The Role of Period Interior Views in the Recreation of Historic Interiors, Part I

Period interior views in the form of paintings, drawings, prints or photographs are an extremely valuable tool in the accurate restoration of historic interiors.  They provide useful and often plentiful visual information about interiors from the past and aid historians in recreating an historic interior where most or all of the decoration and furnishings original to the room have disappeared over the course of time. Additional sources of information are used in the recreation of period interiors, including written historical documents such as household inventories that list most or some of the furnishings in a home at the time of the owner's death; bills of sale for the purchase of decorations and furnishings; family diaries that record changes made to the home; journals detailing household expenditures including the purchase of furniture and other furnishings; newspaper advertisements placed by local merchants dealing in household furnishings, showing what was available to householders in a particular area; and other printed material including household management guides, architectural pattern books, trade periodicals, home decorating books and serial magazines devoted to fashion and culture, all of which provided guidance and advice on how to decorate and furnish a home according to the latest styles and fashions.

The best-case scenario when restoring an historic interior is to uncover a surviving period view of that specific room.  Such a document provides answers to many questions and minimizes guesswork about the past appearance of the interior. Unfortunately, in many instances, period views of the specific historic interior undergoing restoration either no longer exist or were never created.  Under these circumstances, historians must turn to general interior views of the same historical period and focus on those that document rooms of the same type and at the same social level as the interior in question.

Below is a case study that discusses how recreated historic interiors relate to specific and general period interior views.  The essays compare two separate restored interiors to surviving period views of those rooms and to general views of rooms of the same historical period and type.  The interiors include the dining room of the Morse-Libby Mansion in Portland, Maine, and the drawing room of Lyndhusrt in Tarrytown, New York.  Both rooms are part of fully restored historic houses that are now museums.

Fig.1  Morse-Libby Mansion, Portland, Maine. Photograph, 
1910-1925. Victoria Society of Maine, Morse-Libby

Mansion, Portland, ME

In  1858, New Orleans hotel entrepreneur Ruggles Sylvester Morse began construction of his Italianate style brownstone-clad summer house in Portland, Maine (fig. 1).  Maine was the perfect location to build a house for use during the summer months.  Summers in Maine were temperate compared to the intense heat and high humidity associated with the season in Louisiana, where Morse and his wife Olive Ring Merrill Morse spent the rest of the year.  Born and raised in Maine, Morse clearly set out to build an elaborate house that proclaimed to Portland's residents the success and wealth he achieved since leaving the state to make his fortune.

Morse commissioned the recently established New York City cabinetmaking and decorating firm of Gustave Herter to furnish and decorate the interiors of his Portland house.  Herter devised interior schemes that integrated the furniture with the wall and ceiling decoration.  Each of the public rooms on the first floor, including the reception room, drawing room, dining room and library, was decorated and furnished in a different historical revival style. In keeping with the dictates of fashion during the mid-nineteenth century, the dining room was decorated in the Renaissance Revival style, which was considered appropriate to this type of interior because of its masculine, solemn quality and overt classicism.

A photograph of the dining room (fig. 2) from c.1900 clearly illustrates the architectural woodwork, furniture, lighting fixtures and floor covering supplied by Herter's firm approximately forty years earlier. Ruggles and Olivia Morse made no changes to the interiors of their Maine summer home, keeping the rooms very much as they appeared when completed in 1860. Following the death of her husband in 1893, Olive Morse sold the property in 1894 to Joseph Ralph Libby and his wife Helen Louisa Larrabee Libby.  The sale of the house included most of the furniture made by Herter as well as carpets, window curtains and lighting fixtures.  Despite the fact that the decoration and furnishings were old fashioned by the 1890s, the Libby family made only minor changes, essentially preserving intact the interiors created by Gustave Herter in the middle of the nineteenth century.  A comparison of the photograph, dating from the Libby family's period of occupancy, with the actual dining room (fig. 3) shows how this interior survived virtually unaltered over time. Consequently, only minor restoration was required to return the room to its appearance in the mid-nineteenth century.  The c.1900 photograph provided detailed information about the few dining room furnishings that were changed by later owners, such as the upholstery on the dining chairs.  Visible in the photograph is the original upholstery, an embossed and polychromed leather.  This period view was critical to determining the appearance of the 1860 upholstery treatment, which has been reproduced as part of the accurate recreation of the mid-nineteenth-century dining room.

Fig. 2.  Dining room. Morse-Libby Mansion, Portland, Maine. Photograph, c.1900. Victoria Society of Maine, Morse-Libby Mansion, Portland, ME

Fig. 3.  Dining room. Morse-Libby Mansion, Portland, Maine. Victoria Society of Maine, Morse-Libby Mansion, Portland, ME

A portrait by the New York artist Seymour Joseph Guy (1824-1910), titled The Contest for the Bouquet: The Family of Robert Gordon in Their New York Dining Room, depicts Mrs. Robert Gordon and her children in the dining room of their fashionable New York City townhouse (fig. 4). The cornice surmounting the walls and the moldings and center medallion on the ceiling indicate that the house was built in the Italianate style, the same architectural style found at the Morse-Libby house. While the walls of the Morse-Libby dining room are paneled from floor to ceiling, those in the Gordon dining room are paneled only at the level of the dado, or lower one-third of the wall.  The chairs in the Gordons' dining room, like those in the dining room of the Morse residence, are upholstered in leather. During the Victorian period leather was considered an ideal covering for the seats of dining chairs, as it was durable, difficult to soil or stain and could be easily wiped clean.  Several of the furnishings in the Gordon dining room are in the Renaissance Revival style, such as the walnut sideboard standing against the wall on the right side of the room.  The Morse-Libby dining room includes a large Renaissance Revival sideboard placed in a niche and a pair of smaller buffets flanking the fireplace.  Period interior views such as the Seymour Guy portrait, which clearly depicts the tablewares arranged on the Gordon sideboard, provide valuable information about the types of objects that the Morse family would have displayed on their sideboard and two buffets.

Fig. 4.  Seymour Joseph Guy (American, 1824-1910). The Contest for the Bouquet: The Family of Robert Gordon in Their New York Dining Room, 1866. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Despite its large scale and opulent decoration, the Morse-Libby house was considered a "villa" rather than a mansion during the Victorian period. Ruggles Sylvester Morse deliberately chose to build his villa in the city; however, the most ideal setting for a villa according to architectural theorists of the nineteenth century was the countryside.  Truer to the villa ideal was Knoll, built 1838 to 1842 in Tarrytown, New York, for William Paulding, a former mayor of New York City, and his son Philip Paulding (fig. 5). Dramatically sited on a promontory overlooking the Hudson River, Paulding's new villa was designed in the Gothic Revival style by New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892).  The surrounding landscape perfectly complemented the picturesque architecture of the house with its asymmetrical plan, varied outline and irregular massing.  

Fig. 5.  Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892). Knoll for William

and Philip R. Paulding, Tarrytown, New York, 1838. South and east elevations.

Watercolor and ink on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Davis was responsible for the design of the interior as well as the exterior of the Pauldings' villa.  The first-floor public rooms were decorated in the Gothic style, featuring vaulted ceilings with ribs, clustered columns, paneled doors with carved tracery and door and window frames surmounted by arched hoods. In order to achieve a full integration of furniture and decoration, Davis designed for the interiors more than fifty pieces of furniture in the Gothic Revival style.

In 1864, Philip Paulding sold the property to wealthy New York inventor and entrepreneur George Merritt, who changed the name of the house from Knoll to Lyndhurst.  Unlike the second owners of the Morse-Libby house, who essentially maintained the residence as it appeared when owned by Ruggles and Olive Morse, the Merritts made extensive changes to the interiors of the Paulding house and introduced many new furnishings. The alterations were overseen by the original architect of Lyndhurst, Alexander Jackson Davis, who also designed for the Merritts in 1865 an extensive addition that almost doubled the size of the house (fig. 6). The addition of the wing, which included a large tower, essentially transformed the residence from a villa to a mansion.

Fig. 6.  Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892). Lyndhurst for George Merritt, Tarrytown, New York, 1865. West elevation and plan. Watercolor, ink and graphite on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY  

Two photographs of the Lyndurst drawing room from c.1870 show how the room appeared when the house was occupied by the Merritt family (figs. 7 & 8).  The redecorated drawing room included painted patterns on the vaulted ceiling, a wall-to-wall carpet with a Rococo Revival design, a large sculpture of Cupid and Psyche in the bay window and a suite of carved rosewood parlor furniture in the Rococo Revival style.  The continuity that Davis had achieved in his interior scheme for the Pauldings' drawing room was lost during the redecoration for the Merritts.  Rococo Revival furnishings such as the parlor suite and carpet contrasted with the Gothic Revival decoration on the walls and ceiling.

Fig. 7.  Drawing room. Lyndhurst, Tarrytown, New York. Photograph, c.1870. Lyndhurst, National Trust for Historic Preservation

Fig. 8.  Drawing room. Lyndhurst, Tarrytown, New York. Photograph, c.1870. Lyndhurst, National Trust for Historic Preservation

As currently restored, the Lyndhusrt drawing room (fig.  9) approximates the appearance of the room during the Pauldings' period of ownership (1838-1864).  Due to the lack of visual documentation of the drawing room from the Paulding era, the recreation is based primarily on written sources such as Davis's specifications for the interiors and an 1856 household inventory that identifies the furnishings in all the rooms of the Pauldings' home, including the drawing room. In the absence of interior views from the Paulding period, it is difficult to ascertain how the drawing room actually appeared when Davis completed the house in 1842. Substantially more is known about the decoration and furnishings of the Merritts' drawing room, which is well documented in the two interior views from c.1870.

Fig. 9.  Drawing room. Lyndhurst, Tarrytown, New York. Photograph©Lyndhurst, National Trust for Historic Preservation

The recreation of the Paulding drawing room includes grain-painted finishes on the window and door frames, interior shutters and baseboards, undecorated monochromatic ceiling and walls, a geometrically patterned wall-to-wall carpet with trelliswork and lozenge-shaped rosettes and Gothic Revival furniture based on Davis's designs.  The restored Paulding drawing room bears some similarity to the parlor depicted in the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Augustus Carter, painted in 1848 by Nicholas Biddle Kittell (fig. 10).  The walls and ceiling of the Carters' parlor are simply painted a solid color, lacking any sort of pattern.  The floor is covered with a wall-to-wall carpet bearing a design of what appears to be scrolling vines and flowers.  While the Carter parlor lacks the Gothic Revival detailing found in the Paulding drawing room, it is furnished with richly upholstered Gothic Revival furniture, including a sofa, armchair, window seat and a reception chair.  The center table, by contrast, is in the Grecian or Late Classical style.

Fig. 10.  Nicholas Biddle Kittell (American, 1822-1894). Mr. and Mrs. Charles Augustus Carter, 1848. Oil on canvas. Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY