A String of Pearls in a Shoebox

In a radiantly decorated and appointed turn-of-the-century tea house on a Long Island estate, the vision of American artist and Elsie de Wolfe protégé Everett Shinn stands revealed.

Overlooking the formal Blue Pool Garden, the Tea House at Planting Fields in Oyster Bay, New York, is a picturesque structure that encompasses a trellised world where Mary (“Mai”) Rogers Coe held garden parties in the early twentieth century. Long attributed to Elsie de Wolfe, the Tea House remains a subject of fascination to design historians and archivists. De Wolfe’s presence is undeniably felt, but a lack of documentation belies claims of her close involvement.

William Robertson (W. R.) and Mai Coe, the couple who created Planting Fields, maintained scrupulous records of expenditures for their home. The Planting Fields Foundation Archives contain hundreds of ledger sheets—with painstaking notations in impeccable script—that divulge the logistics of the decoration and upkeep of a country estate. However, numerical records do not capture subjective aspects of the story—those ephemeral bits of history that are open to interpretation and are often bent to the will of a particular narrative.

Elsie de Wolfe’s name cannot be omitted from the narrative at Planting Fields. Yet, reconstructing the story based on the archival records redirects the spotlight to artist Everett Shinn, who, it becomes evident in the correspondence, orchestrated the design, with de Wolfe’s decoration of the trellis room at the Colony Club in Manhattan clearly its primary antecedent. How did de Wolfe’s style find its way into Shinn’s design? This is not a story about the paper trail but rather a closer look at Everett Shinn and the forces that propelled him to the Tea House commission.

Shinn moved along with the cultural currents at the turn of the twentieth century, first documenting street scenes for the New York World (1897), then exhibiting theatrical subjects with the Eight in the watershed show at the Macbeth Gallery (1908), and later emerging from the Ashcan school to the lure of the bright lights of the theater. Among his artist peers, he is one of only a few to delve into decorative work. According to Ira Glackens, the son of artist William Glackens, another member of the Eight: “I cannot imagine Henri, Luks, Sloan, or my father painting screens for Elsie de Wolfe.”

As an ambitious new arrival in New York City, Shinn formed relationships with several influential figures, the actress-turned-decorator de Wolfe and architect Stanford White among them, and they, in turn, connected him to patrons. In November 1899 de Wolfe exhibited five of Shinn’s pastels in her Irving Place salon. White, whom Shinn reported first meeting outside the Union League Club, where he admired the motif of an acrobatic figure on White’s ring (appealing to Shinn’s enduring interests in theatrical performance and design), arranged the artist’s first solo exhibition at Boussod, Valadon, and Company in 1900. The show included city scene pastels as well as portraits of de Wolfe, actress Julia Marlowe, and playwright Clyde Fitch.

De Wolfe was known for taking protégés under her wing. She knew that the key to creating her vision and supporting the enormity of her practice and efforts was to employ aspiring artists. In The House in Good Taste (1913), she wrote: “and if you haven’t a daughter or son, encourage the young artisan, your neighbor, who is trying to ‘find himself.’ Let him copy a few good old fixtures for you. They will cost no more than the gaudy vulgar fixtures that are sold in so many shops.” In letters now in the Shinn papers in the Archives of American Art, she urged the artist to visit a gallery displaying Piat-Joseph Sauvage’s grisaille work and “tell me what you think of it as décor” and to study Michael Angelo Pergolesi and Elisabeth Vigée le Brun drawings of eighteenth-century furniture at the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration (now the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum). She cautioned, “We must not repeat the same design on anything. It must be in harmony but not the same.” Like Shinn, Paul Chalfin, Tony Duquette, and James Amster all went on to leave their own marks inspired by de Wolfe’s sensibilities.

A pivotal moment in the artistic partnership between de Wolfe and Shinn occurred when White commissioned de Wolfe to design the interiors of the Colony Club, an elegant ladies’ club on Madison Avenue, in 1905. Shinn—under de Wolfe’s tutelage—painted panels in the private dining room with Louis XV–style flowers, ribbons, and scrollwork and decorated furniture for the bedrooms with eighteenth-century style designs.

During those early years at the turn of the century, Shinn worked on several projects for de Wolfe. Buoyed by this experience, he went on to receive many private commissions for decorations. By 1911 the Philadelphia Inquirer could report that he had “established his position as a decorator” with, among others, mural commissions for the Stuyvesant (now Belasco) Theater and Trenton City Hall.

During this time, Shinn also collaborated with the architectural firm of Walker and Gillette, who would design the farm buildings and the Coes’ Tudor Revival style main house at Planting Fields. Commissions included renderings for proposed concepts, decorative installations, and a portrait of Walker and Gillette partner A. Stewart Walker’s wife, decorator Sybil Kane Walker.

The story of Shinn’s involvement with the Tea House at Planting Fields can be traced to the spring of 1915. He was already an acquaintance of Mai Coe, as indicated by a print of his Dancer in a Tutu (1908) that he inscribed for her in 1914. Indeed, the Coes may have met Shinn as early as 1912, when the artist’s theater group, the Waverly Players, performed Hazel Weston, or More Sinned Against than Usual at A. Stewart Walker’s home on Madison Avenue, with the Coes in attendance. Shinn wrote, directed, and starred in the burlesque, which was later presented on the vaudeville stage at Keith and Proctor’s Fifth Avenue Theatre.

The Tea House originated as a garden house for James and Helen Byrne, the original owners of Planting Fields. After the Coes purchased the property in 1913, they engaged the firm of Guy Lowell and Andrew Sargent, and later Olmsted Brothers, to design the landscape and gardens. The little garden house, attributed to the architect Grosvenor Atterbury, who had also designed the Byrnes’ main house, was a crucial part of the plan. In 1915 the Coes had it elevated and clad in the same overburnt brick as the main house and other estate buildings. Shortly thereafter Shinn was enlisted to design the interior.

Shinn covered the walls and ceiling in de Wolffian blue-green treillage, with lunettes of whimsical pastoral scenes at either end of the room. It’s also likely that through de Wolfe Shinn knew the best craftsmen in town to carry out his vision. In letters to W. R. Coe, he documents the endless array of details and arduous tasks required to create the cohesive jewel of a space: he coordinated with the carpenter, the electrician, and with the Brooklyn-based William H. Johnson Company for the mantelpiece and marble facings. He specified the polychrome floral light fixtures, painted copper andirons, decorative fender, and fireplace tools from the Sterling Bronze Company. In addition, he hand-painted the suite of furniture fabricated by Park Avenue decorators Paul Schleich and John Smeraldi—a settee, four arm- and two side chairs, and an octagonal table—with theatrical gold-tasseled curtains, fan-shaped motifs, and flowers. The silk for the curtains was supplied by Cheney Brothers in Connecticut. Writing about the Tea House in Arts and Decoration in 1915, artist and critic Guy Pène de Bois stated: “Every bit of the work on it, from the painted copper andirons to the alabaster basket lamps hanging from the ceiling is his.”

Shinn wasn’t satisfied with the interior alone. He had greater ambitions for the exterior of the Tea House and, in a letter of May 17, 1915, wrote Coe that “it seems now as if we had a string of pearls in a shoebox but with the new idea the outside will be as beautiful as the inside.” Known for making models of his stage sets, he created a model of the Tea House with an elevated roofline adorned with exterior murals and surrounded by an extravagant pergola. Despite his persistence—he shipped the model to the Coes for their approval—this grand vision never came to fruition.

In the interior, however, Everett Shinn created the kind of dream place his experience and artistic partnership with de Wolfe had nurtured. As he wrote of the role of the artist as decorator: “He is not so much painting a picture as completing a house, an interior or a façade. Perhaps he is embellishing a piano case or a pipe organ panel—or just painting a sign. It matters not what or how, his business is to decorate—to put ideas and visible beauty wherever it will do the most good.”

MARIE PENNY is the Michael D. Coe Archivist for the Planting Fields Foundation.