Elisabetta Mezzani – Matr

Università Ca’ Foscari – Venezia Dottorato di ricerca in Lingue, Culture e Società – 22° ciclo (A. A. 2006/2007 – 2008/2009) THE DECORATION OF HOUSES, BY EDITH WHARTON AND OGDEN CODMAN, JR. INDIRIZZO DI STUDI IBERICI E ANGLOAMERICANI Tesi di dottorato di Elisabetta Mezzani – Matr. 955322 Coordinatore del Dottorato Tutore del dottorando Chiar. ma Prof. ssa Chiar. ma Prof. ssa ROSELLA MAMOLI ZORZI ROSELLA MAMOLI ZORZI 1 The Decoration of Houses by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr. Introduction p. 2 Chapter I Writing The Decoration of Houses: Wharton and Codman’s relationship’s p. 9 development, analyzed through their collaboration and correspondence Chapter II Analysis of The Decoration of Houses’ contents: bibliographic and architectural precedents, and comparison of the book with contemporary texts on interior decoration p. 26 Chapter III House interiors as physical and emotional surroundings and their relationship with the characters in Edith Wharton’s fiction p. 49 Charter IV The Decoration of Houses as a source for Ogden Codman’s buildings, and Elsie de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste p. 85 Conclusion p. 106 Appendix A: p. 108 The Decoration of Houses’ publishing history – Following editions - Reviews - Translations Appendix B: Chapter II: Ogden Codman’s Typescript Version Compared with the Published Version – Italian Translation p. 128 Appendix C: Personal Correspondence: Edith Wharton – Ogden Codman p. 186 Edith Wharton – William Crary Brownell Bibliography p. 207 2 Introduction In 2007, one hundred and ten years after it was first published, The Decoration of Houses was presented in the latest reprint’s foreword as “among the most influential books about decoration and architecture ever published in the United States.”1 The book, co-authored by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., made its appearance on a market not exactly devoid of treatises on the subject: in the United States, after the Civil War, dozens of titles focused on what was not yet called “interior decoration”; they spanned from practical advice on domestic economy to the description of the interiors of the most luxurious houses in America. It was in the 1830s that books on domestic advice became popular, as the Victorian era put a strong emphasis on home and family values, and one could detect a distinct pattern among the published works: women authors dealt mostly with the practical running of the household, “domestic” being the attribute most frequently used in the titles of their books. It immediately called to mind the warm, familiar atmosphere women were expected to be able to create and maintain in the household, and it was usually paired with terms like “house-keeping”, “cooking”, “comfort” and “common sense.”2 Male authors, on the other hand, concerned themselves with the abstract concepts of “interior”, “art”, “beauty”, “decoration”. Two highly influential books appeared in the U. S. A. in the 1870s: the first, a reprint of the English edition of 1868, was Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste (1874), followed in 1878 by America’s Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds, Tables, Stools, and Candlesticks. Eastlake, a trained architect who never practiced but devoted himself instead to designing furniture, was an ardent promoter of the Gothic revival and shared the aesthetic ideals of artists like William Morris; Hints on Household Taste is believed to have strongly contributed to the success of the Arts and Crafts Movement, of which Morris was the foremost representative. In America, the book met with such success, that Eastlake was forced to add a note to the preface of the fourth edition: he meant to disown the furniture produced in the so-called “Eastlake style” which had started to appear on the market, “for the taste of which”, he wrote, “I should be very sorry to be considered responsible.”3 1 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses, New York, Rizzoli and The Mount Press, 2007 – Foreword by Richard Guy Wilson. 2 The American Woman’s Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science, was among the most popular of these guides written in 1869 by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, later the celebrated author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 3 Charles L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1969, p. ix. 3 Clarence Cook’s book, while moving from the same premises of Eastlake’s, shows a more flamboyant approach through the insertion of scraps of poetry, the mention of classic English writers and catchy captions to the illustrations; as was the case with Eastlake’s book, The House Beautiful also originated from a series of articles previously published. Both authors deplored the excesses of fashion, praised the value of hand-made objects as opposed to industrial products, and adhered to the Ruskinian principles of honesty applied to art and architecture. Books such as these, as well as Eugene Clarence Gardner’s Home Interiors (1878), William John Loftie’s A Plea for Art in the House (1876), Marion Harland’s Common Sense in the Household: A Manual for Practical Housewifery (1876), Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Art Decoration Applied to Furniture (1877), Julia McNair Wright’s The Complete Home: An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Life and Affairs. The Household in its Foundation, Order, Economy ... A Volume of Practical Experiences Popularly Illustrated (1879), Ella Rodman Church’s How to Furnish a Home (1881), H. J. Cooper’s The Art of Furnishing: On Rational and Aesthetic Principles (1881), Agnes Bailey Ormsbee’s The House Comfortable (1892), Candace Wheeler’s Household Art (1893), to name only a few, addressed themselves mainly to the vast audience of the American middle class. Some of these authors, as for instance Spofford, Beecher or Hewitt, were familiar names to a large audience of magazine and newspaper readers: papers like Godey’s Lady’s Book or The Ladies’ Home Journal featured articles on domestic economy as well as interior decoration and architecture. The readers were guided through the process of tastefully decorating a house room by room, they were presented with pictures of home interiors taken from all over the country, and, for those who were looking for qualified, affordable advice, the magazines mentioned above ran a series of articles featuring complete plans for specific types of houses, of different categories and prices, as prepared by the journal’s architect.4 The authors of The Decoration of Houses were neither middle-class nor names familiar to a vast reading public – only one of them would become a famous writer, but when the book was published, they were both at the outset of their respective careers. In 1897 Edith Newbold Jones, of an established upper-class New York family, had been married twelve years to a socially prominent Bostonian, Edward Wharton. She had dabbled in 4 The Ladies’ Home Journal of December, 1897, for instance, featured a plan for a two-floors house at the cost of $1000, fourth in a series called “The Ladies’ Home Journal’s Model Homes of Moderate Cost”; according to the publisher, these articles’ aim was “to help its readers in their desires to build artistic homes.” The Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1897, p. 23. 4 poetry and tried her hand at short fiction, signing all her pieces with her married name5, and led the apparently idle life of the leisure class. Far from being herself a merely decorative society matron, Wharton was a linguist, an extremely well-read woman, and her wide-ranging cultural interests, and frequent travels and long sojourns in Europe, especially Italy and France, had contributed to shape her definite artistic taste and were establishing her as a connoisseur. In 1894, during a trip in the Tuscan hills, she had “discovered” a series of terra-cotta groups in the secluded monastery of San Vivaldo, and thanks to her report to the then director of the Royal Museum in Florence, their incorrect attribution had been rectified.6 Ogden Codman, Jr. was beginning to make a name for himself as an architect and interior decorator. About the same age as Wharton, he came from a well-to-do Boston family, and had formed his architectural taste in France, before briefly receiving formal training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.7 He met the Whartons in 1891, when the couple, looking to restore their Newport cottage, engaged what Edith Wharton would later call “a clever young Boston architect.8” Codman had by then opened a second office in New York, and he and Wharton gravitated mostly around the same social circles in the city, as well as in Boston and Newport. The chance meeting of these personalities, who discovered they shared similar views in the field of architecture and home decoration, was to result not only in a fruitful collaboration in the remodelling project of two Wharton homes and in the building of a third one; it also brought about a remarkable book and formed the basis of a lifelong friendship. Wharton wrote in her autobiography that the task she and her husband had assigned to Codman was “a somewhat new departure, since the architects of that day looked down on house- decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gewgaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing-tables. Codman shared my dislike of these sumptuary excesses, and thought as I did that interior decoration should be simple and architectural”9. The excesses Wharton referred to were within reach of the author: Wharton’s biographers agree that the writer of The Decoration of Houses meant to strike a blow at the Victorian style which had plagued so many socially prominent dwellings, her own parents’ included, and against which she unconsciously rebelled even as a child.

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