John Notman: the Father of American Italianate Design

Having presented seven of John Notman's houses, it's now time to deal with the man himself. For being one of America's most important early architects, not a lot is known about Notman's personal life; there are no diaries, letters, and the usual ephemera that tell us about 19th century architects. Not only did Notman introduce Italianate to American design, but he also developed American Gothic and built one of the first academic Gothic churches in the country. His legacy is best found in his buildings, a surprising number of which survive. Beyond a selection of drawings (held in Princeton and Philadelphia) and some personal correspondence between him and his clients and friends, we don't have much. The main monograph on Notman is called John Notman, Architect (1810-1865) by Constance Greiff, whose series Lost America no doubt made her a "constant grief" to progressive minded architects in the 1960s. Greiff offers a conservative, scholarly estimate of his career and provides a full account of his buildings with accompanying plans and drawings.

John Notman was born in Scotland in 1810 and although his early life is little known, he ended up in Edinburgh in the 1820s and was an apprentice to one of the major architects there. Greiff suggests William Henry Playfair because of his Italianate and Gothic designs which could have influenced the young architect. Indeed, Playfair is one of the earliest English Italianate designers, though his works owe much more to traditional Regency plans than the freedom of Italianate asymmetry and massing that characterized the works of Charles Barry and Notman. Perhaps the young Notman was in the know about experiments in asymmetrical planning; he certainly seems more acquainted with Italian rustic architecture than his English predecessors who preferred high style Italian Renaissance urban idioms. In 1831 Notman immigrated to Philadelphia where he set himself up as a "carpenter", really the term for an architect at that time; in his early years he seems to have designed little of note. In Philadelphia he met John Jay Smith, the head of the Philadelphia Library Company who would introduce Notman to a host of rich clients in Pennsylvania and New Jersey for whom he would design his best villas. It was through Smith Notman was given the commission to design Laurel Hill Cemetery in 1835, both its landscaping and its architecture (including an odd sculptural tableau of Sir Walter Scott!). It was also through Smith that Notman met George Washington Doane, for whom he constructed 'Riverside', America's first Italianate building in 1837-9.

Laurel Hill Cemetery Photo: Wikimedia

After these commissions, Notman's fame grew. His first major work that stunned Philadelphia was the Athenaeum of 1842. Here, Notman abandoned the rustic Italian form for the traditional English Renaissance influences. When the building opened, apparently the public was more impressed with his use of brownstone, a rarity in that period, than the design itself. The use of stone rather than brick would characterize almost all of Notman's subsequent works, and he rarely designed in wood. Additionally, his fascination with lacy ironwork and multi striped tent roofs also manifested in the Athenaeum's design. The Athenaeum was hailed as a masterpiece and would influence generations of urban architects to use the Anglo-Italianate mode of design for everything from banks to warehouses to row houses.

The Athenaeum Photo: Wikimedia

Throughout the 1840s, Notman would be busy designing a series of houses, public buildings, churches, and villas for his ever expanding circle of wealthy mid-Atlantic clients and patrons. He was as much an accomplished landscape architect as builder, and after Laurel Hill he seems to have been in demand for vast landscape projects as well as buildings. He was particularly active in Princeton, where he worked on buildings for the Theological Seminary (chapel, library) and the university (the Italianatization of Nassau Hall). Additionally, he worked in Richmond, VA designing the Capitol Square. As we can see from the houses we have looked at, Notman's work became more and more bold as he gained confidence as a designer, and his plans grew ever more complex with new arrangements of volumes and massing. He never followed the trend of other architects who invested their energy into plan books, such as Alexander Jackson Davis. For Davis he did design one plan, Design IX in Cottage Residences. Notman's design is the genesis of what I have called the pavilion plan, a plan base he would use in many of his subsequent houses. Ironically, he seems to have never built a house that matched Design IX. In the façade of this house, we can see much that characterized 'Riverside' especially the fringe on the cornice, the broad tower with massive eaves and the bold porch. Echoes of this design can be seen in his later work, especially at Alverthorpe.

While he was designing Ellarslie in Trenton, Notman was also working on one of the seminal monuments of American Gothic design in Philadelphia, St. Marks church (1849). Getting in with the high church Anglican society was a tough nut for any architect to crack. Notoriously fussy with a host of nitpicky liturgical and denominational requirements, they made a hobby of sneering at architectural designs that were too low church for them. Notman's St. Marks is one of the first Gothic buildings in the US designed for this group, and he studiously sought to allay criticism by adhering to English Gothic precedents. Notman's care thus gave the US its first academic Gothic design that entirely departed from colonial preaching boxes and tried to communicate some of the asymmetry and spirit of Gothic. Church commissions poured in afterwards.

St. Mark's Philadelphia
Photo: Tom Ipri

As the 1850s dawned, Notman was a firmly established master architect for the mid-Atlantic. The beginning of the decade saw the construction of Prospect House in Princeton and Averthorpe in Jenkintown, PA. Notman had established his style and his remaining commissions until his death in 1865 continued in the same vein, working in both Italianate and Gothic modes. In this period belong Fern Hill (originally designed by Notman in a Gothic idiom) and Fieldwood in Princeton. After a fire at Princeton's colonial Nassau Hall in the 1850s, Notman added Italianate towers and a new cupola to the design, bringing the old Georgian building up to date (his additions have been mostly removed). Never one to shy away from innovation, Notman even finished the Second Empire 'Ogontz' in 1862. At his death in the year the Civil War ended, Notman could look back on a revolutionary career in shaping American architecture, and fortunately many of his buildings, especially those of a particularly style-making character survive so we can get a clear picture of his legacy not only through plans but through the buildings themselves.

Notman's Domestic Italianate Designs

As fascinating as his legacy in Gothic design is, here we are most concerned about Notman as an Italianate designer. Departing from English precedents, Notman offered an approach to design that introduced picturesqueness to America, a country he found filled with rectangular, symmetrical Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival houses that looked inward. Essentially, the way that Notman conceived of a building was as a series of symmetrical blocks, each one filled with one or two rooms. In some senses, each of those blocks serves as its own design unit, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes conflicting with the dominant design. These blocks were grouped around a central focal point, usually a central hall. Like the monasteries and farmhouses of Italy, which were built for functionality more than aesthetics, the Italianate design reveals the interior organically, forcing the exterior to some extend to conform to the interior. Without having to worry about fitting rooms into a rigid rectangle with a set window plan, architects could freely combine different rooms and create vistas and flow in a more exciting way. Additionally, it brought the outdoors inside, since each block created a different viewpoint to the outside, one of the reasons Notman worked to landscape around his houses, in order to frame the outdoors for each of these varying rooms. It's no wonder people embraced Italianate design. Not only could you basically do what you wanted and infinitely add on large rooms and pretend like you were living in romantic Italy, but it was something new, something that did not look like the rows of neat but repetitive colonial houses.

The two basic building blocks of Notman's house designs are the rectangle (the block-based plan), often with symmetrical projections, and a group of two rectangles intersecting, the L-shaped plan that would grow into the irregular plan. The block-based plan is in essence a rectangle, while the L-shape has its eponymous profile. Onto these two basic shapes, Notman grafted all sorts of projections as needed for different rooms and vistas. Additionally, there is the tower block, which in Notman's designs is sort of a free agent, moving around the plans and never occurring in the same place. Unlike later designers, Notman located the tower to the side rather than situating it in the center. Thinking of his designs as rural villas, Notman didn't hang any façade out to dry. Because they would be viewed from every angle, most of his houses are finished on each side. This means that one can often seen several different sorts of plans and facades in each house. A back projection, for instance, automatically creates an L-shape, while a long side façade creates a rectangular block. Italianate houses have two conflicting thrusts, verticality and horizontality. For Notman, being a good designer, it was important that these harmonized well. Every time you raised a tower, creating vertical thrust, it had to be counter balanced by a horizontal thrust, which in his case usually took the form of low servant wings. Looking at a comparative drawing of the villas we have examined (Fern Hill excepted, as it follows Upjohn's double tower plan) we can see the block arrangement clearly. Below is a comparative drawing of six of Notman's designs.

It's not only Notman's plans which express his unique style. A look at any of his houses shows a pretty consistent grammar of ornament. Most Notman houses include these features:

-Stone façade, usually of colorful fieldstone with simple brownstone trim (and quoins)

-Large emphatic arches, often in porches

-Renaissance balustrades, harmonizing with high style expectations

-Triple windows and entrances; while this is characteristic of many Italianates, Notman takes it to an
 extreme

-Very thin ironwork porches with concave wooden awnings, historically painted with stripes

-Large overhanging eaves with simple beam brackets, sometimes in double rows

Basically, while Notman leaves the façade as simple as possible with little carving and ornamentation, porches and other elements are made as dramatic as possible. For instance having a heavy emphatic tent roof over a visually diminished porch support makes it seem like it is a real floating awning. Huge arches, broad eaves, and clunky brackets draw emphasis to the center and top of the house, directing the eye to focal points, since it isn't distracted by window ornament.

I hope you enjoyed this post. You should now be able to clearly spot a house by Notman or influenced by him. Make sure to visit the ones you can; many of them are open to the public. Leave a comment and vote for your favorite Notman villa!

The First Italianate-'Riverside' the Bishop George Doane House, Burlington, NJ

'Riverside', Bishop Doane House, Burlington, NJ. 1839 All Photos: HABS

 

In thinking about the sources for the double tower plan by Richard Upjohn, a house that is often hailed as the country's "first Italianate" came to mind. Indeed, although I think the distillation of Italianate into the US was far from a simple process with any clear "first", it cannot be disputed that this house is one of the first. Built for an Episcopal bishop in 1839 who founded one of the US' first all girls boarding schools, it was designed to be the bishop's residence in Burlington, and was kept by the diocese until it was demolished in the 1950s tragically. Apparently, no one cared about saving a key monument in the history of 19th century architecture; the house is a major casualty of the low esteem for Victorian architecture in the mid-20th century. It was designed by John Notman, one of early America's greatest architects who constructed both some of the first Italianates as well as some of the first major academic Gothic buildings in the US. With building started in 1837, it does come first in the history of Italianate design.

The house does not follow exactly any of the plans that shape Italianate design throughout the 19th century. Notman was breaking new ground here and thus had less standard examples or published plan books to work from. Nonetheless, one can see elements of several different plans in the house and can trace the contours of more familiar shapes. If we look at the house head on and cover up the back, tall tower, we can see the root of the irregular plan with its deeply projecting pavilion, set back tower, and recessed wing. On the other hand, if we cut off the projecting pavilion and the recessed wing, we can see the outline of the double tower plan. Looking at the side of the house, to the left (lower elevation) we can see the general shape of the side tower plan. In effect, many of the familiar plans are all present in this house. The Italianate plan is like putting together a set of blocks, blocks which are symmetrical in form. If one takes the tower block, the pavilion block, the recessed wing block, one can make dozens of possible and stylistically appropriate shapes. Judging by the dictum "form follows function", the Italianate house offers all the possibilities for any kind of protuberance or room to be added as needed without violating the requirements of the style. The focus on the picturesque and asymmetrical allows the house's interior to be perfectly comprehensible from the exterior. Thus, it's able to balance both form and function effectively without picking one or the other. Looking at the plan, it seems that Notman started with a central block and then added wings as rooms were necessary, balancing all of his blocks to form a picturesque and varied whole.

Looking at the house as its own entity, without reading other designs in, there is a central long wing with a tall tower tower to the left side. In front of this block, there is a dramatic projecting pavilion, a shorter tower/wing (it appears as a tower from the front view but as a wing off the central block from the sides) where the entrance is located, and a low, one story wing to the right of the lower tower. The wings of the house give it a Greek cross shape. Decoration is spare on the house, appropriate to its early date. The walls are stuccoed and almost all rectangular with the exception of the triple arched windows in the tower. These triple arched windows are intimately associated with the upper stage of Italianate towers from this example. A triple window sits above the excessively wide, heavily molded arched door with an incredibly thick Renaissance style balcony with massive brackets. The projecting pavilion is enlivened by a full story bay window with a tent roof and Gothic diamond paned panels while the cornice has a wooden fringe running around it. The only other bit of decoration is the projecting wing on the back façade which features a bay window and Greek Revival pilasters. The simple cornice without any entablature has rafter brackets, simulating the rafters of Italian houses that project beneath the eave. Interestingly, despite being a country house, the house lacks the usual multiple windows with broad swaths of blank wall.

HABS has a few pictures of the interior with a simple staircase with iron spindles and a lotus shaped newel post, an impressive Gothic paneled room, and Greek Revival interior window surrounds.

'Oaklands' the Lewis Maney House, Murfreesboro, TN

'Oaklands' Murfreesboro, TN. 1860 Photos: Brent Moore

Although I put a date on this house of 1860, I might have equally put 1820 or 1830. Like many plantation houses, Oaklands started life as a small two room house that accrued additions, ells, and wings. When Dr. Maney built his original home, he was in effect a settler, but after his wife died and he retired, his son Lewis took control of the home. Lewis added the Italianate facade in 1860, designed by local architect Richard Sanders, turning the old settler's home into a fashionable mansion, even if the Italianate design was more of a false front hiding a complex past. After the Civil War, the Maneys struggled to hold on with dwindling finances and eventually sold Oaklands to a string of owners. It was abandoned, vandalized, and threatened in the 1950s, but was bought and restored; it is now a house museum.

The house is a five bay plan with a strongly projecting central pavilion, The windows are rectangular with simple flat hood moldings crowned with elaborate rococo flowers and vines. The central window is arched with thick Venetian tracery, so common in other Italianates in Tennessee. The simple cornice has s scroll brackets. What really distinguishes this house is its impressive porch which spans beyond the entire front of the facade. It's a simple Italianate porch with an interesting rhythm of square pillars and arched sections with brackets. As part of the illusory nature of the redesign, from a purely frontal view it looks like it wraps around the entire house, but when one looks from a side view, the porch's dimensions seem rather ridiculous and the design's illusion becomes clear, especially against the earlier 19th century side facades. HABS documented the building in the 1930s before it was vandalized, including several interior views, below.

The Jacques Dupre House, New Orleans, LA

The Jacques Dupre House, New Orleans, LA. 1830 

Built 1830 by Jacques Dupre at 938 Esplanade, this house is unlikely to have been as Italianate as it is today. Judging by the door, although that's a risky busines in a town of architectural synthesis, I'd say it was probably Greek Revival, but its current form is solidly Italianate, probably from the 1850s or so. The house follows the typical side hall plan and currently has a brick facade. First floor windows, as often in New Orleans are segmental arched while those of the second floor are rectangular; all have thick Renaissance style hood moldings. The cornice itself is paneled with simple paired brackets, and a balcony wraps around most of the building with spartan Gothic ironwork. Although not as flashy as some other houses, the Dupre house appears a good example of an average Italianate.

The Richard Alsop IV House, Middletown, CT

The Richard Alsop IV House, Middletown, CT, 1838-9 Wikimedia

The Richard Alsop IV house in Middletown is also on High Street and is perhaps unique in the US. This house is often classified as Greek Revival, as found in the book Greek Revival Architecture in America, but it is rather a transitional Greek Revival and Italianate house, as can be seen by its broad eave and brackets. It was designed by the firm of Platt and Benne of New Haven and was built by Barzillai Sage and Isaac Baldwin. The house was bought in 1948 by Wesleyan University from the Alsops; it is currently the Davison Art Center and houses period furniture and a display of prints. It bears some similarity to the nearly contemporary Starr house across the street. The house does not follow the traditional Italianate plan, but it is similar to the symmetrical plan. The central cube has three bays on the front and is flanked by three bayed lower wings with double height squared pillared Doric colonnades. This aspect is particularly Greek Revival in inspiration, as double height porches are not a feature of Italianate. A long cast iron porch runs across the front with a tent roof that is unusually topped by a balcony. The delicate porch features axes with bundles of arrows tied with ribbons on the supports, which are strong Neoclassical design elements. 

While the facade is stucco and extremely spare, befitting its very early date, the house has some unusual features. Wooden exterior lambrequins can be found on the first floor windows in the center. It's most unique feature is the painted frescoes on the exterior of the house, which seems to have no other parallels in the US. The frescoes express the entablature of the house with swags and paterae or bowls, another classical motif. On the first floor in the center, and on the centers of the side facades are painted trompe l'oeil frescoes of statue niches, a very fine classical touch that could have been as much an attempt to simulate a Greek house as an Italian Renaissance villa. The second floor on the wings contain trompe l'oeil murals of urns in niches. These are a fascinating example of the use of exterior murals to create rhythm and effect on an otherwise plain surface, and they admirably succeed in enlivening the house. The other colors of the house, pink for the background and cream for the trim are also historically appropriate. The rich mural scheme continues in the interiors, which are filled with beautiful designs that show mostly garden scenes or reproduce Pompeian style decoration. The following images highlight some of the details and show the plan of the house. The frescoes alone make this house a stunning example of transitional design; that they have been well preserved is a credit to Wesleyan.

Plans from HABS.

Some Interior views:

The Alsop house sits across the street from the Russell House, one of New England's best Greek Revival homes, which I thought I would include an image of just for fun.

Two Hillhouse Cubes- The Elizabeth Apthorp House and the George Fisher House

The George P. Fisher House, 1865.

The Elizabeth Apthorp House, 1837

In this post I am featuring two of Hillhouse's symmetrical cubes, the George Fisher house and the Elizabeth Apthorp house. These houses stand on opposite sides of the street and at opposite ends, and they are separated by 30 years; yet they share the characteristics of being blocky symmetrical, 3-story compositions. The Apthorp house has been bizarrely marred by additions, while the Fisher house appears as it was built. The houses both share similar window treatments and are much taller than many Italianates, which do not commonly rise above two and a half stories. Thus, I thought they'd make a fitting pair of bookends.

The Apthorp House stands at the end of Hillhouse Avenue on the western side neighboring the Norton house from my previous post. The house is one of several on the street designed by Alexander Davis in 1837, with whom you should be quite familiar now. As Elizabeth Mills Brown (an important architectural historian whose book New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design is indispensable) notes, the brackets are like "exposed rafters under the eaves in the Tuscan manner". If one looks carefully, the brackets are actually quite shallow in height and do give the impression of roof beams peeking out from the eaves. The hip roof is surmounted by a small monitor (that is very hard to photograph). The windows consist of paired flat headed windows with simple moldings and brackets tying them together. The walls, as we have seen in many houses, are coated in stucco scored to simulate stone. What really livens up the façade, however, is the porch, which is uniquely Egyptian in inspiration (the glassed in room surmounting it is a later addition).



Egyptian Revival is a rare style to encounter, especially on a sedate avenue like Hillhouse. It was spurred by the publication of the Description de l'Egypte, a book of illustrations of Egyptian monuments by Napoleon's scientific staff. The series was completed in 1826, several years before the construction of the Apthorp house, but had some influence on American architecture. Connecticut alone has several examples: the monument at Groton, the cemetery gates for New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery (by Henry Austin, 1849), and the church at Essex, CT. The Tombs prison in New York by John Havilland (1838) was perhaps one of the most famous example of Egyptian Revival in the US and was a near contemporary of the Apthorp house (pictured below from Wikimedia.

 

Why this style was chosen is anyone's guess. Perhaps Davis was inspired by other Egyptian buildings like the Tombs being constructed at the same time. Perhaps Ms. Apthorp, who was moving from a decidedly pedestrian five-bay Federal house further down the avenue wanted to make an exotic splash with her new villa. The porch's columns seem to be of the papyrus-bundle type, although the entablature has a band of incongruous rococo swags, a testament to the 19th century's love of eclecticism. As I noted in my first post, Italianate architecture is open to all types of ornament, and the addition of Egyptian elements doesn't make this any less an Italianate villa. It's simply the manifestation of style on an Italianate canvas.

The additions and remuddles are interesting in themselves. A look at the south façade (above) shows a riot of pilasters and columns. The pilasters were added to the house in 1909 by the owner who salvaged them from a demolished house by the Federal architect David Hoadley. In addition, side porches and box windows have been added to the design, leading Mills Brown to call it the "Old Curiosity Shop on Hillhouse Avenue".

 

The George P. Fisher House stands at the entrance of Hillhouse on the east side and was built in 1865. The Fisher house receives some harsh criticism from Mills Brown, who said of it "a surprisingly gawky version of the late-late villa style". The house has the distinction of having four nearly symmetrical facades without side wings, ells, or additions, making it a cube. Like the Apthorp house, the Fisher house rises three stories, has paired flat top windows, and scored stucco. The porch on the Fisher house, is far more classical, being a pedimented and very 'correct' Corinthian affair. A gable atop a small façade projection interrupts the flow of the cornice and wall on three sides of the house, providing an undulating rhythm as one walks around it. The hip roof has no cupola, which is a wonder given the grand effect being sought. The window treatment is particularly interesting, in that the hood moldings over the windows fade into the façade with a small tent roof protrusion.

 

The house has a full verandah on the rear that is currently enclosed. Also of note are the brackets, which form a graceful s-curve, have an open space between the curve and the wall attachment, and are finished with a drop that resembles an acorn. As opposed to many of the brackets we have seen, these large types of brackets are more common as Italianate enters the late 1850s and 60s; in the 1870s, the brackets sometimes approached monstrous sizes. Below are shown the rear porch and brackets.

 

 I have a few pictures of this house's interior which retains many features of the 1860s in its design.



A parlor at the end of the main hall, now used as office space/seminar space.

The newel post and banister. The paired spindles that project from the stairs are noteworthy.

Given these two houses, separated by 30 years, yet very similar in conception, which do you prefer?