White House History Quarterly 56 - Decorative Arts - Naulin by White House Historical Association

Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 56, originally released in print form in 2020. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. ÂŠ 2020 White House Historical Association. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.

O PP OS I TE : B RU C E W H IT E F O R T H E WH I TE HO US E H IST O R IC A L AS SOCIATION RIGHT: OFFICE OF THE CURATOR, THE WHITE HOUS E

A Suite for the Nation RESTORED To Its Original Splendor Regilded and Reupholstered, the Historic White House BellangÃ© Suite Begins Its Third Century MELISSA NAULIN

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o f t h e m a n y f u r n i s h i n g s u i t e s purchased for use in the White House during its 220year history, the French-made, gilded wood suite procured by President James Monroe in 1817 for the oval room on the State Floor has proved to be the most significant. It has the distinction of being the longest-serving suite, in use first from 1817 to 1859 and then again from 1961 to the present after pieces from the original suite began to be reacquired. The suite’s longevity is a testament to its craftsmanship. It was made in the Paris workshop of Pierre-Antoine Bellangé (1757–1827), an experienced cabinetmaker who was well versed in the special considerations that furniture intended for use by a country’s head of state demanded. While the Bellangé suite has demonstrated the durability required of public furniture, it has necessarily required periodic refurbishments during its long tenure. The White House has recently unveiled the suite’s most current refurbishment, which was intended, with the exception of the upholstery color, to restore it as close to its original appearance as possible. The White House Historical Association generously funded all aspects of the recent restoration.

PRESIDENT JAMES MONROE’S FRENCH FURNITURE Following the burning of the President’s House during the War of 1812, President James Monroe inherited the challenge of furnishing the rebuilt Executive Residence anew. In 1817 the United States was struggling after a second destructive and costly war with Great Britain. Anxious to secure the country’s future and its place on the global stage, Monroe understood the role that interior furnishings could play in establishing respectability. To that end, he decided to furnish the two most important entertaining spaces in the President’s House—the oval-shaped parlor (now known as the Blue Room) in the center of the State Floor and the State Dining Room—with goods made in France, which were widely acknowledged as the apex of fashion at that time. Monroe entrusted orders for the French goods to the export firm of Joseph Russell and John La Farge, Americans working in Le Havre. Congress had appropriated $20,000 to refurnish the President’s House, and Monroe budgeted $12,000 of that for French purchases, although he also allowed for an overage of up to $3,000, thereby committing a full 75 percent

of his budget to the imported French furnishings. Ultimately, the French goods overran even the overage amount, as Russell and La Farge sent a bill totaling $18,429.26, with an additional charge of $1,286.82 for shipping. The French furnishings that Monroe selected for the President’s House thus almost completely consumed the fund Congress had established to furnish the entire house.1 In an attempt to control costs, President Monroe had been very specific with his agents about the furnishings he wanted, including the amount he wanted to spend on each item. Monroe was knowledgeable about French domestic goods, having lived for a number of years in Paris, first as the American minister to France from 1794 to 1796 and again in 1803. By 1817, though, Monroe was more than a decade removed from firsthand knowledge of French luxury goods, and much had changed in those years, with the abdication of Emperor Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Russell and La Farge tried to work within Monroe’s parameters but were not always successful. For the central oval parlor, Monroe asked for a suite of mahogany furniture that incorporated eagle decoration of some sort. He received a suite of gilded beechwood furniture without eagles. The change in the suite’s choice of wood significantly increased its cost. Writing to Monroe at the time of shipment, Russell and La Farge explained that while they had tried their best to adhere to his requests and budget constraints, they had vastly overspent Monroe’s stated budget for one of the most important [commissions]. . . the furniture for the large oval room . . . which is caused by the change which we have been obliged to make of giltwood instead of mahogany. The result of that substitution has been an increase of expense for the trimmings of the Fauteuils [armchairs], & c. and the draperies of the curtains, which must be richer, that every thing might be in harmony. We should also add that mahogany is not generally admitted in the furniture of a Saloon, even at private gentleman’s houses.2 Russell and La Farge also blamed the higher cost on the fact that the Bellangé suite was upholstered in “crimson silk trimmings, fringes, & c., which is 50 per cent. dearer than other colors.”3 It is unclear whether Monroe had requested red upholsteries for this room or the French agents had

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previous spread

One of four regilded and reupholstered original armchairs from the Bellangé suite is seen in the Blue Room in 2019, opposite an image of the reupolstery work in progress. The Bellangé suite is the longest serving of the White House furniture suites. The White House now owns ten of the original fifty-three pieces purchased by President Monroe in 1817, as well as eleven reproduction chairs.

H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A

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The earliest known image of the Bellangé suite in place in the White House is an 1856 engraving published in the United States Magazine during the Franklin Pierce administration. Pieces from the original suite included in the image are chairs, a pier table, two sofas, small footstools, two fire screens, and three of the four original curule-base stools. The bergères are the only forms in the suite not included in the illustration.

selected it to complement the giltwood furniture they ordered. Russell and La Farge charged the United States 15,188 francs, or $3,038, for the Bellangé suite, which was certainly expensive but still represented less than one-sixth of the entire French bill. This charge included fifty-three pieces of furniture, while the cost for the single Aubusson carpet for the same room, for example, was 9,060 francs, or $1,812.4 The cost of the Bellangé suite seems to have attracted so much attention after its delivery not because of its actual total but because it was more expensive than anticipated. Many American scholars have questioned Russell and La Farge’s stated reasons for not fulfilling the furniture suite order as directed, suggesting that the commissioners were dishonest and/or greedy, that the cabinetmaker was trying to dump old stock from another project, or that mahogany was difficult for cabinetmakers to obtain during this period.5 While it is impossible to know with certainty what exact factors determined the substitution, credence must be given to the stated reason of adhering to French furnishings protocol.6 At the time of the American commission, Pierre-Antoine Bellangé had been working for almost thirty years within the extensive rules of the French GardeMeuble, the department responsible for furnishing

the official residences of France’s kings, and then its emperor. He had also supplied furniture to the political leaders of other European countries, including Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In 1817, the same year that he was chosen to outfit the President’s House, he was appointed to be an official cabinetmaker to King Louis XVIII. Russell and La Farge described Bellangé to Monroe as the “first [or best] Ebeniste in Paris.”7 Furniture historians would not refer to him that way now, although he was well respected in his time.8 While Bellangé worked extensively in mahogany, the knowledge that he was furnishing a formal receiving room for the official residence of the American president would have led him to consider gilded wood as the only acceptable furniture finish. Monroe’s request for mahogany furniture probably seemed outdated to the French agents and cabinetmaker, reflecting his familiarity with French fashions in the late 1790s and early 1800s but displaying ignorance of the recent Empire-style fashions. Russell and La Farge knew of Monroe’s desire to furnish the President’s House in a manner that would help establish the new nation’s credibility with its international peers and may have felt that, in ordering gilded beechwood, they were saving the president, and their native country, from embarrassment. Bellangé’s fifty-three pieces of furniture must have overwhelmed the 39 × 29 foot oval-shaped room. It is important to note that there were three fewer doorways in the room than there are today, but two 9-foot-long sofas, eighteen armchairs, eighteen side chairs, two bergères (large armchairs with enclosed sides), two fire screens, four stools with X-shaped stretchers, six footstools, and a pier table must have still crowded the room. A visitor to the President’s House in 1825 described the positioning of the many chairs in the room, writing that they were “alternately armed and single so that in the arrangement of the chairs around the room there appears to be no confusion of arms, but a resplendency and simplicity which is very admirable.”9 The only known period image of the room with the Bellangé furniture in place dates to 1856, just four years before the suite was removed, and gives us an idea of how the furniture was arranged late in its use. In the engraving, chairs are seen lining the perimeter of the walls as described earlier, but a few are also seen pulled in toward the center of the room. The single pier table is positioned directly

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opposite the mantel in the room and surmounted by a large mirror. The two sofas flank the pier table on either side and have small footstools arranged in front of them. The two fire screens are placed in front of the fireplace but at a 45 degree angle, and with one of the four original curule-base stools in between. The only furniture form from the original suite not visibly in use are the two bergères. Reaction to President Monroe’s refurbishment of the President’s House was mixed. It is believed that the public first saw the new furnishings, including the Bellangé suite, on January 1, 1818, when the president held a traditional New Year’s Day open house. Thomas Hill Hubbard, a congressman representing central New York, was one of the visitors that day, and he wrote to his wife of greeting President and Mrs. Monroe in the “Elegant Oval drawing room.” He found the Bellangé suite particularly impressive, writing, “The chandeliers were large and Superb—the Carpets very beautiful, but the Chairs & sopha’s of garnet or crimson silk and Gilt exceeded any thing of the kind I ever saw.” He concluded that “the whole Combined so much Neatness & Simplicity with grandeur and Magnificence that I Was much very much gratified with the sight.”10 Others did not see the refurbished house in such a positive light. In 1818, the Washington Gazette published a letter from someone identifying himself as “A Journeyman Cabinet Maker” who complained that the new French furnishings at the President’s House were all about “pomp and parade, extravagance, and profligacy.”11 The American painter and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse commented on this difference of opinion in 1819 when he noted in his journal that some of the President’s House is “decorated in the most splendid manner, some think too much so, but I do not. Something of splendor is certainly proper about the Chief Magistrate for the credit of the nation.”12 As Virginia Senator John Taylor wrote in 1823, the highest quality furnishings in the President’s House were “designed to impress upon foreign ministers a respect for the [United States] government, which may have a valuable influence upon our foreign relations.”13 Thus while European visitors to the President’s House tended to judge it modest, they at least did not accuse the Americans of being ignorant of fashion. The Englishman William Faux, who visited the President’s House in 1820, found it “neither so elegant, superb, nor costly as the seats of our nobility” but still “a good, substantial, pleasant abode.”14

If all fifty-three pieces of the Bellangé suite were initially installed in the oval room, it is clear that they did not all remain there for long. While the pier table, sofas, fire screens, and two types of stools appear to have remained in consistent use in the room until their removal in 1859, the number of chairs gradually decreased through the years, and ten cannot be accounted for by the time they were sold. As was customary at the change of administrations, an inventory of government-owned furnishings was taken in March 1825, the month that James and Elizabeth Monroe moved out of the President’s House and John Quincy and Louisa Adams moved in. This inventory, the first taken since the acquisition of the Bellangé suite, records that twenty-four of the thirty-eight chairs originally provided were still in use in the “Elliptical Drawing Room.” The fourteen chairs no longer in use with the rest of the suite seem to have been moved by that time either to the neighboring “Green Drawing Room” or upstairs to a room that seems to have been serving as a storage room.15 By 1837, there were only fourteen chairs left in use in the elliptical room according to bills for reupholstering the furniture in that room, but sixteen chairs in the “President’s Parlor” (believed to be the present-day Green Room) appear to have received the same upholstery treatment as the Bellangé suite, suggesting that they were also from the suite.16 Eight of the original chairs would remain unaccounted for, if this scenario is accurate. By the time of the next surviving inventory, 1849, only “12 Arm chairs (gilt)” are noted in the “Circular Room” but “12 Chairs (gilt)” and “4 Arm chairs (gilt)” are noted in the “Green Room.”17 In the same year, John Wagner regilded the Bellangé suite and invoiced for “Regilding and Repairing 14 arm chairs,” “12 Single chairs,” and “2 Large Armchairs,”18 adding further evidence to the theory that the twenty-eight gilt chairs noted in the Blue Room and Green Room in the 1849 inventory were all part of that suite. Auction records from 1860, when the majority of the Bellangé suite is believed to have been sold, identify “12 Blue Gilt Arm Chairs” and “4 Green Gilt Arm Chairs” and “12 Green Gilt Side chairs” among the sold items.19 It therefore appears that eight of the original Bellangé chairs were damaged or had been disposed of by 1837, and an additional two were gone by 1849, leaving only twenty-eight of the original thirty-eight chairs to be sold in 1860.

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BRUCE WHITE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION / WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

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The pier table is the only piece from the Bellangé suite that remained in the White House after the 1860 auction. It continued to be used in the Blue Room until 1902, and then stood in the Ground Floor room now known as the Diplomatic Reception Room until about 1944, when it was moved to storage. Jacqueline Kennedy returned it to use in 1961.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY REFURBISHMENTS In defending the cost of the president’s French furnishings to Congress in 1818, William Lee, President Monroe’s primary purchasing agent, wrote: “It must be acknowledged that the articles are of the very first quality, and so substantial that some of them will last, and be handsome, for twenty years or more.”20 Lee would no doubt be surprised to learn that the vast majority of the Bellangé suite would be in continuous use for the next forty-two years and that some of the pieces, returned to the White House in the 1960s and 1970s, have received an additional fifty to sixty years of use. As is to be expected, the suite has required a number of refurbishment campaigns during these years. The suite was likely first reupholstered in 1837, when President Martin Van Buren changed the primary color of the oval room’s furnishings from red to blue. This redecoration led to the room’s current name, the Blue Room. “Sattin Medallion” fabric and matching trims were secured for the Bellangé suite from James Paton & Company, whose business was identified in an 1837 directory of New York City as a “fancy & staple drygoods and curtain material warehouse.”21 Paton & Company also charged for “repairing & covering” the furniture in the “Circular Room 1st Story,” comprised

of “14 chairs, 2 soffa, 4 Tabburetts [tabourets, or the X-shaped stools], 2 Screens, 5 footstools, and 4 Silk Pillows.” As mentioned previously, Paton & Company also provided “Sattin Meddallion” fabric of the same cost that was used for “Repairing & covering 16 chairs” for the “Presidents Parlor,” believed to be pieces from the Bellangé suite that had been moved into the Green Room by that time.22 The suite’s original gilt finish appears to have been in use until John Wagner’s regilding of it during the Zachary Taylor administration. Wagner invoiced the White House for “Regilding and repairing” forty-two pieces of the suite, detailed as “1 Large table, 14 arm chairs, 12 Single chairs, 2 Sofas, 4 Ottomans [the X-shaped stools], 5 Stools, 2 Screens, [and] 2 Large Armchairs.”23 Wagner’s stamped marks remain visible on at least two surviving examples from the suite, with four marks appearing on the interior face of the back seat rail of a White House armchair (1961.14.1) and two marks appearing in the same location on the armchair owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C.

THE AUCTION AND THE RETURN By the late 1850s, the Bellangé suite had been in continuous use for more than four decades and served eleven presidential administrations. The French furniture was undoubtedly considered old and out of fashion by this time, and in 1859 it was removed by President James Buchanan’s niece, Harriet Lane, who served in the role of first lady for her never-married uncle. Lane wanted to furnish the President’s House in the latest fashions, and the Bellangé suite, after all, was thirteen years older than Lane herself. In its place, she selected another gilded suite, also French in design but in the then-fashionable Rococo Revival style. Unlike the Bellangé suite, the new Blue Room suite was made domestically by German émigré cabinetmaker and upholsterer Gottlieb Vollmer of Philadelphia. At nineteen pieces, it was considerably smaller than the suite purchased for the same room in 1817, although it contained four large sofas and a circular divan for the center room. Twelve chairs, the same number of the Bellangé suite that had been in use for many years in the room, were acquired, in three different designs. Two ottomans, or large footstools, completed the set. All were upholstered in blue brocatelle. Vollmer also supplied Lane and Buchanan

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with a new suite of furniture for the Green Room, this one in ebony and gilt with green and gold brocatelle upholstery. As in the Blue Room, the sixteen outgoing Bellangé chairs were replaced with an equal number of new chairs, again in three different styles.24 Forty-two pieces of the Bellangé suite— all but the ten chairs already missing and the pier table—were sold at auction in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 1860, by James C. McGuire & Company. The suite brought just over $300.25 Only the Bellangé pier table is believed to have remained in the house after the 1860 auction. It continued to be used in the Blue Room in the same location opposite the mantel until 1902, when it was moved to the Ground Floor oval room directly below, now known as the Diplomatic Reception Room. The pier table was used in this space until about 1944, when it was removed to an off-site storage location. The decision to retain the pier table in 1860 ultimately led to the eventual return of other pieces in the Bellangé suite. In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy took an interest in historic White House furnishings. After she inquired about the survival of any old pieces, staff brought the pier table from its off-site location to the White House for her inspection. The table, by then missing its marble top and mirror glass, was placed temporarily in the White House carpenter shop, where Mrs. Kennedy first saw it, thus spawning the popular

story that she “found” it there.26 By publicizing her “find,” Mrs. Kennedy subsequently attracted the donation of two armchairs and two side chairs from the original suite to the permanent White House collection. She commissioned reproduction chairs—seven armchairs and four side chairs—to supplement the reacquisitions and thus allow the Blue Room to be outfitted with the Bellangé suite once again. The reproduction chairs were made by Max Schneider & Son of New York in 1962. In the 1970s, two additional original Bellangé armchairs, one bergère, and one of the two sofas were added to the White House collection. Most recently, in 2012, the White House reacquired one of the two original fire screens from Grogan & Company, an auction house in Dedham, Massachusetts. Including the pier table, the White House now owns ten of the original fifty-three pieces of the 1817 suite. With the eleven reproduction chairs, the modern version of the Bellangé suite is thus composed of twenty-one pieces.

RECENT REGILDINGS The pier table, in poor condition when Jacqueline Kennedy saw it in 1961, was soon sent out for restoration. Her friendship with Jayne Wrightsman, a collector of eighteenth-century French furnishings, led to her introduction to the celebrated decorating firm of Maison Jansen, headquartered in Paris.

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The firescreen from the Bellangé suite re-acquired in 2012 for the White House collection is seen prior to restoration. Red threads and small patches of a blue-colored upholstery found caught under tacks on the screen (seen in the enlarged detail above) provided valuable evidence of nineteenth-century upholstery fabrics.

BRUCE WHITE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION / WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

Presumably on Mrs. Kennedy’s recommendation, the White House curator Lorraine Pearce contacted Paul Manno, who directed Jansen’s New York office, for advice. Manno indicated that his firm could complete the work, which he detailed in an estimate: “the existing gold paint will be entirely removed so that we arrive at the raw wood. / The entire table will be regilded with water gilding as done in the Eighteenth Century.”27 The other original Bellangé pieces reacquired by the White House in the 1960s appear to have been put into use with the finishes as they had been when they arrived. In 1972–73, as part of a refurbishment of the Blue Room overseen by First Lady Pat Nixon and White House Curator Clement Conger, all the Blue Room furniture, including the 1962 reproduction chairs and the pier table regilded just ten years earlier, were sent to Thorp Brothers, Inc., a respected New York City restoration company. That firm treated a total of seventeen pieces: six original pieces (the pier table and five required pieces—two armchairs, two side chairs, and one bergère) and the eleven reproduction chairs. The bill, totaling about $18,000, details that the work was comprehensive, including removing upholstery, repairing loose frames, stripping the existing gold finish (metal leaf on some, bronze overpaint on others), recutting gesso on the reproduction chairs to better reveal carved details, replacing missing carving, refashioning the form of the bergère, regilding, and “lightly antiqueing.”28 The three additional original Bellangé pieces reacquired later in the 1970s (two armchairs and the sofa) were all sent to the same restoration shop for similar treatment upon acquisition. While the techniques used in 1972 may have been considered appropriate for restoring museum pieces at the time, in retrospect it is clear that the work was aggressive. The furniture was sanded without an apparent attempt to preserve any of the original gilding. The wood frames of many of the pieces today exhibit extensive cracking and checking, suggesting prolonged exposure to a water-based stripper of some sort, which caused the wood to expand and contract. It is also possible that this water damage occurred during earlier regilding campaigns, including the 1849 work by John Wagner. After decades of use, by the early 2000s the gilding treatments of the 1970s were severely degraded. The gold was completely worn away in many areas, exposing the gesso and red bole layers

underneath, and in some places even the gesso layer was gone, revealing patches of bare wood. In 2006, the White House Office of the Curator hired William A. Lewin Conservator LLC, a Baltimore firm specializing in historic gilding, to survey the original Bellangé furniture and determine if any of the pieces retained evidence of original gilding. Due to previous gilding restoration efforts, few did, but William Lewin and Davida Kovner were able to recover some small finish samples from one of the armchairs that showed original gilding. These samples were mounted in acrylic and studied under a microscope to identify the composition of the various layers and to help determine the original gilding pattern of matte and burnished areas. Conservators at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles were able to use these small samples to ascertain the exact chemical composition of the gold leaf that the original French gilders used on this suite.29 This information allowed Lewin and Kovner to choose gold leaf that matched the original color as closely as possible. The Lewin team used traditional water-gilding techniques to re-create the suite’s original appearance, including contrasting areas of matte and burnished gilding. To deduce the original gilding pattern, they relied on the evidence gained through their study and analysis of the original Bellangé pieces as well as on evidence from similar chairs in the collection of Fontainebleau that retain their original gilding and two presidential portraits that appear to depict chairs from the Bellangé suite.30 The regilding is certainly much brighter than we are used to seeing on historic chairs, but it is based both on scientific analysis of the original gilding and on historical understanding of French gilding practices. The current aesthetic, we believe, closely represents the suite’s original finish appearance.

UPHOLSTERY RESTORATION Textiles by nature are much less durable than gilding or wood, and the Bellangé suite was reupholstered multiple times during the course of its use in the White House, not to mention the reupholstering that undoubtedly took place on reacquired seating furniture in the approximately one hundred years it was not owned by the White House. With the exception of the survival of original underupholstery and unpatterned silk on the back of one armchair from the suite, there was very little

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The DAR Museum allowed us to borrow the chair for further examination and authorized the removal of its mid-twentieth-century show fabric. Once the show cover was carefully removed, Laveissière’s original underupholstery was revealed. The arm rolls and the cushions on the chair’s seat and back were all constructed in the early nineteenth-century French manner, with linen covers, abundant horsehair, tight stitching, crisp edge rolls, and tightly woven webbing. As we suspected, the chair’s upholstered back panel proved the most informative. Traditionally, the show fabric on chair backs like those in the Bellangé suite was applied to the rear side of the back cushion that the upholsterer constructed from the front side of the chair, so that it would be visible through the finished wood frame when viewed from behind. Later upholsterers were forced to apply show fabric to this panel from the rear of the chair unless they wanted to completely remove the chair’s back cushion. Once the modern cover was removed, we found an unpatterened, greenish-blue show fabric hiding below,

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BRUCE WHITE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL A SSOC IATION

physical evidence to suggest how the original textile components could be re-created. All the original seating furniture had been completely stripped of upholstery when it underwent “restoration” in the 1970s. Photographs showing two of the White House chairs (armchair 1973.956.1 and the bergère) before being sent to New York reveal what appears to be original underupholstery in whole (the armchair) or in part (the bergère), but these materials were removed and apparently discarded. The Bellangé fire screen that the White House acquired in 2012 had a few red threads caught under tacks that may be from the original upholstery treatment and small patches of a later blue-colored upholstery, but that was the extent of evidence on the pieces the White House owned. We therefore worked on determining if any of the other few pieces of the suite known to have survived outside the White House had any information to offer. We found what we were looking for just a few blocks away, at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum. This museum was given an armchair from the White House Bellangé suite in 1919, although it was not recognized as such at the time. The chair’s connection to the neighboring White House seems to have been made by DAR Curator Frank Klapthor in the early 1960s, when Jacqueline Kennedy was searching for the whereabouts of other pieces of the Bellangé suite. Once the chair was recognized, Mrs. Kennedy asked the DAR to transfer it to the White House, but was declined.31 On a visit to the DAR Museum in 2008 to examine the gilding of the Bellangé chair, we noted evidence of what appeared to be original underupholstery: the form, the materials used, the tight weave of the webbing, and the fact that the stitches visible on the bottom of the underupholstery still seemed to be functional and connected to the top of the seat pad. Our speculation was confirmed a few years later, in 2011, by the Parisian upholsterer and historic French upholstery scholar Xavier Bonnet, who served as our consultant on this project. He pointed out that small pieces of twine were visible between the underupholstery and the wooden chair rails on the DAR chair. This twine would have originally secured paper wrapping that Bellangé would have placed to protect his handiwork before the chair was sent to Antoine Louis Joseph Laveissière, the original upholsterer. If the original underupholstery had ever been disturbed, this twine would not have survived.32

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An original White House Bellangé armchair, now in the collection of the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, is seen during an examination of its upholstery. During the examination, a greenish-blue show fabric and a red silk fabric were found below the modern upholstery. The fabrics matched what was known of the nineteenthcentury upholstery while the chair was in the White House. In addition, small pieces of twine, visible between the underupholstery and the wooden chair rails were found. They would have originally secured paper wrapping that Bellangé used to protect the chair frame when it was sent from his shop to the original upholsterer. If the original underupholstery had ever been disturbed, this twine would not have survived.

adhered to an unpatterned red silk fabric beneath that.33 These fabrics and their order of placement correspond to our understanding of the upholstery changes for the Bellangé suite that occurred in the White House during the first half of the nineteenth century, based on written records. We would have loved to have found evidence of the original patterned show cover or trims on the DAR chair, but we did not. But the lack of physical evidence was more than compensated by documentary records. The original bill of lading prepared by Russell and La Farge to accompany the forty-one crates of goods shipped to Monroe is amazingly detailed.34 Their fastidiousness in accounting and describing was probably prompted by their need to justify charges that were going to exceed Monroe’s request. As every textile component of each furniture form in the suite is listed individually, with quantity and cost, this bill of lading served as our instruction guide for the upholstery restoration. The document lists the minutest details about the suite’s original upholstery, such as the fact that 86 pounds of horsehair were used to stuff the mattress for each sofa, and that 2 ells (equivalent to 2.36 meters or 7 feet, 9 inches) of 26 ligne (equivalent to 5.6 cm or 2¼ inch) border was used on each bergère. Bonnet helped us interpret this evidence, which we used to determine reupholstery details such as which width border went where on a piece of furniture, where the different gimps were located, and what type of fabric was used on the armrests. Following the evidence laid out in the bill of lading allowed our talented historic upholsterer, Francis Kalista of Baltimore, to reupholster the Bellangé pieces in the same manner as the French tapissier Laveissière. At the same time, the information about the original design of the show upholstery on the Bellangé suite was rather thin. The bill of lading described the fabric as “double warp satin, fine crimson, two colored gold, and a design of laurel.”35 We also knew from Russell and La Farge’s correspondence with President Monroe that the Paris company Cartier fils supplied the original show fabric, although the manufacturer of the fabric was not named.36 Since 1963, the White House Bellangé suite had been upholstered in multiple versions of an Empire medallion pattern featuring an eagle on its seat back. This choice was inspired by the upholstery seen on an oval-backed chair in an 1822 painting of President Monroe by John Vanderlyn, now in the New York

City Hall portrait collection. The chair in the painting has carved detail very similar to that on the Bellangé suite, causing curator Lorraine Pearce and Jacqueline Kennedy to believe that they had discovered an image of the original Bellangé suite fabric. The fact that they treated the painting’s depiction of the upholstery as evidence of the original, while ignoring the fact that there were no oval-backed chairs in the original suite, was problematic. When new upholstery fabric was chosen during the Nixon and Clinton administrations, the Vanderlyn painting continued to be considered period documentation of the original upholstery design. Considering how detailed the bill of lading was, our research team felt strongly that it would have made some mention of an eagle design if the upholstery indeed had had eagles. Bonnet also argued that a pattern with eagles would have been a custom-woven design, which Russell and La Farge would have been unable to secure in the short time they were given to fulfill the White House commission. We therefore decided to break with the sixty-year history of using an upholstery pattern featuring eagles in the Blue Room in favor of exactly reproducing a documented period design. We knew early in the restoration process that despite our quest for authenticity, the one detail that we would not be restoring to the original was the color of the fabric. The Blue Room has been known as such since 1837, and we were not going to upend 183 years of tradition by trying to change the Blue Room to a Red Room. The White House already has a Red Room, after all. The key evidence in the documentary record for our purposes then was that the original fabric somehow featured laurel, and was of a very fine quality since it had two shades of contrasting gold thread rather than the more typical one shade. Using two shades of the same contrasting color would have given the original fabric greater depth and complexity than if it had been made with one. We therefore sought a French fabric design appropriate to the Bellangé furniture that was documented to be in use as of 1817. On the recommendation of Xavier Bonnet, we selected an Empire medallion pattern in which a wreath of laurel leaves encircles a stylized floral design of a fritillaria flower on the seat back, and acanthus leaves and bellflowers on the seat cushion. This fabric pattern, with an alternate seat back design, is documented to have been ordered in 1811 by

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treatments so they could be used interchangeably in the Blue Room. For the 1817 pieces, the Lewin team identified and secured any surviving original gilding that they found by covering it with a reversible barrier layer that allowed the building of the new gesso and gilding layers on top of the original. After regilding was completed, the pieces were carefully transported to Kalista for reupholstery. He first rebuilt the underupholstery for each piece using linen webbing, horsehair stuffing, and linen covers in the same manner that would have been done in Laveissière’s shop two centuries earlier. He

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B O T H I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / W H I T E H O U S E C O L L E C T I O N

upholsterer Jean-René Flamand for a furniture suite for the French Emperor Napoleon’s use at the Château de Fontainebleau.36 The Abegg-Stiftung museum in Riggisberg, Switzerland owns the same textile pattern, but in the richer version with two shades of gold instead of one. The Abegg-Stiftung example is stamped “CF,” which is believed to stand for Cartier fils.37 The Musée des Tissus in Lyon also owns the pattern, but with the fritillaria back design instead the helmet design seen on the seat backs of the Fontainebleau and Abegg-Stiftung examples.38 Finally, a suite of furniture marked by Bellangé and very similar in design to the White House suite had survived covered in fabric identical in design to the Musée des Tissus example, with the frittilaria back. This suite is now in the collection of Buscot Park, a National Trust site in Oxfordshire, England. Prelle, a textile factory operating in Lyon, France since 1752, reproduced the original fabric on the Buscot Park suite in 1994, and we asked them to produce the same design for us, but in a custom blue colorway to match the existing draperies and carpet in the Blue Room. Declercq Passementiers in Paris provided reproductions of the multitude of trims on the White House suite, as detailed by the bill of lading. The Committee for the Preservation of the White House, whichs advises the first lady and the Office of the Curator on restoration projects, was consulted frequently during the planning process for this project, and approved all major decisions. Physical restoration work on the suite began in 2013. The first step in the process was to strip each piece of all upholstery materials. As none of our pieces had any surviving 1817 upholstery, we did not choose to reuse any of the existing materials, but decided to build up each piece from scratch. National Park Service conservator John Courtney constructed and installed alternative frames for each form, providing modern Baltic birch plywood platforms that Frank Kalista could then secure his upholstery to. This method prevents new holes from being made in the original wooden frame of each piece, as all upholstery attachment is done to the new frame. The alternative frames are attached to the furniture’s original framework by reusing existing holes, rather than creating new ones. Once the alternative framing was complete, the piece was sent to the shop of William A. Lewin Conservator LLC for regilding. Both original 1817 pieces and 1962 reproductions received identical gilding

room in May 2019, and the fire screen was reintroduced to the room in January 2020 after 161 years away from its original location. Restoration work continues on the remaining armchairs and side chairs, which will be rotated in as necessary to allow for any necessary gilding touchup or upholstery repairs. The last piece of the suite to be regilded will be the pier table, since it is no longer used in the Blue Room due to the changed configuration of the room. It has not yet been decided whether the pier table will be reinstalled in the Entrance Hall, where it has stood since 1972, or be moved to a new location within the White House.

A SUITE FOR THE NATION When two hundred years ago James Monroe’s purchasing agent, William Lee, found himself defending the cost of the Bellangé suite and other French furnishings procured for the President’s House to Congress, he wrote, In furnishing a Government house, care should be taken to purchase substantial heavy furniture, which should always remain in its place, and form, as it were, a part of the house: such as could be handed down through a succession of Presidents, suited to the dignity and character of the nation. In the end, this sort of furniture is the most economical. The most respectable furniture to be seen in the government houses in Europe has been made for a century, although fashion has quite altered the forms of private furniture. The convenience, solidity, and usefulness of the public furniture has a decided preference.40

opposite and above

The newly restored fire screen was returned to the Blue Room in January 2020 after 161 years away from its place in the White House.

completed all necessary stitching by hand. Because of the stark visual contrast between how the Bellangé furniture appeared before restoration and after, we decided we needed to complete enough pieces to unveil them as a group rather than inserting them piecemeal into the room with unrestored pieces. Once the sofa, five armchairs, and two side chairs had been completed, they were installed, on September 20, 2018. One of the armchairs initially stood where the bergère had traditionally been placed, in the center of the bowed wall overlooking the South Grounds. The bergère rejoined the

The Bellangé suite has proven to be exactly what Lee and Monroe hoped it would be: durable and stylistically neutral enough to be of service to a long succession of presidents. The suite’s longevity despite heavy use and frequent redecorations has made its individual pieces some of the White House’s most valued treasures. The Bellangé suite no longer serves to establish U.S. legitimacy on the world stage; it now represents the rich history of a nation that has achieved global importance. As the suite continues to welcome guests in the Blue Room, we trust that its most recent refurbishment will not be its last.

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B O T H I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / W H I T E H O U S E C O L L E C T I O N

This view of the north side of the Blue Room captures the newly restored sofa and four armchairs. A restored side chair is seen below.

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B O T H I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / W H I T E H O U S E C O L L E C T I O N

This view of the north side of the Blue Room captures the newly restored sofa and four armchairs. A restored side chair is seen below.

white house history quarterly

B O T H I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / W H I T E H O U S E C O L L E C T I O N

A view of the south side of the Blue Room made in January 2019 shortly after the restored suite was unveiled, includes four armchairs and two side chairs. The restored bergĂ¨re (below) was returned to its place under the center window in May 2019. The decision to use a brighter gilding than that used during the late twentiethcentury restorations was based both on scientific analysis of the original gilding and on historical understanding of French gilding practices. It represents the suiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original finished appearance.

white house history quarterly

B O T H I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / W H I T E H O U S E C O L L E C T I O N

white house history quarterly

BRUCE WHITE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION / WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

NOTES

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A detail of the newly restored sofa, the only one of two of the original Bellangé suite sofas now in the White House collection.

William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 1:154.

2. [Joseph] Russell and [John] La Farge to James Monroe, September 15, 1817, Records of the House of Representatives, House Report 79, 18th Cong., 2nd sess., 1824–25, 160, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

City directory. The existence of an appropriate James Paton & Co. working in the city at the time suggests that Seale misinterpreted the period writing in the account. See 2:555nn6, 8. 22. Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 75138, no. 1-30, Record Group 217, National Archives. 23. Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 102509, Record Group 217, National Archives.

3. Russell and La Farge to Monroe, n.d., ibid., 164.

24. Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 136728, no. 20, Record Group 217, National Archives.

4. Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 37131, no. 3, Record Group 217, National Archives.

25. “Sales for a/c Com [Commissioner of ] Pub. [Public] Buildings by Jas. C. McGuire & Co.

5. For example, see Hans Huth, “The White House Furniture at the Time of Monroe,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, 29 (January 1946): 23–46; Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2014), 56–65; Leslie B. Jones, “James Monroe’s White House State Furniture à la Française,” White House History, no. 44 (Winter 2017): 28–39.

27. “Estimate No. 101.383,” May 10, 1961, prepared by Jansen Incorporated for The White House, object folder 1817.420.1 for the pier table, Office of the Curator, The White House (OCWH).

6. This argument is made most convincingly by Sylvain Cordier in Bellangé, ebenistes: Une histoire du goût au xixe siècle (Paris: Mare & Martin, 2012), 131–36. 7. Russell and La Farge to Monroe, n.d. 8. Sylvain Cordier, who completed his dissertation about and later published a monograph on Pierre-Antoine Bellangé, thinks Bellangé would have been considered within the top three to five cabinetmakers (menuisiers) working in Paris at the time that Russell and La Farge fulfilled the White House commission. Conversation with author, September 26, 2014. 9. Alexander Macomb to Jane Kennedy, November 6, 1825, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Free Library, quoted in Seale, President’s House, 1:154. 10. Thomas Hill Hubbard to Phebe Hubbard, January 3, 1818, Hubbard Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 11. “To Corn-Planter,” Washington Gazette, May 28, 1818. 12. Samuel F. B. Morse, journal entry for December 17, 1819, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, ed. Edward Lind Morse (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1973), 1:227. 13. John Taylor to John H. Bernard, January 5, 1823, Robb-Bernard Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va. 14. William Faux, Memorable Days in America: Being a Journal of a Tour to the United States (London: Printed for W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1823), 443. 15. “Inventory of Furniture in the President’s House Taken the 24th day of March 1825,” Records of the United States Senate, 19th Cong., 1st sess., National Archives. The fourteen chairs from the Bellangé suite not inventoried in the “Elliptical Drawing Room” are most likely to be either the “14 Elegant Gilt Green Silk bottomed Chairs” inventoried in the “Green drawing Room” or the “1 Doz. Gilt Chairs with Satin covers, much worn” and “2 Arm Chairs, Gilt with do.” inventoried in the “Third Room” on the Second Floor (today’s Treaty Room).

26. J. B. West, with Mary Lynn Kotz, Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), 240; “Historic Antique Pier Table Is Found in White House,” New York Times, April 15, 1961, 11.

28. “Bill #14170,” June 6, 1972, Thorp Brothers, to White House, OCWH. 29. Kellie Boss, “Electron Microscopy Report for White House Bellangé Gilded Furniture Suite,” November 17, 2015, Decorative Arts and Sculpture Conservation Department, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 30. The two portraits are those of Andrew Jackson painted c. 1830 by Ralph Earl in the collection of the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum and the 1822 portrait of James Monroe by John Vanderlyn in the collection of New York City Hall. 31. William McPherson, “DAR Won’t Yield to First Lady,” Washington Post, February 20, 1962, B4. 32. Xavier Bonnet identified the full name and correct spelling of the Parisian upholsterer “Laveissier” whom Russell and La Farge indicated had upholstered the Bellangé suite. 33. The same application and type of fabrics once existed on the seat back panel of White House armchair 1973.856.1, according to images and correspondence provided by the seller, the antiques dealer Peter Hill. This back panel is presumed to have been removed and discarded when this chair was sent to New York for restoration after 1972–73. Object folder 1973.856.1, OCWH. 34. Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 837131, no. 3, Record Group 217, National Archives. 35. Ibid. 36. Russell and La Farge to Monroe, n.d. Bonnet’s research led him to conclude that the Lyons firm of Dutillieu et Théoleyre was the most likely manufacturer of the original fabric for the White House’s suite. 37. The fabric design we chose is documented as catalog entry 76 in Jean Coural with Chantal Gastinel-Coural and Muriel Müntz de Raïssac, Paris, Mobilier national: Soieries Empire (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1980), 251–52. The furniture, which retains its 1811 upholstery, remains in the collection of the Château de Fontainebleau.

16. Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 75138, no. 1-30, Record Group 217, National Archives.

38. The fabric is object number 5216a-b in the Abegg-Stiftung collection.

17. “Inventory of Furniture &c in the President’s House, January 21st, 1849,” Records of the Former Commissioners of Public Buildings and Grounds of the District of Columbia, Letters Received, National Archives.

39. The fabric is object number 28097.1-2 in the Musée des Tissus collection. 40. William Lee to the Hon. B. Bassett, &c. &c. &c., February 24, 1818, published in “Statement of William Lee,” 5.

18. Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 102509, Record Group 217, National Archives. 19. “Sales for a/c Com [Commissioner of ] Pub. [Public] Buildings by Jas. C. McGuire & Co., Auction and Commission Merchants,” January 17, 1860, Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts, account 136728, Record Group 217, National Archives. 20. “Statement of William Lee, Esquire, Agent for Procuring Furniture for President’s House,” March 9, 1818, House Report 143 (Washington, D.C.: E. De Krafft, 1818), 4. 21. Longworth’s American Almanac: New-York Register and City Directory (New York: T. Longworth, 1837), 481. In The President’s House, Seale identifies the vendor as James Pators & Co., but there is no entry for this company in the 1837 New York

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