As the field of American art emerged from second-class status in the 1960s, Wayne Craven’s wonderful volume on American sculpture helped define the field. Now, in this new book on Stanford White’s role as a decorator and antique dealer, Craven calls attention to a significant aspect of the American Gilded Age. Craven has produced a neat, careful volume documenting a half-dozen of White’s most opulent houses, those designed for William Collins Whitney, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, Payne Whitney, Clarence and Katherine Mackay, Henry Poor, and Stanford White’s own New York City house. The book allows for a closer study of the “statement” houses White designed when the strings of a large purse lay open. This is a complicated and largely unrecorded episode in the history of taste, with Craven working on the American saga while John Harris pursues the English interiors that washed up on American shores. We await Harris’s study. The late French physician Bruno Pons accomplished much of the French story before his untimely death in 1995 (Bruno Pons, Grands décors français, 1650–1800; reconstitutés en Angleterre, aux Etats-Unis, en Amérique du Sud et en France, Dijon: Editions Faton, 1995). Sadly, far too few records have survived, which renders Craven’s study all the more important.

Two caches of McKim, Mead & White papers survive: the first, a two-part gift to the New York Historical Society, and the second, a more recent gift to Avery Library at Columbia University. A number of client files survive in these two repositories, although most of the correspondence was tossed out long ago. Craven’s study is based on several important and well-documented commissions. He has created an open window on the domestic work of White in the second half of his career. The book is a series of still pictures without the run of the tickertape of the firm. It provides a spotlight on some of White’s decorative work, and does not attempt to survey the context of the whole.

After two decades of studying White for a forthcoming book, my sense is that he was born into a world of lost patrimony. His father, raised to be an English gentleman in the New World, lived on the edge of bankruptcy. The young Stanford received a short and poor education in New York City ward schools before going to work for the architect H. H. Richardson in 1870. White drew as a child. His eye was ever searching for beauty. As a teenager, he raced to the roof of one Richardson job to capture a spectacular sunset in watercolor. Moving up rapidly in Richardson’s office, White proved willing and able to do the task Richardson hated—interiors.

The idea of a creative interior in early nineteenth-century New York was almost unknown. Like the red brick row houses they were set in, interiors of the period were pretty similar. In mid century, as the brownstone front superseded brick, decorative firms began appearing in the United States. America’s first glamorous architect, Richard Morris Hunt, began dabbling in interiors by the late 1870s. By this time Hunt’s emerging rival, Richardson, had been forced by some of his clients to do interior work, which he gladly gave over to White—who would continue to do decorating work on his own after leaving Richardson’s employ. White worked with the decorative arts Associated Artists workshop on the superb and still extant room at the Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan, where he and his co-designers created a unique high style based on an assembly of parts, materials, colors, textures, and lighting effects. This clever use of existing forms resembles the assembly of colors, textures, and features that had characterized a recent architectural style, High Victorian Gothic. White was at his most creative at this time, working at Kingscote in Newport and on the main rooms of the Victor Newcomb house at Elberon, New Jersey (both ca. 1880–82). For these commissions, White brought together a variety of items from around the globe to create a distinctive style.

White’s first venture into adding antique items was evidently the screen made from Breton beds in the Isaac Bell house at Newport (ca. 1881–83). Although the details are muddled, the first importer of antiquities with whom the youthful White became acquainted was “uncle” Henry Duveen, who brought Dutch tiles to New York and sold them from a space above an artist’s shop in lower Manhattan. Perhaps the Breton bedsteads came from Duveen; the custom of such beds had declined in Brittany, and as a result many pieces were then on the market. From Duveen, White and his partner Charles McKim learned of the Parisian firm of Carlhian & Beaumetz, who made high-quality reproduction chairs.

The first real example of White’s buying for a McKim, Mead & White house was for the Charles J. Osborn residence at Mamaroneck, New York (ca. 1883–85). White’s serious buying for clients begins in the late 1880s, when he was flush with the expectation of wealth. White appreciated beauty—sunsets, music, tiles, rugs, sculpture, paintings, and women. As White’s world widened with the social acceptance denied his father, his creative energy became overwhelmed by “bought” rather than “creative” beauty. With money in hand and success in pleasing the Osborns, White began his second career as an assembler of antique objects in interiors that would come to characterize the Gilded Era. Not a religious man, White combined sacred with profane, fashioning rich, cluttered, possession-dominated rooms with signature touches. From the old days he retained his love of tiles and rugs. He also favored animal skins seemingly flattened by a steamroller, with only the head standing up from the floor. New forms appear, such as twisted “Solomonic” columns, often supporting a broken pediment, and gold leaf everywhere. As in White’s earlier work, everything is assembled in a creative, amusing manner, never recreating a single period room. White’s practice reflected the coming of age of America and a recognition that the country was no longer provincial. Indeed, by amassing features of the past, Americans could assert themselves as members of the baronial class. Finding their incomes too modest for their way of life, Europe’s aristocrats sold items to newly wealthy Americans. Fireplaces, old velvet, ceilings, doorframes, furniture, and pictures seemed to ricochet from the old barons of the past to the new barons of industry—and White served as their emissary. From the Old World to the New, the palatial house crossed the pond.

Craven’s study shines light on the creation of the great American collections. Regretfully missing is an adequate discussion of White’s aesthetic, based, it appears, on the volumes of Percier & Fontaine and the showrooms of the Parisian and Florentine dealers. Nor does Craven tackle the matter of the fake or “partial” antique. At White’s death, the family, already understandably distraught, learned from dealers that many of White’s pieces were not worth the price he had paid for them. Craven does note that some of the dealers White and other Americans used could be dishonest, but this might also be said of Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini, whom Craven does not question. Americans were new to the world of collecting. They had the money, but not yet the trained eye. White bought with love, not informed connoisseurship. He bought many works that are now in museums and highly regarded there. He also bought works which at his death were considered to be fakes by the galleries that sold off the contents of his and the houses of others.

The freshest material in Craven’s study is his inventory of the paintings in White’s own rented New York City townhouse. Craven bases his description on an article published in the New York Times in 1907, when the Princeton Club took over White’s residence after the latter’s undeserved end. This section of Craven’s study contains important new information. It is well known that White patronized his truest of friends, contemporary American artists like Thomas Dewing, Abbott Thayer, and many others. Surprising here is the diversity of Old Master paintings. One can only wonder where White found these treasures and why he arranged them as he did in the rooms of his house. It is unlikely that he kept them there as a showcase for sale to wealthy clients, as his most valuable items were tied up as collateral for personal loans. Would that White, who was never much of a writer, or a member of his circle, had found the time, or felt comfortable enough, to leave us a memoir.

This book offers insight into White’s work as antiques dealer and decorator. It may be useful to architectural historians, decorative arts specialists, students of collections and American taste, house museum curators, and art historians. It is unfortunate that Columbia University Press was unable to use glossy paper for the illustrations; as they are presented here, the images are dull and too few in number—for example, exterior views of many of these houses are not included. However, in this day, with costs for publications as high as they are, one cannot be too picky. It is surely better to publish than not.

The tragedy of this tale is that the masterpiece mansions no longer existed by the end of World War II. All the work, all the craftsmen’s skills, all the solidity and permanence vanished into thin air. Not a single one of these houses survives with its décor intact. No other nation would be so cavalier with its patrimony. These important houses are all gone, leaving the American version of “le gout Rothschild” alive only in platinum print photographs and at San Simeon in California, where William Randolph Hearst collected White-purchased items that Hearst bought at later sales. Tragically, Stanford White’s personal style, executed, for the most part, for men willing to let White do it his own way, does not survive in a single iconic house left to visit today—which renders Craven’s book all the more valuable.