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"Ventfort Hall: English or American Country House?" - July 23, 2008
LENOX - Veteran Ventfort Hall guide and University of St. Andrews graduate Nannina Gilder will give a visual presentation on “Ventfort Hall: English or American Country House?” on Friday, August 22, at 4 p.m. She will present her lecture at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum and a Victorian Tea will accompany it.
Gilder will show evidence that during the 19th century Britain brought about a revival of the Tudor and Jacobean manor houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Their rambling asymmetrical plans were more convenient to the Victorians than the strict symmetry that had been favored in the 18th century.
Gilder has guided at the Lenox mansion since it first opened for tours in December, 2000. She recently graduated from the University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland, with a first class degree in art history, and received the O.E. Saunders Memorial Prize for her dissertation, “Ventfort Hall: A Synthesis of British and American Architecture.” She is the daughter of George and Cornelia Brooke Gilder.
Reservations may be made for the lecture by calling Ventfort Hall at 413-637-3206. Admission is $15 for nonmembers and $12 for members. The mansion is located at 104 Walker Street in Lenox. |
A more complete summary of what the talk will be.
The 19th century in Britain brought about a revival of the Tudor and Jacobean manor houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Their rambling asymmetrical plans were more convenient to the Victorians than the strict symmetry which had been favored in the previous century. So the aristocrat began building the style of his ancestors, and the plutocrat in the style that he wished his ancestors had been capable of. The trend made its way across the ocean, and in the last few decades of the century manor houses in the British style were being built in the American countryside. In 1891 the Morgan family, whose matriarch was Sarah Spencer Morgan, the sister of the juggernaut banker J. Pierpont Morgan, began a summer “cottage” in this tradition, Ventfort Hall in Lenox.
But are revivals able to cross space as well as time and remain intact, or does a style fundamentally change when it has been carried across oceans? Americans are often faulted for lacking our own culture, for taking wholesale the artistic and architectural innovations of others, but is that true? Ventfort Hall was built in a British tradition, but it also in many ways it exemplifies the American country house of its day. What are the differences between a British manor house and an American summer cottage, and how does Ventfort Hall manage in many ways to be both?
An Englishman may find [American villas] mere copies of his own designs … We must, however, remember that for a style to be progressive it must be modified according to its own requirements, and not by wholesale borrowing from others. – Arthur Rotch, Architect of Ventfort Hall
| | from: Nannina Gilder | on: 07-24-2008 |
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