Coming home after half a century

COURTESY PRESERVATION SOCIETY OF NEWPORT COUNTY
HIGH SOCIETY: The Preservation Society of Newport County paid $650,00 for two paintings, both attributed to Sebastiano Ricci, an 18th-century Italian artist.
COURTESY PRESERVATION SOCIETY OF NEWPORT COUNTY HIGH SOCIETY: The Preservation Society of Newport County paid $650,00 for two paintings, both attributed to Sebastiano Ricci, an 18th-century Italian artist.

The Preservation Society of Newport County’s reacquisition of two 18th-century Venetian paintings that puts back together the largest such collection in the United States has completed the mansion’s dining room restoration at The Elms.
“It’s all very, very exciting, because we lost the paintings,” said Trudy Coxe, the society’s executive director. “The process has gone on for decades.”
The society earlier this summer paid $650,00 for the two paintings, both attributed to Sebastiano Ricci, an 18th-century Italian painter in the style of grand manner fresco painting, and valued at more than $1 million collectively.
The paintings were purchased from Wildenstein & Co., a New York City art dealer, which had purchased the paintings at auction in 1962.
The society took possession of the paintings almost 50 years to the date they were sold off.
“It’s kind of ironic,” Coxe said. “All of our donors were very interested in making sure we didn’t [lose focus] after the paintings hadn’t been sold in the last 50 years.”
The Elms was completed in 1901 after a two-year construction process after having been commissioned by the Berwind family.
In 1962, after the last family resident in earnest, Julia Berwind, died, and no other family was interested in taking over, the estate auctioned off the mansion’s contents.
The estate then sold the mansion to a developer who slated it to be torn down, but the society was able to raise purchasing funds and then opened the mansion as a museum.
Since then, the society has worked to reacquire the mansion’s original contents and otherwise restore it to its original 1901 condition.
“This is truly a significant preservation story,” Coxe said. “We’ve not only reassembled an important collection of paintings, but in doing so, we have taken another huge step forward in restoring a National Historic Landmark to its original appearance.”
The Elms boasted a collection of 10 18th-century Venetian paintings when it went to auction.
The paintings were commissioned in the early 1700s, the society said, by Bernardo Corner, who was a general and member of the ruling Council of Ten of the Venetian Republic, for his family’s 16th-century residence.
Paris decorator Jules Allard purchased the paintings for the Berwind family when the Elms was being built.
“Interior decorator Jules Allard specifically designed the dining room of The Elms as a backdrop for these paintings,” said Eugene Roberts Jr., chairman of the society’s collections committee, in a statement. “The importance of these fine … paintings can’t be overestimated.” When the mansion’s contents were sold, Wildenstein & Co. bought six of the paintings.
The collection’s largest four canvases remained in the mansion because they could not be removed from the foyer and dining room walls where they hung.
In 2004, the society raised funds to purchase four of the remaining six for $200,000, which was below market value, and restore them to where they had hung in The Elms’ dining room.
The society kept discussions with Wildenstein & Co., opening a new line of communication on the possibility of purchasing the final two paintings more than a year ago.
A period of silence ensued, Coxe said, but then former society chairman Armin Allen, who had been working on the discussions, happened to run into one of the Wildenstein negotiators on a bus.
The two had a conversation emphasizing the society’s position as a nonprofit entity and its limited resources.
“We got a phone call a few days later [from Wildenstein] saying ‘We’re willing to give you higher than you wanted [but] lower than what we wanted,” Coxe said. “One of our very generous donors [said], ‘I’m willing to add a little bit more.’ ”
The society took possession of the paintings in mid-August and hung them in The Elms dining room at month’s end.
“We want to give credit to Wildenstein for being a very gracious seller,” Coxe said. “I have to believe at some fundamental level [they] wanted us to be successful. This is where the paintings had come from, and they were storing the paintings.”
That puts the room back to how it looked when completed by Allard and architect Horace Trumbauer.
The room’s other recent significant reacquisition was the dining room table the Berwinds had bought for it, which Brown University had in its faculty club.
Brown bequeathed the table to the society a few years ago after a donor gave Brown a similarly made table.
The society now will debate whether to perform any conservation work on the paintings.
The organization also is working to restore The Elms’ breakfast room immediately next to the dining room. Chinese lacquer panels located there, purchased in Paris by Allard for the Berwinds, have been undergoing restorations through a number of grants. •

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