Integrated Pasts: Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle

JENNIFER BORLAND Oklahoma State University F MARTHA EASTON The Material Collective

Abstract grouped in their new environments, the objects in these eclectic collections span centuries but work together to create richly evoc- In this article we investigate two medievalist enterprises built ative meanings that free them from the constraints of prove- in the 1920s and 1930s: Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, nance. Glencairn and Hammond Castle provide experiences of Pennsylvania, and Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Massa- the medieval world, ultimately reminding us that all interpreta- chusetts. Both buildings were created as homes for wealthy in- tions of a period, whether scholarly or popular, are, in the end, dustrialists—Raymond Pitcairn and John Hays Hammond Jr., reconstructions. respectively—and both are structures built in a medieval style that also incorporate actual medieval objects, including archi- tectural fragments, stained glass, and sculpture. Although they lencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania do it somewhat differently, the two buildings resituate the art (Fig. 1), and Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Mas- of the past in the present, reinterpreting the past but also re- sachusetts (Fig. 2), are two early twentieth-century inventing the medieval objects through recontextualization. We American homes that were built in a medieval re- examine these revivalist buildings as products of the trend of me- gvival style. “Medievalism”—“the ongoing process of recreat- dievalism prevalent among collectors in the late nineteenth and ing, reinventing, and reenacting medieval culture in post- early twentieth centuries, who conflated original and reproduc- medieval times”1—has garnered increasing attention in the tion elements to create a pastiche of medieval and modern. In- broader field of medieval studies over the past thirty years.2 stead of searching for origins and privileging the “authentic,” One reason for this may be the scholarly acknowledgment however, we interrogate the very meaning of authenticity. The spoliated fragments of architectural salvage, sculpture, and glass that all investigations of the medieval, both traditional his- function as relics of the Middle Ages, but they also transcend their torical studies and instances of what we would call medieval- identity as historical markers of the past. Resituated and re- ism, are inevitably informed by the contexts in which we live

We express our sincere gratitude to the staff members at both Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle for sharing their rich archives and collections. We thank archivist Gregory Jackson and curator Ed Gyllenhaal at Glencairn Museum for their generous help. At Hammond Castle, we would like to thank John Pettibone, Jay Craveiro, and Linda Rose for their assistance and support. Martha Easton also wishes to express her appreciation to the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library and The Frick Collection, for the support and assistance of the Center and Library staff when she was a Senior Research Fellow there in the fall of 2015. We are also grateful to Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen for their productive comments and careful editing, as well as for the feedback of Gesta’s anonymous readers.

1. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, “Making Medievalism: A Critical Review,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Emery and Utz (Cambridge: Brewer, 2014), 1–10, at 2. The authors attribute this notion of medievalism to Leslie J. Workman (see note 2 below). 2. Key works in the field include the journal Studies in Medievalism, begun by Leslie J. Workman in 1979; the conference series The Year’s Work in Medievalism, begun by Workman and Kathleen Verduin in 1986 (https://sites.google.com/site/theyearsworkinmedievalism/home); Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Carolyn Dinshaw, Get- ting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); eadem, “Temporalities,” in Twenty-First Century Approaches: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 108–23; the journal Post- medieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, begun in 2010; Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2012); and William J. Diebold, “Medievalism,” in “Medieval Art History Today—Critical Terms,” ed. Nina Rowe, special issue, Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): 247–56.

Gesta v57n1 (Spring 2018). 0031-8248/2018/7703-0004 $10.00. Copyright 2018 by the International Center of Medieval Art. All rights reserved. v57n1, Spring 2018 Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 95 Figure 1. Glencairn Museum, former home of Mildred and Ray- Figure 2. Aerial view, Hammond Castle, 1926–29, Gloucester, mond Pitcairn, 1928–39, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Massachusetts (photo: Philip Greenspun, 2006; http://philip Jennifer Borland). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color .greenspun.com/copyright/). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a version of this image. color version of this image. and are equally distant from the “real” Middle Ages.3 A vast discussed in terms of nostalgia.8 That nostalgia may be charac- range of cultural products created over several centuries are terized as noble and earnest, or naïve and hopeless, but either described as participating in medievalism, leading to the de- way, such critiques are imbued with implications of desire and velopment of descriptions for subfields or categories of the loss.9 This interpretation of medievalism, in which America phenomenon. The two homes on which we focus here are es- yearns for a past it does not have, for the Middle Ages that sentially examples of what some scholars have termed “tradi- once were, often makes sense.10 It is difficult to disagree with tional medievalism,” characterized in part by its desire for the argument that American industrialists who became inter- re-creation of the medieval.4 This type of medievalism has ested in the medieval, expressed through public commissions been contrasted with postmodern medievalism or “neomedie- or private collecting, were enacting an aspect of the country’s valism,” which “comments directly on the process of that re- creation, playing with the entire idea of accessing the past,”5 terns of Collecting, 1800–1940 (University Park: Palmer Museum of and is often characterized by a “gleeful embrace of the absurd” Art, Pennsylvania State University, 1996); Virginia Brilliant, Gothic 6 and “denial of reality.” The kinds of medievalism prevalent Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America in- Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection (Sarasota, FL: John and Mable clude the popularity of Arthuriana; anti-industrialization and Ringling Museum of Art, 2009); and the essays in “Gothic Art in the craftsmanship ethics of the Arts and Crafts movement; America,” ed. Virginia Brilliant, special issue, Journal of the History building of medieval-style cathedrals such as St. John the Di- of Collections 27, no. 3 (2015). 8. Michael Camille, “‘How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque vine in New York and the Washington National Cathedral; Art’: Medieval, Modern and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro,” Oxford 7 and the collecting and display of medieval art. They are often Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994): 65–75, at 71; Janet T. Marquardt and Al- yce A. Jordan, eds., Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages 3. This is brought up in several essays in Emery and Utz, Medi- (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); “The Medievalism evalism: Key Critical Terms, including Emery and Utz, “Making Me- of Nostalgia,” ed. Helen Dell, Louise D’Arcens, and Andrew Lynch, dievalism”; Pam Clements, “Authenticity,” 19–26; Louise D’Arcens, special issue, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2, “Presentism,” 181–88; Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly, “Play,” no. 2 (2011); and Maggie M. Williams, Icons of Irishness from the Mid- 173–80; and Lauryn S. Mayer, “Simulacrum,” 223–30. dle Ages to the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 4. Clements, “Authenticity”; Mayer, “Simulacrum”; and Moberly 9. Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and Moberly, “Play.” The latter (“Play,” 174) use the phrase “tradi- and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago tional medievalisms.” Press, 2009), 335: “America, lacking a ‘real’ Middle Ages, re-created 5. Mayer, “Simulacrum,” 224. its own bigger, better, and whiter cathedrals in the vast simulacral 6. Carol L. Robinson, “Some Basic Definitions to Consider,” in sets of Hollywood or their analogues, like the Cathedral of St. John “A Little History,” http://medievalelectronicmultimedia.org/?page the Divine in New York.” _id=39, quoted in Mayer, “Simulacrum,” 229. 10. For more on medievalism and the imperialism of American ap- 7. For more on the collecting of medieval art in the United States, propriation, see Dale Kinney, “Introduction,” 1–11, and Annabel J. see esp. Elizabeth Bradford Smith, ed., Medieval Art in America: Pat- Wharton, “The Tribune Tower: Spolia as Despoliation,” 179–97, both 96 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 growing imperialist power when they appropriated the Middle Ages for themselves.11 In this essay, however, we argue that there is more to the phenomenon than that: other things also happen when medieval art is acquired, relocated, and displayed in new, American contexts. The two buildings under consideration here were created as homes for wealthy industrialists: Glencairn for Raymond Pitcairn and Hammond Castle for John Hays Hammond Jr. Both are structures built in a medieval style that also incorpo- rate actual medieval components: architectural fragments, stained glass, and sculpture. Although undertaking this process somewhat differently, each building resituates the art of the past in the present, reinterpreting the past but also reinventing the medieval objects through recontextualization. We argue that these buildings reinvigorate their medieval objects, engaging viewers with immediacy and directness that are wholly different Figure 3. Bryn Athyn Cathedral from the north, 1913–28, Bryn from how the objects would have operated in their medieval Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Jennifer Borland). See the electronic contexts, and that, as a result, these homes reorient our usual edition of Gesta for a color version of this image. focus on the origins of medieval art to prioritize the longer life of surviving medieval objects. In this essay we interrogate the In the former home of Raymond Pitcairn and his wife, different ways that “authenticity” can signify in revivalist build- Mildred, built between 1928 and 1939 and now the Glencairn ings such as Glencairn and Hammond Castle. In particular, we Museum in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Athyn, the lines consider how the present and the past work together to make between medieval and modern are overtly, and successfully, meaning beyond the original moment of creation. What com- blurred (Fig. 1). Although described as “Romanesque” in style, pels us about these two buildings has very little to do with how its form in fact is decidedly from the 1930s. Pitcairn began to authentic they are and much to do with how they manipulate collect medieval art to inspire the artists working on the nearby our expectations and create new and unique experiences of the cathedral, a building overseen by Pitcairn and erected between medieval. 1913 and 1928 for the New Church, a Swedenborgian Chris- tian denomination founded in 1890 in Bryn Athyn in opposi- in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from tion to the established Swedenborgian Church of North Amer- Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed. Richard Brilliant and Kinney ica (Fig. 3). Pitcairn’s purchases were made possible by the (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds., wealth generated through the family company that he ran, the Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” outside Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. This collecting eventually de- Kathleen Davis, “Tycoon Medievalism, Corporate Philanthropy, and veloped into a passion, and in a relatively short period of time, American Pedagogy,” 781–800, and Sharon Irish, “Whither Tycoon primarily between 1916 and 1928, he had bought hundreds Medievalism: A Response to Kathleen Davis,” 801–5, both in “Middle of medieval sculptures, stained-glass windows, and architec- ” America, special issue, American Literary History 22, no. 4 (2010); tural fragments, ultimately amassing one of the largest pri- and the following essays in Marquardt and Jordan, Medieval Art and 12 Architecture after the Middle Ages: Janet T. Marquardt, “Introduction,” vate collections of medieval art in the United States. Glen- 1–17; Kathryn Brush, “The Capitals from Moutiers-Saint-Jean (Har- cairn was built to house the artworks and to be his family’s vard University Art Museums) and the Carving of Medieval Art Study home, right next door to the cathedral. Although Bryn Athyn in America after World War I,” 298–311; and Elizabeth Emery, “The Cathedral was constructed using ostensibly medieval methods Martyred Cathedral: American Attitudes toward Notre-Dame de and appears to be a genuine attempt at re-creation, Glencairn Reims during the First World War,” 312–39. See also Bernard Ro- engages with the medieval differently. On the one hand, we see senthal and Paul E. Szarmach, eds., Medievalism in American Culture: fl Papers of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval the in uence of the cathedral in the home’sre-createdstained- and Early Renaissance Studies (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Bing- hamton, 1989). 12. In the end he “had acquired 330 sculptures, 260 panels of stained 11. Wharton, “Tribune Tower”; Marquardt, “Introduction”; Brush, glass, and a smaller but significant number of treasury items”; E. Bruce “Capitals from Moutiers-Saint-Jean”; Emery, “Martyred Cathedral”; Glenn, Glencairn: The Story of a Home (Bryn Athyn, PA: Academy of Davis, “Tycoon Medievalism”; and Irish, “Whither Tycoon Medieval- the New Church, 1990), 163, citing Jane Hayward and Walter Cahn, ism.” A number of the essays in V. Brilliant, “Gothic Art in America,” et al., Radiance and Reflection: Medieval Art from the Raymond Pit- also make this point. cairn Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982), 4. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 97 glass windows, carved stone, and intricate mosaics; on the other and creates cultural memory; the evocative modern setting en- hand, Pitcairn’s rich collection of medieval artworks is thor- ables the visitor to make a virtual pilgrimage to the past. At oughly integrated into the very modern fabric of the house. the same time, the relationships created among the fragments, At Glencairn, past and present collide. and between the fragments and the building, blur and confuse Hammond Castle sits perched on a cliff overlooking the sea the lines between past and present, old and new, European in Gloucester, Massachusetts, like an architectural relic from and American. another age standing proudly amid the stately New England– Such medievalist projects are often criticized for their dis- style shingled summer homes and modern McMansions that regard of historical identification as kitschy or, worse, inten- populate the coastline (Fig. 2). The castle was built between tionally dishonest. We ask whether any reconstruction of the 1926 and 1929 as a home for John Hays Hammond Jr., who past—fanciful, museological, scholarly—can ever be truly “au- is best known for being a prolific inventor, reportedly second thentic.”16 Exploring multiple, interwoven types of authentic- only to Thomas Edison in the number of patents he acquired.13 ities, we encourage a move away from thinking about such His “castle” housed his laboratory, in which he produced hun- buildings as more or less “real” and advocate instead a range dreds of inventions that included radio and weapons systems of different “reals.” We discuss the appearance of the build- for the U.S. military, as well as various technological advance- ings, their methods of construction, authenticities of the ob- ments in musical instruments and music reproduction. The jects in the collections, and the overall effect of the combina- most notable aspect of the castle, though, is its use as a stage set- tions. As Pam Clements points out, the challenges of grappling ting for Hammond’s sizable collection of ancient, medieval, and with the notion of authenticity are precisely these “intertwined Renaissance artifacts. Some of these were sculptural and archi- definitions” that she describes as “authenticity as historical tectural elements that Hammond purchased abroad and then accuracy ...the authentic as the original ...the authentic incorporated into the fabric of the house.14 as the authorized version” and “authenticity as believability While both of these homes include medieval remnants or verisimilitude.”17 Places like Glencairn and Hammond Cas- alongside modern construction, they do not always do so in tle provide a heightened experience of historicized space; they the same way. Pitcairn’s Glencairn, although fantastic in de- preserve cultural memories at the same time as they construct sign, was built with craftsmanship and artistic display in mind, new ones, of spaces and places that never existed but seem as and his collection of medieval art would eventually receive sig- if they did. nificant respect and praise. By contrast, Hammond’s castle, with its mix of real, fake, and composite elements, registers Authenticity as a theatrical pastiche of historical references primarily in- tended to give visitors a memorable experience. As we consider Raymond Pitcairn was not an architect, but he led the build- these buildings, we foreground three interrelated themes: au- ing projects for both Bryn Athyn Cathedral and Glencairn. The thenticity, the spoliated fragment, and confusion. We explore designs for these buildings evolved gradually, relying on what what it means to incorporate “authentic” and inauthentic spolia he perceived to be more “medieval” methods of architectural into a revivalist setting and how the space itself plays a role in the planning and building, such as scale models and then full- viewing experience. The medieval fragment comes to stand in size plaster models of sections.18 Shops were constructed on for the original whole,15 functioning as a relic that both reflects

(New York: Routledge, 2004), 2:388–409; and see also R. Brilliant and Kinney, Reuse Value. 13. For biographical information, see John Dandola, Living in the 16. Dell Upton, “‘Authentic’ Anxieties,” in Consuming Tradition, Past, Looking to the Future: The Biography of John Hays Hammond, Jr. Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the (Glen Ridge, NJ: Quincannon, 2004); and Nancy Rubin, John Hays Age of Tourism, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London: Routledge, 2001), Hammond, Jr.: A Renaissance Man in the Twentieth Century (Glouces- 298–306; Stephanie Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, ter, MA: Hammond Museum, 1987). Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists,” New Medieval Literatures 7, ed. 14. There has been almost no scholarly work done on Hammond Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland, and David Lawton (2005): 9–33; Castle.An exception is James F.O’Gorman,“Twentieth-CenturyGoth- Clements, “Authenticity”; and Shirin Fozi, “American Medieval: ick: The Hammond Castle Museum in Gloucester and Its Anteced- Authenticity and the Indifference of Architecture,” in V. Brilliant, ents,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 117, no. 2 (1981): 81–104. “Gothic Art in America,” 469–80. See also the essays in Megan Al- The castle has been featured in various newspapers and magazines drich and Jos Hackforth-Jones, eds., Art and Authenticity (Farnham: and occasionally in books published for a general audience; see, e.g., Lund Humphries, 2012), esp. Aldrich, “Creating an Authentic Style: the entry on it in Pamela W. Fox, North Shore Boston: Houses of Essex John Soane’s Gothic Library at Stowe,” 122–37. County, 1865–1940 (New York: Acanthus, 2005), 296–301. 17. Clements, “Authenticity,” 19. 15. Nanna Verhoeff, “Archival Poetics,” in Narrative Theory: 18. Glenn, Glencairn, 39–45; Jane Hayward, “Introduction,” in Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Mieke Bal Hayward and Cahn, et al., Radiance and Reflection, 33–45, at 33– 98 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 the cathedral’s building site for working in stone, wood, metal, bookshelves, doors, balconies, and furniture carved from wood and glass. Pitcairn was determined to reproduce the textures and decorated with patterns, family names, and biblical text and colors of the early Gothic French windows he admired (Fig. 5); and the enlarged interlace patterns and Swedenborgi- during his trips to Europe to research construction. In order an quotations in mosaic decorating the high ceiling (Fig. 6). to revive the medieval art of making pot-metal glass, he ar- Nevertheless, the decoration of the house, exemplified by the ranged for Arthur Kingsley Porter—professor of art history Great Hall, was very much informed by the work that had been at Harvard and noted scholar of medieval art and architec- done next door at the cathedral. Pitcairn saw his house as a ture—to translate Theophilus’s twelfth-century text on the valuable opportunity to keep the workshops running and to subject.19 Pitcairn’s artists were sent to England and France continue to employ the artists who had worked on the church.24 to photograph and draw windows in specified churches.20 While Hammond Castle was under construction, many re- Stained-glass craftsmen were sought, and they experimented ports in the popular press described it as a building brought with color recipes before they made the hand-blown windows stone by stone from Europe, but in fact it was a modern struc- seen in the cathedral today.21 Emblematic of the assessment ture embellished with the detritus of medieval doorways, of the “authenticity” with which Pitcairn’s Gothic cathedral windows, and other pieces, often separated by war or neglect was viewed are the words Porter wrote to him: “your church, from their original sites.25 These were readily procurable in alone of modern buildings, in my judgment, is worthy of com- the early twentieth century because of lax European regula- parison with the best the Middle Ages produced.”22 By contrast, tions controlling exports, although these would later begin the architecture of Pitcairn’s home is not a re-creation of a spe- to tighten.26 Many collectors benefited from the availability cific medieval architectural style; instead, it is a quirky combi- of such artifacts, including Isabella Stewart Gardner, William nation of medieval-like elements with 1930s mansion design Randolph Hearst, and George Grey Barnard,27 in addition to and Arts and Crafts aesthetics made popular earlier in the twenti- eth century in the United States by such architects as Frank Lloyd 24. E.g., in a letter to E. Donald Robb written in 1938, Pitcairn Wright (1867–1959) and the brothers Charles Sumner Greene explains that, “In spite of taxes and other difficulties which, from (1868–1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870–1954).23 The a practical and economic standpoint, make my house-building proj- Great Hall, for instance, includes handcrafted elements such ect seem a colossal blunder and the creation of a burden for which as a large mosaic arch with New Church iconography (Fig. 4); my family may have scant reason to thank me in the future, the work has progressed and from a creative and architectural stand- point I get considerable satisfaction out of it. Besides this there is the fact that it has provided employment for many people who were 39; and Beth Lombardi, “Raymond Pitcairn and the Collecting of interested in doing a type of work which, in any other but a New Medieval Stained Glass in America,” in Smith, Medieval Art in Amer- Deal age, might be considered as worth-while and constructive” ica, 185–232, at 185–86. (our emphasis). Raymond Pitcairn to E. Donald Robb, 21 March 19. Hayward (“Introduction,” 47n31) cites a letter of 1918 that 1938, Glencairn Museum Archives. refers to Porter’s translation of Theophilus for use in Bryn Athyn, 25. For more on the removal of architectural fragments from but the results of Porter’s efforts are unknown. their original locations to museums, see Michelle P. Brown, “The 20. These artists included Winifred Hyatt and Lawrence Saint. Modern Medieval Museum,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Ro- Lombardi, “Raymond Pitcairn.” Hayward (“Introduction,” 38–39) manesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph cites correspondence by Raymond Pitcairn to Paul Froelich, an- (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 640–55. See also John Harris, Mov- other artist who also worked on the church’s glass, 7 July and 9 De- ing Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages (New Haven: Yale cember 1921, Glencairn Museum Archives, Bryn Athyn, PA. University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British 21. Hayward, “Introduction,” 36–39. Art, 2007). 22. The complete statement is: “I had expected much of the Bryn 26. Elizabeth Bradford Smith, “George Grey Barnard: Artist/Collec- Athyn church, but nothing like what I found. If it existed in Europe, tor/Dealer/Curator,” in Medieval Art in America, 133–42, at 136–37. in France or England, it would still be at once six centuries behind, 27. For Gardner, see Alan Chong, Richard Lingner, and Carl and a hundred years ahead of its time. But on the soil of great ar- Zahn, eds., Eye of the Beholder: Masterpieces from the Isabella Stew- chitectural traditions, it would be in a measure comprehensible, and art Gardner Museum (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the presence in the neighborhood of the great works of the past association with Beacon Press, 1987); and Hilliard T. Goldfarb, The would in a way prepare the mind for this achievement of the pres- Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History ent age. For your church, alone of modern buildings, in my judg- (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Several of the essays in ment, is worthy of comparison with the best the Middle Ages pro- V. Brilliant, “Gothic Art in America,” mention Gardner, but see esp. duced.” Arthur Kingsley Porter to Raymond Pitcairn, 24 October Fozi, “American Medieval,” and Alan Chong, “The Gothic Experi- 1917, Glencairn Museum Archives. ence: Re-creating History in American Museums,” 481–91. See also 23. Greene and Greene were based in California, and several of Smith, Medieval Art in America; and Shirin Fozi, “‘A Mere Patch of their best-known houses were built in that state: Gamble House Color’: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Shattered Glass of Reims (1908) and Blacker House (1907) in Pasadena and Thorsen House Cathedral,” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, (1909) in Berkeley. ed. Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen, and Mary Franklin-Brown (Bur- Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 99 Figure 4. Medieval stained-glass window installation and mosaic arch, Great Hall, Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Jennifer Borland).

Hammond and Pitcairn. While the latter paid attention to me- posed to represent a different type of space; only some of these dieval methods of production, Hammond was apparently were completed. For instance, he originally intended to have more interested in giving his visitors a virtual tour through an entire twelfth-century cloister, in which the museum would the architectural styles of the Middle Ages than in trying to “show a collection of marbles, tombs, windows and door- re-create an authentic-looking, stylistically cohesive building. ways.”28 As the castle now stands, its most noticeable ele- Thus, Hammond Castle is a pastiche of spaces meant to evoke ments are a Romanesque-style section reminiscent of a castle a medieval monument without truly emulating one. Several keep, an array of Gothic-style buttresses complete with flyers early proposals for and detailed descriptions of the building (Fig. 7), and an area modeled after a late medieval French châ- prepared by Hammond make it clear that each room was sup- teau. Inside, narrow, winding staircases lead to a variety of rooms that suggest diverse medieval spaces, as well as some bedrooms and sitting rooms furnished in early colonial Amer- lington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 321–44. For Hearst’s collecting prac- tices, see Mary L. Levkoff, Hearst: The Collector (Los Angeles: Los ican style. Like Glencairn, Hammond Castle has a Great Hall Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008). See also Victoria Kastner, (Fig. 8): one hundred feet long and sixty feet high, it was built Hearst Castle: The Biography of a Country House (New York: Abrams, to be acoustically perfect for Hammond’s enormous pipe or- 2000); and eadem, “William Randolph Hearst: Maverick Collector,” gan. Its pointed arches, stained-glass windows, and overall ap- in V. Brilliant, “Gothic Art in America,” 413–24. For Barnard, see Timothy B. Husband, Creating The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 70, no. 4 (2013); Smith, “George Grey Barnard”; Fozi, 28. John Hays Hammond Jr., undated, Hammond Castle Ar- “American Medieval”; and Chong, “Gothic Experience.” chives, Gloucester, MA. 100 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 Figure 5. Detail of bookshelves, Great Hall, 1928–39, Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Jennifer Borland). See the elec- tronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image. pearance are reminiscent of a church interior. While the di- church, Hammond’s Great Hall is anchored by a fifteenth- mensions of the Great Hall are said to have been modeled century fireplace that would be more at home in a medieval on the transept of the basilica of Saint-Nazaire in Carcas- manor house; in this way the hall became a sort of religious/ sonne,29 Hammond actually made this connection on a visit secular hybrid. This functional duality is reflected in its use, to Carcassonne after plans for his castle were already under both past and present. Hammond organized concerts in the way. In a diary entry in 1926 he wrote, “Visit the Cathedral Great Hall featuring some of the most famous organists of of St. Nazaire.... Its transept has exact proportions of Great the day, who often played religious music, but he also used Hall in my new house.”30 it as his personal living room. Today the space is rented out In one of the early memoranda about the arrangement of for wedding ceremonies, but it also serves as a site for wedding the house, Hammond detailed his ideas about how the archi- receptions, so that both religious sacraments and secular feast- tectural space should be structured: “The scheme for the lay- ing occur in the same space. out of the buildings, which I contemplate, is first the erection Both Hammond Castle and Glencairn rely on the presen- of a central pile, now fairly complete, representing an abbey tation of works of art in contextually relevant revivalist sur- of the 15th century.”31 To complete this vision of a repurposed roundings, in which visitors can feel that they are experienc- ing a facsimile of actual medieval spaces.32 A better-known 29. O’Gorman, “Twentieth-Century Gothick,” 94. 30. John Hays Hammond Jr., diary entry, 20 August 1926, Ham- mond Castle Archives. 32. On the phenomenological experience of space, see Maurice 31. John Hays Hammond Jr., memorandum, undated, Ham- Merleau-Ponty, esp. Phénomenologie de la perception (1945), trans. mond Castle Archives. Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 101 Figure 6. Ceiling mosaic, Great Hall, 1928–39, Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Diane van Zyverden, Glencairn Mu- seum). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image. example of this type of installation is The Cloisters, the Bradford Smith describes the phenomenon of integrating ob- branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ded- jects and building this way as the “Barnard method,” referring icated to medieval art. Its architect, Charles Collens, was a to the original Cloisters, the home built by George Grey Bar- partner at the Boston-based firm Allen and Collens, which nard to house his medieval collection that he opened to the had designed Hammond Castle more than a decade earlier. public in 1914.33 Although the staff of the Metropolitan Mu- One of the most memorable features of The Cloisters is the seum was not impressed with the lack of art historical integrity way that art is displayed in re-created medieval spaces, both evident in Barnard’s whimsical arrangement of his objects, sacred and secular, such that authentic sculptural and archi- they adopted his vision of medieval objects presented in a re- tectural fragments are seen in a cultural context that attempts vivalist building in contextually appropriate spaces. Unlike the to evoke atmospheric viewing experiences for visitors. The other collectors discussed here, Barnard amassed his medieval Cloisters provides a roughly chronological tour through the art collection mainly out of necessity; he hoped to sell the Middle Ages, ranging from its twelfth-century Romanesque pieces to fund his activities as a sculptor. When he failed to chapel from Fuentidueña in Spain to the Unicorn Tapestries find immediate purchasers, he installed the collection in a room, modeled after a sixteenth-century manor hall. Elizabeth medieval-style building in New York,34 where he attempted to underscore the air of authenticity by lighting the interior with candles and having tour guides dressed in monastic robes 2002). For additional examples, see Jennifer Borland, “Audience lead visitors through the building.35 The collection, purchased and Spatial Experience in the Nuns’ Church at Clonmacnoise,” Dif- ferent Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 3 (2011), http://www.differentvisions.org/issue3/Borland.pdf; and ea- 33. Smith, “George Grey Barnard,” 138. dem, “Unruly Reading: The Consuming Role of Touch in the Expe- 34. For more on Barnard’s Cloisters, see Joseph Breck, “The rience of a Medieval Manuscript,” in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Cloisters,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 20, no. 7 Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Jonathan (1925): 166–77; and idem, The Cloisters: A Brief Guide (New York: Wilcox (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 97–114 and pls. 225–30. Several Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1931). essays in V. Brilliant, “Gothic Art in America” also discuss the atmo- 35. Mary Rebecca Leuchak, “‘The Old World for the New’: De- spheric arrangement of medieval art in domestic and medieval inte- veloping the Design for The Cloisters,” Metropolitan Museum Jour- riors. nal 23 (1988): 257–77, at 257. 102 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 Figure 7. Buttresses on east side, 1926–29, Hammond Castle, Gloucester, Massachusetts (photo: Martha Easton). See the elec- tronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image. in 1925 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with funds pro- vided by John D. Rockefeller, became the basis for The Clois- ters, which opened to the public in 1938.36 Glencairn and Hammond Castle have frequently been dis- cussed in terms of their authenticity, whether as part of the rhetoric of their owners, by the popular press, or in scholarly Figure 8. Great Hall, 1926–29, Hammond Castle, Gloucester, Mas- writing. Their respective levels of authenticity have even been sachusetts (photo: Martha Easton). See the electronic edition of directly compared. In a complimentary article on Pitcairn’s Gesta for a color version of this image. collection in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1982, Walter Cahn, professor of medieval art history at Yale University, con- trasted Glencairn and Hammond Castle. He described the tle, however, have characterized it as fantastical, idiosyncratic, Massachusetts collection this way: “It’s a Disneyland there. and eccentric, confirming Cahn’s dismissal of the building and Most things are not very authentic.”37 This evaluation of Ham- the collection housed there. For example, Faye Ringel groups mond’s assemblage certainly differs from the way it was orig- Hammond Castle with such medievalist buildings as Hearst inally received. Hammond was the subject of much fawning Castle at San Simeon, California; Belcourt Castle in Newport, press after his castle was built (one breathless newspaper ac- Rhode Island; and the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, count described him as the “owner of the most extraordinary Massachusetts. The latter closed in 2013, and its collection was art museum in the world”38), particularly since he almost im- transferred to the Worcester Art Museum. She characterizes mediately turned it into a museum; the board of trustees hired them as “Xanadus,” the name of the house in the film Citizen him as resident curator. Later evaluations of Hammond Cas- Kane, based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, and places them in a chronological sequence of anachronistic American appropriations of the Gothic.39 Her judgment of Hammond 36. Husband, Creating The Cloisters, contains the full account of Castle even extends to referring to its builder as a “mad scien- the complicated chain of events that led to the construction of The tist.”40 Perhaps part of the reason for these negative judgments Cloisters. See also Peter Barnet and Nancy Wu, The Cloisters: Me- was that Hammond’s collection was notably eclectic, its objects dieval Art and Architecture, 75th anniv. rev. ed. (New York: Metro- politan Museum of Art, 2012), 9–16; and Leuchak, “‘Old World for ranging widely in time and place of manufacture. In addition to the New.’” architectural fragments taken from medieval European build- 37. Quoted in C. S. Manegold, “The Splendid Medieval Art of Glencairn,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 29 November 1982, D01. 38. “Masterpieces from Every Part of the World in Hammond’s 39. Faye Ringel, “Building the Gothic Image in America: Chang- Museum Castle on Hesperus Avenue,” Gloucester Daily Times, ing Icons, Changing Times,” Gothic Studies 4, no. 2 (2002): 145–54. 5 April 1930, 7–8. 40. Ibid., 149. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 103 ings and reincorporated into his revivalist castle, he collected successful industrialist, was probably wealthier than Ham- inscriptions from ancient Roman tombs, medieval sculpture, mond, his home remained private. The Disneyland referent Renaissance furniture, early American glass and pewter, and also evokes superficiality: a charming veneer that disguises a a variety of other objects, some picked up in the Caribbean more mundane (that is, modern) structure underneath.44 Ham- when he spent several months sailing there. These included mond Castle may be primarily an imaginary simulacrum of such items as church pews, cannons, and even a skull that he the “real” Middle Ages. In his well-known essay on Disneyland, believed might have come from a crew member on Columbus’s Jean Baudrillard characterized the amusement park as a simu- second expedition to the New World. lacrum that is, in a way, more authentic than its surroundings: Unlike Hammond’s wide-ranging tastes, Pitcairn’s en- “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us be- deavors—his buildings as well as his collection of medieval lieve that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the art—have been treated as more serious and intellectual, and America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the therefore as more authentic. Before the construction of Glen- hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.”45 The medie- cairn was complete, many of Pitcairn’s medieval objects were val fantasyland created at Hammond Castle masks the fact on extended loan to the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (later that there is no “true” Middle Ages, but only our modern per- renamed the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and installed in ception and reconstruction of what the Middle Ages might its new medieval galleries.41 In 1982 the Metropolitan Mu- have been. In the words of Norman Cantor, “the image of the seum of Art mounted a large scholarly exhibition of objects Middle Ages which obtained at any given period ...tells us from Pitcairn’s collection; Cahn coauthored the accompany- more about the difficulties and dilemmas, the intellectual com- ing catalogue with Jane Hayward, curator at The Cloisters, mitments of the men of the period than it does about the me- and other contributors.42 Already in the early years, when dieval world itself.”46 To our minds, Hammond Castle is no he was actively building and collecting, Pitcairn forged rela- less “authentic” than Glencairn, and Hammond’s creation is tionships with such experts as Porter and Fiske Kimball, direc- no more Disneyland than that built by Pitcairn. In the end, tor of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, whose involvement they are but two versions of the Middle Ages—imaginary re- with Pitcairn’s enterprises denotes a certain level of valida- constructions, yes, but no more or less “real” than any other. tion.43 Only rarely are extant medieval structures products of a We see Cahn’s statement as a useful springboard for single unified style; more often they are pastiches and over- thinking about the limits of attempting to assess authenticity, lays of evolving architectural interventions and aesthetic tastes although we also acknowledge the offhandedness of his re- that shifted and changed over time. Hammond’seclecticmé- mark. The reference to Disneyland places Hammond Castle lange of building styles plays with the idea of architectural au- in the realm of child’s play, even suggesting that its owner thenticity. Both the castle and Glencairn were early twentieth- was childlike or childish. It may also imply that Hammond’s century homes, buildings made up of thousands of parts; some motivations were economic or profit-driven rather than in- of these were from other historical periods, but many were con- tellectual, perhaps because Hammond operated his house temporary. In this sense, both Hammond and Pitcairn built as a museum for a paying public despite his entrepreneurial houses that engaged creatively with juxtapositions of new and and financial success as an inventor. Even though Pitcairn, a old, past and present, and intentionally subverted the distinc- tions between what was actually old and what was made to look old. We get a better sense of what Cahn may have meant 41. Numerous letters from Pitcairn to the museum director and others in 1931, the year the new medieval galleries opened, reflect from his survey of Romanesque sculpture in New England this agreement, which appears to have been in place for several collections; Hammond Castle is listed in the section titled years. Glencairn Museum Archives. “Doubtful Authenticity” with the statement, “All Romanesque 42. The exhibition ran from 25 February to 15 September 1982. Hayward and Cahn, et al., Radiance and Reflection, 2. For a typical review of the exhibition, see Paul Williamson, “The Raymond Pit- 44. Michael Camille (Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 351–52) refers to cairn Collection at the Cloisters,” Burlington Magazine 124, no. 952 a new eagle gargoyle added to Notre-Dame in 2000 as “Disneyfied,” (1982): 472–73. but in this case the reference does not seem so much a critique as a 43. Kathryn Brush describes Porter as “America’s most cele- visual description of the cartoonish character aesthetics used in brated scholar” between the years 1910 and 1930. Brush, “Arthur contemporary Disney animation. Kingsley Porter and the Transatlantic Shaping of Art History, 45. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila ca. 1910–1930,” in The Shaping of Art History in Finland, ed. Renja Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12. Suominen-Kokkonen (Helsinki: Society of Art History, 2007), 129– See also Mayer, “Simulacrum.” 42, at 131. She also discusses (139) Porter’s role in the popular cul- 46. Norman F. Cantor, “Medieval Historiography as Modern Po- ture of the Middle Ages and specifically his advisory role to Pitcairn. litical and Social Thought,” Journal of Contemporary History 3, See also Brush, “Capitals from Moutiers-Saint-Jean.” no. 2 (1968): 55–73, at 55. 104 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 sculpture exhibited appears to be of modern workmanship.”47 the same time cheapest collections of old architectural It seems likely that this determination derived primarily from pieces in America.... I have avoided all New York the photographs and descriptions in the first guidebook to antiquaires and all famous collectors abroad.... I have the museum, written by Hammond’s secretary after he died had my pieces checked by experts. As a result I have and she became the museum’s director,48 which Cahn listed found things at unprecedented prices. I have also de- as a source in a footnote. Indeed, the Romanesque-style sculp- veloped an eye for fakes.51 ture in the castle does appear to be of later workmanship. This early guidebook to Hammond Castle is full of inac- It is possible that Swarzenski, Taylor, Porter, and others were curacies about the dates and history of many of the objects, tapped to offer Hammond expert advice about his acquisi- and it includes some farfetched stories about provenance; for tions. On one occasion he sought advice from his friend example, a fireplace is said to have been made from a win- Helen Clay Frick, daughter of the industrialist and art collec- dow that came from the house of the mother of Gregory tor Henry Clay Frick, about a marble plaque of the Virgin the Great.49 Hammond’s own correspondence about his ac- and Child that he had recently bought, which was probably quisitions includes many such fanciful anecdotes, and the the work of the contemporary artist Alceo Dossena.52 source of some of these inventions and exaggerations is not Thus, while Hammond was certainly on the lookout for entirely clear. Dealers may have polished the particulars of au- “authentic” objects, and he trained himself to spot forgeries thenticity and provenance for quicker sales, but Hammond and paid attention to provenance evidence when it existed himself seems not to have been immune to the charms of em- (he was quite proud of a processional cross he had acquired bellishment for the sake of a good story. He claimed that he in the 1949 estate sale of items from the Brummer Gallery in was careful and discriminating about his purchases, and, like New York, for example), his collection included a large number Pitcairn, he cultivated relationships with art historians and of reproduction and pastiche pieces, some of them commis- museum curators. His guest book and surviving correspon- sioned by Hammond himself. The stained-glass windows in dence at Hammond Castle contain the names of people like the Great Hall of Hammond Castle are modern reproductions: Hanns Swarzenski, curator of decorative arts and sculpture the rose window at one end is a version of one at Reims Cathe- at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a noted medievalist;50 dral, created by a stained-glass artist, Jacques Simon, who was Francis Taylor, director of the Worcester Art Museum and based in Reims; the window at the other end is a reproduction later director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Porter. of the famous “Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière” from Chartres The latter, who was so enthusiastic in his praise of Bryn Athyn Cathedral. Correspondence with Armando Pacifici, the Rome- Cathedral, also visited Hammond Castle, and in 1930 he in- based agent who sold Hammond many objects, confirms that scribed a copy of his Medieval Architecture: Its Origins and Hammond requested that damaged objects be restored, re- Development to Hammond. In a letter Hammond wrote to built, repainted, or regilded, depending on the object and its his father during a European trip with his mother, he states, condition. He modified objects to serve new functions, asking, for instance, that holes be drilled in marble sculptures so they Mother told me you are worried about my expendi- could function as waterspouts.53 It seems that, above all, Ham- tures for antiques. You have seen my house and I mond was trying to acquire objects, whether authentic items, am very proud to say that it is one of the best and at restorations, or copies, that worked together in his revivalist space to tell a story about the Middle Ages and serve as inspi- 47. Walter Cahn and Linda Seidel, Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections, vol. 1, New England Museums (New York: 51. John Hays Hammond Jr. to John Hays Hammond Sr., un- Burt Franklin, 1979), 216. dated, Hammond Castle Archives. 48. Corinne B. Witham, The Hammond Museum Guide Book 52. John Hays Hammond Jr. to Helen Clay Frick, 22 September (Cambridge, MA: Berkshire, 1966). A later guidebook written by 1931, Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives, New an art historian is more accurate and balanced: Naomi Reed Kline, York. Hammond believed it was from a church that had been dam- The Hammond Museum: A Guidebook (Gloucester, MA: Hammond aged in the 1930 earthquake near Campobasso, Italy. A year and a Museum, 1977). half later, Miss Frick’s librarian sent Hammond a catalogue of the 49. Witham, Hammond Museum Guide Book, 48. This prove- works of Dossena and suggested that he compare his plaque with one nance was repeated in private correspondence and public accounts there. Ethelwyn Manning to John Hays Hammond Jr., 1 March of Hammond’s collection. 1933, Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives. Frick her- 50. On Hanns Swarzenski, his father, Georg, and their transfor- self had been taken in by a Dossena masquerading as a Renaissance mation of the medieval art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, sculptural group of the Annunciation; David Sox, Unmasking the Boston, see Shirin Fozi, “‘The Time Is Opportune’: The Swarzenskis Forger: The Dossena Deception (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 49–53. and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,” in V. Brilliant, “Gothic 53. Armando Pacifici to W. I. Randall, 27 May 1929(?), Ham- Art in America,” 425–39. mond Castle Archives. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 105 ration for later generations. He wrote, “My ambition is to leave tions’] artistic quality, by the testimony of experts in the field, is a modest, but beautiful museum.... I want only an authentic remarkably consistent—testimony also to Raymond Pitcairn’s atmosphere [with] some furniture and genuine architectural perceptive eye for the beauty of form.”57 The 1982 Philadelphia pieces, doors, windows, etc. In cold restrained New England Inquirer article quoted above states that “Pitcairn is reputed to a place with the romantic beauty of the Italian and French past have had a truly exceptional eye. Few of his pieces are fakes, and may prove the inspiration of many poor artists and students in this respect he differed greatly from some of his contempo- to come.”54 Ironically, Hammond collected many of the sorts raries.”58 Nevertheless, he did not necessarily differ from his con- of objects he originally eschewed, and his tapestry collection temporaries in his opportunism, as surviving correspondence be- and some pieces of classical and medieval sculpture were suf- tween Pitcairn and several dealers suggests that even though ficiently valuable to be auctioned in the 1990s on behalf of the Pitcairn prided himself on his discerning taste and wished to museum at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York.55 purchase artworks of top quality, he still wanted to make sure Raymond Pitcairn seems to have actively encouraged the that he procured them at the most reasonable price possible.59 perception of his acquisitions as selective, refined, and private. Hayward points out that the core of Pitcairn’s collection The publicity around his purchase in 1921 of the large collec- “was formed at the only time in this century when acquiring tion of medieval stained glass assembled by the stockbroker works of art of quality and, specifically, of the medieval pe- Henry C. Lawrence is emblematic of the way Pitcairn is often riod, was possible,” and his successes were at least partly at- portrayed. A relative unknown on the collecting scene before tributable to fortuitous timing rather than to unique skills.60 the sale, he seemingly appeared out of nowhere to outbid The characterization of Pitcairn as extremely discriminating Hearst and others for what was an exorbitant purchase at the implies that he was not easily swayed by dealers, yet at times he time, $153,850 for twenty-three panels.56 Later publications clearly was susceptible to their rhetoric. For example, in 1922 have also contributed to this popular image of Pitcairn as a Pitcairn purchased a thirteenth-century sculpture of St. Paul skilled and devout collector who was self-taught, private (even from the dealer René Gimpel that another dealer, Georges suspicious), and very discriminating, and whose motivations Demotte, had sold to Gimpel some years earlier (Fig. 9). Gimpel for buying objects were largely religious in nature: “[the collec- described it as “one of finest specimens of French art, School of l’Ile de France, 13th; that it has retained its original polychromy and that no modern part whatever has been added thereon.”61 54. John Hays Hammond Jr. to John Hays Hammond Sr., un- dated, Hammond Castle Archives. Pitcairn eventually paid $110,000 for the sculpture, which was 55. These items were sold in the following sales: Sotheby’s, New treated as medieval by the curators and art historians who wrote York, Antiquities and Islamic Art, 14 December 1993; Sotheby’s, the catalogue for the 1982 exhibition at the Metropolitan Mu- New York, European Works of Art, Arms and Armour, Furniture seum of Art, even positing that it “might belong to” the impor- and Tapestries, 12 January 1993; Sotheby’s, New York, European tant Notre-Dame atelier responsible for the decoration on that Works of Art, Arms and Armour, 11 January 1994; Christie’s, New building’s south transept doorway.62 Since then, scholars have York, Antiquities, 15 December 1994; and Christie’s, New York, Euro- pean Works of Art, Furniture and Tapestries, 10 January 1995. 56. Glenn (Glencairn, 173–75) quotes a rather evocative descrip- 57. Glenn, Glencairn, 161. tion of the auction from Thomas E. Norton, One Hundred Years of 58. Mangold, “Splendid Medieval Art of Glencairn.” Collecting in America: The Story of Sotheby Parke Bernet (New 59. Surviving correspondence with dealers, including Joseph York: Abrams, 1984), 91: “Joseph Duveen (bidding for Philadelphia Brummer, Henri Daguerre, Georges and Lucien Demotte, and René Collector Joseph Widener) and William Randolph Hearst (bidding Gimpel, Glencairn Museum Archives. for himself) were expected to carry off most of the finest pieces. 60. Hayward, “Introduction,” in Hayward and Cahn, et al., Radi- However, on the afternoon of the auction a mystery bidder outshone ance and Reflection, 45. For more on dealers working with Ameri- (and outbid) the two old pros. When lot 372, the Tree of Jesse Win- can clients in this period, see Christine E. Brennan, “The Brummer dow [from Soissons], was put on the block, a tall young stranger Gallery and the Business of Art,” in V. Brilliant, “Gothic Art in astounded the audience by paying $70,000 for this masterpiece of America,” 455–68. medieval glass.” That “tall young stranger” was, of course, Raymond 61. René Gimpel to Raymond Pitcairn, 19 April 1922, Glencairn Pitcairn. The sale took place 27–29 January 1921; Pitcairn describes Museum Archives. various aspects of the experience in several letters written in Febru- 62. Charles T. Little, “Apostle Paul,” in Hayward and Cahn, et al., ary 1921. Generally he seemed pleased with the purchase, but an- Radiance and Reflection, 202–3, cat. no. 76. Little is Curator Emer- noyed by the auction and the subsequent attention it garnered itus of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum him. For instance, in a letter to E. Donald Robb he exclaims, “It of Art. In his entry on this sculpture in the 1982 catalogue, he was a terrible experience; however, I secured some of the best things points out (203) that despite its unknown provenance, “its style in the Lawrence collection and it will have a tremendous affect [sic] evolved directly from a group of Parisian monuments of about the upon our stained glass, as you will agree when you see it.” Raymond middle of the thirteenth century.” See also René Gimpel: Diary of Pitcairn to E. Donald Robb, 10 February 1921, Glencairn Museum an Art Dealer, trans. John Rosenberg (New York: Farrar, Straus Archives. and Giroux, 1966), 132, 182. 106 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 unknown origin are understandably underemphasized in the Glencairn Museum’s current minimalist wall labels, which rarely reflect the questions about provenance that one encoun- ters in some of the object files. In thinking about the different sorts of “authenticities” on display at both Hammond Castle and Glencairn, we agree with Stephanie Trigg’s succinct statement: “it is clear that the concept of ‘authenticity’ is deeply problematic.”64 In her essay on cathedrals and medievalism, Trigg explores the ways that surviving medieval churches can bring into question our training as historians, which “bids us be wary of the post- medieval accretions, revisions, and reforms,”65 and she sug- gests that no historians—medieval or otherwise—can deny that they have participated in such attempts to separate out what is “original” from what is not. Her goal is not just to sig- nal this but also to argue that a similar “appeal to the authen- tic” drives both scholarly activity by historians and broader tourism of medieval sites and buildings, despite the fact that the “authenticity” at such sites is often a complete fabrication. As a result, she makes clear the blurry distinction between “medieval” and “medievalist.”66 William J. Diebold, in his re- cent analysis of the term medievalism, has even proposed that what medievalists do is in fact medievalism, especially if we understand that medievalists do not just recover the Middle Ages but actually create it anew with every exploration of the past.67 Trigg may focus on a select number of examples— the Canterbury Tales visitor attraction, Westminster Abbey, St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, The Cloisters, and the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale—but her arguments get at the heart of the problems with “authenticity.” Simply put, nothing can really be authentically medieval if it exists in the modern world. Trigg’s concluding words neatly sum up the situation: “Whether we like it or not, there is no ‘pure’ medieval; there ”68 Figure 9. St. Paul conglomeration, Great Hall, Glencairn Museum, is only medievalism. Her assertion applies also to Glencairn Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Diane van Zyverden, Glencairn and Hammond Castle, two buildings that exist in the space Museum). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of between modern and medieval, real and fake. this image. American Collectors of the Fragmented Past expressed doubts about this sculpture, wondering if it was actually carved by the nineteenth-century artist Jean-Baptiste The appropriation of medieval fragments in the buildings Lassus working under Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s res- erected by Hammond and Pitcairn is in some ways remark- toration of the Sainte-Chapelle.63 Such instances of dubious or argues that the Daria relief (displayed in the Great Hall) and related 63. Charles T. Little to Martin Pryke, 1 September 1983, Glencairn sculptures in several other collections “are without much doubt mod- Museum Archives; and Charles T. Little and Georgia Wright, 24 Sep- ern fabrications.” Cahn, “Romanesque Sculpture in American Collec- tember 2008, memo in object file, Glencairn Museum Archives. The tions, VII: New York and New Jersey,” Gesta 10, no. 1 (1971): 45–53, at latter elaborates on the former exchange between Little and Glencairn 49–50. director Martin Pryke in 1983, asserting that “several things argue 64. Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals,” 12. against the piece being of the 13th century,” including the similarity 65. Ibid., 13. of the sculpture’s head to another head in the Glencairn collection, 66. Ibid., 14. which Little had determined was from the nineteenth century. Numer- 67. Diebold, “Medievalism.” ous works have attracted similar misgivings. For instance, Walter Cahn 68. Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals,” 33. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 107 Figure 10. Great Hall, 1928–39, Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Jennifer Borland). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image. ably evocative of the appropriation of fragments in the Mid- dle Ages; both suggest associations with relics and spolia. If we think about these fragments as relics, as the venerated re- mains of a historical past, they become spiritualized with a kind of aura created through contact, conduits to a past that only these specific objects can conjure. Memorialized but also sometimes violated, relics are often pieces of a bigger entity and thus may also contain the implication of that violence, whether to body or to building. As spolia, older materials that are removed from one context and used in a new one, these re- used pieces continue to evoke violence, but cultural or political violence as much as the corporeal kind; they often represent potentially aggressive domination alongside physical acquisi- tion. In a more neutral sense, spolia can also be considered in economic terms as recycled pieces that may retain a vague connection to their past roles but also, in their new context, Figure 11. Queen statue-column conglomeration, Great Hall, become something else entirely. This complex range of asso- Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Diane van ciations for medieval fragments is provocatively on display at Zyverden, Glencairn Museum). See the electronic edition of Gesta both Glencairn and Hammond Castle. for a color version of this image. The Great Hall of Glencairn comprises a seemingly infi- nite array of objects and materials. About fifty medieval art- numerous carved stone columns and capitals; and hand-hewn works, grouped into conglomerations, are embedded into the wood elements such as bookshelves, doors, and furniture, often walls or placed in specific positions for display, with addi- painted with medieval designs (Figs. 4–5). The highlight of this tional medieval capitals resting atop bookshelves and figura- handmade medievalesque decoration is the high ceiling, the tive sculptures poised on the balcony railing (Figs. 4, 9, and beams of which are encrusted with dazzling glass mosaics that 10). An abundance of stained glass is incorporated into the enlarge the famously complex interlace patterns of the early walls, including fragments of medieval glass purchased by medieval Book of Kells (Fig. 6). In this rich context, several Pitcairn, modern replicas created by the artists working for groupings of medieval objects are created out of freestanding him, and all-new window designs created specifically for artworks arranged in front of architectural remnants built into Glencairn. In addition, throughout the large hall are medieval- the walls (Figs. 9, 11). inspired elements that are not replicas but channel the medie- In one of these conglomerations of fragments, the afore- val through an Arts and Crafts aesthetic: the huge mosaic arch; mentioned thirteenth-century (or perhaps nineteenth-century) 108 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 French polychrome statue of St. Paul is placed at the center, standing on a twelfth-century capital from France carved with a seated Christ flanked by lions (Fig. 9). Above this, set into the wall, is an eleventh-century tympanum thought to be from It- aly. To the right is a twelfth-century capital depicting the Bap- tism of Christ, and to the left is a polychrome wooden Virgin and Child, poised atop a capital, column, and base attributed to the twelfth-century cloister at Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa in the French Pyrenees. Above St. Paul are installed several twelfth- century heads from France and a twelfth-century(?) Italian relief of St. Daria with a lion. Across the hall, a mid-twelfth- century statue-column of a queen from Saint-Thibaut in Provins is positioned in an equally complex grouping of objects from different places and periods, framed by an archway that is now thought to be modern (Fig. 11).69 The same sorts of conglomerations are also present at Hammond Castle. Each room contains objects of widely vary- ing style and date, from the ancient tomb inscriptions decorat- ing the walls of several rooms, to the authentic, pastiche, and reproduction furniture placed throughout the castle; the pieces of wood and stone sculpture; and the different sorts of metal- work, from crucifixes and monstrances to colonial American pewter plates. The dining room, for example (Fig. 12), contains walls made of linenfold paneling; a fifteenth-century Spanish ceiling, purportedly a wedding gift from William Randolph Hearst to Hammond and his wife;70 a floor with medieval- ’ reproduction French tiles (according to Hammond s household Figure 12. Dining room, 1926–29, Hammond Castle, Gloucester, staff, a few original tiles are scattered among the modern cop- Massachusetts (photo: Martha Easton). See the electronic edition of ies); pieces of medieval and Renaissance furniture (probably Gesta for a color version of this image. pastiches of historical and modern elements); and, along the plate rail, a large collection of plates, mugs, and other items in pewter. At the end of the room hangs a fifteenth-century presented so that their original purposes or contexts are ob- painting depicting the martyrdom of St. Romanus—a grue- scured. When we are in a museum, perhaps we are right to some image for a dining room, which apparently suited Ham- expect information about that lost context, but in someone’s mond’s macabre sense of humor. home that expectation needs to be kept in check, because this Not unlike the decontextualized manner in which things integration of old and new, while clouding the past, also of- are often displayed in museums today, these objects and ar- fers another way to understand the lives of the objects. chitectural remnants at Glencairn and Hammond Castle are Grouped aesthetically rather than historically, artifacts from different places and times have been combined in new con- figurations. In each conglomeration at Glencairn and Ham- 69. On this statue-column of a queen, see Pamela Z. Blum, “The mond Castle, connections are established between previously Statue-Column of a Queen from Saint-Thibaut, Provins, in the unrelated pieces, spotlighting these surviving fragments in- Glencairn Museum,” Gesta 29, no. 2 (1990): 214–33; and Susan stead of the lost wholes from which they came and creating Leibacher Ward, “Encounter: A Statue-Column at the Glencairn Museum,” Gesta 54, no. 2 (2015): 119–21. unexpected dialogues between multiple pasts and presents 70. This has always been the story told about the ceiling by mu- that were never intended or imagined when these artworks seum staff, and even though it cannot be confirmed, it is not un- were created. Hence they do not seem to be relics of a lost likely. Hearst and Hammond definitely knew each other. Hammond’s past, preserved but isolated symbols; on the contrary, in this father, John Hays Hammond Sr., was a mining engineer and at one complex context the fragments seem rehabilitated, reformed, time worked for Hearst’s father, George Hearst, a mining magnate. fi William Randolph Hearst collected a large number of medieval wooden newly signi cant. ceilings (forty-four are listed in the William Randolph Hearst Archive In appropriating a romanticized lost Middle Ages and at Long Island University), so he certainly had some to spare. procuring its displaced architectural remains, wealthy private Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 109 place of origin and by being made to function as house decora- tion, but in their new American surroundings, they created an aura that can be perceived as a quasi-spiritualized appropriation of the past, not so much because of their religious origins but be- cause they provide a tangible, even visceral, connection to the Middle Ages.72 Just as a body-part relic connotes the presence of the holy through fragments of the sacred body standing in for the in- tact whole, architectural fragments embedded in the reliquary of the revivalist building suggest the presence of the “true” Middle Ages. Dale Kinney and Richard Brilliant, among others, have discussed the phenomenon of spoliated objects from one culture or era reused in another.73 The fragments that Ham- mond and Pitcairn collected and installed in their homes func- tion like spolia and in their new environments provide an aura of a past time even as they contribute to the construction of the present. The use of spolia has connotations of remembrance, and even souvenir, particularly since Hammond often acquired items on his numerous trips abroad. In some instances it is dif- ficult not to associate the use of the fragment/relic/spolium with aggression and power, given that so many objects were sold to wealthy Americans as vestiges of violent displacement, even if this decontextualization had occurred before they took the final step of transferring the objects into their own collections. The violence of the extracted and repurposed fragment is chiefly evident in the architectural elements that are built Figure 13. Doorway, originally from the château in Varaignes, into the fabric of these two revivalist buildings. For the most France, early sixteenth century, installed in courtyard of Ham- part, the original locations of these pieces are uncertain, and mond Castle, 1926–29, Gloucester, Massachusetts (photo: Martha it is likely that Hammond and Pitcairn did not know their Easton). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of provenance because most of them were purchased through this image. dealers. For example, we now know that a Flamboyant Gothic doorway in the interior courtyard of Hammond Castle was forc- collectors seem to have been searching for atmospheric and ibly removed from the château in Varaignes, France (Fig. 13);74 authentic experience in the face of tremendous social and tech- photographs of it in situ show a superimposed diagram for nological change.71 In Hammond’s case in particular, collect- dismantling and reassembling the piece. Other images of the ing the art and architecture of the past might seem at odds portal, a drawing from 1884 and a picture postcard from about with his career as a scientist and inventor with his eye on 1920 (Fig. 14), provide evocative views of its original location, the future. Yet aesthetically, Hammond, like Pitcairn, was drawn to the past, often the religious past. The medieval reli- gious artifacts that they collected were taken from churches 72. William C. Calin discusses the prevalence of Christianity in and monasteries, although because of religious and political the modern study of the historical Middle Ages and Christianity’s upheavals these religious buildings were seldom still serving relative absence in many instances of medievalism; Calin, “Chris- tianity,” in Emery and Utz, Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, 35–42. their original purpose, if they survived at all. Many of the items 73. R. Brilliant and Kinney, Reuse Value. See also Wharton, “Tri- at Hammond Castle and Glencairn had been long separated bune Tower”; Gwendolyn Morgan, “Authority,” 27–34, and Kath- from their original locations, often already repurposed for other leen Biddick, “Trauma,” 247–54, both in Emery and Utz, Medieval- functions before they entered these new collections. The objects ism: Key Critical Terms; Biddick, Shock of Medievalism; and Dale themselves became secularized by being removed from their Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in Rudolph, Companion to Medie- val Art, 233–52. 74. The doorway is similar to one installed in the Gothic chapel at The Cloisters, although that one is said to have come from the 71. V. Brilliant, “Introduction: Gothic Art in America,” in “Gothic Cistercian abbey of Planselve in Gimont, about 200 miles from Art in America,” 291–95. Varaignes. 110 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 courtyard, a rather odd-looking, historicizing portal of mod- ern date.77 Once he acquired the Gothic doorway, Hammond had this modern original ripped out and the medieval replace- ment inserted—an interesting reversal of chronology.78 Whether or not these collectors knew the origins of a given fragment, the act of reappropriation itself is inherently tied to a type of violence. In Kinney’swords,“Spoliation entails a forcible transfer of ownership.... Spolia are survivors of vio- lence.”79 The ethical and moral issues raised by modern in- stances of spoliation stem in part from the fact that spoliation inevitably destroys the original context,80 even taking into con- sideration that some of those original contexts may already have been partially destroyed. In her essay on Chicago’sNeo- Gothic Tribune Tower (completed 1925), which she identi- fies as an instance of “corporate appropriation” of a histor- ical style that also integrates material fragments of more than 150 global monuments into its facade, Annabel J. Wharton describes this reuse of fragments as “pilfering”: “Each frag- ment implies a successful physical assault on its source.”81 In- deed, the Tribune Tower, and arguably Glencairn, Hammond Castle, and a number of other medievalist homes and build- ings of the period, reflect an imperialist American attitude toward the non-American past and its material remains. The acquisitions of fragments by wealthy industrialist collectors, many of which were the result of the destruction of World War I, “suggest a peculiarly American concern with a dislo- cated past; they archive the contradictions of a nostalgia for a missing history and the pride in the brief American enter- prise as the evolutionary fulfillment of all earlier ones.”82 All of these collectors—Hammond, Pitcairn, Barnard, Morgan, Figure 14. Postcard of doorway in situ, Château de Varaignes, and Hearst—took advantage of the lack of strict export con- photo taken ca. 1920 (photo: photographer unknown, Centre Per- trols in the period following World War I, especially in France, manent d’Initiatives pour l’Environnement du Périgord-Limousin). until about 1928.83 An image of Morgan titled “The Magnet,” See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image. by Udo J. Keppler, which appeared in Puck in 1911, illustrates the collector’s great compulsion to acquire such fragments while more recent photos of the château reveal the destructive extraction of the decorated doorway.75 It is not clear how, why, when, or by whom the château portal was removed, although correspondence between Hammond and a Jean Poly of Paris 77. According to James F. O’Gorman (“Twentieth-Century Goth- is probably about this door. In 1929, after Hammond Castle ick,” 96), this was originally meant to be installed in an addition to one of Hammond’s previous residences, but the addition was never was completed, Poly sold Hammond a door that he called a completed. “grande porte en pierre.” He writes that he is sure it must be 78. Christian Magne, the curator of the Château de Varaignes, re- one of the most beautiful things in Hammond’s building,76 cently visited Hammond Castle and took numerous photographs of and it certainly is the most spectacular medieval doorway the portal in order to create a 3-D replica, which will be reinstalled among the several that exist at the castle. The dates also make in its original location at the château. La lettre du Centre Permanent ’ ’ sense, since originally there was a different doorway in the d Initiatives pour l Environnement du Périgord-Limousin 31 (Sum- mer 2015), https://www.cpie-perigordlimousin.org/la-lettre-dete -n31/. 75. We thank Valérie Teillet of the Centre Permanent d’Initiatives 79. Kinney, “Introduction,” 4. pour l’Environnement du Périgord-Limousin for providing these 80. Ibid., 7–9. photos. 81. Wharton, “Tribune Tower,” 187, 196. 76. Jean Poly to John Hays Hammond Jr., 31 May 1933, Ham- 82. Ibid., 193. mond Castle Archives. 83. Smith, “George Grey Barnard,” 136–37. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 111 time in which people were less educated and thus more inno- cent and childlike.87 This idealization of medieval life has been connected to a kind of primitivization; according to T. J. Jack- son Lears, “[t]he same impulse which led some Americans to medieval Europe led others to the Orient.”88 For Lears, anti- modern medievalism was a response to the perception of apa- thy that accompanied industrialization. Such ideological motivations behind the valorization of the medieval can also be linked to major architectural com- missions and other kinds of American philanthropy in the early years of the twentieth century. Kathleen Davis, in her discussion of Andrew Carnegie and his “tycoon medieval- ism,” notes that for people like Carnegie and Rockefeller, philanthropy was underpinned by selective ideas about the “ ” Figure 15. Udo J. Keppler, The Magnet, Puck, 21 June 1911, New superiority of certain European cultures and American par- York, The Morgan Library & Museum, ARC 2650 (photo: The 89 Morgan Library & Museum). See the electronic edition of Gesta ticipation in, and even inheritance of, that legacy. Carnegie for a color version of this image. was an early figure in a line of wealthy and powerful men who approached European culture in this way. Elizabeth (Fig. 15).84 In another example of collecting ambition, Pitcairn Emery lists “J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, William Ran- attempted for several years (1923–25) to negotiate the purchase dolph Hearst, William Waldorf Astor, Theodore Roosevelt, of the sculpture of Eve from the cathedral of Saint-Lazare in and Woodrow Wilson” as American figures who used medie- Autun, now in that city’s Musée Rolin. In the 1920s the famous valizing architecture to assert a particular view of American sculpture was owned by a man named Victor Terret, a parish superiority and culture.90 The Cloisters was perhaps Rockefel- priest and amateur archaeologist.85 Had this sculpture moved ler’s most visible and successful example of “tycoon medieval- across the Atlantic, it would have sustained an even more rad- ism.” His wealth, influence, and philanthropy created a lasting ical change than the one that resulted from its placement in the monument to the Middle Ages in the United States, even Musée Rolin. Indeed, each and every spoliated fragment speaks though it was created primarily out of objects displaced be- to its forceful relocation, damaged original source, and po- cause of national traumas overseas, turning “economic capital tentially denied past, which greater geographic distance can into symbolic capital.”91 In the later part of this period, espe- only exacerbate.86 cially after World War I, Emery points to a clear “tendency to Pitcairn, Hammond, and other American industrialists appropriate the world’s culture ...in America’s postwar ac- who were collecting medieval art and reusing it in American tivities related to restoration, collection, and tourism—all homes and institutions contributed to one of the many sorts forms of neo-colonialism—and it is also mirrored in the na- of medievalisms at work in nineteenth- and early twentieth- tional cathedrals” as well as in such “cathedrals of commerce” century America. Victorian medievalism was often character- as the Woolworth Building in New York, built by Cass Gilbert ized by a romanticized view of the Middle Ages as a simpler in 1913.92 Early twentieth-century medievalisms existed at the inter- 84. Rachel Cohen, “J. P. Morgan: The Man Who Bought the sections of imperialism, corporate power, racial superiority, World,” Apollo,5September2015,http://www.apollo-magazine .com/j-p-morgan-the-man-who-bought-the-world/. See also Flaminia Gennari-Santori, “An Art Collector and His Friends: John Pierpont 87. T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Morning of Belief: Medieval Men- Morgan and the Globalization of Medieval Art,” in V. Brilliant, talities in a Modern World,” chap. 4 in No Place of Grace: Anti- “Gothic Art in America,” 401–11. modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 85. Terret apparently owned it after it was discovered embedded (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 142–81, 345–51. in the wall of a house in the late nineteenth century. Hayward, “In- 88. Ibid., 143. troduction,” 40. Discussed in letters from 25 February 1923 to 89. Davis, “Tycoon Medievalism.” 15 May 1925, Glencairn Museum Archives. See also Robert A. Max- 90. Elizabeth Emery, “Postcolonial Gothic: The Medievalisms of well, “Accounting for Taste: American Collectors and Twelfth- America’s ‘National’ Cathedrals,” in Davis and Altschul, Medieval- Century French Sculpture,” in V. Brilliant, “Gothic Art in America,” isms in the Postcolonial World, 237–64, at 253. 389–400, at 391–92. 91. Davis, “Tycoon Medievalism,” 783, citing a process described 86. See Maxwell’s discussion of Parthenay (“Accounting for by Pierre Bourdieu in The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice Taste,” 392–98) for an example of a community seeking repatria- (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). tion of medieval remnants. 92. Emery, “Postcolonial Gothic,” 257. 112 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 and philanthropy. While this sort of philanthropic medieval- new museums and organizations dedicated to medieval sub- ism works differently from the medievalism of private homes jects.”94 like Glencairn or Hammond Castle, we can certainly point to In his 1889 essay “Gospel of Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie a form of imperialism at work in the collecting practices of “defines capitalism and industrialism as hallmarks of prog- Hammond and Pitcairn. Industrialization, American nation- ress, and argues that continued progress requires great dis- alism, appropriation of medieval European aesthetics, and parity of wealth.”95 Pitcairn, like Carnegie, was a Pennsylvania collecting were intertwined phenomena in the period. Ham- industrialist, and his attitudes toward his role in philanthropy mond’s wealth and privilege allowed him to travel in Europe and support of the arts are best indicated by his frustration to procure objects for export to the United States, and he felt with the New Deal, which in his view limited his ability to sup- no remorse about removing items from their original cultural port artists and craftsmen like those who had worked on Bryn context for reconfiguration and display in his revivalist castle. Athyn Cathedral and Glencairn. This was, in a sense, a later His interest in the Middle Ages had to do with a particular version of Carnegie’s argument that the philanthropist is type of medievalism, elucidated by Lears, that looked to the the person most qualified to manage his funds and other gifts. past as a time of almost childlike naïveté. In Hammond’s case, The strong link between American medievalist architecture however, this privileging of the medieval world over the mod- and such industrialist resources, whether public commissions ern was specifically tied to his occupation as an inventor, or private homes, is well articulated by Emery, who points out working on radio-controlled torpedoes and similar commis- that “[a]lthough America’s medieval-style cathedral building sions for the U.S. military. While at one end of his castle he of 1880–1930 may seem quaintly anachronistic today, the cam- and his lab assistants perfected sophisticated weapons of mass paign to express particularly American values through reli- destruction, at the other end he could escape among his ob- gious architecture was led by ...some of the same politicians, jects into a constructed fantasy of medieval beauty and ro- industrialists, and financiers responsible for making America mance. Although Hammond acquired some armor and other the world power it is today.”96 Of course, Pitcairn used his items associated with medieval warfare, later in life he ex- wealth on building projects that were not just medieval in style pressed his deep dismay about the technological development but also medievalist in technique, which is especially notable of weaponry and especially what he saw as the potential for given the reputation of his Pittsburgh company as an indus- self-annihilation inherent in the nuclear bomb. try innovator. The extra costs of these “medieval” methods Some of these early twentieth-century collectors not only required the resources of someone like Pitcairn: “Ironically, sentimentalized the Middle Ages but also infantilized the Eu- while Europeans were building religious architecture rapidly ropeans who seemingly gave up pieces of their medieval leg- and inexpensively with iron, Americans embraced the finan- acy so willingly, as if the proper caretakers of these objects cial and temporal sacrifices of replicating the medieval tech- were American. Hammond’s correspondence and diary often niques associated with handcrafted stone masonry.”97 While include anecdotes about how easy it was to procure certain there were a variety of medievalisms in early twentieth-century artifacts because their owners were unaware of their true America and numerous reasons why the Middle Ages were value. Ironically, because of some of the weapons that Ham- deemed worthy of appropriation by people far removed from mond himself developed, Europe’s historic sites were casual- them in time and place, arguably it was Raymond Pitcairn ties of war. According to Emery, “The sense of duty toward who most thoroughly embraced the possibilities of historical war-torn Europe became so widespread that many wealthy engagement with an earlier time. Although both Hammond Americans considered it a ‘patriotic act’ to ‘salvage’ European and Pitcairn collected displaced fragments, often spoils of war, art, whether it was actually damaged in the war or seemingly and reconstructed them in new configurations using contem- unappreciated by Europeans. American collectors felt their porary artisans, Pitcairn was not content with merely collect- intervention would assure the continuation of a treasured civ- ing medieval objects and installing them in a medieval-style ilization about to disappear.”93 These acts of “charity” enriched building; he also consciously revived medieval methods of pro- both private and public collections in the United States: “Thanks duction, as if “authentic” techniques could not just re-create to philanthropic figures such as Rockefeller, who single-handedly but actually create anew the aura of the past. jump-started the restoration at Reims, and private collectors, who salvaged fragments that Europeans did not value, Amer- ica was able to build its own medieval collections and found

94. Emery, “Martyred Cathedral,” 331. 95. Davis, “Tycoon Medievalism,” 787. 96. Emery, “Postcolonial Gothic,” 253. 93. Ibid., 256–57. 97. Ibid., 242. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 113 Conflation and Confusion categories we often want to assign for them.”101 The cathe- dral’s gargoyles are read as medieval, despite when they were At the same time that Glencairn and Hammond Castle made; the absence of a boundary between old and new, the construct idealized, fantastic new contexts for medieval rem- conflation of past and present, creates something that is nei- nants, they also confuse the lines between past and present. ther medieval nor modern but, rather, a new historical hybrid Without close examination it is difficult to determine what is that seems to be both at once. Glencairn and Hammond Castle old and what is new, and the result is buildings that are them- appear to function in very similar ways because they, too, in- selves unique composite objects. As Michael Camille describes tegrate past and present with their mix of medieval and mod- in his study of the nineteenth-century gargoyles of Notre- ern architectural styles and object collections, ultimately tran- Dame in Paris, the Middle Ages as a historical period “is hardly scending both time periods to construct a new historical ever as distinct or as separate as we might want to think, but reality. always flowing into other periods, haunting other epochs, Glencairn now displays modern stained-glass windows, emerging where we least expect it.”98 In Hammond Castle original medieval glass from Pitcairn’s collection, and modern and Glencairn, the conflation of historical periods tends to replicas of medieval windows from Chartres (Figs. 4, 6, and make the reproduction itself seem authentic, particularly in 10).102 Furthermore, the glass tesserae for the mosaics found spaces that make no attempt to distinguish between the origi- throughout the house, including the great arch and vaulted nal and the facsimile. The combination of the authentic and in- ceiling of the Great Hall, were produced in the same shops that authentic produces not a copy, not a simulacrum, but a setting made the windows, even though they are neither authentic nor that transcends time and space and, because the original cul- based on medieval models. The ceiling mosaics that evoke the tural contexts of the objects in the reconfigured setting have Book of Kells are particularly complicated; they engage with the been destroyed, the new context is as rich as the old. medieval on multiple levels, but the result is a uniquely un- In these two buildings, authentic medieval objects exist medieval artifact (Fig. 6). Pitcairn’s decision to take materials alongside replicas, but that difference is rarely made clear to made in a medieval fashion—both the historically informed visitors; in addition, all these things are housed in a medieval- techniques used for the production of the glass and the selec- izing setting that audiences may not always realize is fully tion of mosaic as architectural decoration—and apply them to modern. Rather than interpret this as intentionally mislead- a design based on another medieval source, of a radically dif- ing, however, we find that such conflation provides an op- ferent scale and medium, is a peculiar one. The jumbling to- portunity to think about the more provocative implications gether of multiple media reinforces the imaginary, fabricated of this kind of historical ambiguity.99 Camille argues that the nature of the medieval at Glencairn; at the same time, the cre- nineteenth-century Notre-Dame gargoyles, which have come ative refashioning evident in the building also reinstates the to symbolize the medieval despite their modernity, reveal just flexibility of the medieval and the intangibility of “historical how modern our notions of the Middle Ages are. His point is accuracy” or the “original life” of medieval things. not that “they are modern and therefore less important”; on One of the most intriguing spaces that Hammond built the contrary, “rather than view them as ‘not medieval,’”he ar- inside his castle was a simulated village square, consisting of gues that they have been instrumental “in having helped con- an indoor pool surrounded by plants, several medieval or struct the very idea of the medieval.”100 Yet he also points out medieval-style portals and windows, and two medieval build- that the gargoyles are able to do this precisely because of the ing facades (Fig. 16). He wanted to evoke the effect of the ruins lack of any real distinctions between historical periods or ob- of a Roman impluvium around which a medieval village had ject categories: “Great emblems of historical discontinuity, grown,103 but the entire installation is a mix of medieval and they remind us that cultural objects do not fit easily into the modern, anchored by some of Hammond’s own cutting-edge technological inventions. He told people that he found one of

98. Camille, Gargoyles of Notre Dame, xi. 101. Ibid., 362. 99. E. L. Risden writes that “monuments draw past (actual or fic- 102. Both Glencairn and Hammond Castle have copies of win- tional) and present (actual or imagined) into instantaneous experi- dows from Chartres. Just as it does today, Chartres had a particular ence, creating an interpretable sense of awe that can move an audi- mystique for Americans interested in the Middle Ages and medieval ence both emotionally and intellectually” (our emphasis). Risden, art. Henry Charles Adams’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, pub- “Monument,” in Emery and Utz, Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, lished in 1904 and again in 1913, was influential in bringing Char- 157–63, at 158–59. In the same volume, see also Jonathan Hsy, “Co- tres to the attention of a larger American population. See the dis- disciplinarity,” 43–52; Clare A. Simmons, “Humor,” 109–16; D’Arcens, cussion in Maxwell, “Accounting for Taste,” 397. “Presentism”; and Mayer, “Simulacrum.” 103. John Hays Hammond Jr., manuscript, undated, Hammond 100. Camille, Gargoyles of Notre Dame, xi. Castle Archives. 114 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 Figure 16. Courtyard, 1926–29, Hammond Castle, Gloucester, Massachusetts (photo: Martha Easton). the doorways in pieces in a cellar in Naples, half-buried in the he bought it from Auguste Decour, an art dealer in Paris, dirt; in a letter to Taylor, he states that this was the last rem- and that it was originally from Amiens (Fig. 17).106 Hammond nant of a ruined church close to Ravello, on the Amalfi coast, used fluorescein, a dye used by the U.S. Navy, to color the pool and that it was carved of lava from the eruption of Vesuvius.104 an opaque green so that it obscured the depth of the water, and The two house facades appear to combine original and repro- he loved to startle people by diving into the pool from the roof duction elements, although there is no attempt made, either in outside his bedroom window, which overlooked the court- materials or on the museum labels, to identify which is which. yard.107 The entire space was surmounted by a skylight and a The woodwork of one is said to be intact, with brickwork fin- ished by Gloucester artisans;105 Hammond’s diary states that 106. John Hays Hammond Jr., diary entry, 11 August 1926, Hammond Castle Archives. 104. John Hays Hammond Jr. to Francis Taylor, 1937, Ham- 107. Or perhaps from the bridge over the pool that led to the so- mond Castle Archives. called Gothic bedroom; sources differ on the exact location of 105. Kline, Hammond Museum, 30–31. Hammond’s dives. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 115 Figure 17. Facade from Amiens installed in courtyard, Hammond Castle, Gloucester, Massachusetts (photo: Martha Easton). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

Figure 18. Atrium of Fenway Court, Isabella Stewart Gardner series of overhead pipes so that Hammond could produce rain Museum, Boston, Massachusetts (photo: putneypics, Creative inside, ranging from gentle showers to torrential downpours. Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0). See the electronic edition of The latter were supposedly used to cut short the late-night ca- Gesta for a color version of this image. rousing of his frequent guests, who were an eclectic mix of writers, actors, musicians, politicians, society figures, and gen- dieval and not medieval, since with so many of the objects in eral bon vivants. In conceiving this courtyard, Hammond was the Pitcairn and Hammond collections a complete sense of probably influenced by his friendship with Isabella Stewart their origins is lost (or in some cases never existed at all). Gardner, a frequent visitor to Gloucester, and his knowledge The impossibility of that recovery seems to conflict directly of the interior courtyard of Fenway Court, her Venetian-style with their assertive presence today. We tend to underesti- mansion in Boston, which was opened to the public in 1903 mate how remarkable that presence is. So many artworks, (Fig. 18). Gardner was yet another American collector who in- buildings, and objects from the past have been lost, disman- stalled her art collection in a revivalist building, blending the tled, or destroyed that the mere survival of the pieces to historic and the modern into a new configuration, “where pieces which we have access today, including those on display in of lost architectural monuments are set into a building whose these homes, is significant. Their presence is aggressive, bel- seams remain visible, retaining their status as fragments while ligerent, and powerful, and this persistence makes it arguably being integrated into a larger visual whole.”108 less important whether a particular sculpture was from this Is the confusion created by these conflations intentional building or that one, or stood originally next to this saint or just a side effect of our expectations? Perhaps confusion or that apostle. Do the often inaccessible origins of an object only occurs if one is looking for the distinction between me- really matter as much as we have assumed, or can we allow medievalist projects like Glencairn and Hammond Castle to 108. Fozi, “‘Mere Patch of Color,’” 341. release us from these expectations? Are there equally impor- 116 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018 tant or more meaningful things to be gleaned from extant objects when we no longer prioritize an (idealized) past over the many other moments (including the contemporary one) in the object’s life? The differences between past and present are not always clear. We welcome this confusion, and we in- vite more historians to do the same. It is instructive to contrast The Cloisters with the homes of Pitcairn and Hammond. One of the most famous features of that museum is the area built of remnants from the clois- ter at the abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa. It is a convincing fabrication composed of actual medieval pieces—all of the capitals as well as some of the abaci, bases, columns, and arches—and modern elements that were quarried from the same region in Languedoc as the original elements (Fig. 19).109 Yet it is only half the size of the original, resulting in a mislead- ingly small “re-created” cloister compared with the probable French original.110 Trigg suggests that “visitors are fully con- scious of [the] artificiality” at The Cloisters, and she echoes Baudrillard’sstatementthat“no one is fooled” by the medi- evalism there.111 But we would argue that nothing is self-evident at The Cloisters. Because the stone looks the same, the casual vis- Figure 19. Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa cloister, 1130–40, northeastern itor would not know the difference between the medieval and Pyrenees, installed at The Cloisters, New York, 1925, 25.120.398–.954 modern components of the Cuxa cloister; nor would she know (photo: The Cloisters Collection). See the electronic edition of Gesta that it is notably smaller in scale. Echoing the way that Ham- for a color version of this image. mond Castle was characterized while it was under construc- tion, visitors to The Cloisters sometimes have the impression chitectural elements that are authentically medieval. Yet ulti- that the entire structure was brought over, stone by stone, mately the museum is creating a fantasy of the Middle Ages; from Europe, whereas others believe the museum was origi- as Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl put it, “what is medi- nally a church or a monastery.112 eval becomes stuck in the ideal of a common civic experi- Even if its galleries are fanciful re-creations of medieval ence.”113 Its curators were not immune to collecting, inadver- spaces, the goal of The Cloisters is to display objects and ar- tently, one of the many “fake” medieval objects that were on the market in the early twentieth century. The lion fountain on display in the Cuxa cloister was sold to the museum by 109. Barnet and Wu, The Cloisters, 29; J. L. Schrader, “George the Parisian art dealer Paul Gouvert as a twelfth-century ob- Grey Barnard: The Cloisters and the Abbaye,” Metropolitan Mu- ject from the monastery of Notre-Dame-du-Vilar in Roussil- seum of Art Bulletin 37, no. 1 (1979): 3–52; and Harold Dickson, lon,114 but in fact it is a forgery of the late nineteenth or early “ ” The Origins of The Cloisters, Art Quarterly 28, no. 4 (1965): twentieth century.115 What all three buildings have in com- 253–73. 110. The installation at The Cloisters contains only twenty-nine mon is the effect they have on the visitor; for someone or thirty original capitals, making for a misleadingly small “re- who has not been to Europe, walking through The Cloisters, created” cloister compared with the sixty-three thought to have ex- Glencairn, or Hammond Castle can provide a deeply mem- isted originally, according to a 1779 plan of the abbey. Thomas E. A. orable experience of historicized space, something appre- fi Dale states that thirty- ve remain at the abbey in France. Dale, hended with the body as well as the mind, in a way that dif- “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 3 (2001): 402–36, at 405. Apparently some ninety capitals have been attributed to 113. Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms, 115; and Angela Jane Weisl, Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa (including another four in Pitcairn’s collec- “Spectacle,” in Emery and Utz, Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, tion). See also Faye Hirsch, “Architectural Elements” and “Two 231–38. Capitals” in Hayward and Cahn, et al., Radiance and Reflection, 114. An early guidebook to The Cloisters, written by James 55–59, cat. nos. 5–6. Rorimer (the first curator) in 1938 and updated over the years to re- 111. Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals,” 30; and Baudrillard, flect changes to the collection and the building, repeats the Notre- Simulacra and Simulation, 11. Dame-du-Vilar provenance. 112. A perusal of online reviews of The Cloisters suggests that 115. For the correct provenance of the wall fountain, see http:// this misconception is still common. www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471180. Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 117 fers from viewing isolated objects in the more sterile space privileging of origins and originals and understand instead that of the typical museum. As Trigg, an Australian, points out, objects exist on a spectrum: things created in the past still exist “for many of us who live outside Europe, our first experience in the present, and things created in the present might so suc- of walking in a Gothic cathedral took place in nineteenth- cessfully evoke that past that they become a viable substitute. century buildings.”116 The shattered bits built into the walls Rather than talking about “more” or “less” real, we can talk of these buildings become reunified and reconstituted through about a wide range of “different” reals. In the same way that their reuse. Baudrillard envisioned Disneyland as more “real” than its sur- In the Great Hall at Glencairn, visitors experience group- rounding community, Glencairn and Hammond Castle inte- ings of objects that have come together in a very different lo- grate the past and the present, offering visitors actual reinven- cation in Bryn Athyn (Figs. 9–11). They are not just dis- tions of the Middle Ages that transcend time and place. played alongside each other but are actively recontextualized The objects in these simulated spaces participate in this within a new but still medievalized setting, and they are con- reinvention, whether they are medieval or modern or a com- figured with a bold assertion that this is how they should be, bination of the two. But instead of viewing these revivalist and will be, seen now. At some point it becomes difficult to buildings on a scale sliding between authentic and anachro- imagine these fragments in any other installation, especially nistic, with the collections inside fighting to assert their legit- those in the distant and inaccessible past. It becomes a chal- imacy as “real” objects, our aim in this essay has been to ex- lenge to imagine the St. Paul sculpture not under that tympa- plore how these particular re-presentations alter or destabilize num or the queen statue-column not at the center of that par- the meaning of the medieval objects. The medieval fragment ticular doorway. The complex network of objects created in comes to stand in for the original whole, functioning as a relic these conglomerations constructs new relationships among that both reflects and constructs cultural memory. Such tem- previously disparate pieces. Furthermore, in this type of dis- poral instability revives the medieval object as well, reasserting play specific objects are brought into focus in a way wholly dif- its capacity for new meanings. ferent from what occurred in their original contexts. How The integration that we see at Glencairn and Hammond closely would any of us have looked at the St. Paul sculpture Castle does indeed obscure the past, but it also provides al- if it really had appeared somewhere at Notre-Dame, in a choir ternatives for understanding the lives of these objects. Some- chapel or as part of the south transept doorway (or even if it one standing in the Great Hall of Glencairn or the courtyard was part of a later restoration of the Sainte-Chapelle)? The of Hammond Castle does not see the medieval or medieval- aesthetic logic of the arrangements made at Glencairn pre- izing objects as relics of a lost past, as preserved but isolated sents us with an entirely new, thoroughly modern, and fully symbols; on the contrary, in these complex contexts the frag- engaging experience of these fragments in dialogue with one ments take on new and richly evocative meanings. They com- another and with the building as a whole. municate the personal passion that both Hammond and Pit- cairn had for medieval art but, more than that, they offer a way to reconsider the lives of such objects. Conclusion With the passage of time, these buildings have become his- The search for the “authentic” can become almost a colonial- toric artifacts that tell us something about how people in the ist enterprise, with the pure, unadulterated medieval building 1920s and 1930s collected, displayed, and envisioned the me- the only “true” architectural space, and the “original” object dieval. Perhaps more than any other historical period, the the only one deemed worthy of acquisition, study, and display. Middle Ages inspires later generations not only to try to un- What we suggest instead is that scholars should rethink their derstand it but also, in many ways, to relive it. Rather than see- ing the scholarly enterprise as more worthy and rigorous than popular appropriation, however, we propose that both ways 116. Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals,” 12. In her essay on of seeing the Middle Ages are valid, and, ultimately, both are Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia and its medieval- re-creations of a period that is fundamentally unknowable ex- esque holiday decorations, Laura Morowitz points out, “For many cept through our own reconstructions of it. Glencairn and ’ early twentieth-century Americans, Wanamaker s recreations were Hammond Castle present deeply evocative spaces that con- the closest they got to experiencing these medieval monuments”; Morowitz, “The Cathedral of Commerce: French Gothic Architecture struct collective memories of a manufactured history and make and Wanamaker’s Department Store,” in Marquardt and Jordan, Me- new meanings for the medieval—meanings that are no less dieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages, 340–62, at 340. significant than any that have come before.

118 E Gesta v57n1, Spring 2018