Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England

Chapter 3 - Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner: Making a Collection Permanent

3 Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner Making a Collection Permanent < George Gardner and his wife, Jessie Barker Gardner, were early twentieth-century antique collectors in Providence, Rhode Island. George was a surgeon, Jessie the descendent of an old New England family. The pair spent their adult lives in a middle-class neighborhood of Providence. They knew the famous Pendleton collection of American decorative arts at the nearby Rhode Island School of Design, and they traveled to New York to see the American Wing and the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of nineteen period rooms opened to the public in 1929. They read Antiques and the Antiquarian. They consulted collecting manuals and decorative arts literature. But at a time when the antique market was burgeoning, George and Jessie were decidedly small-time. They did not lend items to the famous exhibition of American decorative arts orga- <฀ 91 C hapter 3 nized by the National Council of Girl Scouts in 1929. George was not invited to join the Walpole Society, and the couple certainly never bid on blockbuster items at major auctions such as the Flayderman sale. Still, George and Jessie’s story is an important one, because they represent a class of antique collectors rarely discussed: dedicated amateurs who lacked the resources to collect at the highest levels, but nevertheless valued antiques passionately. History most often records the stories of wealthy, powerful collectors, individuals such as Henry Francis du Pont or Francis P. Garvan, who built extensive museums or attached their names to prestigious institutions with generous gifts. George and Jessie strove to imitate their more famous counterparts, but theirs is the story of what it was like to negotiate the twentieth-century antique market and create a legacy without the benefits of a bottomless pocketbook or professional advisers. They might not have always followed the recommendations of experts or achieved the most aesthetically pleasing results, but what they did do was to integrate collecting into their lives and find meaning, both personal and political, in antique objects. Middle-class though they were, George and Jessie saw themselves as part of a philanthropic tradition. Jessie, born in Providence in 1873, was the daughter of one of the city’s prominent families (figure 13). Her mother, Annie Cushman Tripp Barker, hailed from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her father, Henry Rodman Barker, was a Providence native who served as the city’s mayor from 1889 to 1890. Jessie attended Miss Abbott’s School for Young Ladies, where she most likely knew Abby Greene Aldrich, the future wife of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. and benefactor of many art museums. After graduation, Jessie attended Brown University as a special student from 1892 to 1894, where she met fellow student George Warren Gardner, a native of Maine. The couple traveled frequently but made their home in Providence, where George worked for a short period as Brown University’s physician and later as a surgeon at Rhode Island Hospital. It is difficult to say when exactly George and Jessie began collecting. Some of their treasured artifacts were inherited; others were purchased at auctions, from antique dealers, and on travel vacations throughout the East Coast and abroad. But in the 1920s they came to an ambitious idea. They would make their collection permanent; they would make it into a museum. 92฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner For most collectors, the hunt is the most dramatic phase of collecting , culminating in the moment when the object is located and secured. Collectors often tell detailed stories about their discoveries, of identifying an unrecognized treasure and rescuing it by adding it to their collection . George and Jessie’s acquisition stories are important for what Figure 13. Painted by artist Sydney Richmond Burleigh, this portrait of Jessie Barker Gardner hangs in Gardner House. Photograph courtesy of Gardner House, Brown University. <฀ 93 C hapter 3 they tell us about how they negotiated aesthetic standards, functioned as consumers, and understood their relationship with the market. But as Leah Dilworth has argued, acquiring individual objects is only a small part of the process of collecting; the objects are also “amassed, selected, grouped, and displayed.”1 These “acts of possession” are important to the collector because they represent an opportunity to attach his or her own interpretation to the artifacts through ordered arrangements and display. But while objects themselves may possess solidity and relative permanence, a collection’s integrity and arrangement can be quite fragile . Objects can easily be sold, resituated, or divorced from the context of other collected objects or period-room settings. Only the owner’s continued custody or control assures the collection’s permanence. In this sense, deposition represents the final act of possession. It is the only way collectors can continue to influence, albeit in a much weaker form, the use and interpretation of their collections after their own custody ends. George and Jessie understood that to maintain control over their collection and ensure its survival, they would have to move beyond collecting and become donors. For George and Jessie, the fragility of their collection was brought home to them when a couple they knew died. They watched as their friends’ antiques were “pawed over and auctioned off,” and they found this process appalling.2 How could a lifetime of work locating, selecting , and acquiring historic objects be undone so quickly and so crassly? Seized with idea that the collection they worked so hard to create would be ripped apart, they began to think about how to prevent their antiques from being “scattered,” cast “to the four winds.”3 The couple had no children and George’s health would soon begin to fail. Building a museum was one of the few ways George and Jessie could secure the continuity of their collection. In the context of collecting practices , building a museum is an extreme act. It is one thing to donate objects to the care of an organization with the expectation of their preservation; it is quite another to establish one’s own institution. Both actions are built on the owner’s assumption, accurate or not, that their possessions are not just of personal but also public value. But a donation requires the donor to give up authority over the collection and place it in another’s hands. By choosing to build their own museum, the Gardners were hoping to exert continued control. 94฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner According to Jessie, she and George considered establishing a museum at several universities and colleges. They liked Middlebury College, and they had long considered moving to a rural area such as Vermont. But only one place seems to have been seriously considered: Brown University in Providence. With Jessie’s Providence ancestry and George’s close relationship with the school, Brown seemed like a natural choice.4 In addition, many of their antiques had Rhode Island roots, and it seemed only fitting that they should stay in the state.5 By donating their antiques to Brown, George and Jessie would protect them from the auction block while aligning the collection with a prominent institution and establishing its value. I do not claim that George and Jessie’s story is a universal one. The couple was part of a category of middle-class collectors, but even though their experiences and frustrations were shared by many of those trying to assemble a first-rate collection in the age of rising prices and increasingly stringent standards of aesthetics and authenticity, their story is individual. My research on George and Jessie’s collecting career is based on several detailed journals that Jessie titled “The Story of Gardner House.” Written primarily by Jessie, with occasional contributions from George, the journals included favorite antiquing stories, correspondence, object lists, personal recollections, and summaries of their experiences establishing a historic house museum.6 The material is related strictly from George and Jessie’s point of view and contains notes inserted by Jessie years later in an attempt to amend her earlier opinions in light of subsequent events. The journals were a way for Jessie, who was clearly thinking about her legacy, to record her version of the museum’s story and define its history. They also provide a window into the rarely documented world of middle-class, nonprofessional collecting. On the Hunt As we have seen, in the 1920s, when George and Jessie were actively collecting , the antique market had already taken its modern form, with specialized publications, networks of dealers, canons of taste, and concerns about fakes and forgeries. Even though they were small-time collectors, the couple experienced this new world fully and did their best to meet the new aesthetic standards. Jessie, the descendant of an old Rhode Island <฀ 95 C hapter 3 family, had plenty of reasons to favor antiques with historic associations. Building her collection locally, she had acquired many pieces of Rhode Island origin, some bought from the families that originally owned them, others inherited. But Jessie had absorbed the new collecting advice against “misplaced sentiment.”7 She cultivated her aesthetic skill and rarely celebrated her antiques as expressions of family or local history. Typical was her interpretation of a set of Lowestoft china that had belonged to her grandmother and several fine lacquered boxes brought from China by her grandfather.8 She considered the Lowestoft one of her most prized possessions and referred to it repeatedly. But what made the china so valuable in her eyes was not the fact that her grandmother had owned it; she valued it because a dealer working for the Metropolitan Museum of Art once offered her $1,500 for the set.9 Similarly, she did not acknowledge the value of her grandfather’s boxes until an antique dealer labeled one “Maidou Longwood with burl amboyna panels,” and declared it an artifact of the China trade.10 In this case, Gardner allowed the market to create significance. An antique dealer’s ability to identify and describe, a solid offer of cash, a connection to the established Metropolitan Museum of Art—these are the mechanisms she used to understand value. Gardner put her faith in the importance of aesthetic classifications. She took great pride in being able to recognize period styles and showed contempt for those who could not. In her journals, she told the story of a woman who came to visit her collection. According to Jessie, she had a “slightly proprietary manner, evidently wishing to give the impression that while she did not possess such objects herself, she had what is better ,—a knowledge and appreciation of them.”11 The woman gushed when she saw Gardner’s English chairs, but her enthusiasm waned when she learned that the tall secretary was a Rhode Island piece. Since American collectors valued American-made pieces over their European cousins, to Gardner the woman’s reaction was a significant faux pas. “Should I enlighten and perhaps embarrass her?” Gardner remembered thinking. “I really just couldn’t resist.” The appreciation of antiques, Gardner decided, did not necessarily follow the expected class lines. She thrilled when a grocery deliveryman correctly identified her Sheraton dining room and when an electrician was able to distinguish English from early American design. The fact that Gardner recorded such small incidents in her journal shows the extent to which she had internalized the new aesthetic standards. She 96฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner believed the ability to identify period classifications was an important category of knowledge, one that corresponded with education and status, but also one that could be learned as a form of self-improvement. While Gardner practiced her skills as a connoisseur, she also relied heavily on dealers for both goods and information. In Rhode Island, she used the services of an antique dealer, D. R. Sexton. Like Israel Sack and theMargolisbrothers,Sextonhadabackgroundincabinetry.Occasionally she bought specific antiques from him; he also repaired and refinished her finds.12 More often, however, Sexton examined her purchases to make sure they were genuine. Like most serious collectors, Gardner saw fakes and forgeries. In the late 1930s, for example, she uncovered a modern nail hidden in the joint of a William and Mary dressing table, a sure sign that something was amiss.13 In another instance, she paid over $1,000 for a pair of Chippendale chairs, one of which turned out to be a refashioned bedside commode. She had purchased the chairs from the reputable Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York, but after only owning them for only a day she learned of the falsification. “Before this unpleasant affair was settled,” she reported, “I had hired three expert antique-detectives, an Englishman, a German (not Jew) and a Swede, and had threatened to sue the Parke-Bernet Galleries.”14 Jessie’s anti-Semitism, apparent in her parenthetical comment, helped her blame fakes on Jewish dealers and made her wary of the Boston market. The fake William and Mary dressing table she pinned on a Jewish dealer in Boston.15 Gardner appears to have tolerated the existence of fakes as one of the risks of doing business. But the market was a corrupt place for her, one that only a trusted dealer with the proper pedigree could help her navigate. Gardner’s preferred dealer was a woman named Katrina Kipper, who owned a shop in Accord, Massachusetts, and who counted Henry Ford and Henry Francis du Pont among her clients. Kipper’s father came from an elite German family, and Gardner had high opinion of him. She described him as “an old school gentleman . . . possessing a mind and heart of rarest culture and beauty.”16 While his daughter’s business was evidence of the fact that the family had long since lost its fortune, the antique business provided them with a way to attach themselves to a genteel past.17 Kipper was successful in her trade. In a single day, she sold $30,000 worth of antiques to the Rockefeller Foundation for the period displays being built at Colonial Williamsburg.18 It was an impressive feat. Kipper’s <฀ 97 C hapter 3 high-profile sales reassured Gardner of the value of her own possessions and allowed her to connect her small museum project with some of the nation’s most prominent. “Katrina is an intimate friend of the American Wing people,” she wrote, “and fortunately for us, a friend of ours.” Later, when Gardner was constructing her university museum, she repeatedly reminded officials at Brown that “if anything should happen” to her before Gardner House was complete, she wanted Kipper to “superintend the interior finishing and furnishing.” Indeed, Gardner relied on Kipper as a source of connoisseurship. Kipper helped her select individual artifacts, choose wallpapers and colors, and cultivate her knowledge of period styles. Kipper was Jessie’s most trusted adviser. Kipper was not the Gardners’ only source for antiques, however; they corresponded with dealers in Maine, Boston, New York, and South Carolina, answered advertisements in Antiques, and even sent cables to dealers abroad. With prices high and specific styles rare, such networks were essential in locating specific pieces. George’s search for a complete set of Chippendale dining room chairs took over a year and spanned two continents. Even a small-time collector had to be committed to his search.19 Like many collectors, the Gardners derived particular pleasure from “buying at the source,” canvassing the countryside for old families willing to sell their possessions.20 These seemingly innocuous country rides placed the Gardners squarely in the role of antique consumers, masterminding deals, exploiting unequal power relationships, and separating artifacts from their family context. The couple’s collecting escapades took them into the homes of many old New England families who had fallen on hard times. If the two feared the same for themselves, they never mentioned it. Gardner portrayed her rural purchases as a kind of rescue mission, saving remnants of their past from families who could no longer appreciate them. In her journal, she wrote about Marguerite Gooding, a Bristol, Rhode Island, woman who epitomized the old New England family’s decaying condition. Jessie and George met Gooding when they answered a newspaper advertisement announcing the sale of many fine antiques. When they arrived at the seller’s home, they found it in disarray: the porch post gave way when George took hold of it, the roof was patched with pieces of tin, and the front porch was ready to fall off the building. “How could there be valuable antiques . . . in such 98฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner a hovel?” Jessie recalled wondering.21 Her first assessment of the house’s resident was not much more favorable. She described Miss Gooding as an “unkempt” woman, wearing a man’s shoes and of such “girth that she would scrape the jambs in passing through any ordinary doorway.” “Repellent,” was her verdict. But over time Gardner came to pity this young woman who was herself ill and caring for her infirm mother. Gooding, she learned, was from an old New England family that had arrived from England during the seventeenth century aboard a private ship. She possessed good breeding and a certain graciousness, offering Jessie presents of flowers, fresh eggs, and craftwork. She also showed respect for her antiques, polishing their hinges and carefully wrapping them for travel. What had caused the family’s troubles? Gardner did not speculate, concluding that only Edgar Allan Poe could “unravel the mystery of the fall of the House of Gooding.” Her focus was on the antiques—a Sheffield mug, a cabriole-leg dressing table, and the family’s seventeenth-century bible box among them. They were the only residents she would try to rescue. Collecting at the source was also a way for the Gardners to demonstrate their knowledge of antiques, self-reliance, and consumer skills. Armed with knowledge gleaned from collecting manuals, antique magazines, and regular columns in newspapers such as the New York Sun, door-todoor collectors made a careful study of antique forms and styles in an attempt to match the skill of pickers. Their goal was simple: subvert the market and capture antiques at bargain prices. Like many collectors on the hunt, Jessie and George were careful to distinguish themselves from what they perceived as corrupt dealers. “After I have knocked at a door I shall wait in fear and trepidation for someone to come, but I shall represent myself at once as a collector rather than a dealer,” George recounted in one of several stories he and Jessie wrote to commemorate their rural finds.22 This desire to distance himself demonstrates the uneasy relationship collectors had with the market. While owners might be pure in their love for objects, market transactions debased both the aesthetic and the associative value of artifacts, exposing the crude economic nature of the transaction. When money was changing hands, the antique was neither an aesthetic object nor a family heirloom; it was simply a commodity. The predatory nature of antique buying was hard to deny. In the same story, George described the liberating rush he felt when approaching a <฀ 99 C hapter 3 potential seller’s home. “No longer am I a doctor hampered by ancient and modern codes of professional ethics,” he recalled; “I am a rapper, I go to the door and rap. I know what I want. I want to get in and have a look for antiques.”23 In their stories, the Gardners often denied any adversarial relationship between themselves and the sellers. In a typical anecdote, George emphasized his own generosity (and revealed his antiSemitism ) by noting that he doubled the offer of a Jewish dealer.24 But even if the Gardners believed that they did pay well, their stories showed that manipulating the market was part of the appeal of rural antiquing. One of George’s most prized possessions was a shelf clock made by the early nineteenth-century Boston clockmaker Aaron Willard (figure 14). George first spotted the clock in a New Hampshire home being run as a boarding house. Displayed on a corner shelf in front of the great dining room, the clock was obviously a family heirloom. George offered the owner $150 for it, the price derived from the fact that another gentleman had offered $135 before. But the man refused to sell, saying that the clock had belonged to his great-grandmother. Time passed and George visited the boarding house again. When he arrived, the family was in the midst of building a new house and had evidently decided that selling the old clock could provide needed funds. They made the sale on one condition: George would also have to take an old mirror that hung nearby. The family had always displayed the two together. They set the price for both at $250. In George’s telling of the story, he emphasized the owner’s limited knowledge, noting that he insisted that the gears were made of wood, while George knew that Aaron Willard only worked in brass. He also mentioned that he purchased the clock without knowing whether it was in running condition, as if to call attention to the risk he took as a buyer. But just as George’s story portrayed him as the clock’s rightful owner by establishing his superior knowledge, it also celebrated his command of the market and his ability as a dealmaker. George knew the clock’s value far exceeded the innkeeper’s modest expectations. He had seen another Aaron Willard clock sell at auction for $2,006. Indeed, price was an important component of George’s antiquing tale: he recorded that one dealer offered him $1,500 for the clock after another potential buyer promised $1,250.25 As museum makers, Jessie and George would forgo profits from such savvy purchases, but stories like that of the Aaron Willard clock belie the Gardners’ claims that their interest in antiques 100฀ = Figure 14. George Gardner purchased this shelf clock, made by Aaron Willard of Boston, along with an antique mirror, from a New Hampshire family for the bargain price of $250. Photograph courtesy of Gardner House, Brown University. C hapter 3 derived only from the love of beauty. Antiquing provided collectors such as the Gardners with the thrill of being skilled consumers. There was the excitement of the hunt, the satisfaction of the find, and the pride of crafting a deal. For George and Jessie, these were experiences to celebrate and commemorate in their journals. An Ideal House George and Jessie displayed their antiques at their home on 44 Orchard Avenue, which Jessie dubbed the prettiest in the neighborhood. Exhibited in the context of the house, the antiques became functional objects that were a part of the Gardners’ daily lives, as well as a reminder of their collecting adventures. Clarence Cook, a student of landscape architects A. J. Downing and Calvert Vaux, had popularized this idea of decorating with antiques as early as 1875, in his articles on interior decor for Scribner’s Monthly. Later collected together as The House Beautiful, Cook’s articles touted antiques as part of an Arts and Crafts aesthetic that advocated greater simplicity and lighter lines for the home.26 But while the notion of decorating with antiques was well established by the time the Gardners set up housekeeping in the first years of the twentieth century, there were still plenty of detractors. In a 1921 article for American Cookery suggestively titled “Heirlooms and Degeneracy,” a Mrs. Charles Norman told the story of her own encounter with antiques after having inherited a “few heirlooms” from an “aged relative.”27 At first the gift was met with joy, since Norman had just married and was in need of furnishings for her new apartment. But then the heirlooms arrived: “There were andirons , tongs, and candlesticks. There were several boxes of books and a chest of papers and another of clothing. There was parlor furniture, solid mahogany, very large and uncomfortable and in perfect condition.” Norman’s final comment reveals her true feelings about these objects. At best she found them impractical; at worse, a burden. Describing herself as possessing a “broad streak of sentiment,” Norman recognized and valued the family history these objects represented. She also acknowledged their aesthetic merit, depicting the silver serving pieces as “extremely beautiful.” But sentiment and beauty would not change one fundamental fact: the heirlooms were “mere things.” 102฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner Opinions like Norman’s represented a real challenge to the antiqueloving public. If antiques were ordinary material goods, then the art of collecting was only another form of consumerism. Dependent on the ever-suspect antique dealer and a ready participant in market maneuvers , collectors like George and Jessie were already in danger of being labeled consumers. By displaying their antiques at home, where they would be used alongside mass-market goods, they subjected their prized possessions to the risk of being conflated with ordinary retail purchases. The prospect of placing their antiques in a museum promised to alleviate this problem. By removing the antiques from daily use and honoring them with the promise of perpetual care, the museum would secure their public value. According to their journals, the Gardners first thought about making the museum in the late 1910s, but it was not until about 1929 that they took action. Between the time that Jessie and George first considered museum making and the time when they actually started the project, the couple was beset by financial woes. The upper-middle-class Gardners had a lot to lose. George’s income as a doctor provided them with financial security and the comfort of an extensive investment portfolio—until the stock market crash of 1929. In many ways, it is not surprising that the Gardners began to concentrate on their antiques just as their financial status began to erode. The couple had originally hoped to leave several public bequests, including funds to create a small urban park. But when their deteriorating financial situation made such generosity impossible, they turned exclusively to the preservation of their antiques. Throughout the Great Depression, antique dealers tried to drum up business by arguing that antiques would always maintain their value and could weather any economic storm. They knew from their own pocketbooks that such a promise was hardly true. But even if sales figures belied dealers’ claims, antiques still suggested permanency and endurance by their very nature. These historic objects had survived, and their continued existence was a testament to continuity in the face of change. For collectors such as George and Jessie, this permanency was part of the appeal of antiques. Jessie described the museum that she wanted to make as “an ideal home.” It was a phrase that acknowledged the origins of the museum in the couple’s home display and also evoked the historic house muse- <฀ 103 C hapter 3 ums established throughout New England by groups such as the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and the Daughters of the American Revolution. George and Jessie believed their new museum would transcend financial struggles, ties to consumerism, and mundane problems. It would be a home in which culture and refinement ruled. But creating an “ideal home” raised its own set of challenges, challenges that would bring George and Jessie back to the world of commerce, loss, and uncertainty. First, however, the Gardners had to find a sponsor for their museum project. With their limited finances, they could not fully endow a museum and provide for its perpetual care, so the couple approached friends at Brown University with a plan to donate their antique collection if the university would provide a building to house it. In May 1932 Jessie and George presented their formal written offer. “Three years ago we began to plan for the ultimate disposal of our possessions. Our idea was then, as it is now, to give our collection of antiques, bric-a-brac, paintings, books, etc., as an entity, a collection to be kept together, to some institution , preferably a college, that will appreciate, care for, renew and use them,” they wrote.28 As part of their arrangement with the university, the Gardners specified that they would donate their antique collection, valued at between $65,000 and $75,000, and establish an endowment for its upkeep. They would also deed their home on Orchard Avenue to the university so that the income generated from its eventual sale or rental could be used to support the museum. In exchange, Brown would purchase an old house adjacent to campus in which to house the collection. The Gardners would restore the house to reflect the date of its original construction and be allowed life tenancy. After their deaths, the house would become the sole property of Brown University and be used as a “guest house–museum.”29 Brown was slow to accept the Gardners’ offer; it took a full three years for an agreement to be reached. University officials were apparently disinclined to acquire another campus building, and they first suggested that some of the couple’s best pieces be displayed in the student center, Faunce Hall, originally constructed in 1904 and expanded with funds donated by Brown alumnus John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1930. But Jessie was adamant that her collections be shielded from rough use. No records exist that fully explain why university officials ultimately agreed to purchase 104฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner a building to house the Gardners’ collections, but Jessie was not wrong in her assumption that American antiques had value in liberal arts curriculum of the 1930s. In the 1910s and 1920s scholars such as Van Wyck Brooks, Vernon Louis Parrington, and Lewis Mumford were beginning to publish studies exploring the “American mind,” the intellectual and cultural qualities that set Americans apart from their Old World brethren. These pioneers in the emerging field of American Studies saw little university support for their endeavors, but by the mid-1920s Yale University had established an interdisciplinary department of History, the Arts, and Letters, which offered courses in “American Thought and Civilization.” Harvard followed in 1936 with an interdisciplinary graduate program in the History of American Civilization Studies, and the same year George Washington University opened its program in American Studies.30 Formal, university-based studies in American culture tended to focus on great American writers, as opposed to material culture collections, as a window into the nation’s psyche. By the 1930s, however, early American antiques had become so widely accepted as legitimate national art that several universities had established teaching collections. Most notable was Yale’s acquisition of over five thousand items—prints, furniture, china, glass, silver, pewter, iron, and other metal works—from collector and Yale alumnus Francis P. Garvan.31 One of the premier collections of the 1920s, heralded for its aesthetically accomplished examples of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century decorative arts, Garvan’s acquisitions bore little resemblance to the Gardners’ proposed gift. Nevertheless, in a letter to Brown officials, Jessie and George cited Garvan’s university donation as a precedent for their own.32 Brown would not establish its own program in American Civilization until 1945, but in 1932 the university received a Carnegie Corporation grant to foster public art education. Although the Gardners’ donation does not seem to have played any direct role in the grant program,33 the grant suggests an interest on university officials’ part in the artistic traditions of early New England, an interest that might have made them sympathetic to the acquisition of American antiques. But it was most likely the Gardners’ personal contacts that sealed the deal. In 1932, the year Brown finally accepted the Gardners’ offer, A. D. Mead was the university’s acting president.34 Mead, a biologist, was not known as an antique aficionado, but he and George Gardner had been friends since <฀ 105 C hapter 3 their college days. It was during Mead’s short tenure as acting president that the university agreed to accept the Gardners’ donation and procure a structure to house it. The couple deeded their Orchard Avenue house to the university to support their donation, but they did not consider it a suitable location for the new museum. The house was in the colonial style, but it was not old, having been built as part of an early twentieth-century development, and it was a mile or two away from campus. It was constructed of wood and thus a fire danger to the Gardners’ precious collection. A new location was, therefore, in order. Jessie’s first choice was that the university build a fireproof reproduction dwelling to house the museum. (She was most likely looking to the example of Pendleton House, just down the road at the Rhode Island School of Design. Charles L. Pendleton had given his antiques to the school on the condition that the it build a fireproof structure to house it. The resulting structure, like Pendleton’s own Providence home, was of Georgian design.) But Brown instead purchased a dilapidated building at 106 George Street, near the campus center. Built by mason Joseph Haile in 1806, the three-story brick Federal-style house was elegantly designed, but it was in terrible shape. The roof leaked, the chimney was crumbling, and cracks marred the exterior brick walls. Inside, dirt, dust, and rubbish ruled. University officials cautioned the Gardners not to visit the house until they had hired contractors and had it cleaned out. But the couple could not wait and arrived to find a soot-covered kitchen, an upstairs bathtub filled with trash, and windows obscured by dirt and cobwebs.35 Jessie Gardner’s approach to acquiring this old family house was very much like the one she used when acquiring antiques directly from owners. She erased its family history. What was locally known as the Peck House, for the family who had inhabited it for generations, quickly became Gardner House. By Gardner’s account, the Pecks were an old New England family who had somehow become debased. The dirty house was all the evidence Gardner needed to justify her acquisition of the building and its history, but she saw Mrs. Peck as particularly contaminated. In a story she titled “When Ignorance is Bliss,” Gardner painted an unflattering portrait of the old woman, describing her as the “lone remnant of a once fine family,” who had “grown to enormous proportions and become infirm and bearded on upper lip and chin with long 106฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner dark curls.”36 Denying Mrs. Peck femininity functioned as a way to erode her claim on the old house. Gender ideology dictated that, as a woman, Mrs. Peck should be able to make a house into a home. By portraying her with masculine characteristics, Gardner denied those abilities, ascribing the house’s ramshackle condition not to poverty or the infirmities of age, but to Mrs. Peck’s essential character. Appropriating the house’s history was the easy part; now the hard work of restoration began. Much of the work was structural. The roof had to be replaced, as did sections of the walls, the front porch, the plastering, two chimneys, the wiring, the heating system, and the plumbing. Over time the house had settled seven inches and required jacking, as well as new steel posts and girders to support it. “Almost nothing exists of the original house, not even the four exterior walls,” Gardner wrote in 1933.37 “It is only a shell of a house with a sieve of a roof and unstable foundation . Each day’s destructive work, tearing out plaster and laths, shows the condition to be more and more serious, so that a large amount of money will have to be spent merely to keep the building from falling into its cellar,” she told another correspondent.38 Needless to say, the project was expensive. According to Jessie, Brown officials originally estimated $5,000 to $6,000 to “put the house in good condition.” Gardner herself believed the project would be accomplished for $15,000.39 But when all was said and done, the total was closer to $30,000.40 “106 George Street has been a horror of anxiety to George and me,” Jessie wrote, “like a beast with a great maw that devoured our fund.”41 With their stock-market losses, $30,000 had become a lot of money for the Gardners. In order to secure it, Jessie turned first to the estate of her brother, Henry Ames Barker, who had died in 1929. An advocate of public parks and a theater enthusiast, Barker had set up a trust to encourage the promotion of drama, the presentation of plays, and the establishment of parks in Providence. At the time of his death the fund was worth over $100,000, but with the stock market collapse the value of the remaining securities had eroded to about $20,000. This money Gardner targeted for her museum. Convincing the trustees of Barker’s estate that the limited funds could best support a more focused project, and that a public museum spoke to her brother’s love of beauty and culture, she persuaded them to donate the stocks to Brown University as funds earmarked for the restoration of 106 George Street.42 Her brother’s money made her <฀ 107 C hapter 3 project possible, but Gardner knew from the beginning that her budget would be tight. Rather than hire an architect to supervise the project, she contracted with the Providence firm of Howe and Church to prepare plans at a fixed price. The arrangement meant that she had to pay for additional consultations and that she would do a considerable amount of design work on her own.43 Even with such cost-saving measures, the Barker fund was insufficient, and by August of 1933 Gardner started to consider the possibility of renting out the building’s top floor and also pleaded with the university to extend her a loan.44 The ideal home that Gardner wanted to construct, the house that would elevate her antiques from mere commodities to priceless cultural artifacts, a place that would be removed from the corrupt world of business, was pulling her and her husband back into market transactions and politics. A staunch Republican in the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gardner saw local government fall to a Democratic mayor, the advent of New Deal programs that threatened her Puritan self-help ideology, and the decline of Rhode Island’s booming industrial economy. Such economic and political developments may seem far removed from the construction of a small guesthouse and museum, but Gardner saw them as a threat to her legacy. New Deal economic reforms were a case in point. Under the university’s auspices, Gardner gladly employed city relief workers whose salaries were capped at $15 a week. She knew that these low wages meant major savings for the project, and she regularly used relief workers for routine tasks such as cleaning out rooms and taking down plaster. But at the same time, she constantly feared that government reforms would raise salaries and further erode her funds. Even her plan to build brownstone steps leading to her front door became a political drama in her eyes when the Republican city officials who had promised to ignore the fact that the design for the steps violated city ordinance were voted out of office.45 Then there was the business with her contractor, a local man named Preston Leeming. When Gardner hired Leeming in 1932, she described him as a “young man of taste and ability.”46 By August of 1933, she was accusing him of having “played horse” with her and inflating prices.47 She began to watch Leeming’s every move, and she demanded that he justify his prices. Typical was her complaint about his bill for rebuilding a section of wall in the cellar. According to Jessie, Leeming’s charge of $37 was grossly inflated. Only two “boys,” she claimed, had worked 108฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner on the project and they were paid only 40¢ an hour.48 Small incidents like this played out again and again. In August of 1933, her complaints about overcharging led Leeming to reduce his prices. Gardner saved $25 on brickwork around the front door, $21 on the copper roof, $50 on basement trim, and $28 on sidewalk repairs.49 Such adjustments did not mollify Jessie but only convinced her that Leeming had been defrauding her all along. With encouragement from Dr. Hermon Carey Bumpus, secretary of the Brown University Corporation, she stopped all work on the house in September and opened the project to additional bidders. Having rid herself of her exclusive contractor, Gardner declared she was “at last a free woman.”50 Certainly she used the new arrangement to her benefit. She hired a second contractor, a Mr. Barker, to provide competition, and she made it clear that Leeming had to toe the line if he wanted to stay. Gardner was thrilled with the results. She believed that Barker knew more about historic buildings, and he gave her advice on moldings. Faced with competition, Leeming seemed to lower his prices by up to half his regular fees. Gardner also felt Leeming to be more sympathetic to her needs, citing the fact that he fixed a set of previously installed garage doors and itemized his bills more clearly.51 Still, financing problems always seemed to haunt the project, and Gardner constantly had to use her skills, not as an antique connoisseur, but as an accountant. In separate incidents she believed that she caught Leeming charging her for material she already owned, Brown University accountants failing to report dividends earned from stock in the Barker fund, and her architect billing her at a higher rate than they had agreed on.52 Such incidents were, in Jessie’s mind, acts of corruption, sullying her project. But managing stocks and juggling inflation rates was not any easier. At every turn, she seemed to lose to the fluctuations of a depressed economy. Lumber prices rose before she could purchase flooring.53 Stocks were sold at their lowest value, and work lagged even as the salaries of her employees rose.54 Eventually, Gardner had to place herself in debt in order to keep the project rolling. After Brown officials denied her request for a loan on the grounds they could not provide her with additional resources when they had just cut their own faculty’s salaries, Gardner applied to the bank and subjected herself to unstable interest rates.55 Everything had come down to cash. Gardner’s inventory is evidence of how much money matters concerned <฀ 109 Figure 15. George Gardner’s portrait is displayed in Gardner House above the Dutch tiles he was admiring when he suffered his first stroke. Photograph courtesy of Gardner House, Brown University. Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner her during this period. Carefully preserved in the records of her house are pages and pages of itemized expenses, letters written to contractors, and detailed synopses of dealings with construction workers and university officials. It is clear that while she might have exasperatedly exclaimed, “Oh, I can’t keep track of all of this,” she did an admirable job.56 It was hard work, certainly nothing like the connoisseurship she thought she would be doing. All was made harder when, in June of 1933, less than a year after the Gardners had started construction on the house, George suffered a stroke that left him weak, agitated, and upset. Objectively, George’s illness had nothing to do with antiques, but for Jessie, her husband ’s decline was intimately attached to their shared struggle to create a legacy. In recounting the story of George’s first “attack” in her journal, Jessie emphasized that it occurred while he was admiring a set of Dutch tiles they had acquired from a contractor who had removed them from a local house whose owners preferred modern brick (figure 15). The passage starts out as a classic antique rescue story, George “shrewdly” discovering the tiles “tucked face to the wall” and purchasing them for a mere $15 from the contractor, who did not appreciate their value. The Gardners had triumphed over the market, but their delight was shortlived . In the course of studying his new acquisitions, George suddenly fell from his chair. In the days that followed his right leg grew weak, and Jessie saw him walking in circles on the lawn, “an anguished look on his face.”57 Soon after, Jessie decided that the stress of their museum project was too much for George and placed him in a rural Maine camp where he could enjoy the beauty of nature. From that point, he had little contact with the Gardners’ museum project, but Jessie continued to blame his ill health on their struggles with the university’s bureaucracy.58 With the exception of occasional visits to Providence, George remained in Maine until his death in 1936.59 It was a difficult time for Jessie be alone, especially since George had always taken such an active role in their collecting endeavors. But his absence only made her more determined. She was building not just a museum, but a memorial as well. Jessie was with George in Maine during his final days. They were far from their Providence museum, but Jessie reinforced his connection to the project by emphasizing in her journals that their last conversation was about the antiques.60 According to Jessie, George took her on an imaginary tour of every room, making suggestions for furniture arrange- <฀ 111 C hapter 3 ments and new purchases. There was the Queen Anne desk he wanted moved, the maple or cherry chest he wanted purchased, and the sitting room that he wanted completely redecorated. “I wish I knew those rooms were going to be furnished as we planned,” George told Jessie a few hours before he died.61 It was clear that he was thinking of the house on George Street as a legacy. Jessie saw it that way, too. She treated George’s final instructions as a source of divine insight. “His suggestions are remarkably fine,” she wrote a few hours before his death. “He comes to the subject as fresh and free (unhampered by association and misplaced sentiment) as though he dropped from the moon. His aim is perfection, his judgment unerring.”62 Jessie transcribed the conversation with her dying husband and placed it prominently in her journal. Two years later, when she compiled a report evaluating her progress, George’s dicta were still much in evidence. Typical was her description of a small room over their kitchen: “George wished to improve the appearance of this room by furnishing it with nice old pieces. I have brought in the maple flat-top highboy as he wished, but have not got rid of the brass beds and other modern pieces. I hope to do so.”63 Nothing seemed to anger Jessie more than the suggestion that George might not have been of clear mind when he dictated his final wishes. She was “boiling mad” at a local doctor’s wife who told her George’s advice couldn’t be trusted since he had a “sick mind.”64 Antiques had literally become an issue of life and death. All through George’s illness Jessie pushed the museum project forward . Living alone in Providence, with the couple’s household assistant, Marian, stationed in Maine to look after George, Jessie oversaw the restoration , made crucial building decisions, managed the accounts, steered her way through the university’s bureaucracy, hired and fired workers, and negotiated with assertive contractors. It was not, by her own admission , a good period for Jessie. “Take a stimulant,” she advised friends in a letter after subjecting them to a detailed list of her troubles.65 Gardner used her journals to record the difficulties she faced, as if she wanted future readers to recognize the obstacles that limited her ability to create the beauty she desired. But from the pages of her journals emerges the story of another struggle, her struggle to maintain standards of architectural authenticity. Authenticity was a relatively new concept in historic preservation. Through the beginning of the twentieth century, women controlled the field of historic preservation as an extension of 112฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner their role as “moral and aesthetic guardians of the domestic environment .”66 These women emphasized the domestic nature of the buildings they restored, often cultivating “period” gardens or serving tea against the backdrop of the colonial fireplace, the symbol of early American home life. They came to the work of preservation from a sense of decor and love for the past, but not from a trained understanding of period styles. They were concerned with presenting an alternative to the present , and picturesque structures could fulfill that function just as well as historically correct ones. But the nature of preservation was beginning to change, and while Jessie lacked the formal training to understand building construction or identify historically correct features, she could not ignore the fact that such skills were now becoming essential. Not far from the Gardner’s new museum lived the preservationist Norman Isham. Born in 1864, he was a pioneer in both the professionalization of preservation—he was one of the first licensed architects to join the movement—and the promotion of historic buildings as aesthetic objects. Isham helped move preservation from a female-dominated model, centered on buildings with patriotic associations, to one concerned with architectural design and structural analysis.67 Working frequently with William Sumner Appleton, whose Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities was dedicated to saving historic buildings, Isham became a preservation architect, restoring such buildings as Rhode Island’s Eleazer Arnold House and the Clemence-Irons House, and also contributing to the period-room displays at the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing. As Gardner acknowledged, Isham was a recognized authority with the skills and knowledge to pursue historical accuracy.68 In October 1932 Gardner wrote Isham one of several letters soliciting his advice. “I wish George or I could speak with you for about five minutes to get the answers to certain questions.” Not one to hold back, Gardner continued with her inquiries: “What kind of floors would you have in the front hall, dining room and bedrooms? . . . Are wall lighting fixtures correct?”69 No reply exists in Jessie’s records, and Isham appears to have provided little assistance. Two years later, Gardner described him as “a crab.” “Great pity,” she wrote, “if he doesn’t give out more generously , much of his profound knowledge of early architecture and furniture will be lost at his death.”70 Despite Isham’s brush-off, Gardner continued her search for professional advice that would help her meet the <฀ 113 C hapter 3 demand for accuracy. She wrote to George Francis Dow, then curator of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and to R. T. H. Halsey, at the time a professor in the Department of American Culture at St. John’s College in Annapolis but most well known for his work on the American Wing. Halsey wrote her an encouraging letter (which she quoted frequently), but both men ultimately referred her back to Isham as the recognized authority on Rhode Island architecture.71 At times Gardner even tried to press the head of Brown’s Art Department, Will Samuel Taylor, into service, apparently believing that his artistic sensibilities would translate into an innate understanding of early American design. Jessie was annoyed when he declined to offer free assistance, but it is hard to imagine what she expected a painter best known for his murals of the evolution of man in the American Museum of Natural History to contribute.72 For the most part, Gardner was left to her own devices. Describing her work in a letter to a friend, Gardner wrote, “Someone had to dig and delve for information as quickly as possible, and the only person to do it seemed to be myself.”73 Dig and delve she did. She consulted books on architecture (most importantly J. Frederick Kelly’s Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut, and Norman M. Isham and Albert F. Brown’s Early Rhode Island Houses), clipped pictures of appropriate models (Yale University’s Elihu Club being one of her favorites, but old copies of the magazine House Beautiful offered other possibilities), and studied the period rooms in museum displays (the Boston Museum of Fine Arts provided her with examples of “early curtain rods,” at least until a “certain disagreeable guard” interrupted her inspection—which was perhaps just as well, since curtains would not have been found in a New England home of that period).74 When these sources did not provide enough information, Gardner consulted extant buildings. In order to ascertain correct proportions for her front steps, she and George set out on an expedition through the streets of Providence, measuring the width, depth, and height of various steps, as well as the overhang of the stair platform, all to make sure that it would produce the correct “sun shadow.”75 The Federal-period houses of Salem, Massachusetts, proved particularly helpful. By the 1930s, Salem’s Chestnut Street was widely celebrated as one of the most beautiful streets in America. Home to early nineteenth-century mansions attributed to the architect and 114฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner carver Samuel McIntire, it was widely featured in architectural books and picture postcards. Gardner studied Chestnut Street’s architecture in Frank Cousins and Phil M. Riley’s 1919 book, Colonial Architecture of Salem, a work she dubbed “a staff to lean upon when wearied by doubts,” and was excited by what she termed the “striking resemblance” between 106 George Street and McIntire’s famous creations.76 Before George’s first stroke, the pair traveled to Salem to make a study of the houses. Armed with a yardstick and permission from the Essex Institute, owner of several historic house museums, they measured doorways and took notes. Salem houses soon became models for the restoration of 106 George Street. Replicas of the famous fanlight at the Peabody-Sillsby House, the sidelights of 10 Chestnut Street (figure 16), and a mantel from the West Parlor of the Peirce Nichols House were all added to Gardner House.77 As an amateur architect and interior designer, Gardner used historic designs to her advantage. Adopting a famous doorway or fanlight treatment in her own house helped buttress Jessie’s confidence in the choices she made. Even though she lacked expert advisers, she could rest assured that she had the weight of history behind her. At the same time, choosing from the catalog of history provided her with a way to escape the massmarket sameness of contemporary design. When Gardner replicated the sidelights of 10 Chestnut Street, with their circles and diamonds, she did so precisely because they would be “fresh in Providence.”78 Similarly, nothing bothered her more than when her architect’s proposed design resembled what could be found in a “popular magazine.”79 But while Gardner used history to escape contemporary consumer markets, her architectural research came to resemble an extended shopping trip. She treated historical models as a design catalog, an architectural sourcebook from which she could choose individual features, independent of their relationship to the integrity of a given building, and apply them to her own domestic setting. Indeed, Gardner assessed the diverse offerings of architectural design just as one would traditional consumer goods. She rejected her architect’s design for the basement door as “absurd” and “pretentious.”80 His plan for the front entrance received similarly poor reviews. “The architect had gone ahead and made a full scale working drawing of an entrance too elaborate for our house according to my taste, and in a design that I detested,” Gardner reported in her journal.81 She never seemed to doubt her discrimination or question her methods of <฀ 115 Figure 16. The front door of Gardner House shows the fanlight and sidelights Jessie Gardner adapted from historic houses in Salem, Massachusetts. Photograph courtesy of Gardner House, Brown University. Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner selection. In her mind, being the custodian of a historic house was based on taste. Aesthetics were central to her understanding of history. Still, Gardner understood that the kind of piecemeal design and slavish imitation that she employed could not hold up under rigorous standards of accuracy. She knew that some of her choices for the house were simply wrong. Such was the case when she decided to install paneling in the dining room. She had planned on paneling that room from the beginning and had commissioned her architect to draw up the plans. But she abandoned the idea when Isham, evidently providing the much-sought-after advice, informed her that the paneling was not in keeping with the period, since Providence houses built around 1800 would have most likely had plastered walls. Confronted with the voice of expertise, she desisted, but still longed for what she considered a “pleasing contrast” in her decor. Then a young architect working as a site supervisor found the plan and praised it. That was enough. Gardner ordered the chimneybreast paneled, even though construction was by then too far along to install the entire plan. “It is due to my own indecision and weakness of character that in the dining room we have an arrangement that is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good salt herring,”82 she acknowledged. Nothing embodied Gardner’s desire to create authenticity gone awry than the seventeenth-century room that she installed in the basement. As she readily acknowledged, Gardner House was built about 1806 in the neoclassically influenced Federal style. These were the characteristics that made the house similar to those on Salem’s Chestnut Street. Yet Gardner decided to convert her unused basement into a seventeenth-century tavern room, to be named in honor of her brother, Henry Barker, reasoning that he always preferred gateleg tables to Chippendale and Hepplewhite.83 But building a seventeenth-century room in the basement of a nineteenthcentury house was no simple task. Gardner made cardboard models of fireplaces in an attempt to adapt the “yawning” fireplace of seventeenthcentury construction to the nineteenth century’s “cramped flues”;84 she had the room’s exterior door constructed in two separate styles (battened on the inside, paneled on the outside), so that each side would blend with its respective context; and, most dramatically, she lowered the floor to create a higher ceiling. When the contractor resisted this last plan on the grounds that it would undermine the building’s foundation, George himself ordered holes dug along the walls to demonstrate its feasibility.85 <฀ 117 C hapter 3 Even as Jessie and George were compromising the house’s physical integrity , Jessie was criticizing her architect’s accuracy of design. Her list of criticisms included “walls of paneled plaster board and picture moldings like a remodeled attic,” and a “dinky little fireplace” made to look antique by the presence of an iron oven door and crane. “Nonsensical,” Jessie pronounced.86 Clearly, adding a seventeenth-century room to an 1800s house was out of context, compromising the building’s stylistic and structural integrity. But Gardner did not see it that way. For her, “authenticity” was a matter of consistency of design, not structure or originality. How do we reconcile Gardner’s professed concern for accuracy with her readiness to improve and remove? As an antique connoisseur, she had learned to accept the importance of authenticity, particularly when it came to furniture. Like most antique collectors, she prided herself on the genuineness of her pieces. “No fakes for us,” she resolved.87 But even though Gardner and her fellow collectors rejected modified or embellished antiques as inauthentic, the rules were not as rigorous when applied to buildings. Frequently modified to suit the changing requirements of their tenants, buildings simply could not claim the kind of organic purity that many household antiques could. When applied to a building, “in the rough” could only mean in disrepair. An important influence on George and Jessie’s plan for Gardner House were the new exhibits of American decorative arts housed in existing art museums. In comparison to the traditional historic house museums dotting the New England landscape, these period-room installations were cutting-edge in terms of accuracy (even if the Boston Museum of Fine Arts example included apocryphal colonial curtain rods). Isham himself had designed the seventeenth-century rooms for the American Wing and had encouraged a rigorous attention to maintaining consistency in period style.88 But even if these rooms authentically replicated early American design, they lacked one crucial feature: they were not buildings, merely rooms housed within a modern structure. For this simple reason, art museums tended to treat buildings as piecemeal collections of decorative features. They mocked up Federalstyle fireplaces, installed seventeenth-century casement windows that looked out to the museum’s interior walls, and removed interior paneling from existing houses for reinstallation in the museum’s galleries. This final action angered many preservationists, such as William Sumner Appleton, 118฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner who saw art museum installations as a threat to New England’s architectural heritage.89 For amateur museum makers like George and Jessie, art museum period rooms had limited value as a preservation model. They encouraged consistency of period style, but for homeowners faced with the reality of an organic structure that had been modified over time, meeting such strict standards would require removing later modifications and building anew, even in the absence of archeological evidence revealing the structure’s original appearance. At the same time, art museums were constructed around chronological and geographic surveys of early American design. They collected period rooms in much the same manner as one would collect furniture—a seventeenth-century room from Massachusetts might be followed by an early eighteenth-century one representing Philadelphia design. In this light, Jessie and George’s plan to install a seventeenth-century room in their basement appears less outrageous . They were merely trying to imitate the chronologically comprehensive displays found at the nation’s leading museums. That by doing so they compromised the integrity of the building they claimed to be restoring shows the compelling nature of art museum displays and the way in which they encouraged antique aficionados to place aesthetics over the history of an individual building. The issue of George and Jessie’s restoration tactics came to a head when Jessie set out to create a commemorative plaque for the building (figure 17). Unsure of how to communicate what she had done, she wrote Lawrence Vail Coleman, director of the American Association of Museums, for advice: “The great question is: just what did we do to this house which we call Gardner House? Did we reconstruct, reproduce, remodel, rebuild? Not exactly.”90 Eventually she proposed “transfiguration,” a term she intended to mean “not so much a change in form, but as an exaltation and glorification of the outward appearance.” Coleman countered with “reconstructed in period style,” but Jessie’s comments show that she understood both the value attributed to historically correct treatments and the invasive nature of her decision to improve on the past. With the shell secured, Jessie turned her attention to the interior and its furnishing, the heart of her ideal home. From the beginning, Jessie and George had applied the idea of antiques as aesthetic objects to their emerging museum. Their furnishing plan took the form of strict period- <฀ 119 C hapter 3 room displays, modeled on the art museum’s examples of chronological and stylistic arrangement. As small as their museum house was, they pursued the comprehensiveness of a large survey museum with rooms designated “Pilgrim,” “Queen Anne,” “William and Mary,” “Sheraton and Hepplewhite,” and finally “Hitchcock Group.” “Any gaps in the succesFigure 17. Jessie Gardner created this plaque to commemorate her and George’s work restoring and furnishing Gardner House. Photograph courtesy of Gardner House, Brown University. 120฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner sion we will enthusiastically fill in,” Gardner promised university administrators .91 Ordering furniture into period arrangements in this fashion provided Jessie and George with the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of antiques and their ability to live up to established canons of taste.92 It required them to identify stylistic schools, assemble harmonious arrangements, and maintain established standards of quality—in short, to prove that they had the knowledge and taste to be considered true connoisseurs. But living up to the demands of the antique-collecting community was not easy for a pair of amateurs. The Gardners knew that their antiques did not meet the aesthetic standards of elite collectors and museum curators. “We have very few pieces of Class A-1,” Jessie admitted in a letter to university officials at the time of her museum proposal.93 Even so, the couple did not give up, convinced that they could improve the collection as their own level of taste increased. “The interesting thing about this game is that the further you progress, the more discriminating you become,” Jessie explained.94 Committed to the idea of aesthetic standards, Jessie and George embarked on a continued course of acquisition and elimination, a process Jessie continued after George’s death. There was always room for improvement . To upgrade the collection, George conducted a room-by-room critique , editing out inferior articles, encouraging new arrangements, and identifying potential purchases. Jessie transcribed his suggestions and used them as a blueprint for the developing museum, returning to them in later years to record her accomplishments in the margins.95 George’s instructions forced Jessie to do away with many possessions. It was not easy for her; even though she did not value her antiques as family heirlooms , they still had associations tied to the life that she and George had made for themselves and to their collecting adventures. But if the couple were to live up to the dictates of connoisseurship, they knew that they would have to practice selection. Jessie explained the situation to university officials using clothing as a metaphor. “George says the contents of our house reminds him of a man whose suit is perfect, of the finest material, and made by the finest tailor in the country, but whose socks are from [the five-and-dime store chain] Newberry, and his tie from Kresge.”96 Quality was clearly at issue. In 1937, Gardner was finally able to report success in editing the collection : “Many hundreds of articles of long and tender association have <฀ 121 C hapter 3 been discarded under the wise initiative and gentle guidance of George Gardner. Looked at in the new light of suitability to Gardner House, these objects, often beautiful in themselves and costly, were admittedly meaningless and commonplace; they represented ‘stock,’ the trite, the easy thing to acquire.”97 Gardner’s comments reveal the degree to which aesthetic standards influenced her idea of the museum and forced her to forgo artifacts with personal meaning. They also establish her belief in the importance of taste over money. Costly objects, she maintained, were not necessarily good objects, especially if associated with easily available , mass-market goods. Gardner’s belief in discrimination as a trait independent from wealth must have given her confidence in her ability to build a noteworthy museum collection. In truth, as we have seen, money was always a factor. In the years after George’s death, Jessie tried to carry out her husband’s final wishes by acquiring additional artifacts to replace those he found inadequate. But even though the market was still depressed, she could not afford the pieces she knew were necessary to achieve the kind of aesthetic display acceptable to antique connoisseurs , or to her own husband. “The library, supposedly Chippendale, is most in need of attention,” she wrote a friend in 1938, “but Chippendale is costly and very hard to find.”98 Without the means to purchase highquality antiques directly from dealers, Gardner relied on compromises and luck. Such was the case when she secured a Chinese Chippendale tea table at a bargain price from a house sale in Providence.99 As we have seen, antique experts always cautioned collectors about bargains, claiming that inexpensive antiques usually merited their low prices. But for a collector like Gardner, such cautions were not practicable. Building a collection required her to be a bargain hunter. The idea of connoisseurship greatly affected Jessie and George’s approach to interior decor. But there was another influence on the way they furnished their house as well: the idea of “home.” Since the midnineteenth century, the canon of domesticity had portrayed the home as a bastion of moral values, physically and spiritually removed from the corrupt worlds of business and politics, yet powerful in its own right. A proper home could promote piety, engender morality, and maintain traditional cultural values, and its influence extended far beyond its own walls. Early preservationists and historic house museum founders drew on this idea of the home as a site of cultural reproduction and connected 122฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner the saving of individual buildings with the preservation and maintenance of traditional cultural values. For some, the connection was explicit. In Salem, Massachusetts, philanthropist Caroline Emmerton purchased the Turner-Ingersoll House, known as the House of the Seven Gables for its connection to Hawthorne’s popular novel, and used proceeds from visiting tourists to finance a settlement house to serve the city’s immigrant community.100 Across the state, in Deerfield, local women used the historic Frary House as a setting for a “common parlor,” a place to discuss community concerns and promote cultural growth.101 For the Gardners, Jessie especially, the idea that their museum was to be housed in a home was an important element, not to be ignored. As part of their arrangement with the university, the Gardners planned to occupy 106 George Street during their lifetimes. Inhabiting the new museum was, in one sense, another economic strategy for the couple. Selling their house would produce additional funds for the museum’s restoration , and because the new building was owned by the university they wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it. But living in the museum was about more than money. It was a chance to make the place a bona fide home. Jessie’s desire to build her own life into the very structure of the museum speaks clearly to her need to commemorate her contributions and build a monument to herself and George, but the idea of home was about more than Jessie and George as individuals; it was wrapped up in the project of museum making itself. By the early 1930s, over four hundred historic house museums had already been established in this country. Rhode Island could claim only fourteen, but nearby Massachusetts boasted well over a hundred.102 Most of these buildings were owned by private associations , each operated according to the individual desires of the community volunteers who maintained them. In 1933, Lawrence Vail Coleman published his Historic House Museums. Recognizing the prevalence and importance of this new museum genre, Coleman set out practical advice about ownership and administration, financing, furnishing, and building restoration. For Jessie, Coleman’s book was a rare source of professional advice. She read her own copy thoroughly, transcribed selected passages into her journals, quoted them in her correspondence, even incorporated them in her will. Of all Coleman’s advice, Jessie cleaved to one dictum: “Historic houses must be made to LIVE again.” “Houses,” Coleman wrote, “appeal partly to the emotions, and this deserves to be strengthened by <฀ 123 C hapter 3 developing atmosphere. One of the commonest remarks of visitors in any well appointed house is that they enjoyed being there because the place is like a home and not like an institution.”103 After stripping 106 George Street of any remnant of the Peck family’s ownership, Jessie could not claim that the museum had a homelike atmosphere. She would have to manufacture it, using her own life as its foundation. From the beginning, Gardner had planned to donate, alongside her valuable antiques, mementos and keepsakes from her own life. These included not only antique furniture and art, but also silver, china, jewelry , and many decorative pieces that Gardner summed up as “bric-abrac ,”104 all of which would help cultivate the homelike atmosphere she sought. The arrangement was a bit unusual. Gardner’s friend and financial adviser, James Collins, assumed that Brown would not want the couple’s jewelry and silver, but Gardner reprimanded him. “Perhaps they don’t know enough to want the jewelry,” she wrote, “but after all, Gardner House is to be a Historic House Museum and that means it is supposed to be personal and to have atmosphere with the beautiful things of the past that have belonged to the people who lived in it.”105 She remained committed to including decorative objects with her gift, but doing so created certain contradictions. On one hand, small artifacts and personal mementos provided homelike touches, but on the other hand, they could also resemble the “trite” objects George had encouraged her to avoid. Clutter was the issue. Victorian decorating practices tended to emphasize ornate interiors, heavy drapes, and a profusion of mass-produced ornament. It was a style clearly out of fashion, but one still found in many workingclass homes.106 If Gardner was not careful, her personal displays could easily be read as outdated, or even worse, lower-class. Gardner thought often about this problem, quoting Coleman in her journal as saying, “It is much better to have incomplete furnishings than to show an abundance of poor material. THE FEAR OF EMPTY SPACE HAS CAUSED MANY AN ERROR.”107 In an attempt to maintain aesthetic standards, Gardner instructed her contractors to build display cases into the fabric of the house. She saw their presence as central to her project, and worried that the money would run out before they were built. The display cases, as ordinary as they might seem to a visitor touring the house, were Jessie’s attempt to reconcile the aesthetics of the art museum with the homelike atmosphere cultivated by historic house museums. In many ways, the two represented compet124 ฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner ing interpretations of the past, one defined by artistic display, the other invested in sentimentality and historic associations. But Gardner saw both as valid. The fact that Gardner saw both “home” and “beauty” as powerful cultural forces helped her see antiques as a force for civic reform. Her interest in civic reform was a bit unusual for an antique collector. Many collectors in the 1920s and 1930s saw antiques as an inspirational testament to the American spirit, but Gardner envisioned a more direct, if still undefined, connection between public museums like her own and social progress. This focus on civic improvement was most likely inspired by her brother, Henry Barker. A businessman by trade, Barker was best known as chairman of Providence’s City Plan Commission and executive officer, from 1905 to 1920, of the Metropolitan Park Commission. In his civic work, Barker collaborated on city traffic plans, worked to introduce zoning, and most significantly, helped establish a system of public parks for the city of Providence and its environs.108 Speaking to the Rhode Island chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Barker made the connection between urban beautification and social progress by comparing what he saw as Europe’s beautiful and artistically built cities with their less refined American counterparts. “There is little of the vulgarity, the rowdy obscenity of the gang on the corner, the hoodlum toughness that in some parts of all our cities is an unconscious protest against the life repressed and the soul imprisoned.”109 Barker’s comments were typical of those associated with the City Beautiful movement. An architectural and urban planning style defined by Beaux-Arts planning principles, monumental structures, and classical design, the City Beautiful movement was founded on a belief in the power of beauty to inspire civic responsibility and social betterment. Often promoted by middle-class women who sought to apply their skills as domestic housekeepers to the city at large, City Beautiful proposals could be as simple as placing trash cans on street corners or as monumental as Daniel Burnham’s 1901 plan for Washington, D.C., which was designed to place America’s capital on par with the great centers of Europe. No matter how large or how small, at the root of such initiatives was a shared belief in the power of beauty to inspire moral rectitude, eliminate social problems, and reverse the ill effects of suburbanization on the urban core.110 By the time Gardner began her museum endeavors, the movement had <฀ 125 C hapter 3 already lost its luster after failing to make good on its lofty promises. But she nevertheless believed her antiques could have an elevating influence on the community as a whole. To that end, she planned to offer her house museum as a meeting space. It would not be one of those “do not touch museums,” she pointed out proudly. Those encouraged to use it included groups interested in “Parks; Civic Improvement; Preservation of Natural Resources; Roadside Beautification; Preservation of Antiquities.”111 As in all things relating to the museum, Gardner would not leave anything to chance. She specifically omitted those “individuals who seek social prestige ” from using the house, noting in the margins a “Mrs. Lustig” who evidently fell into this category. When it came to Gardner House, Jessie rarely trusted anyone but herself to make decisions. Over the course of the years that she restored 106 George Street and installed her collections, her relationship with Brown University disintegrated. She was angry that university officials had stuck her with a decrepit house, that they had refused to give her a loan during her time of need, and that they had (in her opinion) mismanaged the stocks in her brother’s fund. To make matters worse, university faculty did not seem particularly interested in Gardner House as a teaching tool or research facility. Since the project’s conception, Gardner had assumed that the faculty of the Art Department would have a special interest in the building, but no record exists to show that it was ever used for classes or special projects. She did note in her collecting journal the rare visit of a Brown faculty member. Pleased with his apparent interest in the collection , she asked him if he would like to glance through the rooms, but he replied that he had come in search of a solution to his drafty office and only wanted to view the weather stripping on her windows.112 If Gardner’s journal is an adequate record of Gardner House’s use by university faculty , then the university’s acceptance of the donation had less to do with curriculum development and more to do with A. D. Mead’s friendship with the Gardners and his position as acting president at the time of their proposal. In any case, by the mid-1930s Mead was about to retire as the university’s vice president and Gardner no longer trusted the university to manage the museum when she was gone. “Can you believe,” she wrote in connection to her will, “that after the years of complete absorption in this project, . . . I will sign away control and turn our precious Gardner House contents over to the indifferent, uninformed crew that is Brown 126฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner University to do with it as they see fit?”113 As much as Gardner swore she would never give up control, there was little she could do. She was coming to the end of her life. Like George before her, Jessie had suffered a stroke, and the time when she could exert control over material goods would soon be over. What pained her now is that when she and George signed their initial agreement, they had given the university control over the collection, including the ability to add to it after their deaths.114 In a note written in 1934 and inserted next to the original agreement reproduced in the journal, she claimed she and George had been pressured into signing the paperwork. They had been “rushed,” she maintained.115 Antiques were everything to Jessie Gardner. They were sources of beauty, culture, and even civic improvement. But they were also fragile. To maintain their power, they must be treated correctly, arranged to show off their aesthetic qualities, and freed from the corruption of the massproduced and the trite. Building a high-quality collection and exhibiting it according to the standards of aesthetic display had been a challenge for the couple. As amateurs, they lacked the knowledge, professional contacts , and monetary resources to fully succeed as collectors. But that did not mean Jessie trusted the university to carry on in her stead. Still, all she could do was voice her desires in her journal and hope that the university would respect them. “It is my earnest request that no changes be made in GARDNER HOUSE or its contents, that no furnishings be disposed of and none added except under the expert advice of persons of recognized conservative taste. No nouveau or modernistic notions should enter here. Nothing foreign to New England. Furthermore I direct that the house shall be a historic museum but never take on the appearance of collections, but shall be kept simple, spacious, personal, a historic house museum. I hope that it may be so.”116 This was her final wish. Seeking On April 14, 1935, Jessie Gardner staged a ceremony to dedicate the Henry Ames Barker Memorial Room, the seventeenth-century-style room created in honor of her brother. A. D. Mead, still Brown’s vice president, spoke at the ceremony. Gardner immediately reported the event as an enormous success: “While Dr. Mead was speaking, the friends who had <฀ 127 C hapter 3 gathered in the memorial room for a cup of tea and the simple exercises to follow, sat with bowed heads and tears in their eyes; and when he had ceased speaking, there was a silence till he asked them to step forward to witness the ceremony of the hanging of the crane and lighting the fire. Everyone was deeply touched.”117 But when Gardner wrote to Mead several days later, her tone was more ominous. “All through that lovely ceremony , Sunday which your little talk made impressive and just perfect, I was depressed by what I knew was going on behind the scenes: the propagation of countless termites, traveling and chewing the side walls and over our heads.”118 A few months later she called the arrival of termites “the most tragic blow” next to “George’s break in health.”119 Indeed, the insects proved a most persistent foe. They spread all through the Barker room in the basement, which was built on wooden sills placed directly on the ground, and from there throughout the house. Gardner swept up hundreds of wings. Termites were relatively new to the Northeast; possibly they had come from some of the old boards used to give a venerable patina to the Gardners’ new construction. It was a disaster. Gardner had university entomologists consulted and hired a termite control company, but the problem continued, and she eventually wrote a detailed report commenting on all the infestations over a period of nearly ten years.120 As was the case with everything associated with her museum project, Gardner did not see the termites as simply a stroke of bad luck. She saw them as another sign of corruption, and she blamed the contractors, this time because they built the floor in the Barker room out of wood rather than stone and laid the sills directly on soil.121 It is hard not to feel bad for Gardner: everything she had been working for was being literally eaten out from underneath her. It is also tempting to see the termites as a symbol of the tragedy Gardner perceived in making the museum. Indeed, the idea of struggle colored her interpretation of the experience for all time. Pasted at the beginning of her journal is a seemingly cryptic newspaper clipping: “Most of us go through life seeking something. We do not always find it, so we can end the tale with the happy cry: ‘It is not too late.’ Mr. Hilton seems very familiar with the baffling situation that faces most people either because of some lack in themselves or surrounding circumstances which make the accomplishment of their desires unattainable.”122 Gardner saved this clipping as an obvious reference to the frustration 128฀ = Jessie Barker Gardner and George Gardner she felt building her museum. In the simplest sense, she did succeed. She restored the building, installed her antiques, and turned the house over to the university, which has used it as a guesthouse for visiting dignitaries , a function outlined in her original donation. But the clipped quotation suggests that Gardner was not completely fulfilled by what she had obtained. Certainly she would have pointed quickly to the “surrounding circumstances” that compromised her project: the architect’s lack of expertise with historic design, the contractor’s constant price-gouging, and what she saw as the university’s failure to appreciate her project and support it with expert advice and additional funds. Throughout her journals, Gardner was quick to point the finger and lay blame, to take to task those who were not helping as she believed they should. But the quotation raises another question: Did she also perceive “some lack” in herself? I believe she did. The aesthetic standards of the collecting world, with their new emphasis on accuracy and authenticity, were difficult for an amateur to meet. Without the funds to buy at the highest levels, without the advice of experts or the services of dealers, Gardner would always be trying to live up to the ideals of decorative art museums. Indeed, it was an anxiety that ate at her. Many times she wrote in her journal that Gardner House would be a place that must withstand scrutiny, a place that would be judged by everyone in the antique field. The idea that the nation’s most recognized connoisseurs would visit Gardner House was probably a bit of wishful thinking. Nevertheless, her comments speak to the ways in which new forms of antique collecting created canons of taste and forced individual collectors to relinquish authority and command over their own possessions. Gardner found the project of making a museum a huge disappointment. Repair bills, contractors , and termites consumed her project, taking her away from the practice of connoisseurship and filling her days with the most mundane of concerns. Only one thing was worse: the fear of failure. <฀ 129 ...