International studio (80.1925)

inCERDAClOnAL

REPRODUCTION OF THE BALLROOM FROM GADSBY S TAVERN, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
Courtesy oj the Metropolitan Museum oj Art

everything up to the proportions of a Renaissance one at least, the ballrcom from Alexandria, Vir-

palace, it would have been fatally easy to design ginia, is a masterpiece of its kind, one cannot

a building in which the crafts of colonial America stifle the regret that in the attainment of such

would have been lost, just as, up till the present, formal perfection, so much had to be sacrificed,

they may have been lost in existing museum gal- The decoration becomes over-formalized and so

Ieries. loses its charm and invention. Richness of texture

To me the third floor, through which one gives place to permit the pure balance of unbroken

enters, is by far the most delightful, and this in surfaces. Saddest of all, to my mind, furniture,

spite of the fact that three out of the seven rooms at its highest technical point, tends to lose its

are not originals, but reconstructions. No matter, variety. With the best will in the world, I cannot

the copying is excellently done and provides a escape the feeling that a Savery or Duncan Phyfe

marvelous setting for the seventeenth-century highboy is too self-assertive for good fellowship,

furniture. Especially happy is the central gallery, In and for itself it is magnificent, but, as against

round which the rooms are grouped, an adapta- the richly carved chests and cupboards of the

tion of the Old Ship Meeting House of Hingham, seventeenth century, it has lost its capacity for

Massachusetts. The original rooms, paired at becoming a part of its surroundings,

either end, from Hampton, New Hampshire, On the ground floor are rooms of the Third

Portland, Rhode Island, and Newington, Con- Period, the first quarter of the nineteenth century,

necticut, are from the first half of the eighteenth It is the twilight. The balance attained is no

century. All are richly paneled, the first, which is longer a creative balance, but is becoming sterile,

also the earliest, a bedroom, boasting also a An attempted return to decoration leads only to

paneled ceiling. fussiness. But a twilight is not without its com-

The rooms on the second floor, which belong, pensations, when you have architects like Mcln-

according to the accepted classification, to the tyre and Bullfinch and can import charming

Second Period, are in interesting contrast. Not French wallpapers.

noticeably larger, they give the impression of Yes, the American Wing is decidedly a thing

being more spacious. It must have been about to see, whether you are interested in "periods"

this time, about the third quarter of the eighteenth or not. It represents a courageous, and to me

century, that is, that the American designer highly successful, step in the direction of what

developed to its highest point his spacial sense, one may call the humanization of the museum,

of which one finds so many evidences throughout I have only one suggestion. The pictures are

New England. Looking at these rooms, of which mainly portraits of historical personages. This is

three forty

January 1925