Eight
slender chimneys rise tall against the sky; the chipped bluestone is
smooth on the paths, and the manicured lawns stretch away to Bellevue
Avenue. At Vernon Court, a chateau-style, turn-of-the-century Newport
"cottage," all is elegant and serene and, except for the discreet
signage directing visitors to the ticket seller in the south loggia,
little different from the days when its first owner, M m., Richard Gambrill,
could tw glimpsed alighting from her carriage and giving orders to the
butler for tea. But todays visitors can expect a treat of a different
order a new museum, which is scheduled to open in March 2000, presenting
seventy-eight important works of American illustration against the opulent
background of a recently restored Newport mansion.
The National
Museum of American Illustration and its grand, historic venue are the
product of an inspired husband-and-wife collaboration. She is New York
art dealer Judy Goffman Cutler, the undisputed doyenne of the American
illustration market. He is architect Laurence S. Cutler, a former professor
of architecture and urban design at Harvard, MIT and the Rhode Island
School of Design. Together the couple had acquired over two thousand
stellar American illustrations (specially commissioned paintings by
artists such as N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, which
were meant for reproduction in books, magazines and advertisements,
and date from about 1875 to 1960) and were seeking a permanent home
for their collection. Fortuitously, an advertisement for the sale of
Vernon Court caught their eye.
"We went
up to Newport, " Laurence Cutler remembers, "and as soon as
we walked in, we knew we had found our museum. Vernon Court was designed
by Carrère & Has-tings, the great Beaux Arts architectural
firm that built the Fifth Avenue home of Henry Clay Frick in 1914. That
house was intended to be turned into a museum one day, and some of its
features are similar to Vernon Court's. The proportions of the earlier
house were exquisite, the size perfect. We saw it in April 1998, and
by August we were the new owners."
With its classic
lines and well-preserved ornamentation, the Cutlers' acquisition seemed
largely untouched by time-but only if one didn't look too closely. Since
leaving the Gambrill family, the house had passed through several hands,
including a now defunct junior college of the same name, and little
serious repair work had taken place along the way. "There was no
heat, no air-conditioning," says Laurence Cutler ruefully. "Dangling
wires were everywhere. Not a single door closed prop-erly. The pipes
leaked so did the roof-and there were sixty-one broken windows."
The three-acre garden, originally designed by the firm of Wadley &
Smythe after a garden at Hampton Court Palace, now boasted a modern
swimming pool and two tennis courts, but its elegant terra-cotta-topped
brick walls were crumbling, and a once impressive rose garden was sadly
neglected.
Laurence Cutler
moved into the house and took charge, with the help of Newport Collaborative
Architects, of a restoration designed to replicate the aesthetic atmosphere
of 1898 in an ultramodern, technically sophisticated museum environment.
"After every- thing was done," he says, "we wanted the
house to look as if we'd done noth-ing at all." Accordingly, the
roof was repaired with the same massive, hard--to-find two-by-two-foot
slate tiles used by Carrère & Hastings; missing corbels and
decorative garlands were carefully cast and reapplied to the stucco
façade; replacement hardware was bought from the French firm
that made the originals while, taking as their model a single ex-tant
decorative grate, American artisans cast sixty more for the state-of-the-art
heating and air-conditioning system. During that installation (which
entailed jackhammering through three-foot-deep concrete walls and floors),
Cutler uncovered an 1898-style high-tech rel-ic -the house's original
junction box, with handwritten tags identifying everyone of its fifty-two
rooms. (Another rel-ic-a workman's twenty-nine-cent luncheon receipt
gathering dust in the box.) To ensure an art-worthy environ-ment, Cutler
went on to install a hu-midity control system, with twenty three different
zones, and tinted the windows and glass doors in the gallery areas to
provide UV-ray protection.
With these
technical improvements in place, Vernon Court will prove a natural in
its new role. Museum visitors will enter through the south loggia, circle
easily through the grand salon, petit salon, dining/ballroom and north
loggia, viewing the paintings on display, and exit the way they came
in. Although only partially furnished ("We're an art museum, not
a house tour like The Breakers," Cutler points out), these lavish
spaces are a worthy, even distracting, background. They were designed
by the exclusive French firm Allard et ses Fils, decorators famous for
the reinstallation of paneling and other historical elements from European
houses and for the commissioning of elaborate work in metal, stone and
wood.
At Vernon
Court, the designers focused on eighteenth-century France -the period
that enthralled much of fashionable Newport -with selected Italian pieces
thrown in. The south loggia is a bower of flowering vines, painted by
Louis Comfort Tiffany's associate James Wall Finn after a mural at the
Villa Giulia in Rome. The grand salon boasts intricate eighteenth -century
Italian walnut paneling, while next door in the petit salon, a Carrara
marble mantel with ormolu mounts is set off by mauve Rococo paneling.
The dining/ballroom features two massive marble sideboards and a memorable
fire surround ornamented with stylized ormolu acanthus leaves.
As Vernon
Court is also the Cutlers' residence, parts of the first floor, including
a modern kitchen, an intimate paneled library and the marble hall, will
be off-limits to museum visitors. Upstairs, seven private bedroom suites
house the family and their guests. A private third floor has been refurbished
to provide a library and office and storage space. Museum-goers may
visit the gardens, complete with mature plantings, revitalized roses
and classical statuary. Access is through French doors, under the north
loggia in the former servants' dining room -a space that has turned
out to be the perfect place for a small museum shop and public restrooms.
Garden lovers
can stroll across to an adjacent, three-acre plot designed in 1884 by
landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted for a now demolished house
called Stoneacre. The Cutlers own the property and are planning to restore
Olmsted's contoured, pastoral landscape as well as install a monumental
brick arch designed in 1962 by architect Louis Kahn. Although the juxtaposition
may seem unusual, Cutler believes that the classical spirit that pervades
the work of each man will produce a fitting monument to them both.
American illustration
and the determinedly French Vemon Court may also seem an odd combination,
but as Judy Cutler notes, this artistic genre and haute Newport have
much in common. Both flourished during the early decades of the century,
when, in an age before television, everybody from the Vanderbilts to
the scullery maid at The Breakers avidly perused the illustrations in
The Century, Harper's Weekly and Scribner's. No longer dependent
on old-fashioned engraving, such periodicals were using the new offset
printing process to produce colorful, evocative images of all kinds.
J.C. Leyendecker (who painted the Arrow Collar man) and Charles Dana
Gibson (the creator of the Gibson Girl) immortalized well-born American
youth, and Maxfield Parrish created his own fairy-tale world. N.C. Wyeth
brought hard-driving adventures to life, and Norman Rockwell told human
stories-at-a-glance. The illustrators themselves also fired the public
imagination, becoming celebrities whose doings were chronicled as eagerly
as those of Newport socialites (Leyendecker's Arrow Collar man received
seventeen thousand letters, gifts and marriage proposals during a single
month in the early 1920s). Nearly a century later much has changed,
but American illustration and Vernon Court now have something else in
common: Both represent a lost, beloved version of America -a place we
would all like to visit.
We can do
so with paintings such as Harrison Fisher's 1912 Bride Getting Groomed
for the Wedding, in which a crisply uniformed maid hovers respectfully
around a society bride. In the north loggia, Maxfield Parrish's compelling
mural Florentine Fete (1916) reminds us of why, by 1925, one
out of every four American houses sported a Parrish reproduction. As
a nod to Newport's illustrious Colonial past, Judy Cutler has also included
a number of works like Howard Pyle's 1899 Washington at Mount Vernon.
Later decades (until about 1960, when illustration lost its audience
to television and photography) -are represented by such works as Norman
Rockwell's World War II-era Saturday Evening Post cover Liberty Girl
and by N.C. Wyeth's The Doryman (Evening), a hauntingly beautiful
book illustration from 1933. The display is impressive, and with such
a large collection at her disposal, Judy Cutler plans to change it approximately
twice a year and may also mount theme or single-artist exhibitions.
All are likely
to find a ready audience. Although still eschewed by much of the art-historical
establishment (which objects to its commercial antecedents), illustration
is wildly popular with the American public. The Norman Rockwell Museum
in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, attracts nearly two hundred thousand
annual visitors, and collectors ranging from Steven Spielberg to Ross
Perot now pay millions of dollars for choice examples. Aficionados will
welcome the new National Museum of American Illustration as a much-needed
center for the study and appreciation of this art form. But even unsuspecting
tourists, attracted by the grandeur of Vernon Court, are bound to be
captivated by the display within: "Illustration is magical,"
says Judy Cutler. "It can tell an entire story with a single image.
It can capture not just a moment in time but the state of fashion, of
society, of America itself. It's our history, illustrated."
The National Museum of American Illustration is located at Vernon Court,
492 Bellevue Avenue at Victoria, Newport, Rhode Island 02840. Telephone
401-851-8949; fax 401-851-8974; e-mail art@americanillustration.org
