A Visit with Richard & Jane Nylander

On Monday, June 27, at 5:30 pm, the New England Chapter of the Victorian Society of America will honor the Nylanders with a lifetime achievement award for their efforts to preserve New England's Victorian heritage. The benefit reception and award ceremony at the Boston Center for Adult Education at 5 Commonwealth Avenue is open to the public (Victorian Society members $15, nonmembers $20; for information, 781-648-2749.)

"Jane and Richard have shared their vast knowledge of New England Victorian culture with so many people and organizations," says Edward Gordon, former director of the Gibson House Museum in Boston's Back Bay and a presenter of the award.

"Jane's a little concerned about these lifetime achievement awards. Just the phrase, you know," teases Richard. It is the Nylanders' second joint prize. In 1996, Historic Massachusetts, Inc, presented the couple with the Roger and Anne Webb Award.

"We don't do things without supporting each other, without learning from each other, so this is really nice," says Jane.

The Nylanders were present at the founding of the Victorian Society's New England Chapter in 1972, not long after they met and shortly before they married. Jane Cayford and Richard Nylander came to their callings by similar paths. She was an Ohioan with roots in New England. He grew up scouting antique furniture for his parents' Victorian house in Massachusetts. Their families summered in New Hampshire: the Cayfords at an ancestral lake house, the Nylanders in a center chimney colonial on 40 acres that still lacks electricity and plumbing.

As an undergraduate at Pembroke College at Brown University in Rhode Island, Jane researched Providence's 1810 Edward Carrington House, known then as a resource on the New England China Trade. She earned her master's degree at Winterthur in 1961, where her classmates included Jonathan Fairbanks, Craig Gilborn, Robert F. Brown and Darrell Hyder. Winterthur's charismatic director Charles Montgomery advised her on her thesis topic, Providence's Sullivan Dorr House.

Richard studied English at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. On a gamble, he enrolled in the master's degree program in museum administration at Cooperstown, N.Y., where an equally charismatic figure, Louis Jones, held sway. In 1967, Richard joined the curatorial staff at SPNEA, where he has been ever since.

"Just before my senior year of college, I met Abbott Lowell Cummings, SPNEA's assistant director under Bertram K. Little," says Richard, acknowledging the influence that Cummings, a scholar of early American architecture, and Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little, lifelong collectors and avid students of American antiques, had on his career.

Jane's first curatorial positions were at the Historical Society of York County in Pennsylvania followed by the New Hampshire Historical Society, where she was curator and director. Jane joined Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Mass., in 1969, the start of an ambitious, creative decade for the institution. As curator of ceramics and textiles, one of her first major projects, with mechanical arts curator Frank G. White, was furnishing the 1838 Asa Knight Store, completed in 1974.

"The 1830s were the beginning of printed labeling and paper packaging. I went all over New England looking for prototypes in public and private collections to use for reproductions," notes Jane, whose search led her to SPNEA and to Richard.

"Six months later we were married," Richard recalls of their initial meeting. The Nylander ménage, which grew to five, settled into a Greek Revival house on Sturbridge Common. Jane and Richard and their three children moved to Portsmouth, N.H., in 1986 when Jane was named director of Strawbery Banke, Inc. Since then, the Nylanders have lived contentedly in a Federal house furnished with classical furniture, early Nineteenth Century prints in original frames, thousands of books and miscellaneous items of interest.

"Young professionals coming into the field today don't always realize how little was generally known about textiles," says Jane, who conducted breakthrough research on clothing, window treatments and bed hangings at Sturbridge in the 1970s. Her nine articles for The Magazine Antiquesbetween 1964 and 1993 include "Some Print Sources of New England Schoolgirl Art," researched, in part, at London's Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum during her honeymoon and published in 1976; and "Textiles at Old Sturbridge Village," published in 1979.

"One of the books that we were using to study curtains, The Workwoman's Guideof 1838, had patterns for all kinds of garments, from an infant's layette to a shroud. Because I was expecting a baby at the time, we made up a layette. We identified by name the mountain of little white things that historical societies used to call christening gowns and discovered that American babies are far bigger today." Jane answered 20 years worth of visitors' questions in her 1993 book, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of The New England Home, 1760-1860.

Jane's work on curtains led her to co-chair, with then Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curator Jonathan Fairbanks and the Decorative Arts Society, the "Conference on Historic Upholstery and Drapery" in 1979. The international summit, which heightened respect for original upholstery, drew 200 guests and featured programs by 30 top curators from around the world. Edited by Yale professor Edward S. Cooke Jr, the conference papers were published in 1987 as Upholstery in America & Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I.

While planning "Historic Upholstery and Drapery," Jane published Fabrics for Historic Buildings,1977. The best-selling guide that began as a list of reproduction fabrics has been expanded and refined over the years. Richard's book, Wallpapers for Historic Buildings, first appeared in 1983. Publishing house John C. Wiley, which acquired the titles from Preservation Press, has married the companion volumes and is re-releasing them as a single, unrevised edition this year.

"My first job at SPNEA was to rehouse its outstanding wallpaper collection, a project Abbott Cummings began," says Richard, who has steadily built the collection and organized several exhibitions on the subject.

Richard's knowledge of wallpaper was also useful in the 1970s reinstallation of the Harrison Gray Otis House in Boston, built in 1796 by Charles Bulfinch, architect of the Massachusetts State House, and acquired in 1916 by SPNEA for use as its headquarters.

"Rather than impose our ideas of what we thought a federal house should be, we let the Otis House tell its own story. Based on meticulous research, we reproduced the original wallpaper; performed chemical analysis of the paint, which modern viewers found shockingly bright; and replaced Oriental rugs with wall-to-wall carpets, which had been there to start. We looked at the whole house as a unit with a family living in it, rather than as a decorative arts gallery, which is what many historic houses were in the 1960s," says Richard.

His lifelong interest in the White House, the ultimate historic home, bore fruit in 1990 when he was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. Since then, Richard has participated in the refurbishment of the Blue Room, with its concentration of original furniture purchased by James Monroe, and the State Dining Room. First Lady Laura Bush asked the committee to redecorate the Lincoln Bedroom, completed last October.

"It always comes as a surprise to people that what they see is mostly the work of Clement Conger with Pat Nixon, not Jacqueline Kennedy," says Richard. One of the Nylanders' favorite memories of the White House is a dinner for 200 celebrating the residence's 200th anniversary in 2000. "Every living President except Reagan spoke movingly and charmingly about what it was like to live in a historic building," Jane recalls. "After dinner, there was dancing. The Marine Band played a piece composed for the occasion. The first man on the dance floor was Jimmy Carter; the second, Vernon Jordan; and the third, Richard Nylander."

"One of the advantages we have had with our long span in the field is knowing the past generation. They were really the pioneers. We learned from their approach," says Richard. The Nylanders cite increased professionalism, specialization and more factual interpretation of historic settings as trends over the past four decades.

Says Richard, "I've been at Historic New England 38 years because I am still learning. As Jane says, learning is really the joy of it. That and sharing learning with others."