By New York standards Henry Hilton (October 1824–August 24, 1899) was a successful man. He lived in a splendidly decorated brownstone, owned a recognized collection of paintings, and left an estate valued at $6 million. But many contemporaries disliked and mistrusted him. The Times called him a vandal and an ignoramus during his tenure as a commissioner of the Department of Public Parks of New York City. Henry Ward Beecher and William Cullen Bryant, among others, reacted publicly to his refusal in 1877 to accept Jews at his Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. Even in death he seemed petty; he left no bequest to any charity.
Journalists and social critics questioned millionaires who sidled up to somebody else’s hard work, and they could be sharp with those who failed to develop fortunes entrusted to them. Hilton did both. An undistinguished lawyer, he was elected judge of the Court of Common Pleas in New York but retired to concentrate on his role as adviser to the dry-goods merchant A. T. Stewart. Hilton’s wife, Ellen Banker (March 20, 1828–February 20, 1885), was a cousin of Mrs. Stewart. His influence increased steadily; the public gossiped about the judge’s manipulative powers. When Stewart died in 1876, his estate, estimated to be between $35 and $60 million, was placed under Hilton’s control. Twenty years later only a fraction of the great fortune remained.
78. Drawing room, Henry Hilton house, 7 West 34th Street, New York, New York; architect unknown, date unknown; demolished. The Hiltons moved into this house in 1878, after hiring the same decorator who had worked on Stewart’s Marble Palace to do the plaster relief and design of this ceiling and its neutral encaustic walls. The doorways were redone in silverwood. Matching mantels, east and west, were constructed of silverwood and ebony highlighted with ormolu and gilt. Hand-stamped blue-garnet plush was used for the tufted chairs in the foreground. Despite these features, the room was a distant echo of A. T. Stewart’s drawing room (no. 3).
The Hiltons were forced to crowd their drawing room with prized urns, statues and paintings because the house lacked a proper picture gallery. The art obscured or competed with the expensive furnishings and decoration. Many of these pieces were sold at auction in February 1900, but the sale was discouraging. Considered old-fashioned, the collection of 132 paintings was sold for $118,715. It included C. E. Delort’s Arrival of the Cardinal (beside the mantel) and Young Woman Reading (beside it on an easel) by the German artist J. E. Anders (1845–?). The bronze busts on either side of the mirror between the doorways, Woman of Smyrna and Zeibecke, were both by E. C. H. Guillemin (1841–1907).
79. Dining room, Henry Hilton house. In the dining room the Italian decorator was responsible for the flat wall panels painted with garlands, urns and busts and edged with a Greek key pattern, the heavier plaster brackets supporting the plaster entablature, and the composition of the ceiling. The principal wood of the room was ebony inlaid with a lighter wood. It was used for the sideboard, wainscoting, mantel, casing of the doors and the chairs and table. Even the chandelier, its design attributed to the judge, was partly of ebony. This room also contained impressive examples of sewing and weaving. The chairs were covered with flowered silk tapestries on a ground of light blue. The inlaid screen, hiding the butler’s entrance, was composed of three panels on which appliqué work and embroidery on silk depicted late-medieval figures. On the mantel was a clock topped by a sleeping Ariadne by Ferdinand Barbedienne (1810–1892).
80. Dining room, Henry C. Haven house, 195 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts; J. Pickering Putnam, architect, 1881–82; standing. Haven (September 13, 1852–February 19, 1915) was a bachelor physician when he commissioned this $40,000 house. A graduate of Amherst College in 1873 and of the Harvard Medical School in 1879, he specialized in the diseases of infants. His reception room and examining office were located in the front of the house, separated from the dining, drawing and music rooms.
The differences between this dining room and the Hiltons’ are marked. The latter was “decorated,” resulting in a display of intricately crafted and highly detailed objects that did not share a common origin or conform to restricted visual criteria, and were often included for nonfunctional reasons. By comparison, the Haven dining room was spare, serious, dark and heavy, reflecting Bostonian tastes and preferences of the period just as Hilton’s reflected those of the New York fashionable set. The character of the room was determined by the architect, not the decorator. Cherry was used for the paneling and sideboard and dark oak for the chairs and table.
81. Drawing room, H. Victor Newcomb house, 683 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York; McKim, Mead and White, architects, 1881–82; demolished. In the design for the drawing room of H. Victor Newcomb’s city residence, the architects and decorator were influenced strongly by European precedents. Although the room was lavishly furnished and intricately detailed, its elements were combined effectively to create an environment more unified than the majority of the drawing rooms in this series. Absent is the easy mixture of medieval and Renaissance elements characteristic of so many residential interiors of the affluent. The unity of the room is even strong enough to absorb the exotic accent of the tiger-skin rug. The style of the room is Louis XIII, reflecting the influence of the early Italian Renaissance on French design, in which the ceiling and cornice ornamentation was of papier-mâché painted and highlighted with gold. The basic colors of the room were pink, salmon and light blue. The fireplace mantel on the left was carved from bluish-green marble, the drapery was pink plush and pale blue plush, and the carpet, woven in England, was salmon.
In the drawing room hung works by De Neuville, Vibert, E. Frère and Loutaunau. On the easel in the right corner is the Watercarrier by Millet. Above the mantel is a large octagonal mirror in a gilded frame and opposite it, over the entrance, is an allegorical canvas by Pierre-Victor Galland (1822–1892). Another Galland painting, reflected in the mirror, is located above the entrance to the library.
Son of the president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, Horatio Victor Newcomb (July 26, 1844–November 2, 1911) began life comfortably. He married Florence Ward Danforth in December 1866. Succeeding his father as head of the railroad, he moved from Louisville to New York in about 1881 and became president of the United States National Bank. However, mental illness, which had also afflicted his mother, incapacitated Newcomb in 1891. Court cases to determine whether or not he was sane, and thus responsible for his fortune, continued into the twentieth century.
82. Library, H. Victor Newcomb house. The library was quite different from the drawing room, the principal room of the house. Its dark natural woodwork, robustly carved, and the deeply tinted wall fabrics with vigorous patterns give this room a quality associated with the earlier Italianate and Second Empire styles. The primary decorative features, located above eye level, include the floral panels that are either of wood or painted dark to match the tone of the surrounding woodwork, the substantial wooden cornice supported by large consoles spaced at regular intervals and the wide papered frieze. Paintings were hung against the neutral middle section of the wall; the only identifiable one is the scene of mounted riders by Jean-Richard Goubie (1842–1899), above the mantel.
83. Conservatory, H. Victor Newcomb house. The room was fully glazed on one side and was covered by a coved ceiling of glass supported by wrought iron. Though not obligatory in the large city residence, the nineteenth-century conservatory was popular as a place to display exotic tropical plants. The plants could be moved to other rooms for special occasions or could be placed outdoors during warm weather to highlight an entrance, terrace or small city plot. The conservatory also added diversity to interior decoration. With its extreme lightness, openness and greenery, the conservatory could be a marked contrast to the other major rooms of a residence. In a New York City house, such as this one with its restricted lot size, the conservatory was even more essential—a rural oasis in urban density. Furthermore, the profusion of plants complemented the heavy inventory of items.
Like most conservatories in the city, this one was adjacent to the dining room and kitchen at the rear of the house; the dining room, in an adapted Henry II style, is visible in the distance. It was paneled to a height of six feet in mahogany, the same material used for the ceiling, creating a stately though somber setting for dining.