I wrote the chapter on Salem’s Colonial Revival movement in our forthcoming book Salem’s Centuries, an effort that I think was pretty ballsy given that I am neither an American historican or an art/architectural historian. You can be sure that I had both types of experts read it before submission and it has been peer-reviewed several times before publication! I felt confident because I took a biographical and cultural history approach, utilizing the work and lives of Salem exemplars Frank Cousins, Mary Harrod Northend, George Francis Dow, and Caroline Emmerton. They were all so respectful of Salem’s material heritage and more than a bit fearful of change. What we now label the Colonial Revival does seem to have been a movement in Salem, fueled as much (I think!) by nostalgia as by a desire to preserve, and its connections to the fledgling preservation movement in the early twentieth century are what interest me particularly. So while I have a sense of the Colonial Revival as a cultural movement, I am far from any aesthetic understanding, although I think I have made some strides in that direction by working at Historic New England’s Phillips House over these past two summers. The house’s dining room, in particular, a great example of the assertive effort of Salem and Boston architect William Rantoul to “marry” its later-19th century back to its Samuel McIntire front, has become my ideal Colonial Revival room. It all started with the alcove for me. I had seen Rantoul’s colleague and contemporary Arthur Little’s alcove in Caroline Emmerton’s house on Essex Street in person and in renderings (the cyanotype below is from a Little & Browne album in the collections of Historic New England), and it just seemed so Colonial-esque to me, so when I saw some semblance of an alcove in the Phillips’ dining room, it all made sense.
As you can see, Rantoul’s alcove is not nearly as enclosed as that of Little, but the former still carved out that space, removing a staircase for the symmetrical china cabinets and fireplace, delineated from the rest of the room by that strident ceiling moulding. He had modernized the systems for the Phillips after their purchase of the house in 1911: there was no need for that fireplace other than to enhance the “colonial” ambiance, which is also provided by the great Joseph Badger portrait of Phillips relative Thomas Mason (c. 1770-75) with his pet squirrel. I’m not even sure you would call this space an alcove, much less a nook, but it’s the semblence that creates the aura of the past in this large light-filled room.
Frankly this chair annoys me but I understand why it’s there.
Of course, the furnishings set the scene as well, and authors of decorating books from the teens and twenties always advised their readers that they should avoid placing items “of a set” if they were to attain that authentic Colonial look. It was relatively easy for the Phillips’, with their multi-generational wealth and trove of possessions from different places and times, to achieve the desired layered look. Their dining room seems to have attained the general “Colonial feeling” recommended by Helen Koues in her popular manual On Decorating the House (1928), in which the walls and woodwork are light in value, the furniture is mahogany or brown mahogany, silver is shown, and side lights or chandeliers may be in silver with glass prisms, or some fixture Colonial in feeling. Andirons and fireirons are of brass or brass and iron, and the china displayed is of Wedgwood in patterns of the eighteenth century. Of course, Stephen and Anna Phillips were both from old Salem maritime families, so their Wedgwood (and Limoges) is supplemented by a dazzling display of East Asian ceramics.
