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Southwood, Palm Beach, Florida, 1935-1938.
Palm Beach, 1938. Folio, full dark blue pebbled leather, recently renewed matching spine. Photographic title and 74 full-page silver print photographs on 38 stiff leaves; photos 8.5” x 12” plus margins. A handsome house portrait album documenting a plantation-style, Georgian revival home in Palm Beach, Florida, designed by Wyeth and King, Architects, for Dr. John Vietor and his wife, Eleanor, built in 1934. The photographs are by Samuel Gottscho, one of the leading architectural photographers of the day, and portray all aspects of the house and grounds, with many evocative shots. While the style of the house is historical and conservative, it is nonetheless quite appealing. The photographs of the grounds are particularly lovely. Two art deco bronzes by Wheeler Williams—a figure of a woman, and a seal atop a ball in a fountain—introduce a more modern note. The beauty of the images, with their fine sense of the interplay of light and shade, amply demonstrate why Gottscho’s work was in high demand. His photographs appeared regularly in American Architect and Architecture, Architectural Record, and the New York Times. There is one, rather quirky note in the album: several interior shots revealing Mrs. Vietor’s taste for all things penguin. Marion Wyeth (1889–1982) was one of the foremost architects of Palm Beach, designing more than 100 homes in this town synonymous with extravagant wealth. Graduating from Princeton in 1910, and the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 1914, he began his career in New York with Bertrand Grosvenor Goodhue, subsequently working for Carrère & Hastings, before opening an office in Palm Beach in 1919, where he founded the firm of Wyeth and King with his partner Frederic Rhinelander King. Wyeth was the first Palm Beach architect to be elected a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Frederic Rhinelander King (1887–1972) was educated at Harvard (1908) and the École des Beaux-Arts. He worked in the New York City offices of McKim, Mead & White Architects until the beginning of the First World War. Between 1915 and 1917, he was associated with the architect Lawrence Grant White. Frederic King was Edith Wharton’s cousin and the executor of her American estate. He was a member of the American Institute of Architects. Southwood is an extant building, and is located a mere stone’s throw from the estate of billionaire Bill Koch. CONDITION: Very good, rubbed at edges, re-backed.
Item #2848
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