Red Lodge, from which this paneling was taken in the 1920s, was a small structure whose early history is unknown. From the Middle Ages onward, domestic interiors in England were frequently clad with wood paneling that served to insulate as well as decorate. After 1500, older paneling was replaced by the style seen here, called “Romayne [Roman] work.” This style incorporated rondels with faces in profile and other Italianate motifs. Here some of the profiles wear classically derived helmets, while others wear contemporary headdresses. Also seen on the paneling are a rose, feathers, and a pomegranate—the emblems, respectively, of the royal house of Tudor, the Prince of Wales, and Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII. Such heraldic references were common in paneling.
This paneling would have been suitable in a chamber intended for entertaining in a hunting lodge, which Red Lodge may have been originally.
The paneling of this room incorporates elements from the reign of King James I (1603-25) and represents the late Renaissance (Jacobean) style in England. Details such as the ornamentation on the pilasters and the ebonized wood (wood painted to resemble ebony) reflect the influence of the illustrated pattern books of Northern European artists. Rooms with elaborate paneling like this often had ceilings adorned with plaster-relief decoration.
Mr. and Mrs. Wharton Sinkler purchased this paneling in 1918 from John Wanamaker's---the first American store to offer antique furniture, decorative objects, tapestries, and even rooms---and it was incorporated into the furnishings of their home. The popularity of Jacobean-style interiors in both England and the United States can be attributed, in part, to the Victoria and Albert Museum's 1894 installation of a room in this style from the Old Palace at Bromley.
This interior is composed of architectural elements from a reception room on the ground floor of Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire, England. The hall was built in 1724-27 for Nicholas Leake, fourth and last earl of Scarsdale, who hired the architect and master builder Francis Smith of Warwick (1672-1738). Craftsmen from throughout central England and abroad were brought to the site to finish the interiors, which were notable for their elaborate chimneypieces and stucco ceilings.
After the earl's death in 1736, the hall had various owners until it was bought in 1919 by speculators, who sold its interiors at public auction. (Today, the house survives only as an imposing ruin.) Museum Director Fiske Kimball purchased this room, and two others said to come from Sutton Scarsdale Hall, from the well-known London firm Robersons as appropriate settings for the display of the Museum's important John Howard McFadden Collection of English paintings and other suitable furnishings.
This interior is one of three rooms installed in the Museum said to have come from Sutton Scarsdale Hall, a grand country house in Derbyshire, England. The hall was built in 1724-27 for Nicholas Leake, fourth and last earl of Scarsdale, who hired the architect and master builder Francis Smith of Warwick (1672-1738). Craftsmen from throughout central England and abroad were brought to the site to finish the interiors, which were notable for their elaborate chimneypieces and stucco ceilings.
After the earl's death in 1736, the hall had various owners until it was bought in 1919 by speculators, who sold its interiors at public auction. (Today, the house survives only as an imposing ruin.) Museum Director Fiske Kimball purchased this room, and two others believed to be from Sutton Scarsdale Hall, from the well-known London firm Robersons with the intention of acquiring appropriate settings for the display of the Museum's important John Howard McFadden Collection of English paintings and for collections of English decorative arts. While surviving documents make it impossible to confirm that this interior is from Sutton Scarsdale Hall, the proportions of the room and its fine overmantel carving evoke the style of that elaborately furnished, monumental building, which once rivaled its great neighbors Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall.
This interior is one of three rooms installed in the Museum said to have come from Sutton Scarsdale Hall, a grand country house in Derbyshire, England. The hall was built in 1724-27 for Nicholas Leake, fourth and last earl of Scarsdale, who hired the architect and master builder Francis Smith of Warwick (1672-1738). Craftsmen from throughout central England and abroad were brought to the site to finish the interiors, which were notable for their elaborate chimneypieces and stucco ceilings.
After the earl's death in 1736, the hall had various owners until it was bought in 1919 by speculators, who sold its interiors at public auction. (Today, the house survives only as an imposing ruin.) Museum Director Fiske Kimball purchased this room, and two others believed to be from Sutton Scarsdale Hall, from the well-known London firm Robersons with the intention of acquiring appropriate settings for the display of the Museum's important John Howard McFadden Collection of English paintings and for collections of English decorative arts.
Surviving documents make it impossible to ascertain that this interior comes from Sutton Scarsdale Hall. Moreover, the design of the fireplace and overmantel decoration raises doubts about this provenance since they are in a later style dating from the 1740s. When this room was purchased, its walls were unpainted, like those of the Museum's other two rooms said to have come from Sutton Scarsdale, but evidence survives that the wood here was formerly painted. The present color scheme is derived from the interior depicted by Arthur Devis (1712-1787) in his painting of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Bull of 1747.
Wrightington Hall, near Wigan, Lancashire, in the north of England, was the ancestral seat of the Wrightington and Diconson families. The earliest remaining buildings on the site apparently date from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The Hall was extensively added to and rebuilt about 1748, and this room was no doubt part of that reconstruction.
The design of rooms such as this, particularly in provincial houses such as Wrightington Hall, was based on illustrations in books such as The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, published in 1740 by Batty and Thomas Langley. Such designs were important in spreading the English rococo style of interior decoration, which is apparent here in the carved scrollwork and festoons of flowers and foliage on the chimneypiece. This style was essentially French in origin and generally made little impact on the more prevalent Palladian style derived from the classically inspired work of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. The doorway flanked by the two Corinthian columns and the architectural cornice decoration are typical Palladian features and demonstrate how these two different architectural vocabularies sometimes coexisted, even in the same room.
The woodwork and other built-in interior features of this drawing room came from a house in the Tower Hill section of London, a neighborhood of gentry and merchants that was also the birthplace of William Penn, founder of the city of Philadelphia. This room overlooked Tower Hill, an infamous public hanging site northwest of the Tower of London.
First owned by the merchant William Stead, and later by his sons, the property seems to have undergone a major renovation between January 1763 and July 1766, as indicated by a substantial increase in the valuation shown in the tax records. This room, occupying the central position on the second floor, probably became the main reception area of the new house.
The carved architectural elements that decorate the room are probably based on popular eighteenth-century books of architectural designs, such as Abraham Swan's Designs for Chimnies: and the Proportions They Bear to Their Respective Rooms, London, 1765, and Upwards of One Hundred and Fifty New Designs, for Chimney Pieces; from the Plain and Simple, to the Most Superb and Magnificent, London, 1768. Many of Swan's designs were influenced by the Palladian style, so named for the classically inspired work of sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. This elegant and refined style was popular in large English country houses of the eighteenth century. In the design of town houses, the style was reflected in a new emphasis on the second floor level, exemplified here by the large tripartite "Venetian" window.
In the nineteenth century, part of the house became the Crooked Billet tavern. By 1920 the building had fallen on hard times and was serving as a tin can factory. The Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired the room in 1922 as its first period room. It is installed with eighteenth-century English paintings and furnishings.
A manor house called "New Place" is documented as being part of the Gaynes estate in Essex, England, in as early as the sixteenth century. The house descended in the Gaynes family until the 1640s, after which it passed into the Mayor family. In 1748 Mary Mayor married James Esdaile (1714-1793), a knight and a London alderman, and records indicate that around 1775 Esdaile rebuilt "New Place." The paneling in this room may be from Esdaile's house, which was demolished in 1924 and the woodwork dispersed; the Philadelphia Museum of Art purchased the room from the London firm Robersons in 1926. All that remains of "New Place" is the plain-fronted, red-brick building at Upminster, known as the Clock House, which served as the stables.
This drawing room is an archetypal example of the work of Robert Adam, a Scottish architect and designer whose name has become synonymous with this style of neoclassical decoration. The room was originally situated on the ground floor of the grand London house that Adam designed for the third Earl of Bute in the early 1760s. Adam's original plans refer to it as the "Organ Drawing Room," the large recess being intended for Lord Bute's vastly expensive mechanical organ.
In 1765, Lord Bute sold the unfinished house to William Petty Fitzmaurice, second Earl of Shelburne and later first Marquess of Lansdowne, with the provision that Adam be retained to continue work on the home. Adam was already well known to Lord Shelburne, whose father had employed the architect to remodel Bowood, his family's country estate in Wiltshire. (Shelburne, who served as Secretary of State and in 1783 concluded the Treaty of Paris granting independence to the United States, entertained Benjamin Franklin at Bowood on several occasions.) Lord Shelburne and his wife moved into the house in 1768, when it was in what Lady Shelburne described as "so unfurnishd a State." Yet by the time of Lady Shelburne's death and the end of Adam's employment by Lord Shelburne in 1771, the decoration of the drawing room remained incomplete and was evidently abandoned.
Although the room's original furnishings do not survive today, it is known that Adam provided designs for a pier-glass and a semicircular pier-table, executed by John Gilbert; circular picture frames, executed by Sefferin Nelson; and a carpet, the design for which is in the collection of Sir John Soane's Museum in London.
In 1929, Lord Shelburne's heirs sold the house to a group of investors. The room was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1931, when the front of the house, including the drawing room and the dining room (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), was slated for demolition to make way for a new street.
