailles.

I'm something of a geek (I could stop there, but do let's soldier on) about how designs travel and how they are re-invented in each iteration.

In 1799, Samuel McIntire, a self-taught carver, carpenter, and architect in Salem, Massachusetts, was engaged in his largest residential project, one of the grandest houses of its era in America, for the merchant Elias Hasket Derby.  

The program included a summer house for the garden, and this sketch by McIntire, for a Palladian-inspired garden folly, is thought to be a preliminary sketch for that structure.

Photograph of Derby-Beebe summer house by Joel Abroad, via Flickr Creative Commons

However, as built, the garden house had a flat roof with balustrade, ornamented with 8 urns carved by McIntire.  It is a charming structure, with the refined naive elegance and economy of design that typifies the architecture of New England of that era, wood standing in for the stone that would have been used in Europe.  And this is why the engraving electrified me this morning, for it appears that Mr. McIntire had got his hands upon a book of French designs, as in a departure from his usual Palladian and neo-classical inspiration, he seems to have based the design on the Cabinet de Treillage.  Or perhaps it's mere coincidence?

Cabinet de Treillage, Versailles

Coincidence or inspiration, the two buildings have unmistakable similarities of composition.  For your final consideration, I offer up this charming storefront, designed for the Pennel, Gibbs and Quiring decorating firm in Boston in the early 20th century.  By architects doubtless Beaux Arts trained, it takes the idea of the Derby-Beebe summer house and dresses it up in correct Academic orders (the treillage pavilion uses trellised pilasters of no particular order, and the summer house uses Corinthian, properly not for lower floors), but the design still appears to owe a debt to the earlier building in Salem--although a learned friend disagrees with me, I stick by this.  I leave it to the interested reader to draw his own conclusions.

When Elias Derby's great house fell to the wreckers, not many years after it was built, the summer house was moved to a family farm in Wakefield, later acquired by the Beebe family.  In the 20th century, the summer house was removed from the farm and returned to Salem, to the grounds of the Peabody-Essex Museum. Derby had another summer house designed by McIntire on his Danvers estate, which was spared demolition and traveled to his Granddaughter's "Glen Magna Farm", where it remains today..  It is one of the most exquisite buildings of the Early Republic, and spawned its own host of imitators, including wings of a cottage in Bar Harbor.  But that is a story for another day.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME: ROUNDING A CORNER

From early 19th century America, when builders and designers were almost incapable of designing an ugly building, a little riff on how design ideas traveled, in this case from the urban centers to the little seaport of Portsmouth New Hampshire.  I sometimes just enjoy pondering these things out loud--and find that even 200 years ago in Federalist America, with travel primitive and distances remote, the degrees of separation rarely added up to six.

Octagon House in Washington, not really an octagon, designed for John Tayloe by William Thornton, architect of the Capitol and constructed 1798-1800.  This was something new in American domestic architecture when first completed.  When the White House was burned in the War of 1812, it was to this house that James & Dolley Madison retreated.  It is now a museum operated by the American Institute of Architects, whose headquarters behind it so sadly demonstrates how many lessons have been forgotten.

Rear Facade of Octagon House, which originally overlooked a brick stable building far more elegant that the AIA

The Thomas Haven house, Portsmouth New Hampsire, built in 1813 on  the corner of  Middle St. & Richards Avenue in  Porsmouth, New Hampshire.  It was later owned by Admiral George Washington Storer, who as a five month old baby had sat in George Washington's lap in 1783.  Apparently the designer, whose name is lost to history, was familiar with  Octagon house.  Storer's daughter Mabel married the grandson of Stephan Decatur, a hero of the War of 1812, whose Washington house was designed by Benjamin Latrobe.  Sadly the Haven house was long ago demolished by another Storer daughter in favor of a ponderous Second Empire mansion.

The old Custom House, built 1813 on the corner of  Penhallow and Daniel Streets in Portsmouth, a building delicate and provincial in its details, and of almost infinite charm 

The Samuel Larkin house, Portsmouth NH, begun in 1815 nearly across the street from the Haven house, architect unknown.  Mr. Larkin was an auctioneer who had greatly enhanced his fortune on commissions from the sale of booty seized by privateers during the War of 1812.  By 1829, reverses caused him to leave this house for his original smaller frame house next door.  The design is a refinement of the Burd mansion in Philadelphia

The Burd Mansion, on Chestnut St. in Philadelphia is thought to have inspired the Larkin house in Portsmouth.  It was designed in 1801 by Benjamin Latrobe.  This daguerreotype by Frederic deBourg Richards in the collection of the Library  Company of Philadelphia, bears this description: "Mansion of Joseph Sims, Esq. On Southwest corner of Chestnut and Ninth street-the grounds extending to George, now Sansom street, on which latter it has a frontage, with stables, equal to that on Chestnut Street. After the failure in business of Mr. Sims, it was occupied for many years, until his decease, by Mr. Sims' son-in-law, and family, Edward P. Burd, Esq. Mrs. Burd, his widow, still resides there."  The Burd mansion is long lost.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson appointed Latrobe, America's first professional architect, as Surveyor of Public Buildings in the United States.  As such, he took over the construction and design of the Capitol, with some irritation at being instructed by Jefferson to follow the designs made by William Thornton, which he found faulty.  Despite their aesthetic and engineering differences on the Capitol, Thornton's rear elevation at Octagon House and the facade of the Burd house have more than a whiff of common themes.

HISTORIC INTERIORS: A Country House Near Boston

Blogging is very self-indulgent.  One gets to think out loud about one's interests, and share the musings with interested readers---who, with their comments, give the blogger new insight into old passions.

I've been thinking a great deal this year about the graceful old Federal houses of New England---those first flowerings of design from our young country, that so well reflect the ideals, political and social, of the founders, and that for so long defined the look of most New England towns.  In particular, I determined to write about a group of country houses, those with the newly fashionable oval rooms in particular, built around Boston between 1790 and 1820.   I don't flatter myself that I have new insight to add to the impressive body of scholarship published about these houses over the last hundred years, but hope that you enjoy my light summaries.

What brings me back to the subject of oval rooms today is a group of late 19th century photographs passed on by a friend---but more about those in a moment...

McIntyre's drawing for the entrance front of the Vale, which looks backwards to the Palladian tradition of Somerset House, more than to the newly fashionable neo-classicism that characterized the Federal style (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

McIntyre's drawing of the first floor plan (from Old Time New England, Spring 1952

'The Vale', in Waltham, Massachusetts was designed in the 1790's by the great carver-architect of Salem, Samuel McIntyre, for merchant prince Theodore Lyman.   Lyman began development of his estate in 1793, laying out a park and garden in the informal English style of Capability Brown, with a stream dammed to form an ornamental lake, and glasshouses against a brick wall, in which Camellias and other exotics were grown.

The entrance front in the mid-19th century, showing McIntyre's completed design.  The Greek Revival entrance portico is an early 19th century addition

The house designed by McIntyre, completed in 1798, was based on designs in English builder's pattern books, but executed in wood, the plentiful building material of New England, rather than the stone of Old England.  With his typical mastery, McIntyre translated details like quoins and pilasters, meant to be stone, to wood with high effect, yet the scale (the main block was only fifty feet wide), unlike its English prototypes, was domestic, not palatial.  

The Ballroom as it appeared in the early 20th century.

The composition was Palladian, with a separate kitchen wing connected by a hypen, balanced a few years later by a ballroom wing.   The center hall led directly to an oval room centered on the garden front facing the glasshouses, referred to by the family as the 'Bow Parlor'. 

The Bow Parlor, as it appears today.  The white painted Hepplewhite chairs are part of the original Lyman furnishings

Lyman lived in great style in his new house.  After his death, it passed to his son, and in turn his grandson, Arthur Lyman, treasurer of the Lowell textile mills.   What had been one of the grand houses of the area at the beginning of the century was by now dated and old fashioned, and not suited to the more expansive scale of living made possible by industrial age wealth.  Fond of the old house, Arthur Lyman hired the local firm of Hartwell & Richardson (no relation to H.H. Richardson, about whom more in a minute) to enlarge and remodel the family homestead in 1882.

First floor plan as it appeared before 1883 renovations. Note the long curved interior walk to a privy at top right, forming one side of kitchen courtyard, and at a further extreme, a two-holer in the shed at the upper corner.  An indoor water-closet may be seen left of the bow parlor . (Old Time New England, Spring 1952)

The new plan, with modern interior plumbing, but the outside privy still survives. The staircase has moved to left of Bow Parlor

Their first design was for a complete transformation of the house, and was not executed.  Evidence is strong that Arthur Lyman had second thoughts about how drastically he wished to alter the old family homestead, and the final design, completed in 1883 sought to save some of the character of McIntyre's design, even to the extent of re-using the second floor pilasters by McIntyre to frame the new two story bays that pushed out from the entrance front.  Although respectful by the standards of the time, in fact McIntyre's elegant composition was irrevocably altered and subsumed by the new house.  Inside, mantels were replaced, high wainscots installed, yet the Bow Parlor and the Ballroom both survived untouched, as artifacts of the family's past splendors.

The rejected proposal for renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Hartwell & Richardson's accepted design for the renovation (American Architect & Building News)

Interior details in the 'Colonial' style for the new staircase and parlor (American Architect & Building News)

Mr. Lyman writes to American Architect explaining his desire to preserve as much as possible of the old house

 Which brings us back to the photographs that my thoughtful friend supplied.   She thought I might recognize them (I'm a bit of an idiot savant at recognizing buildings from minimal evidence---emphasis on the idiot part), and indeed I did.   They are 21 views of the interior of 'The Vale' after the Hartwell and Richardson remodeling of 1883.  In the rooms can be seen a mix of 18th and 19th century furnishings accumulated by several generations before a 1930's 'restoration' that sought to do away with many of the Victorian 'colonial' flourishes of before.   Like their ancestor before them, that generation of Lymans preserved the Victorian parlor, with its oak woodwork and fire surround of deMorgan tiles.  Today 'The Vale' is owned by Historic New England.

Please click on pictures to enlarge

The Bow Parlor.  The French style furniture suite is original to the house

Two views of the new family living room in the location of the old kitchen.  The tiles surrounding the fireplace are by William deMorgan

The ballroom looking toward the cross hall

The cross hall looking from the new staircase toward the ballroom

The second floor landing

The Drawing Room.  Two of the White Hepplewhite chairs can be seen

The cross hall toward family living room

Dressing room, opening to entrance portico roof

Two rooms in the nursery suite.  Ever thrifty, the Lymans retained the 1850's ingrain carpeting.

The bedroom above the Bow Parlor

Two views of the master bedroom.

A present day view of the master bedroom, after being stripped of its Victorian decorations in the early 20th century (photo uncredited from Historic New England Website.

Present day view of the garden front.  The central bay of the Bow Parlor remains as McIntyre designed it.

 FURTHER READING:

Before we end today's lesson, it is worth noting that Arthur Lyman's sister, Lydia,  married Robert Treat Paine, a housing reformer descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. They lived across the street, on property given them by her father.  When they remodeled the existing house on that property, they hired the other Richardson, H.H. himself, as their architect, and their naturally landscaped grounds were a collaboration with Frederick Law Olmstead.  For that house, click HERE

For previous Dilettante posts about lost Federal country estates in the Boston area, please click HERE,  HERE, and HERE.

For more about The Vale, click HERE for  the Historic New England website

INTERMISSION: ON THE ROAD TO CASTINE

So many deadlines, so little time.  I'm knocking down four articles for publication, opening the shop for the season---delayed by the endless bad weather and a sewer construction project that has deposited more bulldozers, one lane traffic, and orange cones to block the drive than I ever imagined existed, over the last two months, and basically, I am running backwards to catch up, and finishing up a renovation project for a friend that should have completed a month ago.  So, backwards I run, never catching up.  I promise, promise, promise to come up with something interesting once the Fourth is behind me.  

In the meantime, a couple of favorite houses on the road to aristocratic Castine, one of Maine's loveliest and historic villages, its streets still shaded by elm trees and lined with handsome white houses and gray shingled cottages overlooking a beautiful harbor.  My assignment was to interview the owners of one of the most unusual houses there--but more about that, and breathtaking Castine itself, another day.

Both of these houses, dating from the first quarter of the 19th century, have that 'just right' quality---the elegance and spareness that characterizes early Maine architecture at its best----gently landscaped without the suburban displays that people nowadays just feel they must have.   When did people start forgetting that sometimes what one leaves out is more important than what is added?.  For me, this is how an old building looks best in Maine.

In Maine, the old houses were usually attached to their barns by a series of sheds, so that one did not have to go outside on howling winter nights to use the privy, collect firewood, or feed the horses.  In local parlance, this type of building is known as 'Big House, Little House, Back House and Barn' (an excellent book by that title explores the type further).  Along the Castine Road, there are many old capes where this arrangement survives.  My particular favorite is the one above, built for a farmer of refined taste, painted a subtle washed gray.  In the fifty years that I've been admiring it, it has remained in this perfect state---neither shabby nor tarted up, shaded by massive oaks on its rolling old lawn, sheds and barns rambling off to the side, free of 'tasteful' renovation.  

Almost across the road, this house also sits unchanged behind its stone wall, having somehow miraculously survived 200 years without the indignities of replacement windows or doors.  Behind it, fields slope down to the mouth of the Bagaduce River. The worn white clapboards, hand sawn, give pleasing texture, and the thin muntins and wavy glass of the windows have a delicacy that Marvin cannot duplicate, no matter what they say.   The yard is full of old fashioned shrubs.  Looking at the huge Kolkwitzia blooming in front, one understands its common name, 'Beauty Bush'.

Next door is a small ancient cemetery, with beautiful cut stone wall.  Everywhere along the roadside, wildflowers bloom alongside garden escapees gone wild.  Every year, this lovely season, hard won and delicate, seems to go by at greater speed, and one races to soak it all in.  There are many versions of Maine, but in Spring and early summer, this is the one I like best.

AN INTERESTING HOUSE, & QUESTIONS WHOSE ANSWERS I DO NOT KNOW

I have a particular fondness for the houses of Federal era New England---and if that house, as is increasingly rare, has survived in untouched condition---free of replacement windows, plastic shutters, or any of the dozens of injustices so often inflicted upon them by well intentioned (or not so well intentioned) owners, then so much the better.  A little faded neglect?  Better still.  I understand all too well when I read Nancy Lancaster's musings on how the shabby and pure Virginia houses of her youth affected her aesthetic sensibilities, for so too is it for me with the faded houses that still populated New England in my own youth some fifty years later.  

I love these buildings for many reasons---for their reflection of the aspirations of a new country, for their classically inspired proportions and details, and for a certain provincial quality that pervades all but the most sophisticated examples.  I wonder at their details, executed in the pine that was so plentiful in New England, but based on examples that would have been executed in stone in England, or in Italy whence came their ultimate inspiration.  I mused recently in other posts about a pair of country houses in Dorchester, built for members of the glittering new society that formed around Boston after the Revolution.

Thus, when I came across the photograph above in the course of searching pictures for my posts about the Swan (click here) and Morton (here) Houses, I was, as they might have said in Federal America, 'smote' between the eyes.  Here it all was---and with the bravura gesture of the high pediment, a detail traveled from Palladian Italy via Georgian England.  In years of passionate architectural tourism, I thought I had encountered them all, but this one, at least to me, was news.  And its condition!  Untouched, unimproved, shabby but not derelict.  If I could marry a photograph, this would be the one.  But, being an old fashioned guy, I thought we should become acquainted first, yet maddeningly little information could be found about my new love.  The caption stated that it was the 'Dearborn Mansion, Grove Hall' and that the picture was taken in 1868, and apparently, like the Swan and Morton houses, had been in Dorchester.  I googled myself into a stupor, and nearly went without dinner trying to find out more about my mysterious new love, but came up empty.  I roamed through my own library, and not a bit more solid information could be found.  A General Dearborn had been prominent in Roxbury and Dorchester affairs.  A neighborhood in Roxbury, which borders Dorchester, is known as Grove Hall, after a long demolished mansion---but, that mansion was not Dearborn's.

Plate 55, Design for a House, from Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion

And what of its amazing design?  What early designer had created this? One of the many talented carpenter builders?  One of the early and rare architects, like Charles Bulfinch?  Had its design come from a pattern book?  And how, without knowing it, had he nevertheless so evoked the Veneto in this house, while he was probably only thinking of England?  There are several related houses in New England that follow the general design  of this house, but none quite have its elan. In Asher Benjamin's Builder's Companion, one of the designs shown is for a house with a tall central pavilion, and the fanlight in the Dearborn house, with its spiderweb tracery, follows one in Benjamin.  Charles Bulfinch, like Stanford White, has more buildings attributed to him than are reasonable, but the central pavilion on the Dearborn house certainly makes one think of the library building that centered his design for the long vanished Franklin Crescent, Boston's echo of Adamesque London (and whose ambitious development ruined Bulfinch financially).

The Franklin Crescent, and Bulfinch's original drawing for the library at center.

And then, what of those grand and graceful spandrels that flank the pavilion and give the design its unexpected Bravura?  It is a composition and motif one sees over and over in English work, in turn inspired by Italian originals.  One is immediately reminded of the end pavilions at Palladio's Villa Barbara at Maser.

End Pavilion of Villa Barbaro at Maser, by Andrea Palladio

And Bulfinch mined the composition for his brilliant masterpiece, the so-called 'Brick Church' at Lancaster Massachusetts.

The First Church of Christ Unitarian, Lancaster Massachusetts, by Charles Bulfinch, 1816

The composition of the Dearborn house had been used before in New England.  An early example is a house built around 1800 for Samuel Tenney in Exeter, New Hampshire.  This house was built by a housewright named Ebenezer Clifford, working with a designer-housewright named Bradbury Johnson.  Although probably nearly contemporary with the Dearborn house, its design, thought to be based on a plate in a pattern book by English architect Roger Morris, looks backward, and Georgian, rather than neo-classical in aspect appears to be earlier than it is.

The Samuel Tenney House, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1800 (Historic American Buildings Survey)

A few years later, Johnson would design his verion of Bulfinch's crescent for the New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company on Market Square in Portsmouth, again utilizing the high central pavilion (the right wing is now much altered).

The New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company building, now the Portsmouth Athenaeum, 1803

In Kennebunk, Maine, the William Lord mansion, built in 1801, closely echoes the design of the Dearborn mansion, but without the quite the scale and bravura and perfect integration of parts.

The William Lord mansion, Kennebunk, 1801 (White Pine Monographs, Volume IV, no. 2, 1916)

The Sullivan Dorr house in Providence, Rhode Island, designed in 1809 by John Holden Greene follows the center pavilion composition, but with a flat roof.

Here I digress for a moment, with a picture of the portico on the Dorr House, in an American Federal Version of the Strawberry Hill Gothick style, as applied to a house of American inspiration and otherwise neo-classical detailing.

Sullivan Dorr House, by Samuel Holden Greene, Providence

Portico of the Sullivan Dorr house combines Gothick details with neo-classical detailing on the ceiling cove.

But now I've wandered a bit far from my original points, which were curiousity about the Dearborn house in particular, and in general the beauty with which the architects of the early Republic designed buildings that hark back to England of the 18th century, when her architects in turn were borrowing from 16th century Italy.  And the tradition continued---compare for example, Phillip Trammel Shutze's 'Swan House', designed for the Inman family in 1928.  It is fascinating to me to consider two designers, working in very different eras and circumstances, the later probably knowing nothing of the earlier house, but dealing with some of the same inspirations that had created the earlier house, arriving at the same design solutions, if on a grander and more sophisticated scale, 125 years later.

Once again, the Dearborn house (Prints & Drawings Department, Boston Public Library, via Flickr)

'Swan House' in Atlanta, designed in 1928 by Philip Trammel Shutze

 Postscript:  The first comment below mentions the modernist influence.  To that end, here is a photo of the house William Welles Bosworth designed for himself in 1928 at Matinecock, Long Island, a sort of Vogue Regency modern take on Schinkel does ancient Rome.

And another Postscript:  Thanks to commenter Anonymous, of the Hudson River Anonymouses, for bringing Locust Lawn, one of the purest adaptations of Asher Benjamin's design, to the fore.  I remember driving past it years ago, and naturally nearing going off the road (My bumper sticker reads "I brake for unusual Federal houses").  

"Locust Lawn", the Josiah Hasbrouck House in Gardiner, New York, 1814.