THE COLLECTION OF MRS. HAMILTON RICE AT MIRAMAR
A philanthropist and South American explorer of the Gilded Age, Mrs. Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice (1861-1937) amassed a singular collection of French decorative art across three celebrated homes designed by Horace Trumbauer. With her marriage in 1883 to the Philadelphia traction magnate, George D. Widener (1861-1912), she joined one of the country’s premier art collecting families. The superb paintings assembled by Peter A.B. Widener (1834-1915) and Joseph Widener (1872-1943), her father-in-law and brother-in-law, hung at Lynnewood Hall, their 110-room mansion in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and later formed the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Eleanor and George Widener summered in Newport beginning in 1904, and in 1911 purchased a lot overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on which to build a new estate. Trumbauer completed his plans for Miramar, a limestone petit palais in the French Neoclassical style, in March of 1912, just before the Wideners and their younger son, Harry, departed for a three-week trip to Europe. Their return passage was booked aboard the Titanic; George and Harry perished in the sinking, and only Eleanor survived. Despite the loss, she proceeded with the construction of the summer residence and hosted its opening ball, which the New York Times described as “the largest social entertainment of the Summer”, on 20 August 1915. On 6 October of the same year, she married her second husband, physician and Harvard professor Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, Jr., whom she would accompany on numerous South American expeditions, and with whom she would later construct a famed New York townhouse, her last commission from Trumbauer. See M. C. Kathrens, American Splendor: the Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, New York, 2002, pp. 191-201.
At Miramar, the present tables stood in the Grand Salon, located on the first floor and facing the ocean cliffs. Joseph Duveen was responsible for the interior decoration and furnishing of the residence, and sourced for this magnificent room a suite of white and gold boiserie in the Louis XVI style, from the Parisian firm of André Carlhian. Although the room has been described as the ‘Salon’ since Miramar’s construction, its large proportions align it more strictly with eighteenth-century galerie than a salon, and accordingly it served not only as home to Mrs. Widener Rice’s soirees, but also as a backdrop for her magnificent collections. The walls were hung with Gobelins tapestries from the collection of Sir Richard Wallace, and the ends of the room were fitted with shelves for her turquoise-ground Sèvres porcelain. On the floor was a palace-sized seventeenth-century carpet from the Red Fort. The console tables stood in the piers between the ocean-facing windows, and are recorded in an album of photographs preserved in the Carlhian library, today in the Getty Research Institute (accession no. 2017.R.32). Opposite them stood a pair of Louis XVI marquetry secrétaires by Roger Vandercruse, later sold Christie’s, New York, 22 October 2020, lot 182, which Mrs. Widener Rice appears to have transported between her New York and Newport homes.
According to Mrs. Widener Rice’s will, Miramar passed upon her death in 1937 to Dr. Rice in a lifetime tenancy, before ultimately being inherited, upon his death in 1956, by her two surviving children, George D. Widener, Jr. (1889-1971) and Eleanor Widener Dixon (1891-1966). The pair donated the mansion to Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island, as George Jr. made major donations of its artwork in 1957 to the National Gallery in Washington and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The tables were sold to French & Co. of New York, who sold them in March of 1958 to a Mrs. James B. Stuart.
THE COSTA DE BEAUREGARD PROVENANCE
In the inventory preserved in the Joseph Duveen archives, the present tables are recorded as “Formerly in the collection of the Count Costa de Beauregard". This may refer to any of four brothers from the noble Savoyard Costa de Beauregard family, based in Chambéry, each of whom held the title of Count in the latter nineteenth century: Armand-Marie-Henri-Olivier Costa de Beauregard (1838-1921); Gabriel-Marie-Paul Costa de Beauregard (1839-1901); Camille-Jean-Adolphe-Marie Costa de Beauregard (1841-1910); and Charles-Albert-Marie-Olivier Costa de Beauregard (1848-1870). Given that the second-youngest conducted a monastic life as an abbot, and the youngest died at 22 while serving in the Franco-Prussian War, the two elder brothers are presumably likelier to have been previous owners of the consoles.
The father of the four counts was the Marquis Pantaléon Costa de Beauregard, a historian, archaeologist and ornithologist who was a dedicated statesman in Savoie. While the region belonged to Kingdom of Sardinia, he served as a senior member of the Parliament of Turin and was a friend and aide to King Charles Albert. After the annexation of Savoie by France in 1860, however, he quickly allied himself with Emperor Napoleon III, becoming a commandeur of the Légion d'honneur. The family seat, quite possibly home to our tables, was their château in La Motte-Servolex, immediately northwest of Chambéry. The château, built in several phases in the second half of the eighteenth century, was acquired by the family in 1802 from Morand de Montfort, Salteur de Curtille, and sold in 1901 to the historian Théodore Reinach, who remodeled it in the Louis XIII style.
THE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION
The consoles, though securely of the Louis XVI style, may be of a non-Parisian origin. Among the curious details of their fabrication are the exceptional thickness of their rails, uncharacteristic of tables at such a refined scale. Even more curious is their combination of walnut, the primary timber in their manufacture, with the beechwood of the back rails. The overhanging moldings above the friezes are carved from the same block of timber as the carved friezes, meaning that an unusually substantial portion of a massive original block was carved away to create the upper rails. A North Italian origin, may indeed be possible. The delicacy of the carved ribbon-tied roses at the friezes invites comparisons to the Neoclassical furniture of Turin, where the Marquis Costa de Beauregard served in parliament. Curiously, the inventory in the Duveen archives describes the pair as "by Jacob”; the reasons behind this attribution have not been not recorded.
A notable parallel to their design is the famous giltwood suite supplied in 1789 to François-Gabriel Chappuis de Rosières (1763-1814), Président of the Franche Comté parliament, for his hôtel in Besançon in Southeast France by the architect Claude-Antoine Colombot (1747-1821). The suite employs similarly thick, rinceaux-carved friezes for its consoles of similarly small proportions, and is unusual in that its design, by the ornamental designer Richard de Lalonde (active 1780-1790), is still extant, now preserved in Berlin and reproduced in Die Französichen Zeichnungen der Kunstbibliotek Berlin, 402. HD2 3629. An example from this suite was sold Christie's, New York, 23 October 1998, lot 168, and a pair of very closely related consoles was sold Christie's, London, December 12, 2002, lot 30.
Although the original context for the present tables is unknown, clues nonetheless remain in their three distinct layers of decoration. The present grey-and-cream painting scheme sits atop two earlier layers of polychrome and gilding. A recent analysis of the paint and gilding reveals that the earliest scheme of decoration was a parcel gilding combined with blue painted decoration executed in a smalt and lead-white based pigment, which would have faded to grey by the time of their redecoration, sometime after the mid-nineteenth century. The grey and parcel-gilt decoration recorded in the early twentieth century by Joseph Duveen was presumably a refreshment in good faith of the decoration as it appeared at the time.
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