J.M. Kelley Ltd. - A New York Dutch interior for the American Wing

Articles
A New York Dutch interior for the American Wing
By Peter M. Kenny
for The Magazine Antiques
January 2006

For a loan exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1934, Joseph Downs, the curator of the American Wing, brought together furniture and accessories from early colonial New York. In so doing, he acquired for the museum a rare gumwood paneled fireplace wall from a stone house in High Falls in Ulster County, dated 1752. Immediately after the show this paneling was incorporated permanently into the third floor of the American Wing (Fig.

1), where it became known as the New York Alcove and ever since has been home to an evolving display of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New York furniture. Downs wrote somewhat wistfully in the exhibition catalogue that the woodwork showed some "French provincial influence introduced by Huguenot settlers" in that region.¹ He later amended this opinion, stating that it had features "more familiar" in "eighteenth-century American architecture," by which he meant, of course, that it resembled English Georgian style paneling.²

Pl. I

Despite its quality and great rarity as an example of mid eighteenth-century English style architectural woodwork from rural New York, the New York Alcove revels little about the building traditions of the Dutch and others of Low Country descent who settled the Hudson River valley. Current American Wing curators were acutely aware of this gap in the architectural presentation and sought alternative ways, none of them especially satisfactory, to make the alcove more architecturally representative of New York Dutch culture.³ The fates intervened in late 2002 when the opportunity arose to purchase an eighteenth-century house in the Albany region that was relatively pure New York Dutch design.⁴ Acquired without delay, the house was disassembled in the winter of 2003 with each step painstakingly documented, and then was kept in storage until March 2005, when installation of its principal room began on the third floor of the American Wing.

Pl. II

This installation marks the start of an ambitious five-year master plan for the renovation and renewal of many of the galleries and period rooms in the departments of American paintings and sculpture and American decorative arts. Periodic reports on the progress of these projects will appear in The Magazine Antiques.
The old house, or what remained of it, was hidden in plain sight, standing anonymously in a sixteen-acre field in Bethlehem, five miles south of Albany. Known to only a handful of local residents as the "old Winne place," even fewer people were aware that under later additions and alterations to the original steep gable roof was an eighteenth-century house frame of a distinctive type built by the earliest carpenters in New Netherland (see Pl III and Figs. 2, 3).⁵

Upon entering the principal room of the house through a decrepit lean-to addition on the blustery New Year's Eve of 2002, my colleague Morrison H. Heckscher and I realized that it was a truly special interior that would offer museum visitors a first-class architectural experience. We felt it would become a wonderfully atmospheric gallery for the display of the American Wing's rich collection of objects associated with early New York Dutch culture (see Pls. V, VI, VIa). Archaeological investigation, scientific analysis, and genealogical and historical research were all brought to bear in an effort to maximize our understanding of the house and its historical context.

Pl. III Pl. IV Pl. V

The sturdy timber-framed farmhouse was originally the home of a tenant farmer on the manor of Rensselaerswyck, an enormous estate surrounding the city of Albany. The manor was established by a charter in 1629 from the Dutch West India Company, which empowered the first patroon, Kiliaen Van Rensselaer (1595-1646), to purchase all the land

beginning above and below Fort Orange on both sides of the [Hudson] river with the islands therein as many leagues downwards as the Assembly of the XIX has determined.⁶

For generations the Van Rensselaers administered their estate from houses of the same basic design as those occupied by their tenants until Stephen Van Rensselaer II, fifth patroon, built a grand English Palladian style house, which was completed in 1769.⁷ The large entrance hall from that house (Pl VIII) was acquired by the museum in 1928 and is now the pride of the American Wing's eighteenth-century period rooms. It stands just a few feet from a room once occupied by a family that paid the Van Rensselaers a feudal style annual tribute of several bushels of wheat, a couple of fat fowls, and one day's labor at a project of the landlord's choosing.⁸

Pl. VI

The original owner of the farmhouse, as recorded on the 1767 map of the estate shown in Plate IX, was Daniel Peter Winne, a fourth generation descendant of Pierter Winne (baptized c. 1609-d.c. 1692), known as Pieter the Fleming, who was born in Ghent in the province of Flanders (East Flanders in modern Belgium) and came to Rensselarswyck by way of Curaçao in 1652.

Daniel Winne's house was located on the north side of a narrow creek that meanders eastward from the foothills of the Heldeberg Mountains to the Hudson. The stream derived its name, Vlaaman's Kil (Fleming's Kill), or Vloman Kill, from Pieter the Fleming, who first leased a sawmill near its mouth in 1652 and acquired it outright from the director of Rensselaerswyck, Nicholas Van Rensselaer (1636-1678), in 1677.⁹ The stream is close to the house of Daniel Winne's father, "Old Peter Winne," which was built about 1725 and has been undergoing restoration by its current owner since 2000 (see Pls. IX, X).¹⁰
Although built a generation apart, the houses of the father and son are almost identical in plan and construction, down to the exposed molded beans in the overhanging gable. The most obvious difference between the two is the exterior brick cladding on the first floor of the front gable and of the father's house as opposed to the overall covering of the wide white pine clapboards on the side walls and on the back gable ends. These houses are the only known one-and-one-half-story timber-framed houses with overhanging gables in the Hudson River valley. Roderic H. Blackburn has suggested that the house with the brick gable end was an urban type built in a country setting, and cites for comparison an Albany example of similar design of about 1734, now demolished but known from a Historic American Buildings Survey photograph (Fig. 4). It once stood at 922 Broadway in Albany.¹¹

Fig. 1

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	Articles A New York Dutch interior for the American Wing By Peter M. Kenny for The Magazine Antiques January 2006
	For a loan exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1934, Joseph Downs, the curator of the American Wing, brought together furniture and accessories from early colonial New York. In so doing, he acquired for the museum a rare gumwood paneled fireplace wall from a stone house in High Falls in Ulster County, dated 1752. Immediately after the show this paneling was incorporated permanently into the third floor of the American Wing (Fig.
1), where it became known as the New York Alcove and ever since has been home to an evolving display of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New York furniture. Downs wrote somewhat wistfully in the exhibition catalogue that the woodwork showed some "French provincial influence introduced by Huguenot settlers" in that region.¹ He later amended this opinion, stating that it had features "more familiar" in "eighteenth-century American architecture," by which he meant, of course, that it resembled English Georgian style paneling.²
Pl. I
Despite its quality and great rarity as an example of mid eighteenth-century English style architectural woodwork from rural New York, the New York Alcove revels little about the building traditions of the Dutch and others of Low Country descent who settled the Hudson River valley. Current American Wing curators were acutely aware of this gap in the architectural presentation and sought alternative ways, none of them especially satisfactory, to make the alcove more architecturally representative of New York Dutch culture.³ The fates intervened in late 2002 when the opportunity arose to purchase an eighteenth-century house in the Albany region that was relatively pure New York Dutch design.⁴ Acquired without delay, the house was disassembled in the winter of 2003 with each step painstakingly documented, and then was kept in storage until March 2005, when installation of its principal room began on the third floor of the American Wing.

For generations the Van Rensselaers administered their estate from houses of the same basic design as those occupied by their tenants until Stephen Van Rensselaer II, fifth patroon, built a grand English Palladian style house, which was completed in 1769.⁷ The large entrance hall from that house (Pl VIII) was acquired by the museum in 1928 and is now the pride of the American Wing's eighteenth-century period rooms. It stands just a few feet from a room once occupied by a family that paid the Van Rensselaers a feudal style annual tribute of several bushels of wheat, a couple of fat fowls, and one day's labor at a project of the landlord's choosing.⁸	Pl. VI

The original owner of the farmhouse, as recorded on the 1767 map of the estate shown in Plate IX, was Daniel Peter Winne, a fourth generation descendant of Pierter Winne (baptized c. 1609-d.c. 1692), known as Pieter the Fleming, who was born in Ghent in the province of Flanders (East Flanders in modern Belgium) and came to Rensselarswyck by way of Curaçao in 1652. Daniel Winne's house was located on the north side of a narrow creek that meanders eastward from the foothills of the Heldeberg Mountains to the Hudson. The stream derived its name, Vlaaman's Kil (Fleming's Kill), or Vloman Kill, from Pieter the Fleming, who first leased a sawmill near its mouth in 1652 and acquired it outright from the director of Rensselaerswyck, Nicholas Van Rensselaer (1636-1678), in 1677.⁹ The stream is close to the house of Daniel Winne's father, "Old Peter Winne," which was built about 1725 and has been undergoing restoration by its current owner since 2000 (see Pls. IX, X).¹⁰ Although built a generation apart, the houses of the father and son are almost identical in plan and construction, down to the exposed molded beans in the overhanging gable. The most obvious difference between the two is the exterior brick cladding on the first floor of the front gable and of the father's house as opposed to the overall covering of the wide white pine clapboards on the side walls and on the back gable ends. These houses are the only known one-and-one-half-story timber-framed houses with overhanging gables in the Hudson River valley. Roderic H. Blackburn has suggested that the house with the brick gable end was an urban type built in a country setting, and cites for comparison an Albany example of similar design of about 1734, now demolished but known from a Historic American Buildings Survey photograph (Fig. 4). It once stood at 922 Broadway in Albany.¹¹
Fig. 1
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