Eli Wilner and Company Master Framers

The Arts and Crafts Movement

At the close of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement brought heightened interest in individual frame design and heralded a move away from mass-produced, cast composition frames. American artists such as Hermann Dudley Murphy (1867–1945) and Charles Prendergast (1863–1948), who were themselves skilled craftsmen and carvers, began to make their own frames and to receive orders for custom work from other artists. The latter part of Beaux’s career parallels the American Arts and Crafts Movement, which produced some of its most distinctive frame designs in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

The design sources for Arts and Crafts period frames make for an eclectic blend. They include Italian, French, and Spanish frames from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Motifs were combined freely, and the precise details of early frames were sometimes given a more organic and sinuous surface treatment in interpretations that reflected Art Nouveau at the close of the nineteenth century.

The Reverend Matthew Blackburne Grier of 1892 (cat. 37) is framed in an early version of an Arts and Crafts frame that is based on Italian cassetta designs of the Renaissance. A cast design of sausage-like spindles and reels on the inner edge of the Grier frame flanks a wide, flat frieze of fine cast reeding. The frame’s outer edge, now missing, probably was composed of a small, cast Classical pattern. This simple cassetta style was popular in the 1890s as an alternative to the more traditional and fussy Barbizon-style frames with rows of cast acanthus leaf and other ornament on a large ogee (an elongated reverse or S-shaped curve) or quarter-round profile. This frame bears a label on its back from Earles’ Galleries in Philadelphia. A similar frame appears on the portrait of Mary Rodman Foxof 1892 (fig. 77), where the flat, reeded frieze is bordered by a cast pattern of oak leaves, acanthus leaves, and shells on an ogee profile on its outer edge and by a modified spindle-and-reel pattern on its inner edge.

Due to their highly individual character, picture frames designed by the renowned Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White (1853–1906) represent a distinct departure from the most popular contemporary revival styles of the period. Starting in the mid-1880s, White, a partner in the firm of McKim, Mead and White, designed frames for artists whose work he supported and whom he counted as friends, including Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851–1938), Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925), and Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921). Though White took requests for frame designs from his artist friends seriously, he viewed designing as an avocation and never charged for his designs. White’s frames inspired imitators, and some of his designs were adapted and manufactured by Arts and Crafts firms such as the Newcomb-Macklin Company of Chicago and New York (founded 1871) after his death in 1906. Thus, frames that suggest White’s designs may also appear on paintings by artists who had no known relationship with him during his lifetime. Beaux may have had an indirect connection to the architect through her close friends Richard Watson Gilder and Helena de Kay Gilder, as White had remodeled their homes in New York and on Cape Cod.

As a leading architect of the American Renaissance cultural movement, White was encyclopedic in his knowledge of Italian Renaissance and Baroque architectural motifs and could combine them with an unerring sense of harmony and proportion. Frames that White saw and collected during his European travels served as models for a number of his own designs. Some were fairly literal reproductions of antique frames, but more often White combined seemingly disparate motifs into daring yet harmonious designs. The frame for Mrs. George W. Childs Drexel (Mary Irick) of 1894(fig. 78), almost certainly a White design, displays Renaissance motifs on a broad reverse ogee profile. The profile itself finds its origin in seventeenth-century Italian frames.

This frame bears a distinctive Stanford White design trait in the form of an openwork “grille” of imbricated (overlapped like scales) fretwork mesh on its outer edge, suspended over a gilded background for a subtle effect of depth. This grille is made of gilded plaster cast over a wire armature. The upper edge of the molding near the painting bears a typical White motif in the form of a course of large, imbricated laurel leaves and berries with crossed straps at the centers, lending it an architectural feel.

The frame for Man with a Cat (fig. 79), probably inspired by White’s designs, reflects seventeenth-century Dutch and Italian sources. The Italian Baroque–style reverse profile of polished figured oak is overlaid with a series of moldings. The use of polished wood rather than gilded gesso is unusual for a White design. The frame’s inner edge bears a reeded cushion molding of a type that was used in frames designed by both Whistler and Degas. Its scooped outer cove is bordered on the outer edge of the profile by beaded moldings, including one with an outset, or crossetted, contour in the corners, which overlay the cove in a manner reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch frames.

Some works by Beaux from the 1890s to the 1920s were framed in distinctive interpretations of seventeenth-century Northern European “cabinet” frames, with a flat “plate” profile overlaid with crossetted corners, gadrooned interior moldings, and outlining in both wave and ripple moldings. Although the most elaborate of these frames are actually of Flemish and German origin, they are more frequently called “Dutch frames.” A black or dark brown stain allows the grain of the oak carcass to show through as a subtle textural element, as there is no gesso layer. This type of frame was also available gilded overall, unlike its dark seventeenth-century models. The black Dutch frame is a daring choice in this period, when gilded frames still predominated. Dutch-style frames in black were also used at this time on Western “nocturne” scenes by Frederic Remington (1861–1909), and polished fruitwood examples were often used by Dutch-inspired trompe l’oeil still-life painters like William Michael Harnett (1848–1892) and John F. Peto (1854–1907) from the 1880s to early 1900s.

The dark brown frame on New England Woman of 1895 (fig. 80) effectively sets off the blue and lavender tones in the white drapery, while echoing the dark notes of the table and the sitter’s hair in the painting’s otherwise high-keyed palette. The wide moldings, almost architectural in character, act as a sort of window through which we view this intimate interior scene. An installation photograph of the Sixty-fifth Annual Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1895 shows this frame to be original to the painting.

In Sita and Sarita (cat. 41), a similar frame on a somewhat more eccentric composition echoes the color of the black cat and the sitter’s dark hair. The dark frame also allows the somber background colors to be legible. A bright gold frame would have overpowered the subtle interplay of dark tones in the upper portion of the composition and made them appear as an undifferentiated dark mass. Thus, the dark Dutch frame works equally well with both the brightly colored draperies and the dark passages of these paintings. The frame for a replica of Sita and Sarita (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), which Beaux painted around 1921, is identical in design to that on the original painting. The portrait Mrs. Thomas A. Scott (Anna Riddle) (cat. 51) is framed in a narrow, black, scooped molding with a gadrooned edge that recalls simpler seventeenth-century Dutch frames. An installation photograph of the painting in the Sixty-seventh Annual Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1898 shows it in this frame.