John Singer Sargent's holiday in the early days of 1917 wasn’t as paradisiacal as he had expected. A conjurer of flattering likenesses of grandes dames and dollar princesses that he had begun to deride as ‘paughtraits’, the artist had fled frozen Boston for Florida, only to be needled by irritations: insects bedevilled, humidity oppressed and what passed for society largely appalled. But in Coconut Grove, a leafy suburb just north of Miami, he found unexpected refreshment. Bachelor industrialist James Deering’s brand-new house, tinted palest pink and facing Biscayne Bay, ‘is like a giant Venetian Villa [sic] on the Brenta with colonnades & loggias & porticos and steps down to the water, and dark gardens with statues just like Frascati’, Sargent marvelled in a letter to an architect friend. Out came brushes, watercolours and paper, recording everything from the patio, where a breeze billowed the sapphire-blue canvas curtains, to muscled workmen lounging starkers on one of the estate’s beaches. ‘It is very hard to leave this place,’ Sargent observed. ‘There is so much to paint... Hence this linger-longering.’
Eventually, Sargent was forced to depart – his murals for the Boston Public Library weren’t going to paint themselves – but not before dashing off a gouache rendering of his host. Retired from business and weakened by chronic anaemia, Vizcaya’s silver-haired master, suited in white linen, is depicted in three-quarter profile: his head blocky, his eyes partly obscured by spectacles, his lips non-existent, his expression lifeless. But behind the pince-nez lurked an impassioned collector and unapologetic authoritarian with a single aesthetic goal: to build a winter escape in a salubrious clime that would shelter his European art and antiques – Neapolitan Directoire furniture, Milanese painted panels, Flemish tapestries and all manner of provenanced flotsam. Initially, Deering, who also maintained domiciles in Paris, Chicago, New York and Evanston, Illinois, was entranced by Spanish Colonial Revival style, already becoming ubiquitous in south Florida. Instead, he became convinced that only a Veneto-style Baroque house would do for his 156 acres. It would not be a Brobdingnagian fever dream like the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst would erect in California a few years later, but a country place designed entirely in a formalist vocabulary from the past yet with all mod cons. His Vizcaya would be an informed mirage rather than an exaggerated pastiche: beauteous rather than boastful, opulent yet not oppressive, though one of Deering’s friends did complain that its 40 rooms were overstuffed. An article that appeared in the Miami News a few days before Christmas 1916, when the magnate first took up residence, hailed the villa as ‘a three-million-dollar rebuke to those who clamour that romance has no partnership with million-making’.
A museum since 1953, Vizcaya is a fantasia of architectural footnotes artfully plucked, carefully massaged and seductively synthesised; some are delicious inventions, while others are recycled originals, such as carved doors from Rome’s Palazzo Torlonia. ‘It is a completely faithful homage to the villas of Italy, a thorough essay on the essence of those great houses, reflecting the travel prowess of Deering and his creative partner, Paul Chalfin.’ So says Ferguson & Shamamian senior associate architect Jonathan Burgess Hogg, a long-time Coconut Grove resident. ‘The [two men] cleverly adapted what they saw abroad to South Florida, with the use of local building materials and the sensitive utilisation of the natural landscape.’ The property’s existing hammock, or jungle, much of it preserved by an admiring Deering, makes a bracingly feral counterpoint to the soigné boxwood parterres, stone obelisks, musical cascades and plashing fountains that fan out southwest of the house.
Born in rural Maine and brought up in Chicago, the locus of his family’s agricultural-machinery fortune, Deering relied on three men to develop Vizcaya. (Essen- tial read: Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin’s Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, published in 2007 by University of Pennsylvania Press.) Chalfin, an artist and decorator who had been an employee of Elsie de Wolfe’s (WoI April 2023), was the project’s impresario and, some have claimed, Deering’s lover. Whatever his position in the household, he was brilliant, prideful, effete and apt to take credit for others’ contributions, namely some presented by his young associates: architect F. Burrall Hoffman and garden designer Diego Suarez, who had worked at some of the same Italian villas that would be echoed at Vizcaya. Neither was treated particularly well by Chalfin, resulting in enmity and a lawsuit. Prickly as he was, Chalfin was a genius at getting the best out of his team and remarkable in his ringmaster oversight, seamlessly knitting together disparate inspirations, whether it was a flight of steps informed by one at Santa Maria della Salute in Venice or a walled orchid garden cribbed from Villa Gamberaia outside Florence. Striped gondola poles awaited guests who arrived by boat. The swimming pool, a third of which is tucked beneath the house, was conceived as a beshelled grotto with a marine-life ceiling by Robert Winthrop Chanler. Particularly stupendous is the 48-metre-long break- water at the rear of the building, sculpted as a stone barge and seemingly anchored in Biscayne Bay, the waters of which were ruffled by a few mignon islands that Deering had raised for picturesque purposes, utilising excavation leftovers. He also dug channels, still in use, through the shallow bay for easy navigation.
An early visitor to Vizcaya observed that the bay view, one of many that Sargent had painted, was best enjoyed from Deering’s four-room private suite on the first floor. That sequence of refined spaces includes an exquisite marble bathroom that Pieter Estersohn, who snapped almost 200 images of the house and grounds for WoI, calls ‘the most beautiful in America’. That being said, Deering, a man once rather drearily described as ‘polite and genteel’, admitted that he never quite felt comfortable in his sanctum sanctorum, where he slumbered in a narrow Empire bed with Bonaparte provenance. His subtropical Xanadu showed off his possessions with uncommon grace — ‘Is this a dream made real, or a reality greater than a dream?’ Chalfin swooned, declaring Vizcaya ‘a garment of beauty... spread over the things of centuries’ — but it may have offered precious little ease.
Perhaps this explains why the sickly millionaire, who would finally expire aboard an ocean liner in 1925, often could be found relaxing amid a swath of untamed vegetation. There, a small table was surrounded by mismatched chairs, modest in form, homely in appearance, and seemingly straight out of a summer camp. You can take the boy out of Maine, but no matter how much money is in his pocket, you can’t take Maine out of the boy.
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, 3251 South Miami Ave, Miami, FL 33129. Details: vizcaya.org
A version of this article appears in the May 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
