By Karla Klein Albertson

PHILADELPHIA, PENN. — In the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, Philadelphia was a dynamic hub of society, politics and fashion. Many of the magnificent townhouses have disappeared over the last two centuries, their interiors unrecorded by any ancestor of Architectural Digest. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, however, has preserved in its collection a remarkable group of objects — united by theme and decoration — which once furnished the fashionable residence of William and Mary Wilcocks Waln. After years of research, investigation and restoration, this collection of surfaces and sculptural forms is displayed in “Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House,” on view until January 1.
Although the Waln house did not made the midcentury mark, a remarkable 21 pieces from an 1808 furniture commission have survived. Every surface is covered with gold and bright paint in a robust Classical style that pays tribute to the art and archaeology of Greece and Rome. The reason for their survival in such remarkable condition is evident — they were simply too splendid to discard. Of this group, the Philadelphia Museum owns the largest block — seven side chairs, a sofa or couch, a card table and a sideboard. The exhibition places them in a re-creation of the home’s drawing room, in a gallery filled with supporting material from the permanent collection or on loan from other institutions.
Thanks to generous grants, there is an accompanying volume by Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, the museum’s Montgomery-Garvan curator of American decorative arts, and Peggy A. Olley, associate conservator of furniture and woodwork. The book analyzes the relationship of the furniture to the interior decoration and architecture of the Waln townhouse. The show and catalog are the fruit of Kirtley’s passionate interest in the material. Kirtley notes, “It’s been a five- or six-year project, but my interest in it really began the moment I arrived at the museum.”
When they married on March 14, 1805, the Walns united two strong cultural traditions that existed side by side in Philadelphia. William Waln (1775–1826) came from a prominent family in the Society of Friends community. His father had given up his law practice to become a most conservative Quaker preacher. Mary Wilcocks (1782–1841), on the other hand, was born into a sophisticated merchant family of Episcopalian persuasion. The Wilcocks appreciated the arts, music and dancing. The two family’s paths crossed when William entered the merchant trade and formed a lucrative partnership with four of Mary’s older brothers. As they prospered, Waln acquired a taste for beautiful things and the hand of their younger sister.
With their fortunes united, the Walns immediately set about commissioning a proper city house where they could begin a new life of refinement and entertainment. For the master plan, they commissioned the fashionable, classically inclined architect B. Henry Latrobe (1764–1820). He was already juggling many civic, commercial and residential projects in Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore, among them the construction of the United States Capitol. The English architect, after a brief sojourn in Virginia, had moved to Philadelphia in 1798, where he designed a veritable Greek temple for the Bank of Pennsylvania; Sedgeley, a Gothic Revival country mansion on the Schuylkill River; and the Waterworks. On view in the exhibition, Rembrandt Peale’s circa 1815 portrait of Latrobe makes the architect appear timeless. He could be the thoughtful man across the table at a conference or reading in the corner of Starbucks.
Latrobe’s plans for the house to be built on the southeast corner of Chestnut and Seventh Streets — a block and a half west of the Pennsylvania State House, now Independence Hall — included not only the appearance and layout of the outer structure, but also an interior concept that specified the wall decoration and furniture design of the two principal drawing rooms. Scholars are fortunate to have an 1847 watercolor of the exterior, painted by Richard Hovenden Kern (1821–1853) shortly before the house was demolished.
Latrobe was not the first nor last architect to exercise total control over the residential environment, inside and out. William Kent had achieved it in the Eighteenth Century. Frank Lloyd Wright continued the tradition in the Twentieth Century. To execute his plans for the interior, Latrobe enlisted other artists working in the city, notably English decorative painter George Bridport, Philadelphia cabinetmaker John Aitken and John Rea, a popular local upholsterer.
For the interiors, the style was a full-on classicism that owed a debt to the dissemination of archaeological discoveries that began in the Renaissance and accelerated when Pompeii and Herculaneum were unearthed and recorded in the Eighteenth Century. Wealthy families owned volumes filled with drawings of Greek and Roman antiquities, which they often viewed in person on the Grand Tours of the day. For the walls, Bridport used a scheme of tricolor paneling that echoed the hues of Greek vase decoration and the painted rooms revealed at Pompeii. The Walns’ guests, the beneficiaries of a classical education in Greek and Latin, could have identified the Homeric scenes in a classical frieze that circled the room at the top of the walls.
As part of Latrobe’s vision, the painted rooms were filled with furniture fashioned by Aitken in forms that echoed ancient prototypes. In decorating these pieces, Bridport used fantastic pairs of mythical beasts and unifying borders in bright gold against a black background with red accents. Kirtley says of the furniture, “The irony of it is that it’s based in antiquity and yet looks futuristic, especially to Philadelphians in 1808. You’ve had these stilted references to classicism in the Neoclassical, but here you have pieces where the Greeks themselves could be sitting in the furniture. Remember, these people were obviously extremely theatrical, and their house is right in the middle of the newly minted theater district in Philadelphia.”
Filled with the attractive wall paintings and colorful furniture, the conjoined drawing rooms would have been used by the Walns for musical entertainments, dining and games. Sixteen chairs survive in various museum collections — there may have been as many as 20 or 24 in all — and these would have been arranged to suit the occasion. The couch and card table could be easily moved on their casters. In a special feature of the exhibition, the lighting can be adjusted to display how the room would have looked at different times of the day, a factor most certainly considered by the architect. Kirtley devotes an entire chapter of the book to the “social theater” created by Latrobe and the Walns.
By 1821, William Waln had lost his fortune and the contents of the house were sold at auction, but the surviving furnishings remain as a testament of the townhouse’s splendid heyday. Co-curator Olley was the lead conservator on the project. Her task benefited from the fact that subsequent owners of the furniture had confined themselves to adding varnish layers rather than repainting or stripping the furniture.
First of all, she explains, “We had to bring all the pieces together and look at them. Although the pieces are together now, they were divided at one point, and they have different restoration histories … We began by taking lots of cross-sections, which are small samples — they’re illustrated in the book.… We wanted to see how many varnishes there were and how we could reduce some of those layers.…The crest rails received a lot of varnishes and the bottom of the legs, which had a different wear pattern, had some overpaint. We worked with analytical labs here to figure out what to do. We were really only taking off the upper layers. We left the original and early layers intact, and that’s why it took so long.”
Olley adds, “We always like to say, it took a team of people to make the furniture, and a team to do its conservation. There were many materials involved — wood, paint, varnish, gold, metal casters and the textiles.” The re-creation of the silk upholstery was especially challenging since only minute fragments of the original fabric had survived. The conservators were able to consult historical design sources, such as period paintings of similar seating, and to examine the museum’s large collection of textiles from that era. In his early Nineteenth Century advertisements in Philadelphia, Scottish-born upholsterer John Rea cited his impressive inventory of luxury trimmings.
While some elements of the elaborate passementerie needed for the modern replacement trim can still be ordered, the large tassels needed for the side chairs were actually made in-house by staff members. More thorough investigation of the seating elements led to valuable discoveries. When old upholstery was removed from the Grecian couch, for example, the team found that original materials including the linen covering and padding of the bolsters had survived beneath.
On Friday, November 4, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Center for American Art and the Decorative Arts Trust will present a one-day symposium at the museum on “Latrobe and Philadelphia: The Waln House Furniture Revealed and Reconsidered.” In addition to exhibition co-curators Kirtley and Olley, there will be presentations by architect Annabelle Selldorf, design historian Emily Eerdmans, furniture historians Peter Kenny and Gregory Weidman, conservation experts Susan Buck and Elizabeth Paolini and architectural historians Jeffrey A. Cohen and James B. Garrison. Admission is $80 for the general public, $65 for members of the PMA and Decorative Arts Trust. Register online or call 215-235-7469.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is at 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. For information, www.philamuseum.org or 215-763-8100.
Journalist Karla Klein Albertson writes about decorative arts and design.