Annie Robinson,
Lectures and Victorian Tea

Schedule

Description

Architectural historian Annie Robinson is slated to give an illustrated presentation on “Peabody and Stearns: Country Houses and Seaside Cottages” at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum on Wednesday, August 4, at 4:00pm. The speaker will autograph copies of her new book of the same title during a Victorian Tea. The lecture is the sixth in Ventfort Hall's 2010 Summer Lecture Series.

 

For forty-five years beginning in 1870, the Boston architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns remained one of the country's most prolific offices with designs that covered nearly every type of building, from commercial, residential, public and private. Robert Swain Peabody and John Goddard Stearns, Jr., secured more than one thousand commissions during that time, from warehouses and town houses to retail stores, banks, schools, railroad stations, libraries, playhouses, and country homes.

 

Peabody & Stearns was a major player in a field that included H.H. Richardson; McKim, Mead & White; Bruce Price; and Carrere & Hastings. The firm also played a major role as a training ground for young architects. Its country homes and seaside cottages were some of the most noteworthy in the Northeast during the Gilded Age. Among the country houses Peabody & Stearns designed for Berkshire cottagers were the original sprawling shingle-style Allen Winden (1882), replaced by the present Georgian structure; Coldbrook (1882), now part of the Cranwell property; Elm Court (1887-1900) that grew to 94 rooms; Wheatleigh (1893), presently a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World; Wyndhurst (1893), now occupied by the Cranwell Resort Spa and Golf Club.

 

Robinson's book is the first of its kind to focus on eighty of the firm's country house commissions, giving a glimpse into the social and economic vitality of such Gilded Age resorts as Newport, Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor. The firm's work was also found in the Middle Atlantic States, the South and the West. The era spurred a vast market for recreational buildings, including casinos, boathouses, stables and gentlemen's farms, all of which Peabody & Stearns created designs.

 

Robinson spent twelve years researching the work of Peabody & Stearns.  During that time she gave a series of lectures on the firm at the Salve Regina University, Victorian Society in America and The Society of Architectural Historians. She is the author of an essay titled “A Portrait of a Nation:  The Role of the Historic American Buildings Survey in the Colonial Revival” published in the book Recreating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival. A resident of Brunswick, Maine, she is involved in the work of several local historic preservation organizations. She is a candidate for a Ph.D. in art history and architectural history from Boston University.

 

Price

$14 member, $16 non-member