Papers of Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863-1951)

Historical/Biographical Note

Historical/Biographical Note

Ogden Codman, Jr., first child of Ogden Codman, Sr. and Sarah Fletcher Bradlee Codman, was born on 19 January 1863 in the house of his maternal grandfather, James Bowdoin Bradlee. He lived at his parent's house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, until 1872, when the family removed to Dinard, France. His early exposure to French art and architecture sparked a lifelong interest in these subjects. He was sent to Bonn by his father in 1882 to work in a German bank, an unhappy experience. His request to return to Boston was granted and he was apprenticed to his uncle, John Hubbard Sturgis, architect of the Museum of Fine Arts building, with whom he lived in Brookline. Sturgis was to have a profound effect on Codman's choice of a career, if not his stylistic development. He enrolled his nephew as a special student in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Academic study was not to Codman’s liking, however, and he dropped out, even requesting many years later, that his name be dropped from the Institute's student roster. From 1884 to 1886, he apprenticed to a Lowell architectural firm, a "dreary" experience, before being hired by the Boston firm of Andrews, Jacques, and Rantoul, where he met his fellow apprentice Herbert W. C. Browne. He struck up a friendship with Browne and Browne's future partner, Arthur Little, who were to form the noted Boston firm Little and Browne and with whose work Codman's own was later to be compared. It was during this period that Ogden's interest in architecture, genealogy, and old furniture began to take root. Some fifty years before the Historic American Building Survey was launched, he began to make measured architectural drawings and photographs of colonial buildings in and around Boston (especially the work of Samuel McIntyre and Charles Bulfinch), as well as New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Among the important buildings he recorded was the Governor Shirley Eustis House in Roxbury. He also compiled notebooks on the lineage of Boston's "first families" that eventually numbered in the hundreds, including unpublished biographies of John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart and research notes on decorative and fine arts.

With the financial backing of his aunt, Frances Bowdoin Bradlee, and his own financial resources, Ogden launched his career as both architect and interior decorator. This is how he identified himself in the Boston Directory of 1891-1892, with offices at 100 Chestnut Street in Boston and at the house in Lincoln. That he was a society decorator and designer is evident from the list of his clients, with names such as Otis, Paine, Cabot, Sturgis, Coolidge, Updike, Little, Wharton, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Newbold, Ogden, and others, and he could number friends and relatives among them. Between 1895 and 1920, he designed twenty-one houses, remodeled ten more, and worked on the decoration of seventy-five others, with stylish and elegant settings. Principally this work consisted of country estates and townhouses in Boston, New York, and Newport. He had begun to summer in Newport in 1883, and it was there that he received his first big commission in 1893: the remodeling of "Land's End" for Edith Wharton and her husband. That same year he opened an office in New York City, at 5 West 16th Street, and a branch in Newport at 18 Bellevue Avenue. Codman's reputation was greatly enhanced when Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned him in 1894 to design and decorate the second floor of "The Breakers," including thirteen bedrooms. The income from this work provided the means to begin acquisition of an architectural library which, ultimately grown to hundreds of volumes, was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Codman befriended and strongly influenced pioneer interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and her circle, and William Odom, founder of the Parsons School of Design. De Wolfe's book, The House in Good Taste, published in 1913, owes much to Codman's ideas. But it was Edith Wharton, friend and client, with whom Codman was to score a more important and lasting success.

Together they wrote The Decoration of Houses in 1897, setting forth their confident and bold position on what decoration can and should be. The book argues, elegantly, that house decoration must be seen as a vital part of architectural expression, as part of the architectural order of the house itself. The book expanded both architectural and social horizons, offering the style of la France civilisatrice, especially the eighteenth century, together with its scale, proportion, and architectural grammar, as the model for American building. Edith Wharton called him "that clever young Boston architect." This seminal effort was reprinted in 1902 and again in 1978 as a cornerstone in the Classical America Series in Art and Architecture. For all that, Codman remained outside the American architectural profession and one of the last of that breed of gentleman architects without much formal training. He shared with Edith Wharton a love of Italian formal gardens. In 1899, he built for his mother a formal garden at the family estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Landscaping was of as much professional concern to Codman as interior decoration. In Boston, the most notable of his extant works is the house built at No. 84 Beacon Street for the Bayard Thayers in 1912-1914. Codman married Leila Howard Griswold Webb, wealthy widow of Henry Walter Webb, in October 1904, and moved in with her at 15 East 51st Street, New York, a townhouse Codman had designed for the Webbs some years earlier. From 1905 to 1915, he spent his summers in Europe, where he combined business and pleasure by acquiring many art objects for his client's houses. His income during these years averaged $10,000 annually, with 1907 being a record year with income of $25,000. When Leila died in January 1910, Codman sold the house on 51st Street and built himself another, in 1912, at 7 East 96th Street. He maintained architectural offices at various places in New York City until 1917, when his attention turned increasingly to France. He removed permanently to France in 1920, returning to the United States only once, in 1928. In 1926, he purchased the Chateau de Gregy, outside Paris, where his cousin Colonel Charles R. Codman, aide to General Patton, found him reading in bed as the Germans beat a hasty retreat in 1944. He built his magnificent chateau, his magnum opus, "La Leopolda," at Villefranche-sur-mer, on the Riveria, between 1929-1931, on land once belonging to King Leopold of the Belgians. Ogden was an early preservationist, joining the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) in 1913 and arranging, in 1920, for the family estate in Lincoln to pass to the organization upon the death of the last Codman heir. He died on 8 January 1951 at Gregy, Brie-Comte-Robert and is buried there in the garden.