In justice to the apparent partiality of the adaptation angel for Mr. Hunt, I must say that he was not entirely alone in her favors, but that there were other architects who had learned how to adapt English Renaissance of the Georges as cleverly as Mr. Hunt could adapt French châteaux, and who were, therefore, not seriously inconvenienced. But I see I am running before my
[Illustration: A QUEEN-ANNE HOUSE AT SHORT HILLS, N. J.
FREDERICK B. WHITE (deceased), Architect.]
[Illustration: AN ULTRA-FASHIONABLE COLONIAL HOUSE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 1904.]
horse to market, and must reserve the consideration of this later architectural development for a chapter upon the art of adaptation while I return for the present to “Fashion in Architecture.”
And now I come to a much execrated style of architecture--the Queen Anne style, the last direct influence of the Centennial Exposition and the first fashion to incorporate the vital spark of Anglo-Saxon home feeling. It was the suggestion of historic home atmosphere, though much disguised with American nonsense, that appealed to the better educated people without their knowing it. They thought Queen Anne architecture to be merely another clever fashion, more clever because odder and stranger than any of its predecessors; indeed, the architects themselves, most expert with its vagaries, could not have told you the real secret of its popularity. Like all fashions in architecture, it was burlesqued and ruined while its most active votaries still living have passed on to a higher plane--the plane of adaptation--and do not like to reflect upon the Queen Anne houses they once erected. The fact of it was, the nation was groping in the dark, and if the truth must be told, it is groping in the dark still; but we have learned this much beyond refutation: a purely sensational and affected style of architecture such as was the Queen Anne style practised in this country is relegated now to the cheap speculative builder; the better class of Americans know that the secret of successful architecture does not lie in odd conceits and invention, at any rate.
There was once a young man named Frederick B. White, whose short and brilliant life is worth putting on record here. For if there was ever an architect who was _facile princeps_ with Queen Anne architecture, it was he. He came from Princeton University at a time when the revival was in its first flush, and nobody, it seems to me, ever grasped the spirit of the style in so admirable a way. In Plate LXIV I have the honor of presenting an edifying example of this architect’s work, the Queen Anne dwelling-house at its best, and between this example and the Queen Anne house shown in Plate LXII the reader will, without doubt, note many degrees of deterioration in both taste and harmony.