January 2011

Westover (right) was constructed shortly after 1730 by William Byrd II (1674-1744). It is widely regarded as the most distinguished Georgian residence in America. Originally it consisted of a freestanding main house flanked by a kitchen and a library. The library was destroyed by fire during the Civil War and was reconstructed on its original foundations early in the twentieth century. During that time the narrow passages called hyphens were added, joining the main house to its dependencies. As the drawing below shows, the house’s proportions are derived from simple geometric units. The facade is composed of two adjacent squares. Their bases anchor an equilateral triangle, the apex of which reaches the peak of the roofline. Intersecting arcs, whose radii equal the sides of the squares and whose center points are at the squares’ highest corners, determine the level of the first floor.

Gable roof

A roof with two slopes meeting at a peak.

Gambrel roof

A roof with a break in the pitch of its slopes, the lower slopes being steeper than the upper.

Hipped roof

A roof with four sloping sides.

Pediment

The gable of a classical temple, often found as a decorative device above a doorway or window, where it may be triangular, segmental, scroll, or broken.

Pilaster

A column that projects from a wall, either exterior or interior, especially around doorways, where it supports an entablature or pediment.

Entablature

The horizontal element between a column and a pediment.

Cornice

The upper part of an entablature.

Frieze

The central and usually widest part of an entablature.

The fine furniture of the era bore the unmistakable stamp of the Georgian house style; its symmetry and classicism were often translated virtually unchanged from the outside to the interior. Yet experts rarely describe an American piece as a Georgian chair or table. Instead they refer to the Queen Anne style, dominant in England and in this country from about 1720 to mid-century, and to the somewhat more exuberant Chippendale period that succeeded it. The examples shown here, from Colonial Williamsburg, would have been perfectly at home in Westover. Some Georgian pieces were imported from England, while others were the work of increasingly skilled and specialized native craftsmen. America’s furniture makers generally produced more restrained versions of the prevailing English styles. There was no loss of elegance, however. In appreciation of an early highboy, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: ”. . . the moderns have invented nothing better in chamber furniture than those chests which stand on four slender legs, and send an absolute tower of mahogany to the ceiling. . . .”

The Georgian style prevailed in the Colonies from around 1700 to the Revolution. During that time builders copied and adapted patterns from contemporary English design books, such as William Salmon’s Palladio Londinensis . A drawing in that book (left) is the model for Westover’s doorway. In the 1750s and 1760s the style spread through New England, as can be seen from the examples shown here. As late as 1918, when Wallace Nutting, the authority on New England furniture, was attempting to remove Victorianisms from the Wentworth-Gardner house in New Hampshire in order to return it to its Georgian origins, he too designed a door that may have been inspired by Salmon’s book.

Georgian architecture is still being copied, as the streets of every big city and most small towns bear witness. Much of the time other decorative elements have crept in, or correct ones have been used in unlikely ways, rendering the result less than pure. Although the tile roof of the gas station and the cupola of the Florida courthouse pictured above are fairly faithful renditions of the style, the lines of the courthouse building are chunky and lack the perfect proportions that are the underpinnings of the real Georgian product.

By Lawrence W. Levine; Harvard University Press; 306 pages.

Talking one day to a fellow scholar about the films of Buster Keaton, Lawrence Levine concluded that Keaton was a great artist. His colleague agreed but then offered a caveat. Keaton, he explained, was a great popular artist .

Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow shows us a period of American history when the classification of art was far less important than it is today, when an event could be both culturally important and hugely popular. Levine draws a picture of nineteenth-century America in which William Shakespeare was the most performed playwright in the nation, symphonies played popular music as much as they did the works of the great masters, and museums exhibited painting and sculpture alongside mastodon bones.

In “The Secret Life of a Developing Country (Ours)” (September/October), Jack Larkin quotes a Francis Underwood of Enfield, Massachusetts. I would like to point out that in the early nineteenth century Enfield was located in Connecticut and not in Massachusetts. Enfield, in common with the towns of Suffield and Woodstock, seceded from the Royal Government of Massachusetts Bay and joined the Charter Government of Connecticut in 1749.

Stamps like you’ve never seen ‘em before . . . birthday thoughts about George Washington by his greatest living biographer . . . what makes a Georgian house Georgian . . . and, because we’ve given so freely for so long that people have come to think it their due, more.