The Winter Art Show

The country houses of northern Italy usurped the English architectural imagination in the 1830s and ours a decade or so later. In the years before the Civil War, handsome villas were going up all over, and despite its folk-art touches (the two-foot-tall owners), this rendering is a fine example of the vogue. If this particular house was ever built, it probably was in Connecticut. But no record of it seems to have survived, and it may merely have been an exercise in the style that every architect of the day had to master if he wanted to get ahead.