Friday, May 13, 2016

Arabella Worsham's Gilded Age Dressing Room

A detail of the vanity cabinet door
by George Alfred Schastey
for Arabella Worsham's Dressing Room.
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Devoted Classicist is a long-time fan of museum period rooms.  For a time, these installations had fallen out of favor due to their cost and space required for a successful display.  But it is heartening to a Traditionalist to see a major institution step forward with a new installation with artifacts that have languished in storage for years:  The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A model of the Worsham residence
4 West 54th Street, New York City.
Photo by John J. Tackett for
The Devoted Classicist blog.
Commissioned by Arabella Worsham (later Huntington) as part of a comprehensive interior renovation of an existing brownstone townhouse, the room is a rare surviving Gilded Age commission from now-little known cabinetmaker/decorator George A. Shastey in 1881.  The room comes from Worsham's house at 4 West 54th Street, a property that also included the two flanking lots; the site is now the garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

Alexandre Cabanel's 1882 portrait of
Arabella Worsham, collection of
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Photo by John J. Tackett for
The Devoted Classicist.
Arabella "Belle" Worsham's background is a bit sketchy and possibly 'sanitized' to say the least.  Born Arabella Duvall Yarrington in Union Springs, Alabama, around 1850, she grew up in Richmond, Virginia, a tough but bustling town during the Civil War years.  Her widowed mother owned a boarding house and Arabella was said to have married John Archer Worsham when she was 18 or 19 and soon widowed before having a son.  But married or not, J.A.Worsham was already married and very much alive, owning a gambling card parlor in Richmond frequented by Collis B. Huntington leading up to his 1869 purchase of the eastern leg of his railroad empire which stretched coast to coast.  Although not a drinker or smoker, Huntington loved to gamble and he had an eye for young women although he was married with a wife living on Park Avenue at 38th Street, New York.  Soon Arabella, her son, several siblings and her mother were installed in Manhattan where they bought several properties financed by Huntington but always in Arabella's name, leading up to the purchase of this house.

The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room.
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Arabella had the house gutted to the exterior shell and set about having luxurious interiors installed in the latest taste, with expense not being an issue.  The house was one of the first private residences to have a passenger elevator, just one of many innovations for the time.

The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room.
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Dressing Room is a high-style example of Aestheticism, a combination of European Renaissance, Islamic, Japanese and Modern styles mixed to create a luxurious private environment for the lady of the house. Satinwood and amaranth (or dark purpleheart) are used to create intricate marquetry in geometric patterns and motifs such as sewing implements and hairdressing tools as well as jewelry plus carved detailing with cherub heads, swags and garlands.

The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room.
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A wide, marble-topped lavatory is placed beneath a massive mirror and a secondary gaslight fixture.  The upper walls are covered in teal wallpaper stenciled in gold and silver quatrefoils that shimmer in the subtle lighting.

Built-in fittings in the Worsham-Rockefeller
Dressing Room as installed at
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo by John J. Tackett for
The Devoted Classicist.
No detail was left without consideration.  Even the ceiling had elaborately planned decoration.  The silver toiletry set includes combs, hand mirrors, scissors, a needle case and a darning egg.  All the elements add up to create a single Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.

The ceiling of the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room
as installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo by John J. Tackett for The Devoted Classicist.
Huntington's wife Elizabeth died in 1889 after a long bout with cancer, allowing Huntington to marry Belle and adopt her son Archer; the ceremony was performed in the home with Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, officiating.  They moved into Huntington's Park Avenue house (and then building a house in 1893 at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street on the site now occupied by Tiffany & Company) and the house was sold fully furnished to John D. and Laura Spelman Rockefeller.  The furnishings and decorations were kept intact until his death in 1937 when parts were distributed to museums before being demolished in 1938.  A Moorish-style Smoking Room was given to the Brooklyn Museum and this Dressing Room and adjacent (Master) Bedroom were given to the Museum of the City of New York.  After it became clear that the latter could no longer display the rooms, the bedroom was given to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and this dressing room was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Anabella Worsham's toilette set
as displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo by John J. Tackett for The Devoted Classicist.
After Collis Huntington's death, Belle inherited one-third of his estate, $150 million (about $3.1 billion today) making her one of the wealthiest women in the country.  Never really part of New York Society, she bought a 14 bedroom house in Paris that underwent a complete renovation and became even more interesting in collecting art.  Thirteen years later, she married her late husband's nephew, Henry E. Huntington, who had built a lavish estate in San Marino, California, some say to woo her.  But she did not care for the area and never spent more than a month there for the rest of her life.  That estate is now the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.  Arabella Worsham Huntington is buried in the San Marino garden in a classical mausoleum designed by architect John Russell Pope.

11 comments:

  1. She didn't like California. Why did they bury her there?

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    1. That's just what I was thinking.

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    2. I do not know the answer to this. It was not that she did not like California -- she had a San Francisco mansion destroyed by the Great Fire -- but that she was uneasy, from what I have read, with the celebrity attention she received from the San Marino locals. It is the opposite of the trend today, where non-celebrities have become famous for the attention they crave.

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    3. Arabella chose her grave site, they loved San Marino...but age and infirmity caught up to her...thus making her journey across country impossible. Pope's design for their Temple d' Amour eventually became the verbatim model for The Jefferson Memorial in DC thus making his career. Arabella and Henry adored the Mediterranean aspect of San Marino, which they owned entirely...the vast open sky radiating colors unimaginable at Sunrise & Sunset, gardens they created which were unheard of then, bamboo forests, cactus gardens with plants brought in on trains from Mexico deserts, Redwood groves mimicking Sequoia, lakes filled with all types of waterlitlies and sacred lotus and even an authentic Japanese tea house for ceremony rituals with family and friends....all set within a Japanese garden reached under a pergola of wisteria with the pergola structure styled in Adirondack style but of concrete fashioned to look like woodbranches and trunks...last seen on film in Memoirs of a Geisha.

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  2. I am surprised that the Rockefellers, such sticklers for propriety, would buy a house with a questionable past. The rooms from that house now in Brooklyn and Virginia are real stunners. After Rockefeller's death the original house was well photographed, so these period rooms are especially well documented.
    --Jim

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    Replies
    1. Apparently J. D. Rockefeller, though a strict Baptist, was practical and non-judgemental enough to realize a substantial, furnished, 3 lot property, was a good buy despite any possibly tainted associations. His son, JDR Jr, built an enormous apartment building-sized mansion on the same block, but complained later that the area had become too commercial with so many noisy bars and a few brothels.

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  3. She was the 19thC La Pompadour, as Alma Spreckels was for the early 20thC in San Francisco society...both building magnificent homes, living in Paris part of the year, Huguette Clarks mother had a similar rise to wealth. Anna's son, went onto to found the Hispanic Society of America, which counted Hearst and Morgan amongst others as members. In San Marino he restored the Old Mill and gardens, part of the San Gabriel Mission which one can still meander thru...and he married the famed sculptress Anna Hyatt Huntington. Henry adored Anna, and I suspect there was always a spark for an affair as Collis was certainly far beyond in years...Anna, literally blind as a bat, amassed great knowledge culminating in collecting Sevres & French Royal provenanced furnishings, and Henry...well the Library says it all. As a former docent of the Huntington Library...I can attest she was a great LADY...who really must've had a Mind so magnetic to pull objects, men and wealth to her. I suspect she was the Great Conversationist rather than the Great Seducer some thought of her as...you know, the same ones who were jealous but for the era their great fortunes derived from either a pick, an axe or a hoe...not like today's spawned from legal avarice. I had the wonderful chance to be seated next to the curator, she spoke of the restoration, installation and the mounting excitement of this room being prepared for the public at The Met Gala celebrating Charles James a couple of years ago...it's spend our was the talk of the table...shimmering beautiful whispers...in the 21stC.

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    Replies
    1. She was definitely an interesting woman, one I had not read much about until recently. She appeared not to be particularly concerned with creating a public image as a woman with rarified taste, but rather creating high-style interiors filled with art and antiques she appreciated herself. It is a refreshing departure of an all too common approach today where walls are absolutely lined with record-breaking purchases of contemporary art, purchased on the advice as investments. Thank you for commenting, T.S.

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    2. Meant today 'it's splendor was the talk of table'...it was Arabella who chose the site for her grave...and Pope's Temple d' Amour to Henry & Arabella would became the model that years later would make his career, Jefferson's Memorial in Washington, D.C. Belle & Henry both loved San Marino, the expansive glorious sunrise/sunset colors then not known to most back East, she even had an authentic historic Japanese Tea House installed for the ceremony...surreal and rare cactus gardens then not seen outside of Mexico or the Mediterranean, thickly fended Redwood groves with understory plantains of camellias in abundance, Bamboo groves, water lily ponds and lakes...and that glorious home, of really which was one of many...age and infirmity did sweep in quickly, thus putting a damper on all. San Marino was really their ranch...their Shangrila.

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  4. I'm rather gobsmacked by the model. I wonder who made it?

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    Replies
    1. Ulysses Dietz says it was made in the 1950s for the Brooklyn Museum in conjunction with the installation there of the Moorish Smoking Room. I loved the model, too; the sort of thing seldom seen these days of computer generated images. Thanks for commenting.

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