The Higginson house (left) and the Whittier house (right).
Two adjacent houses were completed on Beacon Street in Boston in 1883, one designed by Henry Hobson Richardson for Francis L. Higginson and the other by McKim, Mead and White for General Charles A. Whittier and his wife Elizabeth. Both houses attracted considerable attention because they had been designed by major firms in American architecture and because they were major additions to the resplendent section the Back Bay had become. Mariana Van Rensselaer compared them in her series on recent American architecture in The Century Magazine (March 1886):
They differ greatly in style and treatment, but each has considered the other in its own growth, and consequently is helped, not hurt, by the presence of its neighbor. Mr. Richardson’s [on the left] is the more striking of the two, and there is always a fervor about his work that seduces the would-be critic. But it has been called a trifle too “mediaeval” in its massiveness and in the element of grotesqueness introduced into its ornamentation. Perhaps it is true that the expression of the other is better suited to a modern home—to the voicing of that modern life whose ideal is elegance rather than physical force. So charming a house is it, indeed, that one longs to give it unstinted praise. And one might if only the porch worked in better with the general design—looked more as though it had taken its place and shape by virtue of an unmistakable impulse of artistic growth.
Richard G. Wilson also compared the two elevations in his dissertation, “Charles F. McKim and the Development of the American Renaissance” (University of Michigan, 1972):
Both houses were built of the same red brick and Longmeadow stone, they had the same high pitched roofs, and continuous string courses and cornices, but in feeling and style they were different. Richardson’s house was by far the heavier mass, and in contrast to the upward lift of McKim’s tower, the Higginson tower appeared shrunk in on itself. The stone of the base in the Richardson design was continued up into the tower which created the feeling of a solid mass in contrast to the lighter brick wall behind. The houses had equal frontages of 52 feet apiece, and both adopted a scheme of three unequal bays. While both houses were symmetrical, Richardson’s was only awkwardly balanced, but McKim was able to balance the house and also create a homogeneous interrelationship of the different elements. McKim’s fenestration had a constant scale that was lacking in Richardson’s design. Richardson used a variant of his normal Romanesque-Gothic detailing, with perhaps traces of the Queen Anne in the bay window. Richardson’s detailing, when it did appear as in the bay window or the dormer, was clumsy and unrelated. In contrast to the spareness of Richardson, McKim’s ornament was freely applied with a lushness and continuity to all three bays that tended to unite the house both vertically and horizontally. The porch and spandrels of McKim’s Whittier House were François I, but there was a Queen Anne air to the dormer. The dissenting note was the awkward porch, that was merely an added appendage.
The Higginson house (left) and the Whittier house (right).
McKim had designed the house for one of the partners of the investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Company, the same Higginson who now lived next door. Charles A. Whittier (August 6, 1840–May 14, 1908) had graduated from Harvard in 1860, joined the Union forces during the Civil War and was a brevetted brigadier general by 1865. He returned to the military after the fall of Manila in the Spanish-American War, again serving as brigadier general. His wife was the former Elizabeth J. Chadwick; they had two daughters, Pauline and Susie. He died on the Mauretania during one of his many crossings of the Atlantic.
Commissioned in 1880 and completed in 1883, the Whittier house stood until 1929, the same year in which the Higginson house was demolished. Despite the fact that the owners had spent approximately $80,000 on the structure and almost as much for their interior decoration, the house appealed to Sheldon because it combined quality and moderation. For him it symbolized sophisticated and restrained wealth, and expressed ownership that knew the difference between size that was demonstrative and size that was useful, between effects that were conspicuous and effects that were fitting.
169. Hall, Charles A. Whittier house, 270 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts; McKim, Mead and White, architects, 1880–83; demolished 1929. Fortunately, the new houses of the Back Bay district in Boston were not constrained in width as were town houses erected on New York’s narrow lots. Architects in this section of Boston could plan generously in width as well as in depth and create halls that were larger, better illuminated by natural light and looked like hubs of family activity rather than lengthy corridors. This hall, designed by a firm that often placed spacious living halls at the center of its contemporary country houses, was one of the most attractive of this series.
Although this photograph reveals the size of the Whittier hall and provides a view into the reception room, it does not emphasize its principal feature—a triple archway opposite the fireplace that divided that side of the room into the base of the stairway, a large inglenook in the center and a vestibule that led to the entrance porch. McKim, Mead and White contrasted one side of this space with the other. On the right the wall was composed of carved panels arranged symmetrically around the fireplace. This wall, well-crafted and tightly controlled, was a handsome backdrop for Chinese porcelain urns and mounted, hand-painted chargers. The left side, however, was open, light and articulated by fluted shafts, nervous spindles and graceful broad arches. If the one side expressed order and solidity, the other celebrated movement and lightness. The flutes and the spindles of both the balustrade and the screen between the inglenook and vestibule represented another cadence. One climbed the stairs around three sides of the nook and from different locations could look into it as well as into the hall. The framing wood, dark oak, was used for the columns and arches, the strips of the ceiling and the architrave that determined the top of the overmantel, the height of entrances and the height of the capitals.
170. Library, Charles A. Whittier house. The author of Artistic Houses wanted very much to prove that American architecture and interior decoration had come of age and to argue that their achievements were natural outgrowths of a maturing national sensibility. He realized that this was impossible without wealth but also was aware that money in the hands of the tasteless rich could be counterproductive. Thus, when he encountered wealth seemingly untempted by ostentatious effects, he was especially pleased. The Whittiers were models:
The owner’s good taste has been not only active and pervasive, but authoritative; and one may imagine him to have constantly enjoined upon the man who had contracted with him to be the spender of his money: “Spend what you like, but keep your effects down. If you must have a great deal of cash in order to produce what I want, remember, please, that what I don’t want is meaningless and ostentatious show.”
Compared to other libraries in this collection, this one was above average in size and number of volumes and below average in clutter. Furniture was modest and not coordinated; bric-a-brac was kept to a minimum. In this photograph the library appears to be divided into two parts, a relatively simple and open main section on the right and a more complex chimney nook on the left. In the latter, surfaces of marble contrasted with the quieter woodwork in walnut. The area around the fire opening was faced with marble tiles and the corner niche, containing book shelves, with dark, grained marble slabs. At either end was an unusually high window and chimney seat below.
171. Dining room, Charles A. Whittier house. Like the hall and the library, the dining room gives the impression of spaciousness that is intentional and unhurried, as if space were an architectural ingredient to be used or exhibited for its own sake. The result is an emptiness uncharacteristic of the period. With the exception of the wall opposite the only windows of the room, the wall dominated by the large painting by de Neuville, the mahogany woodwork looked extremely dark. In order to catch the details of these tenebrous surfaces, the photographer exposed the film for 20 minutes. The fireplace side of the room would have been less gloomy and just as dignified if the ponderous cupboards at the corners had been deleted.
The painting Un Porteur de Dépêches, painted in 1880, was a curious choice for this room. Dining-room paintings usually referred to food or eating, and while this scene depicts a meal during the Franco-Prussian War, the attention of the French officers is fixed on a recently captured German. Too large for the dining room, the painting would have appeared less dominant had it been hung lower, but this was impossible because of the height of the room’s paneling. On the other hand, paintings were hung at a higher level in these houses than they would be in late twentieth-century American houses. Furthermore, the Whittiers may have reasoned that this relatively dark and spare room needed a commanding focal point.
172. Boudoir, Charles A. Whittier house. If formal solemnity characterized the dining room, here we sense a personalized space. This boudoir was a private retreat that met needs not addressed by the reception room, the drawing room or even the library. A boudoir in the 1880s would be a small sitting room on the first floor used by the mistress of the house, often the control center from which the house was run or, as in this case, part of a bedroom suite. Beyond the portieres we see a brass bed and a Chippendale mahogany chest on chest.
The woodwork of the boudoir was in flat relief and painted a yellow-brown. The wallpaper, also light in color, was floral in pattern, as was the pattern of the portieres and the Turkish frame chaise longue. Distributed through the room were small vases, statuettes of lovers or amorous putti, family photographs and prints and reproductions. Another feature not evident in the proper rooms of the main level was the signs of habitation. There is a sewing basket under the table and gloves and a letter opener on top.
173. Dining room, Gilbert R. Payson house, 456 Belmont Street, Watertown, Massachusetts; Van Brunt and Howe, architects, ca. 1882; standing but altered. On the highest point in Watertown, which provided a fine view of the Boston skyline, the Payson house on Oakley Hill was certainly one of the most impressively situated residences in Sheldon’s collection. Located today on the grounds of the Oakley Country Club, a section of the original elevation (see American Architect and Building News, February 2, 1882) is still visible in the heart of a large, recently opened condominium complex.
Payson (ca. 1840–June 9, 1891) graduated from Harvard in 1862. He was a partner in White, Payson and Company, which became one of the major dry-goods commission merchants in Boston in the 1880s. He was survived by his wife, the former Althea Train of Framingham, and three sons and a daughter.
Ash, not commonly found in either city or country houses of this decade, was used throughout this dining room. The sideboard in the niche to the right was stained ash, as were the china cabinets above and the paneled cupboards below. Ash was cut into narrow strips and pieced together in a tongue-and-groove fashion, as if it were a hardwood floor, to form the herringbone design of the ceiling and the surface of the coved frieze over the mantel. The wood was also shaped into curves to form the arches within the overmantel, the larger arches above and to either side of it and the supporting brackets. Complementing the warm color of the wood were the yellow-brown tiles of the fireplace, dark green wallpaper and golden flowers in sections of the frieze.
174. Ladies’ parlor, R. H. White and Company Warehouse Store, 30 Bedford Street, Boston, Massachusetts; Peabody and Stearns, architects, 1882–84; demolished. The dry-goods firm of R. H. White and Company erected a store on Washington Street in Boston in 1877 and built additions to it until its ground area was approximately 55,000 square feet. Wheaton Holden claimed that the Warehouse Store addition at the corner of Bedford Street and Harrison Avenue by Peabody and Stearns was “the most important of all the firm’s commercial buildings of the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s” because of its influence on other noted architects, among them John Root, Louis Sullivan and Henry Hobson Richardson.
What a sensible, appealing idea—a respectable parlor offering women shoppers a quiet alternative to the noisy floors and a central place to meet friends! Yet this women’s oasis had a distinctly masculine flavor. Its great arch was massive and heavily textured, its furniture strong, its high ceiling dark and deeply coffered. The plaster panels of the upper walls were also dark, red and gold against a deeper red ground, and the oak paneling below was stained blue-green. Even the poem below the clock celebrates the rugged life: “Blow high, blow low, not all the winds that ever blow can quench our hearth fires ruddy.” There were counterbalancing accents—delicate tiles above the arch, intricate carving around the fireplace and a diminutive musicians’ gallery in the right wall.
175. Dining room, William G. Dominick house, 35 East 57th Street, New York, New York; architect unknown, 1881–82; demolished 1928. Dominick (January 14, 1845–August 31, 1895) was a descendant of a Huguenot named Dominique who arrived in New York in 1742. In 1874 he married Anne De Witt Marshall, whose ancestors had arrived in Virginia in 1624. Not surprisingly, they belonged to societies created for those with lineage. Though active with several New York social clubs and riding and hunting organizations near their summer home at Quogue, Long Island, the Dominicks also worked steadily for the city’s poor. When he died suddenly at the age of 50, he was the senior partner of the brokerage firm of Dominick and Dickerman.
The dining room was not large for a new house erected on 57th Street in the early 1880s. Consequently, the architect and decorator concentrated three-dimensional effects, weight and dark hues at the base, and created a three-part wall composed of a mahogany dado slightly higher than the backs of the leather-covered mahogany chairs, a flat plane of wallpaper that was brighter in tone in a neutralizing floral pattern and, finally, a light frieze closely related to the design of the ceiling. From this viewpoint, the clarity of this three-part system was weakened by the sideboard and by the fireplace and its overmantel. However, by facing the upper part of the sideboard with transparent glass cabinets and a central mirror and by inserting a stained-glass window above the mantel, the decorator tried to keep the middle section as light and as flat as possible. Though mirrors were common in overmantels, stained-glass windows were not because they required background lighting and split chimney flues. The range of decorative objects was mixed in theme and international in origin.
176. Dining room, John Wolfe house, 8 East 68th Street, New York, New York; Detlef Lienau, architect, 1881–82; demolished. Wolfe (December 18, 1821–January 17, 1894) was recognized as an influential figure in the New York art world from 1850 until the early 1880s. He began collecting works by German artists, sold them in 1863 for $114,000 and then concentrated on French paintings, for which he received $ 132,000 at auction in April 1882. The two paintings visible in this room were holdovers from his first collection. Directly ahead was a self-portrait by J. P. Hasenclever (1810–1853) showing the artist, in front of his famous Wine Tasters, toasting his patron, Wolfe. To the left was a depiction of a La Fontaine fable, The Stork Invites the Fox to Dinner by Paul Friedrich Meyerheim (1842–1915).
This interior was designed by Lienau (1818–1887), who was born in Schleswig-Holstein and came to the United States in 1848. It was filled with European paintings, furniture and objets d’art, including the two suits of armor seen through the doorway. This Renaissance Revival dining room was finished entirely in black walnut; the built-in pieces as well as the embossed-leather–covered chairs were of carved walnut. The chandelier was ordered from Paris.
177. Hall, Elizabeth E. Spooner house, 196 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts; Peabody and Stearns, architects, 1881; standing. Boston, steeped in the Colonial tradition and possessing many buildings from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, led in the revival of early American architectural forms during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. An example is the home of Mrs. Daniel Nicholson Spooner at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Exeter Street. Very little is known about Daniel N. Spooner, who was born about 1825. He married Elizabeth Elliot Torrey; they had one child, Elizabeth Elliot. Mrs. Spooner had lived at one time in China, but it is not known if her husband, who had died when this house was completed, also had some association with the Orient.
The hallway reflects the Federal style in its light woodwork, delicate classical detailing and massive fireplace, which resembles an old cooking fireplace with its small decorative hanging kettles. These historicizing elements are woven together with other decorative statements more typical of the period to create an interior materially more demanding than any historic American prototypes. Still, compared to many contemporary town houses of the affluent, the Spooner hall expressed restraint and refinement. The plates, vases and medallions displayed in the hall were collected by Mrs. Spooner while in China. The bronze maiden on the newel post attracts attention to the main stairway on the right, which rises to the second-floor railing seen at the top of the photograph. Colored textiles were often conspicuously displayed on banisters and railings to add both color and a touch of informality.
178. Drawing room, Elizabeth E. Spooner house. Mrs. Spooner paid close attention to the importance of color in a decorative arrangement. This relatively serene and comfortable living space had walls of crimson and gold, upholstery of more subdued tones of the same hues, portieres of satin panels of light blue against old gold plush and a ceiling that was a cool, neutral area. The room was accented by exquisitely carved teakwood, specifically around the fire opening and in the overmantel and, opposite this, in the frame of the large mirror accented on either side by extravagant wall sconces. To either side of the mantel were teakwood cabinets on ebony tables. The large painting to the left is a Madonna and Child by an unidentified student of Rubens. The room was unified above by the continuous broad frieze with a raised floral pattern.
179. Dining room, Elizabeth E. Spooner house. This room, with its elliptical shape and strikingly articulated ceiling with sunburst pattern, received its inspiration from the Federal style. Its plan is identical to that of the Blue Room in the White House in Washington and is similar in form to elliptical parlors designed by Boston architect Charles Bulfinch. In this instance the ornamentation is much richer and deeper than in earlier buildings. The curved walls provide space for four closets, the first of which was used as a silver safe, the second as a refrigerator, the third for glassware, and the fourth for china. The wood in the room is darkened oak, the paneled ceiling gold and silver. The leather-covered walls had embossed patterns slightly lighter than the woodwork. The strong fireplace at the left was balanced on the other side of the dining room by a substantial sideboard of old oak. Above this was an oblong piece of Venetian tapestry in creams. Despite Mrs. Spooner’s interest iri Oriental objets d’art and their presence in all of her rooms, these rooms architecturally followed the general directions of American interior planning and decoration of the early 1880s.
180. Entrance hall, John W. Doane house, 1827 Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois; T. V. Wadskier, architect, 1883; demolished. The Doane house by Wadskier, a Danish immigrant who had first practiced in Philadelphia before arriving in Chicago in the 1850s, was, according to Sheldon, already regarded as one of the most elaborately finished residences in the city. From Prairie Avenue a grand flight of steps led to the heavy oak doors that admitted visitors to the vestibule illuminated by stained-glass windows from the workshop of John La Farge. Then one stepped into this entry hall with a conveniently located reception room on the right, a hall so spacious and magnificently furnished that it may have seemed like the primary hall of the house. Its ceiling was approximately 15′ high, and its openings to the reception room and stairhall were unusually wide. However, the room was probably too small for the overinflated system of plinths, carved columns and capitals, and deep lintels. Color effects came from the oak woodwork, the heavy portieres, Persian rugs and a stained-glass window. In the foreground is an ebony table on which visitors placed their calling cards and, in the distance against the side of the stairway, a fountain surrounded by ferns and rare plants.
181. Hall, John W. Doane house. At the fountain one turned right to walk into the grand hall, a space approximately 30′ square that looked larger than it was because of the oval opening above. On the north side were four identical arches supported by columns, two of which were also the newel posts of the main stairway. The stained-glass windows of the landing can be seen under these arches. The reception room, visible through the tied portieres, was in the northwest corner of the house. Like the entrance hall, this space was finished entirely in oak. Other rooms on the main floor were completed in cherry, Santo Domingo mahogany and bird’s-eye maple. One of the larger halls of this collection, it was also one of the more emphatically furnished, the result of an odd combination of contemporary open space and old-fashioned tactile overstatement.
In addition to his Chicago town house, Doane (March 23, 1833–March 23, 1901) and his wife, the former Julia Moulton, maintained a hotel apartment in New York and a summer home in Thompson, Connecticut, where he had been born. He first arrived in Chicago about 1855. After the Great Fire of 1871 he entered importing, circumventing Eastern markets to bring teas and coffee directly to Chicago. To this shrewd venture he added directorships in four railroads and, from 1884 to 1898, the presidency of the Merchants’ Loan and Trust Company. Doane was neither a dedicated philanthropist nor an art collector.
182. Hall, C. Oliver Iselin house, Hunter’s Island, New York; McKim, Mead and White, architects, 1882–83; demolished. Iselin (June 8, 1854–January 1, 1932), head of the banking firm of Iselin and Company, was a sportsman’s sportsman who was active in 15 social and athletic clubs in and around New York City. He is best remembered as the canny yachtsman who sailed in several America’s Cup victories between 1893 and 1903. He married Frances Garner in 1880, but she died a decade later. In 1894 he married Hope Goddard, daughter of the influential William Goddards of Providence (nos. 161 & 162).
This country house was located in picturesque and unpopulated surroundings. According to Leland Roth, it was designed by McKim, Mead and White in collaboration with Sidney Straton and cost only $6522, exclusive of furnishings. This photograph suggests that the Iselins could be both formal and informal. The arch acted as the frame of this scene and the stairway, oddly planned with an extensive but low landing yet exquisitely finished, was its main protagonist. Within this relatively uncluttered though spatially active area, the Iselins placed objects discreetly.