VMFA receives period room with a past

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is being given its first period room. And, as befits a Richmond museum, it is a room with a past.

The 1880s Aesthetic Movement bedroom belonged to Arabella Worsham Huntington, a native of Richmond who grew to become the wealthiest woman in the country.

It was a few years before she became the wife of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington that she furnished her bedroom in her Manhattan mansion, and that is the opulent room that is being given to the museum.

But Arabella Worsham Huntington's life was not always so gilded. She was born in Richmond in 1850, and by the time she was 15, her father had died and she was living in what was probably her mother's residential hotel near Capitol Square. In a disreputable part of town, she met John Archer Worsham, who owned a gambling establishment.

Her relationship with Worsham may have fallen short of marriage, although they had a child together. She moved with him to New York, and their relationship dissolved shortly thereafter. In 1884, she married Huntington, who may have paid for her move to New York with Worsham and for her mansions. The wedding came nine months after the death of his first wife.

Huntington died in 1900, and in 1913, she married his nephew, Henry E. Huntington. With the younger Huntington she helped to create the Huntington Collection, Library and Botanical Gardens near Pasadena, Calif., home of Thomas Gainsborough's painting "The Blue Boy." She and Huntington purchased the famous painting in 1921, three years before she died.

The bedroom that is coming to the Virginia Museum is furnished with a Napoleonic half-tester sleigh bed and red damask seating. It features ebonized furniture inlaid with stylized leaf-and-vine motifs inspired by Asian designs.

The room was part of the mansion she sold to John D. Rockefeller after marrying Collis Huntington. Rockefeller kept the rooms essentially intact, and after his death in 1937, his son donated three of the rooms to the Museum of the City of New York and the Brooklyn Museum.

"It's a great example, and there are few of them, of an intact interior from a period that's right on the cusp of this full decorating moment," said Susan J. Rawles, the museum's assistant curator of American decorative art.

"It's so unusual that we would have something that is so expressive of that particular moment in arts decoration. And it represents the very highest style of it.

"It's fascinating locally because it represents that postbellum period . . . in the war-ravaged South when people could, if they had her determination, reinvent their lives. She really reconstructed herself," Rawles said.

The Museum of the City of New York is being renovated, and the bedroom is too tall for the new floor plan. That museum is donating the room to the VMFA, and the other two rooms from the mansion to the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art.

The room will be part of the James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin Galleries for American Art when the museum's new wing opens in the spring of 2010.

Also recently acquired by the museum are a rare Indian scroll from the 18th or 19th centuries; a portrait by American artist Cecilia Beaux, who at one time was called "the best woman painter in history"; a hexagonal center table from around 1845-1850; a set of Aesthetic Movement andirons; and a variety of early 20th century photographs, including some by Doris Ulmann, who specialized in pictures of blacks in the rural South.