MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The ambitions, tastes and trends of the nouveau riches in early twentieth-century America may be viewed as a reflection of the desire to match the material aspirations of high-society American culture. The country estate, Pembroke, was a monument to excess on Long Island’s Gold Coast. Built in 1910 by the architect Charles Henry Pierrepont Gilbert (1861–1952) for the Wall Street financier Captain Joseph Raphael De Lamar (1843–1918), the French Neoclassical mansion with its opulent interiors, art collection and elaborate gardens and greenhouses, served as a showpiece for De Lamar and his vision of himself as a sophisticated man of taste and knowledge.

As Pembroke was demolished in the 1960s, details about the mansion’s Tiffany Studios windows have only recently been uncovered. Known today as “Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria” (c. 1915), in the Chrysler Museum of Art’s collection, the window was once prominently displayed above Pembroke’s entry hall along with a custom Aeolian organ. De Lamar commissioned important windows from Tiffany Studios, and his rags-to-riches life story and extravagant tastes have only recently been examined more closely. This paper will explore the window’s distinctive design as it survives as well as in comparison to related period photographs and a design drawing. Recent analysis has yielded a fuller understanding of its original context corresponding to Pembroke’s location, architecture, interiors, and grounds. In particular, De Lamar’s taste for opera, art, and gardening, as well as his penchant for entertaining on a lavish scale effected the design of the window. As an expression of De Lamar’s ambitions to impress visitors with his cultivated interests in art and music, the window can be seen as a vehicle for De Lamar to gain acceptance among the wealthiest echelons of American society.