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A COLONIAL DOORWAY FROM THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY

THE doorway from a house in Westfield, Massachusetts, here illustrated, which the Museum has just acquired, is a wonderful specimen of a type which seems to belong especially to the Connecticut Valley. Examples are scattered from Deerfield to East Hartford, and variants more or less closely related appear even on the shores of Long Island Sound.

Few details of our colonial houses are more interesting than the doorways and

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few are more important. From the rectangular or curved-headed opening filled with a door of nail-studded boards to the latest design of McIntire or Bulfinch or Greene, they are an epitome of the architectural changes not only of this country but of the older land as well. For while Inigo Jones would scorn the incorrectness of this design, he is nevertheless responsible for it, and quite directly, too, for the main entrance at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, which is attributed to him and which at least is like his work--is of the style that he introduced into England--has all the elements of this. There can he seen the wide rectangular opening filled with double doors, the engaged columns each on a pedestal, the breaks over them in the entablature, and the double curved and broken pediment. Such a door the carpenter who designed and executed this specimen had in his mind. Why did he not follow it exactly? Why did he vary so from the elegance and dignity of Jones? Was he a mere bungler? No, he was a man with a good sense of proportion and with considerable sense of balance and of the value of ornament. He did not know his model at first hand, and was hampered by an early tradition and by old-fashioned moulding-planes, as well as by ignorance of detail.

Here, therefore, in 1750, possibly earlier, but not much, he had done what Jones was doing in 1636, but in the way that Jones superseded, that is, in the way handed down to him by the craftsmen who had copied the Dutchmen and Germans whose pattern books the great architect banished from fashionable England.

The rectangular opening is of good proportion and filled with an excellent pair of doors. On each jamb is a wide strip with rustications like those of the actual stone doors of England, though the joints are too close together and the last one at the top, that at the line of the bottom of the lintel, is left out while the one below it, on each side, is sloped as if drawn to a center, as are the voussoirs in the lintel. The flaring out of this pseudo-stone background at the top of each side is quite characteristic of Connecticut. On each strip is a group of pilasters, or

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one pilaster cantoned upon two others, and these pilasters all have pedestals which follow the breaks and projections, and caps which do likewise.

The carving on the pilasters, while it recalls that on a Hadley chest, is not the same, though apparently of the same family. It is excellently placed. The pedestal face has a treatment, rather out of scale and unfortunately now partly destroyed, which can or could be seen entire in the doorway of the Grant House, in East Windsor.

The leafage in the cap is a curious attempt to render the lower acanthus leaves of a Corinthian capital. The volutes are lacking, but are suggested, as is the central ornament, by the leafage above the lower row.

In the entablature the three members are present and in nearly correct proportion, though the cushion frieze is too small to be orthodox. The mouldings, too, keep the general appearance of the orders, but they are profiled with ancient curves and are quite sharp, as at the top of the architrave, while the cove in the surbase of the pedestal is almost undercut. It is this curious effect of conservatism working on the new material demanded by fashion which gives the doorway its remarkably important historical character. We can see our old craftsman, a man imbued with a sound tradition in building and endowed with artistic ability of no mean order, struggling to fit old and new together in New England as his Jacobean forefathers had done in the older land. And as their work was charming, so was his; and we honor him for his result, which was the best doorway we know of the type so dear to the conservative valley.

Norman Morrison Isham.