INTRODUCTION

HENRY VILLARD AND THE “GOLDEN MOMENT” OF AMERICAN WEALTH

In 1883, while George Sheldon was preparing his comments on the “magnificent and celebrated” Henry Villard house on Madison Avenue in New York, Villard himself rapidly reached the peak of his career as a railroad entrepreneur. In Sheldon’s description, the house, whose “size is perhaps unequaled by that of any other similar edifice in the city,” aptly matched Villard’s grand-scale ambitions for the Pacific Northwest, which his completion of the Northern Pacific railroad was now opening to the world. Villard saw the Northwest as America’s last productive frontier, able to bring prosperity to countless new farmers and other residents while pouring its grain out to the hungry of Europe. He in turn would be the great organizer of this bounty. Public acclaim was equal to Villard’s expectations, for his efforts had brought success after several years of intermittent railroad construction and now, in September 1883, resulted in completion of the longest single railroad line in the world.

Villard celebrated appropriately, organizing a four-train expedition to open the road and pound the ceremonial last spike. Using the English and German financial connections that had made completion of the Northern Pacific possible, Villard filled the trains with the English, German and Austrian ministers to the United States, several heads of German banks and members of the British parliament, American cabinet members, “two earls and a couple of lords,” and the ubiquitous former President Grant. The journey west from Chicago was an extended triumph. Financiers recognized Villard as the new peer of Jay Gould, William H. Vanderbilt and Collis Huntington, while crowd after crowd cheered the railroad builder and what he meant for their region. The Daily Pioneer-Press of St. Paul asserted that “but few men in the history of the country have ever been the recipients of such ovations as greet Mr. Villard and will continue to greet him as he moves westward.”

Yet even while driving in the last spike on a September evening in western Montana, Villard knew that construction costs were at least tens of millions of dollars above both earlier estimates and his company’s resources. By the end of the year, Villard found himself forced to resign several company presidencies and pledge his property to prevent complete collapse of his empire. Newspaper opinion now pilloried him as a typical example of the corporate looter, a view ironically corroborated by the Villard family’s move at just that time into their new house, which Sheldon described as having “unusual significance” for both “its magnitude and costliness.” The house became the symbol of Villard’s supposed callous selfishness. He knew the move would only increase public hostility, but he had built the seeming palace, actually intended for six families, when his wealth warranted it and now he had no other city home, nor the funds to rent. Villard was never at ease in the house, as the sparsely furnished rooms in Sheldon’s photographs (nos. 183–189) suggest, and in the spring of 1884 the family moved to a country home and soon left the United States for a two-year stay in Germany. As soon as he could, Villard sold the house to Whitelaw Reid, then editor of the New York Tribune. Although Villard had lived in the house less than six months and owned it for little over three years, he gave his name to the group of “Villard houses” that Sheldon recognized would become a landmark, although at the time his reference to their “chaste simplicity” might well have met with jeers from the public that now condemned Villard’s lavish celebrations.

While few of Sheldon’s 92 owners of the “Artistic Houses” experienced such a dramatic rise and fall as did Villard, particularly just as their houses were being publicized, Villard’s career showed elements common to the lives of many of Sheldon’s subjects. Several did indeed rise in fortune dramatically, only to drop as far. H. Victor Newcomb’s rising to “boy president” of the Louisville and Nashville and plummeting into drug addiction and commitment to a mental institution was the most melodramatic of all, but far from unique in its pattern. For many of these men and for others among the house owners whose material fortunes remained stable, the rapid reversal of public attitude was a common phenomenon. Many entered the 1880s almost universally acclaimed as great builders of both their own often immense fortunes and of the country’s material progress, only to find by the end of the decade that the same activities were now condemned as exploitive and parasitic. George Sheldon presented Artistic Houses to the public at what proved to be a key moment in shifting public opinion, marking years in which general fascination at ostentatious display turned to an increasing disgust. While most men of wealth found themselves still admired for their success by the end of the 1880s, it became increasingly necessary to fend off particular attacks and to justify certain of their activities.

Villard further typified many of Sheldon’s house owners in the particular form of his economic success, the consolidation of several separate, often faltering enterprises into one smoothly organized and stable corporate empire. In Villard’s case, although he failed dramatically for a time, the Northern Pacific survived in the hands of others as a solid, major element of corporate America. Virtually all the other great fortunes Sheldon found manifested in the houses stemmed from this same determination to bring order and stability to fragmented enterprises, whether in meat packing, oil refining, retail trade, insurance or any of several other areas. This process of large-scale organization, just like the personal reputations of the organizers, was commonly subject to a sharp change in public attitudes. While many of the “Artistic Houses” were going up physically, the creation of corporate empires was usually hailed as evidence of a distinctive American combination of efficiency and grandeur. Within a very few years in many cases, these same enterprises had become trusts and were being condemned for their rapacious determination to prevent any new competition.

Villard, like many of Sheldon’s men and women of wealth, searched for the right combination of activities and characteristics, both to satisfy his own sense of how a man of wealth ought to behave and to respond to public attitudes. How ought a person of wealth to live and what did such a person owe to society? These were questions much on the mind of many Americans as Sheldon displayed some of the fruits of wealth in such detail. Direct public service by holding elected or appointed office was characteristic principally of Sheldon’s older house owners, such as Presidential candidate Samuel Tilden, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish or New York Mayor James Harper, all born before 1815. Villard’s own way of fulfilling a sense of obligation was less direct but common to his generation. In Villard’s case it took the form of purchasing the New York Evening Post in 1881, in order to save one of America’s most respected newspapers from possible extinction. Villard kept at a distance from daily management, naming three trustees to conduct the business financially and hiring a trio of editors unexcelled in distinction in American journalism: Carl Schurz, Horace White and E. L. Godkin. Many others among the owners of “Artistic Houses” found similar ways to serve, and perhaps elevate, public taste and opinion. The accumulation of art, which the public might view on occasion, and the organization of museums were the most common expressions of a sense of public responsibility, but in other areas George W. Childs secured a reputation as an unusually philanthropic employer, while Robert Paine worked to organize and expand charity and social service in a municipality. Some of Sheldon’s subjects showed an intriguing beginning of the apparent loss of any sense of public obligation, as many of his younger house owners were already gaining reputations as “sportsmen” and “gentlemen of leisure.” For C. Oliver Iselin, sailing became the central preoccupation of his life, while for Bradley and Cornelia Martin, entertainment was their hallmark.

SOURCES OF WEALTH

Who were the owners of the “Artistic Houses”? George Sheldon himself says little about the people who owned the homes he describes, providing only scattered information about individuals, nothing at all about the owners as a group, and occasionally even using only a last name. Nevertheless, it is possible to discover significant information about the great majority of Sheldon’s house owners. Of the 84 men listed by Sheldon as house owners, only two, Henry Belden and F. W. Hurtt, remain too obscure for us to be sure of anything about their lives. Hurtt, in fact, may not have been living when Artistic Houses was published. Because of this possibility his house has been listed under the name of his wife, Sarah Ives Hurtt. Sheldon also referred to “Mrs. John A. Zerega’s House” (nos. 24–26), but we have listed the residence under her husband’s name because he was living in 1883–84. Five of the eight women owners were well known in their own time, either because of their own work, as in the case of Clara Jessup Moore, a successful writer, or as widows of prominent men, as was true of Julia T. (Mrs. James) Harper and Cornelia M. (Mrs. Alexander T.) Stewart. Yet three women owners are uncertain figures, and we know little or nothing about them.

Not surprisingly, Sheldon found most of the people whose homes he wanted to present along the Eastern seaboard. His own career had developed in New York and Americans assumed that the most up-to-date taste moved from East to West. Accordingly, 40 of Sheldon’s 92 owners were studied with respect to homes they owned in New York, while ten more persons lived in “Artistic Houses” in the New York suburban area, stretching from Henry M. Flagler in Mamaroneck, New York, and Samuel P. Hinckley in Lawrence, Long Island, to William I. Russell, Franklin H. Tinker and O. D. Munn in the newer, planned New Jersey suburbs of Short Hills and Llewellyn Park. Three other men commonly lived in New York, but Sheldon preferred to describe the Newport homes of Samuel Colman, Robert Goelet and Henry G. Marquand.

Fig. 1. Samuel P. Hinckley house, Lawrence, New York.

Boston provided Sheldon with his next-largest concentration of homes, with 13 of his houses in Boston itself and four others in outlying towns, owned by men who earned their livings in Boston. Next came Philadelphia, providing ten homes that Sheldon described, including two of publisher George W. Childs’s houses, one in the city and one in Bryn Mawr. After Philadelphia, only Chicago provided a cluster of house owners for Sheldon, giving him four. Although Newport also yielded four houses for Sheldon’s study, only George P. Wetmore considered the town his principal residence.

Sheldon found eight more men and women who owned “Artistic Houses” scattered as far west as St. Louis, where lumber merchant Joseph G. Chapman’s home was known “even in the East” for its “artistic treasures.” The southern boundary to Sheldon’s interest was Washington, D.C., where General Nicholas Longworth Anderson’s new home, designed by H. H. Richardson, was “easily the most interesting private residence in the capital.” In upstate New York Sheldon found three homes to include, those of woolen-mill owner Swits Condé in Oswego, tobacco manufacturer William S. Kimball in Rochesterand the Geneseo home of gentleman farmer James W. Wadsworth. In New England, aside from Boston and Newport, Sheldon described three more homes. The new Bar Harbor home of Mrs. G. B. Bowler was being studied at the same time in a series of Century articles on contemporary architecture. Sheldon also included the home of silk-mill owner Knight D. Cheney in South Manchester, Connecticut, and the Providence, Rhode Island, home of another textile magnate, William Goddard. The inclusion of houses in such varied locations gave Sheldon’s work a semblance of comprehensive coverage, but over four-fifths of his examples were from his three main metropolitan areas.

Sheldon’s house owners were quite varied in occupation, representing most of the major sources of substantial wealth in the late nineteenth century. Yet the newer types of industrial activity were underrepresented. In the 1880s, railroads and iron and steel manufacturing were still the most fruitful newer sources of fortunes, joining the somewhat older textile mills as the principal foundations for industrial wealth. Only the relatively little-known John H. Shoenberger, who had recently retired from business and moved from Pittsburgh to New York, represented the substantial iron and steel industry. Railroads played a larger part in the wealth of Sheldon’s subjects, but a proportionally small one considering their importance in the national economy. William H. Vanderbilt was one of Sheldon’s best-known house owners, a man whose control of the New York Central and other lines had made him a principal public symbol of railroad wealth. Also well known when Sheldon was writing was Henry Villard, as mentioned, a principal figure in the Northern Pacific. Two other men had made their initial fortunes in railroads but were not actively involved when Sheldon described their homes: John Taylor Johnston had been president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey for 30 years, until the depression of the 1870s led to a reorganization of the line; H. Victor Newcomb became president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad following his father, but resigned the position in 1880, as his interest turned more toward New York banking. Two other men also represented the newer forms of industrial activity. Henry M. Flagler possessed “one of the great fortunes of the United States” as a result of his partnership with John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company, while Edward H. Williams rested his wealth on his partnership in Philadelphia’s Baldwin Locomotive Works.

The older industrial activity of cloth and clothing manufacture was an important source of wealth in Sheldon’s group, accounting for eight of his home owners. Henry S. Hovey and William Goddard owned cotton mills, Swits Condé and David L. Einstein woolen mills and Knight D. Cheney and William De Forest silk mills. William Clark was well on the way to becoming one of America’s major producers of cotton thread while John T. Martin had made a fortune in clothing production during the Civil War, after which he diversified into banking and real-estate investment. Martin’s pattern was common to many of Sheldon’s subjects, who achieved substantial wealth in one field, but then increased it by activity in two or three others.

Fig. 2. William Clark house, Newark, New Jersey.

As with cloth and clothing, older types of raw-material processing were the foundation of the wealth of several of Sheldon’s house owners. Like Standard Oil’s Flagler, Herman O. Armour, one of four brothers in the meat-packing business, represented one of the better-known new fortunes of the post-Civil War era. William F. Havemeyer and Robert Stuart in sugar refining, Henry C. Gibson the Philadelphia distiller and Jacob Ruppert the New York brewer, Joseph G. Chapman in lumber milling and William S. Kimball the tobacco processor, rounded out this source of wealth among Sheldon’s people.

Trade was another important activity for Sheldon’s subjects. The most common figure was the dry-goods merchant, often a man who built up a substantial general hard-goods trade. Both A. T. Stewart and Marshall Field were preeminent in the developing department store, while Chicago’s Henry J. Willing had accumulated his fortune with Field before retiring to travel. Ralph H. White built up a major retail dry-goods firm in Boston and Charles Stewart Smith secured his wealth from the wholesale dry-goods business in New York. Also prominent in New York merchandising were George Kemp in drugs and toiletries and John Wolfe, who inherited his hardware business from his father. The sale of coffee, tea and groceries provided the origin of Chicagoan John W. Doane’s millions, while the general import-export trade with China and the Philippines occupied John Charles Phillips in Boston. The China trade had also been the principal source of John L. Gardner’s inherited wealth, but Gardner himself put the money into railroads, mining and other investments. Also in Boston, Gilbert R. Payson and Joseph H. White were partners in a firm marketing textiles for major New England mills.

Banking was the principal occupation of almost a dozen of Sheldon’s owners and a major activity that many others took up after they had accumulated a fortune in some other field. Among Sheldon’s bankers, J. Pierpont Morgan had already established a solid reputation in railroad financing. Morgan’s conspicuous investment activity, accompanied by growing public attention, was almost the opposite of the quiet “bankers’ bank” business of George F. Baker, who with Morgan would soon become one of the country’s most powerful financiers. Sheldon found bankers prominent among his house owners in all his major cities, with the Hunnewells and Asa P. Potter representing Boston and Samuel M. Nickerson prominent in Chicago. In Philadelphia, Clarence H. Clark of the First National Bank was reputed to be one of the city’s richest citizens. Rounding out Sheldon’s group of bankers were several New Yorkers, including Joseph S. Decker, Frederic W. Stevens, Frederick F. Thompson and Richard T. Wilson, whose banking was much less well known than the socially advantageous marriages of his children.

The related fields of brokerage and insurance accounted for several other house owners, including James W. Alexander, first vice president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, one of the largest firms in the field. Edward Eddy Chase, William G. Dominick, Rudolph Ellis and E. Rollins Morse all participated in stockbrokerage firms, while William I. Russell handled investments in metals.

Fig. 3. E. Rollins Morse house, Boston, Massachusetts.

Along with banking, real-estate investment was an activity that provided the central wealth of several house owners and a secondary activity for numerous others. Robert Goelet was heir, with his brother, to one of New York’s major real-estate fortunes, begun in the early nineteenth century. Goelet needed to involve himself little in active management of the investments, as their value steadily increased with the growth of New York. Similarly, Nicholas Longworth Anderson in Washington lived a life of leisure on income from Cincinnati real estate developed by his grandfather Nicholas Longworth, the “first millionaire of the West.” Samuel P. Hinckley took a more active role as a real-estate dealer on Long Island, while James W. Wadsworth managed the landholdings his father had put together in upstate New York. The income of these four was most clearly tied to land, as was the inherited wealth of Mariana Arnot Ogden, widow of one of Chicago’s earliest major landowners, William Ogden.

Real estate and banking also provided significant second careers for many of Sheldon’s men of wealth, so that to some extent categories break down. John T. Martin, for instance, made enough money in a St. Louis clothing firm to retire before he was 40, in 1855. He then moved East and soon made a substantial fortune by means of uniform contracts during the Civil War. “Retiring” again, he concentrated on developing his increasingly significant collection of sculpture and paintings, but also served as a director of a half-dozen banks and trust companies and managed his large tracts of Brooklyn waterfront land. Many others, including William Goddard, George Kemp and Henry G. Marquand, followed similar paths, so that when Sheldon described their houses in the mid-1880s, they were as much or more involved in banking and real estate as in their original occupations.

Fig. 4. John T. Martin house, Brooklyn, New York.

One other business, publishing, was a significant occupation of Sheldon’s house owners. George W. Childs, owner of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, was one of the best-known newspaper publishers of his generation. The Ledger’s “exceptionally high tone,” which put it on “the right side of every question,” had made it both eminently respectable and financially rewarding. This success and Childs’s active philanthropy made him one of Philadelphia’s most eminent citizens, a fitting host for President Grant and the Emperor of Brazil when they arrived in Philadelphia to open the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. One of Childs’s competitors, William M. Singerly, who published the Philadelphia Record, was responsible for the only “artistic office” in Sheldon’s collection. Sheldon’s only other newspaper publisher was Oswald Ottendorfer, owner of one of the country’s most important foreign-language papers, the New York Staats-Zeitung. Ottendorfer had married the woman principally responsible for the paper’s early success, Anna Behr Uhl, who died as pictures of the couple’s “Beautiful pavilion on … the North River” were being published. Sheldon included two magazine publishers, the young Franklin H. Tinker, whose firm published several trade journals, and O. D. Munn, whose Scientific American had been an important periodical since the 1840s. Another of Sheldon’s house owners, Julia Thorne Harper, owed her inherited wealth principally to publishing, but she took no active role in Harper and Brothers, the firm that her husband James had helped to found.

Among the professions, law provided Sheldon with several house owners. Both Hamilton Fish and Samuel J. Tilden had legal practice at the center of their careers, but both had expanded their incomes with real estate and corporate investments and both had devoted much of their energy to political life. Fish capped his career with service as Secretary of State throughout the Grant administration, while Tilden went from the governorship of New York to an unsuccessful campaign as the Democratic nominee for President in 1876. When Sheldon described their houses, both were elder statesmen of their respective parties, each living “the private life of a gentleman of ample means and cultivated tastes.” Owing his reputation more clearly to his legal practice was Edward N. Dickerson, one of the country’s ablest patent lawyers, whose cases had included tests of Colt firearms and Goodyear rubber patents. In Boston, Robert Treat Paine, Jr., was a lawyer whose practice enabled him to find the profitable railroad and mining investments which, in turn, allowed him to retire to public service and philanthropy in 1870, at the age of 35. Several more of Sheldon’s subjects trained in the law and were members of the bar, including J. Coleman Drayton, Judge Henry Hilton and Bradley Martin, but legal practice was not a significant source of their income.

Fig. 5. Julia T. Harper house, New York, New York.

Medicine contributed two of Sheldon’s more accomplished house owners and one of his obscure ones. Dr. William A. Hammond had been Surgeon-General of the United States Army during part of the Civil War, but his “masterful personality” clashed with the “autocratic spirit” of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and he was dismissed in 1864. While spending 15 years winning reversal of his court-martial verdict, Hammond also became an authority on nervous diseases and “one of the pioneer neurologists of the United States.” Dr. William T. Lusk, by the mid-1870s “the fashionable obstetrician of the day” in New York, marked the opening of the 1880s with publication of his Art and Science of Midwifery, the most learned textbook on the subject at the time. Dr. Henry C. Haven, the third of Sheldon’s physicians, practiced in Boston, where he specialized in the diseases of infants and helped found several medical institutions for children.

Three of Sheldon’s owners made their livings in the arts, helping to create and decorate just the kind of homes Sheldon wanted to present as models for up-to-date taste. In the mid-1880s, Philadelphia’s Frank Furness was just reaching the apex of his career as an architect. Having already designed several important public buildings in his hometown, he was now being called on by the city’s banking and railroad magnates for both office buildings and suburban homes. Samuel Colman, a Newport painter who had begun to receive recognition during the Civil War years, also created during the 1880s designs for fabrics and wallpapers and experimented with interior wood stains. Similar experimentalism characterized the third of the professionals in the arts, Louis C. Tiffany, who had studied painting under Colman before turning toward more varied decorative arts, especially the many uses of stained glass. Another of Sheldon’s owners, Clara Jessup Moore, was a prolific author, but did not think of herself as a professional. While her husband lived, Moore published social advice, poetry and short prose under pseudonyms for about 20 years. By the late 1870s, living on the fortune from her late husband’s paper-manufacturing business and donating to charity the proceeds of her writing, Moore published more frequently under her own name and became a popular writer of novels and children’s stories.

Two of society’s traditionally honorable professions, the clergy and the military, were also represented among Sheldon’s people. Phillips Brooks, in the 1880s still the minister of Boston’s Trinity Episcopal Church, was among the country’s most widely known clergymen. He had turned down academic offers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in order to remain in the church, a commitment rewarded a few years later when he was chosen Bishop of Massachusetts. Sheldon’s military figures included Nicholas L. Anderson, Charles A. Whittier and Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, who had commanded the victorious Northern forces in the Civil War and then served two terms as President of the United States, was in these years facing the last of many low points in his life. His investment firm failed in 1884 and in the same year he discovered the cancer that soon killed him, but not before Grant’s characteristic determination had enabled him to complete his Memoirs.

Fig. 6. Trinity Church rectory, Boston, Massachusetts.

While their professions provided the shape and focus of the lives of most of Sheldon’s house owners, a sizable group found earning an income of no particular significance. Inherited wealth was not the defining characteristic of these house owners, for others among Sheldon’s subjects had fallen heir to fortunes but had devoted their efforts to active management of inherited businesses. The single wealthiest owner in Sheldon’s array, William H. Vanderbilt, was also well known for his constant attention to his railroad empire. Others, such as Samuel J. Tilden and Hamilton Fish, gave a large part of their lives to public service, but only after strenuous effort in accumulating the fortunes that made such service possible. Unlike these men were the house owners who spent all their lives as men of leisure or the few who did engage in cultural or political activity made possible by wealth they had done little to develop.

Assignment of some men to such a category represents a judgment not strictly factual and objective. Robert Goelet, for instance, was seen as “uncommonly sagacious” in augmenting the immense New York real-estate fortune left to him and his brother by his father and uncle, but such activity seems never to have provided the focus to his life, which he devoted to music, sport, club life and travel. The Metropolitan Opera and his magnificent steam yacht represented his paramount concerns. A more clear-cut example of the man of leisure was Bradley Martin, a man who “began at college the social career in which he subsequently attained such a conspicuous place as a leader of society both in America and Europe.” When Martin married Cornelia Sherman in 1869, he married the fortune that launched them both on an increasingly lavish series of balls and enabled them to spend the last portion of their life in Britain, after public reaction to their depression-era ball of 1897 made life in America too unpleasant. Skill at leisure activity was seen as most noteworthy in such others as New York banker’s son C. Oliver Iselin, “whose love of sports and his prowess in coaching, polo, hunting, quail and pigeon shooting, made him a notable and colorful figure.” Iselin, from one of the country’s wealthiest families at the time, was especially well known as a yachtsman and defended the America’s Cup in three famous races.

If Iselin used wealth to cultivate a firm mastery of recreational skills, other house owners demonstrated a talent for scandal and defeat. When Sheldon was describing his home, J. Coleman Drayton was coasting smoothly through an active social life that rested on the fortune of his wife, Charlotte Astor, whose family combined wealth and social distinction as few others did in the 1880s. By the end of the decade the Draytons were headed toward the separation and subsequent divorce that became the “most conspicuous society scandal of the generation.” Less explosively dramatic but equally precarious in his good fortune was Henry Hilton, early in his career an inconsequential municipal judge in New York. Hilton’s wife was a cousin of the wife of department-store millionaire A. T. Stewart, a connection the Hiltons carefully cultivated. The matter-of-fact Stewart made Hilton his social master of ceremonies and friend, coming to treat him as a son and leaving in Hilton’s hands management of the fortune he left his widow upon his death in 1876. As custodian of Stewart’s millions, Hilton lived lavishly, bought a luxurious house, donated freely to charity, but so mishandled Stewart’s business, especially after Mrs. Stewart’s death in 1886, that he rapidly ran through and dissipated the huge fortune ($20 to $40 million) that observers estimated he began with.

More productive in their use of inherited wealth were John L. Gardner of Boston and George Peabody Wetmore of Newport. Neither had much involvement in the businesses their merchant fathers created and both initially used their wealth for extended and frequent tours of Europe. Gardner, and particularly his wife, the former Isabella Stewart, soon became increasingly committed to sponsorship of the arts in Boston, while Wetmore entered Rhode Island politics in the mid-1880s, starting at the top with election as governor in 1884.

A quieter life, free from both great scandal and notable achievement, characterized Sheldon’s remaining families of leisure. Representative of several was the amalgamation John Hay saw when he ushered at the wedding of William Sprague Hoyt and Janet Chase in 1871: “He is a very nice fellow—and no end of cash. She is a very nice girl—and no end of talent.” Although Hoyt’s cash had its ups and downs depending on the fortunes of his cousins’ cotton firm, and although Mrs. Hoyt’s connections with national and Rhode Island politics (through her father and brother-in-law) sometimes presented problems, the marriage included European and Caribbean travel, a comfortable home the couple designed for themselves on an island near Pelham, New York, and enough jewelry to warrant newspaper coverage of its theft, with time for Janet Chase Hoyt to gain a reputation as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. Apparently similar was the life of Charles A. Whittier and his wife Lillie, who divided their time between homes in Boston, Buzzard’s Bay and New York; traveled frequently to Europe; and married one daughter to a wealthy Iselin and the other to a Russian prince.

Such families devoted themselves chiefly to private pleasures, often centered in the homes Sheldon presented. For some, personal enjoyment and their home became a preoccupation equivalent to a business career for others. Sheldon notes that Egerton Winthrop imported from France every article of furniture in his New York apartment (nos. 53 & 54), including papier-mâché ornamentation. Winthrop had spent much of his early married life in France, where his second son was born, and he became a pioneer in the use of antique French furniture in America. His concern with taste in art led novelist Edith Wharton to find in Winthrop her first real adult friend, the first to provide her with “intellectual companionship.” As Winthrop turned more and more toward devotion to such amenities as the perfection of his dinners, Wharton described him in a way that suits many of Sheldon’s men of leisure: “Never, I believe, have an intelligence so distinguished and a character so admirable been combined with interests for the most part so trivial.” For Winthrop, the rooms themselves that Sheldon portrayed, and the activities he orchestrated in them, became essentially the entire content of his life.

DEFINING AN AMERICAN ELITE

Fortunately for later researchers, the contemporaries of Sheldon’s house owners were becoming increasingly interested in establishing and defining categories of elite status in America. Wealth and social prestige had long fascinated Americans, in part because possession of either could change so rapidly, in part because great wealth and high status paradoxically both affirmed and denied American tenets of social mobility, individual ambition and egalitarian democracy. As a result of this American fascination with wealth and status, there had always been impressionistic identification of the richest or most well-born Americans. In the 1880s, both outside observers of the wealthy and those who saw themselves as inside guardians of “society” began to be more systematic and explicit in their defining of categories, producing extensive lists of families and individuals. The lists, among their other functions, help to define Sheldon’s house owners.

Among the first to attempt a comprehensive identification of men of great wealth was Thomas G. Shearman, who intended his series of articles for The Forum in 1889 and 1891 as an alarm signal calling attention to the growing concentration of wealth in the United States. In an effort to prove that the “wealthiest class in the United States is vastly richer than the wealthiest class in Great Britain,” which Americans were used to thinking of as an aristocratic society, in 1889 Sherman published a list of all those Americans easily identifiable as having at least $20 million in individual wealth. His 67 people and estates were those commonly accepted as the very top level of wealth in America. Although his list was current for the late 1880s, and thus came after the death of some of Sheldon’s house owners, eight of them figured in Shearman’s list in some way. Henry M. Flagler, J. Pierpont Morgan and Marshall Field were counted as individuals; William H. Vanderbilt’s spirit was present through the listing of several of his heirs; and inheritance or other family connections gave Herman O. Armour, Robert Goelet, William F. Havemeyer and Cornelia M. Stewart either a place on, or a link with, Shearman’s list.

Shearman’s efforts, as well as a rising public concern with concentrated wealth, led to an even more careful study by the New York Tribune in 1892. The Tribune’s interest was prompted by arguments that recently raised protective tariffs were responsible for unjust concentrations of wealth. The protariff Tribune hoped to show that most Americans who possessed great wealth gained it in fields that received no advantage from the tariff, but overall it also devoted great time and effort to accumulating the most accurate list of all Americans who were worth $1 million or more. After much correspondence and cross-checking, the Tribune’s researchers discovered and listed 4047 millionaires from all over the country, about .0001 percent of the adult population.

As with Shearman’s list, the Tribune’s came too late to include those of Sheldon’s owners who had died in the 1880s. Thirteen of the owners of “Artistic Houses” had died by the time of the Tribune’s list, yet even so five of them were represented. Three men whose houses Sheldon described (Anderson, Shoenberger and Vanderbilt) had passed on sufficient wealth so that their widows merited inclusion on the list of millionaires, while two (Gibson and Phillips) had their estates listed. Mrs. James Harper, a widow, was not listed, but all of her brothers-in-law were, while the fathers of three other house owners (Hovey, Walter Hunnewell and Tiffany) were included by the Tribune, though the sons were not. The Tribune listed the wives of four men whom Sheldon considered the owners of houses (Drayton, Iselin, Bradley Martin and Wadsworth) as millionaires by inheritance, but not the husbands. Fully 44 more of Sheldon’s subjects, almost half his group, made it onto the Tribune list in their own right. Twenty-two of the house owners who were still alive in 1892 had not accumulated enough wealth to merit inclusion, while in the case of five it is not known if they were still alive or where they were living.

According to the Tribune’s systematic assessment, one major characteristic Sheldon’s house owners had in common was great wealth, for almost two-thirds of his subjects, either personally or by family association, rated inclusion in the category of millionaire, the pinnacle of the pyramid of wealth in America. Even among the 22 men still living in 1892 but not ranked as millionaires or represented by a relative, many had accumulated substantial wealth. James W. Alexander was vice president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, one of the country’s major insurance companies. Knight D. Cheney was moving up toward the presidency of his family’s silk mills, the largest in the country. Although neither Frederic W. Stevens nor Frederick F. Thompson, had amassed a million dollars, each was director of a half-dozen significant New York banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. Still others, who lacked a million of their own, constantly rubbed shoulders with the very rich, either as their pastor (the Reverend Phillips Brooks), their decorator (Samuel Colman) or their architect (Frank Furness). Among those dead by 1892, the year of the Tribune’s list, and not represented by heirs, Cornelia M. Stewart had briefly enjoyed one of the country’s great fortunes and several others, such as James L. Claghorn, Edward N. Dickerson and Samuel J. Tilden, had been men of substantial wealth.

Thus, the homes Sheldon presented were owned almost entirely by men and women of unusual wealth. In a few cases, notably those of Marshall Field, Henry M. Flagler, Robert Goelet, J. Pierpont Morgan, Cornelia M. Stewart and William H. Vanderbilt, Sheldon was discussing homes owned by people of legendary wealth, the sort of immense fortune that made the family name a household word throughout America.

In dozens of other cases, Sheldon’s subjects constituted what English observer James Bryce identified as one of “the most remarkable phenomena” of the late nineteenth century, the rapidly growing class of “millionaires of the second order, men with fortunes ranging from $5,000,000 to $15,000,000.” The prosperity of the 1880s was creating a great surge of such wealth, a development that fascinated the general public, alarmed reformers and perplexed Society itself.

With the great rise of new fortunes, various leaders of Society decided it was necessary to define the boundaries of acceptability. Of course, there had always been social definition, but it had been largely informal and simply in the minds of those who belonged. As late as the 1870s, according to such old-family representatives as Edith Wharton and Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, it had still been possible for “New York Society” to be “a representative, exclusive body of all that was best in the city,” on a basis of mutual recognition and privately agreed-upon invitation lists. Then, according to Wharton, “the first change came in the ‘eighties, with the earliest detachment of big money-makers from the West.” Just as the great increase in “millionaires of the second order” had led journalists to develop their explicit, categorized lists of the wealthy, so too the influx of new families led to a formalization of membership in Society, most clearly exemplified by the Social Register.

The Social Register was another new phenomenon of the 1880s, designed to end confusion as to who truly belonged in Society. American journalists had been attempting to define Society, looking for “Class Distinctions in the United States” or “Caste in American Society,” but they found themselves puzzled. One writer, Kate Gannett Wells, reported that she had been to eight society functions in a week and had not seen one person twice. “Where is society?” she asked. “At each door there were carriages, and each house was well appointed. Some would fold their napkins; others would throw them crumpled on the table. Some would have wine, others water.” She could find no certain key to Society behavior and membership. The Social Register sorted this out, both recording and in a sense creating in print the formal Society that the 1880s called into being. Published by the Social Register Association, the first volume of the Register appeared in 1887 and naturally devoted itself to New York. Listing fewer than 2000 families, the Register included Dutch and English families from the colonial era, families who had made fortunes and gained status in the early nineteenth century and some of the more recent arrivals.

Forty-nine of Sheldon’s house owners were still alive in 1887 and in the New York area. Of them, 28 merited inclusion in the first Social Register, a slightly lower proportion than earned their place on the Tribune’s list of millionaires. Among Sheldon’s members of Society were several whose families had been prominent for several generations, such as the Fishes, the Goelets, the Iselins and the Winthrops. Early-nineteenth-century wealth was represented by such men and women as Julia T. Harper and William F. Havemeyer. Some of Wharton’s “moneymakers from the West” (and others from the South) won a listing as well, among them H. Victor Newcomb, born in Kentucky and at the beginning of the decade the youngest president of a major railroad, the Louisville and Nashville. Another post-Civil War arrival in New York Society was Richard T. Wilson, a Georgia native who settled in New York in the 1860s with money gained marketing Confederate cotton in England. Still others of Sheldon’s owners gained a presence in Society primarily through professional contacts. Two of his physicians, William A. Hammond and William T. Lusk, acquired only moderate wealth but were well known as society doctors.

Doctors Hammond and Lusk, in their Social Register inclusion but absence from the Tribune’s list of millionaires, represented six other New York-area owners of “Artistic Houses.” James W. Alexander and William Sprague Hoyt were others who had inherited or married social connections, but failed to achieve great wealth. Among Sheldon’s New Yorkers, the largest single group consisted of those 19 house owners who were both socially prominent and wealthy. All of the wealthy owners noted above were in the group, as were bankers George F. Baker and J. Pierpont Morgan; such substantial merchants as George Kemp, Henry G. Marquand and John Wolfe; and John T. Johnston, a railroad investor. Edith Wharton might have been pleased to note that there were a dozen house owners with enough wealth for the Tribune who had not been accepted into Society and that such Western millionaires as Herman 0. Armour, Henry M. Flagler and John H. Shoenberger were prominent in the excluded group. They were joined by Sheldon’s one Jewish house owner—David L. Einstein—and several millionaires of German immigrant background, such as Oswald Ottendorfer, Jacob Ruppert and Henry Villard. Eight of Sheldon’s New York-area owners were not distinguished for either wealth or social prestige in the 1880s.

Fig. 7. Jacob Ruppert house, New York, New York.

The Social Register Association followed its New York debut with volumes for Boston and Philadelphia in 1890. The first Philadelphia Social Register was much smaller than New York’s—one-tenth the names for a city about half the size of New York. Of Sheldon’s Philadelphians, only James L. Claghorn had died by 1890. Among the others, George W. Childs, Frank Furness, Henry C. Gibson and Clara Jessup Moore had earned state or national recognition for their achievements or philanthropy and, except for Furness, they owned at least the $1 million that the Tribune looked for, as did three others of Sheldon’s group, but neither wealth nor achievement won them or any other owner inclusion in Philadelphia Society, a group noted in the late nineteenth century for its high degree of exclusiveness.

Fig. 8. Joseph H. White house, Brookline, Massachusetts.

Boston Society, on the other hand, was more inclusive or else Sheldon had selected his Boston owners in a different way, for, of 16 families who owned houses in Boston itself or in nearby towns, 12 merited inclusion in early Social Registers. An additional person, Phillips Brooks, died too early for listing in the extant Registers but surely would have been included. Of Sheldon’s owners, only two Boston merchants, Joseph H. and Ralph H. White, banker Asa P. Potter and Elizabeth E. Spooner failed to be listed. In Boston, then, Sheldon had a group with an unusually high proportion of membership in the social elite. The other house owners lived in cities which produced Social Registers only in the 1890s or never, but there is no question that men like Joseph G. Chapman, trustee and benefactor of Washington University and the St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts; John W. Doane, who presided over one of Chicago’s banquets for Ulysses S. Grant after completion of his world tour in 1879; or William S. Kimball, one of Rochester’s foremost businessmen and philanthropists, were considered among the elite of their communities. Overall, Sheldon assembled a group that enjoyed not only great wealth but high social status.

THE UPPER CLASS ORGANIZES CULTURE, LEISURE, EDUCATION AND MANNERS

The Social Register was simply one way in which the American upper class attempted to define itself and achieve what proved to be an elusive stability and organization. In the 1880s, such an achievement of order still seemed possible and Sheldon’s owners played an active role in most of the activities designed to bring it about. To some extent, the efforts of the 1880s built upon, yet in a way opposed, earlier work by an upper class that thought of itself as more exclusive. This earlier elite included some of Sheldon’s older house owners, among them Hamilton and Julia Kean Fish, pillars second to none in New York’s Knickerbocker aristocracy. The home itself was central to social organization, for Mrs. Fish’s invitations were crucial in defining who belonged and who did not. While she (no. 52) or such a friend as Elizabeth Marquand (nos. 92 & 93) hosted a “limited but exceedingly brilliant gathering of society people” in their homes, Hamilton Fish took his turn presiding over the older cultural institutions, such as the Academy of Music and the New-York Historical Society, that helped define his generation’s elite. According to longtime New York diarist George Templeton Strong, what he and Fish and several others had been trying to do was to “take charge of polite society, regulate its institutions, keep it pure, and decide who shall be admitted….”

Such efforts proved unable to cope with the surge of new wealth during and after the Civil War, so that the 1880s became the crucial period for the establishment of a sufficiently inclusive yet durable upper class. Local cultural institutions played a notable part, as they had earlier, with such newer organizations as the Metropolitan Opera and the Metropolitan Museum of Art expressing the energies of the newer upper class. Among Sheldon’s owners, A. T. Stewart was one of the biggest early donors to the Metropolitan Museum, sugar refiner Robert Stuart was active on the organizing committee and railroad president John Taylor Johnston became the museum’s first president. The Metropolitan Opera provided an even greater opportunity for new families to shine, for box ownership gave conspicuous places to such new arrivals in New York as H. Victor and Florence Newcomb and Richard T. and Melissa Wilson and to other rapid risers in society, such as George and Juliet Kemp and Bradley and Cornelia Martin.

Parallels were to be found in such other cities as, for instance, Philadelphia, where banker James L. Claghorn, retired from active business since the outbreak of the Civil War, took over leadership of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia’s preeminent art museum since soon after its founding in 1807, moved into its new home, designed by Frank Furness, a few years after Claghorn became its president in 1872. Claghorn, one of America’s foremost collectors of etchings and engravings, worked on the Academy’s board with another Sheldon subject, distiller and wine importer Henry C. Gibson, and the two made substantial donations to the collections. Rising to challenge the eminence of the Academy was the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, begun only in the late 1870s as a result of the great Centennial Exhibition. Gentlemen such as Claghorn and Gibson kept the museum at arm’s length, but it received a solid foundation in the fine arts from the mid-1880s gifts made by still another Sheldon owner, Clara Jessup Moore.

In Chicago too, men of newer wealth built up a new museum to help symbolize their own economic and cultural achievements. For Chicago, the Great Fire of 1871 gave particular impetus to new beginnings and the Board of Trustees that set out to reestablish the Academy of Design soon founded instead a new Academy of Fine Arts, which in 1882 became The Art Institute of Chicago. Active on the Board in all these stages was Samuel M. Nickerson. Born in Massachusetts, and later clerking in his brother’s store in a Florida town in the early 1850s, Nickerson had moved to Chicago in 1857 and by the time of the fire was president of both the First National Bank and the Union Stockyards National Bank. By the time Sheldon presented his home (nos. 103 & 104), Nickerson’s art collection was considered one of the largest in the West, a collection he ultimately donated to the Art Institute.

Art, both in the home and in museums, had long been a way for an upper class to combine personal pleasure with a declaration of social status. To this and other traditional expressions of rank, the newly enlarged upper class of the 1880s brought several innovations intended to make clear lines of social distinction and establish homogeneity. Residential patterns, for instance, took on a new significance as the 1880s brought the rise of the upper-class suburb, a planned community with firm restrictions on who could buy and build. In Artistic Houses, Sheldon limited himself primarily to distinctly urban homes, but Short Hills, New Jersey, the home of William I. Russell and Franklin H. Tinker, typified the new suburban pattern. As Sheldon noted, “six years ago the place was a wilderness of forest-growth,” while when he visited it contained three dozen attractive year-round homes and all the amenities of “a beautiful village, without the nuisances of a village.” In other words, it had music hall, church, club, stables and greenhouses but “no stores, no unsightly sheds, no country ‘bar.’” Russell, a broker in metals who late in life wrote an autobiography, moved into his new home, “Redstone” (no. 74), in 1882, soon made friends with Tinker, a fellow book collector, and found life in the small, self-contained suburb “all that we would have it—peaceful, happy, contented.” Given the small size and homogeneous character of the community, social activity involving all the residents soon became a hallmark of Short Hills life. Russell found that “the frequent pleasant little dinner-parties of four to six couples, where bright and entertaining conversation was general,” made his new home the key to “serenity and delight.” Bringing together the whole little community were “enjoyable amateur dramatic performances, followed by light refreshment and a couple of hours’ dancing.” Now and again there would be a special community event, as when Russell hosted a ball to open his new carriage house and stable. The stable itself was transformed into a ballroom, with floral horseshoes, a bronze jockey and coaching pictures for decorations, the orchestra upstairs around the open hay doors, and guests receiving with their dance cards “a sterling silver pencil representing the foreleg of a horse in action, the shoe being of gold.”

A complementary innovation, drawing the well-to-do out of the city in an organized and exclusive way, was the country club, also a new phenomenon of the 1880s. Such clubs, springing up on the outskirts of most Eastern cities in the decade, brought together the rising interest in sport, such as riding, coaching and tennis, with the growing concern for social exclusiveness. The Country Club, founded in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1882 is commonly considered the first of its kind, and one of Sheldon’s Boston couples, John L. and Isabella Stewart Gardner, were active members. Coaching with two, three or four horses and a variety of conveyances became a particular interest of the Gardners; leading a line of coaches from Boston out to The Country Club gave Isabella Gardner an opportunity to cultivate and display flamboyance. Similarly, in Washington, Nicholas Longworth Anderson was writing to his son in the 1880s that he and his wife were helping to establish a similar country club, perhaps inspired in part by Gardner, “one of my most intimate friends.” The Andersons found their new club a welcome opportunity for recreation and a new vehicle for the social life that included frequent entertainment of American political leaders and European diplomats.

Club and suburb were important not only for who was included and accepted, but for who was excluded. In many cases no doubt a man of wealth found himself left out because others did not care for his personal habits, his business practices or his family. One type of exclusion by group identity was becoming more pronounced and formal in the 1880s—anti-Semitism. Institutionalized anti-Semitism was relatively easy to bring about when one was forming a new club or residential area, but the practice received its most well-publicized beginning in a long-established place of public accommodation. In the late 1870s, one of Sheldon’s owners, Judge Henry Hilton, had recently begun effective management of the A. T. Stewart millions and one of his responsibilities was the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York, a summer retreat popular with the wealthy. When Hilton, in 1877, refused rooms to Joseph Seligman, a prominent New York Jewish banker, he incurred a flurry of denunciation, but Hilton’s anti-Semitic policies soon caught on and set the pattern for an increasing number of upper-class institutions in the 1880s.

While the exclusive suburb and the country club offered upper-class definition to separate local groups, the prestigious boarding schools begun in the 1880s were designed in part to cultivate links between elites in different cities, to help bring about a self-conscious national upper class. A few of what became socially selective boarding schools had been founded earlier, notably Phillips Exeter, Phillips Andover and St. Paul’s. They had been day schools, educating a local clientele at a time when many wealthy families hired tutors to educate their children at home. The shift of the older schools toward boarding students drawn from throughout the Northeast mirrored the character of the new schools founded in the 1880s expressly to educate a national elite. Foremost among the new schools was Groton, founded in 1884 by Endicott Peabody to help train gentlemen. Learning was important, but it was also essential “to have good manners and be decent and live up to standards.” On his first small Board of Trustees, Peabody enlisted the vital support of two of Sheldon’s householders, Trinity Church’s pastor Phillips Brooks and prominent Episcopal layman and banker J. Pierpont Morgan. As one of his first two teachers, Peabody hired William A. Gardner, nephew of John L. Gardner and raised in the Gardner home.

Such formal institutions were important ways of organizing society, but the home itself remained the key to definition and cultivation of a recognizable and responsible upper class. Clubs and schools affected people only at a particular time in their lives or through a specialized interest, and for the most part their activities included only men. Invitation into the home was the one act that could touch all aspirants to inclusion in Society. Such an invitation was first an opportunity and a testing and later a confirmation that one belonged.

Proper behavior in the home was not something that could be taken for granted, for the rapid increase in the number of wealthy Americans meant that there were many men and women who believed they ought to be invited into upper-class homes but who were unsure how to behave once they got there. They solved the problem with a book. The fictional Silas Lapham, for instance, as soon as his family had been invited to dinner by the long-established Coreys, immediately bought an etiquette book to save himself from obvious blunders.

Lapham had innumerable real parallels, as the great popularity of such books in the 1870s and 1880s demonstrated. Of these the most widely read was Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society by one of Sheldon’s Philadelphia house owners, Clara Jessup Moore. Moore first published the book under a pseudonym in 1878, and it soon went through 20 editions. Having inherited some $5 million on her husband’s death in the same year, Moore had a solid place among the wealthy in Philadelphia, but her father had suffered business failure when she was young and wealth had come only in the 1850s, as a result of a partnership between her father and her husband in paper manufacturing. Moore was perfectly aware of at least a part of her market, giving the name “Madame Newrich” to one of the recipients of instruction in her book. Moore assured her readers, however, that they need worry about no inherent inferiority in manners. No one had natural or inborn manners, which were “only acquired by education and observation, followed up by habitual practice at home and in society.” So there was no reason for men or women to fear betraying their origins, as long as they applied themselves to learn the intricate and rigid code Moore described.

Fig. 9. Clara Jessup Moore house, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As in the other efforts to define a stable upper class, etiquette too required fixed order. Moore recognized that mobility and economic growth made a fixed code of manners difficult to achieve, but American heterogeneity made such a code all the more necessary because friction and conflict could be avoided only as a result of “our obedience to the laws of that etiquette which governs the whole machinery, and keeps every cog and wheel in place, and at its own work.” People had to know what to expect of each other and only agreed-upon manners could prevent serious misunderstandings or “rudenesses suspected where none are intended.” Writing after the upheavals of the Civil War and of the depression of the 1870s, Moore hoped that America had settled into a pattern that would make possible fixed manners. Otherwise, if “the first principles of social intercourse” are “violated at the foundations, the entire structure of society becomes insecure.”

Quite apart from such goals of national stability, Moore also knew that people going through her own earlier experiences would feel more comfortable in the homes of the Claghorns and Gibsons and the like if they knew just what to do. She would tell them, in chapter after chapter of specific instruction. Suppose a reader found him- or herself in one of the dining rooms Sheldon pictured, exactly the kind of situation Silas Lapham worried about:

As soon as seated, remove your gloves, place your table-napkin partly opened across your lap, your gloves under it, and your roll on the left side of your plate. If raw oysters are already served, you at once begin to eat; to wait for others to commence is old-fashioned. Take soup from the side of the spoon, and avoid making any sound in drawing it up or swallowing it. Vegetables are eaten with a fork. Asparagus can be taken up with the fingers, if so preferred. Olives and artichokes are always so eaten.

To master such rules and go on to host such social events was no trivial accomplishment, Moore and other etiquette authorities argued. The person who could “make her parlor a rallying-point for nice people is doing a great public service,” according to M. E. W. Sherwood, author of Manners and Social Usages. She and Moore agreed that a society leader was a power for good, by refining and elevating standards of behavior, checking the pretensions of the vulgar and the immoral, and raising to influence those with genuine merit in a country where all sorts of people were mixed together. The home in this way was the key to decency, honesty and stability in society.

Moreover, the home gave women in particular an influence otherwise difficult to exercise. Women of wealth recognized that the lack of household work gave them no practical importance in the home. As adults in the 1880s, most such women had not enjoyed a substantial formal education and they did not expect important roles in the public institutions of their lives, such as the church. They faced a dilemma well described by a fictional young woman in a popular novel of the decade, Ruth Cheever in Edgar Fawcett’s A Gentleman of Leisure. As Cheever explained to the novel’s hero, “A woman gets no satisfaction, in this age, out of the most legitimate discontentments. She has a choice between two extremes, and that is all. She must either consign herself to frivolities, or else be satirized as a prig, a person ‘with views.’ And in either case she is satirized, 1 find, all the same.” Moore and Sherwood offered women a way out. They could transform those social activities that others might label frivolous and infuse them with moral purpose. “What do women want with votes,” Moore asked, “when they hold the sceptre of influence?” This influence, she made clear, was not just that traditional influence of moral motherhood, for it did require rigorous formal education, but it was a use of domestic position well beyond the benefit of one’s own family to achieve goals that men alone could not. By setting a standard in society and organizing it so as to make social distinction both clear and desirable, women could see to it that members of the American upper class “really fulfill certain important functions, that they really offer a higher standard of elegance and culture, that they really encourage an improvement in manners, and stimulate the growth and spread of refined taste.”

The ordinary dinner party or tea naturally offered opportunities for working toward Moore’s ends, but what most caught the public’s eye was the much more conspicuous effort to organize one unified upper class, as seen in the great balls of the 1880s. Probably the single most important event of this sort took place not in one of the homes that Sheldon described, but in that of Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, son and daughter-in-law of Sheldon’s William H. Vanderbilt. The younger Mrs. Vanderbilt’s ball to open her new Fifth Avenue home on March 26, 1883, marked the at least limited acceptance of the newer aristocracy by the older, symbolized by Mrs. William Astor’s attendance. The desire of Mrs. Astor’s daughter Caroline to be invited to the ball had supposedly been the principal reason for the mother’s social acceptance of the younger Mrs. Vanderbilt. The amalgamation of older and newer aristocracy would soon be made more vivid by Caroline’s marriage to another ball guest, Orme Wilson, son of the Richard T. Wilsons who had been making such a social splash in New York since their arrival from Georgia after the Civil War.

A more substantive indication that old differences could be overcome in the interest of upper-class unity was the presence at the same ball of two other Sheldon house owners, Mrs. Hamilton Fish and Mrs. William H. Vanderbilt. To her own generation, Julia Kean Fish, even more than Mrs. Astor, represented the most rigorous exclusiveness of the old Knickerbocker elite. Edith Wharton and M. E. W. Sherwood, for instance, both singled her out as an example of the high moral tone and seriousness of the old-school social leader. Her ability to live up to expectations had been amply demonstrated when she set the social standard for the Grant administration, in which her husband was Secretary of State. Maria Louisa Kissam, on the other hand, had been socially unacceptable even to the self-made Cornelius Vanderbilt when his son married her at the age of 19. The senior Vanderbilt virtually exiled William H. and Maria to a farm on Staten Island, and Mrs. Vanderbilt never felt comfortable with the position in New York society to which her wealth and home entitled her. That she and Mrs. Fish could converse readily at her daughter-in-law’s ball indicated a coming together of the urban upper class such as the new boarding schools, for instance, were trying to achieve or that Boston minister Phillips Brooks was working for in his church.

The junior Mrs. Vanderbilt’s guest list included a variety of representatives of the older and newer upper classes. Among other Sheldon home owners were former President and Mrs. Grant, friends of both the Fishes and the senior Vanderbilts, and J. Coleman and Charlotte Drayton, she the daughter of Mrs. Astor. Bradley and Cornelia Martin no doubt surveyed the ball for usable ideas in their own beginning social campaigns. Others participating in the lavishly costumed quadrilles or observing included Mr. and Mrs. Robert Goelet, who enjoyed one of New York’s older real-estate fortunes, and Mr. and Mrs. John T. Johnston. Frederic W. Stevens, on the board of a half-dozen banks and insurance companies and another half-dozen museums and libraries, was present with his wife. From out of town came Mr. and Mrs. George P. Wetmore, owners of a Newport “Artistic House,” but thoroughly at home in New York social and cultural activity.

The Vanderbilt ball, which according to the New York Tribune “equalled, if it did not excell, any similar entertainment ever given in this city,” marked the beginning of a decade of flamboyant entertainment. Grand costume balls became a standard method either of claiming or of consolidating social position and the most elaborate were noted as the pinnacle of social activity for decades before and after in their respective cities. Such, for instance, was the “Mikado Ball,” hosted in 1886 in Chicago by another of Sheldon’s home owners, Marshall Field (nos. 55 & 56). Some 500 guests attended in oriental costume and the reputed $75,000 expense helped make the Field ball a landmark event in late nineteenth-century Chicago.

The great balls, with their published guest lists, together with the appearance of the Social Register late in the 1880s, might be thought to have achieved the goal of a fixed, defined Society. In New York at least, such methods of selection still produced too large a group, so further refinement seemed necessary, and in 1888 society organizer Ward McAllister first used the term “the Four Hundred” to describe the core group, the most elect. The term supposedly derived from the number of guests who could be entertained comfortably in the ballroom of Mrs. William Astor, foremost of the three principal society hostesses in New York. The other two, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, were daughters-in-law of Sheldon householders.

Not until 1892, when McAllister agreed to an interview with the New York Times, did the public get a reliable list of the Four Hundred by name, and then it included fewer than 300 individuals. The list showed that the core of Society was much as the interested public had come to think, a group of men and women who devoted their lives primarily to entertainment of themselves and each other. Few of the men had an active occupation, but had lived on family income for most of their lives, and most had used their leisure in club life, yachting and the like rather than in museum trusteeships or some other form of public service. Among Sheldon’s house owners, McAllister’s list did include former Rhode Island Governor George P. Wetmore and his wife, long mainstays of New York society. Egerton Winthrop was more representative. Mr. and Mrs. Robert Goelet, owners of one of the most magnificent steam yachts afloat, were included, as were those constant party givers, Bradley and Cornelia Martin. The Richard T. Wilsons were by now well established at the center of New York society through their son’s and daughters’ marriages into the Astor, Goelet and Vanderbilt families. By the end of the 1880s, then, Society leaders had accomplished what they set out to do: make clear the composition of the accepted American upper class.

THE EFFORT TO ACHIEVE LASTING ORDER IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

The Four Hundred made up one small but well-publicized segment of wealthy America. The ever more lavish entertainments sponsored by Vanderbilt and Fish heirs and others increasingly captured public attention by the end of the 1880s and gave a false sense of frivolity to upper-class activity. In one respect, however, the Four Hundred did show a pervasive current in upper-class concern—the determination to create a lasting order, to impose unity where there had been fragmentation. The decade of the 1880s saw the ripening of a generation of wealthy men and women who seized the opportunity to gain firm control over the American economy in order to make permanent what they saw as the necessary conditions for continued prosperity and social stability and, based on those two factors, the flourishing of American culture.

At the opening of the decade, such men and women looked back on a period marked by upheaval, disorder and tension in many areas of life. Political life had been tarred by corruption and scandal in the Grant administration, although the President himself escaped with his reputation for personal honesty intact. The panic of 1873 and subsequent depression had revealed instability in economic expansion. A by-product of the depression had been bitter conflict between workers and employers, most vividly seen in the great railway strikes of 1877. Continued dissent over race relations and the federal government’s responsibility for civil order in the South remained a source of friction through much of the decade. Corporations seemed plagued by guerrilla warfare waged against each other, as in the railroad skirmishes launched by the Erie Railroad, or by internal weakness that brought bankruptcy after the 1873 panic. In all of these areas and others, those men who survived the 1870s with wealth and power intact saw patterns of instability and disorder that they were determined to correct. They would impose their control in crucial areas and launch a period of calm which would not only profit themselves but make possible widespread prosperity and cultural advance. For a time they succeeded, and the 1880s proved to be the last period in which men of wealth enjoyed not only such relatively unchallenged power in America but also so much public acclaim. In most of these achievements, Sheldon’s householders were at the forefront.

For many of Sheldon’s owners, men who were in the midst of creating their own fortunes, business success was, of course, the focus of their lives and their activities give little sign of larger social concerns. For some, such as silk manufacturer Knight D. Cheney, woolen maker Swits Condé, or another wool manufacturer, David L. Einstein, concentration was on rescuing and strengthening a family business. Each of these men found himself fully busy in the 1880s saving and expanding a business, founded by father or uncles, that had slipped in the depression of the 1870s and now needed a newer, firmer hand. Sheldon’s group also included several who had started their own business, devoted their lives to them, and saw the prosperity of the 1880s essentially as a chance for personal gain. Irish immigrant George Kemp, who had arrived in New York in 1834 at the age of eight and gradually built up a major drug- and perfume-manufacturing and wholesaling firm, and metals broker William I. Russell, who had started with one clerk and a tiny office in 1871, concentrated on making the most of the expanding economy. For Russell, increased prosperity meant opportunities to get rid of small customers and concentrate on large ones. The resulting satisfaction and continued focus on one’s own business, with recognition simply among one’s business associates and friends, was characteristic of many of Sheldon’s owners.

While men like Kemp and Russell remained inconspicuous, strict devotion to one’s own business became part of Marshall Field’s increasing reputation. If men of wealth had any obligation to society, Field saw that responsibility as pure and simple efficiency in business. Find products that people needed and sell them at a uniform, moderate price; the man who could do that well had fulfilled his most important social role, in Field’s view. Starting in retail trade in Chicago in the mid-1850s, Field had already gone through several partners by the mid-1880s and was well known for taking no active part in Chicago politics and giving little attention to any charitable activities. Field was becoming a recognized model for the strict, no-frills businessman who never borrowed or speculated, who kept all transactions on a cash basis, who held all his associates to a strict meeting of obligations, and who spared no energy from the affairs of his own firm. In this light Field embodied the virtues that men of wealth respected, but he was an inadequate model for an upper class that welcomed wider responsibilities.

Similar to Field in some respects, seeing his business itself as his main form of public service for a time, was John Taylor Johnston. Johnston entered railroading by means of the practice of law and helped consolidate several New Jersey lines into the Central Railroad of New Jersey, of which he became president in 1848. Like Field, Johnston saw economical provision of an essential service as his main contribution to society, but he expanded that idea somewhat to a hope that his railroad could be a particularly safe and attractive example. Accordingly, Johnston used his control to eliminate grade crossings wherever possible, to erect well-designed stations and to surround his stations with landscaped parks. Though focusing clearly on the railroad business, Johnston accepted responsibilities other than efficient service.

If running one’s own store or railroad well was the focus for some of Sheldon’s owners, others were gaining a reputation for attempts to dominate a whole segment of the economy. To such men, the lesson of the 1870s had been that economic instability resulted from fragmented industries in which too many firms lacked the resources to survive temporary setbacks. The solution was consolidation, with major firms buying out and absorbing competitors while at the same time gaining control over the suppliers and distributors of their product. For Americans at the time the greatest and most controversial example of this effort to impose order and stability was the Standard Oil Company and, except for its principal founder John D. Rockefeller, no person had played so large a part in Standard Oil’s success as one of Sheldon’s house owners, Henry M. Flagler.

Flagler, in Bellevue, Ohio, had dealt with Rockefeller in Cleveland as early as 1850, when both were buying and selling grain. After an unsuccessful venture in salt in Michigan, Flagler moved to Cleveland and, in 1867, entered into a partnership with Rockefeller and others in oil refining. At the time, the petroleum industry was made up of innumerable small, independent drillers, refiners, tank-car companies, retailers and the like. Flagler and Rockefeller set out to bring order to what they saw as chaos. They concluded that they could enlarge the market and lower the price of petroleum products, ensure stability of supply and make fortunes for themselves if they eliminated the waste and duplication of competition, so for some 15 years they persistently extended their control and discipline over the industry until, by the time they formed the final Standard Oil Trust in 1882, they controlled at least 90 percent of American refining.

Flagler’s work in Standard Oil was probably the best example among Sheldon’s group of the characteristic determination to impose order and set a pattern expected to last, but other house owners were equally active in other areas of the economy, if not as successful as Flagler. In meat packing, Herman 0. Armour worked with several brothers in Armour and Company to consolidate an activity earlier characterized by many small packers. Another food-processing field, sugar refining, experienced the very successful amalgamating efforts of the American Sugar Refining Company, in which the Havemeyer family, represented in Sheldon’s collection by William F. Havemeyer, played a significant role. Railroading was one of the country’s most active fields of consolidation and two of the most well-publicized entrepreneurs of the 1880s, Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific and William H. Vanderbilt of the New York Central system, were among Sheldon’s owners.

While some consolidators were able to rely largely on their own resources, banking houses were heavily involved in much of what went on. If the achievement of order and stability through the elimination of competition and the strengthening of dominant firms was a hallmark of the 1880s, then already playing a leading role was another Sheldon figure, investment broker J. Pierpont Morgan. From the late 1860s on, Morgan had built a career on the identification of his own fortunes with the elimination of weak or erratic firms in major industries, especially railroading. Morgan sought to put out of business those he saw as working only for short-term gains and to put industrial activity into the hands of those who would ride out economic fluctuation. In 1879 Morgan helped William H. Vanderbilt maintain the value of New York Central stock by placing a large block of shares directly with English investors, an act that particularly solidified his reputation as a man of both great ability and great concern for stable control.

If the foremost public responsibility of the man of wealth was capable management of his own firm, then charitable giving was expected to follow soon after. Many of the rich certainly accepted the obligation, thinking, with John T. Johnston, that “I consider it just as much my duty to give to benevolent institutions as to pay my butcher’s bill.” Often the giving was to local charities and, as was said of Boston merchant John C. Phillips, done in a “quiet and unostentatious manner.”

Charitable donations, however, were also one of the few areas in which wealthy women could be active in public ways without being unladylike. Among Sheldon’s home owners, several women gained reputations for philanthropy as their expression of upper-class involvement for social good. Best known in the 1880s was probably Cornelia M. Stewart, widow of department-store millionaire Alexander T. Stewart. The Stewarts had no children and Mrs. Stewart received what she thought of as an overwhelming number of requests for charity when her husband died. While denying most requests, Mrs. Stewart made major gifts to a residence for working women and to a school for boys, and a particularly impressive donation to construct a cathedral in Garden City on Long Island.

Another widow who carried on her husband’s giving, but more fully and with more continuing personal interest, was Mary McCrea Stuart, whose husband Robert had made his fortune first in candy manufacture and then in sugar refining. When Robert Stuart died in 1882 he left his wife about $5 million, much of which for the rest of the decade she distributed in gifts. Princeton was her main interest, but she also made substantial donations to the New-York Historical Society, to boards for foreign and domestic missions and to establish residences for newsboys and orphans, frequently with the stipulation that she receive no public recognition. When Mrs. Stuart herself died at the end of 1891, newspaper attention was as substantial and appreciative as for any other woman in Sheldon’s group.

A third woman for whom charitable work was important had done much to earn the family fortune herself. Anna Behr, born in Bavaria in 1815, arrived in the United States in 1837 and soon afterward married Jacob Uhl, with whom she published the New York Staats-Zeitung, soon the major American German-language daily. Jacob Uhl died in 1852 and his widow carried on the paper by herself, hiring Oswald Ottendorfer to help, and marrying him in 1859. The continued growth of the German community in America increased the newspaper’s prosperity and Anna Ottendorfer turned more toward philanthropic activity. She concentrated on the welfare of German-Americans and contributed generously to hospitals, schools and homes for the elderly that served that group—activity for which, in 1883, shortly before her death, she received a medal from Empress Augusta of Germany.

Among philanthropic businessmen, the best-known of Sheldon’s owners was surely George W. Childs, publisher of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Born in Baltimore in 1829, his father never acknowledging his birth nor marrying his mother, Childs was an epitome of the self-made man. He spent his teens in naval service and as a store clerk, but soon opened his own bookstore, then began to publish and built a substantial reputation as a book publisher. Childs bought the Ledger in 1864 and made it the most profitable paper in Philadelphia. Almost as soon as he was making a large income, Childs began to build lavishly and to donate money to worthy causes. His most conspicuous gifts honored literature, for he gave a stained-glass window to Westminster Abbey to honor William Cowper and George Herbert, raised funds to mark the grave of Leigh Hunt, built another monument for the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, and subscribed generously to a memorial window for Thomas Moore.

In Philadelphia he created a printer’s cemetery and endowed a maintenance fund, and engaged in such intermittent public charities as paying admission fees for some 2000 deaf and dumb or homeless children to the Centennial Exhibition. Far from “quiet and unostentatious,” Childs in the 1880s was widely admired as the model employer and generous citizen, “the living illustration of that noble characteristic so rare among men of influence—the accumulation of riches, not for himself alone, but to make others happy during and after his life.” Indicating a similar uneasiness about the accumulation and use of wealth, observers also commonly remarked that Childs had made his fortune in a way that injured no other person, seemingly an unusual characteristic.

Childs’s lavish giving had certain common strands, honoring Anglo-American literature and aiding the poor and printing workers locally, but it lacked the system and order increasingly thought essential in charity. Just as business had to be consolidated and made efficient, benevolence too required control and discipline if it was to have maximum effect. This antipathy to individual, idiosyncratic giving and to the prevalent form of poor-relief that simply gave money to the poor, was best expressed in the Charity Organization movement, a self-styled scientific approach to charity that took form simultaneously in several Eastern cities in the 1870s and developed into the National Conference on Charities and Corrections by the end of that decade. The coordination of all charity by one local organization, the resulting elimination of waste, the differentiation between the “worthy” and the “unworthy” poor, and the substitution of advice and good management for money charity were central characteristics of the movement, with clear parallels to trust building in the corporate area. What the Charity Organization movement also made possible, as corporations sometimes did not, was a place for “men of leisure with the tradition of public service,” in the words of one early leader.

No one better represented the upper class’s turn to organized charity than one of Sheldon’s Boston householders, Robert Treat Paine, Jr. Paine’s direct ancestors included a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a governor of Connecticut. After practicing law in Boston for about ten years, Paine was able to retire in 1870, at the age of 35, to devote his time to charitable work. By that time Paine had combined inherited wealth, his wife’s property and his own investment skills to create a reliable and substantial income. As Paine described the shift in his interests, “the conviction was forced upon my mind that we only have this life in this world once, and that I was not willing to devote it to business when noble uses of it could be found to make the world a bit happier around me.”

In the early 1870s, Paine was particularly involved with the community work of Trinity Church and its pastor, his friend Phillips Brooks. When the church was destroyed by fire in 1872, Paine played a major role in raising funds for the new church and rectory, designed by H. H. Richardson. With his experience both in church-related benevolent work and in large-scale money raising, Paine came to see a need for efficient, coordinated charity and was one of the founders of the Associated Charities of Boston in 1878, becoming its first president, and from that base gaining a national reputation as an authority on scientific charity and a leader in the national Charity Organization movement. Paine hoped to see much charity made unnecessary as low-income workers were helped to live economically, save money and become property owners. Toward this end he organized the Wells Memorial Institute, a club for working men and women that included an industrial-trades school, a cooperative savings bank and a loan association for home building. He helped finance the construction of model tenements and helped establish the People’s Institute, a meeting place frequently open to labor-union speakers.

In the mid-1880s, Paine, apparently deciding that direct private involvement was insufficient, entered politics and secured election to the Massachusetts legislature, where he chaired the committee on charitable institutions. In 1884 he ran for Congress as a Democrat but was unsuccessful, perhaps in part because of what others saw as his thoroughly patrician manner. In any case, Paine’s Charity Organization work continued and he was able to help create in Boston a comprehensive network of institutions designed to help workers make intelligent use of their talents and resources, so as to minimize simple poor-relief. He did not expect any significant alteration of social structure but he did think that diligent workers deserved fair opportunities and he was particularly concerned that his own class open up those opportunities. As Paine put it, “the rich, the happy, the cultured, are put under a conscious moral servitude to every form of distress,” a religious obligation that he learned in part from Brooks and then implemented with business efficiency in his Charity Organization work.

Elected public service, a brief interlude for Paine, was not something that many of Sheldon’s owners tried, but the exceptions were conspicuous. Since most of the men had quite successful business careers, friends often thought of them for public office, but in most cases the house owners declined. Like Charles Stewart Smith, a New York dry-goods merchant offered the Republican nomination for mayor and several times spoken of for governor, they did not want the problems of an electoral campaign or the constant and varied demands of office. On the other hand, such men often had a definite sense of what was needed in public life. Smith was active in police-reform work in New York, served several years as president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce and frequently wrote articles on political and social issues for the North American Review. He expected others to implement his ideas.

Among those of Sheldon’s owners who held elected office, several were just embarking in the early 1880s on what would prove to be successful careers. In Massachusetts, Oliver Ames may have had a sense of general public responsibility but more particularly he was out to rehabilitate his family’s reputation. His father, Oakes Ames, had been among the congressmen most tainted by corruption in construction contracts for the first transcontinental railroad. Oliver first built up the neglected family farm-implement and shovel business; after putting the business on solid ground Ames secured election as a Republican to the Massachusetts Senate in 1880 and in 1882 began four terms as lieutenant governor. From that post Ames would go on to the governorship, holding office for three terms: in 1887, 1888 and 1889.

In Rhode Island, George Peabody Wetmore followed a similar pattern in the 1880s, though without a parental stigma to erase. Wetmore, who inherited several million dollars from his merchant father, was a member of both the New York and Rhode Island bars but never practiced. He married in 1869 and spent much of his time traveling in Europe. He entered Republican politics in 1880, when he served as a Presidential elector, a post he held again in 1884. In his substantial Newport home (nos. 192 & 193) he regularly entertained political leaders, including President Chester Arthur in 1882. In 1885 the party ran Wetmore for the governorship, a race he won and then won again for a second term. His third-term bid failed and he remained out of office for a time, but he would go on to the United States Senate, where he served from 1895 until 1913. In and out of office, Wetmore had a continuing interest in architecture, which showed not only in his alterations of the family home, but also in his service as an important member of commissions with responsibility for building the Rhode Island statehouse and the Metropolitan Opera House.

As Ames and Wetmore were beginning their elective careers, two other owners of “Artistic Houses” were enjoying the respectful afterglow of distinguished political service, each in “the private life of a gentleman of ample means and cultivated tastes.” Near neighbors in their New York City homes, Samuel J. Tilden and Hamilton Fish had risen through the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Tilden had reached the New York governorship in 1874 on his record of cleaning up the political corruption associated with William “Boss” Tweed and was his party’s candidate for President in 1876. Fish too had been governor of New York, a generation before Tilden, and then senator in the 1850s. Ulysses S. Grant brought Fish out of retirement to serve as his Secretary of State from 1869 through the end of Grant’s term in 1877. In their political careers both Tilden and Fish had come to be seen as almost the epitome in their respective parties of the values of moderation, honest efficiency and businesslike organization. Particularly in the later stages of their political careers, each had worked to minimize the disruptions associated with Reconstruction to create the political conditions they saw as necessary for stable economic growth.

Fig. 10. Samuel J. Tilden house, New York, New York.

Both Tilden and Fish had a role in another significant aspect of public service by the wealthy, the creation or strengthening of cultural institutions. Tilden, virtually a recluse in his later years, acted through his will, leaving several millions to found a free library in New York. Fish served at different times as a trustee of the Astor Library (with which the Tilden funds later would be combined), chairman of the trustees of Columbia University and president of the New-York Historical Society, in mid-century the country’s most significant art museum.

Except for success in their own business field and, by means of such success, organization of the American economy, Sheldon’s home owners were most likely to see work for major cultural institutions as their most significant form of public service. Work for museums not only enabled members of the upper class to define Society, as described earlier, but was also their best opportunity to help shape a durable order and set of standards in American society. As was appropriate for owners of “Artistic Houses,” more than a dozen of Sheldon’s subjects were active, knowledgeable collectors, while three more, Samuel Colman, Frank Furness and Louis C. Tiffany, earned their livings in the arts. Among the wealthy collectors, about ten not only gathered paintings, drawings, sculpture and the like for their own enjoyment, but devoted a significant part of their energy to creating or managing major museums, one of the most visible examples in the 1870s and 1880s of a determination by the wealthy to create symbols of a new urban culture.

The creators of this culture were conscious of living in what they themselves called a Renaissance. As Mary Elizabeth Sherwood, a cultural commentator and society hostess, wrote in 1882, the term Renaissance might seem trite but no other would do to describe “our emergence into the full floodtide of modern art improvement and beauty.” Americans, she continued, had “lived through a very dark night, to be rewarded with an exceedingly fresh and brilliant morning.” Wealth was one of the primary factors making possible this triumph. Another critic, O. B. Frothingham, summarized a widespread view when he wrote in the same year: “Wealth in America is becoming firm, settled, established. The period of convulsion is over. Wealth is the precursor of fine art [because it] gives the opportunity, provides the motive, furnishes the attraction, directs mental force, stimulates talent, brings floating genius to a useful point.” Encouragement of such an artistic flowering was not simply an end in itself, for by inculcating values of generosity and service, and standards of taste, men of wealth could moderate and direct social change. As Henry Lee Higginson, Boston banker and active philanthropist, put it at the end of the 1880s, “The gentlemen of this country” can “save ourselves and our families and our money from mobs” by leading “the new men, who are trying to become gentlemen.” This was to be accomplished by setting an example of giving and by working in behalf of cultural institutions.

All of the major cities Sheldon drew on for his houses yielded examples of men and women acting as Higginson advised, although perhaps not necessarily for his reasons. In St. Louis, Joseph Gilbert Chapman’s “artistic treasures” were “known throughout the West,” according to Sheldon (no. 98), and Chapman’s interest made him a prominent manager of the St. Louis Museum and School of Fine Arts in the 1880s. In Chicago, Sheldon found Samuel M. Nickerson, whose art collection (nos. 103 & 104) was perhaps “the largest in the West,” and who was active in reestablishing the Academy of Design after the Great Fire of 1871 and then in creating The Art Institute of Chicago in 1882, a museum to which he later donated much of his collection. In Philadelphia, James L. Claghorn and Henry C. Gibson were among the most influential leaders of the old and prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, of which Claghorn was President from 1872 until his death in 1884. The two men were active private collectors, Claghorn of prints (no. 9) and Gibson of paintings (nos. 46–49), made extended collecting trips in Europe, and collaborated closely on construction of the Academy’s new museum building in the mid- 1870s, a project that marked one of the first major commissions of another of Sheldon’s home owners, architect Frank Furness.

In New York, several of Sheldon’s subjects worked together to create one of the major new museums of the postwar period, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When fund-raising began in the early 1870s, John Taylor Johnston and A. T. Stewart were among the biggest donors, with Henry G. Marquand and Robert Stuart also active in early leadership. By the early 1880s, both Stewart and Stuart were dead and their widows, owners of the houses that Sheldon described, did not keep up their husbands’ involvement in art, but Johnston was serving as the Metropolitan Museum’s first president, a position he held from 1870 until his retirement in 1889. In the 1870s, Johnston traveled in Europe and Egypt, assembling the core of the museum’s first collection owned by itself and buying for himself a group of paintings which at the time was considered to have no parallel in America. When his Central Railroad of New Jersey collapsed in the depression of 1876–77, Johnston &old his collection at New York’s first great art sale in an unsuccessful effort to strengthen the company’s finances. When Johnston yielded the museum presidency, another Sheldon house owner followed him in the office. Henry G. Marquand’s first artistic interests were in architecture; early in life he became the first honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. Later he became the Metropolitan’s most substantial nineteenth-century donor, marking his election to the museum’s presidency in 1889 with a gift of old masters still considered among the best works the museum owns. Marquand remained president until his death in 1902.

The last of Sheldon’s great artistic organizers had not yet found her mission in the 1880s. Born in 1840, Isabella Stewart had been traveling in Europe since her late teens. After her marriage to John L. Gardner in 1860, she settled in Boston. After her son died in his second year and she suffered a miscarriage in 1865, Isabella and John L. Gardner turned more and more toward art collecting, beginning in 1867 what became regular trips to Europe and the Middle East. By 1883 their travels had expanded and in that year the couple sailed to Japan and China by way of India, Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Their collection of painting and sculpture increased rapidly and, although John L. Gardner was a trustee and treasurer of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the couple began to think seriously of building a significant gallery of their own. Not until after John L. Gardner’s death in 1898, however, did Isabella Gardner embark on creating the museum that would ensure her lasting reputation.

While the biggest single group of Sheldon’s house owners saw art collecting and museum management as their vehicle for affecting public values and organizing a significant dimension of society, two were embarking on the realization of visions that would shape the development of entire states. For Henry Villard the 1880s brought both the rise and the collapse of his plans for the Pacific Northwest, while in the same years Henry M. Flagler began what would be decades of activity in Florida.

Flagler was able to do in Florida much of what Villard had projected for Oregon. In his case, the plan was almost a hobby, carried out in a more leisurely fashion than Villard’s rapidly unfolding empire building. Like Villard, however, Flagler was attracted to the possibility of creating basic institutions and economic order in a relatively undeveloped state. Flagler first visited Florida for his wife’s health, but her death in 1881 indirectly increased his interest further, for the death jarred him from his preoccupation with the Standard Oil Company, led him to devote more time to his children and opened his mind to new opportunities for social organization.

Flagler married again in 1883 and continued to visit Florida, becoming more and more impressed with its resort possibilities, if these were properly managed. Within a few more years he had begun to build substantial hotels and to consolidate small railroad companies into the Florida East Coast Railroad. In effect, Flagler started a whole new life for himself and found new springs of enthusiasm as he not only built several more hotels and gradually extended his railroad to Key West, but also began to found and donate money to schools, churches, hospitals and other local institutions. Flagler’s more gradual involvement produced more enduring results than had been true of Villard. By the time of Flagler’s death in 1913 he had done more than any other individual to shape the character of Florida’s economic growth.

While Villard and Flagler set their sights on organizing a state, still another of Sheldon’s house owners had his hand in organizing and consolidating virtually every significant dimension of national life. Although still new to power when Artistic Houses appeared, J. Pierpont Morgan was soon recognized as the most powerful individual in America, a man to whom even the federal government would turn in a financial crisis. Morgan epitomized his generation’s preoccupation with consolidation, stability and order, gaining his first reputation by pursuing just those ends in the railroad wars of the late 1860s and the 1870s. Morgan thought it essential for economic growth that railroads be in the hands of men whose wealth would enable them to weather periodic crises and that competition be minimized, so that substantial profit would keep service reliable. In the 1880s, he put his greatest energy into railroad consolidation, particularly helping the Pennsylvania Railroad and William H. Vanderbilt’s New York Central gain dominance over competing lines. While concerned primarily with railroads, Morgan was alert to other opportunities as well and provided, for example, important financial help for commercial development of Thomas Edison’s electrical innovations. Morgan’s home (nos. 155–159) was the first in New York to have electric lighting.

In addition to economic development, Morgan played an important role in other efforts to consolidate an upper-class role in American society and achieve widespread social order. As already noted, he was one of the founding trustees of Groton, and was one of the most active and influential laymen in the American Episcopal Church, seeing in it, too, a force for stability in society. By the late 1880s, Morgan and his wife were among the 50 patrons and patronesses of the principal subscription balls recognized by the Social Register and they were prominent among the box holders in the new Metropolitan Opera House. Morgan was also beginning the serious interest in art collecting that would take him to the presidency of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1904, the third of Sheldon’s house owners to hold that position. When, in 1895, President Grover Cleveland found himself forced to rely on Morgan to market government bonds in Europe, in order to save the government’s gold reserve, Morgan emerged as the very symbol of stability in America. The symbolic role would cause Morgan, and his class, great problems, but, for the moment, he and they appeared to have achieved the great end of using private wealth to impose order and control on all facets of American life.

ACCOMPLISHING AND OVERREACHING

As many of Sheldon’s house owners discovered, Morgan’s handling of the gold loan and other contemporaneous events proved to be the last time men of wealth realistically could expect such a direct measure of control over the economy. In retrospect, the owners of “Artistic Houses” often saw the 1880s, the decade in which their homes were opened photographically, as the peak of the era of stability and order they had hoped to sustain permanently. Although in some respects the achievements of the elite proved durable, others of their expectations collapsed. For the most part, the corporations and cultural institutions that Sheldon’s owners helped to create survived their founders and became lasting monuments to the energy of men and women of wealth in the 1880s, but the hope of establishing an agreed-upon Society that would set a widely accepted standard proved vain. Where collapse occurred, it was commonly because Sheldon’s owners and others overreached themselves.

At the personal level, the 1880s or early 1890s proved to be decisive years for several of the men and women celebrated in Artistic Houses. Henry Villard’s rapid rise and sudden fall, the best-known example of that pattern, was not unique. Another railroad magnate, H. Victor Newcomb, experienced much the same reversal in the decade, but in an even more melodramatic way. Newcomb had taken over direction of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad soon after his father died in 1874, making Newcomb the youngest head of a major railroad. He extended its lines and built up its major terminal facilities, then in the early 1880s turned his attention to banking in New York. He established himself quickly, owning two of the houses Sheldon described (nos. 81–85). When the first Social Register appeared, Newcomb was included, and when the Tribune compiled its list of millionaires, Newcomb was among them. According to one of his obituary notices, overwork soon caused Newcomb to break down and to retire. The inactivity or some other cause led him to experiment with chloral hydrate, a narcotic, and by 1891 he was “enslaved to the habit,” according to the New York Times. His wife soon had him committed to a sanatorium, where he remained for ten years. Upon his release he embarked upon a long court fight to regain control of his property and to separate from his wife; both efforts were successful, but Newcomb never regained his former wealth or position and died in 1911.

On a smaller scale, William I. Russell’s success and subsequent personal disaster paralleled Newcomb’s. Russell created his own fortune as a broker in metals and when his suburban New Jersey home (no. 74) appeared in Artistic Houses, the honor sealed his rise. “Oh, it was a great year!” Russell said of 1884 in his autobiography. His income of $30,000 was his largest yet and was “earned by my own efforts, out of a business that I alone had created … I wanted to succeed. I felt I had succeeded.” The 1880s remained prosperous for Russell but financial panic in 1893 and new tariff legislation undermined his firm, so that in 1895 he could meet none of his major obligations and the firm failed. Russell tried to continue operating as a small independent broker but had difficulty earning enough to support his family. Farming in New Jersey helped somewhat, but Russell had fallen into near-poverty and an obscurity broken only when his suicide note and his brief jailing for debt brought him publicity in the first few years of the twentieth century. The suicide letter to an office clerk prompted a citywide search for Russell, who acted as if nothing unusual had happened. With that crisis passed, he lived on till 1925 and received a perfunctory obituary noting his former prominence.

Villard, Newcomb and Russell were the most dramatic in their fall from the eminence ratified in Artistic Houses, but others joined them. William H. De Forest, for example, after establishing a substantial fortune in silk importing and manufacturing, followed the pattern true for many wealthy Americans and shifted his attention to real estate. Concentrating on Manhattan, De Forest augmented his wealth but finally extended himself too far with his purchase of the former Alexander Hamilton “Grange” in the upper part of the island. Newspaper accounts in 1888, describing De Forest as “a speculator by habit and inclination,” asserted that by holding out for more than double what he had recently paid for the property, De Forest forfeited solid opportunities to sell, soon found he could not meet his own debts and had to sell much of his property at a loss. Land may have been the basis for some of the greatest American fortunes, such as those of the Goelets and the Andersons, among Sheldon’s owners, but it was likely to be a trap for those determined to rise quickly.

For some among Sheldon’s house owners, the decade brought personal tragedy. Financial collapse for some has already been noted but, not surprisingly, death began to claim some owners or members of their families almost as soon as the houses were photographed. Robert Stuart had died in 1882, as Sheldon’s project was under way, and others followed soon afterward, with James L. Claghorn, Hollis Hunnewell and Mary Goddard Tiffany, Louis C. Tiffany’s first wife, all dying in 1884. The next year brought death to two of Sheldon’s most famous owners. Ulysses S. Grant died after a painful and well-publicized struggle with cancer, while William H. Vanderbilt died more simply, not long after completion of the house to which Sheldon gave such ample attention (nos. 114–124). John Charles Phillips died the same year, as did Mrs. Henry Hilton, followed in 1886 by her cousin, Cornelia M. Stewart. Two prominent representatives of the older social order, Julia Kean Fish and Samuel J. Tilden, died in 1887. In many cases, Sheldon had presented the homes of men and women with long-established wealth so it was not unexpected that the group of owners would soon diminish.

For others in Sheldon’s group, the 1880s produced significant moments of success, often leading on to productive careers. Dr. William A. Hammond, for instance, entered the decade with his Civil War court-martial sentence newly reversed and his rank of surgeon-general and brigadier general (retired) restored to him. Becoming one of the founders of the New York Post-Graduate Medical School in 1882, Hammond consolidated his reputation as one of the country’s leading neurologists, extended his list of major medical publications, and published several popular novels in the middle years of the decade. The 1880s brought him cultural and social distinction as well, with M. E. W. Sherwood, in an 1882 Harper’s Monthly article, citing his house (nos. 131–133) for “one of the first conspicuously artistic interiors in New York.” An article on medical education in another issue of Harper’s in the same year saw Hammond as the epitome of the successful professional. Watching Hammond address a medical class, the writer observed: “His private practice is enormous; he is called to testify as an expert in courts of law; and his reputation is so wide that patients come hundreds of miles to see him. [He is] a voluminous writer of books on his specialty, a famous entertainer, a frequent diner-out …. Very few men combine the successful pursuit of science and literature with the pleasures of society as Dr. Hammond does.” With their daughter married to an Italian nobleman and themselves listed in the Social Register, William and Helen Hammond could see the 1880s as remarkably generous to them.

Many others found the years surrounding their homes’ appearance in Artistic Houses particularly rewarding and productive. Continued business success was the common denominator for most. They had already built the fortunes that enabled them to own the homes Sheldon described and few of the men embarked on new career directions. Henry M. Flagler did shift his attention to Florida in the mid-1880s and George F. Baker began to assemble what would become the Southern Railway, but for the most part successful businessmen continued to expand along familiar lines.

Outside of business, the 1880s brought distinction to many of Sheldon’s owners, as when Empress Augusta of Germany awarded Anna Ottendorfer a gold medal in 1883. The decade saw Oliver Ames, James W. Wadsworth and George P. Wetmore embark upon their long political careers and gave Robert Treat Paine, Jr. his term in the state legislature, before he decided his temperament fitted him more for charity organization. Recognition came also to Phillips Brooks in 1884, when he was chosen for the founding board of Groton; to Charles Stewart Smith in 1887, when he began nine years of service as president of the New York Chamber of Commerce; and to William Goddard in 1888, when he was elected chancellor of Brown University. Varying forms of personal achievement were also enjoyed by Nicholas L. and Elizabeth Anderson, who moved into their home, designed by H. H. Richardson, in 1883; and by Dr. William T. Lusk in 1887, when he performed the second birth by caesarean section in the United States in which both mother and child survived. At the time, Lusk’s The Science and Art of Midwifery was the standard textbook in its area and had been translated into Arabic and several European languages. Success of a more indirect sort came to Richard T. and Melissa Wilson in 1884, when their eldest son, Orme, married Caroline Astor, confirming the Wilsons’ ties to the richest and most well-connected of New York families. For the Wilsons and for many other families, the 1880s were a key period, bringing recognition for past accomplishment or setting patterns of new ambition.

As the Wilsons consolidated their hard-won social position by means of marriages to a Goelet, an Astor and a Vanderbilt, Society itself was beginning to come apart. According to Clara Jessup Moore and other commentators on manners, a social elite justified itself by setting a moral and cultural standard, by behaving in ways that earned acceptance and respect from most of the thinking public. Moore’s expectation had been reasonably well met during the decade of Sheldon’s Artistic Houses, but the collapse of standards and a stable order was evident within only a few more years, as two of the house-owning families brought about a sustained public reexamination of the American upper class.

Fig. 11. J. Coleman Drayton house, New York, New York.

J. Coleman Drayton and his wife, the former Charlotte Astor, produced the first problem. When they married in 1879, Drayton brought to the match old South Carolina and Philadelphia ancestry, while Charlotte brought the usual Astor dowry of an income from about $500,000 and a Fifth Avenue house (no. 197). Charlotte also carried with her the power of her mother, “the” Mrs. Astor, who took seriously the responsibilities of a Society leader. These included a fierce moral rectitude applied to herself and her guests. In 1892, when newspapers first began to publish gossip-column items about her daughter’s apparent affair with a New York insurance executive, Hallett Borrowe, cracks in the moral standard were evident. Charlotte left for Europe with Borrowe; Drayton followed and challenged Borrowe to a duel that never occurred. Drayton returned home and sued for divorce, keeping the couple’s several children, and in 1896 Charlotte married, not Borrowe, but a Scot named George Haig. Through all of what became known as “the most conspicuous society scandal of the generation,” Mrs. Astor remained loyal to her daughter. Charlotte was welcome beside her mother in a receiving line even while the divorce suit was being fought. The loyalty was impressive but American readers could also conclude that Society had no claim to moral leadership.

J. Coleman and Charlotte Drayton gave a blow to Society by pursuing individual emotional satisfaction, but Bradley and Cornelia Martin’s cataclysmic error was the result of careful planning. The Martins were model social climbers, noted for practicing their skills even in their youth. Landmarks in their rise included the leasing of a large Scottish estate for hunting, beginning in 1881, and the marriage of their daughter Cornelia to the Earl of Craven in 1893. So far, the Martins’ social activity had been noted largely for self-indulgence and perhaps that image bothered them. At any rate, in 1897, after several years of deep economic depression in the United States, the Martins decided to use their position to do some good for others. According to Bradley’s brother Frederick, who tells, the story in one of his autobiographical volumes, the idea occurred at breakfast one morning when Bradley said, “I think it would be a good thing if we got up something; there seems to be a great deal of depression in trade.” Cornelia objected to his suggestion for a concert, arguing that the money would just go to foreign musicians. Instead she urged, “Let us give a costume ball at so short notice that our guests won’t have time to get their dresses from Paris. That will give an impetus to trade that nothing else will.” Frederick later concluded she had been perfectly correct in her expectations, for “many New York shops sold out brocades and silks which had been lying in their stockrooms for years.”

Most observers did not draw the conclusion that Frederick Martin did. The ball, given in February 1897, excited the most vigorous criticism of any social event in the decade. Sermons denounced it, editorials criticized it, cartoons caricatured it—all, ironically, for its supposed insensitivity to the needs of the poor. That the rich could indulge themselves so ostentatiously while others starved had become unacceptable to many vocal Americans. Feeling themselves thoroughly misunderstood, the Martins soon found the criticism too overwhelming and left the country, living most of the rest of their lives in England.

Sheldon’s house owners, struggling to define and maintain an upper-class order in American society, did much to undermine their goal. William H. Vanderbilt’s earlier remark about his railroad’s obligations to society—“the public be damned”—had caused a sensation at the time but had been an isolated example. In the 1890s, the Drayton divorce and the Bradley Martin ball produced a more lasting impression of the rich as merely self-indulgent. At the same time, J. Pierpont Morgan’s handling of the government’s gold borrowing became a symbol of great power unaccountable to the public. More and more the corporate empires once seen as marks of American greatness— Flagler’s Standard Oil, Armour and Company, the Havemeyer family’s sugar-refining company, the Clark Thread Company, Vanderbilt’s New York Central, George F. Baker’s First National Bank—were increasingly identified as irresponsible, rapacious trusts instead. To combat such perceived selfishness and greed, Samuel J. Tilden’s great creation, the stable and orderly Democratic party, was first thrown into disarray and then taken over by outsiders. From a position of apparently solid power in the 1880s, the American upper class found itself in the 1890s undermined from within and attacked on several fronts. Although the dominant public image of men and women of wealth was influenced for generations primarily by the excesses of a few in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the years of the upper class’s greatest influence and achievement left enduring monuments in the form of major corporations, eminent schools, great museums and other cultural institutions, and in many cases the family houses themselves.

A SPECIAL MOMENT IN AMERICAN ART

Occasionally in our study of the past we will find a quotation that seems so apropos, one that seems so timely, catches a particular viewpoint of its day, reveals assumptions and attitudes, and itemizes points that we would like to underscore. Such an observation, pertaining to the state of culture and art on the Eastern seaboard of the United States in the early 1880s, was written by Earl Shinn under the pseudonym of Edward Strahan and appeared in the introduction to his Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, a multivolume study of the W. H. Vanderbilt house and its treasures, published in 1883–84. Many twentieth-century historians and art historians have also appreciated and cited this passage:

In these volumes we are permitted to make a revelation of a private home which, better than any other possible selection, may 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…. The country, at this moment, is just beginning to be astonishing. 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 re-invent everything, and especially the house.

This quote reflected Sheldon’s thinking, and its appearance coincided with the publication of Artistic Houses. It contains a number of statements, assumptions and implications that deserve closer examination to understand better the artistic climate of the time when Artistic Houses appeared. It can also serve as a springboard to comment on several general points before focusing on Sheldon’s publication. These are: The years of the early 1880s were seen as a special moment in the evolution of American art and taste; this positive self-assessment was an Eastern phenomenon inspired by New York; many thought the best fruits of the heightened taste and the best efforts of contemporary American designers were to be seen in interior decoration; and, finally, the commentators of the period thought recent achievements were not temporary but permanent because they had been realized at the core of the nation—in its homes.

Shinn was referring to an important stage in American art when he observed that the country “is just beginning to be astonishing.” One of the country’s leading art authorities was stating, with an intriguing mixture of confidence and wonder, that those long-awaited signs of cultural and artistic maturity were now too numerous and reassuring to deny. This must have been a heady time for him and others, like Sheldon, who agreed with his conclusion. American art was growing up, leaving an adolescent stage and preparing to compete with the artists of the old nations of Europe. Generations of American intellectuals, poets and artists never doubted that the country would one day fulfill its artistic promise despite the persistence of European doubts, such as Prime Minister William E. Gladstone’s contention that where the industrial spirit is strong beauty will suffer. For Shinn, the sober Vanderbilt house and its dazzling though newly acquired contents proved that, in New York at least, the rough ways had been made smooth. And the other mansions on Fifth Avenue, many too restrained by restrictive lots to convey adequately the enormous wealth behind them, represented a patronage that mocked the support art once received from fifteenth-century Italian princes.

A number of art commentators who wrote for metropolitan newspapers and the monthly journals of the East Coast also thought the country was coming of age artistically. Although they wrote about such indicators enthusiastically, they were unable or were not inclined to explain why the transformation was taking place. They mentioned reasons quickly—the reunification of the nation after the Civil War, an expanding economy and instant private fortunes, the cultural influence of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, better education (especially for women), more leisure time, the popularity of foreign travel—but rarely tried to explain the causes carefully. On the other hand, some evidence of the growing importance of art could be cited easily. In the late 1870s and early 1880s new art journals, such as the Art Review and The Art Amateur (1878), appeared, articles on art and architecture were published in increasing numbers, such art organizations as the New York Etching Club (1878) and the Architectural League of New York (1881) were created, city art museums were strengthened or established, and annual salons received closer scrutiny. Shinn and Sheldon sensed the moment and documented it with impressive publications. In addition to his catalogue of the Vanderbilt collections and careful description of the interiors of the mansion, Shinn completed The Art Treasures of America (three volumes) in 1882, an attempt to describe and inventory the major private collections of the country. For Artistic Houses Sheldon probably visited the interiors of most of these 97 buildings in order to describe their appearance.

Shinn concluded that the country was just beginning to be astonishing because of what he had seen in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. When he wrote of the nation beginning “to have a taste of its own,” he was not thinking of Cheyenne or Sacramento. If the United States was on the threshold of artistic maturity, most of the country was not aware of it, though cities and states outside of the Eastern corridor would soon be. The American Architect and Building News (August 9, 1884) acknowledged that “in these days of rapid transportation, and almost electric speed of ideas the fashions change almost simultaneously everywhere, so that the latest work in Chicago is not appreciably less advanced than the latest work in the East ….” However, this observation, in retrospect, is more accurate when applied to the end of the 1880s than to the beginning of that decade. Shinn and Sheldon were functioning in 1883–84 in a greenhouse art world dominated by the wealthy and pedigreed of New York City. Approximately 60 percent of the 93 private residences included in Artistic Houses were located in New York or its metropolitan area. Both men generalized about national achievements and prospects from evidence that was geographically and socially narrow. But filled with goodwill and confidence, they probably assumed that what was happening on Fifth Avenue could be repeated elsewhere and that people elsewhere would want to repeat it. It was Shinn’s expansive, upbeat mood that inspired him to characterize the Vanderbilt house, built for approximately $1,759,000 and constructed by a regular staff of 600 laborers and 60 European sculptors and decorators, as “a typical American residence.” Paradoxically, Shinn was expansive and parochial, assuming with no evil intent that as New York goes so goes the nation. Ironically, attempts to outdo the Europeans at their own game, so visible in the Vanderbilt interiors and also in many published by Sheldon, were not as astonishing ultimately as the changes taking place across much of the country in the freestanding suburban houses of the upper middle class.

When Shinn claimed the United States was reinventing “everything, and especially the house,” he was not referring to spatial or technological but to decorative changes in recent domestic architecture. It was the decorative features of the rooms—the inlaid paneling, painted friezes, rosewood tables, porcelain vases, silver tea sets, brocaded walls, stained-glass windows and the paintings—that he concentrated on in his four volumes on the Vanderbilt house. This was understandable because the decorative-arts movement had captured New York interiors in the early 1880s. Writing in Harper’s Monthly in October 1882, M. E. W. Sherwood noted, “There are, perhaps, no two words more frequently on the lips of the present generation than these two: ‘Internal Decoration.’” “Nothing,” she claimed, “can be more beautiful, more orderly, more harmonious, than a modern New York house which has blossomed out in this fine summer of perfected art.” M. G. Van Rensselaer (Lippincott’s Magazine, February 1880) thought the recent advances in the expression of beauty had been most successful “along the line of decorative art ….” The demand for artistic houses had become so heavy, reported Sherwood, that many promising artists were giving up their canvases to work on plaster ceilings. The best example of such an artist was Tiffany, whose firm, Louis C. Tiffany and Company, Associated Artists, was swamped with commissions during its four-year existence (1879–83). Sheldon was pleased to see such artists as Tiffany, La Farge, Lathrop, Low and Saint-Gaudens accepting commissions to work on interiors, and predicted that “the time must come when our best artists generally will contribute the creations of their genius to the adornment of American homes in other shapes than in that of the oil-painting in a gilt frame.” Artistic Houses was published during the heyday of the decorator. In the opinion of many contemporary authorities, the decorative arts, not painting or sculpture, were America’s strongest suit.

Finally, Shinn makes the point in his quote that the private home is the best example by which to judge the “new impulse” in the country. Why the private house rather than the country’s churches, municipal buildings or libraries? One answer would be that there were more houses than other types of architecture, providing judges with a surer sample. Furthermore, the house was an American phenomenon reflecting the structures of American society; no European nation rivaled the United States in these years in the percentage of its families living in separate houses. The house was also the environment that taught the young and sustained them in later years, a point clearly stated by Harriet Spofford in Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 1878: “Its study is as important, in some respects, as the study of politics; for the private home is at the foundation of the public state, subtle and unimagined influences moulding the men who mould the state ….”

But the reason that is given or implied most frequently in the literature of the early 1880s is that the house reveals its owners. Spofford underscores the influence of the house on the family; the shepherds of the art scene of the early 1880s are more intrigued with its revelations to the public. “Just as there is no more certain means of gauging a man’s social position than by discovering what manner of womankind belongs to him, so there is no better way of measuring his degree of intellectual or artistic culture than by examining his library, or the furnishings and arrangements of his house …” (American Architecture and Building News, August 9, 1884). Vanderbilt intended a public statement when he asked Shinn to inventory his rooms. And Sheldon consistently stresses the house as a revelation of character and not as a private educator. “The interior of the house of a professional man of scholarly pursuits, cultivated tastes, and wealth sufficient to gratify both, is at least the proximate expression of his experience and convictions ….” In Sheldon’s view, cultural elites were essential to stimulate and direct the course of a nation’s artistic development. That these American elites were responsible enough to demand good art for their houses was reassuring to him.

COLLECTING OBJETS D’ART

Sheldon probably visited most of the houses he included in his survey and walked through the rooms with their owners. They pointed out particular pieces they had collected, frequently explaining when, where or how the purchases had been made. Sheldon took these comments seriously, for he repeatedly accounted for the provenance of a vase or retold an anecdote associated with a given painting. This information could only have come from the collectors themselves, which makes his text valuable not only for its inventory of pieces and artists but also because it reveals why these owners prized certain works. On the other hand, comments in the text about quality or beauty could be Sheldon’s judgments, not necessarily those of the collectors. Though we would assume that beauty or merit would be major reasons for adding a piece to a collection, the text is surprisingly uninformative on this issue. Granted, there are numerous references to quality in phrases like “some exquisite Sèvres porcelains glisten from a wall-cabinet” or “on the center-table is a superb Capo da Monte casket” or “the specimens of Rico, Delort, Meyer von Bremen, and Papperitz are excellent.” Such evaluative but imprecise phrases abound. He tells us the works are beautiful but seldom why they are beautiful. Furthermore, the absence of any negative criticism of the art in the homes he visited suggests that his declarations of the exquisite or superb quality of a work may have had more to do with goodwill than discrimination.

If he slighted questions of artistic merit, Sheldon did not ignore the associative aspects of art, those extrinsic to the formal properties of the work itself. The text of Artistic Houses contains numerous lengthy passages in which the author relates “interesting” information associated with particular works of art. This kind of commentary occupies so much of the text and is written so earnestly that Sheldon and the owners seem to value the paintings and the bric-a-brac in these houses for what can be told about them—their age, who had owned them, where they came from, their rarity, their cost and their stories.

His hosts repeatedly stressed the age of their favorite pieces in order to convince Sheldon they had been responsible collectors. He accepted age as a prime factor of artistic importance, pointing out, among scores of examples, a Scandinavian silver loving cup dated 1763 in Judge Hilton’s reception room, a Beauvais tapestry “perhaps two hundred years old” in Egerton Winthrop’s reception room (no. 54), “an Eastern rug one hundred and fifty years old” in George Kemp’s hall (no. 139), and “old oaken furniture” that seemed to have “come from the baronial halls of poesy” and cabinets, their age affirmed by worm-eaten backs, in Clara Jessup Moore’s house. He liked David L. Einstein’s house because it had “the soberness and seriousness of demeanor which belong to age.” These comments provide insights into two characteristics of the families featured in these photographs. This group of art patrons did not brag about its bric-a-brac, furniture or tapestries which had been manufactured recently. If these collectors owned modern works (paintings and sculpture excluded), they did not call them to Sheldon’s attention. Secondly, their reverence for the past encouraged them to make purchases in which age was often a distinguishing and conversational feature.

The provenance of a work was also mentioned frequently in the text. American collectors of the early 1880s were quick to explain that choice items in their houses had once been choice items in noted collections of the past. We can imagine the pride with which Edward N. Dickerson told Sheldon that his Bohemian blue-glass punch bowl had been bought in Paris by Thomas Jefferson himself. Dr. William A. Hammond explained that the candelabra in his dining room had been made for the King of Bavaria. Candelabra once owned by Napoleon stood in Henry C. Gibson’s dining room (no. 48). If a work could not be assigned to the household of a figure of history, it was common to assign it to an acceptable class, as the Joys did when explaining that their bronze statues of Henry IV of France and his wife, Marie de Médicis, had been in the “possession of a noble French family until within a few years.” Sheldon did not question the accuracy of these claims and did not ask for verification; the claim of distinguished previous ownership was enough. This is another illustration of the way in which talk becomes a substitution for the object so that what is said about a collection may be more impressive than the works on display.

A work was also singled out by reference to its place of origin. Artistic Houses contains numerous references to suites of furniture imported from Europe, and, in the case of the Stevens’ ballroom (no. 21), an entire apartment from a palace in Belgium. Others searched beyond Europe to find furniture in Morocco, hangings in Turkey, bowls on the Mount of Olives and fans in Japan. Often the goal of artistic unity was superseded by a stronger desire to show proof of world travel. These acquisitive journeys were considered creative attempts to find the finest artifacts money could buy, not acts of international plundering. Sheldon was complimentary when he reported the Einsteins had “ransacked the ends of the earth for objets d’art” and that Bradley and Cornelia Martin had obtained their “rare and beautiful objets d’art from European palaces and treasure-houses.” A work of art created in a foreign country, then, in addition to age and previous ownership, was another measurement of worth respected by the majority of these American collectors in the early 1880s.

These collectors assumed the singularity of many of the objects they showed Sheldon and made statements to this effect. They wanted him to know they owned not just representative, but exceptionally fine examples of a medium or type. Trusting their comments, Sheldon alerted his readers to the “rare and costly pieces of Dutch marquetry,” doors “of rare East India wood,” Limoges enamel of “extremely rare and exquisite workmanship,” “Persian rugs of rare quality and color” and “rare old hangings of velours.” If Sheldon did not designate a work as “rare,” he might call it “genuine.” If it were neither rare nor original, he would frequently reassure his audience that it was “an exact copy” of the prime version found in a given museum or private collection.

The cost of an object was another attribute cited by the author of Artistic Houses. He implied in his commentary a corresponding relationship between money paid and quality obtained. “Baron Rothschild, of Frankfurt-on-the-Main, is said to have paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars last year for the original of an old silver goblet, of which Mr. Einstein owns an excellent copy ….” References to “costly Sèvres vases” and “the costliest and best mahogany” were typical of many comments about money scattered through the text. However, Sheldon may have underscored the price paid for an object more strongly than the patrons he interviewed. His information also could have come from the popular press, which routinely stressed the sums paid for works of art in these years. Wealthy patrons, on the other hand, discreet about the extent of their wealth, were more inclined to talk about the collections from which their vases and tables had come than to talk about the amount of money paid for them.

If the owners of these well-stocked rooms and galleries tried, through remarks about the age, provenance, source, uniqueness and cost of their prized pieces, to convince friends and the public of the quality of their domestic museums, they also romanticized particular objects by telling stories and anecdotes about their histories. This was another indication of the tendency of the relatively inexperienced American collector to resort to words as compensation, and even as substitution, for understanding and engagement. These stories focused on what had happened to the pieces over the decades and centuries and, like the remarks about age and ownership, were difficult to verify and easy to embellish. Again, Sheldon was empathetic to this kind of associative criticism, believing, as he put it in reference to Marshall Field’s hall furniture (no. 56), that “every article … has its history” and that these histories were inseparable from the work and should be retold. His attitude was well expressed in a comment about some Japanese pieces in the collection of the Zerega family:

One of them is an immense Japanese fan, opened to its full extent and six feet wide, painted by hand, and imported in a case as big as a coffin; the other a Japanese bill of lading, covered with mysterious Japanese characters, and inviting the visitor to ask the hostess (who, by-the-way, saw it in some débris of a fancy-goods establishment, and carried the trophy off for its immediately discerned adaptability to its present use), “Won’t you tell me the story about that?”

Often the story concerned the length of time taken by a noted artist to complete a distinguished piece of peculiar artistic or functional qualities. The Bradley Martins owned six Italian chairs, each carved from a single piece of wood. They had discovered them in Amsterdam where they had been sent as models for reproduction. William A. and Helen Hammond had found some white-oak chairs that would not break if thrown from a fourth-story window.

Fig. 12. Charles H. Joy house, Boston, Massachusetts.

Owners singled out certain pieces of furniture and hangings because they had played inanimate roles in the lives of history’s personalities and in recorded moments from the past. The Hammonds owned two corner tables supported by gilt cupids that had been removed from the palace of the Duke of Parma when King Victor Emmanuel’s troops were trying to unify Italy. Marshall Field claimed that Savonarola may have used one of his chairs. George W. Childs had a table made from ebony that had been brought to the United States from Africa by Paul du Chaillu. The Joys of Boston still had Gobelin tapestries that had been brought from France by his ancestors and had once been in Concert Hall in Boston when a reception for President Washington was held there.

Though these photographs of rooms crammed with materials collected from the “ends of the earth” document the phenomenon of bric-a-brac mania, they also describe interiors in which objets d’art were less noticeable. Also, Sheldon met collectors—James L. Claghorn, John Taylor Johnston, Henry G. Marquand, John Wolfe—whose long familiarity with art resulted in different conversations, discussions that revealed their knowledge or sensitivity rather than their self-consciousness, their desire to share delight rather than to impress. Regionally, those who lived in the impressive town houses of Boston and Philadelphia were less inclined to turn their houses into museums of the world’s artifacts than were the New Yorkers included in this study. Compare, for example, the Boston apartments of E. Rollins Morse (no. 10), Robert Treat Paine, Jr. (no. 73) and Walter Hunnewell (nos. 147 & 148) with the New York rooms of H. Victor Newcomb (nos. 81–83), Robert Stuart (nos. 99–101) and John Wolfe (no. 176). There were exceptions, such as the quarters of Oliver Ames (nos. 33–37) in Boston, but New Yorkers entered the competition for international art objects and fashionable modern paintings more aggressively than did residents in this anthology who lived in other cities.

Fig. 13. Walter Hunnewell house, Boston, Massachusetts.

A number of these photographs depict country houses in which spatial interaction and casual comfort are more conspicuous than vases or portieres. Some rooms belonged to artists like Louis C. Tiffany (nos. 13–16) and Samuel Colman (no. 29), who, dedicated to revitalizing the present, not venerating the past, created new kinds of interior decor for such clients as William S. Kimball (nos. 67 & 68) and George Kemp (nos. 139–142).

Despite evidence to the contrary, the paragraphs and photographs of Artistic Houses document an economic, social and cultural phenomenon of the early 1880s—families, possessing extraordinary wealth (often freshly acquired), who used their money to purchase or build town houses on fine avenues in major cities and then transformed these houses into personal museums displaying art objects, paintings and sculpture from around the world. Artistic Houses regarded the men and women whose houses it featured as the enlightened agents of an American Renaissance.

Fig. 14. John Charles Phillips house, Boston, Massachusetts.

Some of these home owners had launched their collections before the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, among them Claghorn, Johnston, Marquand, Wolfe, Hamilton Fish, A. T. Stewart, J. Pierpont Morgan and Joseph G. Chapman. A larger number, however, inspired by this infusion and display of international culture, became active collectors in the last half of the 1870s and the early 1880s. Samuel M. Nickerson and John W. Doane in Chicago, John Charles Phillips in Boston and William H. Vanderbilt in New York intensified their buying as their new houses were being finished between 1879 and 1883. Individuals who had been buying art prior to the centennial were not necessarily more sincere and informed than those who entered the market later. However, art collecting was more fashionable about 1880 than it had been earlier, and several of the later collectors appear to have become involved for social reasons.

In the 1980s it is impossible to separate cleanly those collectors of a hundred years ago who bought art primarily because they enjoyed it from those who bought art primarily because it was the thing to do. The motives of most collectors were probably mixed and in some cases these motives changed with time. J. Pierpont Morgan began as a fashionable collector but became increasingly absorbed and ultimately transformed by his contact with art. More research is needed on this question of motives spurring the large number of private collections in these years.

Directly and indirectly, Sheldon provides us with some sense of the seriousness or sophistication of the collectors he encountered. Occasionally, he referred to a collector as an authority—“Mr. Claghorn’s extensive knowledge of the art and history of engraving …”—but these tributes were reserved almost exclusively for those who had been purchasing art for several decades. When discussing the rooms of those who had recently become involved with art, Sheldon can be indirectly informative in the amount of space he allots to associative commentary about provenance and anecdotes. The collectors most eager to tell him who had previously owned their works and to recount the silent roles these objects had played in great moments in history—Egerton Winthrop, H. Victor Newcomb and Bradley Martin, all of New York City—had put their collections together after 1876. Furthermore, they remained collectors whose lives were essentially unaffected by public commitments to art. If we lack sufficient evidence to make hard judgments about the relative integrity in the relationships between owners and their art, we can conclude that Artistic Houses argued that important people should own works of art and that the artistic content of their houses and the skill with which their art was displayed were signs of their good taste and cultural sophistication.

If Sheldon was aware of questionable motives and concerned about their possible negative consequences, he never mentioned them. His silence was not shared by all contemporary critics, particularly those who argued that money might buy art but not insure judgment or even encourage sensitivity. These critics questioned the wisdom of people with abundant and often new money but with little previous training acting as the country’s arbiters of beauty. The following attack appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine, February 1883:

Let us contrast the qualities which go to make a genuine lover of beauty, with a delicate and accurate perception of it in all varied forms, and those which are essential to the composition of a capable and successful “bric-a-brac” collector …. First, the collector. Apart from any intrinsic quality of his own, he must belong to the well-to-do class, must have “money in bank” or in his pocket: this is evidently a requisite. But what must be in himself? Some uninitiated person cries out, “He must, above all, love beautiful things, and know them when he sees them.” By no means. Nothing could be more detrimental to his success, should his love and perception of beauty be largely developed or allowed free action, for under their dominion he may be led into fatal and irretrievable errors. In order that his collection of “objects” may be admired and valuable, it must be composed primarily of “rarities” as nearly “unique” as possible, secondly, of “objects” possessing a certain money-value and a floating capacity of increasing value, so as to be put advantageously on the market when the owner wishes; for the salient mark of the “collector,” by which he might readily be distinguished from the beauty-lover, is the love of variety and change….

This spirited piece raises questions about the relationship between art and wealth that Sheldon did not understand or did not wish to publicize.

Individuals who wanted to live in artistic houses in which acceptable works of art were displayed in the mode of the day, but who lacked the experience, knowledge or confidence to achieve this goal, could rely on experts to help them. These experts were the architects who designed their houses, or the decorators who arranged and furnished their rooms, or the art agents who recommended and procured works of art. Much of the ceramics, glass, silver, tapestries and furniture visible in these photographs had been acquired by the owners themselves in antique shops, at auctions or on their tours of Europe, the Middle East, China and Japan. However, owners appeared to rely more heavily on agents when purchasing paintings and sculptures and when the costs of desired works were high. The agents would visit dealers and the studios of agreed-upon artists, represent the patron at auctions, act as consultants in shaping collections and as instructors in the history and appreciation of art.

As collectors became better informed and developed a clearer idea of the works they wished to purchase, their dependence on authorities might decrease. At first their agent might bargain with Goupil and Company in Paris or visit specific studios alone. Later the patron might travel with the agent on a trip to France and, finally, the patron might travel alone to renew friendships with painters whose works he or she had previously bought. Twentieth-century historians regularly mention William H. Vanderbilt’s friendship with Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier and his meeting with Rosa Bonheur. John Wolfe claimed the Wine Tasters in his dining room (no. 176) had been given to him by the German painter J. P. Hasenclever. Henry C. Gibson bought heavily in 1879–80 when he toured Europe with his sister, son and granddaughter.

There were disadvantages to relying on agents. If a family had assembled a reputable collection, the family wanted the credit. Owners tended to employ art advisers discreetly in order to discourage the public from concluding they were possessors without understanding. William H. Vanderbilt was sensitive to gossip that he was really an artistic dolt incapable of a decision without the approval of Samuel P. Avery. Though evidence to the contrary exists, the image of him at the end of Avery’s leash persisted. On several occasions Avery stated that his assistance was minimal, but he failed to change the mind of a public that wanted to think otherwise. He wrote the New York Times, March 10, 1882:

In the account of Mr. Vanderbilt’s collection of pictures in this morning’s Times the writer gives me credit for what I am not entitled to, viz: that I “selected” them for him. Mr. Vanderbilt’s collection is not a rapid accumulation. He has been a picture buyer for over 20 years and does not need the services of any person to “select” for him, willing as he may be to be advised by his friends.

The public should not have been surprised that capitalists turned to experts for assistance in developing their collections; before purchasing a mill or a railroad, the investor or the developer turned to those knowledgeable about the prospects for textiles or the likelihood of population shifts along certain routes. However, there was a qualitative difference between buying mills and buying art. A purchase of art was “successful” if an ineffable but transforming relationship between owner and work existed and grew. Purchasing art was risky because it was impossible to predict the evolving nature of this mysterious intercourse. The patron could not be a disinterested spectator or absentee owner; personal involvement was unavoidable. If owners permitted experts to determine their choice, they were substituting another’s criteria of quality and taste for their own. The fact that this person was a professional in determining quality did not guarantee the integrity of the emerging relationship.

Agents may have contributed to this problem, but they were not the cause of it. Collectors, working independently of professional help, often overlooked personal criteria when judging collections—their own included—according to the names they contained, and when they engaged in “painted to order” transactions. Though Sheldon did not state flatly that good collections contained the names of certain artists and that collections in which these were missing were poor, he argued this implicitly throughout Artistic Houses. If patrons did not own a work of a painter in vogue, they often searched until one was found. Adding a name, then, could be more important than subject or quality. Names could be added by writing to the artist in Europe and requesting a painting of a given size and subject. In such instances the client would be expressing a personal preference, though not one that would insure enjoyment of the painting once it arrived. Probably less than ten percent of the individuals and families included in Artistic Houses engaged in this practice.

THE PAINTINGS IN THE DOMESTIC MUSEUM

Judging from these photographs, town houses from Boston to Washington and as far west as Chicago and St. Louis were repositories of various kinds of collections in the 1880s. Robert Stuart commissioned cabinetmakers to design ebonized oak cases to hold his rocks and to place them below the paintings in his gallery (no. 99). Sheldon included several homes that held impressive libraries: Franklin H. Tinker (no. 143) owned books autographed by Victor Hugo, Tennyson, Ruskin, Whittier and Holmes; Frederick F. Thompson (no. 60) claimed 3000 titles; Edward N. Dickerson (no. 76) possessed a very good collection of scientific literature; and Samuel J. Tilden’s library, though not featured in this series, was one of the largest in New York City. By the 1880s the library had become an expected, if not obligatory, room in a well-appointed city residence, forcing those who did not enjoy reading to “stage” their literary enthusiasm. These photographs show several rooms in which even rows of printed leather, some covering boards, not pages, suggest symmetrical display rather than active use.

Fig. 15. Edward N. Dickerson house, New York, New York.

Works of art represented the most common type of collection. Most of these interiors displayed carefully chosen textiles, ceramics from Europe or the Orient, historical furniture or well-made revivals of earlier styles, and many a mantel showed off some of the most complicated marble or metal clocks in the history of artistic clock making. The then-current popularity of stained-glass windows can be measured in numerous interiors, for example, the library of the Clarence H. Clarks (no. 19), the Russells’ hall (no. 74) and the dining room of the Armour residence (no. 135). We also see sculpture in these interiors, but with the exception of the collections of Stewart, Smith, Singerly, Gibson and Hilton, these owners did not develop holdings in figurative, three-dimensional art. There were many watercolors, drawings and prints hung on these walls or kept in specially prepared print drawers, but the oils were the medium by which the press, the owners and even Sheldon judged the importance of an art collection.

Collections of oil paintings, varying in size from a few originals to more than 200 in the Stuart (no. 99) and Vanderbilt (nos. 119 & 120) houses, were common in this series. Approximately 60 percent of the houses contained works by known contemporary painters or, occasionally, a painting from the Renaissance or Baroque. Fifteen of these owners would have been considered in the early 1880s among the foremost collectors of fine art in the country. Sheldon’s familiarity with the European-American art market partially explains why such a high percentage of houses with strong collections was chosen for Artistic Houses.

The author’s comment, “Mr. Doane [nos. 180 & 181] has not yet had time to cover his walls with art-treasures—a process requiring care and time,” provides us with several insights into contemporary attitudes toward the house as a museum. Sheldon assumed that walls of splendid houses would be hung with works of art. Walls not adorned by paintings could be embarrassing. As soon as new houses were completed, the “treasures” would be displayed. To qualify his implication of inevitability, Sheldon reminds us that decorating a house with paintings requires patience and skill.

As more paintings were purchased, opportunities to display them effectively decreased. The quantity of exhibition space was one factor convincing a number of these families to move to new quarters or to build new city residences in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In 1883 Samuel M. Nickerson, who eventually gave his paintings to The Art Institute of Chicago, moved into his new home where its gallery (no. 104) was equipped to handle paintings, prints and folios. “Mr. Nickerson’s collection of art treasures is probably the largest in the West, and now that his beautiful gallery is completed, he will undoubtedly continue to add to its numbers.” Robert Stuart died several months before his new residence at the corner of East 68th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York was completed in the spring of 1883. His widow arranged 66 paintings in the picture gallery (no. 99), along with his geological treasures, and scattered the remaining 174 oils throughout the principal rooms of the house. Objecting to leaving their house at 450 Fifth Avenue, in which she had raised eight children, Maria Louisa Vanderbilt tried unsuccessfully to convince her husband to add a wing if he needed more space to hang his pictures. Although his gallery at their new address, 640 Fifth Avenue, was the largest in New York when completed in 1882, he enlarged it the following year. Rarely were all the paintings of a collection housed within one space. Several of the better-known collectors, J. Pierpont Morgan and John Wolfe, for example, had no formal gallery room. One out of ten houses included in this publication contained a picture gallery.

Serious collectors assembled their collections of paintings and prints for their enjoyment and the enjoyment of their friends, and some invited the public to see their originals. After Sunday evening suppers, Cornelia and Alexander Stewart would take their guests into the art gallery (nos. 7 & 8), illuminated by gas jets, for conversation and coffee and cigars for the men. Stewart was less generous to the general public. Initially he permitted an authority or an artist to study his paintings but later discontinued this practice, a policy that was enforced from his death in 1876 until his wife’s death ten years later. In the last years of Stewart’s life, he spent much time alone in his gallery, smoking cigars and contemplating his masterpieces. On the other hand, community-minded John T. Martin of Brooklyn often displayed his paintings (nos. 149& 150) for the benefit of a specific charity or deserving institution. Prior to the sale of his collection in December 1876, John Taylor Johnston opened his gallery once a week to the public and once a year to all the artists of New York City. James L. Claghorn in Philadelphia welcomed visitors from all over the United States to study his outstanding collection of prints.

Twentieth-century historians have depicted William H. Vanderbilt as the epitome of the rich but crass American who waved an infinite supply of dollars before mediocre French painters in order to obtain the “finest collection” in the New World. They have not given him credit for doing more than any other New Yorker included in this series to share his collection with the public. On Thursdays, from 11:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., by cards of invitation, individuals were admitted to his galleries through a specially constructed entrance on West 51st Street. His most expansive gesture occurred on December 20, 1883, when he invited 3000 business associates, out-of-town visitors and the bulk of the city’s art community to an “art levee” at his house. More than 2500 responded, many of them dressed in “threadbare Prince Alberts.” Full of pride and goodwill, he greeted them at the door and later joined the crowds inside to discuss the paintings. But many of the guests wanted to gawk rather than examine and discuss works of art; the Times reported they opened books in the library, handled expensive bric-a-brac and wandered into the elegantly furnished bedrooms. Offended, and perhaps even threatened by such etiquette, Vanderbilt reconsidered his role as public educator and sharply curtailed access to the gallery during the last year of his life.

Like Vanderbilt, most of these collectors purchased works for private enjoyment, not public instruction. Most were pleased to share their paintings and sculptures with authorities and with reputable artists. Some felt an obligation to make their holdings available to the public on special occasions, but unless these affairs could be carefully controlled, owners concluded the invasion of their privacy was not worth the effort. The majority considered that they had served their civic duty admirably by establishing a notable collection in their city, even if these works of art were rarely seen by local subsistence-level artists.

Private museums, more numerous and conspicuous in New York than in Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago, flourished during the 1870s and early 1880s. These were the same years in which the major museums of those cities were founded. The Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were started in 1870, the predecessor of the present Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1876–77 and The Art Institute of Chicago between 1879 and 1882. While fledgling city museums struggled, searching for money, instructive and celebrated objects, adequate galleries, appropriate addresses, clearer missions and logical directions, private museums, supported by restless money, could be formed quickly and installed in instant galleries on prestigious avenues. These two kinds of art institutions competed with each other in the decade of the 1870s, but in the later years of the 1880s the competition became less intense. Private galleries and collections continued to be fashionable during the 1880s, but collectors were increasingly inclined to think of their prized objects as instruments of public education. They were far more willing to support the public museum through bequests in the mid- and later 1880s than they had been in the previous decade. To illustrate, A. T. Stewart purchased Friedland, 1807 by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier for approximately $60,000. In 1876 this painting and The Horse Fairby Rose Bonheur were probably the best-known pictures in his collection and regarded as among the most important examples of modern French art in the country. At the sale of the Stewart collection in March 1887, Judge Henry Hilton and his son bought Friedland, 1807 for $66,000 and then gave it to the Metropolitan Museum.

Although one example does not prove a general point, this painting was one of the best known in the United States, and the bequest received much publicity. The commentary in the press was complimentary, indicating that the stress on the public’s access to important works of art, as opposed to private ownership, was in vogue as it had not been earlier. This shift of outlook was affected, in part, by the growing importance of the Metropolitan Museum and also by the growth of museums in other major cities. Even Meissonier was pleased. He wrote to Hilton, who shared the contents of his letter with the New York Times (July 13, 1887): “It is a royal gift and your city should be proud of claiming you as one of its citizens.” Hilton may have been more imitative than generous. At the same auction, Cornelius Vanderbilt, through his agent Samuel P. Avery, purchased The Horse Fair for $53,000, and then donated it to the Metropolitan. In his letter of donation Vanderbilt stressed the importance of enabling the public to see fine works of art. The painting, he wrote, “should be in a position where it can be permanently accessible to the public.” In the acceptance letter from the museum’s secretary, Di Cesnola, Vanderbilt was praised for contributing “to the instruction and enjoyment of the multitudes ….”

The respective acts of the first and second presidents of the Metropolitan Museum, John Taylor Johnston and Henry G. Marquand, whose homes were included in Artistic Houses, may also reflect the growing strength and significance of the city museum in the 1880s. Johnston gave generously to support the early purchases of European collections, but he also continued to develop his own collection, and in 1876 offered for sale 200 oils and 125 watercolors in one of the largest art auctions of the decade. The Times did not rebuke him for ignoring the new Metropolitan Museum, but noted wistfully that it was a shame such a fine group of paintings could not become a public possession. Turner’s Slave Ship, which Johnston had loaned for the first exhibition of the museum in February 1872, was sold for $10,000.

A month before Henry G. Marquand assumed office in 1889 he gave the museum 33 paintings, among them works by van Eyck, Hals, Lucas van Leyden, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Velazquez. This bequest was the finest series of old masters the museum had ever received. According to the Times (January 17, 1889), “the donor had noticed with pleasure the public interest manifested in the pictures, and, being convinced that the collection would be of greater service in a public gallery than in any private one, he had determined to offer the pictures unconditionally to the Trustees of the Museum.” No doubt there were particular reasons why Marquand shared his collection and Johnston did not, but their respective decisions were symbolic and reflected their times. Sheldon’s photographic record of interiors was published at the height of the popularity of the private, residential art gallery and shortly before the public museum replaced it as the focal point of a city’s artistic activity.

Regardless of the size of the painting collection, and whether it was displayed in a special gallery or was to be found in Boston, New York, Philadelphia or Chicago, these works were painted by the same artists. How surprising that such affluent Americans, whose fortunes had been made by authoritative decisions and the courage to take the risks of a gambler, were so attentive to those who determined which artists were in and which were out. Art critics of the early 1880s, including Sheldon, knew what names constituted a fine collection and then looked for the obligatory Bouguereau, Detaille, Fortuny or Schreyer. If the roster was incomplete, a collector would often hunt for an example by the missing artist. According to the gossip of the day, William H. Vanderbilt was told so many times that his collection was not balanced without a Corot that he eventually bought two of them.

By examining Sheldon’s text and photographs and by checking the inventories of collections in The Art Treasures of America: Being the Choicest Works of Art in the Public and Private Collections of North America, a three-volume work compiled by Earl Shinn between 1879 and 1882, we get a rough listing of the most popular painters of these years. Sheldon named approximately 220 different artists, a total that may appear to contradict the assertion that there was a defined stable of fashionable painters, and referred to more than 430 different paintings. Shinn’s anthology included nine of the collectors Sheldon visited: Cornelia M. Stewart, Henry C. Gibson, Charles S. Smith, Henry Hilton, Mary Stuart, William H. Vanderbilt, John T. Martin, J. Pierpont Morgan and John Wolfe. If we add the references to an artist named in Artistic Houses to those in Shinn’s catalogues of these nine collections, we are able to estimate the relative popularity of desired painters. Accordingly, they were Diaz, Bouguereau, Detaille, Corot, Meissonier, Schreyer, Merle, Vibert, Fortuny, Madrazo and Meyer von Bremen.

Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña (1808–1876), born of Spanish parents, lived in France. A painter of nymphs and gypsies or allegorical figures in woodland settings, he was also respected for his Barbizon landscapes in which vivacious colors illuminated skies, trees and glens. Influenced strongly by his years in Italy, Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825–1905) painted in a skillfully smooth (though anachronistic) manner portraits, mythological and anecdotal themes and sentimental genre pieces. After joining the army during the Franco-Prussian War, Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Detaille (1848–1912) concentrated on military history and moments from the daily life of soldiers, subjects that he executed easily in a realistic manner. Of the painters sought after in the early 1880s, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) has received the most favorable treatment from twentieth-century historians and critics. His popularity in the United States rose after his death. American collectors liked his quiet landscapes more than his portrayals of meditative women, but both were considered poetic antidotes to literal, didactic painting.

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891) was the teacher of Detaille. Buyers in the United States preferred his military paintings, though several collections contained his portraits and historical genre scenes which he based on exhaustive research. Adolf Schreyer (1828–1899) was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. “A master of emotional, as well as he is of prismatic, effects,” according to a St. Louis critic, he succeeded with scenes of mounted Arab horsemen or wolves attacking winter coaches in the forests of Russia. Hugues Merle (1823–1881) painted genre works with titles like The Secret or literary-historical descriptions of moments, such as Get Thee to a Nunnery. His sweet academic style was influenced by fellow French painter Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.

The artist who dominated the ecclesiastical genre market was Jean-Georges Vibert (1840–1902). Painting in exquisite detail, he caught Catholic clergy, particularly cardinals, in literal vignettes that gently mocked their pride, gluttony and foolishness. Mariano Fortuny y Carbo (1838–1874) was born in Spain but also studied in Rome. Impressed by the colors and light of North Africa in 1860, he subsequently produced Moorish and Spanish genre scenes marked by brilliant hues. Though technically facile, he was not a deep thinker. Don Federigo de Madrazo y Kuntz (1815–1894), having studied in Paris with Winterhalter, became the painter to the Spanish court. He was noted for his portraits. Paintings by Johann Georg Meyer, better known as Meyer von Bremen (1813–1886), were included in seven of the nine Artistic Houses collections catalogued by Shinn. He depicted children in morally edifying but cloying moments and gave them titles such as The Little Rogue, The Little Knitter, The Little Pleader. First Sorrow, in the Stewart collection, depicts a heartbroken child and a dead canary.

Only slightly less popular among American millionaires of the day were paintings by Zamacois, Ziem, Troyon, Millet, Van Marcke, De Neuville, the American Eastman Johnson and the British-American painter George Henry Boughton. But the point has been made that in the years just prior to 1883 wealthy art patrons on the East Coast and in Chicago and St. Louis were not buying old masters, French romantics, English landscape painters, mid-century realists, and certainly not Degas, Manet or the Impressionists, who first exhibited as a group in Paris in 1874. There were exceptions. A. T. Stewart owned a Titian Madonna and Child and a Hobbema Moonlight Landscape, but at the sale where Friedland, 1807 and The Horse Fair stirred such blockbuster bids, the Titian went for $800 and the Hobbema for $350. In Boston, Mrs. D. N. Spooner had found a Holy Family by a pupil of Rubens, a sunset landscape by Claude and an original attributed to Domenichino. Samuel Colman, himself an artist, had Delacroix’s second version of Dante and Virgil Crossing the Styx and a portrait head supposedly by Rembrandt.

Fig. 16. Samuel Colman house, Newport, Rhode Island.

Several collectors who later developed magnificent holdings of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art were relatively uninformed art patrons in the early 1880s. Isabella Stewart Gardner, of the Gardner Museum in the Fenway, Boston, had purchased a copy of a Boucher painting but did not acquire her first major old master until Bernard Berenson led her to Botticelli’s Death of Lucretia in 1894. Aside from a few poetic French and American landscapes, J. Pierpont Morgan in these years was buying the same kinds of explanatory paintings as William H. Vanderbilt and Marshall Field. In summary, the 60 percent of the families included in this study which purchased contemporary paintings tended to buy canvases of relatively conservative French artists of the last half of the nineteenth century or to buy paintings by Spanish, German and sometimes Hungarian and Italian artists whose styles and themes reflected those of the French.

Many of these families represented new wealth created by the astounding economic development of the United States in the nineteenth century. Some had made fortunes which dwarfed generational fortunes in Britain or France, some could command resources that would have upstaged the princely families of fifteenth-century Italy. Yet this American aristocracy of wealth did not support Yankee painters who were using their creative talents to explain the beauty, breadth and unlimited potential of the United States. The New York Times lamented this in an editorial on December 2, 1876:

Nevertheless, our picture-buying public is largely commercial. It demands “potboilers.” It is hardly necessary to add that it gets them. Is it any wonder, then, that the progress of art among us is slow? Of course, we make no account of the prevalent complaints of those struggling geniuses who are “unappreciated,” and who, like other equally worthy men in other professions, have mistaken their calling. It is true that hundreds of deserving artists are restrained from doing violence to the noblest ideas of art because they cherish a spark of devotion to their ideal, and not because an enlightened public taste has withheld them. A rich picture-buyer hangs a canvas on his wall and glows with honest pride as he points to the signature of its European painter.

American painters were plentiful, talented or gradually improving, concerned with many of the themes purchasable in Paris, and certainly needed a generous national patronage, but most of the families included in Artistic Houses treated them as second-class artists. “Fine art” meant art produced across the Atlantic.

American painters were not ignored, but they represented a fraction of the total holdings in these houses, approximately 20 percent. The preference for foreign artists was also measurable in the prices paid at auctions between 1876 and 1883. At the John Taylor Johnston sale in December 1876, the highest price, surprisingly, was paid for an American work— $12,500 for Niagara Falls by Frederick Church—but the next highest bids were for foreign paintings: $9700 for Troyon’s Autumn Morning, Landscape and Cattle; $8600 for Meissonier’s Marshal Saxe and Staff; $8350 for the Turkish Patrol, Smyrna, by Decamps; and $8000 for Gérome’s Death of Caesar. At the Claghorn auction the following year, the highest figures were $4100 for In the Fields, by Ludwig Knaus, $4000 for The Disputed Point, by Zamacois, and $3225 for Arabs in Ambush by Adolf Schreyer. The top price for an American-born artist was $700 for Church’s painting of a landscape in Connecticut. No American works were auctioned at the sale of the John Wolfe collection in 1882.

Fig. 17. Frederick F. Thompson house, New York, New York.

Among the collectors who patronized American painters were Dr. Henry C. Haven, who bought works by Elihu Vedder; Joseph H. White, who owned works by George Fuller and George Inness; and Robert Stuart, who had landscapes by Church, Cole, Cropsey, Doughty, S. R. Gifford, William Hart, Huntington, Inness, Kensett, McEntee and J. F. Weir. Prior to his auction, Johnston owned not only Niagara Falls but also Homer’s Prisoners from the Front, which brought $1860, and all four of Cole’s Voyage of Life series, which realized a total of $3100. The remaining collectors in this anthology who supported American artists were Frederick F. Thompson, William G. Dominick, Clara Jessup Moore, Clarence H. Clark, Samuel M. Nickerson, J. Pierpont Morgan and William F. Havemeyer.

The most distinctive fine-arts collection included in Artistic Houses was that of James L. Claghorn, who probably knew more about his thousands of prints than others did about their scores of oils. In April of 1877 Claghorn sold his numerous predictable paintings for $76,635 in order to concentrate on prints, which at his death in 1884 numbered between 30,000 and 40,000, representing the efforts of more than 1500 printmakers who lived between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. He owned at least 185 Rembrandts, including states of The Three Crosses and Ecce Homo, and 85 impressions by Albrecht Dürer. This collection was exceptional nationally, not just among those singled out by Sheldon. Philadelphians were unhappy when all of these prints were purchased by Robert Garrett of Baltimore for $150,000 in 1885.

So similar in subject matter were these collections that it is possible to identify categories and to suggest their relative popularity. Obviously, there were variations—Robert Stuart bought a much larger percentage of landscapes than did Judge Henry Hilton, who liked military paintings and scenes from North Africa and the Middle East—but even these personal preferences do not invalidate the generalization.

Approximately 50 to 60 percent of the average collection consisted of genre themes. These could be divided into descriptive genre, moralistic genre and sentimental genre. Descriptive paintings were given titles like The Lost Night Key, The Poor Student, or The New Shoes—titles that provided a general introduction to a specific moment in the life of the individual or individuals depicted. These paintings were essentially frozen narratives. The obligation of the painter was to link the title to the painted scene by supplying enough visual clues for the viewer to reconstruct the narrative correctly. Because the correct reconstruction was crucial, the clues were usually numerous, didactic and difficult to ignore. In such paintings the artist had to be a master coordinator, insuring that the roles of all persons in the scene were understandable and, at the same time, subordinating their actions to the primary issue illuminated by the title. These paintings, usually overclarified, seldom risked subtleties that might be misconstrued. Didactic texts, like the following commentary on The Effects of a False Note of 1875 of Antonio Casanova, which appeared in the sale catalogue of the John T. Martin collection in 1909, left little room for imagination:

The young marquis has a birthday! and so the floor of his spacious salon is littered with presents—toy soldiers, a model kitchen, and what not. A number of notables have called to pay their respects in the stately style and gorgeous costumes of the middle eighteenth century. And of course there is a band, a hautboy and a cello, a violin and a trombone. And the trombonist, in the kindness of his foolish old heart, had decorated the bell of his instrument with a fearsome dragon’s head, and proceeds to wind him a most raucous note, full of bellowings and the shrieks of a monster. A second shriek answers him, and the poor little marquis, toys flung aside and terror in his noble heart, flies to his mother for rescue, while the horrified ladies tug at the poor trombonist’s coat-tails.

A subcategory of descriptive genre dealt with the life of the Catholic clergy—the first sermon of a nervous priest or a monk dancing with a colorfully attired Spanish woman. Moralistic or edifying works employed titles such as Worldly Thoughts, Take Care or A Difficult Choice. These were visual sermons about pride or avarice, or they recreated moments common to human experience from which lessons could be taken. Sentimental paintings exploited babies and ingenuous children, as well as kittens, lambs and other newborn, nonviolent animals to posit an innocent paradise on earth.

The second most common subject in these paintings was landscape, a theme that appeared about one-third as frequently as genre scenes. In 1883 American patrons were purchasing more paintings of attractive country scenes, particularly by Barbizon and Hudson River artists, than they had ten years earlier. Although American patrons seemed more willing than previously to take nature as it existed, appreciating the beauty of the ordinary, they were still impressed by landscapes made more beguiling by the light of early morning or twilight. And they certainly remained enthusiastic about paintings of exotic locations and dramatic scenery. Landscape is a difficult category to define neatly because painters also used it as a backdrop for pictures with titles like End of the Day, in which returning cattle became a human metaphor, or as the setting in which simple but admirable peasants rested from their work.

Depictions of life in the Middle East and North Africa followed genre and landscape in popularity. Because the “Eastern” painting included views of Venice, Constantinople or Cairo, these could also be classified as landscapes. However, this kind of subject was usually geographically vague—Moorish Girl Dancing or Arabs at a Ford—but romanticized life in distant regions. Next came military paintings, a field dominated by the French, who concentrated on the battlefield glories of Napoleon or skirmishes from the recent Franco-Prussian War. American collectors also bought encampment descriptions of roll calls and soldiers playing cards.

The remaining categories appeared much less frequently. Occasionally, these collections contained paintings based on historical events or scenes from literature. Likewise, myths, allegories and religious subjects were rare and still-life arrangements even rarer. Portraits tended to be of current family members or of ancestors.

What did these American collectors want in painting? Their choices suggest that they accepted the primacy of subject matter, that they enjoyed paintings that could be translated easily into words in order to minimize the ambiguity of the scene and, finally, that they were happier with themes evoking a European past than with those documenting an American present.

They respected the ability of a painter to command artistic means, lively colors or strong brush strokes, for example, but they regarded these means as subordinate to theme. Their definition of a good painting probably would have excluded the spatial experiments, questions of perception or the reality of flux that increasingly intrigued innovative French artists of the 1860s and 1870s. They expected artists to account for a reassuring or a romantic world, not to inquire about the independent possibilities of formal elements, and they assumed brushwork would be thematically descriptive rather than an expressive indicator of a period’s pulse.

Secondly, the paintings they bought were “verbal” paintings, works of art that described places, told stories, explained situations, accounted for events. These canvases narrated, discovered or contrived moments cleansed of ambiguity and confusion. Unlike the ineffable Rembrandt portrait that demands imagination and risk and may change in content from day to day as variables in the interactive process change, these paintings offered little room for interpretation. Their statements, reflecting a world viewed in terms of categories rather than possibilities, were easily read and easily discussed. They encouraged talk—talk that would confirm the evidence the artist had cleverly worked into the explanatory scheme.

Finally, the subject matter these collectors enjoyed had relatively little to do with the dynamic forces that had transformed the United States and had made them financially secure. We do not find paintings of rolling mills, railroad yards or grain elevators. This could be explained by arguing that painters on both sides of the Atlantic ignored such subjects. Yet these patrons regularly commissioned artists in Paris and in New York and could have requested works that showed the vitality and achievements of the country’s industrial and commercial transformation. They were also surprisingly modest about their own activities. Where are the paintings depicting J. Pierpont Morgan at the office or A. T. Stewart in his department store? Instead, owners preferred scenes of a rural, preindustrial world, pictures set in the small towns of France or Germany, in European fields plowed for centuries or in the tranquil valleys of Connecticut or the mountains of the Catskills.

The people in these rural places recall for us the good old days. Their actions, expressing the positive and negative of their humanness and their persistent failure to remember the lessons of the past, were socially instructive but politically innocuous. Not all subjects were comforting. Arabs on horseback, sheiks entering harems or generals quizzing recently captured prisoners provided excitement and variation, but such exotic events in distant places were taken by American as enchanting fairy tales, not disturbing realities. Curiously, the pragmatic businessman, who was seldom quiet about the virtues of American life and enterprise, wanted his art to romanticize a European past.

WHAT THE PHOTOGRAPHS REVEAL

Sheldon and D. Appleton and Company, the publishers, selected 203 photographs for Artistic Houses to illustrate their contention that “The domestic architecture of no nation in the world can show trophies more original, affluent, or admirable.” Of the 97 buildings photographed, four (nos. 17, 174, 199, 203) were not private residences. The rooms featured in the 93 private houses and apartments were the spaces in which the whole family met or entertained the public. Sheldon selected 53 plates of halls, entrées and stairways, 47 of dining rooms, 36 of drawing rooms, parlors, salons and sitting rooms, 30 of libraries, 11 of picture galleries and five of reception rooms. There were also two photographs of music rooms, two plates of Japanese rooms and one each of a smoking room, conservatory, ballroom, pavilion and tapestry room. Thus, 96 percent of the interiors in these houses were public rather than private spaces, rooms in which the family would normally entertain friends and guests.

Only eight of the photographs described rooms (five bedrooms and three boudoirs) that probably were used only by the members of the household. Sheldon chose interiors to photograph which, though usable informally by the residents, were central to formal occasions. He ignored basements, attics, kitchens and servants’ quarters, support areas for the functioning of the household without which the “effortless” entertaining that occurred in the dining room and living room would have been impossible. He also avoided areas in which family and guests might let their hair down or perform private functions, such as the billiard, room and bathroom. The interiors he featured were, undoubtedly, the ones of which a family was most proud and also the ones a curious public would have wanted to see. They were also the best to prove his contention that American domestic architecture was unrivaled for trophies “original, affluent, or admirable.”

The photographs of these formal spaces published in 1883 and 1884 reveal a surprising similarity in appearance despite obvious exceptions. The exceptions that stand out are those usually explainable by the kind of house, its function, location or age. Many of the New York houses were restricted to 25′ or 50′ widths, such as the homes of George F. Baker and William H. De Forest, while those of William I. Russell (no. 74) and O. D. Munn (no. 130) were freestanding structures located in the bucolic settings of planned communities. A few of the houses included were summer or weekend houses, not the primary residences of their owners. The halls of the Newcomb house at Elberon, New Jersey (nos. 84 & 85) and the Goelet house at Newport, Rhode Island (nos. 27 & 28) are spacious, informally furnished and located at the centers of radiating plans. Their shape, size, purpose and character differ markedly from those of their owners’ town houses in New York City. The Moorish pavilion (no. 72) near the Ottendorfers’ house overlooking the Hudson River is singular in this series. Geographical differences are also noticeable. The interiors of several houses in Boston—for example, those of Walter Hunnewell (nos. 147 & 148), John Charles Phillips (nos. 163–165) and Charles A. Whittier (nos. 169–172) appear to be less crowded, roomier and more comfortable than the houses erected in New York at the end of the 1870s and the first years of the 1880s. The collection also includes houses built decades earlier but later remodeled to keep up with decorative trends. Though fashionable for the 1880s, the dining room of Samuel J. Tilden on Gramercy Park South (no. 111) does not look like dining rooms of new houses erected uptown in these years.

Fig. 18. Robert Goelet house, Newport, Rhode Island.

Another exception to the general appearance of these interiors is attributable to the work of L. C. Tiffany & Associated Artists. Tiffany and his colleagues were responsible for the interior decoration of several of these houses; the best examples of their touch are seen in the photographs of the dining room and library of Tiffany’s own apartment (nos. 15 & 16) and in the George Kemp salon (no. 140). In these rooms the decorative energy comes from the square and rectangular panels of varied materials that make up the wall surface rather than from the arrangement of discrete objects. The result is a mosaic of shapes held together tenuously in a plane, conveying an implication of flux not found in the majority of these rooms.

Despite these exceptions, these interiors share a marked family resemblance as if they were created at the same moment, according to agreed-upon decorative criteria, by designers who had taught one another. We find the same materials and preferences over and over: partially covered parquetry floors; three-part walls consisting of a strong dark wainscoting, a middle neutral ground of paper, brocade or leather, and a decorated frieze at the top; ceilings usually paneled in dark wood but sometimes finished in painted plaster; brass sconces and chandeliers; centered, shelf-supporting overmantels with tiles below; fine woods and superior wood carving; exquisite hangings of plush and velvet; heavy embroidered portieres; firm but appealing colors—crimson, dead gold, bronze; stamped leather chairs in the dining room; Oriental and Moorish accents; bric-a-brac from the world over—“Egyptian waterbottles, Japanese cups, Thuringian porcelain, crackleware, cloisonné, Spanish faience”—and on the walls original oil paintings by familiar names of the modern French, German, Spanish and Italian schools.

These homogeneous interiors tend to be dark because of the dominant mahogany, walnut or stained-oak paneling and because the windows are not adequate to overcome their prevailing seriousness. Perhaps the photography unduly affects this conclusion. The light that does enter does not lift these interiors but bounces from the exquisitely finished surfaces of the wood and from the scores of well-crafted objects within the rooms. The reflected lights from these objects compete with one another and with the glistening surfaces of the panels. Despite attempts to draw attention to focal points such as fireplaces, sideboards or paintings, these rooms lack areas to contemplate. There are not enough voids or neutral zones to permit visual rest, and the competition between objects, major and minor, prevents us from appreciating any one. Space is displaced by fastidious arrangements of unlimited, disparate possessions. Quantity triumphs over character and presentation over discovery.

The inclination of the wealthy elite in the United States in the early 1880s to define, clarify and order Society extended also to Society’s art, particularly art within the home. Just as there were authorities in the field of manners, there were authorities in the field of art and decoration to protect couples, some with little artistic training or sensitivity, from embarrassment and to reassure them that their domestic environment would properly reflect their position in society. With a few exceptions the homes Sheldon visited had not been decorated by their owners.

Mrs. Burton Harrison observed in Harper’s Monthly (August 1884): “In plain words, the decorative ‘craze’ has had its day. Amateurs no longer creep in where artists dare not tread. The legitimate adorners of our homes breathe a long sigh of relief.” Amateurs were out; the experts had entered the interiors Sheldon photographed. How much control the decorator exerted varied, but in many of these houses, as a member of the New York firm of Pottier and Stymus explained in 1882, the work could be extensive. “We generally get a house from the mason, that is, when the mason work has been finished, and have charge of the entire woodwork decoration…. Sometimes we get carte blanche for everything—style, design, quality, and price.”

Home owners, particularly the women, were encouraged by those who wrote columns on interior decoration to indulge their caprices, but those included in Artistic Houses tended to do so within the artistic framework determined by a decorator. Sheldon praised Mrs. John A. Zerega for her pencil drawing which John La Farge transferred into the portiere at the end of her drawing room (no. 25) and Mrs. F. W. Hurtt for the furniture she had selected in Morocco for their Moorish library-parlor (nos. 95 & 96).

The surprising similarity of these interiors, referred to earlier, was caused by several factors. Most of them were created, reconstructed or refurnished in the major cities of the Eastern seaboard—Boston, New York and Philadelphia—within a few years of each other in the late 1870s and the early 1880s. They were designed and furnished by decorating experts who guaranteed homeowners fashionable, contemporary rooms reflecting their wealth and social status. Despite variations among decorating firms and acts of self-expression on the part of the owners, the need and reassurance of proper behavior, extended to the design of the home, transcended them.

In addition to the similar appearance of the large majority of these rooms, they are also similar in that they contain no people—for that matter they contain few signs that human beings have used them recently. The photographs show no proud wife and husband sitting in their newly decorated drawing room. Many of these couples had at least four children—the Cheneys had 11—but there is no child posing in these photographs or even surreptitiously watching the photographer at work from behind a grandfather clock. The photographs are strangely devoid of indications of informal family life responsible for those untidy piles of items which, at the end of day or before the guests arrive, are picked up and returned to their proper locations. Such evidence of messy human use is hard to find. In fact, any evidence of human use is rare. The slip of paper that Maria Vanderbilt left in her book to mark the place where she stopped reading (no. 124) is one of the few reassurances that the owners read the books that are seen in these photographs.

We cannot find children’s toys or games, even playthings neatly put away. Sometimes we can see a newspaper or a magazine on a lower shelf, but not where it will be clearly documented in the photograph. Sometimes we find a letter opener, but rarely the opened letter. Ashtrays are cleaned and pipes removed, pencils picked up, sewing put in the basket. Occasionally, we notice imperfections that take on positive qualities in the face of such fastidious housekeeping. Someone has neglected to set both candles perpendicularly in the Joys’ library (no. 30) or to straighten the books in the Willings’ unique hall in Chicago (no. 153). In short, these photographs do not document the casual or accidental reminders that human beings lived at these addresses.

On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that the families and servants worked hard to get the house ready for the arrival of Sheldon and his photographer. They have cleaned the fireplaces and polished the metal plates at the rear of the fire opening or they have lit a fire (nos. 165–167)—another sign of life. They have arranged scarfs carefully to accent railings (no. 88) or pinned back a portiere to reveal the entrance to another room (no. 23). In many rooms they have aligned objects on tables as if working from a graph-paper pattern or they have stacked books to obtain arty asymmetrical balance (no. 203). Likewise, chairs have been placed in drawing rooms in locations that would have frustrated conversation but won awards for artistic distribution (nos. 100, 116, 129). In shooting numerous dining rooms, the photographer has suggested that the two closest to the camera be pulled out from the table to funnel the response of the viewer.

As they prepared for the photographer, the owners and servants tried to give their interiors a spit-and-polish look before they became permanently frozen on the pages of Artistic Houses. This is not surprising. However, the intensity with which they wanted to leave the impression of domestic perfection is surprising. They purged the accidental and the casual in their quest for the appearance of impersonal and impeccable order. They wanted to be recognized by the contemporary public and by history for their flawless arrangements rather than their personal imprints. In addition to getting ready for dress inspection, many actually staged the scene that was to be photographically preserved by rearranging rooms to strengthen the intended impression. This can be observed by examining rooms photographed from two different positions, good examples of which are the John T. Martin picture gallery (nos. 149 & 150) and the Hurtt library-parlor (nos. 95 & 96). Martin’s prize painting was a Millet study of a male and female peasant walking to work. In number 149 it appears behind the divided sofa at the near left; in number 150, the same room photographed from the opposite end, the Millet reappears on the easel at the distant right. Similarly, the objects on the central table have been changed and shifted to suit each perspective. In the Hurtt interiors, the statue of a strumming musician was moved to appear each time in the foreground room, the round table has been substituted for the three-legged table and the objects on the latter have been changed.

These are small reminders that photography is not necessarily neutral. Some of these house owners were willing to manipulate their domestic settings in exchange for the impact they thought the photographs would have on the public. Artistic Houses is a valuable record of interior decoration and the life-style of the wealthy in the early 1880s. It was also an active agent that discouraged revelations of family idiosyncrasies and normal patterns and encouraged steps that left the impression of elegant and ordered homes.

The photographs in Artistic Houses document interiors that do not look like the interiors of houses built earlier in the nineteenth century. This is to be expected because changes in fashions meant different materials for hangings, different woods and styles of furniture, or the increasing popularity of Oriental rugs and stained-glass windows. However, the difference between many of these interiors and those of the decades preceding the 1880s was not, primarily, caused by changes in furnishings but by a new function of the wealthy American town house, particularly the town house in New York City. A large number of residences celebrated in Artistic Houses have been transformed from traditional domestic environments stressing elegance, comfort and convenience into domestic museums. The American Architect and Building News recognized this new phenomenon (August 9, 1884): “But a man’s house, which used to be his castle, is now his museum, and the purist understands that things are to be considered as unticketed specimens, the tokens of the collector’s prowess or the souvenirs of his travels.” Clarence Cook noticed the tendency to fill houses with objects as early as 1876 in his series on the house written for Scribner’s Monthly (February 1876):

A New York parlor of the kind called “stylish,” where no merely useful thing is permitted, and where nothing can be used with comfort, is always overcrowded; things are bought from pure whim, or because the buyer doesn’t know what to do with her money; and as the parlor is only used on what are called state occasions, what would be the good of having easy-going, comfortable things in it. So everything bought for show goes there; and as the temptation to New York rich people is to be all the time buying things for show, the inevitable result is, that in time the intruding camel crowds out the occupant of the tent.

This description certainly does not apply to all of the metropolitan interiors published in Artistic Houses. It is not true of the drawing room of Walter and June Hunnewell (no. 148), or the dining rooms of Dr. Haven (no. 80) and Jane and John Charles Phillips (no. 165). But these were interiors in Boston, not New York, where Society’s definition of what an important house should look like was discussed and heeded more frequently than in Boston or Philadelphia.

Americans for generations had displayed prized possessions within their homes. The difference between the traditional approach and the new one evident in so many New York interiors is that, as Cook predicted, the objects were crowding out the family. So jammed with stuff are some of these spaces that we may wonder if the owners asked the photographer for a few minutes’ delay in order to bring in special objects from surrounding rooms. In the drawing room of Judge Hilton (no. 78) so many chairs, stands, tables and easels block the way that they must have affected the traffic patterns of the house. Egerton Winthrop’s reception room (no. 54) looks like a warehouse of exotic but not very functional furniture. Even the established families of old New York were smitten by bric-a-brac mania, as the drawing room of Hamilton Fish (no. 52) demonstrates.

In such houses the museum mentality seems to have replaced the idea of the home as a protective environment serving the physical, social, spiritual and cultural requirements of the family. As the importance of domestic exhibition space increased, comfort, convenience, movement, intimacy and repose decreased. When the William H. Vanderbilt mansion was first opened to 2000 friends of the family on March 7, 1882, the reporter for the Times searched for signs of domesticity amid the glitter:

There is nothing exactly loud, or anything which “swears.” Still, the effect is crushing. Eyes distended to their utmost are palled, as the gustatory sense is sometimes cloyed by overtasting. One longs to find out if there is not one simple room where there might be found some repose.

This writer may have been reacting particularly to the Japanese room (no. 118).

An ironic consequence of the museum mentality was the failure of many of these interiors to express the distinctiveness their families assumed they were expressing. Believing that a house should reflect who the family was and what the family did, owners displayed proudly Japanese screens, Bristol faience, modern Louis XVI furniture from Paris, fragments of Venetian tapestries—artwork they had labored to find or traveled abroad to purchase. And they commissioned Tiffany windows and worked to add a Diaz painting to their collections. Unfortunately, there were other families trying to find distinctiveness through the same objects. One display of bric-a-brac looked like another display of bric-a-brac, one family’s series of modern conservative masters matched that of another family. Reassured of being correct, they were not reassured of being distinctive in their choices. Furthermore, works of art in many well-appointed houses looked like works of art in a museum, an assemblage of disparate objects. Collected for ulterior reasons, the displays in the new domestic museum often were not held together by a personal point of view. These assemblages of prized possessions, intended to reveal the family, frequently revealed the characterlessness of the formulation of the collection.

Sheldon’s informative but critically timid commentaries do not alert us to trouble spots which then or later might dim the brilliant new day of American domestic art. He would have seconded M. E. W. Sherwood’s conclusion about the country’s participation “in the full floodtide of modern art improvement and beauty.” He did not refer to the possibility that these interiors may have resembled one another even though he praised owners for including certain names within their painting collection and implied the sophistication of collectors who display the particular bric-a-brac that was fashionable in 1883–84. The decision to eliminate people from the photographs and to focus on the objects and settings was undoubtedly his idea. These scenes of impersonal perfection delighted him. His enthusiasm for what he saw was unchecked, as is evident in his repeated phrases lauding owners and decorators for their ability to produce results without flaws. His text is filled with compliments like “perfect harmony runs through the walls,” “furnished throughout with rare good taste,” “surroundings in perfect accord with the desires of a cultivated taste.” Nor is Sheldon aware of the vulnerability of these interiors to charges of ostentatious display. To the contrary, he repeatedly reassures his readers that the opposite is true. Of the Childs’ drawing room (no. 202) he wrote, “Not the slightest attempt at show appears in this room, or, indeed, anywhere throughout the house.” “Nothing has been done for ostentation” in the Anderson parlor, the decoration of the Goddard library (no. 161) “shows no haste to be something for its own sake,” and even in the palatial Villard houses “no attempt at ostentation appears in any part of the architectural outline or the decorative scheme.” Sheldon tried to convince readers that all of these interiors had been discreetly integrated to obtain the ideal balance, “to secure style without pretension, luxury without danger to homely, domestic effect, simplicity without monotony, and dignity without severity,” as he characterized the William Clark house.

Perhaps we could attribute Sheldon’s relentlessly positive conclusions to the circumstances of the publication. He had asked important and wealthy citizens to permit him to describe and photograph their houses. Once they consented, he was not in a good position to tell them how to arrange them better. The entire text contains no negative criticism, not even a highly qualified reservation. Even when he seems to be heading toward an inevitable rebuke, Sheldon will either find a positive implication or will leave the impression that there is nothing wrong. An example of the latter is his response to the drawing room of the Vanderbilts (no. 116). “The effect is gorgeous in the extreme: everything sparkles and flashes with gold and color—with mother-of-pearl, with marbles, with jewel-effects in glass— and almost every surface is covered, one might say weighted, with ornament ….”

Sheldon was positive because he could not risk offending subscribers, because he believed the contemporary interiors of no nation could match those of the United States and because the text and photographs in Artistic Houses were the “worthiest extant representative” of this superiority. He had reasons to be confident. Never before in America had the most influential and wealthiest citizens of the largest cities been so involved in art. They wanted beautiful homes. They hired noted architects to build them and noted decorators to furnish them. They collected works of art to display in their houses, sometimes traveling abroad to find appropriate items. They read about the increasing quality of American architecture and decoration in newly-formed art journals and in the increasing number of articles that appeared in such popular monthlies as Lippincott’s and Harper’s. They were proud of the high quality of craftsmanship in their houses and enjoyed the intricate and extensive evidence of that skill in the houses of their friends. They knew that the finest of American homes were now testimonials to the country’s rising cultural and artistic taste. Artistic Houses confirmed the reality of this “exceedingly fresh and brilliant morning.”

Fig. 19. Hollis Hunnewell house, Boston, Massachusetts.

Yet this artistic dawn was not entirely American. “A journey through France might not produce an impression half so Gallic as an entrance into Mr. Hunnewell’s ballroom,” Sheldon had written. On the other hand, if affluent Americans were buying the old treasures of Europe, Europeans, restless under the long shadow of the Renaissance, were beginning to discover refreshing characteristics in American domestic architecture. This began in the years the volumes of Artistic Houses were published. By 1887 architectural journals in Germany, France and Britain had called attention to American houses because they were so “curiously instructive.” These characteristics were not those discussed by Sheldon or stressed in his photographs; in fact, they were not the same houses he had selected.

Europeans overlooked the town houses and concentrated on the freestanding houses, usually of wood, that had been built for the middle and upper-middle classes in the suburbs and the countryside. What they admired were features which the photographs in Artistic Houses tended to obscure or to demote. They liked the unpretentious informality which indicated the family was “at home,” the simplicity and absence of show, the spatial openness made possible by central heating, the internal flexibility that enabled owners to link or isolate rooms, the importance of comfort, the laborsaving mechanical innovations and shortcuts that increased domestic convenience, and the architects’ extended authority (built-ins, closets, chimney seats) over the appearance and the function of the interior.

Ironically, European architects and critics turned their backs on the new urban architecture that had inspired Artistic Houses and Sheldon’s pronouncements of national achievement, but found an “exceedingly fresh and brilliant morning” in the suburban houses based on a longer and broader American tradition.