But let us see how unintelligently, nevertheless, we went about the new art movement. Like the North American Indian who habitually first learns the vices of civilization, we were not slow to discover the meretricious in whatever art the old world chose to exhibit, and this we began assiduously to adapt, especially in the field of applied ornament.
A school of design called the “Eastlake school” ([Plate LXII]), I believe, was the first to emerge from the confused mass of ideas with which the American brain became suddenly surcharged. As the Rococo in France had been called down by the Empire, so was our Scaramouch architecture of the Reign of Terror, with all its extravagant circular work, called down by the Centennial, and straight lines innumerable—congeries of straight lines—became the rage. Mouldings were no longer returned, but died against perpendicular members the faces of which were also ornamented by lines. With the jig-saw still dangerously convenient there was shortly evolved from the Eastlake propaganda, at first devoted to the manufacture of furniture, an American travesty of the eighteenth century châlet of Switzerland. The historic châlets were covered with ornament. On close inspection, however, this ornament was easily seen to be hand carving of the most skilful description; but never mind, our jig-saws could fake it sufficiently well to please a not over-fastidious public taste, and it is hence we derive fashionable house number one.
But the Eastlake style was not the only product of the Centennial. Contemporary if not coördinate was the Romanesque revival undertaken by H. H. Richardson ([see Plate V]), also a certain type of Victorian-Gothic ([see Plate LXIII]) associated more or less with the name of Richard Morris Hunt, neither of which could be expressed in wood, and therefore, represented the more expensive fashions. The references to the Romanesque revival which occur in Chapter I of this review will answer, I hope, for that fashion in architecture, so I will proceed with some desultory reflections upon the Victorian-Gothic style.
Mr. Hunt was probably the most remarkable
“BELLWOOD,” MADISON, N. J. EPOCH 1878.
architect this country has produced. His professional training occupied some twelve years of his life, which he spent mostly in universities abroad. He told me this himself when I called upon him, now many years since, for encouragement and advice. He sat me upon a high stool in his private office, and related about twelve chapters of his memoirs, as nearly as I can recollect, i. e., one chapter for each year of his prodigious scholarship, all of which I have no doubt was intended for my good, which I trust it has, in some measure, accomplished. Returning to this country laden with scholastic honors, for twenty-five years this brilliant diplomé concerned himself principally with academic detail. Rarely did he go beyond the integument of a structure with his characteristic impress, apparently satisfied to decorate according to the canons of the Ecole des Beaux Arts the architecture sui generis of America.
About this time the Victorian-Gothic school of design was advertising its merits, in which school Mr. Hunt found a congenial medium to exploit his essentially grammatical detail, and Bellwood at Madison, New Jersey, supplies me a fine example of this once very fashionable architecture and of Mr. Hunt’s work of that period. In 1897 I was consulted by Mr. Bell, who had purchased the place from Mr. Twombly, regarding a proposed extension to the house. Although not at all in sympathy with what Montgomery Schuyler calls Mr. Hunt’s “staccato style,” I remembered the episode of Michelangelo and the plans of St. Peter’s by Bramante, and advised that the ruling spirit in any new work directly attached to the main building of the estate should be Victorian-Gothic notwithstanding that the style had gone completely out of vogue, and I, myself, had been obliged to remove some of the interior woodwork for Mr. Bell, which, while academic in every line, was crying ugly—so ugly that nobody could look at it a minute without irritability. But my devotion to art lost me the only profitable part of the work, for Carrère and Hastings were subsequently employed to erect an Elizabethan end which I have taken care not to show in the illustration, not because of lack of architectonic merit in the extension, but because it impairs just so much of the historic value of the subject.