A GOOD AND ELEGANT HOUSE
AND FURNITURE: FURNISHING THE CADWALADERS’ PHILADELPHIA HOUSE,
1770-1775
Tuesday,
November 13, 2007, 8:00
p.m.
Koret
Auditorium, de Young
Museum
A slide lecture by Alexandra
Alevizatos Kirtley, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia,
PA
Following his 1768 wedding to Elizabeth Lloyd,
an heiress from Maryland, Philadelphian John Cadwalader purchased a
home in 1769 at the behest of his father-in-law, Edward Lloyd
III. The house had been
built by Samuel Rhoads, a master of the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia and designer of
the Pennsylvania Hospital for which John’s father, Dr. Thomas
Cadwalader, had been a founder. Plain but large, the
three-story brick dwelling was a little larger than most, a good
“starter” home for a well-to-do Quaker merchant whose wife, also of
Quaker descent, had brought the largest fortune in America to their
marriage.
Major alterations to
the house began in 1770, soon after Elizabeth Cadwalader’s father
died in January, leaving an inheritance that made the couple even
wealthier. They gutted
the house and each room was adorned with decorative plaster
ceilings, mahogany paneling, lively carved friezes and overmantles –
many of which were gilded.
The Cadwaladers – who had been members of Philadelphia’s
elite, established themselves as the most fashionable of
Philadelphia’s scions.
The interior
furnishings were a mixture of family heirlooms from the Lloyds and
furniture ordered from Philadelphia’s finest artisans. The richly carved furniture,
based on English pattern books, was made by cabinetmakers Thomas
Affleck, Bernard and Jugiez, and Benjamin Randolph. William Savery made more
modest furniture for the lesser rooms. The Cadwaladers’ suite of
parlor furniture is recognized as among the major accomplishments of
American colonial decorative arts.
Silas Deane, a
Connecticut delegate to the First Continental Congress, wrote from
Philadelphia in 1774 that he was impressed by the Cadwaladers’
“furniture and a house [that] exceeds anything I have seen in this
city or elsewhere.”
John Adams, a Massachusetts delegate in 1774, was also
suitably taken with the Cadwaladers’ “grand and elegant house.”
Although of Quaker
parentage, John Cadwalader maintained a showy home that strayed from
Quaker principles. His
modishness, however, was consonant with his secular education at the
College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania). Although he dropped out
before graduating to organize a successful mercantile business with
his brother Lambert Cadwalader, he served as a college trustee
(1779-1786), following the death of his father who served as a
trustee 1751-1779.
Even more un-pacifist
(and therefore un-Quaker), John Cadwalader served as a
brigadier-general in the Continental army – and crossed the Delaware
River with General Washington.
His father, Dr. Thomas Cadwalader, had supported the French
and Indian War, as well as the American
Revolution.
The Cadwaladers’ reign
as Philadelphia’s trend-setters, however, was brief. The contents of the home
were dispersed soon after Mrs. Cadwalader’s untimely death in 1776,
and the house was razed by Stephen Girard in 1816 to build
tenements. Sufficient
furnishings and documentation survive so that we can visualize the
home’s spaces and understand the aesthetic that defined the
Cadwaladers’ brief reign as the most fashionable of Philadelphians
during Philadelphia’s golden age of wealth and
influence.
Ms Kirtley will
discuss the building of the Cadwaladers’ home and focus on the
surviving works of art: tables, chairs, silver, china and five
family portraits by Maryland-born and trained Charles Willson
Peale. Their gilded
frames, resplendent in the front parlor, were carved by
Philadelphia’s London-trained James
Reynolds.
Alexandra Kirtley’s
research on the Cadwaladers follows logically from her Winterthur
thesis on the Lloyd family’s furnishings at Wye (the topic of her
presentation to the American Decorative Arts Forum in August, 2004)
and work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including the
acquisition of a Cadwalader family side chair. After her graduation from
Hamilton College, she interned at the New-York Historical Society,
graduated from Winterthur’s program in early American culture,
coordinated the Delaware Antiques Show and, since 2001, has been the
assistant curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art.
She has curated
exhibits on Rookwood pottery and Philip Syng’s silver. Next year, she will curate
an exhibit of Bonnin and Morris porcelain. Research interests include
the klismos chair, painted furniture, Philadelphia frame maker
Marinus Pike, Baltimore and Philadelphia neoclassical furniture, and
the Community of Turners in Philadelphia,
1700-1820.
7:15 p.m.
mini-exhibition: As we know from the recently discovered
“The 1772 Philadelphia Furniture Price Book,” for which Alexandra
Kirtley wrote the introduction to the facsimile edition, carving
represents additional time of a skilled craftsman and, therefore,
additional cost. Share
your carved furniture and objects, a chair with a carved splat or
cabriole leg, a whimsy, a cane or a
box.
8:00 p.m.
lecture: Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate
Park, San Francisco.
Enter from Level B1of the parking garage; pedestrians enter
the garage from the concourse side of Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive and
down the steps from the museum’s main entrance. Admission is free to
ADAF members and $15 to the general
public.
