Payne Whitney
The Rotunda, viewed from east to west with the entrance doors framing a replica of Michelangelo’s young archer.
It’s not often you walk into a house and have your breath taken away by a marvel of a room. This happened to me in the old Payne Whitney mansion, a unique retreat on Fifth Avenue in a handsome Beaux Arts building garlanded with ivy, in the middle of Museum Mile, just down across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, oh, joy! It has the ultimate luxury of a garden oasis with shady trees and a birch grove. (Called the Florence Gould Garden, its new design in 2000 was made possible by the eponymous Foundation.) In fact, since the entire block in which the house stands remains much as it was when built to ordained residential scale in the early twentieth century, one has a vision of a vanished grand old Fifth Avenue before most of it was developed into high rise apartments.
The building has been owned by the French government since 1952, when Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of modern anthropology and the first French cultural counsellor to the United States, cleverly persuaded his government to buy it. It now houses the Cultural Services department of the French embassy,
The Payne Whitney house is both an important relic of New York’s Gilded Age and a heartening example of how an atavistic mansion can be turned into a modern thriving sanctuary of culture, learning and enjoyment. (Incidentally, the term the Gilded Age was first used by Mark Twain, derogatively – as gilded refers to a veneer on a baser substance, “hardened into a brazen gaudiness.” Not applicable here, fortunately.) It was built in the first decade of the twentieth century by the architectural company McKim, Mead & White and, though identified as the work of the collective firm, it was actually designed by Stanford White, whose design principles embodied the self-confident American renaissance of the time. American wealth was amassed in a flash and they built their houses in a flash, using European models to make a show of opulence signifying the existence of an aristocratic caste in a democratic city.
The house was a wedding present to a rich and prominent New Yorker, Payne Whitney, from his uncle, Colonel Oliver Payne. The Colonel had bought the plot of land in 1902 for $625,000 (over $15,000,000 in today’s figures) and spent at least as much again building the house. Payne’s bride, Helen Hay, was a writer, successful racehorse breeder, patron of the arts and poet – known as the Poetess of the Ballroom. (Her father had confiscated nearly all copies of her first book of poetry for fear of embarrassing the family.) She lived in the house in great style until her death in 1944.
It is one of Stanford White’s most successful monuments, granite, bow-fronted, with fine carved details and entablatures between its five stories. He oversaw every detail and spent more than $350,000 in Europe for the young couple, buying statues, paintings, tapestries, furniture, rugs and lamps, as well as mantels, columns, stained glass, wood panelling and a gilded oak portico.
The Venetian Room, just off the Rotunda.
He had finalized the aesthetic details and was still supervising the construction of the exterior and interiors when, in June 1906, he was shot dead by a jealous husband in a scandalous affair which reverberated in New York for decades. (A film, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, was made about the murder.)
It isn’t obvious from the street that part of this building is open to the public. For tucked into the mansion is the best, the only French bookshop in New York. (The last one, the Librairie de France, closed in 2009.)
So. Venturing into a spectacular rotunda through the carved pilastered entrance with its wrought-iron doors is to be taken out of New York life’s jazzy rhythm (never ordinary at the best of times) and into another kind of Gallic harmony. The shallow-domed circular hall, for all its gleaming marble, is slightly crepuscular. A ring of eight pairs of veined marble pillars supports a domed ceiling decorated with lattice and vines. In the center a rebarbative iron rail protects a marble fountain designed by Stanford White; and on the fountain stands (in a manner of speaking, since his legs are somewhat truncated) a marble statue of a young archer. This is a replica, as the original, which White bought in Rome, is now thought – amid much fevered excitement – to be an early work by Michelangelo, and is on loan to the Metropolitan Museum. This replica was produced by computerized 3D modelling
The painted ceiling has a curious anaglyptic look with roundels of vapid scenes of children and dogs and bas-reliefs of cherubs at play; there is still the rose in the center from which a chandelier once hung.
And now to the bookshop. This little delight – called Albertine Books, in homage to Proust – has more than fourteen thousand contemporary and classic titles in French and English, from thirty French-speaking countries. It opened in September 2014 and it owes its existence to the imagination and daring of the then cultural counsellor for the embassy, Antonin Baudry (now editor of the Paris Review). He lamented the loss of a French bookshop and meeting place in the city and set about looking for ways to launch a new one. In a coup de foudre he realized he could make one inside the Cultural Services building – no rent! – and at the same time fulfill his desire to let New Yorkers see how beautiful the interior was. “It made no sense that such an international city didn’t have a French bookstore,” Baudry said in a interview. “Francophone New Yorkers were coming back from Paris with suitcases crammed with books. And this building is part of the patrimony of New York. Now the doors are open.”
The architect Jacques Garcia did a fabulous conversion of some old offices. Through the doors up the stairs (not the grandiose marble stairs which featured in Gone with the Wind), past the huge windows, is a browserie where you can sit on a sofa or pretty chairs and read to your heart’s content under the huge hanging amber-shaded lights by Garcia, like art installations in themselves. “I want this to be a place that has a soul,” Baudry said, and he got his wish. You could be in a corner of the Palais Mazarin. The celadon-painted bookcases, outlined with burnished trim and sconces with miniature shades matching those of the hanging lamps, carry a row of busts from the Louvre atelier, of writers and savants from Descartes to Camus. Plus Benjamin Franklin. Voltaire of course is looking down. It wouldn’t be properly French if he weren’t.
Jacques Garcia once said, “I am, before everything, a creator of atmosphere,” and he has certainly followed his precept through here. Its astrological blue and gold ceiling was painted by artisans in France after the starry sky painting created by the symbolist painter Franz von Stuck in the music room of his villa in Munich. Talk about luxe, calme et volupté.
But the room that makes you hold your breath is on the first floor. It is one of the most stunning rooms in all of America: this exquisite, over-the-top, extravagant, pellucid, precious little mirrored jewel box is called, not without reason, the Venetian Room. Mirrored walls with gilded composition fittings, a gold-leafed metal latticework cove with vining porcelain flowers, antique French and Italian portraits in gilt frames with putti, oak wainscoting, a herringbone parquet floor and neoclassical ornaments surrounding the large mirrored panels make for a grotto Narcissus might have died for. (Still, the huge elaborately carved marble fireplace, quite out of place, might have brought him back to his senses.)
White had approved the final details shortly before his death in 1906 and his final drawings show the room almost exactly as it appears today. Helen Hay Whitney loved the room and although after her death the house and furniture were sold, her son, Jock Whitney, followed her wish that the room be preserved. It was dismantled and remained in storage in the stables at their country estate in seventy-five hermetically sealed wooden packing cases until 1997, when Jock’s widow, Betsey Cushing Whitney, donated the room to the French-American Foundation and provided the financial support for its restoration.
It’s a room from a mini palazzo; you feel the waters of a Venetian canal must be rippling outside. Yet for all the outpouring of luxury and conspicuous consumption, there is an air about this room that avoids pretension and gives it a forlorn beauty.
Voltaire wrote: “Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” What’s so wonderful is that this excellence belongs to anyone who walks through these doors.
The Marble Room doorway, leading into the second floor of Albertine Bookstore.