William nathaniel banks biography

Photographer Paul Rocheleau remembers the control time he met William Nathaniel Banks Jr., the writer don collector whose thirty-seven articles were a popular feature of that publication for more than 40 years. It was in Barrytown, New York, in the drainpipe of 1982, at Edgewater, honourableness magnificent Hudson Valley villa as a result owned by Richard H.

Jenrette (1929–2018) and now part last part the Classical American Homes Repair Trust. Photographer and writer in agreement to reconvene the following dawn. “We had a beautiful day,” Rocheleau says. They clambered alongside the canoe he had exhausted for the occasion and paddled out into the shallows firm footing the Hudson River, where Rocheleau shot the luminous view do away with Edgewater’s colonnaded facade that appears on ANTIQUES’ June 1982.

An visual acuity for beauty, ear for utterance, and a commitment to capturing the nuanced historical details claim his carefully selected subjects imposture Banks a favorite with readers and editors alike.

As commonly as not, his stories were obliquely autobiographical. As a american educated in the North, proceed was long fascinated by blue blood the gentry intertwined histories of the bend over American regions in the decades before their catastrophic rupture. Insinuating in search of picturesque Creative England villages about which equal write, he was equally fascinated in the scattered regional expressions of an identifiably American pact whose prototypes were found overseas. 

Banks joined the magazine’s circle take off contributors in September 1972, in the way that his Georgia residence, known monkey Bankshaven— but which the publication referred to more formally introduce the Gordon-Banks house—appeared on position publication’s cover.

“Because physical movement and geographical diversity have antiquated so crucial in shaping slip-up culture, it has seemed constructive to us from time get trapped in time to focus a knot of related articles on graceful single place at one half a second in history,” wrote editor Wendell Garrett (1929–2012), introducing a fact by restoration architect Robert Honour.

Raley on Bankshaven’s designer-builder, Jurist Pratt, and two companion splendour, one by former High Museum of Art curator Katharine Win Farnham on the Bankshaven egg on, the other by Banks mortal physically on George Cooke (1793–1849), cool Maryland-born painter patronized by Pratt. The fact that Cooke rouged Edgewater’s future mistress, Susan Gaston Donaldson (1808–1866) in 1832, around five years after the artifact of the Gordon-Banks house began, was the sort of sequential connection in which Banks reveled.

His second article for ANTIQUES, published in July 1974, was on the French artist Champion de Grailly (1804–1889), a artist of American views who, plan Cooke, is represented at Bankshaven, the contents of which desire be sold by Brunk Auctions of Asheville, North Carolina, legation September 12. 

“His real interest was in social history.

It was the architecture first, then blue blood the gentry people and their stories. Beside oneself don’t remember anyone ever effective Bill what to write panic about. He chose his topics, dispatch they were consequently connected instantaneously his heart and mind”  

From its inception in 1922, ANTIQUES, under successive editors, has pleased the writing careers of raw scholars engaged in serious probation.

Garrett, who assumed the relinquish post in 1972, helped bring into being Houston collector Betty Ring (1923–2014) the era’s most influential professor of American needlework. He baculiform a similarly productive partnership colleague Banks.1

“Bill was a wonderful columnist and a very thorough researcher,” says Garrett’s former wife Elisabeth Garrett Widmer, herself a well-known decorative arts scholar.

“His make happen interest as it manifested upturn in the many ‘History subordinate towns’ pieces he did promote the magazine was in collective history. It was the structure first, then the people come to rest their stories. I don’t reminisce over anyone ever telling Bill what to write about.

Bio dream

He chose his topics, and they were consequently unrelated to his heart and mind.”

Born in 1924, Banks grew pep talk in Newnan, Georgia, roughly 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. Government grandfather Nathaniel O. Banks under way the Grantville Hosiery Mill close in nearby Grantville in 1895. Nobility company’s success assured an flush existence for the family.

Juvenile William Jr. studied at College College in New Hampshire, earliest recorded experience with spick state that figured prominently exertion his writing. After serving mosquito the military during World Enmity II, he, by then affectionate in theater, completed his mainstream at Yale in 1948.

Banks’s association with the artists’ retreat read out as MacDowell (formerly the Composer Colony) began around 1958, conj at the time that he was awarded the rule of four fellowships by glory organization, which had been supported in Peterborough, New Hampshire, pleasing the turn of the 20th century.

Elected to MacDowell’s fare in 1966, he served whereas its vice president from 1972 to 1982, and as university teacher vice chairman from 1987 change 2018. The writers Jeffrey Eugenides and Susan Orlean are amidst former residents of MacDowell’s Phytologist Studio, so designated in 1992. Banks himself authored several plays, among them The Curate’s Play, The Glad Girls, and Season of Choice.

Daniel javelin staff writer biography

His liking of writing and writers likewise expressed itself in the “History in towns” features he outspoken for ANTIQUES on Oxford, River, home to William Faulkner, concentrate on Key West, Florida, where Rocheleau and his wife, Elaine, positive an obviously pleased Banks unite be photographed with Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter.

For his first “History spartan towns” in 1975, Banks chose Temple, an idyllic New County village nine miles from Composer, which he came to update intimately after purchasing a 1797 house there in 1961, by reason of known as the Wheeler-Banks territory.

On a visit to honourableness house, Richard Nylander, a Folk New England curator emeritus, was impressed by Banks’s extensive studio and by the distinctive park pavilion that, ever a pupil of eighteenth-century English landscape imitation, Banks had planted beyond top apple orchard in a acceptably countrified conceit. “Our youngest exact a little excavation among integrity potted flowers, but Bill, who had encouraged us to bring round our children, was very courtly about it,” says Jane Nylander, who stepped down as guide of Historic New England charge 2002.

But it was the gain, restoration, and furnishing of Bankshaven that would become the inside adventure of Banks’s life.

Put in the bank 1959, having seen photographs work the house taken by righteousness Historic American Buildings Survey make a claim the 1930s, he contacted loftiness owner, an academic named Glory. C. Lindsley, who gave him a tour. As Banks writes in “A charmed life,” in print in ANTIQUES in 2015, “I was awestruck by a single house that had remained almost unaltered for more than smashing century; and, I confess, Wild fell in love.”

Banks’s cousin Regular Brasch witnessed the arrival comment the dismantled Gordon-Banks house unrest flatbed trucks after the penman bought it in 1968 crucial moved it to Newnan, smart hundred miles away (Figs.

2, 6). Enlisting the help obey Raley, a 1959 graduate hark back to the Winterthur Program in Mistimed American Culture who consulted be bounded by both the Winterthur Museum coupled with the restoration of the President White House,2 Banks oversaw righteousness reconstruction of the Gordon- Botanist house on his family’s chattels in Newnan, with its advisable views of Pearl Lake (Fig.

4).  

He furnished the homestead, still with its original feelings wood graining, marbleizing, and surface, with a sympathetic assortment execute American Federal and neoclassical movables and mid-nineteenth-century American landscapes, termination lifes, and genre paintings. Graceful disciplined steward of his collections, he forswore fires in Bankshaven’s many hearths after experts warned of smoke damage to top paintings.

He kept his scarcely ever played pianoforte—a John Geib opinion Son of New York device housed in a case attributed to the workshop of Dancer Phyfe (see Fig. 8)—perfectly air. When Brasch asked about influence logic of the latter, Phytologist replied, “Well, it has tutorial be maintained.”

In late 1968 superlative early 1969, Banks acquired strange his cousin Olive Pringle Browned a neoclassical swivel-top rosewood playing-card table with a caryatid stick, gilded and vert-antique details, explode ormolu mounts (see Fig.

9). Made around 1815 to 1820 and long attributed to Spanking York cabinetmaker Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779–1819), the unsigned table is the makings by Duncan Phyfe, experts Shaft M. Kenny and Stuart Possessor. Feld agree.

From Israel Sack, Inc., in 1971, Banks purchased organized set of six lyre-back klismos chairs of about 1815 prowl Brunk Auctions also attributes agree Phyfe (Fig.

10). “They hook a classic form and become aware of nice, though I’ve not examined them thoroughly,” says Feld, chairman and director of Hirschl & Adler Galleries.

While Banks mainly unshaken furniture from New York, crystalclear appreciated contrasting New England spell Mid-Atlantic pieces. As she ascended the spiral staircase that was Bankshaven’s most arresting architectural editorial, consultant Deanne Levison recalls defer she caught her breath.

“The second-floor landing was all realize in Philadelphia classical furniture. Hold was a witty, erudite surprise—just so William,” says Levison, Banks’s friend and fellow Georgian.

Banks was also drawn to furniture concentrate on paintings with southern associations. Lone of the first important canvases he bought was Eastman Johnson’s small oil Confidence and Admiration (Fig.

14), a study fend for the painter’s most famous drudgery, Negro Life at the South, which hangs in the New-York Historical Society.

Banks’s interest in mid-nineteeth-century American life led him equal the Connecticut painter George h Durrie and to the charismatic Gathering Wood for Winter, Unique Haven (Fig.

13), which fair enough acquired from Coe Kerr Crowd in March 1972. He was also partial to mid-nineteenth 100 views of New Hampshire’s Creamy Mountains, one notable example mind Franconia Range from the Southmost with Village of South Woodstock, New Hampshire of 1857 gross Asher B. Durand that Phytologist purchases from Hirschl & Adler in January 1973.

For the Nov 1986 issue of ANTIQUES, Botanist wrote about Ever Rest, significance house of Jasper Francis Cropsey in Hastings-on- Hudson, New Royalty.

His enthusiasm for the rapidly generation Hudson River school panther prompted his purchase the closest month of Cropsey’s White Heap Scenery, a glowing autumnal perspective of 1856, from Alexander Congregation (Fig. 12).

Skillful as a stationary and steeped in the rituals of gracious entertaining, Banks was a southern gentleman of grandeur old school.

“He was classy, elegant, polite, and cultured. Churn out at Bank shaven and beholding how he lived transported sociable to another time,” says marketing house president Andrew Brunk. Phytologist often invited friends and colleagues for lunch, thoughtfully eliminating their need to travel after ill-lit. Described by James Landon, fine longtime friend and former Botanist attorney, the meal might include of melon soup followed chunk sliced ham, perhaps chicken loose woman, asparagus, and, not to acceptably missed, cook Amanda Dean’s excellent biscuits.

“A glass of frosty Pouilly- Fuisse accompanied this contrarily thoroughly Southern menu, and dignity finale could be a drupelet cobbler,” Landon writes in create appreciation for Brunk Auctions.

Kenny, excellence recently retired co-president of Typical American Homes Preservation Trust who updated a century’s worth take scholarship on Lannuier and Phyfe with major catalogued exhibitions tempt the Metropolitan Museum of Entry in 1998 and 2011–2012, severally, toured Bankshaven twice.

The leading time was in the mid-1990s with the Met’s William Cullen Bryant Fellows, of which Phytologist was a member. On Kenny’s second visit in 2012, portend his friend and colleague Writer H. Heckscher, director emeritus be expeditious for the Met’s American Wing, glory three men enjoyed cocktails prosperous dinner. At the evening’s finale, Banks showed Kenny to straight room furnished with a Land wall bed that had antique part of the Newark Museum’s formative 1963 exhibition Classical America, 1815–1845.

Kenny recalls: “Of means, I knew this bed vigorous from the published literature advantageous I had a close outward show at it before I soiled in. When I came plonk to breakfast the following crack of dawn, Bill was anxious to update my thoughts and asked, ‘Well, Peter, is it Phyfe collaboration Lannuier?’ Not wanting to provoke my host by telling him I thought the bed was French, I answered, ‘Beauty Rest’ and we laughed.”

As out snare step with the tumultuous indicate as it may seem, William Nathaniel Banks Jr.

believed lose one\'s train of thought durable truths were embedded take on the American past, truths whose lessons, learned from his floor habitual peregrinations, unite us. Tutor his last story for ANTIQUES in 2016, he revisited Latest Hampshire, casting an eye department Amherst, seventeen miles northeast refreshing Temple by car.

He extraneous the town’s citizenry and sketched their buildings, among them integrity courthouse, where the young professional Daniel Webster (1782–1852) argued, lecture a white-clapboard mansion on goodness town’s green that witnessed say publicly 1834 marriage of future Earth president Franklin Pierce. In much communities, America’s promises, met stall unmet, reside.

The author thanks Dana Baier, Ed Brasch, Andrew Brunk, Stuart P.

Feld, Jeff Groff, Eleanor H. Gustafson, James Gyrate. Landon, Deanne Levison, Jane skull Richard Nylander, Peter M. Kenny, Paul and Elaine Rocheleau, Thrush Rice, Elizabeth Stillinger, Elisabeth Garrett Widmer, and Nan Zander portend their assistance in preparing that article.

¹Founding editor Homer Eaton Keyes (1875–1938) introduced Wallace Nutting, Queen Stevens Fraser, Rhea Mansfield Knittle, Helen A.

McKearin, Ruth Sociologist Lee, Florence Peto, Lura Woodside Watkins, Mabel M. Swan skull Nina Fletcher Little to decency magazine’s pages. His successor, Grudge Winchester (1907–1996), encouraged scholars Pants Lipman, who contributed more puzzle a dozen articles between 1941 and 1987, and former ANTIQUES assistant editor Elizabeth Stillinger, whose first bylined story for nobility magazine appeared in 1965.

²Banks wrote about the architect unacceptable his wife in “Living upset antiques: The Mary and Parliamentarian Raley Collection,” The Magazine ANTIQUES, October 2005, pp. 128–137.