Colonial Revival Research Articles

Poker Faces: Seeing Behind the Mask of Convention

“Poker Faces” interrogates the category of modernity in the history and criticism of domestic architecture, examining the relationship between formal innovation — typically used as our measure of originality — and planning innovation, in which new ways of living and experiencing the home are enabled through the translation of unconventional programs into interior spaces. Two examples of houses built for women clients — William Brainerd’s Colonial Revival “SCARAB” in Wellesley, Massachusetts (1907), built as a home for Professor Katharine Lee Bates and her life partner, Professor Katharine Coman; and Richard Neutra’s Constance Perkins House, in Pasadena, California (1955) — suggest that sometimes the most radical households lie behind self-protectively diffident façades.

Review: Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston by Michael Rawson

Michael Rawson. Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, xii + 367 pp., 29 b/w illus. and 3 tables. $29.95, ISBN 9780674048416 The removal of cows from Boston Common was a burning political issue of 1830. The anti-cow faction saw the 631-acre pasture on the western edge of the Shawmut peninsula as a potential site of leisure, recreation, and refinement. These petitioners often resided in the wealthier adjacent areas of the city. A counter petition emerged from pro-cow advocates who more likely earned their living, in part, from the keeping of animals. Boston’s town council decided in favor of the petition to ban cows; the common people appealed that decision the following year and lost again. This seemingly benign change in agricultural and social practice is presented as a turning point in the attitude of Bostonians to nature in the most important book published in recent years on the city’s nineteenth-century environmental history. Michael Rawson’s Eden on the Charles succinctly summarizes the relevant literature, opens new research territory, and provides a larger context for understanding the human relationship to nature in American cities. The book features five fascinating and interlocking chapters: “Enclosing the Common,” “Constructing Water,” “Inventing the Suburb,” Making the Harbor,” and “Recreating the Wilderness.” An admirer of Raymond Williams’s writings on the social construction of nature, Rawson examines the ways that Bostonians redefined their …

The Derby Room from the Ezekiel Hersey Derby House, Salem, Massachusetts, 1798–1799

The Derby Room was created in 1927–28 by Fiske Kimball using architectural fragments salvaged from several different rooms in the Ezekiel Hersey Derby House. Charles Bulfinch designed the building in 1795–98, but much of the interior finish was by Samuel McIntire. Rather than being a recreation of a single room from the house, Kimball created an idealized parlor to celebrate Salem’s unique neoclassical style and McIntire’s role in creating it. Should the room be left intact to honor Kimball and the colonial revival movement, or would other options for interpretation be more meaningful to a modern audience?

Carol Herselle Krinsky. Review of "The American Style: The Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis" by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins.

Carol Herselle Krinsky. Review of "The American Style: The Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis" by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Colonial Revival

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer, writes the narrator of Yellow Wall-Paper. colonial mansion, she continues, hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of felicity--but that would be asking too much of fate! (166). opening Yellow Wall-Paper with a reference to middle-class enthusiasm for ghostly colonial homes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman situates her story within late-nineteenth-century colonial revival discourses about old houses and their offer of intimacy with Anglo-American history. Gilman's take on colonial houses, however, radically revises the historical narratives those structures were imagined to bear forth. most late-nineteenth-century tales of colonial homes, moderns do, indeed, stumble upon stories of romantic felicity (166), from liaisons between colonial youths to tales of patriots' heroic lives. (1) But Gilman's narrator finds quite the opposite in her old mansion: hard-to-read traces of a brutal, gendered history that renders impossible a nostalgic view of the national past. To date, literary scholarship on Yellow Wall-Paper, while voluminous, has tended to focus on the story either as a self-contained feminist critique or as a historicized protest against nineteenth-century attitudes about female sexuality, health, and labor. (2) The prominence of Yellow Wall-Paper within Gilman studies and its role as a representative feminist text (if not the representative feminist text of the nineteenth-century United States) has, moreover, often led scholars to treat it as an isolated work, and this has tended to obscure the story's place within larger literary and historical contexts. this essay I demonstrate that Yellow Wall-Paper was the last in a sequence of three imaginative works that Gilman wrote in early 1890 that explore gender in relation to racialized national and regional histories. These include the short story Giant Wistaria and the unpublished In the Name of the A Romance (co-written with Grace Ellery Charming Stetson) (3) While In the Name of the King! has been among the Schlesinger Library's holdings since 1983, until now it has not been recognized as a part of Gilman's body of work and, accordingly, has received no critical attention. As this essay demonstrates, however, it clearly merits consideration by those seeking to understand the range of Gilman's writing and to historicize her most famous story. late February and early March 1890, just days after she participated in a colonial revival tea in Pasadena, California, Gilman noted in her diary that she and Stetson had begun work on a Colonial play (Diaries 412). This play, set in Salem, Massachusetts, became In the Name of the King! Although it was never, to my knowledge, produced, this drama marks the beginning of Gilman's exploration of white New England women's historical legacy, an intellectual terrain she continued to chart in Giant Wistaria and Yellow Wall-Paper. fact, less than a week after beginning to write this play, Gilman recorded in her diary that she was working on Giant Wistaria, a tale that explores the connections between a colonial New England woman's ghost and young urbanites of the late nineteenth century who rent a colonial mansion in the New England countryside (Diaries 412, 413). And, by early June, Gilman was writing another story that featured women from the past haunting the colonial mansion of the present: Yellow Wall-Paper. (4) Recognizing Gilman's engagement of colonial revival discourse has three significant outcomes. First, it gives new insight into Gilman's historical thinking about gender in the United States. (5) Second, it verifies Gail Bederman's claim that [Gilman's] feminism was inextricably rooted in ... white supremacism (122). As Alys Eve Weinbaum points out, it has tended to be the scholarship on Gilman's nonfiction writings that have explored and historicized the racist and nativist aspects of Gilman's theories (77). …

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

The Founding and Design of William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art and the Art Village

The Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art (1891–1902), directed by William Merritt Chase, was the largest and best known of America’s late nineteenth-century plein air summer schools. The school and its campus, the Art Village, traditionally viewed as the philanthropic endeavor of Janet Hoyt and colleagues, were founded, the authors’ research reveals, in collaboration with the Long Island Railroad as part of the development and marketing of Shinnecock Hills as a summer resort. The essay further explores how the Colonial Revival informed the design of the Art Village, Shinnecock Hills resort architecture, and William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock house and studio.

The ‘art which conceals’: a cottage industry and the invention of Cushing's Island

The ‘art which conceals’: a cottage industry and the invention of Cushing's Island

Thomas Eakins and the uses of history

List of Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1. William Rush and the History of Art Chapter 2. Thomas Eakins and the Colonial Revival Chapter 3. Reenacting the Antique Chapter 4. Behold the Man: Eakins's Crucifixion Chapter 5. Collaboration and Commemoration in Public Sculpture Conclusion. Rush Revisited: Eakins as Old Master Notes Index Acknowledgments

Reinstalling Mrs. Ward's Corner Cupboard

This essay uses the Artemas Ward House, which was given to Harvard University in 1925 as a "Public Patriotic Museum," as a case study to examine a popular colonial revival strategy of display—the colonial corner cupboard. In the early twentieth century corner cupboards were symbols of memory keeping. As both historic artifacts and a way of viewing historic artifacts, they served to naturalize the objects displayed inside of them as authentic and antique. The corner cupboard historicized the house museum by suggesting that elegant objects on display were always part of the colonial interior. The Ward House contained an eighteenth-century cupboard that was reinvented in the twentieth century to present a specific version of the house's past, offering an imagined material story about the Ward family's history and objects. Analysis of the Ward corner cupboard highlights the connection between display practice and narrative in colonial revival house museums.

Forefathers' Day Dinners and Martha Washington Teas

As early as a half-century before the 1876 national centennial, the point at which many scholars have marked the beginning of the colonial revival movement, historicized foodways appeared at centennial celebrations and homecoming gatherings across Northeast America. Commemorative consumption, the communal participation in anachronistic foodways, provided a vehicle for inscription into heritage-based groups, thus catalyzing the coalescence of collective self-consciousness during a time of cultural upheaval and social dislocation. Early discrete examples of commemorative consumption provided a seedbed for more widespread, popular expressions of the same. Through clambakes, centennial picnics, and Forefathers' Day dinners, New Englanders appropriated Native American foodways and re-enacted European settlement, symbolically laying claim to a region and a nation. Later, through Martha Washington teas, middle and upper-class Anglo-American women in the Northeast and beyond asserted their prerogative as a social and political force, metanymically celebrating the nation and imaging the national community in their own image.

Re‐creating Mount Vernon

The Virginia Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, was understood as a complete replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The replica’s elite, white creators simultaneously posited Mount Vernon as a paragon of the Southern plantation system defended by the Confederacy and as a symbol of a shared, national history that indicated the South’s willingness to reconcile with the Union. Through the similarly conservative and retrospective strategies of the Lost Cause and the colonial revival, the Virginia Building simulated an ideal world that reflected the attitudes of its proponents on race, gender, and the state’s national role.

Shopping for the Nation: Women's China Collecting in Late-Nineteenth-Century New England

Hunting for china in rural New England was more than a shopping expedition; it was a patriotic act, a tribute to America's commerce, and a form of historic preservation. Against the backdrops of nativism, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Colonial Revival, late-nineteenth-century women sought to return the nation to its Anglo-American roots.

Jewett at the Fair: Seeing Citizens in "The Flight of Betsey Lane"

Twice in 1876, when she was 26 years old, Sarah Orne Jewett traveled family members from her home in South Berwick, Maine, to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exhibition. Seventeen years later, despite mounting physical infirmities, she made the long, westward excursion to Chicago to take in the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This should not surprise us. Like many well-educated people of her time, class, and race, Jewett was a dutiful student and celebrant of her nation, its history, its development, and its presumed shining future in the Her regional identity deepened and refined these impulses, growing up, as she did, in the midst of New England's colonial revival movement, when the region's elite labored, in the face of increased industrialization and demographic disruptions, to restore or create old farmhouses, village centers, and a semi-fictional historiography that enshrined this group's foundational position in the country's growth and identity. (1) By 1893, this form of identification reached a kind of inevitable expression for Jewett when Exposition organizers hung a portrait of her in the State of Maine building. (2) Her professional commitment to regionalism, we might say, over-determined her fair-going. Her literary representations of New England had become definitive enough that an emblem of her career, the portrait, could signify that in a national framework, replicating through curatorial context the mutually constituting relation between region and nation that helped enable regional fiction in the first place. She went to Chicago because, in some real way, she was already In complement to the metonymic promise of the two fairs--their invitation to fairgoers to know whole regions, nations, and the world through their exhibited emblems--was a way of seeing the world more generally that biographers ascribe to Jewett's personality and which her own work suggests is central to her sense of authorial aptitude: a faith in the expressive power of objects and what Paula Blanchard calls her inexhaustible ... capacity for wonder. (3) Never mind people who tell you there is nothing to see in the places where people lived who interest you, Jewett writes from England to her artist friend Sarah Wyman Whitman in 1892, after a visit to the Brontes' home at Haworth. Nothing you can ever read about [the Brontes] can make you know them until you go there. (4) Nine months later she stands in Chicago with tears in [her] eyes before the Statue of Lincoln in Lincoln Park. As she writes to an old Berwick friend and editor, nobody can see the great sights of that Exposition ... without being proud of his country, which is in itself one of the best things in the world. (5) This is the same writer, the same extractor of patriotic wonder and pride, who hopes the story she would be most remembered for is Decoration Day (1892), a tale about old, down-on-their-luck Civil War veterans reviving their small town's parade and the nearly extinct patriotism that goes it (Letters, Cary, 95, n. 2). In a confined historical sense, then, Jewett's enthusiasm for American fairs and other nationalizing events is deeply predictable. As a figure of future importance in U.S. literary history, though, she would have been wiser to stay away--and to have kept such enthusiasm off her literary pages as well. Canonical twentieth-century literary sensibilities and the historical and cultural forces that helped produce them have left very Little approbation for unironic patriotic writing. (That the last working title for Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was Under the Red, White, and Blue may say enough for us on this subject. (6)) And the patriotism these world's fairs bespoke was of course something more than the commemorative variety invoked by local parades. As many cultural historians now recognize, the fairs, especially the Columbian Exposition, constituted early signal expressions of this country's new imperial self-regard. …

An Acre of Entertainment for the Entire Community: Rapp & Rapp’s Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville, Virginia

JAMES TIPPECONNIC FOX Figure 4 Rapp & Rapp, Paramount Theatre, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1931, Main Street facade ca 1964, example of a stand-alone movie palace (Photograph courtesy of the Theatre Historical Society of America) 38 ARRIS I VOLUME NI NETE EN 2008 JAMES TIPPECONNIC FOX AN ACRE OF ENTERTAINMENT FOR THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY: RAPP & RAPP'S PARAMOUNT THEATRE IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA JASON TIPPECONI\JIC FOX T he 1931 opening of the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought the small college tovvn a luxurious and modern standard of moviegoing previously only available to audiences in the region's largest cities. Designed by C. \V & Geo. L. Rapp of Chicago and New York ("Rapp & Rapp"), one of the nation's foremost firms specializing in the type, the Paramount is representative of the careful adaptation of the movie palace typology to local conditions. This process , which is frequently overlooked in studies of the type, was integral to the proliferation of movie palaces across the country. Rapp & Rapp accomplished this by balancing a strict adherence to the typology's proven functional and stylistic formulas with deliberate responses to local circumstances and culture. In Charlottesville, this practice is illustrated by the Paramount's response to three themes: function, architectural taste, and culture. Functionally, the Paramount relied on established formulas employed by movie-palace architects across the country-profitably adapting the typology's complex requirements to the community's size and built environment . The Paramount established an immediate connection with Charlottesville audiences by foregoing the Art Deco designs characteristic of the chain's contemporary movie palaces in favor of the locally popular Colonial Revival. Culturally, the Paramount strove to reconcile the "democratic" ideals associated with the type to the city's racial segregation. THE MOVIE PALACE·Movie palaces emerged between the mid-191 Os and the early 1920s in response to the functional requirements unique to the emerging medium of film. Shaped by economic concerns, movie palaces bad to continually attract large crowds of moviegoers and accommodate them in a complex assortment of spaces squeezed onto irregular plots of prime real estate. 1 The type emerged from the work of a number of architects, notably Thomas vV. Lamb in the Northeast and Rapp & Rapp in the :Midwest, working on behalf of rival exhibitors. vVithin the context of the careers of these architects, who, along with John Eberson, founded the three most prominent firms specializing in the type, movie palaces reached the height of their construction during the 1920s before falling out of favor in the United States after 1932.2 vVhile there is no standard definition of what constitutes a movie palace, such theatres typically shared a number of characteristics in relation to decor, function, service, and amenities.3 These elements distinguished them from other types of motion-picture theatres and together defined a distinct moviegoing experience. Architecturally, movie palaces were characterized by ornate decor in varying exotic, historicist, or modern styles meant to attract patrons and convey an atmosphere of escapism. Functionally, they accommodated at least 1,000 patrons and contained luxurious lobbies, foyers, VOL UM E I ~.ETE.E 2008 I ARRIS 39 JAMES TIPPECONNIC FO X and lounges to comfortably hold waiting audiences. Their auditoriums featured unobstructed sightlines and good acoustics and provided for live performances. The experience of the movie palace went beyond the building itself to encompass the services of teams of uniformed ushers, the sounds of theatre organs, a variety of live entertainment programs, and amenities such as museumquality art and furnishings. These attractions, as noted by David Naylor, made movie palaces not only sources of entertainment but also community gathering places.4 CHARLOTTESVILLE'S MOVIE PALACE On December 11, 1930, Charlottesville's newspaper, the Dai£y Progress, announced that a deal had been finalized for the construction of the town's first movie palace.'> Local investors Hollis Reinhart and Percival H. Faulconer spearheaded the effort to construct the theatre, which would be part of the Paramount-Publix Corporation's Publix theatre chain. They hoped to capitalize on Charlottesville's need for a motion-picture palace of the type found in the region's larger cities, such as Norfolk, Richmond, and \'Vashington, D.C. Reinhart and Faulconer assembled a half-acre site bordered by :Main, 1\tfarket...

Re-creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival (review)

Reviewed by: Re-creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival Pamela H. Simpson (bio) Richard Guy Wilson, Shaun Eyring, and Kenny Marotta Re-creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. 431 pages. 138 black-and-white illustrations. ISBN 08139-2348-4. $49.50 In fall 2000, the University of Virginia's Department of Architectural History held its annual symposium but this time with a diverse group of cosponsors. What would bring together the Department of Landscape Architecture, the Office of the Architect, and the National Park Service with a group of academic architectural historians? It was the Colonial Revival, an apt topic for a campus that features not only Jefferson's architecture but its many variations and renewals that have appeared in the past two hundred years. Richard Guy Wilson, the head of the conference and one of the editors of this volume, is of course, one of the well-known scholars in the field. Under his leadership, the symposium drew a large audience to hear fifty-eight papers. From those presentations, twenty-three were selected for this publication. Wilson and his coeditors organized them into seven sections, starting with an essay by William Rhodes, the man who pioneered the modern study of the Colonial Revival with his 1974 dissertation (published in two volumes in 1977). They drew on a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the people who helped shape the Colonial Revival, the role of the federal government in sponsoring and promoting it, preservation issues that surround it, case studies of its use, and interiors done in its name. They concluded with what they call "Colonial translations," that is, versions of the Spanish Colonial image in the Southwest as well as examples of American-style buildings in France (including a recreated Mount Vernon for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris). The volume that results from all this is hefty, but the individual essays are fairly short. Most are about ten pages with about six illustrations. The essays cover subjects such as Wallace Nutting's role in helping to invent the idea of Colonial America (one of his hand-tinted, made-up photographs is on the dust jacket), Ellen Biddle Shipman's ideas for what a Colonial Revival garden style could be, the role of the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) in championing a renewed interest in Colonial-era buildings, the myth that Georgetown has an abundance of eighteenth-century architecture (most [End Page 129] is Victorian), and the idea of what Colonial Revival interiors should look like. The essays that work best are those like Kim Hoagland's on "The Architecture of Efficiency: The U.S. Army and the Colonial Revival Style in the West," in which she makes a clear, central argument that the Army used the style not for its iconography but for its modern efficiency, lays out the story with precision, substance, and purpose, and never loses track of her main point. Or Marilyn Casto's "The Concept of Hand Production in Colonial Revival Interiors," in which she gives us a subtle, nuanced reading of all the complicated factors that went into the romantic celebration of the handmade. Other essayists seem more interested in telling the story than in making an argument, and a few seem to have difficulty telling their stories within their page limitations. But all of them contribute toward the overall purpose of the volume, namely to explore the many facets of the Colonial Revival and to demonstrate its persistence in our culture. The Colonial Revival is usually thought of as a style of architecture. These essays show its scope is much wider than that. There is not enough space here to comment on all of the essays, so let me refer to just a few to demonstrate the scope of the collection. Tim Davis in his "The American Parkway as Colonial Revival Landscape" argues that "folk culture, historic preservation, and idealized national landscape" were part of the shaping of the parkway system (140). In a novel approach, he suggests that the parkway was shaped, at least in part, by an antimodernist historicizing championship of picturesque "sturdy...

Celebrating Years Together

As part of the colonial revival movement of the late nineteenth century, Americans used material culture to commemorate events related to the founding of the nation. They also memorialized past personal experiences. After more than twenty‐five years of marriage, Absalom Bixler gave to his wife, Sarah, a series of plates and flowerpots that reflected on their courtship. Incorporating preindustrial technology and longstanding trends in redware design, Sarah's gifts are often misinterpreted as products of the early nineteenth century. An examination of documentary records and related objects exposes their context as later personal manifestations of the national need to remember the past.

A Period of Transition: The Wallace Nutting Collection and the Wadsworth Atheneum, 1925–1934

ABSTRACTIn December 1924, the Wallace Nutting Collection of Early American Furniture and Household Implements came to the Wadsworth Atheneum for exhibition. One of the nation's finest assemblies of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century furnishings, it instantly provided the Atheneum with the objects necessary for a new series of Americana galleries. This article analyzes the initial installation of the collection and its place in museum history. The installation, which struck a balance between pure aesthetic display and historical reconstruction, reinforced the idealized notions of the Colonial Revival. The article concludes with a discussion of the dismantling of the original installation in the mid‐1930s and the Atheneum's transition from the period‐room format to “masterworks” galleries.

Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century

as a cultural invention; Say New England and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region - the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

"Best, Lowliest Style!" The Early-Nineteenth-Century Rediscovery of American Colonial Architecture

Scholars have located the origins of the Colonial Revival in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, but have seldom explored its deep background in the intellectual life of the early nineteenth century. The revival of the 1870s was not wholly innovative but the culmination of trends of thought that reached back at least three generations. The Picturesque Movement as imported from England around 1800 brought with it all the elements needed for a positive reevaluation of colonial architecture: antiquarianism, a concern with the humble cottage, a nostalgic Old English mindset. Promulgated by poetry, travelogues, and villa books, the Picturesque joined with patriotism and nationalism to produce a sweeping change in opinion, as colonial architecture-long scorned and neglected-was gradually rediscovered, celebrated, preserved, and eventually imitated. The process of rediscovery was highly selective, the Picturesque always translating the colonial according to its own contemporary needs and predilections.