Art Collector
In 1886 the Phelps mansion was completed. At Christmas time the family held a glorious celebration with people from all over the country viewing the mansion for the first time. Phelps' favorite room was a gallery which he had designed himself to hold his priceless collection of art treasures from the ends of the earth.
It was nearly midnight on April 1, 1888 when Phelps, returning to his apartments in Washington, D.C. after an evening with friends, found on the table in his bedroom two telegrams which told him that his mansion in Teaneck, where his family then was, had been totally destroyed by fire, with a loss of nearly all its valuable contents. He disturbed no one upon receiving this startling news, but very early in the morning awakened his secretary, told him what had happened, and said that he was going to take an immediate train for New York. He left on the train without once alluding to the great calamity.
The mansion, once the most beautiful in the area, became known as "Phelps' Ruin" and local residents picnicked near the destroyed home, marveling at what it once had been. Phelps immediately began renovation of the house.
Read more about this topic: William Walter Phelps
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or collector:
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)