They were big, brawny, and bold. The near-identical sofas in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA)-once celebrated as rare examples of gilded furniture from the shop of John Henry Belter-were so visually pushy that the former curator of American arts, David Park Curry, dubbed them the “Tarleton Twins.” Today, following several years of research and an extensive conservation campaign, the sofas have emerged with an intriguing history and each with a distinctive look (Figs. 3, 4).
The fate of the sofas was among the decisions awaiting Sylvia Yount, when she became VMFA’s Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art in 2007. The museum was in the midst of a major expansion, and the sofas were slated for the upcoming reinstallation. But a pending issue loomed. With Curry’s earlier encouragement, Kathy Gillis, the museum’s senior conservator of sculpture and decorative arts, and independent conservator F. Carey Howlett had completed microscopic cross-sectional analyses of the sofas and discovered a resin finish layer beneath the gilding, suggesting that the gold coatings had been applied some appreciable time after the pieces were produced.1 The resolution: remove the gilding from one sofa, thereby revealing its original rosewood surface as conceived in the mid-nineteenth century by Belter, and restore the gilded surface of the other sofa, preserving its appearance as enjoyed by Gilded Age owners in the early twentieth century.2 This painstaking intervention, now successfully completed, has provided a dramatic twenty-first-century chapter in the sofas’ long, curious story.
When the sofas arrived at VMFA in 1954 without shop labels or early provenance documentation, their age, style, and complex mode of construction strongly supported their attribution to Belter. The discovery of a fragment of a German-language newspaper fused between plies of wood on one sofa provided a legible printed date of 1848-contemporaneous with Belter. That talented émigré, first listed as a furniture maker in the 1844 New York City directory, came to prominence during a burgeoning market in revival styles. Among competing workshops, only Belter committed himself solely to the “Modern French” manner-today better known as rococo revival. By 1850 he and his craftsmen had taken the curvilinear mode to new extremes. Key to their success was the use of laminated wood, typically six to eight layers of thin rosewood fused together. While Belter did not invent the process, he patented a method of alternating layers with perpendicular grains that produced strong frames capable of withstanding the piercing and deep carving that brought him renown.3 Whether purchased together directly from the Belter shop or later matched by an owner with an eye for symmetry, the sofas make a striking pair. Each measuring nearly eight feet wide, they feature similar tri-arch backs defined by undulating frames of carved cornucopias sprouting grapes, leaves, seedpods, and flowers. Their most obvious difference is the floral decoration atop each crest rail: one features a bouquet of roses and the other a basket of various flowers (see Figs. 1, 3a, 4a). The latter sofa is remarkably similar to a pair in a documented Belter suite in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Described on the furniture maker’s 1855 invoice as featuring an “Arabasket” design, each sofa was itemized at $175-about $4,500 today.4 Clearly, purchasing such elaborate furnishings required substantial wealth.
There is no question that John Roll McLean (1848-1916), owner of the sofas at the turn of the twentieth century, had means. The Ohio native made an immense fortune through investments in real estate, utility companies, and as owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post. In 1899 he relocated permanently to Washington, D.C., with his wife and son and soon commissioned John Russell Pope to design a Georgian revival mansion at Friendship, his sprawling estate off WisconsinAvenue. Just as that building was completed in 1903, the multimillionaire also hired the architect to build a Renaissance revival palazzo at 1500 I Street in the heart of the city. According to his daughter-in-law, Evalyn, the intended purpose of the massive showplace was “for entertaining, nothing else.”5
After the I Street mansion was completed in 1907, McLean hired Frances Benjamin Johnston to document the residence in a series of photographs, and her images provide the earliest surviving record of the VMFA sofas (see Fig. 5). Enhanced by oversized pillows, they stand at the center of the so-called Old Gallery, facing opposite directions, with a rectangular table between them.6 It is curious that McLean, whose birth year matches the scrap of paper lodged in one sofa, would so prominently display furnishings of a then-outmoded style. Whether keepsakes from affluent parents or recent acquisitions to help fill the cavernous gallery, the sofas were already gilded when Johnston photographed them.7 The luxurious treatment helped the American works blend more harmoniously with McLean’s collection of antique French furnishings. Such eclectic mixing is further documented in a 1911 article in Architectural Record, which notes the new mansion’s “self-assertive assortment of incidental furnishings and trappings.”8
Following McLean’s death in 1916, his only child, Edward Beale “Ned” McLean (1889-1941), gained access to his father’s vast fortune and properties.9 Keeping the I Street residence and its contents intact, the younger McLean and his wife, Evalyn Walsh McLean, far surpassed his parents’ tradition of grand entertainment. During the Jazz Age, Ned and Evalyn-Colorado gold-mine heiress and owner of the Hope Diamond-hosted countless functions for the city’s social and political elite.10 Among them was a banquet given in 1921 to honor President Warren G. Harding and various diplomats who gathered for an international arms conference. In her memoirs, Evalyn recalled the evening as a triumph. “That was the night,” she wrote, “Alice [Roosevelt] Longworth sat on a gilt sofa between Senator Borah and Balfour.”11
In 1932 Evalyn arranged herself on one of the Belter sofas for a formal portrait made by Underwood and Underwood, a commercial company that provided news bureau photographs of well-known people and places. Posing in regal splendor, she wears an ermine-trimmed gown, bejeweled tiara, and her signature Hope Diamond pendant (Fig. 2). While the appearance of Evalyn’s famous gemstone would have been obligatory for the shoot, she no doubt selected both costume and furnishings to maximize the aura of glamour.
At the time, this picture of radiant prosperity belied Evalyn’s growing difficulties in making million-dollar ends meet. Locked in a bitter and ultimately unresolved divorce dispute, she and Ned had vacated the I Street residence. While he traveled abroad, she moved with their children-and the Belter sofas-to Friendship.12 Following her husband’s bankruptcy and subsequent death in a Maryland sanatorium in 1941, Evalyn moved her household one final time. At a mansion at Wisconsin Avenue and R Street, the indomitable socialite continued to host elaborate entertainments until her death in 1947. There, the following year, the sofas were sold with thousands of her other possessions at a seven-day public auction.13
On May 18, 1948, a Washington Post article announced: “At Fancy Prices: McLean Rococo Treasures Went to Millionaire Texans, Washington Housewives.” Bidding on the final day was Bessye “Polly” Morrison (1895-1987), not a housewife but the owner of the Gralyn Hotel on N Street. The widowed proprietress won the pair of sofas, listed in the auction catalogue as “Carved Giltwood Upholstered Settees” by Belter. The lot entry included the disclaimer, “covering as is.” The deteriorating cut velvet fabric-at least the third set of covers at that point in the sofas’ history14-seems not to have deterred Morrison, a passionate antiquarian nicknamed the “Mayor of N Street” for her preservation efforts.15 Six years later, however, Morrison was ready to part with her prizes. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, months away from opening a new wing, was a willing recipient.16 In September 1954 the gilded sofas-reduced to their muslin under-upholstery-entered VMFA’s permanent collection. Immediately, director Leslie Cheek ordered their quick restoration, which included touching up areas of gold leaf and having them outfitted in new show covers of red silk damask. In late October the museum celebrated its first expansion; as promised their donor, the restored sofas had taken their places in the nineteenth-century American section-not as decorative arts objects, however, but as gallery furniture (Fig. 7).
For the next two decades, visitors blithely perched on the Belter sofas while viewing paintings on the walls. In the years preceding the national Bicentennial celebration, however, growing interest in American decorative arts prompted museum officials to reconsider the pair. They were promoted from gallery seating to featured objects, and in May 1978 then-director Peter Mooz highlighted the “exceedingly rare” gilded work by Belter in an article about VMFA’s American furniture for The Magazine Antiques.17 The remarkable sofas remained on exhibition until 2005, when the galleries were cleared in preparation for the museum’s fifth and largest expansion.
During the construction phase of the new James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin wing, the Belter sofa with the Arabasket motif was selected as a visual anchor in a small thematic exhibition titled Dazzle. In preparation, the conservation staff cleaned the piece, removed areas of acrylic and bronze paint, and in-painted and in-gilded where needed. At the opening of the McGlothlin wing five years later, the restored sofa went on display in the new American antebellum gallery. Its mate-still undergoing extensive treatment-would take its place in a planned rotation.
Returning the second Belter sofa to its mid-nineteenth-century appearance proved to be a complex, multiyear process.18 Inch by inch, Gillis and her staff removed layers of gold leaf, bole, gesso, and stray patches of bronze paint without disturbing the original resin varnish beneath. Hidden for over a century, the finely figured rosewood eventually emerged, revealing Belter’s characteristic layered laminations (see Fig. 6). A new varnish was applied in areas where the original finish had been removed during the gilding process, and an application of wax enhanced the remnants of the original finish coat, deepening the wood’s rich natural colors.
The museum commissioned specialist Jennifer A. Zemanek to restore the sofa’s upholstery. After securing internal layers of cotton batting and horsehair, she reinforced select areas with additional foundation. Last, she created a new show cover, attaching it using a minimally invasive procedure. The silk damask, selected in consultation with Susan J. Rawles, VMFA’s assistant curator of American decorative art, is the Lullingstone pattern by the Gainsborough Silk Weaving Company (see Fig. 8). Matching the fabric’s deep blue shade, Scalamandré produced the silk cord and braided trim-the latter custom designed from a photograph of extant Belter upholstery in a private collection.19
With their distinctive appearances, the two sofas embody not only the extraordinary craftsmanship of John Henry Belter, but also represent sequential chapters in an absorbing 165-year story. Taking turns on view, they draw ongoing admiration and attention-and await new chapters to come.
ELIZABETH L. O’LEARY is an independent art historian and retired associate curator of American art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.
KATHY Z. GILLIS is senior conservator of sculpture and decorative arts at the VMFA.
1 For information about the microscopy and other conservation treatments on the sofas, including upholstery treatment by Jennifer A. Zemanek, see VMFA conservation and curatorial files, acc. nos. 54.15.1/2 (roses) and 54.15.2/2 (basket). Specifics were also discussed by Kathy Z. Gillis in “A Tale of Two Sofas: Belter Furniture at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” paper presented to the Wooden Artifacts Group, June 3, 2011, Philadelphia, proceedings forthcoming in Wooden Artifacts Postprints, American Institute for Conservation. 2 Catherine Hoover Voorsanger suggested that the gilding on the VMFA sofas was a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century addition in “‘Gorgeous Articles of Furniture’: Cabinetmaking in the Empire City,” in Art and the Empire City, New York, 1825-1861 (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000), p. 321, n.216. We also thank Virginia Commonwealth University professor Charles E. Brownell for his insights. In consultation with several specialists-in particular Marijn Manuels, conservator of furniture and wooden objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who generously shared Belter expertise and documents-VMFA arrived at the restoration plan to interpret two distinct eras. 3 For more on Belter, see Marvin D. Schwartz, et al., The Furniture of John Henry Belter and the Rococo Revival (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1981). 4 Belter’s September 1855 invoice is for a ten-piece suite. One of the Arabasket sofas is pictured in Nineteenth-Century America: Furniture and Other Decorative Arts (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970), No. 126. Price conversion figures from westegg.com/inflation. 5 James B. Garrison, Mastering Tradition: The Residential Architecture of John Russell Pope (Acanthus Press, New York, 2004), pp. 49-56; Evalyn Walsh McLean with Boyden Sparkes, Father Struck It Rich (1936; reprint Arno Press, NewYork, 1975), p. 187. 6 Johnston’s photographs are in the Library of Congress. Some are published alongside a floor plan of the mansion in Garrison, Mastering Tradition, pp. 49-56. The possibility that the VMFA Belter sofas were the ones photographed by Johnston was proposed by Ed Polk Douglas to David Park Curry in a letter of December 16, 1991. 7 The I Street mansion was razed in 1939. Edward T. Folliard, “McLeans to Sell ‘Party’ Home in 2-Million Deal,” Washington Post, November 24, 1938, p. X-1. 8 Herbert Croly, “Recent Works of John Russell Pope,” Architectural Record, vol. 29 (June 1911), p. 462; interior views picturing one of the Belter sofas, pp. 456, 458. 9 McLean, Father Struck It Rich, p. 227; “E. B. Mclean Wins Estate Control,” The Fourth Estate, September 1, 1917, p. 10. 10 As details about their events filled the society columns, whispered tales also spread about President Harding and a circle of close friends defying Prohibition at Ned’s private parties held at I Street and at the “love nest,” a nearby dwelling connected by an underground passage. Formerly John Roll McLean’s office and the site of Elsie de Wolfe’s first interior decorating commission, that town house was leased by Ned in the early 1920s to U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty and an assistant. Daugherty was later implicated in the Teapot Dome Scandal, which tarnished Ned’s reputation as well. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, pp. 187-188, 227, 239, 278; Laton McCartney, The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country (Random House, New York, 2008), pp. 28, 63-64; “Mrs. Evalyn W. McLean, Owner of Hope Diamond, Dies in Capital,” New York Times, April 27, 1947, pp. 1, 60. 11 McLean, Father Struck It Rich, pp. 262-263. 12 Ibid., pp. 293-295, 308; “E. B. M’Lean Sued For Maintenance,” Washington Post, November 8, 1930, p. 1; Folliard, “McLeans to Sell ‘Party’ Home in 2-Million Deal.” 13 “E. B. McLean, Former Post Publisher, Dies,” Washington Post, July 28, 1941, p. 1; “Evalyn Walsh McLean,” ibid., April 29, 1947, p. 6; The Estates of Evalyn Walsh McLean and J. R. McLean, Meredith Galleries, Washington, D.C., May 8, 10-15, 1948, lots 2780 and 2781, sofa illustrated on p. 223. 14 The cut-velvet fabric shown in both the 1932 portrait of Evalyn and the 1948 auction catalogue is different from the show covers pictured in Johnston’s 1907 photographs. Those earlier covers were likely put on after the furniture was gilded; before that there would have been the original covers and possibly one other replacement. 15 Ruth Wagner, “Antiques Are Her Favorite Crop,” Washington Post, May 8, 1960, p. F-15. For reasons presently unknown, Polly Morrison believed that the sofas were purchased for the Lincoln White House, a notion put to rest by White House curator Lorraine Pearce in a letter to Leslie Cheek, June 26, 1962. 16 Muriel B. Christison to Mrs. Hamilton Farnham Morrison, April 20, 1954. 17 R. Peter Mooz and Carolyn J. Weekley, “American Furniture at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” The Magazine Antiques, vol. 113, no. 5 (May 1978), p. 1061. 18 In addition to conservators and consultants named in the article, other team members assisting with one or both sofas were contracted specialist Sandy Jensen; conservation technicians Cheryl Sumner and Heather Logue; and volunteer Benjamin Weitz. Photo documentation was made by Talitha Dadonna and Jennifer Bridges. 19 The Gainsborough commission was facilitated through Belfry Historic Consultants. Susan J. Rawles designed the custom braid following consultation with Nancy Britton, upholstery conservator, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
