Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, Peggy A. Olley, and Jeffrey A. Cohen. Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016. 160 pp.; 170 color and 22 bw illus., checklist, chronology, appendixes, bibliography, index. $30.00.
In a compelling work of scholarship, Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley and her coauthors, Peggy A. Olley and Jeffrey A. Cohen, have combined their talents to explore the historical context of the extraordinary suite of painted and gilded furniture designed in 1808 by Benjamin Latrobe for the Philadelphia home (also of Latrobe’s design) of William Waln and his wife, Mary Wilcocks Waln. This group of furniture is not new in decorative arts literature—far from it. The book’s introduction quickly acknowledges this, tracing broadly the history of the accession by American museums’ of objects from the group, beginning with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s (PMA) acquisition of two chairs in 1935 and referring to earlier publications that over many decades laid the groundwork for Classical Splendor. The reader may find it interesting to review the publications listed in the bibliography and footnotes to trace the development of scholarship and the objects’ various attributions. One might observe that the successes of the present book result from looking more closely at the evidence contained in the objects themselves, in related documents, and from thinking more expansively about the contexts in which they can be understood. Taken together with the research that came before, Classical Splendor is an object lesson in the cumulative accomplishments of scholarship combined with the evolution of curatorial perspective. As time has passed, the focus has moved from one of aesthetic interest in the objects to one that increasingly views them as much more than spectacular works of art—as cultural artifacts whose significance lies equally in their expression of multiple historical dynamics.
To touch briefly on a few of the works that preceded Classical Splendor: an early mention of two of the Latrobe chairs in Berry B. Tracy’s Classical America, 1815–1845 (1963) contained no attribution other than a Philadelphia origin and suggested that they dated from circa 1820. In 1987 Beatrice B. Garvan’s Federal Philadelphia: The Athens of the Western World included thirteen objects from the Waln suite: side chairs, card tables, a pier table, a sofa, and a window bench. The text identified Latrobe as the designer, Waln as the client, Thomas Wetherill as the maker, and George Bridport as the possible painter. The furniture was dated 1808–1810, coinciding closely with the completion of work on the Waln House. In addition, Garvan’s essay suggested more of the details and visual impact of the interiors for which the furniture was designed. Jack Lindsey, writing in The Magazine Antiques of January 1991, expanded on Garvan’s work by discussing Latrobe’s possible design sources for the Waln furniture as well as his furniture designs for Dolley and President James Madison. In Lindsey’s essay, Thomas Wetherill is still credited with making the Waln furniture and George Bridport with painting and gilding it. In 2004 Sumpter T. Priddy’s American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790–1840 included items from the Waln suite as well as Latrobe’s designs for the Madisons. Priddy placed them in the context of the classical taste—in this case, particularly as expressed in Philadelphia and Baltimore—that informs much of the early fancy material he considers.
Though these writings and other earlier scholarship pointed the way, Classical Splendor allows for a greater scope of inquiry and sets a higher aspiration to explore fully “the story of the furniture’s patrons and makers, as well as its creation, use, and history, [and to] show the widespread influence of these pieces on the landscape of art and interiors in the nation’s early years” (p. 9). The opening chapter, Jeffrey A. Cohen’s “Place, Time, and Architecture: Materialized Memory and the Moment of Latrobe’s Waln House,” makes it clear that the authors sought to establish a deep and extensive context for the Walns’ furniture. Their approach to the subject responds to what must have been Latrobe’s approach to his commission, one articulated in the often-cited exhortation of architect Eliel Saarinen to his son, Eero, over a century later: “Always design a thing by considering its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” (as quoted in Cranston Jones, “The Maturing Modern,” Time, July 2, 1956, p. 51). Cohen not only delves into the documentary resources themselves but pauses to reflect on some of the nineteenth-century antiquarians whose efforts preserved critical fragments of Philadelphia’s architectural history as buildings were being lost to urban redevelopment. Passages such as these enliven the historical narrative, to be sure, but they also demonstrate the strength of the house’s early grip on Philadelphia’s historical consciousness. Cohen lays out the typology of Philadelphia’s grander houses, analyzing examples from the second half of the eighteenth century, giving attention to their external composition, massing, surface treatments, and relationships to their sites. With these, he sets the stage for what he calls Latrobe’s “new modernity” that emerged at the end of the century. Cohen examines Latrobe’s correspondence about the Waln commission as plans developed and changed in response to, among other things, the Walns’ selection of a new location for the house during the design process. Comparison with another commission, the unbuilt Tayloe House in Washington, D.C., for which drawings survive, allows the reader to appreciate the Waln House as an inflection of Latrobe’s design strategies rather than a unique expression. Cohen goes on to trace the influence of the Waln design on later Philadelphia residences that adopted and adapted its three-storey height, three-bay width, and prominent arches.
In the next chapter, “Social Theater: Latrobe and the Walns Set the Stage,” the authors continue to build the dense, multidimensional context for their subject. They discuss federal Philadelphia as fertile ground for Latrobe’s ambitions, point to the social and religious backgrounds of William Waln and May Wilcocks Waln, and examine closely the architectural and historical design impulses that drove Latrobe’s work. They give special and expansive attention to the design background of the elaborately paint-decorated interiors of the Walns’ two drawing rooms that would be the setting for the furniture suite. Additional exploration of the furniture’s genesis includes discussion of the Francophile atmosphere of contemporary Philadelphia, which delighted in its celebrated Napoleonic exiles, as well as the Walns’ travel with Latrobe to New York City to seek design inspiration. To emphasize the radical nature of the furniture’s design and the spectacular visual quality of its decoration, the authors cite and illustrate pertinent examples from Baltimore and Philadelphia, most compellingly the famous ebony seating furniture made almost contemporaneously for Stephen Girard, which expressed the strong continuity of conservative taste among the very wealthy. Just as the Walns’ house left its mark on Philadelphia’s architectural landscape, their furniture also had its effect, which the authors explore.
The chapter goes on to consider in detail and with more specificity than previous treatments the design sources George Bridport employed for the Waln furniture. For example, the designs painted on the chairs’ tablets or crest rails had long been understood as adaptations from Thomas Sheraton’s The Cabinet-Maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, but the authors demonstrate not only the motifs’ derivation from other published sources that Bridport owned but also that Sheraton was not recorded in his library. The reader is left with little doubt that the design achievement of Latrobe and his collaborators was indeed singular. As something of a denouement, the chapter touches on subsequent additions and redecorations by the Walns and on the dispersal of their furniture after they suffered financial reversals in the Panic of 1819.
The text moves next to an exploration of the primary individuals responsible for making and decorating the Walns’ suite: cabinetmaker John Aitken, decorative painter George Bridport, and upholsterer John Rea. While Bridport and Rea had long been associated with Latrobe’s furniture for the Walns, they are here definitively linked. And while earlier work attributed the furniture’s manufacture to carpenter Thomas Wetherill, whose signature appears on the Waln sideboard, Classical Splendor gives credit for the chairs and sideboard with ample documentation to Scottish-born John Aitken, who employed Wetherill as a journeyman to build specific components. Without corresponding specific documentary references, the sofa and card table in the PMA collection are attributed to him. Each of these three artisans is thoroughly discussed, in terms of his biography, professional career, and especially of his association with Latrobe and the Waln commission. Bridport’s section is longest, owing to his extensive list of high-profile projects and multiple collaborations with Latrobe.
“The Vanguard of Classical Splendor: Impact and Epilogue” addresses the influence of the Waln interiors and furniture, primarily on the subsequent commission Latrobe received to decorate a suite of rooms in the President’s House for James and Dolley Madison, who was a friend of Mary Waln. With designs closely related to those for the Walns, the new rooms for the Madisons were a setting for social gatherings that gave national and international significance to Latrobe’s work. As a coda to the Waln furniture’s history, the chapter closes with Waln’s financial ruin, the sale and dispersal of the furniture, and the eventual entry of much of it into museum collections.
A catalogue of Waln furniture in the PMA collection constitutes the book’s closing chapter. It contains an impressive range of information and detail, including an introductory section on the group as a whole and entries on each furniture form. Here the reader can find the results of the project’s intensive examinations of construction, decoration, upholstery, and repair and conservation history. Each catalogue entry includes commentary, which discusses the form’s origin, history, and design significance.
One finishes Classical Splendor with the sense that the subject has been exhaustively covered and that the book will be considered definitive for many years to come. To the authors’ great credit, they have crafted a volume that incorporates an exceedingly high level of scholarly detail without losing a sense of delight that Latrobe’s designs constituted a breathtaking triumph of vision and imagination in the service of the Walns’ ambitions. Their achievement allows us to have a full understanding of the intellectual, aesthetic, economic, and social environments that gave rise to these remarkable objects, while still conveying appreciation of their stunning visual impact and emotional power.
Bradley C. Brooks
Bayou Bend Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston