Chester A. Arthur was perhaps our most diva president. He worked only a few hours a day, and got around D.C. on a leather-trimmed carriage adorned with his coat of arms painted in gilt, lamps of silverplate and gold lace curtains.
he High Victorian train station on what is now the National Mall was virtually empty when the president and his secretary of state walked inside to catch a train north. But on this steamy July day in 1881, the president would not make his train. Instead, James Garfield was shot twice by a disgruntled madman. He would spend the next two months in agony as inept doctors rummaged around his organs looking for the bullet and his insides became infected until he died.
But on Sept. 19, 1881, the man who was supposed to be the country’s most forgettable vice president became one of its most forgettable presidents. While hard to imagine now—indeed, to even acknowledge now that the People’s House is anything other than perfect is politically dangerous for presidents—the White House’s occupants often thought it was a dump with little to no privacy, filled with rats, poorly furnished, and in danger of collapsing. Mrs.
Tiffany brought a crew from New York that was willing to work day and night with only the president allowed to visit. Plenty of objects remained, however, and Tiffany had to incorporate or work around them.
For the Red Room, Tiffany continued with the idea of color gradation. The walls were painted a sumptuous Pompeiian red that verged on claret while the wainscoting was a darker almost currant color. The frieze was verging on pink and, in the words of White House historian William Seale, covered in an abstraction of stars and stripes. The wood trim was also covered in a dark red paint but rubbed until it was glossy.
In 1882 Chester A. Arthur commissioned the interior designs and decorative arts of Louis Comfort Tiffany to make the Entrance Hall more welcoming.While Tiffany’s designs for the rooms of the White House were a spectacle, one addition was undoubtedly the most famous: his glass screen separating the entrance hall from the transverse hall which ran along the Red, Blue, and Green Rooms and connected the East Room with the staircase.
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