Stanford White was a real artist, one of the kind that could no more help doing beautiful things than he could help living. Practically a boy when he did it, I saw a frame in his home that he had carved for Mrs. White during their engagement. It was a most delicate and complicated pattern—I have the impression that it was of flowers and figures—but it gave the effect of one of those Chinese openwork ivory carvings, and formed the most exquisite setting for a small portrait by Thomas Dewing, something that Meissonier could never have done, as he had not Dewing’s sense of beauty.
I believe that Stanford set the fashion here of building to our latitude. We had formerly copied the British in our homes, using red brick or brownstone, with small windows, reps curtains, and nailed-down carpets of warm dark brown and scarlet—the stuff of the north for New York City, which is the latitude of Madrid. The change was to blond brick, marble, or Missouri limestone for the outside; and stone or polished floors, Turkish rugs or mats for the inside, with a decided lightening of the color scheme, so much so that a great “gag” was to call the firm “McKim, White, and Gold.” To show that most of their tendencies were for light interiors, a remark of Stanford’s can be quoted. He told a woman, for whom he had just finished an ivory-colored room, when she asked him what to put on the walls, “Oh, any color as long as it is red.” Any painter knows that, given white as a background, the only color one can trust the average citizen with is red. It takes an artist to put blue and white or green and white together; and some one with a Whistlerian feeling to put black and white together; but a child can use red and white.
Nothing could be more different in style than the buildings Stanford designed—the Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Club, Doctor Parkhurst’s Church (which has now been torn down), or any of his business buildings, are each made for the things they were to house. His personal tastes were absolutely under the control of his artistic feelings, and his sensitiveness was so great that he could lose his own personality. When he fitted up his own house in Gramercy Park, the music room was not his, it belonged to his family and their friends, and he made it more beautifully classic than anything I have seen in North America. A flight or two up was his own room. Vercingetorix in his cave with all his spoils piled up around him! Everything he cared about (and he wanted it at once) and a heterogeneous mass of priceless books, paintings, draperies, all in a careless disorder, was happiness to him in his own den.
I was in The Players when Stanny returned from his trip to Virginia, having been asked to restore the principal building of the university, which had been designed and built by Thomas Jefferson. As we sat together over something to drink he seemed to be puzzled, confused, and silent. I asked him what was the matter. He started and came out of his mood, saying it was the job down South. “I’ve seen his plans,” he said, speaking with great deference. “They’re wonderful and I am scared to death. I only hope I can do it right.” This left me with a conception of the greatness of Jefferson in another rôle of which I was ignorant—his architectural side. He is constantly impressing me as our first American—an artist and, like all the big ones, a true democrat. He represented the ideas of to-day and was farsighted enough to know they were coming.
I saw the Metropolitan Club built; in fact, I painted the library ceiling. I remember, in looking it over one day, I threw a lighted match among some shavings and, in a panic, ran to stamp it out. I was told I need not be afraid, as everything was fireproof. Stanny had bet a large amount with Ogden Goelet that he would have the club finished on the specified date. Just at the last moment the workmen struck. The mantelpieces, of which there were a large number, had not been polished in the state of New York and the unions demanded that they be done over again. There was no time the night before the limit expired, but I knew Stanny had a plan, so I went up to see the fun.
Stanny and the contractor had a line of boats filled with the necessary materials waiting at the North River, and another line of carts and workmen to bring them up. A thousand men and women were waiting in the street—masons, handy men, scrub women, and what not. At six o’clock sharp every trades-union workman had left; then in came the army. The first ones, bearing huge rolls of paper, unrolled them on the floor from the door to every fireplace. Women with mops stood at attention, to clean up if anything dropped. Out on the street, the carts came up to the door, one by one, each in solemn rotation, depositing its contents of the grates, cement, bricks, or some material necessary to the completion. These were whisked up by the workmen and borne in to their rightful places. A continuous procession upstairs and downstairs which reminded one of an army of ants building themselves a new home. All this time the women with mops were waiting, lest a bit of something drop on the new polished floors or splash against the walls. So carefully was the whole affair planned, however, that not a thing was marred, and at 9 A.M. the next morning Stanford White handed over to the committee a finished building. He won his money from Mr. Goelet, but with his customary generosity bought a beautiful piece of tapestry and presented it to the club.
Stanford was accused of shamefully copying when he built the Madison Square Garden. It was supposed to be an exact replica of the Giralda, in Spain. I have never seen the Giralda, but I have seen on the right and left of a page, in juxtaposition, a photograph of both buildings. I do not see a resemblance striking enough to comment upon. When one thinks of how Shakespeare and Dumas, and, in fact, almost every great man, has borrowed, the question for the fair minded is whether the thing borrowed has been changed by the personality of the borrower, which, if he be of any value, must overlay and extinguish that first personality and give an entirely new impression. Remember the lines, “He winked at Omar down the road....”
Mrs. Van Rensselaer wrote a long article somewhere about the Madison Square building and gushed about that rare quality in the architects who would go so far as even to vary the color of their bricks in constructing the tower, so as to give it variance of tonality. This seemed to me improbable, and one day I asked Meade about it. He said it was “rot,” that if one of the brickmakers had not gone bankrupt, the tower would have been the same color all the way up. I commented upon the hideous color of the combination of brickwork and terra cotta produced both in this building and in the Herald Building at Thirty-fifth Street. Stanny told me not to be silly, but to wait until they were twenty years old. Remembering it the other day, I looked, and, behold! the tonality and color in the Madison Square building had come together like smoothing velvet.
The first attempt at the statue on the top failed by reason of the fact that the drapery which flew from the shoulder, and served as a tail or rudder, did not accomplish its purpose of turning her arrow into the eye of the wind. Saint-Gaudens (the sculptor) and Stanny spent some thousands of dollars in taking it down and making a new one. The second worked as a weathercock, but, alas! it was not half so beautiful. To-day the drapery over which they spent so much time and money is gone. So much does America care for its art and its artists!
One should not judge Stanford White’s ability as an architect by the Washington Arch which stands at the foot of Fifth Avenue. The temporary arch which preceded this one was put up in lath and plaster—staff—to celebrate a memorial occasion, and was rarely beautiful in structure and proportion. The city fathers asked him to reproduce it for permanence in marble. He told them it could not be done, but after much argument he gave in. I suppose it was a question of bearing power or stress, but he did not succeed. Very few men have ever been able to alter—to their own satisfaction, or to that of the public—their first inspiration. A “dub” can; an artist can’t. The Washington Arch stands to-day, as many other buildings in America do, a monument to the interference with an artist’s dream.