Art: Art, May 1, 1944

The Whitemarsh Mystery

What was going on at Whitemarsh?

Ever since Morgan Partner Edward T. Stotesbury died in 1938, Whitemarsh Hall, his 145-room country house, north of Philadelphia’s swank suburban Chestnut Hill, had stood empty and unlived in. In the winter of 1942 it became a place of mystery. Passers-by reported strange doings. Around the vast, Versailles-inspired mansion a high steel fence went up. By day armed guards patrolled the herbaceous borders. By night great floodlights on the parapets sometimes flashed on to light up Whitemarsh Hall’s massive, two-story limestone facade and Ionic columns.

Rumors flew: Whitemarsh Hall was a fancy concentration camp for Axis diplomatic prisoners; it was an Army asylum for the insane.

Last week the mystery was dispelled. Whitemarsh Hall had been the hideaway for the priceless art treasures of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum.

Far from the Madding Bombs. In the feverish days after Pearl Harbor, when plane watchers on Manhattan’s skyscrapers scanned the skies for the Luftwaffe (and sometimes thought they saw it), Metropolitan Museum officials feverishly sought some shelter where their millions of dollars’ worth of art would be safe from Nazi bombs. Even earlier, various vacant buildings in Westchester and Putnam Counties had been inspected and found wanting. An abandoned shale mine near Kingston seemed safe but too damp. At last a Metropolitan trustee suggested Whitemarsh Hall.

Into Whitemarsh Hall, with its 45 bathrooms, moved the Metropolitan’s Building Superintendent William Chapman. Into special vans went 90 loads of crated, padded masterpieces and objets d’art. In case of accidents, no van carried more than a million-dollar load. But the secret, heavily guarded trips proved uneventful.

Venus and 13 Bachelors. Soon some 450 great paintings were racked on pipeline scaffolds set up in the huge, thermostated hall where Financier Stotesbury once gave concerts for 1,000 guests. Among the hidden paintings were ten Rembrandts, Breugel’s Harvesters, El Greco’s View of Toledo, Titian’s Venus and the Lute Player, Vermeer’s Lady with the Lute, Daumier’s Third Class Carriage, Raphael’s Virgin and Child Enthroned, a spate of Italian primitives, twelve Sargents, twelve Winslow Homers. The priceless Sèvres porcelains were never unpacked. The medieval tapestries stayed on their long rollers. All were guarded by an electric signal system wired to a specially installed power plant in the house. They were also guarded by 13 picked Metropolitan staff members, all family men doomed to temporary bachelorhood, who moved into the former servants’ wing. The only servants were one cook, one maid.

Feeling a good deal like Siberian exiles, the museum men whiled away the long, blitzless days by whamming golf balls across the manicured terraces or romping with a police dog named Peggy. Drinking was strictly forbidden.

Then one day last year word came that the danger was over. The piecemeal return to Manhattan began.

Last week the Metropolitan was once more abustle with a feverish combination of moving day and picture hanging. Next month art lovers will again be able to see all of the Metropolitan’s great art. With unusual moderation Mayor LaGuardia himself had said it: “I won’t say [Hitler] is not coming over, but I’m sure he can’t come with enough to aim at the pictures and hit the mark.”