About this time the Victorian-Gothic school of design was advertising its merits, in which school Mr. Hunt found a congenial medium to exploit his essentially grammatical detail, and Bellwood at Madison, New Jersey, supplies me a fine example of this once very fashionable architecture and of Mr. Hunt’s work of that period. In 1897 I was consulted by Mr. Bell, who had purchased the place from Mr. Twombly, regarding a proposed extension to the house. Although not at all in sympathy with what Montgomery Schuyler calls Mr. Hunt’s “staccato style,” I remembered the episode of Michelangelo and the plans of St. Peter’s by Bramante, and advised that the ruling spirit in any new work directly attached to the main building of the estate should be Victorian-Gothic notwithstanding that the style had gone completely out of vogue, and I, myself, had been obliged to remove some of the interior woodwork for Mr. Bell, which, while academic in every line, was crying ugly--so ugly that nobody could look at it a minute without irritability. But my devotion to art lost me the only profitable part of the work, for Carrère and Hastings were subsequently employed to erect an Elizabethan end which I have taken care not to show in the illustration, not because of lack of architectonic merit in the extension, but because it impairs just so much of the historic value of the subject.
Technically, Bellwood is admirable. It looks to me just like the Earl of Beaconsfield and the Congress of Berlin or the period at which the Victorian age was in the midst of glory, but from the standpoint of true, Anglo-Saxon home feeling, it does not satisfy. Mr. Hunt was an academician above everything. We see this one idea in all his early work, its culmination regardless of ugliness being exploited in the _Tribune_ Building in Park Row.
But a new mission in life awaited Mr. Hunt. After all these years of mediocrity of talent, and when he was passed fifty years of age, it was as if some angel had descended in the night while he slept, and had whispered the one magic word with which he was ever after to immortalize himself, namely--“Adaptation!” For suddenly, without a word of warning, this remarkable man designed the house of W. K. Vanderbilt at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, the pioneer and a very beautiful adaptation of French Renaissance which made its architect famous almost before it was completed (Plate LXX). More than this his success with the new medium of expression in which Mr. Hunt soon received other commissions, attracted to his office the life-long clients of other architects to whom no angels had whispered, and who were without sensations of their own. Notably was it so in the case of Mrs. Gerry, who had just come into possession of her father’s money, and who did not hesitate to turn down her father’s architects as well as those who had faithfully served her husband in order that Mr. Hunt might build her new house at Sixty-first Street; while even the late Cornelius Vanderbilt would not positively decide upon the amplification of his enormous dwelling at Fifty-eighth Street until Mr. Hunt had consulted with his architect. This was a signal tribute to Mr. Hunt, and required the greatest delicacy upon his part, to which I believe he was equal.