History
Vernon Court was constructed in 1898 to be used as a summer cottage for the young widow of Richard A. Gambrill of Peapack, NJ and New York (1848–1890), Anna Van Nest Gambrill (1865–1927). In addition to her husband's fortune, Mrs Gambrill had inherited a substantial sum from her father, a railroad baron. Mrs. Gambrill's sister, Jane (Mrs. Giraud Foster) had just hired Carrère and Hastings a year earlier to design their estate near Lenox, Massachusetts, Bellefontaine (one of the Berkshire Cottages).
Although Carrère and Hastings typically considered the grounds and the architecture together as an ensemble, Mrs. Gambrill hired her florists, the firm of Wadley & Smythe, as landscape architects for the property. They based their design for the primary garden loosely on the Pond Garden at Hampton Court Palace
The property remained in the Gambrill family until 1956, when it was auctioned. From 1963 until its closing in 1972, it served as the administration building for Vernon Court Junior College, an all-girls school. Over the next two and a half decades it passed through several different owners. In 1998, Vernon Court was acquired by Laurence and Judy Cutler, founders of the National Museum of American Illustration.
The mansion currently houses the museum's collections of American illustration; as the Gilded Age architecture is contemporaneous with the "Golden Age of American Illustration" theme on which the collection focuses.
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“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)