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Colden Mansion, Coldenham, New York, 1859. Engraving.
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People and Places
The Verplanck Room comprises elements from two sources: a collection of furniture and other objects that belonged to Samuel Verplanck (1739–1820) and a room from the house of Cadwallader Colden Jr. (1721–1797) in Orange County, New York. Both the Verplancks and the Coldens were prominent families in eighteenth-century New York, though the Verplanck residence was more ornate than that of the Coldens. The marriage of elements from the two homes has allowed the Museum to represent the Verplanck furniture in a context generally fitting its date and location.
The suite of furniture and other objects in the room are from Samuel Verplanck's impressive town house built by his father before 1750. The house stood at 3 Wall Street in New York City; it was demolished in 1822 to make way for the Branch Bank of the United States, the façade of which was preserved in 1924 as the front of the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing. In 1763, after he returned from a trip to Amsterdam during which he married his Dutch cousin Judith Crommelin, Samuel took possession of the house and most likely purchased the suite of furniture for his parlor. During the Revolutionary War, Samuel supported the Revolutionary cause but his Dutch wife did not. When the British took Manhattan in 1776, Samuel retired to Fishkill, New York, where he remained until his death in 1820. His estranged wife stayed in the Wall Street house, maintaining a friendship with Lord William Howe, commander in chief of the British forces. Howe presented her with two of the paintings currently hanging in the room, The Temptation of Eros and The Victory of Eros, both in the style of the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffmann. After Howe was recalled to England for "dissipation and high play," Judith remained in Manhattan until her death in 1803. After that, the house was closed and most of the furnishings were sent to Fishkill, where they remained until they came to the Metropolitan.
The Colden house was built in 1767 on a three-thousand-acre family farm in Coldenham, New York. Cadwallader Colden Sr., a noted scientist and the lieutenant governor of New York State from 1761 until his death in 1776, gave his son the title to five hundred acres of the family farm in 1744. In 1767 the young Cadwallader built two houses on the land. The Museum acquired woodwork from one of these homes in 1940. The earliest surviving image of the house is an engraving of 1859 (shown above). The image reveals that the original stone house was two and one half stories high and five bays wide. The first floor consisted of two parlors, one on each side of the central hall. There were two chambers above the parlors and a basement kitchen below the east parlor. The paneling installed in the Museum's Verplanck Room came from the west parlor.
