by Jean Strouse
Journals devoted to art, architecture, and interior decor began to appear around 1880, and the country’s growing regard for education and the arts was reflected in new professional organizations (the American Historical Association, the Architectural League of New York), as well as in the founding of universities, schools, galleries, libraries, orchestras, opera houses, and museums.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art finally moved into its permanent home in 1880. That March, President Hayes and New York’s cultural elite attended the formal dedication of Vaux and Mould’s Ruskinian Gothic redbrick pavilion at Fifth Avenue and 80th Street. The principal speaker was Joseph Hodges Choate, a trial lawyer and museum trustee. In the context of increasing political conflict between rich and poor, Choate emphasized the moral and social value of the new institution, reiterating its founders’ belief that a knowledge of art would “humanize, educate, and refine a practical and laborious people.” The original aim had been to provide a vast “department of knowledge” for “the vital and practical interest of the working millions”—modeled on the South Kensington Museum in London—to teach American artisans and students “what the past has accomplished for them to imitate and excel.”
This marriage of commerce, aesthetics, and social virtue was going to cost a great deal of money, and Choate urged his audience of potential patrons to direct some of their resources to art: “Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble, and railroad shares and mining stocks … into the glorified canvas of the world’s masters, that shall adorn these walls for centuries. The rage of Wall Street is to hunt the philosopher’s stone, to convert all baser things into gold, which is but dross; but ours is the higher ambition to convert your useless gold into things of living beauty that shall be a joy to a whole people for a thousand years.”
The “higher ambition” of turning money into art had enormous appeal for wealthy New Yorkers, but they did not begin giving major works to the museum until later in the decade. In the early eighties the city’s aesthetic attentions were focused largely on the house. A writer for Harper’s Monthly announced in October of 1882 that “Internal Decoration” had become the consuming passion of “the present generation,” and that nothing could be “more beautiful, more orderly, more harmonious than a modern New York house which has blossomed out in this fine summer of perfected art.” The rage for “artistic houses” had grown so intense, she noted, that artists such as John LaFarge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Lewis Comfort Tiffany were turning their attention to interior decor.
The houses of the Gilded Age served as domestic museums—private exhibitions of architecture, artifact, and art that would testify to their owners’ ample means and stylish tastes. A few of these men had in fact become discriminating connoisseurs—among them Henry Marquand, John Taylor Johnston, John Claghorn, and John Wolfe—but most of the new American millionaires in the early eighties had more money and zeal than educated knowledge about the arts; awed by European culture, they imported it in bulk to the United States.
Morgan’s 40th Street neighbor William Henry Vanderbilt bought up the entire west side of Fifth Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets for $700,000 in 1879—the year he sold his interest in the New York Central—and spent another $2 million building enormous twin brownstones for himself, his wife, and two married daughters. Designed and decorated by the Herter brothers, these boxlike mansions reflected Vanderbilt’s self-ascribed preference for “an almost indiscriminate assemblage” of Roman balconies, “Ghiberti” doors, English oak panels, a neoclassical library, a Japanese parlor, a Venetian frieze, Chinese screens, and mother-of-pearl on every available surface. The picture gallery—the largest in New York—was filled with French art from the Académie, and open to the public by invitation once a week.
Mr. Vanderbilt commissioned a study of his new house by the art critic Earl Shinn, who produced a multivolume paean that captures both the parochialism and exhilaration of this American moment. The country was “just beginning to be astonishing,” Shinn wrote under the pseudonym Edward Strahan in 1883–84: “Re-cemented by the fortunate result of a civil war, endowed as with a diploma of rank by the promulgation of its centenary, it has begun to reinvent everything, and especially the house.” The Vanderbilt mansion might “stand as a representative of the new impulse now felt in the national life. Like a more perfect Pompeii, the work will be the vision and image of a typical American residence, seized at the moment when the nation began to have a taste of its own.” That this “typical American residence” had been built at a cost of $2 million, by six hundred American workers and sixty imported Europeans, was an irony lost on Mr. Shinn.
When two of Vanderbilt’s sons built palaces along Fifth Avenue in the early eighties as well, the stretch of the avenue between 50th and 58th Streets came to be known as Vanderbilt Row. Cornelius II constructed a late Gothic/early Renaissance château of redbrick and white stone between 57th and 58th Streets, its courtyard facing Grand Army Plaza and Central Park. His brother William Kissam hired Richard Morris Hunt to design a limestone castle modeled on the Château de Blois and the Jacques Coeur mansion at Bourges, between 52nd and 53rd Streets. To celebrate its completion in March 1883, William K.’s wife, Alva, held a costume ball that gave free rein to the fantasies of New York’s social elite: Alva dressed as a Venetian princess accompanied by live doves, her husband as the Duc de Guise; her brother-in-law, Cornelius, came as Louis XVI, and his wife as Edison’s electric light. There were sixteen more Louis XVIs, eight Marie Antoinettes, seven Marys, Queen of Scots, one King Lear, one Queen Elizabeth, assorted Scottish lairds and Valkyries—and General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant in ordinary evening dress.
Edith Wharton, speaking for Old New York, sighed to her friend Ogden Codman, Jr., “I wish the Vanderbilts didn’t retard culture so very thoroughly. They are entrenched in a sort of thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them.” Another critic quipped that America’s late nineteenth-century architecture was “either bizarre or Beaux-Arts.”
The Morgans’ friends Fred and Adele Stevens had been among the first to build a European castle in New York. On the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, their redbrick Romanesque mansion, completed in 1876, had four stories, five towers, acres of Flemish and Spanish tapestries, and an entire palace ballroom shipped over from Ghent. It stood out among the rows of brownstone that Mrs. Wharton said made the city look as if it had been coated in cold chocolate sauce. Oscar Wilde, driving along Fifth Avenue one January day in the eighties and depressed by everything he saw, cheered up at the sight of the Stevens mansion with sun glinting off its gables: “That house,” he said, “seems like a voice crying, in this wilderness of dark art, ‘Brighter days, brighter days, brighter days.’ ”
To the south and east, transportation baron Henry Villard commissioned from McKim, Mead, and White a set of six linked brownstones around an open courtyard at 451 Madison between 50th and 51st Streets, behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This Italian Renaissance palazzo had more grace and conceptual integrity than the Fifth Avenue châteaux; it also had a hydraulic elevator, electrical wiring, thirteen flush toilets, a central heating system that used a ton of coal a day—and it cost nearly $1 million.
In late October of 1882, at some geographic and financial distance from the excesses of Vanderbilt Row, the Morgans moved into their renovated brownstone on the corner of Madison and 36th. Like most of the new “domestic museums,” this house was richly ornamented with Oriental rugs, ceramics, paintings, elaborate woodwork, stained glass, and bric-a-brac. Yet it made quieter, more American claims for itself than many of its contemporaries (it was not “neo-” anything), and articulated a measure of patrician restraint.
Working closely with the Morgans, Christian Herter had installed Circassian walnut doors at the new entranc
e on 36th Street and stained-glass sliding panels opening from a mosaic-tiled vestibule onto the front hall. Walking up a few steps to the first landing, visitors immediately faced the minstrel and maid in Pierpont’s beloved von Kaulbach cartoon, The Bird Song, above a recessed mantel. Daylight filtered through a stained-glass dome (from the studio of John La Farge) into the central well of the house, and also through stained glass set into spandrels over triple arches on the landing. Twin white-oak staircases with densely spindled railings led from the front hall up to the family living quarters. There was an elevator off the hall, a two-story burglarproof safe in the butler’s pantry, a gymnasium for the children in the basement, and a private telegraph wire connecting the house to 23 Wall Street.
On the main floor, the new drawing room took up the entire west side of the house. It centered on a seventeen-foot bay framed by Pompeiian-red columns and a gold-flecked white frieze inset with stained glass. A coved ceiling painted to look like mosaic emphasized the length of the room, and a studied arrangement of rugs, cushions, tables, chairs, Japanese embroideries, silk brocade curtains, paintings, and books managed to avoid Victorian clutter and give the space a feeling of formal balance.
The gentleman’s library, a standard feature of the New York town house, was just to the right of the entrance hall, which meant that Pierpont could come in from the street and disappear into his private study without running into anyone else. He hired Dr. Rainsford in this room shortly after moving in. Its wainscoting and recessed inglenook were made of Santo Domingo mahogany, and there was an eight-foot plate-glass window facing south. Herter had covered the chairs and sofas in peacock-green plush, tiled the raised fireplace in ocher and blue, and installed allegorical figures representing History and Poetry in octagonal panels on the ceiling. Morgan proudly told visitors that Herter had painted these panels “himself, with his own hands.” Stained-glass doors designed by John LaFarge led from this masculine retreat into a sunny conservatory that ran sixty feet along the eastern side of the house, filled with orchids, ferns, climbing vines, and flowering plants. Banks of potted palms lined the windows, and a lion’s head framed in black marble spouted water in a fan-shaped stream.
The dining room, more stolid and Victorian than the rest, was painted dark red, with English oak wainscoting, Siena marble columns, Oriental screens and jars, a small circular table with oak and leather chairs, and a stained-glass skylight twelve feet square. Over a large sideboard hung Frederic Church’s painting Near Damascus.
In November of 1882, Pierpont had these rooms photographed for a large-folio, four-part publication called Artistic Houses, Being a Series of Interior Views of a Number of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes in the U.S., With a Description of the Art Treasures Contained Therein (1883–84). Bound in tooled leather and privately printed in a limited edition for five hundred wealthy subscribers, Artistic Houses surveyed ninety-seven buildings, including the residences of William H. Vanderbilt, George Baker, Marshall Field, Henry Marquand, John T. Johnston, Fred Stevens, Louis C. Tiffany, Samuel Tilden, and Henry Villard.‖
Like Earl Shinn’s tribute to the Vanderbilt mansion, it paid proud homage to America’s aesthetic accomplishments and tastes. “The domestic architecture of no nation in the world can show trophies more original, affluent, or admirable,” declared the anonymous author of the text, art critic George W. Sheldon. By not using their own names, Shinn and Sheldon probably hoped to protect their critical reputations while serving as paid purveyors of praise, but in the surge of excitement about the arts in the early 1880s, they may have believed much of what they said. Sheldon catalogued the “rare,” “exquisite,” “costly” objects that filled the “artistic” houses, and described their owners as “professional [men] of scholarly pursuits, cultivated tastes, and wealth sufficient to gratify both.” Only a few of these men had the time or predisposition for scholarly pursuits, but Sheldon’s hypberbole suggests how highly they valued cultivated taste, and how insulated they were from critical appraisals of their judgment. “To the Greeks there was no gulf between the useful and the beautiful,” Sheldon wrote. “So one feels in Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s mansion.”
Unlike many of the owners of “artistic houses,” Morgan did not install a formal picture gallery at 219, but he, too, had been collecting contemporary European salon paintings. A catalogue on The Art Treasures of America by the busy Mr. Shinn, again as “Edward Strahan,” devoted four pages to “the small but precious collection got together by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan of New York.”a Virtually all the Morgan paintings were landscapes or narrative genre scenes depicting worlds far removed from modern industrial America—an open-air Arab Court of Justice by T. Moragas, a flirtation on the Grand Canal by Luis Alvarez, a Spanish promenade by the popular Barbizon school painter Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, a servant of Horace forgetting his errand by Hector Leroux. There was a canvas attributed to Corot called Le Gallais—Shinn declared it a “magnificent specimen” of that artist’s “charm of mystery and pearly tenderness,” but it eventually disappeared from Morgan’s walls. Someone said that Corot painted six hundred works, six thousand of which were in America.
Shinn liked the adjective “pearly.” He considered Morgan’s Laundress of the Cupids, by J. L. Hamon, to be “one of the most audacious and original of the fancies of that poet of the palette”—a “pearly scene of dawn” in which “a maiden cleanses her conscience of its loves.” The “greatest rarity” in Morgan’s possession, however—according to Shinn—was The Cardinal’s Fête, painted by “the Cavaliere Scipione Vannutelli, of Rome” in 1875: “the dashes of glitter, the mixture of pomp and piety, the indulgent and complaisant clergy, the palace decked with tapestry and with sacred banners, afford an opportunity to the painter for the resources of a glittering palette.”
Tastes in art change, and connoisseurship was in its infancy in the 1880s. Still, Shinn’s raptures over work that now seems at best banal, his uncritical endorsement of Victorian sentimentality, his silence on the formal properties and aesthetic values of these works, and his disregard of superior artists (in the collection of Joseph Drexel, he does not mention paintings by Canaletto or Caravaggio), render the catalogue more useful as a window on the aspirations of the Gilded Age than as a source of information about art.
Morgan’s taste was not entirely Eurocentric. Probably owing to his Sturges connection, he had several works by Americans—Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand (Thanatopsis), John F. Kensett (Sunrise in the Adirondacks), S. R. Gifford (October in the Catskills), and a scene from the Odyssey by Elihu Vedder that he had commissioned called Nausicaa and Her Companions, which Shinn found “quaint and interesting.”b
While Americans were collecting academic genre scenes, the nineteenth century’s great innovative artists—Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir—were rejecting conventional subjects and forms to portray the life immediately around them, experimenting with light, color, texture, and composition. The first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874 announced one of the most radical artistic developments of the century (the other was photography), which contemporary critics and collectors, with some notable exceptions, dismissed as insane. When Morgan and other American collectors of his generation eventually turned away from salon paintings in the late 1890s, they would look not to the modernist future of Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse but to the hallowed authority of the past.
In 1883, shortly after Morgan moved into 219, he had a catalogue of his books compiled and published by the New York dealer Joseph F. Sabin.c His early library more or less typified a New York gentleman’s collection of the 1880s, with editions of famous authors in fine bindings, religious texts (Bibles, hymnals, psalters, tracts), and standard histories. Perhaps reflecting personal interests, however, Morgan owned sixty-six volumes on Napoleon and His Generals and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The library’s lighter fare included a ribald Life of Sir John Falstaff illustrated by George Cruikshank, a book on Mrs. Jordan, the English actress who wa
s mistress to William IV, and A Burlesque Translation of Homer, published in 1792.
Morgan was, however, also building a reference library on art. He owned Crowe & Cavalcaselle’s Early Flemish Painters, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Michael Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, books on Venice and Pompeii, several volumes on ceramics, a catalogue of the Louvre’s collections before 1815, and Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, and Seven Lamps of Architecture. Like Ruskin and the Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton (though without their aesthetic and moral analyses), Morgan was drawn to the arts of the Middle Ages, and by 1883 he owned several of the books that were kindling nineteenth-century interest in medieval subjects—including Sir John Froissart’s Chronicles, published in 1868 with chromolithographic reproductions from manuscripts in the French Bibliothèque Nationale, Paul Lacroix’s Les Arts au Moyen Age, Henry Shaw’s Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages, and two volumes on Les Evangiles des Dimanches et Fêtes de L’Année. He also had facsimiles of manuscript illuminations by Jehan Fouquet, the great fifteenth-century French master who was equally celebrated as a panel painter.
And he had begun to acquire original literary and historical authors’ manuscripts. Junius in 1881 had given him the complete holograph manuscript of Sir Walter Scott’s 1815 novel Guy Mannering, set in eighteenth-century Scotland—the loss of this Scottish national treasure to the United States cannot have pleased the British. Pierpont himself bought an autograph letter of Robert Burns written in 1793. Junius owned the George Washington letter that he had read at Delmonico’s in 1877; Pierpont by 1883 had four Washington letters, as well as a set of autographs by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and a bound set of documents relating to the death of Alexander Hamilton. The most important item in his library of the early eighties was a copy of John Eliot’s Indian Bible (Cambridge, 1663)—the first complete Bible printed in North America, in an Algonquin dialect.
