Ralph Carpenter

NEWPORT, R.I. -- Newport, America's fabled kingdom by the sea, huddled unsociably in a wrap of off-season fog as guests began arriving in the dark for dinner at Harbour Court last April 30. It had been raining all day. Straggling up the wet lawn to the baronial entrance of the former Brown family summer retreat, now home-away-from-home for the New York Yacht Club, were a few of Christie's most cherished customers and select members of the Newport Symposium, the international conference celebrating its fifth anniversary this April 29-May 1.

In a scene worthy of Henry James, assorted British aristocrats mingled inside with their American counterparts, later retiring to the glittering banquet hall for dinner. Afterwards, Sir Anthony Tennant, chairman of Christie's International, rose and warmly thanked his hosts, Mr and Mrs Ralph E. Carpenter.

For half a century, Ralph Emerson Carpenter, Jr, known in the decorative arts world as "Mr Newport," has not so much held court as assembled the courtiers. From 1953, when he published The Arts and Crafts of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1820, to 1993, when he participated in founding the Newport Symposium, Carpenter has been at the center of a high-spirited group of collectors that has requited its passion by sharing it with others. In his unyielding determination to save a city he loves deeply, Carpenter has transformed Newport and inspired a following.

J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art and scion of Rhode Island's most illustrious clan, introduced last year's Newport Symposium on "The Age of The Grand Tour." More than 250 people -- from 92 cities and towns, 21 states, and six countries -- sat rapt as Brown's sinewy, cultivated voice swooped and soared, gliding along elongated vowels for added emphasis. Many of the same will attend the by-invitation-only event again this year.

Though not a new idea -- a group of local merchants and learned men first met here in 1703 to share books and conversation -- the Newport Symposium, hosted jointly by the Preservation Society of Newport County and Christie's, and loosely modeled after Colonial Williamsburg's 50-year-old Antiques Forum, was largely the result of Ralph Carpenter's patient, persistent prodding.

In founding the symposium, Carpenter, now 87 years old, dreamt of restoring the world he knew as a young man, when collectors joined in good-natured camaraderie to explore their mutual enthusiasms. "I think the symposium begins to resemble that coterie of early collectors," says Carpenter. "People have gotten to know each other. They wouldn't find the same stimulation in isolation."

This year's topic -- "Art, Trade and Empire" -- is a metaphor for Carpenter himself, whose life has cleaved evenly between the monetary rewards of Wall Street and the art world's more sublime pleasures. Like Carpenter, the program promises to be expansive, well-traveled and complex, navigating between discussions of Venice, Amster "One of the most interesting things about Ralph's life is its symmetry. It is bracketed in every way," observes Wendell Garrett, a senior vice president at Sotheby's and editor-at-large of The Magazine Antiques. Through symmetry Carpenter has achieved near-perfect balance, which in turn places him at the center of virtually every endeavor he undertakes. "He is one of the steadiest, most consistent individuals I have ever known," agrees Dean Failey, senior director of American furniture and decorative arts at Christie's and a chief collaborator, along with the Preservation Society's John Tschirch, on the symposium project.

"He has blocks and shells in his blood," notes Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Morrison Heckscher, alluding to Carpenter's scholarly eminence in the field of Eighteenth Century Newport furniture made by the Townsends and the Goddards. Carpenter's ties to the area actually predate those of the Quaker cabinetmaking families. In the Museum of Newport History at The Brick Market, one of several local historic sites Carpenter fought hard to preserve, a plaque bears a long list of the town's founders.

Several years before the establishment of Newport in 1638, William Carpenter was one of ten people to accompany Roger Sherman to Providence. Ralph Carpenter still has deeds to his ancestor's property in Smithfield, just outside the capital. "I was born nearby in Woonsocket, but just by chance," says the Rhode Island native, whose entrepreneurial father moved frequently.

His early memories of the Ocean State are happy ones. As a young man he spent 11 summers at his uncle's 200-acre camp in Matunuck, across the bay from Newport in more ways than one. "Social life was nil. We had a little beach club called Willow Dell. It was the ultimate in simplicity. It had one building, with two rooms for changing and no roof. There was no Coke machine, no water cooler, no nothing. Everyday after a swim and a picnic lunch we'd go over to Point Judith and play golf and tennis. We'd eat and be in bed by nine."

Carpenter had lived in Woonsocket, Cleveland, Boston, New Haven, Hartford and Plainfield, N.J., before leaving for Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Four years later, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering, and in June 1931 accepted a job with Alcoa. By September, the Depression-struck aluminum company had rescinded its offer.

Out of work and living in Toledo, Carpenter presented himself at the local office of a life insurance company, which offered him a job selling on commission. For pocket money, he peddled Christmas cards from door to door. Six months later, the born trader moved to New York, where his career in the financial district began its rapid ascent.

"For three years I went into tall buildings, looked up names, and took the elevator up to talk to somebody about buying life insurance. They weren't that much interested," Carpenter recalls. By the time Social Security, the Depression-era salve, was instituted in 1935, Carpenter had parlayed his way into the nascent pension industry. His first big client was Bristol-Myers.

Carpenter had married just out of college. As the young couple began setting up an apartment in Scarsdale, N.Y., he found himself interested in antiques. "One afternoon I went to an auction at Silos on Vanderbilt Avenue, right around the corner from the Yale Club. I bought good, bad and indifferent furniture -- some of it reproduction -- but I furnished a whole apartment for $500, something I could never have done had I gone to W & J Sloans." The slew included a portion of a three-part dining table, purchased for $4.50. One of the few material reminders of those early ventures, the table traveled west to Chicago with Carpenter's daughter but is now back in his wife's office.

The collector's conversion was complete when an antiques dealer named Willy Richmond visited him in Scarsdale. "He stood in the doorway and said, `Carpenter, everything's got to go.' From then on I was upgrading." Soon, the young pension planner had whittled out a routine. "I would go to Schrafft's for lunch: chicken sandwich and a milk shake. That took 20 minutes. Then I'd take another hour and a half and go up and see the dealers: Israel Sack, Izzy Winick, Henry Weil, Ginsburg & Levy and the Ensko Brothers.

"I've got very nice memories of Ralph going back to the struggling days of the Depression," Albert Sack recalls of the man who is the contemporary of his older brother, Harold. "None of us had any money, but Ralph was an avid collector. He used to visit our place frequently and struggle to buy. He acquired a good bit of Hepplewhite and Sheraton. Then he began putting together a magnificent house in Scarsdale, filling it with Queen Anne furniture from New England."

By 1952, Carpenter had caught the eye of Alice Winchester, editor of The Magazine Antiques and the collecting field's most influential spokesman. In her May issue, Winchester wrote that "Mr Carpenter aroused so much interest at the 1952 Antiques Forum in Williamsburg, where he spoke on his `new old house,' that we asked him to write the story of its building for readers of Antiques."

In the first of two articles, Carpenter described the creation of Mowbra Hall, his Georgian-style home at 55 Morris Lane in Scarsdale. Occupied eight months and nine days after construction began, it was the first of many characteristically ambitious projects he pursued with unflagging energy.

"Our ultimate objective was to have a house that would look exactly as though it had been built two hundred years ago and lived in by successive owners who preserved it entirely in original condition except for changes occasioned by use and age," Carpenter wrote. "For us the charm of eighteenth-century houses, as of furniture, depends as much upon the effect of age on the color and surface texture as it does upon the original design and craftsmanship."

The hipped roof, center hall dwelling was patterned after the Wentworth-Gardner House in Portsmouth, N.H. The interior combined architectural woodwork salvaged from several New England houses slated for demolition. Antiques dealer J.A. Lloyd Hyde, who maintained a lengthy association with Carpenter, helped procure three marbleized rooms from Mowbra Castle, a Wickford, R.I., home that lent both its name and its architectural components.

The Carpenters left no stone unturned. They found brownstone steps in a Middletown, Conn., quarry, and recruited specialists in early flooring, plastering and decorative painting to finish the details. Complete to the last candlestick, Mowbra Hall's stunning interiors were unveiled in June 1952 in one of Antiques first color spreads.

"I had long been intrigued with Ralph Carpenter because Mowbra Hall incorporated a door from a house in Greenfield, Mass.," remembers Peter Spang, who joined Historic Deerfield as its first professional employee in 1959. Now senior associate for special projects there, Spang recalls that Carpenter was part of tight-knit group of collectors and scholars that included Katharine Prentis Murphy; Miss Ima Hogg; Edgar and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch; Maxim Karolik; Charles Montgomery of Winterthur; John Graham of Colonial Williamsburg; Alice Winchester; Lloyd Hyde; Edgar Bingham, a Chinese export porcelain expert who headed the antiques department at Shreve, Crump & Low; and, of course, Historic Deerfield's founders, Henry and Helen Flynt. "There were about 40 of us in this coterie," agrees Carpenter, adding to the prestigious list the names Price Glover, Henry Francis du Pont and Electra Havemeyer Webb.

"It is to people like Ralph that we turn for insight," says Jonathan Fairbanks, the sage head of American decorative arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "Ralph is the kind of guy who takes you off to the side and tells you a story, and thereby you learn the history of the circumstances. It is always instructive to hear it straight from a person who inevitably was much involved in the initial stages."

Carpenter's recollections, regrettably too numerous to be catalogued here, provide an eye-witness account of antiquing in the middle decades of the century, when powerhouse collectors -- the founders of Colonial Williamsburg, Winterthur, Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, Bayou Bend, Shelburne Museum, and Historic Deerfield among them -- opened their doors to the public.

"Ralph tells a wonderful story about being invited down to Houston by Miss Ima," reveals Dean Failey, who was curator of Hogg's former home, Bayou Bend, when he met Carpenter. "The first night Ralph and his cohorts showed up for dinner at one of the local country clubs, done up to the nines. Everyone in Houston was in street clothes. The following night they all had dinner at the other country club. This time, the group from "back East" showed up in street clothes. Everyone from Houston was in black tie."

Historian Elizabeth Stillinger counts Katharine Murphy among a quartet of matriarchal collectors that included Electra Havemeyer Webb, Louise du Pont Crowninshield and Hogg, daughter of a Texas governor. Hogg was particularly close to Murphy, and Murphy to Ralph Carpenter. Each year, for 15 years, the Carpenters threw a birthday party for the collector, whose bold style influenced the look of period rooms around the country. When Murphy turned 80, a lavish celebration was staged in the Versailles suite at New York's St Regis Hotel. Knowing the widow's fondness for men, Carpenter made sure her's were the only XX-chromosomes at the table of ten. As a fillip, he seated her between designer Hubert Givenchy and self-made billionaire John Kluge.

Some of Ralph Carpenter's most vivid stories involve Maxim Karolik, the flamboyant Russian emigre who scandalized Boston society when he married Martha Codman, a Brahmin many years his senior. The marriage lasted until Codman's death three decades later, and today the collection assembled by the unconventional couple occupies a place of honor at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Notes Carpenter dryly, "When the marriage was finished, one of the family said to Maxim, `You know, we thought you were an adventurer, but you really perpetuated the Codman name.' And Maxim said, `Well, that wasn't what I had in mind.'"

"I tell you this simply because it's the way this coterie of people lived and played and worked together," says Carpenter, launching into another story. He has taken the day off to show me around his beloved Newport, and I am clearly not the first to be so honored. Several pens have marked the upholstery in his car, evidence that more than one diligent scribe has sat at his side.

"Five of us -- Maxim, the Garbisches and the Carpenters -- left Newport one morning around ten to go to New York," he begins. "Our first stop was a warehouse in Providence. I had bought an open-claw Goddard table and wanted to stop and see it. The Garbisches wanted to go to the Worcester Museum. When we got there it had closed, so I called Clarence Bingham, head of the American Antiquarian Society, and he came and let us in."

From Worcester the ensemble set off for Hartford, arriving at the home of an elderly woman around 11:30 pm. When she refused to sell her painting, they continued on to Scarsdale. It was about 2:30 am when the Carpenters and Karolik tumbled into their beds; the Garbisches continued on to New York.

The Carpenters and their sleepy Russian companion were up again several hours later and off to the Cornell-Princeton football game. "We drove to New York, but missed the train. We left Maxim in Times Square, and he was completely lost, because he had always been driven by a chauffeur. We caught the next train to Trenton and took a cab back to Princeton." By now thoroughly caught up in the odyssey, I ask, "When did you get there?" Carpenter, whose sense of timing has always been unerring, replies, "In time for the kick-off."

"I enjoy people: watching them, seeing how they think. My business has put me in contact with a great variety of people from Jules Prown to Edward," continues Carpenter, who, after golf with the Duke, dined with the Windsors at their home in the Bois de Bologne. Through golf he was also introduced to Presidents Nixon and Eisenhower, and once gave Senator Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, a ride to Bailey's Beach.

Carpenter is fond of saying that if Jonathan Nichols, who built the 1750 Hunter House in the old Quaker part of town, came back to Newport, he could still take his meals at the White Horse Tavern, go to services at Trinity Church, borrow books from the Redwood Library or have his tombstone engraved at the John Stephens shop. "In what other place in America are so many pre-Revolutionary War buildings still used for their original purpose," he marvels, still awed by the historical pageant that wrested his attention over a half century ago.

"I used to knock on doors of old houses in Wickford and Westerly. I never bought anything, but I studied the architecture and took photos," Carpenter recalls of early weekend excursions out of New York. They resulted in his first book, The Fifty Best Historic American Houses, Open To The Public.

The restoration of Hunter House, what Carter Brown has called "Ralph Carpenter's magnum opus and one of the jewels in the Preservation Society of Newport County's crown," began soon after. Several museums were considering buying paneling from its incomparable interior. To forestall evisceration, a group headed by Maude Wetmore and Katherine and George Henry Warren purchased Hunter House and gave it to the newly formed preservation society in 1945. Winterthur's director, Joseph Downs, was to supervise its restoration. When Downs became too ill to continue, he asked Carpenter to take over.

The refurbished Hunter House, which now contains one of the finest collections of Townsend-Goddard furniture anywhere, opened to the public in 1953. "To draw attention to the house," says Carpenter, "we organized a loan exhibition of 75 related examples of furniture, plus silver, paintings and prints." The show's catalogue, The Arts and Crafts on Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1820, forever secured Carpenter's reputation as "Mr Newport." "His book," trilled Ruth Davidson in The Magazine Antiques, "...far surpasses most exhibition catalogues in its scope ... suggesting comparison with such milestones in American regional studies as the Harvard Tercentenary catalogue, Southern Furniture, or Baltimore Furniture." Only 2,000 copies were published, the most valuable of which -- 125 collector editions bound in marble paper and red morocco leather -- bring over $1,200 each.

Several more restorations followed. As an early trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, he helped rebuild Longfellow's Wayside Inn after a fire damaged the property purchased by Henry Ford in 1923 and furnished by Israel Sack. Having completed the White Horse Tavern, Trinity Church and the Brick Market, Carpenter's attention is now trained on the Redwood Library and the Old Colony House.

Around Newport today, the ever gentlemanly preservationist is both admired and a bit feared. Staff at local museums address him as Mr and invariably agree with what he has to say. Stopping for lunch at the White Horse Tavern, Carpenter wants to know whose decision it was to repaint the Windsor chairs he selected for the eatery nearly 40 years ago. The maitre d', who surmises the patron's dismay only by the persistence of his mild questioning, twitters nervously and edges toward the door.

In 1958, Carpenter left the pension business to join the investment banking firm Reynolds and Company as a partner. His dual responsibilities, for institutional research and European offices, entailed extensive overseas travel. Characteristically, while abroad Carpenter found time to visit Europe's top collections -- the Villa Favorita, the Lugano home of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, stands out in his memory -- and became acquainted with London's major auction houses from the inside out.

"It was because I spent so much time in London that I'm at Christie's now," reflects Carpenter, who joined the firm as a consultant in 1978. When first approached, the collector -- who by then was retired, remarried and dividing most of his time between Newport and Palm Beach -- told Christie's deputy chairman, "I want to travel, do some writing, play quite a bit of golf. But I'd be happy to find you buyers and sellers."

"Ralph came to Christie's with an incredible reputation," recalls Ron De Silva, the Garrison, N.Y., dealer hired as Christie's first American decorative arts specialist in 1977. "His following was gilt-edged. He could get on the phone with Mrs Lammot du Pont Copeland, or anyone, and it was done."

In 1979, Carpenter recruited Dean Failey, who visited the collector in Newport shortly before resigning his post as curator of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. "As I recall, he gave me a very candid description of what life at Christie's would be like," the auctioneer says. "At the end of the afternoon, as I was about to leave, he said, `Well, Dean, the only promise I can make you is that you will never be bored.'"

"I suppose that after all this time the story may be told," continues Failey, when asked how Christie's landed the Nicholas Brown desk and bookcase. His account adds contour to that already drawn by Harold Sack in his memoirs, American Treasure Hunt. The block-and-shell carved Newport casepiece, auctioned for $12.1 million in 1989, remains the most expensive piece of American furniture ever sold. Maxim Karolik had reportedly once said of the towering casepiece, "One more inch and it would have been a freak."

"In late 1988, I received a call from Eddy Nicholson. He said, `Dean, the biggest one ever has just come up.' I went to Christie's vice chairman, Stephen S. Lash. We picked up the phone and called Robert P. Emlen, executive director of the John Nicholas Brown Center in Providence. He was amazed we had heard so fast. At Thanksgiving, Nicholas Brown had informed the family that he planned to give the secretary to the institution in a deferred tax arrangement."

Harold Sack had recently offered $10 million for secretary on behalf of a private client. Emlen had declined, explaining that a decision had been made to auction the work. Knowing how much it would take to buy the masterpiece, Carpenter began making a list of 75 clients he knew had the means and possibly the desire. On his list was Doris Duke, the reclusive heiress who spent some of each year in Newport and had restored 76 houses through her Newport Restoration Foundation.

Carpenter had met Doris Duke only once. "John Drexel and I share a birthday, so we always take turns giving a party. On one occasion Doris was in town, and was invited and came. We spent an hour after dinner talking about restoration. Afterwards, I sent her a spectacular aerial photograph showing every building in Newport in relief. A couple of days later she called and thanked me. We chatted a minute and that was the total."

In the six months leading up to the sale of the Nicholas Brown desk and bookcase, Carpenter "worked on a lot of people." He knew Duke had stationed a cardboard model of the attenuated cabinet in the Whitehorne House, just to see how it looked, but was she seriously interested? Three days before the sale, Christie's American decorative arts team blanched upon learning that an agent for Duke was the underbidder on an Italian Old Master painting by Pontormo, sold that day for a record $35.2 million. This seemed certain proof that the capricious collector had, at least for the moment, abandoned plans to buy the secretary.

Then, at 3:30 pm the afternoon before the sale, Carpenter got a call from Duke's business office. Her agent had been authorized to bid to $10.5 million. The next day, with Harold Sack in the front left of the room, Robert Emlen just a few rows back on the right, and Carpenter seated with Duke's representative, the Nicholas Brown desk and bookcase was knocked down to the New York dealer for $11 million plus premium. Duke was underbidder and Eddy Nicholson, represented by New Hampshire auctioneer Ron Bourgeault, was a distant third contender. "It was the timing and the players," sighs Failey. "The stars were in alignment."

"No one is more passionate or thoughtful about American antiques than Ralph Carpenter," says John Hays, Christie's specialist in American decorative arts. "He lifts the business to a whole new level with his elegance and grace. He redefines business ethics. He believes that if you aim high, others will have no choice but to follow."

Elegance and grace are words inevitably chosen to describe Carpenter, who embodies the Walpole Society ethic in his gentility, erudition and bonhomie. Hollis French, a founder of the 87-year old fraternity, wrote, in a letter published in 1940, "Our future depends on the proper selection of our members, who not only must have the requisite knowledge in our various lines, but ... a broad general culture which stamps a gentleman and a scholar." Carpenter was elected to the elite cadre of collectors and museum professionals in 1950, a year after Bertram K. Little and a year before Henry Flynt. Today he is the group's most senior member, and the only Walpolean whose presence overlapped that of a founder, Harry Harkness Flagler.

"We share stories and generally enjoy each other's company," Jonathan Fairbanks says impishly when asked to describe Walpole Society activities. Twice a year the group meets in one or another historic spot, where it is lavishly entertained. The revelry is recorded with good-humored pomp in the Walpole Society Note Book, published annually and distributed to members.

In the 1986 Note Book, Peter Spang described a scene from the Walpoleans' autumn foray in Newport. "That evening, gorgets a-gleaming and quizzing glasses bepocketed, the members motored to the home of Carpenter, a Classical Revival mansion of the turn of the century. ... Carpenter welcomed us to his commodious and treasure-filled house. The sumptuous dinner included cold lobster, roast beef and cheesecake, washed down with a 1983 Chablis, 1979 Medoc and champagne, which stimulated an unusually long and discursive business meeting."

The Carpenters have since moved to a Federal-style house of recent vintage, set in a wild, grassy pasture off Ocean Avenue. It is a new beginning in a series of beginnings. Appropriately, it stretches three stories high, thereby assuring the broadest view of the town behind and the ocean beyond. The golf course is just 100 yards away. "I keep the cobwebs out of my body that way and out of my mind the rest of the time," says Carpenter, who plays nearly every day.

Inside are the treasures others have written about: Newport furniture, Chinese enamels, Dutch paintings, American and English silver, Boston needlework. It is his library that Carpenter most wants me to see; he boasts that it is second only to Wendell Garrett's in its majestic disarray. In the lofty brow of the house and looking out on water as blank as unlined paper, Carpenter's study is not as intimidating as promised, though its dense strata of books, documents, photographs and letters give appropriate measure to the depth, breadth, continuity and endurance of a life very well lived.

"Newport takes much knowing to be fully appreciated. Certainly a day and a half is not nearly enough time," Ralph Carpenter had written in 1952, as if anticipating the life that would unfold before him. Describing Newport's fledging preservation movement, he aphorized revealingly, "To do too little would lose this opportunity forever...".