AFA 18th Anniversary

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 109 “In decorating the walls of a room, the first point to be considered is whether they are to form a background for its contents, or to be in themselves its chief decoration.” [ The Decoration of Houses (1897), 45.] Walls are the essential element that ties all parts of a room together. Here, the wallpaper is a copy of an eighteenth-century American wallpaper in the Webb-Dean House in Wethersfield, Connecticut. It was made by Adelphi with permission from the Colonial Dames of Connecticut. It serves as the background for South Asian sculpture and American antiques. Wharton is well known to us now as a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who was sui generis—self-taught and educated, a true autodidact who was able to fully imagine the interior worlds of her largely upper-crust characters. It is with good reason that The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome , and The Age of Innocence are still required reading. But when The Decoration of Houses came out, Wharton hadn’t yet written a novel, and Codman was just beginning a career as an architect. Codman is certainly the lesser known of the pair, a child of privilege and a distant cousin of Wharton. He brought a practical, working knowledge of design to their collaboration, and interior design was really his strong suit. They first interacted professionally when he was hired to work on her house in Newport, Rhode Island. Years later, he helped design her Berkshires home, The Mount. In the wider world, Codman gained fame for his work on the interiors of The Breakers in Newport, the Vanderbilt mansion in Hyde Park, the east wing of the Metropolitan Club, and Kykuit, John D. Rockefeller’s house in the Hudson Valley. Personally, Codman was enough of a snob that he refused to rent his mammoth house in the South of France, Villa Leopolda, to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In Wharton and Codman’s minds, the design of houses had taken a turn for the worse in the second half of the nineteenth century. Architects forfeited their hold on design for interiors,