The first effect of the Renaissance forms in America was not to
destroy the vernacular but to perfect it; for it provided the
carpenter-builder, whose distance from Europe kept him from profiting
by the spirited work of his forbears, with a series of ornamental
motifs. New England, under the influence of an idol-breaking
Puritanism, had been singularly poor in decoration, as I have already
observed: its modest architectural effects relied solely on mass,
color, and a nice disposition of parts. In its decorative aspects
medievalism had left but a trace in America: the carved grotesque
heads on the face of the Van Cortlandt Mansion in New York, and the
painted decorations in some of the older houses and barns among the
Pennsylvania Dutch pretty well complete the tally.
Classical motifs served to fill the blank in provincial architecture.
As long as the carpenter worked by himself, the classic influence
was confined to little details like the fanlights, the moldings, the
pillars of the portico, and so on. In the rural districts of New
England, from Maine to Connecticut, and in certain parts of New York
and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the carpenter keeps on building in his
solid, traditional manner down to the time that the jig-saw overwhelms
a mechanically hypnotized age; and even through the jig-saw period
in the older regions, the proportions and the plan remained close to
tradition. The classical did not in fact supplant the vernacular until
the last vestiges of the guild and the village-community had passed
away, and the economic conditions appropriate to the Renaissance
culture had made their appearance.
The dwelling house slowly became more habitable during this period:
the skill in shipbuilding which every sheltered inlet gave evidence of
was carried back into the home, and in the paneling of the walls and
the general tidiness and compactness of the apartments, a shipshape
order comes more and more to prevail. The plastered ceiling makes its
appearance, and the papered wall; above all, white paint is introduced
on the inside and outside of the house.
Besides giving more light, this innovation surely indicates that
chimney flues had become more satisfactory. Paint was no doubt
introduced to keep the torrid summer sun from charring the exposed
clapboards; and white paint was used, despite the expense of white
lead, for the reason that it accorded with the chaste effect which was
inseparable in the eighteenth-century mind from classic precedent.
Indeed, the whiteness of our colonial architecture is an essential
characteristic; it dazzled Dickens on his first visit to America, and
made him think that all the houses had been built only yesterday. The
esthetic reason for delighting in these white colonial farmhouses is
simple: white and white alone fully reflects the surrounding lights;
white and white alone gives a pure blue or lavender shadow against
the sunlight. At dawn, a white house is pale pink and turquoise; at
high noon it is clear yellow and lavender-blue; in a ripe sunset it
is orange and purple; in short, except on a gray day it is anything
but white. These old white houses, if they seem a little sudden and
sharp in the landscape, are at least part of the sky: one finds them
stretched on a slight rise above the highroad like a seagull with
poised wings, or a cloud above the treetops. Were anything needed to
make visible the deterioration of American life which the nineteenth
century brought with it, the habit of painting both wood and brick gray
should perhaps be sufficient.