The magnificent mantelpiece that greeted guests at the Vanderbilt mansion on 57th Street
Imagine being a first-time guest to one of Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Gilded Age balls or dinner parties, held at their spectacular new mansion on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.
As you pass through the front doors of the house, completed in 1883, you’re received in view of this stunning ornate mantelpiece. At the time, it dominated the mansion’s entry hall, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It’s the kind of objet d’art one would expect from a Vanderbilt mansion. Sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had been hired by artist John La Farge, the mantelpiece features “two classical caryatids, Amor (Love) and Pax (Peace), [which] support the expansive entablature with bowed heads and upraised arms,” noted the Met.
Elaborate carvings and floral motifs decorate the mantelpiece. Above it is a mosaic with Latin words across a woman’s head. Cornelius Vanderbilt himself chose the phrase, which translates into “the house at its threshold gives evidence of the master’s good will. Welcome to the guest who arrives; farewell and helpfulness to him who departs,” according to Wayne Craven, author of Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society.
The mantelpiece was commissioned by the Vanderbilts—and it outlasted them and their house as well. An 1890s renovation doubled the size of the mansion, and the mantelpiece with the caryatids was relegated to a family sitting room on the second floor, states Craven.
Not long after the expansion, Cornelius Vanderbilt (grandson of the Commodore) suffered a stroke, passing away in 1899. Alice stayed in the house with an army of servants, struggling to pay for the upkeep even with a multimillion dollar inheritance.
In the 1920s she moved out and put the house up for sale (below in 1907), correctly anticipating that the land it sat on was more valuable than the house, which would be torn down. In the house’s final weeks she managed to salvage some items from the interiors.
She donated a sculpture group to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel going up across Fifth Avenue. And to the Met she gave this mantelpiece, a lovely remnant of Gilded Age art and architecture and the kind of wealthy family palace New York will never see again.
[Third and fourth images: Wikipedia]
