Author: Craven, Wayne
Title: Stanford White: Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiquities
Description: New York, Columbia University Press, 2005. Hardcover. black boards w/ emerald spine printing. 264 pgs w/ bw illustrations. multi-color illustrated dustjacket w/ white printing. "..Craven also offers a vivid portrait of the sweeping social and cultural changes taking place in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He places White's work as an interior decorator within the context of the lives and society of the nouveaux riches who built unprecedented fortunes during the Industrial Revolution. Rejecting the dominant middle-class tastes and values of the United States, the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Astors, Paynes, Mackays, and other wealthy New York families saw themselves as the new aristocracy and desired the prestige and trappings accorded to Old World nobility. Stanford White fulfilled their hunger for aristocratic recognition by adorning their glamorous Fifth Avenue mansions and Long Island estates with the sculptures, stained-glass windows, coats of arms, and carved fireplaces of the European past. Interior decorators such as White did more than just buy single pieces for these families. They purchased entire rooms from palazzos, chateaux, villas, nunneries, and country houses; had them dismantled; and shipped—both furnishings and architectural elements—to their American clients. Through Stanford White's activities, Craven uncovers the mostly, but not always, legal business of dealing in antiquities, as American money entered and changed the European art market."--Amazon. VG/VG (scuffs, scratches to boards. spine top bumped, crinkled & rubbed w/ rubbing to tail. dustjacket scuffed & scratched; rubbing to spine ends; small stain to front) .

Keywords: Biography / Autobiography, Stanford White ; White, Stanford ; ;


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