A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York by King Greg

Author:King, Greg [King, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620458839
Publisher: Turner Publishing Co.
Published: 2008-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Mills mansion along the Hudson, entrance facade.

White’s new building dominated a tranquil stretch of park, its sloping lawns dotted with classical statuary and banks of trees that screened the house from a meandering drive. The visual impact was therefore all the more dramatic when a final turn revealed a neoclassical mansion of the lightest gray stone, a perfect interpretation of an English country house glistening in an artfully conceived Elysian landscape that consciously evoked an unalterable sense of refined privilege. The facade was all that Ruth had wanted, an overpowering building adorned with Corinthian pilasters, sculpted swags and reliefs, and an ornamental balustrade. Though refined, there was nothing subtle about the structure: at the center of the eastern facade, the architect built an immense and intimidating temple portico said to have been modeled on the north portico of the White House, its entablature supported by six massive Corinthian columns. By the time White had finished, the original Greek Revival house had been completely subsumed into a new, sixty-five-room mansion designed to convey entrenched power and sublime taste.48

Within, White designed new, elaborate public rooms, arranged en enfilade to provide sweeping vistas from one end of the house to the other, to accommodate the grand entertainments at which Ruth excelled. Two rooms in the old central block were gutted to create a suitably impressive entrance hall, designed in the English style with walls paneled in quartered oak adorned with a gallery of portraits of Livingston ancestors alternating with eighteenth-century Gobelin tapestries; a massive, L-shaped staircase with finely turned wooden balusters swept up to the second floor, beneath a ceiling brimming with dancing cherubs against a cloud-strewn sky.49 To the south was the drawing room, spanning the full width of the house. Created when White combined two existing rooms, it suffered from the relatively low, twelve-foot ceilings prevalent in the old house. Because raising the ceiling height would intrude into the corridors above, White was forced to work within these proportions, made more claustrophobic by the room’s immense length. Attempting to break up the monotony, White added a bowed window overlooking the west terrace and faced the pale blue walls with delicate molding to add visual interest, but the result, crowded by Ruth with elaborately carved and gilded Louis XVI-style sofas and chairs covered in floral tapestry, remained starkly at odds with the regal aspirations of the rest of the house.50

White placed the two most important rooms in his new wings, where he could take advantage of appropriately high ceilings and numerous windows to create the desired effect. At the southwestern end of the house was the library. Designed by Jules Allard of Paris, this was a lofty, fifty-foot-long room with paneled walls of carved, quarter-sawn oak adorned with ormolu reliefs. Six-foot-high glass-fronted bookcases filled with elegantly bound but rarely read volumes edged the walls, flanked by Corinthian pilasters with gilded capitals supporting a carved and gilded cornice decorated with reliefs of telescopes, nautical charts, and compasses.51 It was all coldly splendid and suitably impressive.

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