Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; but it can also be attained, by architects who are really in quest of it, in other styles quite as well, which admit a much wider range of expression, while the student is forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre repertory of Queen Anne any other quality than quietude can be expressed. Its successes in domestic architecture are mainly the successes of unnoticeableness, which is really the character not only of the dwellings just mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, and of a house, which has the great advantage of double the usual frontage, by Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s reproduction; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street by these latter architects, which looks less like a work of architectural art than a magnified piece of furniture “with the Chippendale feeling,” can scarcely be called successful, while the house they designed for Mr. Astor in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street front in brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called Queen Anne, in spite of the three rows of egg-and-dart moulding, already remarked, which crown its rock-faced basement. The highest praise to which these typical Queen Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thoroughly studied detail, such as the treatment of the oriel in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is that they look like eligible mansions for highly respectable families content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also the highest praise that can be bestowed upon their prototypes of the Georgian era. We can repeat the admission that it is far better they should look like that than like the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons, without thereby admitting that the prim and prosaic expression of respectability never so eminent can be scored as a triumph in domestic architecture. The domestic architecture of Venice, or Rouen, or Nuremberg has something more to say to us than that. And a touch of such spirit and picturesqueness as Mr. Bruce Price has given us in a brick house in Fifty-sixth Street (p. 22), or as Mr. Hunt has given us not only in the elaborately ornate house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, but in some dwellings in upper Madison Avenue, is more to be desired than a mere omission to outrage decorum.
HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.
Such as the successes of Queen Anne in domestic architecture are, they are its only successes, although it is only fair to say that much interesting work has been done in it, if not strictly of it, in suburban houses and sea-side cottages, which do not come within our present scope. A “feature” suffices for the architecture of a narrow street front, and a feature may be compiled out of the repertory of Queen Anne by a designer who thinks that result a reward of his pains. The oriel, for example, in effect comprises the architecture of the house just mentioned as designed by Mr. Haight. But even in a house which is only a feature the classic detail is not always adjusted without a visible incongruity to the constructions, out of which classic detail cannot spontaneously grow as it grew out of classic constructions. The doorway, for example, of the house designed by Mr. Robertson, which is virtually repeated in the window over it, is a moulded round arch standing upon pilasters of its own width, and thus apparently making of the jamb and arch a complete and detached construction. That is to say, the pilasters seem to carry the arch. The architect of the New York Post-office has done the same thing in a much ruder way. But the elegance of Mr. Robertson’s detail cannot rid even the spectator who does not stop to analyze the source of the feeling of an uneasy sensation that what is thus elegantly expressed is not the fact. An arch does, in fact, exercise a lateral as well as a vertical pressure; and if the arch and its vertical supports formed a detached construction, as they here appear to do, the arch would be unstable. Insensible as the classical Romans were to considerations of artistic expression, they were not so insensible as this. They recognized the existence of a lateral pressure by marking the impost of the arches with a continuous moulding, thus allying the arch with its lateral abutment as well as with its vertical support; and here the architect of the Post-office, wiser, or, if thought be not predicable of his architecture, more fortunate than Mr. Robertson, has been content to imitate them.
The buildings in which these solecisms appear, we repeat, are the successes of Queen Anne. For structures more complicated most of its practitioners have shrunk from invoking it. Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, indeed, took the ground, when they designed the Union League Club House, that a “feature” supplied a sufficient idea for that edifice; and that a portico of four large Roman Corinthian columns in front, subdued to an equal number of brick pilasters on the side, would meet the architectural requirements of the case, if they let their consciousness play freely over the remaining surfaces without reference to this central thought. But the result has scarcely justified this belief, and the spectator finds that the building, in spite of the unifying influence of a large and simple roof, in addition to the feature in question, does not make a total impression, but is scattering and confused; while its parts, taken singly, are feeble in spite of their extravagant scale. This, indeed, is not even a sacrifice to the conventions, but a specimen of what can be achieved in a style of gentle dulness gone rampant. If tame Queen Anne is a somewhat ineffectual thing, what shall be said of wild Queen Anne? There is nothing wild about two other public buildings in which architects have ventured upon Queen Anne—one a hospital, in Park Avenue, by Mr. Haight, and one an “institution” of some other kind, in Lexington Avenue, by Mr. Fernbach. Both of these, indeed, are tame, and whatever the differences of detail may be, both have much the same expression, so that one carries away from either, as from one of the commonplace faces which we are always confounding, an impression which may be that of the other—in either case of a centre with projecting wings separately roofed, and the whole wall overlaid with a shallow trellis of brick-work, too shallow to be serviceable as buttresses, and serviceable only as the badge of the alleged “style.” It seems hard upon an owner that he should be required to pay money for rectangular applications of brick which can scarcely strengthen his building appreciably, and can hardly be held to beautify it, by way merely of labelling it, “This is Queen Anne.” And this resemblance, be it noted, which is not so much a specific resemblance as the expression of an amiable characterlessness common to both, is not all to be imputed to the architects, except upon the ground of their choice of a style. The works of both of them have character, and not at all the same character, when they are working in a style which is a real form-language in which meanings can be expressed, and not a mere little phrase-book containing elegant extracts wherewith to garnish aimless discourse. Mr. Fernbach,[C] as is testified by such works as the “Staats-Zeitung” building and the German Savings-Bank in New York, and the building of the Mutual Insurance Company in Philadelphia, is one of the most accomplished practitioners in this country of academic Renaissance. Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is a highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not their fault if Queen Anne, when spread over an extensive façade, spreads thin.
Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the temerity to attempt a Queen Anne church, and the success of his essay is not such as to invite imitation. The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue, with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, which are of a rugged rusticity, with the needful openings left square-headed and unmodelled; but these walls are crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow shingles, under a broad gable, and its openings united under a thin ogee canopy of painted pine. There is here and there a little classic detail, which, if it pleases the designer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the interior that is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what the German critics call the “playful use” of forms devised for one construction and one material in another material and with no visible construction; and the result of this pleasantry is what a German professor, celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “an important joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, the treatment passes a joke, for the mahogany nave arches, with their little protruding key-woods, and their supporting posts incased in boxed pedestals, are actually doing the work of carrying the clere-story—unless, indeed, there is a concealed system of iron-work—although their function is so far sacrificed to their form that they are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne contains no forms that can be even tortured into the construction of an open ceiling, the architect has omitted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere loft, sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as in the fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is entirely playful, so that the interior of the church seems to be a collection of pleasantries. In a dining-room, for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes seems to be ruled out by the previous question as to the admissibility in the sacred edifice of levity even of the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for the appliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeed for the designers of “cozy” churches in general, that there is no official censorship of church architecture as there is of church music, and that no rubric makes it the duty of every minister, with such assistance as he can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to suppress all light and unseemly architecture by which vain and ungodly persons profane the service of the sanctuary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the spirit in which we have been asking other architects, what he has gained by abandoning such an effort as he made some ten years before in the Phillips Memorial Church to develop a composition out of his subject in favor of these scraps of quotations, and of quotations neither fresh nor very pregnant! He might answer that the church in which we admire at least the effort was a somewhat untamed and obstreperous fabric, and that the present edifice is much more chastened and subdued. It is tame, no doubt, and Mr. Robertson’s talent, when he works in Queen Anne, is subdued—
“subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand;”
but, upon the whole, it is difficult to see how the architect, comparing the earlier with the later work, could fail to feel that the attempt to express something, however crude and so far unsuccessful the attempt might have been, was a more manly and artistic employment than this elegant trifling, in which the highest attainable success has an element of puerility. In truth, it is gratifying to remark that the argument by which we have supposed the architect to have solaced himself for the result of his ecclesiastical labors in Queen Anne does not seem to have convinced himself, and that a later work still, a sandstone church farther down the same avenue, is a much more serious piece of design, being an attempt to develop the architecture out of the structure itself. It would be especially unjust to misapply to Mr. Robertson’s Queen Anne church the saying that the style is the man, for the church last mentioned shows that Mr. Robertson is a man of talents, when he gives his talents a chance.