In the early twentieth century, when monogrammed and monotone white damask ruled the tables of the American upper crust, the parti-colored innovations of Marshal Fry arrived to shake up the scene.
“Only an expert in crochet, brought up in a French convent, would be able to do those corners,” Marshal Fry (1878–1965) wrote to Henry Francis du Pont on August 19, 1926. Although he was referring to the crochet inserts added to a lace tablecloth, his appraisal applies equally to these napkins. All the Fry linens are unlabeled—the fineness of the workmanship was considered by both seller and buyer to be a signature in itself. Except as noted, the objects illustrated are in the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, Delaware; photographs are by Nat Caccamo.
Besides founding museums and having lots of money, what did Abby Rockefeller, a strict Baptist; Harry du Pont, an introverted aesthete; and the ebullient businesswoman Marjorie Merriweather Post have in common? As it turns out, linen closets piled with a rainbow selection of Marshal Fry napkins and placemats. In mid-twentieth-century America, Fry was who you called if you took entertaining seriously. Rockefeller, du Pont, and Post did. Today, the only identified linens are the ones he made for du Pont between 1919 and 1961. Inspired by schoolgirl samplers and displaying the fine needlework of refugees of the Greco-Turkish War, these are in the collection of Winterthur, the museum du Pont founded in 1951.
A prominent New York-based ceramist, teacher, and American impressionist painter, Fry had a curious career. Well known in the first decade of the twentieth century, he gave up landscapes for tablescapes during World War I and plunged into obscurity. An arts and crafts professional who professed to help the Everyman, Fry nonetheless advertised in the tony Social Directory of Southampton, and the prices for his handiwork were so high that only millionaires could afford them. In the 1920s and ’30s Fry’s client list also included heiresses Millicent Rogers (oil); Ailsa Mellon Bruce (banking); and Dorothy Payne Whitney (finance). As the nineteenth-century artist William Morris lamented about his own life, “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich” led to the implosion of Fry’s art career.
The early American dining room in H. F. du Pont’s 1926 Southampton summer house, Chestertown, in a period photograph in the Winterthur Archives.
Fry’s crusade to end the tyranny of the white damask tablecloth began auspiciously. In 1916 three of his artful assemblages headlined a well-publicized Keramic Society exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. This somewhat surprising venue was available because of a perceived connection between the institution’s displays of “primitive art” and Fry’s brilliant hues (yellow, lavender, apricot, coral, emerald green). Fry combined linens that he made with vibrant European pottery and candlesticks that he collected. His intention to free Americans from outdated dining conventions by using vivid color on the table seems absurd in today’s oversaturated world, but contemporary commentators approved of and piled onto Fry’s radical bandwagon. The Christian Science Monitor hailed Fry’s work in the show as “an awakener . . . the first of its kind,” while a book published that same year titled The New Interior declared that Fry “emancipated” the dining room from the “white elephant” in the middle of the room, a phrase lifted from the April 4 New York Times review. The Times reviewer praised Fry’s table settings, ending with a convoluted sentence expressing solidarity with Native Americans.
Fry made it hard to buy his linens. Although he occasionally had some in stock to sell, he usually insisted potential customers bring him a sample plate and dining table dimensions. With these in hand, he would make paper patterns into the size and shape of the custom-made napkins, tablecloths, or placemats. He would harmonize the colors of these with the plate and his recommended glassware and flowers. Only after approval by the client would Fry cut, dye, and finish the pre-woven fabrics. Commission to completion took months, sometimes years. “Our work is so exceedingly simple,” Fry wrote to du Pont, “that it would seem as if no especial creative effort would be required to plan the schemes, but it is really the simplicity that makes it so difficult to achieve anything satisfactory.”
Fry dyed fabrics to create table linens that would harmonize with the plates of his customers. This arrangement is from the 2023 Yuletide Tour at Winterthur.
He designed the crochet edging and monogram, then farmed the work out. Though sending material abroad created delays, he would sometimes employ needleworkers in Marseilles, France. At home he depended on Catherine, the widow of one of his two older brothers. A French-Italian Catholic from the cosmopolitan Greek port of Smyrna (present-day Izmir, Turkey), she lived with her brother-in-law and did his fine sewing. Fry and his sister-in-law moved with the season, wintering in a series of apartments in the outer boroughs of New York City and summering in a large studio in Southampton.
In the early 1920s, Fry was swept up by colonial revival fever: “Nothing in this world has ever given me the joy as has my slight venture into Americana.” The jewel tones of nineteenth-century glass goblets from Sandwich, Massachusetts, stimulated some of his best work as did schoolgirl samplers, which he used as a color guide for dyeing, and copied the cross-stitches for monograms. He fashioned new creations from (close your eyes if you are a textile conservator) sliced-up antique homespun sheets, patchwork bedcovers, quilted skirts, and checked remnants. The Americana formula dovetailed with the tastes of Long Island’s rich. But Fry struggled with success and delays continued.
Blue-green painted table and chairs set with Fry’s own linens in the dining room of Wayside, his Southampton house, as published in the December 1923 issue of House and Garden. Redecorated by Fry after his conversion to Americana, this room was part of the 1911–1912 remodeling by society architect Aymar Embury II (1880–1966). During the summers, Fry would rent Wayside and he and his sister-in-law Catherine (1875–1948) lived and worked in a studio called Meadowcot on Hill Street in Southampton.
Fry tried to control his products even after they were sold. Aware that his customers seldom did their own laundry, he wrote cleaning and storage instructions for the household staff. Every item in an order came with stiff cardboard templates and the warning that linens “should never be piled, one upon another, without the cardboards in between.” While allowing that the “usual laundress” could wash, dry (“in the shade”), and iron the napkins, his laboriously constructed table mats required more delicate treatment. Spot cleaning was recommended, and ironing discouraged (it spoiled the shape). Post took his counsel so seriously that late in life she announced to a puzzled audience at the National Women’s Democratic Club in Washington, DC, that her placemats had not been washed in forty years.
Help arrived in the form of his sister-in-law’s relatives, who had been displaced when Smyrna burned during the Greco-Turkish War. “Our home was being made so desperately unhappy in
consequence,” Fry wrote. “I felt there was nothing for me to do but to invest a large share of my principal and bring these people to America.” That winter, thirteen refugees from the Aegean coast, speaking French, Italian, and Greek but little English, lived on Fry’s Southampton property. Three of them were experienced in fileting, crochet, and embroidery, so Fry employed them on his overdue commissions. The “almost primitive” cross-stitch destined for the tables of prosperous Americans must have been a surprise to the needleworkers, accustomed as they were to more lavish ornamentation. They adapted quickly, however, to the spare decoration that American “good taste” allowed. Thanks to their skills, Fry completed his commissions on time. Some of the workers would remain in his employ for decades, including Catherine’s sister, Mary Mainetty and her daughter, Stella (1902–1971, who, after Fry’s sister-in-law’s death in 1948, become his chief embroiderer.
A miniature Italian garden dinner table constructed by Fry for the 1916 table settings exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, intended to demonstrate that color and formality were not in opposition. Organizing white, oyster, and lavender linens, sweet-peas, and porcelain on a blue-painted table, Fry wrote that his compositions were meant to “startle then delight.” The black-and-white images published in the July 1916 issue of Keramic Studio lack the vivacity of the original display.
Du Pont was equally sympathetic. Around the time of Fry’s death in 1965, an admonishing paragraph was added to a letter du Pont wrote to his executors: “The colored mats and napkins are not to be sent to a public laundry. With careful washing they have kept their colors for many years. I do not want them spoiled. They were made by Marshal Fry of Southampton and are in themselves well worth preserving.” As no doubt Fry would have wished, this document, read after du Pont’s own death in 1969, was the basis for a memorial collection. Winterthur, du Pont’s Delaware estate, holds an annual Yuletide tour, during which thousands of visitors over the years have seen Fry’s placemats and napkins on display. Few if any onlookers are aware that they are gazing on linens designed by the painter who emancipated the dining room.
Monograms
Du Pont ordered eight napkins with the early American look of this monogram, which were intended to be combined with nineteenth-century green-edged pearlware from Leeds and a brown-and-white check tablecloth. In 1932 Fry charged du Pont $1.10 per napkin plus $1.50 per monogram.
In her 1922 guide Etiquette, Emily Post recommended that table linens should be made of plain, high-quality damask, with no trim other than a monogram (or crest). Virtually all of Fry’s clients demanded their napkins be monogrammed or initialed, and the placement of this was a major consideration in the overall design of the table setting. “I must always remember that the linens are only background,” Fry wrote, “and must be so simple on that account and because of the repetition of the units around the table.”
After designing monograms for twenty years, Fry’s enthusiasm remained undimmed. He wrote to du Pont on February 9, 1939: “We have only scratched the surface of possibilities.” For the top napkin, Fry had his needleworkers sew blue and green threads into a vibrant turquoise square, highlighting the bare linen “R du P” monogram of du Pont’s wife, Ruth. Beneath is a striking greenish-yellow linen napkin. In April 1940 Fry billed du Pont for eight lime-yellow placemats and napkins marked with an octagon centered by “du P.” Eight more napkins were ordered in 1952. Over the course of those twelve years, the fee Stella Mainetty (1902–1971) charged for embroidery increased from $1.20 to $3.00 per napkin.
Usually, a bride would bring linens marked with her maiden initials to her new home. Custom dictated that linens acquired after the wedding would be embroidered with the initials of her married name, or just the initial of her new last name (“R” for Rockefeller). Embroidering the initials of a man’s first name on table linen was not standard practice. If a wife divorced and remarried, her last name would legally change again. The ladies’ auxiliary shops of New York City were likely clogged with linens bearing outdated initials. Among the better-known examples: Barbara (“Babe”) Cushing Mortimer Paley, Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson Windsor, Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall Astor, Millicent Rogers von Salm-Hoogstraeten Peralta-Ramos Balcom.
MAGGIE LIDZ is an independent historian. Her book Polly Jessup, Grande Dame of Palm Beach Decorators will be published by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach and Giles in February 2025.
Special thanks to Taylor Johnson, estate guide at Winterthur, and Jason Speck, Head of Archives and Special Collections at the Hillwood Museum, Washington, DC, for research help.
