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

In part one, two restored rooms in historic house museums were used as examples to discuss how recreated historic interiors relate to specific and general period interior views.  The third example is a parlor removed from a house built in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the mid-nineteenth century and installed as a "period room" in the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.

A period room in an art museum is a rather unique type of historic interior.   The simplest definition of an art museum period room is an interior that has been removed, frequently in toto, from an historic residential structure, installed in the exhibit galleries of a museum and then arranged with furnishings of the same historical period as the architectural elements of the room.  The purpose of a period room is typically to represent the domestic interior architectural styles and decorative fashions of a particular historical period.  Unlike the restored rooms in a historic house museum, period rooms in art museums usually do not contain furnishings original to the house from which the room was removed nor do they reflect the lifestyle or personal tastes of the actual individuals who once occupied the residence.  In most instances, the architectural elements in a period room, including doors and door surrounds, windows and window surrounds, mantelpieces, overmantels, floor boards, wood paneling, plaster walls, plaster or wood paneled ceilings, cornices, mouldings and plaster relief decoration, derive from one source while furnishings such as furniture, decorative objects, lighting and  floor coverings come from a completely different source, typically the museum's permanent decorative arts collection. The furnishings that are selected, while of the period, usually do not echo the exact furnishings that were originally in the room. The recreated interiors in historic house museums do not always contain original furnishings, but typically the period substitutes mirror the types of furnishings documented in period interior views or in written documents such as household inventories.  As is too frequently the case in American period rooms, the architectural interior and the furnishings are from different regions of the United States, despite historical evidence indicating that in the geographic area where the room was once located, the furnishings would have been obtained locally rather than purchased and shipped from another part of the country.

A few period rooms stand out as an exception to the rule, such as the parlor from the mid-nineteenth-century house of Colonel Robert J. Milligan (fig. 1), now part of an encyclopedic collection of American period rooms installed at the Brooklyn Museum. The 1855-1856 architectural decoration and furnishings in the Milligans' parlor survived intact into the middle of the twentieth century, when the Brooklyn Museum purchased the parlor and library and their contents.  This important acquisition of two mid-nineteenth-century upstate New York interiors included not only architectural elements and furniture original to the rooms, but also a number of surviving bills of sale, or receipts, for the parlor furnishings purchased by the Milligan family in the 1850s.  In 1940 the rooms and furnishings from the Saratoga residence were officially accessioned into the museum's collections and later installed in the nineteenth-century American decorative arts galleries.

The Milligan residence, built 1854-1856 in Saratoga Springs, New York, is a two-and-one-half-story Italianate style house featuring pedimented windows on the main facade, an entrance portico surmounted by a cresting of anthemia and palmettes and a cupola rising from the roof (fig. 2).  The design reflects a certain degree of conservatism in its strictly symmetrical plan, which harks back to the floor plans of Greek Revival houses of the 1830s and 1840s.  Also somewhat anachronistic from an architectural standpoint are the projecting center pavilion with pediment and Palladian-type window on the entrance front, elements typically associated with Georgian houses built a century earlier.

Fig. 1.  Parlor from the Colonel Robert J. Milligan House, Saratoga Springs, New York, as installed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

Fig. 2.  Colonel Robert J. Milligan House, Saratoga Springs, New York. Photograph, 1940. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

Fig. 3.  Detail of ceiling in parlor. Colonel Robert J. Milligan

House, Saratoga Springs, New York. Photograph, 1940.

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

The plan of the first floor of the Milligan house consisted of a center entrance hall flanked on either side by two rooms.  The parlor and the library stood back to back on one side of the hall.  In the Victorian era the parlor was a formal room used for receiving visitors and entertaining guests while the library frequently served as the family sitting room. As the reception room, the parlor was larger and more elaborately decorated than the library.  The decoration of the Milligans' parlor includes a carved marble mantelpiece, shaped panels framed by classical moldings centering a medallion on the ceiling and a molded plaster cornice crowning the walls (fig. 3).  Dividing the parlor and library are two sliding pocket doors framed by fluted Corinthian pilasters surmounted by an entablature (fig. 4).  The panels of the doors are decorated with Gothic tracery.

Fig. 4.  Detail of pocket doors between parlor and library. Colonel 
Robert J. Milligan House, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Photograph, 1940. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

Surviving historical written and visual documents, including bills of sale and photographs, provide a record of the furnishings in the Milligans' parlor. In 1856 the family purchased an elegant matched set of Rococo Revival rosewood furniture manufactured by the cabinetmaking firm of Elijah Galusha, a prominent furniture maker active in Troy, New York, from 1828 to 1870. The suite consists of a sofa, armchair, bergere, four side chairs and a center table. Other furnishings purchased for the parlor include a Rococo Revival étagère, an Elizabethan Revival rosewood reception chair, a pair of side chairs, a Rococo Revival rosewood pianoforte, a Rococo Revival gilt overmantel mirror with molded gesso decoration, giltwood window cornices, a colorful wall-to-wall carpet with a bold Rococo Revival pattern of sprays of flowers, swirling leaves and scrolls and a Rococo Revival gilt-brass six-branch gas chandelier.  Most of these furnishings are now part of the Milligan parlor installation at the Brooklyn Museum.

The objects in the Milligans' parlor reflected the dictates of fashion in the mid-nineteenth century, when tastemakers prescribed the Rococo Revival style for the decoration and furnishings of what was regarded as the most important room in the home.  The Victorian housewife was expected to serve as hostess to visitors and guests, all of whom were entertained in the parlor.  The parlor was therefore perceived as the domain of the woman.  It was also the room that contained the most expensive and impressive furnishings in the entire household.  The Rococo Revival style, with its emphasis on voluptuous curves and delicate decoration of flowers and scrolling leaves, had a lighthearted, feminine quality that perfectly suited the room over which the lady of the house presided as hostess.

Descendants of Robert J. Milligan presented to the Brooklyn Museum not only bills of sale but also a number of family photographs, including a late-nineteenth-century view of the parlor (fig. 5).  This photograph, which appears to date between 1880 and 1900, indicates that the Milligan family did not update the decoration or furnishings of the parlor as the years passed and new decorating styles came into fashion.  Practically all the furnishings and decorations from the 1850s were still in place when the room was photographed later in the nineteenth century.

Fig. 5.  Parlor. Colonel Robert J. Milligan House, Saratoga Springs, New York. Photograph, c.1880-1900. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

Fig. 6.  Lambrequin, silk brocatelle, 1850-1865, probably New England.
Historic New England, Boston, MA

The photographic view of the Milligan parlor captures a fashionable but rather modestly decorated room.  In the photograph can be seen the Rococo Revival parlor suite made by Elijah Galusha, supplemented by additional side chairs and reception chairs in different revival styles. The center table is arranged with a stack of books as well as with a gas table lamp connected by means of a rubber hose to the six-branch gas chandelier hanging above.  The room does not appear to contain many decorative objects, although most likely the mantelpiece, which is out of view, was arranged with a combination of items including girandoles, vases and perhaps a mantel clock.  While the floor is covered with a boldly patterned wall-to-wall carpet, the walls are simply plastered and painted a solid color. Close inspection of the photograph reveals that the windows are hung not only with lace curtains but also with window shades, described as "roller blinds" in the nineteenth century.  The absence of heavy window curtains implies that the photograph was taken during the summer months.  In the Victorian period, curtains made of silk, wool or cotton fabrics, with linings and interlinings, were removed before the summer to allow air to flow through open windows.  The lightweight lace curtains and roller blinds, which hung under the heavy "main" curtains most of the year, were left in place during the warm season to provide privacy.  The photograph shows that each window frame was mounted at the top with a Rococo Revival stamped sheet-brass window cornice.  These cornices most likely suspended shaped valances called lambrequins (fig. 6).  Along with the heavy window curtains, the lambrequins would have been removed for the summer season.

As installed in the Brooklyn Museum, the Milligan parlor appears more elaborate than the room depicted in the late-nineteenth-century interior view.  While the majority of the furnishings seen in the parlor today are original to the room, many mid-nineteenth-century decorative objects from other sources were introduced at the time of installation.  These items outnumber the quantity of decorations visible in the photograph.  An opulent two-tier gas chandelier hung with cut-glass pendants substitutes for the simpler single-tier gilt-brass chandelier seen in the interior view.  The window treatments that now adorn the parlor windows, red and gold silk curtains and lambrequins from a house built in Brooklyn in the 1850s, are most likely more elaborate and expensive than the curtains and valances that originally hung at the windows in the Milligans' home.

It appears that when the Milligan parlor was installed in the Brooklyn Museum, the room was transformed into a "high style" Rococo Revival parlor, similar to the richly decorated and elaborately furnished drawing room of Litchfield Villa in Brooklyn, built 1855-1857 to the designs of New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis (fig. 7).  Ironically, the silk window curtains now hanging in the Robert J. Milligan parlor were originally made for the Litchfield residence.  

Fig. 7.  Drawing room. Litchfield Villa, Brooklyn, New York. Photograph, c.1876-1886. The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, New York, NY

The arrangement of the furniture in the Milligan parlor installation is similar to the placement documented in the family photograph.  The mid-nineteenth-century parlor was dominated by the center table, a round, oval, square or rectangular table, usually with a marble top, that stood in the middle of the room.  The center table served as the focal point, drawing all other furniture within its sphere. Along the perimeter of the parlor were sofas and chairs arranged symmetrically.  Other chairs stood in the middle of the room, encircling the center table.